Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 239

J.C. Carleson: The Terribleminds Interview

Normally, I’m the one in control of these interviews. But when someone yanks you out of your Hyundai, throws a black bag over your head and drives you out to the middle of the desert so that you may interview someone, well, you do it. Not least because they’ve got a gun shoved up into your gonads. So! Here, then, is my interview with CIA spy and new author, J.C. Carleson, whose debut novel, Cloaks and Veils, is out now. You can find her at her website — jccarleson.com.

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.

A true, slightly embarrassing story about the relativity of language.

I moved to Spain right after the birth of my first child, and right when I decided to get serious about writing. Between moving to a new country where I didn’t know anyone, learning how to be a parent, and writing full time, I was pretty isolated. Okay, very isolated. My interactions tended to be limited – the cashier at the grocery store, the janitor in my apartment building, the nannies watching the other children in the park, etc.. In Spain, these jobs are held primarily by immigrants from South America – and so it was that I learned to speak a Latin American form of Spanish even though I was living in Spain. (The difference is akin to the difference between British and American English.)

I was also fortunate to have a lovely woman from Ecuador as a house cleaner – to this day I swear that I learned most of my Spanish from the endlessly patient Dolores. We quickly developed a method of communicating that involved short words and lots of elaborate body language. My husband couldn’t understand a word of what either of us was saying, but Dolores and I understood each other perfectly.

Once I mastered the basic vocabulary I asked Dolores to teach me all of the bad words. She’d only whisper the really bad ones, and would shriek, giggle, and go red in the face when I repeated them back. She preferred milder words, so among others she taught me “joder” (pronounced ho-dare). She assured me that it was a benign invective – along the lines of “darn” or “dang”. It has a satisfying, slightly guttural sound to it, so I tossed it into my daily vocabulary. Couldn’t find the right change while the taxi driver was waiting for me to pay? “Joder!” I’d mutter while rooting through my wallet. Ancient elevator in our building creaking and groaning more than usual? “Joder!” I’d say to the neighbor riding up with me. Particularly hot day out? “Joder!” I’d say to the person next to me on the metro while fanning my face.

I used the word a lot.

And then one day I was pushing my baby in a stroller behind a slow-moving gaggle of pre-teens in my neighborhood. Unable to get by them on the sidewalk, I perdona’d and por favor’ed several times to no avail before finally saying “joder, niños!” in a fairly loud voice.  Now, I thought that translated roughly into “geez, kids”, but the group went silent and turned on me with wide, shocked eyes. Several almost tripped in their hurry to get out of my way.

I began to suspect that joder did not mean what I thought it meant.

Later that day I asked a bilingual friend for help. Fuck. In Spain it basically translates into “Fuck” – both the act and the exclamation.

Dear Dolores hadn’t intentionally steered me wrong – in Ecuador and in some other South American countries, joder is apparently a mild term. Company appropriate, you could say. Not so in Spain. Which meant that I had spent more than a year generously tossing “fuck” into conversations with strangers, neighbors, my child’s daycare providers, my husband’s co-workers, etc…. Joder.

Lesson learned: The nuances of language matter. Sometimes a lot.

Why do you tell stories?

I got used to being paid to lie in my old career and I wanted the paychecks to continue.

More seriously, storytelling is a huge part of working undercover. Huge. You have to create a persona, live a cover story, and disguise your intentions – and you have to do it convincingly. I discovered that I was pretty good at storytelling while working for the CIA. I’m also a lifelong bookworm – a true book lover – so stepping into fiction after leaving the espionage business felt like the most natural thing in the world.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

Finish something. A novel, a screenplay, whatever. But finish it. I could write opening chapters all day long. It’s only with the blood, sweat and tears of bringing something to The End, though, that you can truly learn about effective character development, plot coherence, and pacing.

Plus, everyone has an unfinished manuscript in their drawer. Harness your competitive streak and actually get yours done.

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

You’ll never make it as a writer without an MFA. Bollocks.

