Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 225

Me, GenreCon, Brisbane (Translation: Holy Crap! Australia!)

News for you Australian-types out there:

I’m one of the guests of honor at GenreCon in Brisbane this year!

Obviously, this is extremely flattering to be invited, and to also get to travel to the opposite end of this little blue-green marble in order to meet friends and fans. I SEEK TO LEARN YOUR AUSTRALIAN WAYS. Please teach me. And also please protect me from your army of venomous creatures. (Seriously, every time I read about Australia it never fails to mention something about your unholy host of venomous creatures. I think everything has venom over there. “The average Australian Cattle Hound has venom glands near its dew-claws, and when it nibbles on its paws it creates a toxic hell-froth inside its muzzle and…”)

Seriously, though:

Fucking. Excited.

Thanks to the kind folks of GenreCon for having me. Hope to see some of you there!

Details on GenreCon here.

25 Thoughts On Book Piracy

Here’s the deal. I want to talk a little about book piracy. I’ve been blabbering about the realities of publishing recently, and this is one of them. It seems easy to assume the post should be as short as, “HEY FUCK THOSE GUYS,” and to a degree, yeah, absolutely. But it’s a sticky wicket, this wocket, and so it deserves a way-too-long-post from yours truly.

(The tl;dr –? I don’t like book piracy but recognize it’s a very complex issue for a lot of reasons.)

Grab and oar and let’s sail the foam-tossed seas, buccaneers.

1. It Stings A Little

We’re all egomaniacs with improbably frail egos, and we all have our little Google Alerts for our names (mine’s easy because who the fuck else is named Wendig?). We see when our books pop up on file-sharing sites or when some forumite somewhere is asking for a free copy of one of our e-books. We see it. And it stings. And it doesn’t sting because we think about lost revenue, exactly — it stings because silly as it may seem it hurts our feelings that you don’t feel our work is worth the same amount of money as an inhaled cloud of dog flatulence. It erodes us, like the ocean eating the shore. We pretend that it’s professional. But sometimes, it feels personal.

2. A Big Mushy Poopy Pile Of Gray

It’s that stung feeling that leads us to get angry about piracy and turn it into a very black and white issue where we talk about pirates as if they are the same scum who pillage villages or punch orphans or whatever. We think of them as dehumanized robbers, evil robot invaders with all the value of a bloated tick clinging to that spot between our shoulder blades we just… can’t… reach. But we have to take a moment to recognize that piracy — like with so many of our modern challenges — is actually a very gray, very smooshy, very non-concrete issue.

3. You’ve Probably “Pirated” Something At Some Point

Ever copy a CD for someone? Or, if you’re a cranky old man like me, have you ever made a mix tape for someone? (The art of the mix-tape is a lost one.) Ever lend a book to someone? Buy or sell a used book? Copy a VHS tape? Give someone your DVD copy of Emmanuelle VIII: Porny French Chick Soft-Core Boning A Bunch Of Moon Colony Astronauts? But here you stammer, “Tha– bluhhh — fnuhhh — that’s different.” And it is in terms of magnitude, but take away magnitude and you still have theoretically lost revenue. (It’s why companies resisted allowing devices that copied content.) It can’t be wrong when someone downloads your book but okay when you copy a cassette tape — that’s like saying, “It’s okay for me to steal five bucks from that guy but not okay for you to steal five bucks from those 1,000 guys.”

4. Except It’s Kinda Not Theft, Exactly

It’s easy to call this stealing, but it’s not. Stealing is the act of taking something that does not belong to you — and here, “taking” implies that the other person does not get to keep it. This isn’t stealing. This is getting water on Gremlins. This is doppelgangering. This is motherfucking multiplication. That’s not to say it’s right or fair or legal, but you cloud the issue every time you call it “stealing.” Yes, it feels like stealing. But this is copying. Illegal duplication.

5. Arrr, Shiver Me Kindle

The “thing” that gets pirated is, from the author-publisher’s perspective, our story. Our, as the phrasing goes, intellectual property. The “thing” that gets pirated from the perspective of pirates is a file. They’re not stealing a book off a shelf. They’re copying an e-book file in the same way you’d copy and transfer a Word doc, a Quicktime movie, an Excel spreadsheet, a filthy animated GIF of Bea Arthur simulating hand-sex. This is important (not Bea Arthur hand-jobs, but rather, the pirate POV) in that it explains how easy it is to do — and how easy it is to justify.

6. It’s The Internet’s Fault

The thing we love about the Internet is also the thing that makes piracy craaaaazy easy. The Internet distributes information very quickly and efficiently. And it does so by connecting people quickly and, drum roll please, efficiently. The Internet has increased demand for non-corporeal information delivery, meaning: MP3s and YouTube movies and, of course, e-books. It’s ghosts and vapor. Couple this with the fact that we’re used to a culture of wide open access to a bunch of free shit, (again, YouTube or Pandora or Hulu) and you start to see that piracy is as much about cultural attitude and rapidly-evolving technology as it is about “crime.” The Internet connects people. It offers technology to move lots of data really quick. It provides moist, open access 25/8. It’s no wonder that illegal fire-sharing is the result: that’s like running a marathon and not showering and wondering how a cluster of jock-itch spore-pods decided to grow from beneath your sweat-frothed undercarriage.

7. Broken-Ass Data

We don’t have a lot of great data on book piracy. Some will tell you there is — there ain’t. We have almost no idea what impact it has in a practical sense. We need better — or any — data.

