Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 230

Chris Baty: The Terribleminds Interview

Chris Baty, ladies and gentlemen: the founder of NaNoWriMo is here just in time to save you and your novel. I met Chris as the Crossroads Conference down in Macon, GA, this year, where the both of us were guest speakers of the con (and what a kick-ass con it is), and damn if he isn’t the nicest and most inspiring dude. Which tells me he’s probably a serial killer, but that’s okay. Who isn’t? Chris harnessed the power of his niceness and inspiration and focused them on an interview here at terribleminds. Find his site at chrisbaty.com, and you will find him on the Twitters @chrisbaty.

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.

Almost a decade ago, one of the most active members of the NaNoWriMo message boards died in a car accident. I’ll call her Mary. Mary lived in a small town in Michigan, and on New Year’s Eve, she was driving alone on an icy road when a deer jumped in front of her car. She swerved and skidded, slamming into a tree. We learned about the accident when the executor of her will posted a note about her death on the NaNoWriMo forums.

Everyone was stunned. Mary had been a vital, hilarious presence in the NaNoWriMo message boards. She’d always gone out of her way to be encouraging to everyone, and had been particularly generous with younger participants. Mary had a lot of virtual admirers spread out all over the country, and none of us really knew how to deal with her sudden absence.

A week later, the first bit of weirdness appeared. A fan of Mary’s had posted in the message boards, saying she’d contacted the mortuaries in Mary’s town because she’d wanted to send flowers to the funeral. And none of them were hosting a funeral for Mary.

Thinking “Mary” might have been a pen name (or that Mary was being buried elsewhere), this person called Mary’s local newspaper to get the details of the woman killed in the New Year’s Eve crash. Which is how she learned there had been no New Year’s Eve crash.

This weirded everyone out. I sent Mary an awkward email asking, in essence, if she really was dead. She didn’t respond. Shortly after that, a longtime member of the NaNoWriMo community decided to take matters into her own hands. She found Mary’s phone number online and called it. To her surprise, a woman answered.

“Mary?” the caller asked.

“Yes?” the woman said.

The caller hung up and immediately posted details of the interaction on the NaNoWriMo site. Mary’s sister, who had never posted on the site before, responded quickly, saying that she had been packing up Mary’s house and had answered the  phone. The name thing had been a misunderstanding.

This was fishy enough that, by the time someone found Mary alive and well and posting on another other message board one week later, most of us had already accepted the fact that she’d faked her death, creating the executor and sister to sell the lie.

It was an unforgivable stunt. But as a writer, I had to give Mary grudging props. She’d woven a ridiculous plot twist into the story of her life, and artfully deployed a cast of supporting characters to make it believable. We’d been sucked in by it. Our anger over being so thoroughly manipulated was only slightly lessened by the knowledge that we’d managed to expose her fiction.

As the scandal was dying down, I went into the admin area of the NaNoWriMo site and checked the IP addresses of all the key players in the story. Sure enough, the Executor’s account had the same IP address as Mary’s. The sister’s did as well. I was kicking myself for not checking this earlier.

Then, on a strange impulse, I looked up the post by the woman who had accidentally unraveled Mary’s story by calling the newspaper.

It had also come from Mary’s IP address.

I checked the forums posts from the person who first called Mary at home.

Ditto.

Dumbstruck, I checked all of the other NaNoWriMo accounts involved in the fracas, and they were thankfully coming from places far away from Mary’s small Michigan town. They were legit. Right?

I didn’t know. At that point, Mary’s reach seemed limitless. She’d been brazen enough to kill off one of our community’s beloved heroines and then bring her back to life as a monster. It was brilliant and awful, and for years afterwards I asked myself the question: Who does that sort of thing?

I wish I knew.

Why do you tell stories?

Well, this is going to sound weird after the above tale, but I really like to make people laugh.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

Make the most of your novel-writing time by only polishing prose that you’re relatively sure will end up in front of readers’ eyeballs.

I’ve found that stories can change a ton between the outline and the first draft, and they can shape-shift again between the first and second drafts. Novels are slippery buggers, and we usually have to write all the way through them a couple times before we pin down exactly what they’re about and how best to tell the tale.

This means that big parts of our early drafts will usually need to be demolished or completely reconfigured to make room for the mind-blowing, award-winning, bestselling creatures our books are destined to be.

Getting rid of utilitarian prose is hard. Getting rid of  polished, bookstore-ready chapters packed with hilarious dialogue and eloquent descriptions will make you want to die. It can be so demoralizing that we can get all Golem-y about it, holding on to our precious sections even when we know they’re sapping strength from our books.

No matter how long you postpone your fine-tuning, you’ll still end up having to cut some golden prose—everyone does. But if you let sentence-fixing and dialogue-bettering be the cupcake you reward yourself with for making it all the way through one or two drafts, I think you’ll be happier (and more prolific) in the long run.

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

I feel like at every writer’s conference there’s a tough-love expert who gets up and tells everyone to quit. They lay out the dire economics of the publishing world. They talk about how the field is already overcrowded with aspiring writers. They say that, unless you’re among the .1% of writers who are so committed to your craft that blood spurts out of your eyeballs on the days your don’t write, you should just pack it in.

I know it’s coming from a place of wanting to protect people from getting hurt down the line. But we’re all adults here. Life is short. Writing is fun. Why would you discourage anyone from doing it?

How does a writer combat demoralization during writing and editing?

Argh. Yeah. That’s such a great question. I’ve watched some of the most gifted writers I know abandon promising manuscripts just because they lose momentum on them.

This is why I think they should teach the dark arts of project management in writing classes.  If I were teaching that class, my first lecture would be on the Five Truths That Will Make You Less Likely To Kill Yourself or Your Book During the Writing Process.

Truth # 1: Books take longer to write than you think they will. (This one is especially hard to accept for those of us who wrote our first drafts in a month.) Some of the most toxic frustration we dump into our writing process starts with unrealistic expectations about how quickly we should be able to revise our books. Think of your book as a house that you’re building alone. Eventually you’re going to have this supremely satisfying moment where all your friends come over to your finished place and sit in your new hot tub out on the beautiful deck and marvel at your talent, discipline, and vision. To reach that glorious hot tub moment, though, you have to schlep a lot of bricks. It takes time, but the best things always do. As long as you’re continually pushing forward on the project, you should never beat yourself up about how long it takes to finish it.

Truth #2: Momentum is everything. Isaac Newton’s law that objects in motion tend to stay in motion is deeply true when it comes to book building. The more frequently you write, the easier each writing session becomes. Characters work hard for authors who visit them often.

Truth #3: Your book will get better. If you’re feeling despondent about your story, know that many of the things bothering you will be fixed by the time you get to the end of your current draft.  Appreciate your book for what it will become, not what it is now.