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

I may be the wrong person to ask, because I love a flawed character and I think that unreliable narrators tell the most interesting stories. Maybe I’m weird, but as a reader I’ve never felt the absolute need to side with or believe in the characters of books. I don’t even have to like them. I just want them to tell a damn good story, even if that story is full of lies. I am aware, however, that some editors don’t share this opinion. In fact, CLOAKS AND VEILS was rejected by several editors who felt that the protagonist of my book, a female CIA officer, was not convincing or likeable enough because she makes a few highly-consequential mistakes and has a tendency to let her personal life become intertwined with her professional life (to say more would be a spoiler). But as someone who spent nearly a decade as a CIA officer, I can tell you with absolute certainty that real-life spies are every bit as flawed as the rest of the world – and probably more so. They most certainly make mistakes, and they most certainly bring work problems home and personal problems to work. My protagonist is absolutely imperfect. She’s also absolutely realistic.

But if by “strong character” you mean “interesting, well-developed character”, then I think it’s all about the voice. I love a character who can tell me a story just in the unique way he or she walks down the street or reacts to a mundane situation. Does he pet the stray cat, or does he kick it? I want to like the character or hate the character by the end of the first page – even if that opinion changes later on. As long as I’m not indifferent, then character development is going well. A strong character transports readers in every scene just by walking and talking and reacting in a way that is intriguing, or different, or even shocking.

Bonus question: Gillian Flynn does an incredible job of telling a great story via a deeply flawed, highly unlikable character in DARK PLACES. Her protagonist, Libby Day, is lazy, selfish, mean-spirited…and utterly fascinating. As a reader you doubt half of what she says, but you can’t help but listen anyway. She may be weak in spirit and morals, but she’s sure as hell interesting. (Chuck do I get a bonus for my bonus question for coming up with a strongly written, weak character?)

You’re former CIA. What can you tell us about the CIA that most people don’t know or wouldn’t expect?

-      There’s a Starbucks inside CIA headquarters. And a Dunkin’ Donuts.

-      The CIA has a writers’ club. I was a member, but I traveled too much to make many of the meetings.

-      The CIA has a dedicated publication review board. Like all CIA officers, I’m required to submit my writing to them prior to publication for the rest of my life. (They even reviewed this blog interview!)

-      CIA officers hate being called spies. They’re not spies – spies are people who commit espionage against their own country. CIA officers RECRUIT spies.

-      The overwhelming majority of CIA employees are not undercover.

How did “telling stories” come in handy while at the CIA?

There is a great deal of motivation to develop excellent storytelling skills when angry and heavily armed men are asking you questions like: “What are you doing with this top secret file from our prime minister’s office?” or “What were you doing meeting with the president’s top aide at 3:00 a.m. in a deserted park?” or “Why are you sneaking across our border with $200,000 in cash and passports in three different names?”

Storytelling is a survival skill in the CIA.

What kind of person becomes a spy?

May I let one of my characters from CLOAKS AND VEILS answer that question? Here’s Caitlin (she has good reason to be cynical), on page 53:

“You know, the people who recruit CIA officers think that they’re looking for Boy Scouts. The perfect patriot who speaks four languages, ties sailor knots, jumps out of airplanes, and goes to church on Sundays. But you know what they really want? They want people who can cheat and lie and steal—and then go to church on Sundays without the least bit of remorse. They need people with a hidden dark side.”

Do you have bad-ass spy gear? Will you share?

Of course I do. But I’m not sharing. I’m saving it all for the zombie apocalypse.

What’s the strangest place you’ve been, and why?

In Kabul, Afghanistan, in the back of a jeep driven by a chain-smoking Afghan man, with my feet propped up on a Stinger missile. The missile was just slightly too long to fit, so I was holding the unlatched door to keep it from flying open. Every time we hit a big bump the driver would turn around, cigarette dangling out of his mouth, laugh hysterically, and say “Boom!”.

Why? Business as usual.

Sell us on Cloak and Veils. First, the 140-character Twitter pitch…

CLOAKS AND VEILS: A disturbingly authentic spy thriller about one CIA officer’s fight to survive after an operation goes terribly wrong.

And then by telling us exactly how this is a book only you could’ve written.

ER was a popular TV show when I was in high school, but my father had to leave the room every time I watched it. He was a doctor, and he used to get so upset about the technical errors that he would end up yelling at the TV set. “You don’t do that during open heart surgery!” “What kind of an idiot would give those medications at the same time?” “An ER doctor would never do that!”  These were things that most viewers would never notice, but were glaringly obvious to him.