8. Theoretically Lost Revenue Rather Than Actually Lost Revenue

Every stolen e-book is lost revenue in a theoretical sense. If the book costs five Amazon ducats, and the author would’ve made twenty solar chits from that pile of ducats, then when a pirate copies that book without buying it, that equals a small pile of theoretical ducats-and-chits that do not go to the publisher or the author. But from a practical sense, that’s not accurate. It’s not actually lost revenue — I didn’t steal a Blu-Ray player off a truck so that the device can no longer be sold. If you’re thirsty and I pour you a glass of water from my tap (or if I don’t like you I scoop it out of my toilet bowl ENJOY THE TASTE OF A THOUSAND FLUSHES JERKPANTS), then Dasani or Aquafina may say, “That’s lost revenue because that person with the free fucking water isn’t buying our water, that asshole.” You can see where that logic falls apart.

9. DRM Probably Creates More Piracy Than It Deters

Digital Rights Management is when the company that owns or distributes the content places a metaphorical chastity belt on the content itself to ensure it doesn’t go sleeping around with other distributors or wayward devices. It’s also notoriously weak and often annoying. Implementation of DRM is frustrating and frustration will lead to piracy rather than away from piracy. It’s like the old Leia-telling-Tarkin, “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”

10. Piracy Helps Some Authors

The “piracy hurts authors” meme is obvious — theoretical or no, it surely represents some lost sales, and further, sometimes the versions of our work that get passed around are incomplete or are early drafts, which only makes us look like amateur hour a-holes. But, you also have to recognize that piracy has helped some authors (Adam Mansbach tells a story about how Go The Fuck To Sleep‘s pages leaked all over the Internet before release, and at first he was pissed off about it — until he realized pre-orders had skyrocketed as a result.) The problem here is, this is not an outcome you can foresee and control: an author can “control” piracy in much the same way you “control” a housecat or a housefire. Or worse, an arsonist housecat who started a housefire to get back at you for that shitty store-brand food you’ve been giving it. Jerk.

11. Pirates Have Their Reasons (Even If Many Of Them Are Crappy)

Pirates don’t appear to illegally share files because they relish being shitheads. They have, like any antagonist in any story, reasons for what they do.

12. Sometimes It’s About Lack Of Access

A reader may be driven to book piracy because that reader lacks access to the book in some way. A reader in a territory where the book has not been released may have no other way to get the book (and this is sometimes why you’ll often find your book on some torrent site in, like, Flarzblargistan). Further, publishers and libraries have not yet become besties-forever on the subject of e-books: so, many digital books (and even print books) are not available through a library service. A book may not even be an e-book yet (cough cough the final Wheel of Time book). Or it may not be platform-agnostic and lives only on, say, the Amazon Kindle, or the B&N Nook, or the Toyota Yaris (that’s an e-reader, right? I’m pretty sure it’s an e-reader).

13. Sometimes It’s About The Cost

The excuse is sometimes that e-books are just too expensive. The hardback is $15, the e-book is mysteriously three dollars more. And there exist plenty of justifications for why that price is as high as it is, just as there are plenty of justifications for why someone thinks that price is too high no matter the excuse. A customer has very little interest in why a price is too high — they only believe, sometimes rationally, sometimes not, that it is. And it’s here that a customer can be turned to the Dark Side of the Capitalist Force and choose instead to seek the book for free. A spurned customer will become an eager pirate if it’s easy enough.

14. Sometimes People Are Just Dicks

A lot of the reasons for book piracy amount to: “Because I want it.” It’s not driven by evil, but rather, selfishness. Selfishness is rarely seen as that; it’s often bound up in excuses that make a person feel okay for what they’re doing, but at the end of the day, it boils down to acting upon one’s wants without considering the needs of others. (And here let me wax political: the myth of America is that we’re a troop of hard-working capitalists who pulled ourselves up by our boot-straps, and you can see this in all the talk of our personal liberty, our individual rights, but the reality is, that individualism can sour and become the reason we refuse to ever play advocate for others — couple that with our crass consumerist tendencies and you start to see why I want it so I’m going to take it becomes such an easy decision to make. Further, the door swings both ways, and explains why a publisher will implement high prices and DRM regardless of the market wisdom that suggests it’s a craptastic idea that hurts instead of helps readers.)

15. Downloader As Potential Fan

Consider the possibility that the person who has downloaded your work is not your enemy but rather, your fan. Maybe an old fan, maybe a new one. You may say, “I don’t want that fan, that fan is a thieving fuckswab,” and you are within good reason to say so. (This is definitely the reaction you feel when someone walks up to you and tells you they love your new book and you rock and high-five and oh by the way I downloaded that book for free. Your immediate response feels like it should be, “Oh, cool, well, I downloaded my semen onto your toothbrush for free, you little shit-ferret.”) Just the same, consider the possibility that this person could be an evangelist for your work. Consider that they could be an engine of that most potent of marketing creatures: the slippery eel known as word-of-mouth.

16. Your Pirated Books Might Not Be Your Pirated Books

You will sometimes find your book smeared across the Internet in the gooey handprints of a chocolate-spackled toddler, but be advised, that might not be chocolate. You’ll see a site and it’s like, “OH MY GOD I SEARCHED FOR MY NAME AND THEY HAVE 80 BILLION ITERATIONS OF MY BOOKS AND NOW MY BUTTHOLE HAS TIGHTENED UP WITH SO MUCH ANGER MY BODY IS BEGINNING TO IMPLODE.” But do realize that programmatically some of these sites are there to deliver viruses and spyware: the actual download of your book may just be some shifty, shitty .exe file that is meant to harm the user and doesn’t have a single word you wrote inside its code.