Truth #4: Nothing gets done without deadlines. Schedule the hell out of every draft. Share those deadlines with other people and ask them to check in on your progress. Even as you cut yourself slack when the book’s overall timeframe shifts (see Truth #1), be sure to move heaven and earth to hit each mini deadline.

Truth #5: You deserve treats. Celebrate every bookish milestone by doing (or buying) something nice for yourself. Don’t wait until the house is finished to raise a glass to yourself and everything you’ve done.

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

I love characters who are great observers. Characters who have simple, true insights into themselves, the people in their lives, and the world at large.

As a writer, these are hard to pull off because we have to first come up with the insights and revealing details and then sneak them into the brains and mouths of our protagonists in a way that seems natural to them.

I’m reading The Leftovers by Tom Perrota, a book about life in a small suburb after a rapture-like event has mysteriously claimed a quarter of Earth’s population. One of the characters is a teenage girl whose mom has run away with a Christian doomsday cult that has popped up after the Sudden Departure. Here’s a passage about the girl.

“She missed everything about the woman, even the stuff that used to drive her crazy—her off-key singing, her insistence that whole-wheat pasta tasted just as good as the regular kind, her inability to follow the storyline of even the simplest TV show (Wait a second, is that the same guy as before, or someone else?). Spasms of wild longing would strike her out of nowhere, leaving her dazed and weepy, prone to sullen fits of anger that inevitably got turned against her father, which was totally unfair, since he wasn’t the one who’d abandoned her. In an effort to fend off these attacks, Jill made a list of her mother’s faults and pulled it out whenever she felt herself getting sentimental:

Weird, high-pitched totally fake laugh

Crappy taste in music

Judgmental

Ugly sunglasses

Uses words like hoopla and rigmarole in conversation

Nags Dad about cholesterol

Flabby arm Jello

Loves God more than her own family”

So many rich details that say a lot about who the mom and daughter are. Nice one, Tom.

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

Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres has such a strong story that not even the abysmal movie adaptation staring Nicholas Cage could completely ruin it. Such a great book!

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

“And,” when placed at the start of a sentence, is probably my favorite thing in the universe. (Thank you for your use of it in this question, by the way.)

Curse word: Pants. British people say it. Hilarious!

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

My friend Jen makes a deceptively simple bourbon drink that I would take with me to a desert island. Here’s her recipe:

Pour into a tall shaker filled just over halfway with ice…

2 oz Bulleit Bourbon
1/2 oz simple syrup
1 – 2 dashes Angostura Bitters

Stir aggressively for 20 – 30 seconds to chill and slightly dilute the drink. Taste. Adjust as needed. Place a large ice cube in a glass and pour over.

Peel an orange slice over the glass (you want to get the oils from the peel) and use it as garnish.

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

I can make weapons-grade coffee.

Where did NaNoWriMo come from?

I’ve always been full of bad ideas, and NaNoWriMo was just one in a series of questionable endeavors that started with me emailing my friends and saying “Hey, what if we all got together and…”

The 21 of us that took part that first year really loved books, but none of us knew much about writing them. From my work as an editor, I’d seen writers pull off miraculous feats when given impossible deadlines. So I jokingly named the challenge “National Novel Writing Month” and came up with the 30-day deadline and the 50,000-word goal (scientifically calculated by counting the words of the shortest novel on my bookshelf.)

To help make the whole thing less scary, we all got together after work and on weekends to write. That camaraderie, coupled with the stupid deadline, gave all of us the high commitment and low expectations that turn out to be a godsend when you’re writing a first draft of a novel. We had a great time and wrote delightfully craptastic (but promising!) books.

It turned out to be kind of a revelation for me. And I knew that if we could do it, anyone could do it. The next year, I put up a website and invited more people to take part. It just started growing from there.

Would you change NaNoWriMo or evolve it in any way?

I think a great next step would be coming up with a fun, collaborative adventure that makes novel revision easier (and less lonely). I know NaNoWriMo HQ is working on a plan for that now, and I can’t wait to see what they come up with.

What is your NaNoWriMo experience?

I’ve done it every year since 1999. Of the thirteen drafts I’ve written so far, I’ve really loved four or five of them. But even the ill-fated books I’ve buried in my back yard have taught me a ton about writing. I would have thought I’d be sick of it by now, but the process of knocking out a first draft in a month is somehow still just as fun as it was back in 1999.

You’re now promoting a series of posters, right? Where do these come from? What should writers take away from them?

I’m a big graphic design nerd, and I have an endless appetite for cool posters with encouraging messages on them. (My favorite, framed on my living room wall, says “Done is better than perfect.”)

I stumbled on a really neat poster project last year called Advice to Sink in Slowly and it inspired me to team up with illustrators and create some you-can-do-it posters for writers.  I have them printed at a press near my place in Berkeley, and then pack and ship all of them out of my living room (which is now permanently imbued with the aroma of printer’s ink and paper.)

How go your own efforts at writing a novel?

Good! Right now, I’m waist-deep in my NaNoWriMo novel about a monster who finds a VHS tape and sets out to return it. In December, I’ll say goodbye to the monsters and go back to revising my YA novel about a boy who discovers a secret buried beneath his town.  I’m working on the seventh draft of that book, and I’ve been schlepping bricks on it for a long, long time. The end is in sight, though, and I’m hoping to sink into that hot tub this spring.

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

I’m trying to finish that young adult novel and two screenplays.

As soon as I do that, I’m turning my full attention to the robot apocalypse.

Failing Versus Quitting (Or, “Your Lack Of Confidence Is Neither Interesting Nor Unique”)

I have, as of late, been trying to beam shining waves of positivity, bathing you in the golden light of rah-rah-you-can-do-it vibes, hugging you in the enveloping arms of cheerleadery awesomeness, making out with you and using my ovipositor tongue to plant in your esophagus seed warts of raw confidence.

But the time for such kindness is over.

The time for my boot to destroy your rectum has begun.

Don’t think I don’t see you over there. Trembling in the corner. Moping. Sniffling. Your pants bottom soggy from the cooling urine beneath you. You’re a writer. Or you “want to be” a writer. And you’re staring off at an unfixed point in space, and in that unfixed point is a gravity well that draws forward your motivation, your confidence, your authorial hopes and dreams.

And then you get on Twitter. Or Facebook. Or the NaNoWriMo forums. Or you grab your cat. And you tell them all how you’re not going to be able to do it. How you’re not good enough. Or you make up some other excuse: kids, time, wife, life. And everybody nods and smiles and tells you it’s okay, and they pat your hand while condemning you with a single thought: Pfah. Writers. Or worse, they put quotation marks around that word — “writers” — because in their hearts they know you’re not the real deal.

And so, you plan to quit. Just this book, of course. You’ll quit this one. Start another some day.