I feel the same way about many spy thrillers — particularly when it comes to female protagonists. I just cannot bring myself to read a book in which the buxom stripper assassin pulls a throwing star from her cleavage and hurls it expertly at the Russian mafia thug at the same time as she detonates the explosive device hidden in her stiletto heel, all the while holding witty conversations in fluent Japanese and German. Just…no.

Please note that I’m not bashing the genre as a whole – there are many, many outstanding books, and I’m a huge fan of many authors in the field. But far too often, CIA officers are portrayed as invincible super-heroes. They have unlimited resources, they are experts at everything,  and they never, ever screw up. Personally, I find this level of perfection boring. I wanted to write a spy thriller in which the protagonist, a CIA officer, is a real person who makes real mistakes within a real, flawed organization, and then and has to use real skills to survive. Trust me – there’s nothing boring about authenticity when it comes to the CIA!

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

Jose Saramago’s BLINDNESS. (Do NOT judge it by the execrable movie.) It’s post-apocalyptic brought down to a personal level – everyone losing their vision, one person at a time. It shows the basest of human behavior right alongside the most heroic. It’s at times gruesome and at times poetic, and it makes you cringe and then turn the page anyway, over and over again. (It seriously makes you think about cleanliness and plumbing in a whole new way…not for the faint of heart.)

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

Favorite word? Mistral. As in le mistral. (Come on, try it. It totally sounds better with a French accent.) It’s the name of the strong, Mediterranean wind that blows through the south of France. It just sounds romantic, and maybe a bit spooky. It’s a word that transports.

Favorite curse word? As you’ve probably already guessed, I’m a sucker for learning curse words in foreign languages. But I always come home to good, old-fashioned “fuck” as my favorite. It’s just so damn versatile.

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

I’m a red wine gal. Big, full-bodied, grab-you-by-the-throat reds – you’ll win my friendship forever if you serve me a Cabernet from Heitz Cellar, for example.

Don’t ever serve me anything pink. If I ran the world I would banish Rosé  wines and pink cocktails. Blue cocktails too, come to think of it.

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

I worked for the CIA, remember? We’re the ones who built the evil robots. So I know where the secret off button is.  (Note to tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorists: I’m joking. There is no off button.)

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

I’m taking a brief break from fiction for my next book, but storytelling is most definitely still involved. WORK LIKE A SPY: BUSINESS TIPS FROM THE CLANDESTINE WORLD is coming out in February 2013. It’s a leadership/management book in which I apply lessons learned from my CIA career to the business world. After that I think I’ll return to fiction, though I haven’t decided whether to write a sequel to CLOAKS AND VEILS or start something completely new.

Put My Meat Sauce Inside Your Mouth

See, that post title is exactly why I shouldn’t be allowed to talk on the Internet.

BUT WHATEVER NO LIMITS WOOOOOO

Ahem.

What I mean to say is, it’s recipe time, you sons-a-bitches. Which further means, you’d better get under that Gallagher tarp, because it’s about to get sloppy all up in this muh-fuhuh.

It’s time to talk about meat sauce.

Which was, coincidentally, my nickname back in the Royal Air Force. “Oy, Meat Sauce!” a fellow pilot would call. “Get the dog’s bollocks with a fanny cracker, you chip-twiddler!” And we’d all laugh.

Whatever. That was then, this is now. And now is the time for meat sauce.

I make this from time to time and the recipe swerves drunkenly about like Lindsay Lohan in a Lexus, bringing in new ingredients and discarding others. But this is the most current iteration of my meat sauce.

And it requires a bit of multitasking. Not the kind where you juggle chainsaws with one hand and manually masturbate a sea lion with another — by the way, who let that sea lion in here? This is a kitchen and he smells like herring. Ugh. Whatever. What it will require of you is to: a) put something in the oven and b) put something on the stove all at the same time. Gasp! Crash of thunder! Tense violin music!

First, the oven.

Set your fire-box (insert Lindsay Lohan vagina joke here) to 425. That’s Fahrenheit, because that’s how we roll in America. Then, once it gets all roasty-toasty, it’s time to throw in the vegetables.

