Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 233

Bait Dog: $1.99

Hey, check it –

For today — yes, yes, blah blah, CYBORG MONDAY or whatever — my novel Bait Dog (which also contains the novella Shotgun Gravy) about a troubled teenage detective-slash-vigilante named Atlanta Burns is $1.99.

Snippet of a review from Govneh, aka “The Russian:”

“This story is absolutely gripping. In true Atlanta style, our heroine willfully and knowingly throws herself into situations that are way over her head, armed with nothing but a sharp tongue, uncooperative attitude and at times, a shotgun. We watch, helpless, as she slowly digs herself into a deeper and deeper hole. Throughout, however, she remains unwilling to compromise what’s right for what’s easy. When presented with a chance to erase her mom’s mortgage woes, to get one of the big players in town off her back, to remove herself from a volatile situation, Atlanta bargains the way Atlanta knows how-a big Fuck You with a shotgun shell.

Wendig does well writing Atlanta both a petulant teen and an unwilling hero. On one hand she’s surly, she’s rude, she can’t cope with her emotions and gets an F+ in ‘plays nice with others’. On the other, she’ll go to hell and back for her friends, she’ll stand up to the bad guys and she’s not afraid to sacrifice to make sure people pay for what they’ve done. Atlanta is strong but Atlanta is broken; she’s a social pariah but the hero of the freaks, the geeks  and the outcasts. It doesn’t alwaysjust get better, sometimes you have to make it better and if you need help, Atlanta is there.”

You can nab it at:

Amazon US.

Amazon UK.

Barnes & Noble.

Or buy direct using the button below.

This Pot Roast Is Your God, Now

It’s time for turkey to eat a bag of ducks.

*checks notes*

Oh. Dicks. Dicks.

Whatever.

Thanksgiving is over. Kaput. Time lurched forward this year with the speed and grace of a fast-running zombie rather than a slow shambly one, and as such, the Turkeypocalypse (in which many turkeys are summarily slaughtered and ascend to their final resting realm of Gobblheim) is over.

We’re done with turkey. Till next year, gobblers. Sayonara, you big fat dummies.

It’s time to move on. Time to put that holiday behind us. Time to put away childish things.

NOW IS THE TIME FOR POT ROAST.

For a long time I didn’t “get” pot roast. I mean, I understood its nature — it is a roast of meat that you cook inside a pot. I’m not mule-kicked. I grokked the core concept. But every time I did a pot roast it came out tough or dry or it lurched out of the pot and tried to bite off my face (though there I admit I misunderstood the concept as a piranha roast, which is apparently a whole different thing that nobody ever does). I used to do it in the crockpot and the fact that it came out dry puzzled me — how can something bathed in meaty juices come out dry? (Answers: cooked too long, wrong cut of meat, crockpot too hot…)

But I have since perfected the pot roast. I mean that. It is perfect. It is a shining example of meatliness. It is the Platonic ideal — a pot roast that can comfortably be placed upon the altar and given to the god of your choice as a gift without fear of being smited or smoted or… whatever the word is.

The great thing about this pot roast is, for a family of, say, three, you get to eat it for three whole days. The pot roast continues to feed you. It’s like self-replicating manna! The perfect food.

Here’s how:

Get yourself a big slab of chuck roast. Three to five pounds.

Take your magma-cube (aka “oven”) up to 275F.

It’s time now to punish some vegetables for being vegetables and not being meat. Take two onions, four carrots and two stalks of celery. Cut the onion into rough pieces. Peel the carrots and chop them into two-inch lengths. Cut the celery into smaller slices — quarter-inch. Sure, fine, you can wash the vegetables first if you want, but I personally find that a little sprinkling of e.Coli does a body good.

*checks notes*

Okay, it actually does a body bad. Apparently, wash your vegetables.

(Cowards.)

Now you want to take a heavy pot or a Dutch oven (HA HA HA DUTCH OVEN) and slap that motherfucker atop the fiery doom circle (aka stovetop) on medium. Splash into the pan a little squirty-squirt of olive oil. Once it warms up, pop the vegetables in there. (If you’re patient, you can do them in batches. Onions, carrots, then celery. Or you choose the order, I don’t give a fuck.) Get a little color on them. Scald them for their transgressions. This’ll maybe take you five, even eight minutes.

If you’re feeling sassy, cook some minced garlic in there too.

Whilst that is happening –

It is time to handle our meat.

Once again, not a masturbation euphemism. I am in fact troubled by how often you think I’m talking about masturbation and how often I see you ripping your pants off like a child freeing a Christmas present of its crinkly wrapping, but that is a discussion for another time.

For now, get out the chuck roast.

Wipe it down with a little olive oil.

Then coat it with a sprinkling of black pepper.

Then some garlic powder.

Then comes the salt. I don’t want you to be a coward with the salt. This is not the time for craven curs. I want you to salt the ever-living shit out of that pot roast. Lots of salt. On all sides. I mean, you should still be able to see meat beneath that salt, but trust me: salt is your friend. Except when it kills you by hardening your arteries and turning them into dead little twigs, but that’s later in life.