17. The Danger Of Letting Legislation Be The Answer

It’s easy to say that we want the political process to protect us creative-types from this sort of intellectual intrusion, but remember: politicians frequently co-opt causes and use them as Trojan Horses to shepherd other more problematic legislation into existence. You may just want to firm up intellectual property rights, but they want to punish some kid who lip-synced to a Justin Bieber song on fucking YouTube. They want to make it okay to spy on your Internet traffic. They want to lock up the Internet in an AOL-flavored box and hand the key over to a bunch of untrustworthy companies (“THE INTERWEBS: SPONSORED BY THE BLACKWATER-MONSANTO CONGLOMERATE. PLEASE INSERT DNA STICK SO THAT WE MAY SEND AGENTS TO YOUR HOME TO ELIMINATE YOUR WEAKNESS I MEAN WHAT NOTHING.”). They want control and need an excuse to take it. Do not give them that excuse.

18. Our Primary Source Of Revenue Is Our Books And, Oh, By The Way, We’re Fond Of Not Starving And We Also Like Paying Our Mortgages And Feeding Our Kids And Sweet Jeebus This Header Really Got Away From Me Didn’t It?

Artists and authors need to eat. If our books won’t feed us, we’ll stop writing them. Yes, yes, we’re capitalist swine. Just the same: no, really, we need to eat. And pay bills. Which is why we’d like it if you bought our books instead of just, y’know, plucking them out of the ether.

19. Publishers Need To Eat, Too

Just a reminder through all of this talk: artists need to eat. Further, publishers need to eat, too. Er, not the actual publishing companies themselves, because as it turns out corporations are not actually people so much as they are unthinking entities. No, I’m talking about the people in publishing. The people who love books. Who edit them. Who do awesome covers. Who make phone calls and do marketing and all the crazy shit a book needs that you didn’t realize it needs. It’s frequently the artist and author who, understandably, is seen as the one who suffers here — but a book is the product of a whole ecosystem of people. Some pirates will offer to give the author money directly, but this is why some authors — like Pat Rothfuss — will say, “Fuck no, my publisher is why this book exists and the people there deserve their cut.”

20. That Old Chestnut

Some will say that obscurity is a fate worse than piracy. That may be true. That may not. Like all such pithy sayings, it’s always more complicated than what the pithy saying contains — but it is worth considering, isn’t it? Is a pirated book, at the least, a positive sign that people know of and want that thing you wrote? I mean, it’s not a compliment exactly, but…

21. The Napster Conundrum (Which Is Not The New Dan Brown Novel)

I, like many early intrepid Internet yeomans, once used the services of Napster before it became a paid site — meaning, I used to grab all the free music my poor little hard drive could hold. Here’s the trick, though: that was also a period of my life where I bought more music than ever before. Not saying the same thing is true with book piracy, but it’s worth a mention. (I don’t grab anything off torrents or file-shares anymore; I pay, or I don’t play.)

22. Let Your Publisher Fight The Battle

It’s a tremendous waste of time trying to play the vicious Whack-a-Mole game of finding and calling out every instance of book piracy of your work. Do that and you’ll end up awake for 37 hours straight, twitching, drooling, peeing, seeing thievery in all corners of your life (“I SEE YOU POTTED PLANT, YOU SONOFABITCH. YOU’RE TRYING TO STEAL MY EMAILS WITH YOUR PHOTOSYNTHETIC MIND!”). If you see it, alert your publisher. Don’t fight the battles yourselves. Your time is better spent writing new and awesome things.

23. Combat Piracy By Adding Value

Piracy is predominantly about digital, so bring value to the work beyond the digital. Do not restrict digital, but consider limited edition physical prints, or other deals like, say, “Buy a physical copy, also get a digital copy.” (More publishers need to be doing this, stat.) Or maybe, “Buy a physical version of the book, get a taco.” Because FUCK YEAH TACOS, SON.

24. Fight The Culture Of Piracy Rather Than The Pirates Themselves

The problem with piracy, like most ingrained problems, is not one of crime, but one of culture. It is a tremendous waste of emotional and intellectual energy to combat individual instances of book piracy: you’re better off yelling at the waves rolling in and knocking over some kid’s sandcastle. In fact, to carry that metaphor: you don’t fight the effects of climate change, you fight climate change itself. You don’t fight the symptoms of a disease, you fight the disease. You don’t fight individual bears, you fight the culture of bears. … okay, maybe not that last one.

25. The International “Please Don’t Pirate My Book” Day

Here’s what I’m proposing:

Tomorrow, February 6th, will be Please Don’t Pirate My Book Day. On that day, you writer-types should take time — as little or as much as you can manage — and hop online to talk about piracy. About how it has affected you, or what your thoughts about it are, but most importantly, why you’d like people to pay for your book instead of, say, just taking it.

Speak your mind, whatever that may mean.

So, tomorrow: blog post, Tumblr text, tweet, whatever.

Talk about book piracy and how you feel about it, specifically.

I’ll do it. Won’t you?

(Probably not, and that’s okay. I know that you’re busy. After all, you’re not answering my texts. I’ll just sit here in your shrubs and keep eating these Goldfish crackers while flipping through my iPhone photos of you on the toilet. I LOVE YOU SO MUCH.)

Fireside, Year Two: Serialized Content By Yours Truly

Fireside is a fucking great magazine.

Brian White put together three full issues via Kickstarter, featuring powerful stories across all genres by some incredible writers (Blackmoore, Bear, Howard, Liu, Grintalis, etc). Further, he pays his authors very well — well above what is sadly an unevolved base professional rate.