In a roasting pan, deposit the following: one sweet onion, chopped into maybe eight pieces. One small carrot, skinned like a rare African monkey, chopped into four or five rough pieces. Two bell peppers — one red and one yellow if you like the color. Sometimes, though, I use smaller sweet peppers if they’re available. (And when they’re not available, I throw a tantrum in the store, whipping nearby shoppers with a cat-of-nine-tails made of cilantro and asparagus.)

Then, finally, the tomatoes.

Listen, I don’t care what kind of tomatoes you use. That’s your business, not mine. I’ve done cherry tomatoes, plum tomatoes, fat heirloom tomatoes that have funky names like Green-Breasted Sioux Daddy or Farniker’s Morbidly Obese. One’s choice in tomatoes is like one’s choice in a God; it’s between you and your pantheon of divinities. I shall respect your decision, whatever it may be.

I use a pound of chosen tomatoes.

Chopped and seeded and de-snotted. Because that’s what’s in tomatoes. Seeds floating in a sea of tomato snot. So appetizing. That stuff is naaaaasty. What is wrong with the guy who invented tomatoes? I mean, cripes, after I’m done de-snotting a pound of tomatoes, it looks like a llama sneezed into my garbage bowl. (And if you’re not using a garbage bowl to collect all your vegetable garbage, then there’s your pro-tip of the day. Use a garbage bowl. Then compost your garbage. Then use the composted earth to grow new tomatoes with new tomato snot. THEN THE PROCESS BEGINS AGAIN OH MY GOD I’M TRAPPED IN SOME KIND OF RECIPE HELL THE SNAKE BITES HIS OWN TAIL AND)

Whew, sorry. Feeling better now.

Garlic. You want garlic. A bulb’s worth of cloves, skinned and tossed in there.

Upon your roasted vegetables, you want to grease them up with liberal use of olive oil. Like, imagine you’re about to have sex with them? Use that much culinary lube. Then: salt, pepper, and a heavy sprinkling of some kind of Italian herbaceousness. You know, the oregano and marjoram and — hey, is marjoram even a real herb? I bet it’s something someone just made up. Anyway. My secret weapon is Herbs de Provence, which features lavender, and I don’t know why, but I think it kicks the sauce up a notch in terms of its olfactory power. So, use Herbs de Provence or I’ll break your femur with a mad karate kick.

Finally, you want to select a good Italian sausage. I like a mix of sweet and hot. You get the best Italian sausage in New Jersey (and this is not a reference to truck stop male prostitution no matter what the gossip blogs say about me), but I live in Pennsylvania so I get whatever I can get. Lube up the sausage. Pop it on top of the soon-to-be-roasted vegetables. Then, into the oven the whole thing goes.

One hour. No less. Maybe more. Till your veggies start to scream and burn.

“Caramelized” is the name of the game.

Now, while that’s cooking:

BEHOLD, THE BIG-ASS SAUCE POT.

Get some heat under that fat-assed pot and then it’s time to put some shit — not literal shit, mind you, because ew what’s wrong with you — into the steel receptacle. First up?

Big motherfucking can of tomatoes. I know, canned tomatoes? Aren’t we roasting real tomatoes? We are. And we’re also putting canned tomatoes in there. Make peace with this now.

Big can means 28 oz, probably. I go with crushed tomatoes. No spices or salt or anything because uhh, we can handle that, thanks, can of tomatoes. I got this. Don’t be pushy. Stupid can.

Then, two little cans of tomato paste. That’s all they seem to sell of tomato paste are little cans. But I guess that’s fine because tomato paste is like, the potent uranium of tomato sauce. You only need a little to go a long way. Whatever. Both those cans go into the bubbling brew.

Then: two cups of chicken stock. Homemade if you can. If not: store-bought, low-sodium. If not that, then veggie stock. If not that, then water, I guess. What are you, poor? How do you have the Internet?

Then: one cup of red wine. Your choice here is your own. I like a simple “cab-sauv,” which is what we call Cabernet Sauvignon in the wine world. Pinot Grigio we call “pee-gree.” Merlot we call “Merbugluh.”

As a sidenote, Wine World is definitely a planet I want to call home.