You begin a doubt circuit, a loop of explanation that explains it all away, that fills the holes, a medicated ring of self-made gauze that eases the sting and comforts the blow of quitting. This book was never going to be good enough. I haven’t learned enough! I haven’t been enough places. I haven’t hob-nobbed. I don’t know the right people. This computer is too slow. I need a better word processor. Scrivener sounds good, but that’ll take me time to learn. I need to read more writing advice. I’m just gonna get rejected. Publishing is cannibalizing itself anyway — just last week all the Big Six publishers got together to form a giant space arcology and when it’s complete they’ll leave Earth with all the writers and nuke us from orbit. Agents are going extinct. Novelists can’t make a living. Who cares? This book was stupid.

The whole thing is stupid.

I’m stupid.

I’m giving up.

Yeah, no.

Shut up.

Seriously. Shut the fuck up for a minute.

Take that voice — the jabbering jaw inside your head, the one spouting excuses and explanations, the one barfing up a septic toilet-bowl of toxic reasons, the one attempting to ascribe value to your shame, to your lack of confidence, to normalize all your fears and make them acceptable — and choke it off. Close its windpipe. Crush its trachea. Cram a brick in its throat if you must.

It’s not okay to shellac over your failure with excuses.

Failure is necessary. But quitting is not the same as failing.

Failure provides powerful lessons. It affords insight. It allows you to have a whole picture that you can one day hold before you and say, “I see what’s wrong with this picture, now.” Quitting is standing there with a half-a-picture. An incomplete image. And more to the point: an incomplete lesson.

Failure is stepping into the street with a gun at your hip and standing across from your foe — clock strikes noon, she draws, you draw, bang bang, gunpowder haze, smoke clears, and you drop while she keeps standing. That’s failure. You drew. You fell. Maybe you live to fight another day. Maybe you learned something about the next time you need to draw that gun. And everybody knows you fought with honor.

You did the deed. And the deed is done.

Quitting is you hiding in a fucking rain barrel while the gunslinger passes you by.

Failure is brave. Quitting is a coward’s game.

What, you think you’re the first writer who doesn’t think he can do it?

Uh, hello, please to meet every writer ever. We’re all fucking headcases. We all hit a point in every piece of work where we hate it, hate ourselves, hate publishing, hate the very nature of words (“Marriage? What a stupid word what’s that goddamn little ‘i’ doing in there FUCK THIS HOO-HA LANGUAGE IS STUPID I QUIT”). We all bang our heads against our own presumed inadequacies and uncertainties. Writing and storytelling isn’t a math problem with a guaranteed solution. It’s threading a needle inside our heart with an invisible string strung with dreams and nightmares.  We are afforded zero guarantees.

You got… what, you got writer’s block? A crisis of confidence? I have good and bad news for you, hoss: you’re not alone. Good thing is, others have gone through it. Bad news is, others have gone through it and they’ve come out the other side of the shit tunnel with a completed manuscript in their trembling hands. Some writer has inevitably had it far worse than you do and they still managed to spin straw into gold and get the job done. They had less time than you. They felt worse than you. Their crisis-of-confidence was more profound than yours. And they still managed.

I mean, sure, a lot didn’t manage. And now they’re piles of smoking wreckage by the side of the road as faster cars pass them by. Fuck them, we’re not talking about them. We’re talking about you. And you’re going to keep on keepin’ on. You’re not just gonna pull over, turn off the car and starve to death. You’re gonna push that pedal to the floor. You’re gonna make the rubber hit the road. You’re going to finish this goddamn motherfucking sonofabitching journey even if you end up in a different place than you planned.

You can feel good about failure. Failure means you did something. You finished the story even if it wasn’t what you’d hoped. Failure means you’re learning. Growing. Doing.

But quitting — man, you don’t get that with quitting. With quitting all you get is a box full of puzzle pieces that don’t connect. You get a shattered mirror. You get a handful of dirt even the earthworms don’t want.

In storytelling, we say we want characters who are active over passive.

That’s you. You are the character in this story.

Quitting is passive. It’s letting go of the steering wheel.

Hell with that. Be active. Grab hold. White-knuckled.

Here’s what you’re going to do:

You’re going to suck in your gut. You’re going to lift your chin. You’re going to put on a big pair of shit-stompy boots and you’re gonna stomp on all the shit that’s in your way. The only thing you’re quitting today is the idea of quitting.

Repeat after me: It’s not okay to give up.

Again: It’s not okay to give up.

In all caps, now: IT’S NOT OKAY TO GIVE UP.

With more profanity: FUCK QUITTING.

With more incoherent rage: GNAARRRGHBLARG QUITFUCK KYAAAAAHH

I don’t want to hear about you quitting anymore. If I hear about you giving up, I’m going to modify a laser pointer to increase its intensity and I am going to laser shut your pee-hole. And then you’ll just urinate inside yourself and all you’ll be is a big ol’ roly-poly rumbly-tumbly sloshing skin-bag of wee-wee. Like that girl from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, except filled with her own urine instead of blueberry juice.

It’s time to take it to the limit.

1980s montage style.

Punch beef. Tear a car battery in half. Jog in lava. Lift a John Deere tractor.

Because you can do this.

Maybe you’ll fail. Maybe you’ll succeed.

But at least you know you never quit.

Now, shut up and get back to work. Miles to go before you sleep.

In Which I Arrive At An Overly Complicated Applesauce Recipe That I Adore

It’s Thanksgiving week. Which is the culmination of autumn. And for me, the power of autumn lies not in the bullshit power of pumpkin (let’s be honest, half-a-dozen other squashes will kick pumpkin right in the gourds — uhh, hello? Butternut? Acorn? Kabocha? Motherfucking delicata?), but rather, in the power of apples.

My son, he loves applesauce. He would stab me to get to the applesauce that I made — foolishly, of course, since I’m the dude actually making that applesauce. He kills me? No more applesauce, kid. But he loves applesauce so much it’s like he’s on bath salts. It clouds his brain. Ruins his judgment. Makes him run around willy-nilly in a sociopathic nightmare video game world of his own making where instead of eating dots and running from ghosts he’s running from cops and eating people’s faces.

Needless to say, we make sure he gets his applesauce fix.

I’ve been trying to circumnavigate a strong applesauce recipe for a long time — the proper spices, liquids, apples. Since we have a VitaMix blender, I can just take raw apple, chuck it in there, and arrive at a capable applesauce in like, 30 seconds. No cooking required.

As a sidenote, for those who do not possess a VitaMix and who are hesitant about paying the admittedly-exorbitant advice –? It’s worth it. I use that thing as often as I use our oven, which is to say, with great frequency. It’s like paying to have a grizzly bear hang out in your kitchen, a robotic grizzly bear who will gnash up in his mouth anything you require… uh, gnashed. The blender will chop up whatever you so desire. You can chuck a boombox in there and it’ll turn it into a black slurry. If you throw a single molecule of uranium into the spinning blades, you will create nuclear fusion. Or fission.