Fireside’s back with a new Kickstarter, this time transitioning from a print magazine to an online-only and e-book presence. And, in this iteration, I’m on board, too.

In fact, I’m on board with a 12-part serial storytelling experiment (tentatively titled “The Forever Endeavor”). It’s been a story I’ve wanted to write for a long time but which is challenging for reasons that will become apparent should the Kickstarter reach its goal — it’s not exactly a mainstream story and it’ll be funny and sorta fucked up and something of a noodle-cooker in terms of how it boggles my brain (and hopefully yours). So, I’m excited to have a forum to put this thing to paper — er, “paper” — and get it into people’s heads.

Plus, Brian’s got other great writers joining in, putting me in some excellent company — Ken Liu, Delilah Dawson, Karina Cooper, and the mighty Lilith Saintcrow.

Plus: design by Pablo Defendini!

And that artwork by Galen Dara, c’mon. C’mon.

Anyway.

Want in? Then put me to work.

The Kickstarter is now live.

Promote Something Awesome That Will Make Us Squeesplode

It’s another pimp something you love post.

Let’s keep it to books, this time.

Tell us about a book — preferably one you’ve read recently or that’s coming out recently — that you dig so much you have to tell us about it or you’ll squeesplode all over the damn Internets.

And yes, I just made up a word, “squeesplode.”

Please spread it widely and with wanton disregard for good manners.

One thing you wanna pimp. Tell us what it is, by whom, and why you dig it.

And not by you. But by someone else.

Here’s mine:

DEAD THINGS by Stephen Blackmoore.

Urban fantasy by way of Richard Kadrey and Jim Butcher. Grimmer stuff, I think, than his debut, CITY OF THE LOST, but still funny at times, too. It’s about magic, and the power and sacrifices one makes with that magic — and one of those sacrifices may involve cozying up to Santa Muerte, which is not a goddess you really want to cozy up to. It’s got murder, mages, and ghosts aplenty. It’s really bad-ass and I want you to read it.

Oh! And two more books in the series will be on the way, too. (CITY OF THE LOST takes place in the same world with the same rules but only has very minor crossover into DEAD THINGS.)

Click here to check it out (you can even read the first chapter there).

Your turn!

Alex Hughes: The Terribleminds Interview

When you hear a book is a cross between Blade Runner and Chinatown, you can’t help but lift your brow and give the story a second glance. Such is the case of Alex Hughes’ novel, Clean — and here, Alex sits down to be subjected to the scalpels and drills of the terribleminds interview. You can find Alex at her website or on Twitter @ahugheswriter.

This is a blog about writing and storytelling. So, tell us a story. As short or long as you care to make it. As true or false as you see it.

Once there was a hedgehog named Obion. Obion was a smart hedgehog, much smarter than all the other hedgies in his class in school, and they were jealous. So one day they cornered him in the laundry area of the school (puffy sweaters were popular that year) and pushed him into the trans-dimensional portal in the dryer that normally eats socks.

Obion fell through time and space in a swirling maelstrom of terror and joy. He landed on a busy interstate outside of El Paso, TX, right in front of a huge semi-truck of migrant workers, which fortunately was stopped. A small boy named Manuel stopped to look at him.

“What are you?” the boy said.

“I am a hedgehog!” Obion growled, and much to the surprise of both, the boy nodded.

“I am a boy,” he said. “And we are going to California to pick the avocados. Do you want to go along?”

Obion the hedgehog thought about it. He was so disoriented and he wanted more than anything to go home. But this sounded like a grand adventure, and all the other hedgehogs had told him he was not very brave. So he agreed, and found he did not like avocados at all.

The boy grew up into a man, and over the years they had many adventures together. Obion told the boy what to do, and the boy – now a man – did it. But soon the man fell in love, and the woman did not approve of a talking hedgehog, much less one that gave orders.

So Obion found himself on the street again, an old hedgehog with painful joints, still unable to get home. He found a little spot in a soup can in an alley behind a Chinese restaurant. He looked at the stars that night, and wondered if any of the other hedgies would ever remember him.

He met a raccoon that night, but that is another story.

Why do you tell stories?

There is nothing in the world like falling completely into a story. It’s nubby velvet and rich chocolate, the sting of fear and the bitterness of lemon peel all rolled into one. It’s the chance to live a hundred lives outside your own, and come back to your own warm bed. It’s joy.

Writing your own story is living in that moment a long time, and being the architect of all of those feelings in other people. When it’s beautiful, it’s beautiful, and when it’s hard, there’s nothing quite so hard in all the world. But I keep coming back to that feeling I love – of the world falling away and the story taking over. That feeling, that joy, is why I write.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

Never give up. Never, never, never, never, never give up. And never get complacent. Keep getting better, keep getting the words on the page or the stories in the air, and eventually you’ll find your genius.

What’s the worst piece of writing/storytelling advice you’ve ever received?

All stories must have three acts, which must be outlined in advance with no more than three major characters. Poppycock. The messy, crazy, complex stories of the world are sometimes the very best. Learn the “rules,” then break them shamelessly and without apology when it suits your purpose.

What goes into writing a great character? Bonus round: give an example.

A great character is someone who wants something very badly and can’t have it. The more specific and difficult the better, whether it’s a flying unicorn with a red spot the character saw in the next kingdom (her dad the king is too poor to buy it), or justice for a tortured eighteen-year-old victim whose killer left no clues. Then you fill in the rest of the world in terms of the character. Real people are messy and complicated, with crazy likes and dislikes and opinions about everything. Spend the time to have your character react to the world around him or her and give them hobbies and opinions to the point it seems excessive.  Give him or her quirks; steal shamelessly from the people around you.