Then, into the mix: one squirt of ketchup, one tablespoon splash of Worcestershire sauce (aka Shire Sauce, or Hobbit Sauce, or It’s Actually Fish Sauce But Nobody Really Realizes That), one splash of cider vinegar, a dash of pepper, a sprinkling of salt, sprinkling of white sugar, a flurry of Italian seasoning, one bay leaf, and then the milk squozen from two lemur bladders.

JUST SEEING IF YOU WERE PAYING ATTENTION.

No lemur parts. Too acidic.

One more thing goes into the pot:

MORE MEAT.

In this case: pepperoni.

Get a whole “dick” (AKA one stick) of pepperoni, then chop it into little quartered bits.

Those go into the bubbling red mire.

Cover and simmer while the veggies roast.

While all that’s happening, kill time with whatever time-killing task that makes your grapefruit squirt. Tetris, gardening, whale-taming, donkey-shaming, engaging in copious alcoholism, practicing rampant masturbation, hunting the Most Dangerous Game (which contrary to rumors is not “man” but rather, “robot orangutans armed with bazookas and garotte wire”). Your call.

When your roasted veggies are done, uhh, roasting, take ‘em out. I pop ‘em in the blender or into a food processor (or, if you have one, the mouth of a Labrador Retriever) and coarsely blend ‘em up.

Then they go into the pot.

Then, you wait another, mmm, ohh, two hours.

And that’s it, really. It’ll give you a metric orificeload of meat sauce.

Rescue the bay leaf because, y’know, yuck.

If you cook pasta, remember to cook the pasta in water just prior to “al dente status,” then finish the cooking of said pasta in the meat sauce itself. Because that’s just how you do it, shut up.

Prior to eating, I’ll chiffonade (which is French for “cut into hoity-toity little ribbons”) some basil and put in there. And I like to grate some Parmesan cheese upon the dish just before consumption.

Now eat.

And praise my meat sauce.

PRAISE MY MEAT SAUCE.

Ask A Writer: In Which I Exhort You To Care Less

Once again, time for another session of The Little Miss Wendig Writing-and-Storytelling Advice Column. Want to ask a question? Go to terribleminds.tumblr.com/ask and deposit it there under a name or as an anonymous human of the Internet. If I pick your question (and you’re not anonymous), I’ll toss you a free writing-related e-book of your choice. Easy-peasy George-and-Weezy.

Amber Gardner asks:

“What would you say to someone who were to run up to you and say: ‘Help! I have terrible performance anxiety whenever I sit down at the keyboard! Like my chest tightens up and physically feel like shit. I want to just sit down and write through it, ’cause writers write, and that’s the whole penmonkey attitude, but the more I try to force it, the worse it gets and what I write is awful anyways. What do I do?!’”

Care less.

That’s my answer.

I’ll give that a second to seep in.

Care. Less.

*whistles a tune*

Okay, I think I’ve given that enough time for it to crawl into your brain-bone.

Let’s talk.

Your writing is just that. Words written on a page.

And yet, we come to our stories loaded for bear with expectations. They’re like children, in that way — we deeply hope they’ll go out into the world and cure cancer and solve the down economy and grow up rich and happy and maybe be a lawyer, too, and a nuclear physicist, and have a litter of darling Village of the Damned-looking grandkids and, and, and. We wish the best for our stories. We want them to be great. We want them to win awards and climb to the top of the bestseller mountain and maybe they’ll change somebody’s life and earn us a giant sack of cash which will allow us to buy a jet-boat or an oil drum full of that very rare civet-poop coffee. Maybe a jet boat fueled by civet-shit coffee. Who knows?

We step up to the blank page — this snowy tract that hasn’t earned even a single footprint across its virgin expanse — and the potential overwhelms us. Or, it has me, at least — once upon a time upon starting a new story I’d feel like I was standing drunk on the ledge of a skyscraper. Vertigo overwhelming as if even typing one letter would send me dropping down in that cavernous concrete abyss. And this sense of woozy dizzy gonna-fall-itis is compounded by the heavy burden upon one’s shoulders — that burden of potential, of a story that must succeed if it is do anything at all, a story whose entrance into the marketplace would not be enough, a story on which hung my life, my career, my hopes, everything, all of it, OMYGOD I CAN’T FEEL MY LEGS CAN’T BREATHE PANIC gaaaaaasp *pees pants falls down cries a lot*

It’s bullshit, of course.