Or maybe just uranium pudding, I dunno, shut up.

Back to this goddamn applesauce.

So, like I said, I’ve been working on various applesauce recipes over the course of the many moons, and I think I’ve arrived at one. This recipe is needlessly complicated. And when I say needlessly, I mean it — I suspect these steps (which drift toward the alchemical) are somehow irrelevant. I could probably do this much easier. Each component is almost certainly extraneous, but hey, whatever. This is the only way I’ve been able to arrive at an applesauce I properly adore. B-Dub loves it, too, because I tried one day to take this applesauce away from him, and he bit off my index finger with all his new teeth. And fresh baby teeth are sharp. They’re like new knives. They are at maximum ouchieness.

Anyway.

Here’s what you do to get the applesauce inside your body:

First:

Four apples.

Strike that. Four honeycrisp apples. I have tried this with other apples — *angry buzzer sound* — nope, just ain’t the same. Your mileage may of course vary in that you prefer other apples. Fine. Whatever. Philistine.

Take two apples and peel them.

Then roughly cut ‘em up. Couple-inch pieces. You don’t need to dice ‘em. Get a cleaver and – whack whack whack — make it happen.

Then take the other two apples and dice them up. Little cubes the size of the tip of your pinky finger. Maximum surface area. That’s what you want. Which is also the name of my Die Hard-esque action movie where I battle terrorists not in a giant skyscraper but rather in an empty asphalt lot. My catchphrase is, “You Want Valet Parking, Motherfucker?” THEN BOOM.

Now: bisect your apple supply. Little cubes over there. Big rough hunks over there.

The diced bits are going to be roasted.

The bigger chunks cooked on a stovetop.

For the roasting:

Take your HELL CHAMBER (‘oven’) and launch that badboy into the area of 425F. When roasty-toasty, take your apples and spread them on a non-stick cookie sheet. You will now become the Brown Sugar Fairy and sprinkle brown sugar over them. Also: a dash of cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger.

Then into the oven they go. Fifteen minutes or until they are totally soft and show a little color.

For the stovetoppery:

Chuck (HAH I’M A VERB MOTHERFUCKERS) those apple chunks into a saucepan. Cover them roughly with — no, no, not water, put that goddamn water down. Don’t be an asshole. Water is worthless here. And so boring! Water is the thief of taste. No, here it’s — well, you know how in some recipes you cover beef in beef broth, or chicken in chicken broth? We’re going to cover the apples in drum roll please, apple broth.

By which I mean, apple cider. Not hard apple cider, unless you’re a liquor pig.

Use the apple cider of your choice. I like unfiltered.

Another sprinkling of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger.

Also: a half-a-TB of vanilla sugar.

If you have no vanilla sugar (which is easy to make: you bury a used-up vanilla bean in your sugar like you’re a cat burying his, erm, “tootsie rolls” in the sandbox, then you wait like, a day and all your sugar smells like vanilla), maybe try just a splash of vanilla extract and the same amount of sugar. I don’t know. I don’t care. You do what you like, I’m not your mother.

UNLESS I AM.

*dun dun dun*

Boil, then reduce heat to a simmah.

So: cook until the apples are fork-tender. Shouldn’t be more than ten minutes.

When done, you take:

The roasted apples.

And the stovetop apples.

And you throw them in a blender. Or a food processor. Or under a potato masher. Or in a bowl with a fork. Or under the feet of some dancing homeless person. I don’t really care how you smoosh this stuff up.

Oh! But wait there’s more.

Into the mix, pre-blend, put one-third a cup of the cider in there.

(The rest of the cider: Uhh, drinky-drunky-dranky that shit, hoss. It’s warm and delicious. Especially with whiskey! Then again, aren’t all things better with whiskey? THEY ARE IT’S SCIENCE.)

I blend on low for a short time to get a chunky sauce.

You may like a smoother sauce because you are a coward.

That’s okay. Blend it to an airy froth if you like. I’m not the boss of you.

UNLESS I AM.

*dun dun dun*

Ahem.

One last thing:

You think, “Oh, I can just start eating this applesauce right fucking now.”

But you would be mistaken.

Stop. Put it in a glass dish. Cover it up.

Then put it in your refrigerator (aka THE COLD-BOT). Overnight. Overnight. Do not test my patience. Do not ruin your own taste sensation. This applesauce needs time to cool down. For all the flavors to marry together in an autumnal orgy of sweet arctic fruit-sex.

Only then will you eat it.

And only then will you thank me for my needlessly complicated applesauce recipe.

I accept donations in the form of bottles of whiskey.

*waits for whiskey*

Flash Fiction Challenge: 100-Word Stories

Last week’s challenge: Sub-Genre Mash-Up With A Twist.

Hey, I know — most of you are nostrils-deep in NaNoWriMo.

You don’t have time for a big long crazy flash fiction challenge.

As such, let’s tighten the margins on this one.

You have three days to write 100 words.

I don’t care what the story is or what genre it falls into.

But three days: due by Monday, noon EST.

And under 100 words.

Post at your blog and link back here.

Let’s see what you got.

Tumblrs Be Trippin’

I want you to go to this Tumblr, right now:

Windows 95 Tips, Tricks, and Tweaks.

Seriously. I know, you’re thinking, “Why do I need Windows 95 tips?”

Just go. Just go.

It appears to be the brain-child of Neil Cicierega, who years back was responsible for the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny. You can find Neil on Twitter as neilyourself, presumably a tweak on the Neil Gaiman account, neilhimself.

(There is, as yet, no neilitself or neilherself.)

So now I ask you: recommend some Tumblrs. Interesting, entertaining, single-theme Tumblrs. Not necessarily personal blogs or anything. Funny or weird or whatever. Something I might have missed.

(Also: those looking for interviews: those will be back. Likely after Thanksgiving, as I have to get a second round of questions to a number of victims — I mean, “interviewees.”)

Why Stories Should Never Begin At The Beginning

I was in a car accident.

Relax — I wasn’t really. I mean, I’ve had car accidents in my life. None recently. None dramatic.

But, let’s just pretend:

I was in a car accident.

Let’s pretend I’m telling you that, right now. This is me telling you the story. We’re sitting across from each other at a cafe or strip club or on a bench watching squirrels humping. And I say, “I was in a car accident.”

And you say — after that look on your face falls away — “What happened?”

Right here, mark this. Put your thumb on it. Circle it with a fucking pen.