Example: You’re going to laugh at me for using the Archie McNally books as an example, but I adore Lawrence Sander’s main character. I haven’t read one of the books in years, but to this day I still remember Archie going out to the seashore every day to swim for an hour in ridiculous swim trunks. He said he “did the breaststroke because it sounded so nice.” That tells you practically everything you need to know about the character in one sentence – and it made me laugh. Genius.

Give us the 140-Character Twitter Pitch For Your Novel, Clean:

Recovering addict telepath helps the police in future Atlanta track down killers. The latest is a serial killer who kills with the mind.

Where does this story come from?

I’ve always been a *huge* fan of TV cop dramas; I used to watch them with my family growing up, and I still watch 2-3 a week. In college, I’d just read this book called Catspaw by Joan D. Vinge about a tortured telepath trying to make his way in the world, and loved it. I decided I’d try to write a tortured telepath too, only mine would be a detective like the ones I loved from TV. When I sat down to write it, a friend of mine was struggling to recover from anorexia, and I knew I wanted to talk about her story somehow in fiction that year–so I asked, would this fit with this story? And I thought, for this story, I’d need an addiction a little easier to understand. It took multiple drafts to get the story to its present form, but that’s where it started.

How is this a book only you could’ve written?

I end up putting bits of myself and my obsessions into every story I write. For this one, it’s my love of physics and neuroscience, the struggle of my friend and the research I’ve done along the way. But ultimately, this is the story I had to tell because Adam showed up and started talking to me, specifically. It’s not always an easy conversation, but it’s a story I have to tell.

Your bio lists you as a bit of a foodie: what’s one food you wish more people would eat?

This one changes depending on the day you ask me. Today, I’m going to say bruschetta. The good stuff, with homemade just-toasted baguette, aged balsamic vinegar reduction, fresh heirloom or roasted cherry tomatoes sliced with care and love, and a dusting of perfect cheese. Goat cheese, perhaps, the mildest you can find, in little clouds on the top. Or fine aged parmesean, just grated. Bring out the right red wine, and you have an entire perfect meal. Yes, today I’m going to say bruschetta.

Recommend a book, comic book, film, or game: something with great story. Go!

Lately I’ve been recommending Phone Booth, a movie that apparently nobody saw but has an amazing story. The writing on this one is crazy good. I mean really, who in the world can trap a character alone in a phone booth for most of the movie and have me on the edge of my seat the whole time? Plus huge suspense, a genuine character arc, and what Aristotle calls the “unity of time and place,” something no modern screenwriter does. Plus Colin Farrell kicks ass at acting in it.

Favorite word? And then, the follow up: Favorite curse word?

Indubitably. It just makes you sound smart, plus you get all the play of “whatever.” Curse word? Hmm. There are several lovely ones out there! Personally, I like shit. Nice hard sound with a great visual, particularly if there’s a turning fan involved. My series character Adam, though, likes damn, so lately that’s been sneaking into my speech pretty often.

Favorite alcoholic beverage? (If cocktail: provide recipe. If you don’t drink alcohol, fine, fine, a non-alcoholic beverage will do.)

I love a really good red wine, especially a California blend or a complex Malbec from Argentina. I’m also a fan of flavored rum with white grape/peach juice, but I’m told that’s hopelessly girly of me. It is rather overwhelmingly sweet J

What skills do you bring to help us win the inevitable war against the robots?

Networking, a phone, and excellent coordination skills. I have many friends with machetes, swords, and automatic weapons stockpiled (not always in the same house). I also have several engineering friends, and one guy who works with robots for a living. The plan is, I start dialing, we assemble a small army of overly confident Southern guys with weapons to hold off the robots while the geeks reverse-engineer the operating code and Trojan the heck out of the survivors. I figure, forty-eight hours and we’ll have a small army of robots working for us to help me make an Italian feast for the folks who showed up to help. I’ll supervise.

What’s next for you as a storyteller? What does the future hold?

The future is unknown – but that’s the fun.

I have nine books sketched out for the Mindspace Investigations series, so I imagine those will keep me busy. But I’d also like to branch out into other worlds, other stories and other characters. I love stories and I’d like to get my hands in lots of them.

Flash Fiction Challenge: Three Haikus Tell One Story

Last week’s challenge: “Choose Your Motif“

The haiku.

Three lines in syllables of 5 / 7 / 5.

You’re going to use the haiku form to tell a story.

I’ll be nice: you can have three haikus to tell that story.

Hew to the 5 / 7 / 5 structure — yes, there are other permutations of the haiku form, but we’re going to go with the base level structure we all know and love from English class.

This week has a prize:

If you win, I’ll toss you a copy of each of my writing-related e-books. That’s both Penmonkey books and all four of my “lists of 25″ books (starting with 250 Things).

You’ll get those e-books in PDF format.

You have till next Friday to post your three-haiku story in the comments below. That is to say, by February 8th at noon EST. You get only one entry, so choose well. (Multiple entries will disqualify all entries.)

I’ll choose my favorite the week following.

Now go forth and haiku the hell out of this place.

Or, rather:

The terribleminds

haiku challenge is now live

for you to conquer

Ten Questions About Dead Things, By Stephen Blackmoore

I am a fan of Stephen Blackmoore. I also consider myself his friend, even though he keeps taking restraining orders out on me — seriously, now I have to stay 603 miles away from him at all times, which will make the next WorldCon very awkward. WHATEVER. I dug the hell out of his first novel, City of the Lost, but for me, Dead Things is an epic favorite — I don’t read fast, but this book was like a gun pressed to the back of my head and I read the hell out of it in very short order. I loved it. So will you. Let Herr Doktor Blackmoore tell you all about it.