It’s always bullshit, these mental games we writers play with ourselves.

Our words are just words. Our stories are just stories. Maybe they transcend their form. Maybe they don’t. It doesn’t matter. Repeat after me: it doesn’t matter. Care less. Fuck it. Fuck it. Write like you don’t give a damn. Write like there’s no expected outcome except a finished story. Write the story that sings in your heart, not the one that whispers in your brain. You’re not curing cancer. You’re not saving the whales.

You’re writing.

One word after the other. No wants, no needs, no fears.

Only words.

There’s no real risk to writing except your time. (Well, and maybe your sanity, but let’s be honest — the fact that you choose writing as a profession suggests an already disintegrating SAN score.)

Nobody’s watching. You get as much time as you like. As many do-overs as you like. Er, all this presupposing you’re not on deadline. Deadlines present another axis of stress — some authors work well with a gun at their temple, some feel hamstrung by the pressure. But therein I still suggest the answer is to care less. Take the pressure off however you must.

You free yourself by caring less. By dumping the dueling goblins of Fear and Expectation out the back of a C-130 and into the mouth of an open and active volcano named Mount Don’t-Give-A-Shit.

Sure, it would seem that the answer would be to care more — how can you possibly care enough? If this is a thing you want to do and a thing you love, well, why not give it all the caring you can possibly muster?

Because we can smother the things we love by caring too much. Sometimes you gotta let your kids play in mud. Sometimes you gotta let a dog be a dog. Sometimes you have to let your story just be a story.

Care. Less.

There you go. That’s my answer.

Now, as an addendum, there could be other things going on. First, I’ve gone on the record time and time again to say that Writer’s Block is not a real thing, in the sense that writers don’t own mental blocks anymore than any member of any other profession — anybody can get blocked, be they gardeners, physicists, or insane government assassin cyborgs. But they don’t get special names for it (“I have a bad case of Gardener’s Trowel!”), so why do we? Further, the solutions to defeating said block is almost always to just write through it — head down, run the gauntlet, get out the other side.

But the thing is, there is another form of Writer’s Block where you are crippled by the process and writing through it just yields greater frustration and sadness, and in this case Writer’s Block is likely due to depression. Which means it’s not Writer’s Block at all but, uhh, well, depression. So, if you go at the problem trying to treat “Writer’s Block,” you will be treating a symptom and an outcome, when really you need to be treating your depression. How you do that is up to you: meds, meditation, therapy, oolong tea, chakra-realignment, I don’t know. What I do know is that depression is not at all uncommon in writers and many writers with depression are not crippled by it and are, in fact, quite successful. But it’s something that must be dealt with day in and day out — this all sounds a bit glib and dismissive, when the reality is that depression can be quite limiting. But just the same: you either deal with it, or it deals with you. Easier said than done, but must be done just the same.

(After I saw this, I caught sight of this post by the Mighty Mur Lafferty that touches on the subject of depression and caring and so on. It is, of course, a cracker of a read, because she rocks.)

So, that’s one thing that could be happening.

The other thing is: you don’t like writing.

Throughout my life I’ve thought that I liked things more than I actually did — like, say, watercolor painting. I liked the idea of the thing, but turns out, I did not like the thing in practice or habit, and attempting to do that thing did not salve my artist’s soul but rather enraged it in the way that you might enrage a giant gorilla by attacking it with helicopters. So, sometimes we want to like something or find a connection with a task or an act and the fact is, it’s just not our thing.

I don’t know how you know that except maybe by stopping and discovering, “Oh, hey, I’m much happier not sitting down every day and banging my head against a keyboard till it’s bloody.”

Do with this as you will. Hope it helped.

Now go forth and write.

Without pressure, without fear, without the expectation of doing anything but crossing the finish line.

Bait Dog, And Other Updates!

First up, let me say this: Bait Dog is done. Like, done-done. Like, in the hands of backers.

Been hearing some good rumbles from folks who have already read and finished it (!):

“…it’s a gut punch. Great heroine, gripping story. I’m proud to have supported this Kickstarter!”