What I don’t say is:

“Well, I got my keys off their hook and then I went into the garage, I got into the car, I sat down, pulled my seatbelt across my lap, inserted the key into the ignition and then turned the key clockwise — or is it counterclockwise? — and the engine revved. Then I reversed out into my driveway and–”

The reason I don’t say that stuff is two-fold.

One: it’s not critical information. In fact, that’s an understatement: none of that information — outside the seatbelt, maybe — is the least bit goddamn relevant. Just isn’t. It’s worthless fol-de-rol. Chaff, not wheat.

Two: it’s boring as shit. This, an even more critical sin. My “getting in the car ritual” — since it doesn’t include like, a human sacrifice or killing terrorists or having dirty sex in the backseat — is duller than a cement floor.

What I do say is:

“I was driving down I-90, and I’m fiddling with the radio knobs and soon as I look up — here comes a garbage truck bounding over the median like a drunken bison, and holy fuck it’s coming right for me.”

Then, from there, I tell the rest of the story. I careened off a guardrail, I flipped the car, I fell through another dimension where my vehicle was stomped to a steel pancake by a Nazi brontosaur, whatever.

The point is that I got to the fucking point.

Look to the way we tell stories in person for critical tale-telling lessons we can use on the page. On the page we seem to have no audience: it’s us looking down the one-way street of a ghost town. But when you tell a story to a live human being, you can behold their body language, can see their eyes shifting and maybe looking for an exit, you can hear the questions they ask to prove their engagement and confirm their curiosity — you have a whole series of potential reflections that tell you whether or not your story (and more important, its telling) is effective. Powerful feedback, right there.

So –

Act like someone is there when you’re writing.

Listening to your words as you type them.

Have you hooked them? Or are they looking for someone else to talk to? Some other story to read?

Have you skipped the bullshit beginning and gotten to the mother-loving point?

By the way, that’s why origin stories are the dullest stories. The Spider-Man Becomes Spider-Man storyline is probably the most boring of all — and made worse because the films keep reiterating the same snooze-a-palooza over and over again. A hero’s origin story is important, but not so important we need it blown into a whole story. It can be a scene. Hell, most of the time it can be a single sentence. “A criminal killed Bruce Wayne’s parents when he was but a boy, and so now he hunts criminals as Batman.” As storytellers we like to imagine that each piece of the puzzle is super-critical because we thought of it — but the reality is, not all story needs to live on the page. Sometimes it lives behind the page. I don’t need to see the electronics behind the screen to be impressed by the image on my television. In fact, it’s more impressive when I don’t know.

Leave the magic intact.

Skip the boring beginning.

Forget the peel. Get to the banana.

Enter the story as late as you can.

That is all.

*ninja smoke-bomb*

Dear Geeks:

It’s cool you like stuff. I know I like stuff. Liking stuff is rad.

That’s what to be a geek means, right? To really, really like a thing?

I dunno. That’s always been my read on it.

Whatever the definition, I just want you to know:

All kinds of people are geeks. And geeks geek out about all kinds of geekery.

Women can be geeks. Many are. How they look or how they dress is irrelevant to their identity of being a geek. Being a geek isn’t something that comes with a card. You don’t stick a hot copper wire in a petri dish of blood to determine if a person really is one, like in The Thing. Being a geek is pretty much saying you’re one.

You don’t have geek ratings, or scores. Geekery is not contained to a percentage.

Geekery is not contained to being dude or lady.

Folks of any color, creed or religion can be geeks.

Your sexual preference has no bearing on being a geek.

Geek tribes are not real. The borders that separate our peculiar interests are imaginary. We are not given over to literal territory. Our fences are purely metaphorical and, basically, total crap-pants. You can, for instance, be a geek about cosplaying comic book characters even if you are or are not equally a geek about the comic book characters you cosplay. You can be a geek about fan-fiction or steampunk or Star Wars or fast cars or baseball cards or any fucking thing you like. I know people who like baseball stats more than they like baseball games. Who gives a shit? Like what you like.

Because that’s what it’s all about. Being a geek means just really liking stuff. With an obsessive, sticky, delightful passion. Liking stuff is a positive thing. So, keep it positive. It’s awesome that people are willing to be passionate about stuff, whether that stuff is Klingon poetry or pretending to dress up like dragons so you can sex up other people who dress up like unicorns.

Passion is not synonymous with poison.

It’s important to remember that liking stuff is cool.

Which means we should like the very act of liking stuff.

Let positivity breed positivity. Like rabbits. Or horny elves.

And we should extricate hate and prejudice from our behaviors.

Go forth, be geeky with the love of the thing in your hearts.

Don’t let anybody put you down. And don’t put anybody down in return.

Now, is somebody going to sex me up, or what? I’ve been wearing this fucking unicorn costume for like, three hours and I’m starting to sweat through the fur.

(Reference: Comic Book Illustrator Tony Harris Hates On Cosplayer Ladies.)

25 Ways To Unstick A Stuck Story

You’re teats-deep in a story. And it feels like instead of swimming forward, your boots are stuck in the wet mud below. You need something to churn the waters. Loosen the mud. You need to unstick the stuck story.

Here, then — a list of 25 ways to help you do that. Most of these are plot- or story-focused — meaning, practical efforts to open that pickle jar. If you’re looking for solutions that lie beyond that focus and, say, land on you as a writer, maybe check out “25 Ways to Defeat Dread Writer’s Block.”

Now, let’s do this.

1. Form Of: Flopsweat! Form Of: Retroactive Outline!

Sometimes, being stuck is the same thing as being caught at the crossroads of indecision — you don’t know which way the story should jump. Will Bob kiss Mary? Will Mary stab Bob? When does the Ancient Demonlord Humira-Adalimumab reveal himself? You ever open a refrigerator and stare into its depths for like, 15 minutes, completely paralyzed by your inability to decide what to eat? (“Chicken noodle soup? Old ham? New cheese? Daikon radish? AAAAGHH.”) This is like that. So: take the pressure off. Pull yourself out of the word-treacle. Do an outline. If you’ve done one already: re-do it, because this one hit a wall. Outlining can take whatever form you choose: chapter-by-chapter, index cards, mind-map, human centipede.

2. Roadblocks, Speedbumps, Stop Signs, And Angry Dragon Crossings

Obstacles. Conflict. Pain and suffering. Sometimes, being stuck on a story is just because things are too easy. And “too easy” translates to *poop noise* BOOO-RING. Tease out your inner sadist. Tickle the taint of your own psychic Marquis de Sade. You need to start making life harder for the protagonist. Disrupt his quest. Set him back. Put everything you can in his way — and then even more as the story tumbles forward. Hurt him. Move the goalposts. Demand sacrifices. Complicate the journey. Remember, the worst business advice happens to be very good storytelling advice: elevate costs and eliminate convenience.