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

I am a sparkly unicorn who grants wishes and frolics in the… Wait.  Where am I?

Oh.  OH.  Sorry.  That’s, uh, that’s for something different.

I’m an author.  I write books.  There’s CITY OF THE LOST, about an undead thug who gets caught up in a hunt for the item that raised him from the dead.  KHAN OF MARS, which comes out later this year, set in the 1930′s pulp adventure world of the role-playing game SPIRIT OF THE CENTURY, about a hyper-intelligent gorilla fighting for freedom on the red planet.  My newest book, DEAD THINGS.  I also write short stories and co-host the bi-monthly lit event Noir At The Bar L.A. and run a true-crime blog called L.A. Noir.

I’m kinda all over the place.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

DEAD THINGS is an urban fantasy novel about a necromancer who comes home after 15 years to solve his sister’s murder to find it’s a trap.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

The protagonist of DEAD THINGS, Eric Carter, is a necromancer, a rarity among mages.  He sees the dead, talks to them, makes them do what he wants.  It gives him a perspective on life and death that a lot of people don’t have.  It’s isolating for him in a lot of ways.

Carter disappears from his old life leaving behind a lot of resentment, anger and confusion.  And when he comes back fifteen years later to deal with his sister’s murder he finds himself having to deal with the fallout of his decisions.  His old friends don’t know how to handle him and he doesn’t know how to handle his friends.  It’s not easy for him.

Between that and his abilities with the dead a lot of the book is about ghosts.  Ghosts of dead people, ghosts of dead relationships, ghosts of the way things were and aren’t anymore.

And for me that’s the core of the story; disconnecting yourself from your life and the challenges of trying to come back to it.  That doesn’t always work.  People change.  Sometimes it’s the people you thought you knew.  Sometimes it’s yourself.

We’ve all done it at one point or another.  It’s part of growing and defining your own life, whether you do it at eighteen, thirty or sixty.  And there’s always fallout from those actions. Carter’s forced to confront the choices he’s made and the consequences of his decisions.  A lot of the story comes from examining what kind of awkward homecoming that might be like.

HOW IS THIS A STORY ONLY YOU COULD’VE WRITTEN?

A lot of writing is about choices.  Which words to use, which ones to leave out, what plot points to emphasize, that sort of thing.  All of those together, and a dozen other things, contribute to a writer’s voice.  I’d like to think that I bring something unique in terms of style to the stories I write.  Another writer would have made different choices, focused on different things.  I’m sure, hell, I know, that someone else could have written Eric Carter’s story.  But it wouldn’t have been this one.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING DEAD THINGS?

Making the character of Eric Carter unique and not a rehash of Joe Sunday, the protagonist of CITY OF THE LOST.

Though it’s set in the same world as CITY OF THE LOST, DEAD THINGS is a very different book.  The protagonists are very different people.  How they view the world and their place in it and the challenges they face are about as far removed from each other as it’s possible to be.  In CITY Joe Sunday is trying to adjust to a sudden new world that he’s been thrust into.

But with Carter, it’s coming back to a world that he thought he knew.  Sunday’s very much a fish out of water character, and Carter is more of a guide.  He knows his world, or at least he thinks he does.

I tried to keep Carter different from Sunday by focusing on Carter’s relationships and his character more than I did Sunday’s.  It’s a much more emotional and character driven book.  I think it worked.  Guess we’ll find out.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING DEAD THINGS?

That writing a book is something I can repeat and do it on a deadline.

I’ve looked at my writing career, though it’s new enough that calling it a career feels pretentious I don’t know what else to call it, as a series of stepping stones.  I always want to be moving.  I don’t want to do anything that isn’t going to lead me to something else.

The first novel I ever wrote was a weird, little mess for NANOWRIMO back in 2002 to prove to myself that I could do it.  After that I focused on writing and publishing short stories, get my name out there, get some bullets on the resume.  I didn’t try to tackle anything longer for a few years.  Then I wrote CITY OF THE LOST, sold that and jumped onto DEAD THINGS.

I’m proud of CITY OF THE LOST.  I think it’s a good book.  I wanted to make sure that DEAD THINGS was, if not better, at least as good and yet different enough that it stood out.

Up until the point that I turned the book in I wasn’t entirely sure I could do that.  NANOWRIMO notwithstanding (and I don’t really count it) I had never written a book with a deadline.  I was playing with things that I hadn’t really done before, digging into some emotional territory that wasn’t always fun to write, dealing with the pressure of knowing that I could completely blow it.

Now that the book is making its way into people’s hands I’m fairly confident that I pulled it off.  Knowing that I can do that gives me something to hang onto when I run into a rough spot and start believing that I can’t.  I have proof that I can.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT DEAD THINGS?

That Eric Carter is a fuck up.

It’s not that Carter’s incompetent, it’s that he makes bad choices because of flawed assumptions.  You know, like we all do.  He set in motion a series of events based on what he thought people needed and when he comes back into the life he left behind he’s still operating as though everything should be the same and it isn’t.

I don’t like characters who can’t fail.  Superman holds no appeal for me.  Indiana Jones is more my speed.  Watch Raiders of The Lost Ark and you’ll see just how much of a failure as a hero Indiana Jones is.  He screws up just about everything he tries to do in that movie.  Loses the gold idol, burns down Marian’s bar, gets her killed (not really, but he doesn’t know that) and ultimately loses the Ark.  He’s a fuck up.  he just looks good doing it.