Veggies done? Good. Rescue them from danger.

Now it is the meat’s turn to suffer your wrath.

Brown it on all sides. Since the roast will most likely be in the shape of some kind of… drunken sludgey cube, you have roughly six sides that need a little color. Hurt it. Make it beg for mercy. Let its fat squeal and pop.

When each side is sufficiently browned — say, three to five minutes on each side — take it back out of the pot. Put it on a plate. Let it sit there and think about what it’s done to deserve this fate (a fate that, don’t tell the meat, ends in your belly). While that’s happening, it is time to deglaze the pan. Splash some red wine — no, not red wine vinegar, not broth, but motherfucking red wine, you goddamn teetotaler — into the still-hot pot and as it starts to bubble up, use a metal scrapery-thing (spatula, flipper, spoon, ice scraper, robot claw) to loosen all the charred meaty bits from the bottom of the pot. Now put the meat back in there. Listen to it shriek and blubber as you lower it back into the heat.

As the vegetables hang nearby, chuckling at the torment you visit upon the quivering block of meat, point at them and say, “YOU’RE NEXT,” and then cackle madly as you upend them over the roast.

Now, it’s time for fluids.

One-and-a-half cups of coffee, into the mix.

Then: one-and-a-half cups of beef stock. Or broth. Or some liquidy part of the cow as long as it’s not, say, urine. What’s wrong with you, trying to cook your roast in cow pee?

You’re lucky I still let you hang around here, mutant.

Here’s the only seasoning you need (since you salted the very soul out of that roast):

Herbs de Provence.

It’s my secret weapon in things like this. Any time I think I need rosemary and thyme, I instead think, “Well, let’s bring them and all their Frenchie friends to the goddamn party,” and I reach for the Herbs de Provence and then I take a swig of whiskey and a hit of acid and I wake up in Reno for the 57th time covered in greasepaint and blood. Then I haul my way back home to start it all over again.

Whatever.

Herbs — say, two generous pinches — atop the meat and veggies.

Cover the pot.

Shove it in the oven.

Roughly one hour per pound of the roast, though I sometimes tack on another five minutes per pound of the roast because my oven is a bit finicky that way. You do what your oven commands. Unless that oven commands you to like, feed it babies. That’s a defective oven. You learn that after two, three babies and it keeps wanting more, more, more. “MORE BABIES,” it roars with hot breath. Jerk.

When it’s done, take it out.

Should be fork tender. May even fall apart with gentle prodding, like a Girl Scout under intense Guantanamo interrogation. Now what do you do? Jesus Christ, do I have to tell you everything? You eat it. Preferably with your bare hands like some kind of feral hobo.

Though, should you choose to be civilized and incorporate it with a meal, it goes very nicely over mashed potatoes. And the vegetables are soft and lovely. Pillowy, I might say, were I the type of person to use the word “pillowy.” AND I AM.

The great thing is, this is three to five pounds of meat that you will not eat in a single sitting.

So, next day? Make sure to save all those sweet meat drippings in the fridge. Take it back out, once cold, and you can free it of its fatty crust. Into a smaller pot you make a roux (two to three TBsp of butter with equivalent amount of flour), let it golden up, then pour upon it the de-fatted drippings. Bring to a boil, stir till it thickens. Add, if you care, a bit more black pepper and then a splash of heavy cream and it will make the kind of gravy that will cause an angel to betray God and join Satan’s gravy-loving army.

Or: POT ROAST TACOS.

Or make a hat out of it.

I don’t give a shit. You do as you like.

All I know is, at the beginning of all this, the meat was your peon, your minion, your slave in earthly fealty. But by the end, the cosmic tables will have flipped. This pot roast is your god, now. Bow down and offer it praise. Consume its body as you would any avatar of the divine.

OM NOM NOM

IA IA POT ROAST FTHAGN

In Which I Smother You All In A Bathtub Brimming With Thanks

It’s Thanksgiving, y’all. Though a good part of me refuses to believe that to be the case and assumes I’m the victim of some grand illusion where it’s really the first week of November. ENJOY THE LARF, JERKS.

Point is: no real post today except to say I am a thankful motherfucker. I’ve got a good life. My family rocks. Our new dog is a delightful dumdum. I’ve got a writing career for the foreseeable future. I’ve got you people — the ones who come here and the ones who read my books (and the crossover in that wonderful Venn diagram). Frankly, this life I have doesn’t properly exist without you.

Yes, you.

No, not you. You stay over there in your corner. Put a shirt on. And stop molesting that pumpkin pie.

So: to all my readers: a heaping helping of gratitude ladled upon your head like so much gravy.

And to all the writers I know: you kick ass. You inspire. Keep on keepin’ on.

High-five, all.

Now I’m gonna go do some calisthenics do get myself in prime-time turkey-gobbling shape.

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.)