3. Diversify Your Character Portfolio, Motherfucker

You’ve got all these characters and yet, you’re hovering over one character like a fly over a stinky diaper. Realize that you’ve got a kickass superpower: you can possess and take-over anybody inside the story. With the power of Point-of-View, you can drag us along for the ride. You can shove us into their eyes, their minds, you can force us to piggyback on their experiences past and present. Sometimes untangling a knotted-up tale means looking at it from different eyes: what better eyes than those of the other characters inside the story?

4. Recalibrate The Motivation Matrix

You might be stuck because your characters are strangers to you. And that won’t do: you need to use this time to get to know them. Likes. Dislikes. Favorite ice cream flavor. Panty size. Sexual peccadilloes. And most important of all: motivation. These crazy assholes want something! So, what is it? It’s more than just a base level survival instinct — they need something. The desire, gnawing at them like rabid hamsters. Find out what that is. Once you know that, their path becomes clearer, their decisions certain. The story will move because they will carry it that way — and often straight into the thorny maw of conflict.

5. Jock-Straps And Under-Wire Bras

Your story needs more support. One of the ways we do that is to beef up the supporting cast. A strong and active supporting cast is powerful stuff — all those B-tier players who want to be A-tier. They have their own motivations, their own fears. Let loose a cabal of free-thinking characters into your story, it’s like dumping a sack of coffee-guzzling cats in your living room: shit will start to happen. Motivations cross! Agendas clash! CATS ASPLODE. Plot and story is really just a chain reaction of character motives put into action.

6. Partygoers Come And Go

You’re at a party, old guests exit, new ones enter. Two folks bail to go fuck each other on the fire escape. Two more arrive bringing an eight-ball of coke and a circus bear. Treat your story like just such a party: re-energize the narrative by pulling away from some characters and introducing new ones. A mysterious assassin! A prostitute with dubious motivations! An untrustworthy circus bear named “Mister Tickles!”

7. Sequins Of The Vents!

PLOT IS MADE OF SEQUINS WHICH ARE MADE OF VENTS OOOOH SO SHINY. *receives note* Oh. Okay. Sequence of events. I swear, my life is plagued by homophone problems. Someone says, “Meet me at Starbucks,” I show up at Starbucks and pelt them with ground beef. Anyway. Sometimes, a story trips itself on a snarled-up sequence-of-events, AKA, “plot.” The word plothole is not precisely accurate in describing what’s really happening: a plothole is really a gap in the sequence of events, where that gap would and should feature the proper information that would bridge Point A to Point Z. You say, “I don’t know how Dave gets to the moon, he’s just… there.” You’ve failed to provide the proper connection, to bridge that gap with the necessary narrative data. Simply put: the bridge is out. Which means the journey cannot continue. Find these gaps. You probably already know where and what they are. Fix them now. Writing needn’t be linear. Go back. Add content and context. Fill the holes. Mind the gap. SHINY SEQUINS.

8. The Plot Beneath The Floorboards

Sometimes our stories get constipated because of a too-samey, unvaried diet. You live off of Eggo waffles and buttermilk for a couple weeks, your personal plumbing is going to get boggy. A story is like that: we have one major plotline and it chugs along without any time for anything else, and somehow it seems to grow enervated, slowing down before eventually miring itself in grave ennui. ENTER THE SUBPLOT. One or several subplots perform a powerful task: they create alternate related stories that distract from the larger plot while also making us pine for it. Further, when done correctly, they prove energy and narrative information to the larger plot. The big plot feeds off the little ones. The little stories contribute to the larger.

9. Drop Acid, Have Flashbacks

Consider the reported therapeutic value of LSD, wherein psychologists used to use it to jar loose those mental boulders that are jamming up our brain-canyon. Now, consider the value of running your story through the same gauntlet — meaning, maybe it’s time for your tale to trip balls. Flashbacks. Hallucinations. Dream sequences. Cryptic visuals. Foreshadowing events. All of these force the story to take a (temporary) left turn. Deviations from the expected course, as with subplots above, do a lot to give extra impetus and urgency (and a booster shot of valuable uncertainty) to the narrative. Give your story a little acid. Let it run naked through Wal-Mart, fighting invisible goblins with a soup ladle.

10. The Mysterious Mystery Of The Questioning Quest

Introduce a new mystery. Something that just doesn’t add up. The story seems to be going one way, and then suddenly the protagonist gets a package: a steamer trunk full of severed heads, a strange journal written by a long-dead reanimator, or — *crash of thunder* — A FRUIT-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB DELIVERY THREE MONTHS AFTER THE DELIVERIES ENDED. Okay, maybe not that last one. Point is, jamming a big fucking shiny-ass question mark into the ground like you’re planting the flag on Iwo Jima is powerful: question marks have gravity. They draw us toward them. (If you’re really brave, introduce a mystery to which you do not yet have the answer. That can give you major juice — but it can also sink you further into the mire.)

11. Steal Your Protagonist’s Shoes Then Make Him Walk On Glass

Storytelling is an act of cruelty. We are cruel to our characters because to be kind is to invite boredom, and boredom in storytelling is synonymous with big doomy death-shaped death. So: be cruel to your protagonist. Rob him of something. Something important. Something he needs. A weapon. An asset. A piece of knowledge. A loved one. A DELICIOUS PIE. Take it away! Force him to operate without it. Conflict reinvigorates stale stories. New conflict, or old conflict that has evolved and grown teeth.

12. Someone Isn’t Who They Say They Are

Consider the value of the midpoint twist. No, it’s not a new dance. It’s a bit of narrative stuntery. Stuntery isn’t a word? IT’S MY BLOG YOU SHUT UP OR I’LL THROW YOU OUT AN AIRLOCK. I’m sure I have airlocks around here somewhere. Point is: there comes a time in the narrative when you have an opportunity to take pre-existing elements and twist them sharply. (The next several items on this list actually lend themselves toward that notion.) One option is that someone in the story is not who they say they are. A criminal is actually a cop. A loved one is a secret monster. A parent is a butthole-sucking tapeworm alien from space. Someone’s mask comes off. Someone’s true face is revealed.

13. The Knife In The Back

A dread betrayal! A turn of friend to enemy! Someone betrays the protagonist. Or more than that: betrays the plan, betrays the town, the Earth, the Omniverse. At the last second, he sabotages the MacGuffin Machine! He urinates in the water supply! He steals the protagonist’s keys and throws them in a storm drain! HE EATS THE LAST OF THE LUCKY CHARMS. I’m sure you can think of far better betrayals (murrrderrrr). Any impactful event in a story — particularly one that pivots the tale in an unexpected direction — takes that story and shakes it like a baby. Er, metaphorically speaking. Please don’t shake babies.

14. “No, Father, I Did Not Poop In Your Toolbox. It Was. . . A Ghost. It’s Ghost Poop. Totally From A Ghost. Please Do Not Investigate This Further.”