That kind of character is much more interesting to me and I tried to put that sort of limitation into Carter.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

Well, I’m about to do a next time.  The sequel to DEAD THINGS, BROKEN SOULS, is due to be delivered in July for a 2014 release.  DEAD THINGS was written during nights and weekends because of my day job.  This time I’m going to try to carve out a couple weeks off the day job and go somewhere I can’t be interrupted.  I don’t know if it will help, since I have an enormous capacity for distraction, but I’m hoping to find out.

Also, the outline for BROKEN SOULS is slightly more comprehensive than the one for DEAD THINGS.  The DEAD THINGS outline started something like, “Stuff happens and then this thing over here and then…” eventually getting into the actual plot.  I didn’t really have a beginning in mind.

This one is a lot more locked down, which on the one hand should make things easier and on the other, as I write it, I realize that it might be a little too tight.  I’m curious to see how far away I diverge from the outline with the finished book.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

I don’t have a favorite paragraph, but I do have a favorite line.  ”Death keeps her promises.”

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

I’m working on BROKEN SOULS at the moment and then I have the next one in the series, HUNGRY GHOSTS, along with a couple of short stories I need to do and, depending on how things shake out, some gaming work that I can’t really talk about, yet.

I’m hoping to branch out into some other directions this year and try my hand at a comic script, maybe a screenplay, two things I’ve never tried before.  I don’t really expect much to come of them other than getting used to the form and use them to jump toward other things.

Like I said, they’re all stepping stones.

Dead Things (Feb 5th): Amazon / B&N / Indiebound

Read the first chapter here.

site: stephenblackmoore.com

Twitter: @stephenblackmoore

The Storytelling Lesson In Jon Klassen’s “Stolen Hat” Books

If you care about this in the context of children’s books (at which point I must assume you’re like, eight years old and probably don’t belong here anyway): the following post has a spoiler warning for Jon Klassen’s I Want My Hat Back and its follow-up, This Is Not My Hat.

Kay?

Kay.

So.

Rob Donoghue sent me the first “hat” book, and it is easily my favorite book to read to my son. Further, B-Dub likes it, too. When he wants it, he makes growling noises and taps his head, or calls out any of the animals within (a particular favorite is turtle, or “toor-tull”).

Yesterday, I poked through Barnes & Noble (hey, look, physical bookstores still exist! even though this one was phasing out of existence even as I walked through it, the air shimmering and revealing a panoply of retail possibilities — Panera, Old Navy, Coldstone Creamery, Big Dan Don’s Buttplug Bonanzaporium) and I found the sequel, This Is Not My Hat.

I read it.

And I realized:

The two books are essentially the same.

They tell the story of a most ungracious hat thievery, in which one small animal steals the tiny hat of a larger animal. In the first book, a rabbit steals that from a bear. In the second book, a little fish steals the hat off a much larger fish.

In both books, the big animal discovers what has happened and, despite being a bit big and doofy, eventually tracks down the hat thief and… well, it is implied that the bigger creature eats the smaller creature in order to regain the precious and titular hat.

Here’s where a critical storytelling lesson lies:

In the first book, the bear is the protagonist. The bear’s hat has been stolen.

In the second book, the tiny fish is the protagonist. The tiny fish has stolen a hat.

First book, we side with the victim.

Second book, we side with the thief.

We read the first book, and we feel for the bear. When he finally goes ahead and eats the rabbit and reclaims his hat, there is a moment if triumph (if a triumph of some black humor) because: YAY BEAR HAS HIS HAT BACK.

We read the second book, and we feel for the tiny fish. The tiny fish gives all his reasons for having stolen the hat. The tiny fish believes he has gotten away with, erm, clean fins, as it were. When the big fish finally tracks down the tiny fish and eats him to reclaim the hat, there is a moment of horror because: OH GOD THE TINY FISH IS (probably) DEAD.

Same story.

But a shift in perspective wildly alters our perception of that story.

From triumph, to revulsion.

From a tale of a dumb bear reclaiming his beloved hat…

…to the tale of a tiny delusional hat-thief getting his brutal comeuppance.

The lesson is, of course, that a simple shift in perspective changes so much in a story. Use a shift of perspective in fiction — and, perhaps, in life — to deepen the complexity of the story and to gain fresh understanding. Ignore this shift to keep things more narratively monochromatic. Further, it’s a lesson that few antagonists believe themselves evil: the tiny fish does not steal the hat because he is evil but rather because he is selfish and is able to delude himself about that selfishness. He has his reasons. He is, as are most antagonists, the hero of his own story.

For a kid’s book, it’s powerful stuff.

Maybe too powerful right now for B-Dub, who is not even two years old –

But powerful, just the same.

Ten Questions About The Aylesford Skull, by James Blaylock

You want steampunk? We got steampunk. Here’s James Blaylock — one of steampunk’s first team — talking about his newest, The Aylesford Skull.

Tell Us About Yourself: Who The Hell Are You?

I’m a writer who sold his first short story in 1976, titled “Red Planet,” about a young man on a Greyhound bus in the Midwest who thinks he’s traveling to Mars, but perhaps is confusing Mars with the red agate marble in his pocket Since then I’ve published about 25 novels and short story collections and a heap of essays, introductions, and other short pieces. I won the World Fantasy Award twice, for my short stories “Paper Dragons” and “Thirteen Phantasms,” and the Philip K. Dick Memorial award in 1986 for my Steampunk novel Homunculus. That was still a couple of years before K. W. Jeter would coin the term. My books are translated in 15 foreign countries. My most recently published book is titled Zeuglodon, The True Adventures of Kathleen Perkins, Cryptozoologist. I recently sold a short novel titled The Pagan Goddess to Subterranean Press. I’ve lived in California all my life. Married for 40 years. Two sons. Dog named Pippi. Tortoise named Ollie. Readers can check out my website at jamespblaylock.com.