Someone has a secret. And they’re forced to lie about it. That there is a kick-ass one-two punch combination to give some oomph to an ass-dragging story. Secrets and lies are a simple and surprisingly effective way to introduce fresh conflict born from pre-existing characters and plotlines. Someone is fucking someone they’re not supposed to be. Someone makes a mistake. Someone has a part of a dark past that threatens to be revealed. Lies aim to cover up, but lies beget more lies: deception is a gremlin you get wet and then feed after midnight. It multiplies and turns into an uncontainable monster.

15. Kill Some Poor Sumbitch

Storytelling feels like an act of magic, and some magic is ritualized, and a great deal of ritual magic requires a sacrifice upon its altar. Your story is full of precious lambs — I mean, “characters.” Take one. Preferably one that matters (not, say, “Tom the Cab Driver who shows up for one paragraph in Chapter Four”). Then: off them. As a part of the plot, of course; I don’t mean like, drop a fucking anvil on their heads. But just the same: kill them. Death is a boulder dropped into a lake: it doesn’t just create ripples. It creates waves. It splashes on everybody. It gets still waters moving.

16. Ill-Advised Romantic Pairing

Take two characters who should not be making kissy-kissy (or, fucky-sucky, or, bondagey-wondagey) and make them do exactly that. It works because we know it should not work. Forgive the deviation, but here’s a valuable note: suspense and tension is created when characters we love perform actions we hate. They make mistakes. They choose poorly. They open doors they’re not supposed to open, they steal something we know they shouldn’t steal, they smoosh their genitals up against someone whose genitals should be caution, cuidado, verboten. This works because we, the audience, know to fear certain acts as we (wisely) suspect the outcome will be bad. We love our protagonists. We want them safe! We want them to choose wisely! Which is why we, as writers, work often (and work hard!) to punish the audience through the characters on the page. The “ill-advised romantic pairing” is just one example of a particular path of storytelling which goes like this: “Identify the thing that the audience fears will happen, then engineer that very thing so that it happens in a way that’s worse than they ever imagined.”

17. Keep Throwing The Story Off The Cliff

Dickens knew it. The old pulp serials knew it. Sometimes, you have to keep the audience’s attention by throwing your entire storyworld (plot, characters, ideals) into perilous imperiled peril. And, since you might be considered Audience Zero for your own story, this works when writing, too — constantly drop-kick your story off the cliff’s edge. Make that poor fucker hang there by his fingernails. Create interesting problems. Invoke certain danger. Write your way out of the trap. The challenge may engage all your creative synapses.

18. Raise The Stakes

I like to raise the steaks to my mouth and EAT THEM YUM YUM NOM NOM wait I’m doing it again. Goddamn you, homophones! Ahem. Raising the stakes, narratively speaking, means that the consequences of failure get worse. It means that the task becomes harder. It means that new information makes everything more complicated. You are, in storytelling parlance, “stickying the wicket.” Fine, whatever, nobody says that. (But it makes a charming euphemism for masturbation!) Suddenly the protagonist’s goal isn’t just about saving the love of her life — it’s about saving the world. Or it’s about making a choice: save that love or save the world or find the needle-threading third option that saves everybody. Amp the conflict. Make it harder. Make it cost more. Make it even more important. Boom.

19. Hero Grabs The Story By The Yam-Bag

This one’s simple: a story will suffer log-jam if the hero has been passive. So much relies then on external events it grows tiresome and, in some cases, narratively prohibitive in terms of the effort you have to put into the way the world constantly acts upon him. Reverse that. Time for the hero to grab the story by its story-balls and take control. This isn’t the same thing as making the hero successful — it’s just about making the protagonist active and complicit in the narrative.

20. Threat Level: Physical, Emotional, Philosophical

Your story might be firing on one cylinder, when really, it needs to fire on three: the goals of the protagonist and the conflicts that work against him must cross three axes: physical, emotional, philosophical. Physical: “I am in danger of being eaten alive by a starving were-badger.” Emotional: “But the starving were-badger is my true love, Betty McGoohan.” Philosophical: “If I cannot reconcile this and the story demands I slay my true love, then love cannot succeed in the face of evil and I am forced to accede to a cynical worldview in which monstrousness is ascendant and all my victories are Pyrrhic and were-badgers are neither cuddly nor sexy.” Harness all three axes for powerful story-combo power-up extra-life ding.

21. Sit Down, Right Now, And Figure Out Your Ending

Sometimes, it’s nice to just get in the car and go. Enjoy the scenery. No destination. But other times, you end up just driving in circles and seeing nothing of value. A story is a journey with a very specific function. A story is a journey that has a destination at its culmination — it is not a disconnected series of pretty pastoral vignettes. (“Look, honey, cows. For 300 pages. Cows. Just standing around. Chewing cud. Pooping. Goddamn cows.”) Your journey needs an end point. It needs a thumb-tack in a map that says, “THIS IS WHERE I AM FUCKING GOING.” Sit down. Right now. Figure out your ending. It may not be the ending you use, but you’d be amaze at how unstuck you’ll get when you know what direction you should be going.

22. Play The “What If?” Game

Being stuck in the story often means hovering at a single point and saying, “I don’t know what happens next.” The simplest game to play to get you out of that is to ask “What If?” like, several dozen times, answering differently each time. Write each what if down, even if unanswered. What if he kills the antagonist now? What if he fails and gets captured? What if he snaps and goes nuts? WHAT IF HE BECOMES A MAGICAL OWL-MAN WHO RIDES A STEED MADE OF CLANKING TIN-CANS AND CARRIES A SWORD MADE OF SQUIRRELS? Don’t worry. It’ll get crazy. It’s supposed to. But it’ll set the pot to boil. Somewhere in there, you’ll find the answer presents itself. Like a flower to a bee desiring sweet pollination.

23. Determine The Most Insanely Unexpected Course Of Action, Then Do That Shit

True fact: storytelling isn’t always an act of precision. Time comes, a story’s gotta get messy. Untamed. Unhindered. Sometimes, a story just gets fucking weird, which means you, the storyteller, gotta get weird with it. You say you’re stuck? Fine. Take your story and drop a nuclear narrative event upon it. Change everything. Go crazy. Ruin the world. Make the antagonist the protagonist. Blow things up. Whatever the audience expects would not — could not — happen? Do it. It’ll unseat that stuck story right quick.

24. Kill The Last Ten Thousand Words

Another rather extreme assertion, one that will surely turn your gut sour: go back five thousand — maybe ten thousand — words, highlight, then click delete. You’ll gasp. You’ll gape. You’ll pee five, maybe ten, drops of anxiety-urine. But then: ahhh. A sudden sigh. A giddy elation. Whatever was jamming you up is now gone. You are free to move forward. This seems extreme but consider: storytelling is sometimes walking a maze and walking a maze means hitting dead-ends. When you hit a dead-end, the only solution is to backtrack until you can find the proper path. It is hard. But you will move forward, unfettered.

25. Punch, Kick, Think, Then Write Your Way Through It

You’re stuck? Poor you. Fuck it. It’s a mental thing. Don’t give in. Think through it. Karate-punch the story. Kick it in the teeth until it yields. You’re the boss. Worse comes to worse: write around the gap. Got a section where you don’t know what happens? Write in 144-point font: WHO THE FUCK KNOWS? FIGURE THIS FIDGETY SHIT OUT LATER and then write the next section. A stuck story might be you feeling stuck when really, the story’s zipping along just fine. And even if there really is a problem, you can’t always identify the problem until you’re done the whole damn thing. So: you’re stuck? Fuck it. Fuck you. You’re not the horse. You’re the rider. The one with the spurs, the buggy whip, the carrot at the end of a stick. Make it move. Get it done. Your words are a battering ram: knock the door down and walk on through.

Want another hot tasty dose of dubious writing advice aimed at your facemeats?

500 WAYS TO TELL A BETTER STORY: $2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER: $2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

500 MORE WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER: $2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING: $0.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY: $4.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY: $2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Blackbirds For Best Horror 2012?

So, holy crap. Blackbirds — thanks, I believe, in part to folks who wrote-in votes for the book — is on the opening round list for the Goodreads Choice Awards this year for Best Horror.

I would, of course, be tickled in the pink parts if you went over there and voted for the book — provided, of course, that you liked the book and also that you didn’t find some of the other entrants more worthy (which would not surprise me, as I’m in the company of some incredible storytellers like Seanan McGuire, Jonathan Maberry, Scott Sigler, and one of my own personal writing heroes, Joe Lansdale. Not to mention one of my favoritest novels of last year, Alex Adams’ White Horse).

You can swing over to the Choice Awards voting page by clicking this clicky spot.

I’m also voting like a motherfucker for Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon in the fantasy portion, because it’s a helluva book — and a fresh face on the fantasy genre.

Thanks for everybody who supported the book and wrote reviews and said nice things to me — it’s really pretty cool to have a book out there that people are digging on. Tell your friends! Tell your enemies! Skywrite your recommendations in the heavens with a plume of toxic contrails! Woooo!

Other News

I’m writing like a motherfucker these days. I’m currently hurtling through The Blue Blazes, my next book with Angry Robot — wherein I smash together the criminal underworld and the mythic and monstrous Underworld in one big crazy urban fantasy book.

That’ll be done by December.

Then I got my edits back on likely-to-be-retitled Popcorn, the first book of my Heartland YA “cornpunk” trilogy — and holy hell, the edits came to me via UPS. Written by hand on a giant bison-bludgeoning print-out of the book. Old-school editorial. Anyway — then I work through those edits (which are fairly light) while also starting the next Dinocalypse book.

Then: The Cormorant, which is the third book in the Miriam Black series.

Then: probably the next Atlanta Burns novel, tentatively titled Harum Scarum.

Then: next Heartland book.

Then: next Dinocalypse book.

Then: final Heartland book.

Then: I have no idea what happens after that. Though I’ve got a cool transmedia project in the wings that’ll take me to Vancouver in December and maybe a few film things percolating. And did I mention that I’m working on a script for a Shotgun Gravy film? True story.

I guess I start writing some new shit. And maybe another Miriam Black or Mookie Pearl book? No idea what the future holds, only that I’m happy and fortunate to have this career as a novelist appear out of the fog to carry me through the next two years or so.

Why Am I Suddenly Excited For Star Wars, Episode VII?

The Disney-Lucasfilm corporate fornication did not reach my ears immediately upon its occurrence, as I was huddling in the dark around a barrel fire, eating charred squirrel during the hurricane.

But, once it did reach my ears, my initial response was an overwhelming…

Mnuh? Guh? Eh. Whatever.

Star Wars? Big part of my youth. As it was a part of the collective youth of many in my age range. The first trilogy was a fundamental narrative marker in our burgeoning personalities, for better or for worse. It left its fingerprint. Indelible and undeniable.

Then, the new trilogy came out — and, for that I was geeked beyond belief. That hearty nerd-wind filled my sails until I finally saw Phantom Menace and… was… excited at first? And then after that, a series of diminishing returns. My mind, affected the same way an addict’s mind is affected: that single dopamine rush never again experienced. The new trilogy could not match the power of the first, and with ever repeated viewing and every new film, the geyser of pleasure lessened until eventually it was just an airy splutter from a gassy garden hose. Splurt. Pbbbt. Dribble.

I’m not one of those people who think that the new trilogy is some kind of betrayal to my childhood. I don’t think they’re the worst films ever put on screen. They have some great stuff. They also have some face-punching, head-scratching storytelling going on. I don’t think Lucas betrayed us. I just think he kinda…

Missed the mark. Hubris and hamartia.

So: new trilogy gets announced, I just wasn’t that excited. I had as much excitement as one would have when, say, hearing an announcement for a new “triple-exxxtreme-ultra-mouth-blaster” flavor of Mountain Dew: I’m happy for those that care, but I won’t be partaking, thanks.

And yet, something’s changed.

I have this feeling –

Effervescent. Bubbly. Like Mountain Dew but without the horrible taste. A giddy, giggly something inside.

You might be saying, “Ahh, it’s because Chuck heard that Lucas isn’t really all that involved.”

Nope.

Maybe it’s that Harrison Ford said he’d be happy to resume the role of Han Solo.

Or that Carrie Fisher wants to play Leia again.

Nope, and nope. (Actually, I’m not sure either of those are a good idea.)

Maybe it’s that Michael Arndt, kick-ass screenwriter and big story-thinker extraordinaire, is tackling the film? Or that they have a number of high-octane directors in line to take control of the franchise?

Nope, but that does inflate the “hope balloon” by several liters of warm, cozy air.

Here’s what it is:

When I saw Star Wars: Episode IV, I was four years old.

And, when Episode VII drops, my son will be four years old.

I’ll be able to take my son to a brand new Star Wars film.

And it’ll be his. It won’t be mine. Maybe I’ll like it. Maybe I’ll love it. But if it’s done right — and I hope that it is — it’ll mark him in a way that it won’t mark me. It’ll be a thing he remembers, a thing that gets him happy and gives him imagination fuel for the next ten, twenty, thirty years.

That’s why I’m excited. Because it’s coming full circle. It’s not about Lucas or Han Solo or any screenwriter or director. It’s about what I can show to and share with my son.

I’m excited because the Force will one day be with him, too.

*lightsaber sound*

*credits roll*