Give Us The 140-Character Pitch:

Quick-moving plot, river pirates, graves robbed, magically altered skulls, kidnappings, explosions, many strange occurrences, a certain amount of eating.

Where Does This Story Come From?

I’ve been publishing stories about the characters that inhabit The Aylesford Skull (so to speak) since 1978, when Unearth magazine published my story “The Ape-box Affair,” the first domestic Steampunk publication, hence my being referred to as the Grandfather of Steampunk. (Actually there are three Grandfathers, Tim Powers and K. W. Jeter included. I got in first only because it’s quicker to write a publish a short story. Both Tim and K.W. were writing novels at the time.) I prefer Godfather or Grand Vizier or High Priest or something. “Grandfather” needlessly makes me feel older than I am. Anyway, The Aylesford Skull is my fifth novel involving these characters, so its origins in that sense are decades old. The concept of the story, however, came out of my fascination with so-called Japanese Magic Mirrors (also arguably Chinese Magic Mirrors) that were exceedingly cool objects, which seemed to people to be authentically magic. I believe that they probably were magic a few centuries ago, before magic packed its bags and left town.

How Is This A Story Only You Could’ve Written?

I’m not certain how, but I’m certain that it is (unless we’re talking about the infamous roomful of monkeys with typewriters). Bruce Sterling once said that my work had a “refreshing natural lunacy,” and Robin McKinley, in what was no doubt meant as a positive statement, wrote, “No one should be spared the unique perversity of Jim Blaylock’s world view.”

What Was The Hardest Thing About Writing The Aylesford Skull?

The constant research was difficult, or at least time consuming. There was a ton of it necessary in the beginning, when I was working simply to envision the book and the characters, but the real work came when I was writing. I found myself checking any of a hundred different sources on every page that I wrote, and to make matters worse, one thing would inevitably lead to another. I’d start out reading about hops growing in Kent, England, for example, which would lead me to pieces about oast houses, which would remind me of a scene in The Pickwick Papers that I’d best reread, etc. I can’t tell you how much I learned about coal dust, for example, while I was working on the book (utterly useless knowledge in my daily life, I’m happy to say). Also, I’m anxious to get the language “right.” I want it to sound authentic in some sense of the term, not inaccessibly antique, but not characteristically modern, either. I wanted to fool the reader into hearing a novel that I might have written if I were alive in the 19th Century. I constantly read Victorian novels, or modern works set in that time period, just to keep my ear in tune. It’s shocking how often I checked useful dictionaries in order to avoid anachronism or to understand idioms or scientific words of that strange age. I was surprised to discover that “dirigible,” for example, was very new in 1883. If the book were set in 1880 I’d have stuck with “airship” or “air vessel.” I often found myself checking The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in order to find a nifty word or phrase, and then rechecking it in the Oxford Universal Dictionary on Historical Principles in the interests of accuracy, and then deciding against using it altogether because I didn’t like the sound of it or because it was too obscure or show-offy. That sort of thing could waste a good five minutes or more, and the result was that it would take twice as long to write the day’s thousand-words as it would have taken me to write two thousand words of a contemporary novel set in California. That being said, it was a great deal of fun.

What Did You Learn Writing The Aylesford Skull?

I learned something that I already knew but that I often forget: that the best stuff in any of my stories and novels flies into my head out of nowhere during the act of writing, and that I have to trust to the language and the muses and not to a lot of pre-thinking. Conversely, much of that cool, flying stuff ultimately can’t be used, because it simply doesn’t fit. There’s a constant interplay of momentary inspiration and rational assessment.

What Do You Love About The Aylesford Skull?

I’m very fond of some of the smaller characters, who began as bit players and then developed into very much more. That’s related to what I was just talking about – part of the very real magic of writerly invention when all cylinders are firing.

What Don’t You Like About It?

Can’t think of anything, and if I could, I’d quite likely keep it to myself. Reminds me of one of my favorite bits from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: “A dwarf who carries a standard along to measure his own size is a dwarf in more articles than one.”

Give Us Your Favorite Paragraph From The Story:

This one is completely impossible. Here’s a paragraph that I like, however:

Wise reeled away. His senses were uncannily sharp in that

moment; he heard the rain beating on the deck and hissing on the

hot iron of the oven, and he smelled the rain and the river, and saw

with particular clarity the lights winking along the far shore. He

felt the railing in the small of his back, and he heard what sounded

to him like the murmuring of the Thames flowing in its bed toward

the sea, its waters unsettled and agitated by the incoming tide. He

found himself teetering backward, his weight levering him over

the railing – the brief sensation of falling and of the dark waters

mercifully closing over him as he drowned in his own blood.

What’s Next For You As A Storyteller?

I’ve got two novel proposals in the works – one Steampunk and one not. Also I’ve promised to write a couple of short stories. That should fill up a couple of years of my writing life. More of the same after that, as long as my brain doesn’t lose air pressure like an old tire.

The Aylesford Skull: Amazon / B&N / Indiebound

The Official Reddit AMA

Is live.

Click here to go ask me questions.

Anything at all! Er, hence the name. AMA.

Ask. Me. Anything.

I’ll pop back in later to answer them.

Er, at Reddit, not here.

Because, y’know.

Reddit.

AMA.

And so forth.

Now fly, you fools!