“Read it all in one sitting. Wow. I cried & cheered out loud.”

“Finished it last night – it was fucking great. I like your other work, but Atlanta is by far my favorite.”

I’ll be releasing this wide to the public on, I believe, August 13th.

The novel will come with Shotgun Gravy packaged into the text.

The book was hard row to hoe — Atlanta is an easy character to write and, in the technical sense, this book was easy, too. It leaped up out of me — I barely had to facilitate its birth.

But the subject matter is tough stuff. I mean, dog fights? C’mon. Eeesh. Scary.

Anyway. Hope you’ll check it out when it drops. Keep your grapes peeled.

Other Stuff Stuffed With Different Stuff

New Mockingbird review from Fantasy Bytes: “The leanness of the writing that I so loved in Blackbirds is still very evident, although…in places it seems to have put on a pound or two, which works just as well. It’s more verbose than its predecessor, more descriptive and initially at least, slower paced. Again, I like this, it shows a different side to things. The switch-up between the two styles is effective, you never know what’s coming next and that’s a real bonus. You need to be ready for anything here… Miriam is as terrifyingly, captivatingly awesome as ever.”

New Mockingbird review from Adventures Fantastic: “The story didn’t go where I expected it to.  I was surprised several times.  Wendig has come up with a killer that is at least as scary as Hannibal Lector.  There were scenes that were downright flawless in their creepiness.  I doubt I’ll ever look at crows the same way again.  We learn more about Miriam, and it’s kinda spooky, some of the stuff we learn.  Of course, Wendig only gives us so much.  He leaves plenty of questions and implications hanging, making us want more.”

New Mockingbird review from Snobbery: “I totally heart Miriam. She’s probably my favourite UF heroine right now – and that says quite a lot.”

Oh, and sometime this week I’ll probably start loosing new Mockingbird promos upon the world.

I’ll be signing Mockingbird in Chicago for the book’s release, there with three other kickass Angry Robot authors (Adam Christopher, Gwenda Bond, Kim Curran) at the Book Cellar on 8/31, 7pm. Details here.

Lessee. What else?

Great review of Dinocalypse Now: “If pulp heroes duking it out with psychic dinosaurs, intelligent apes, and Neanderthals from Hollow Earth doesn’t seem like your sort of thing, you’re probably not going to enjoy this book. Dinocalypse Now is the distilled essence of that sort of thing, carried off with considerable flair, and to really enjoy it I think you have to buy in.”

Here’s an, erm, ‘review’ of 500 Ways To Be A Better Writer at Amazon, which I’ve flagged as being inappropriate: “This “writer” thinks he’s funny but his sense of humor is really just plain retarded. I only made it a quarter of the way through until I couldn’t take any more. I think his volcabulary is about 100 words deep, this book does not live up to the title, spare yourself the pain and click away from this book immediately, reading it can only make one dumber and a worse writer, there are hundred’s of books on writing better than this. Repeat..stay away.” (Sorry about my ‘volcabulary.’ If only I had hundred’s of better words! Ahem. Sic.)

The Liar’s Club anthology of shorts, Liar Liar, got an audio deal with Blackstone Audio. Both Stephen Susco and I will be contributing late stories to the anthology, so, get excited.

Tales From The Far West, the Wild West Wuxia transmedia mash-up, has a short story collection (which I’m in), and it just got nominated for an ENnie.

I’m playing with Scrivener now on the Mac. Digging it so far, but no work actually done yet.

Oh, creative types and executive types? Read these two letters from Patton Oswalt. It’ll get you charged up to be a creator in the 21st century. Best line: “This isn’t a threat, this is an offer.”

And that’s it. Stick a fork in me, not because I’m done but because I have a fork fetish. Mmm. Forks.

*licks*

Flash Fiction Challenge: “Antag/Protag”

Last week’s challenge? Must Love Time Travel.

This week, I talked about what it takes to write an antagonist.

And so it seems like a good time to connect a flash fiction challenge to it.

Here’s what you’re going to do.

You’re going to write a flash fiction story, maximum 1000-words.

You will write half of it from the perspective of a protagonist.

You will write half of it from the perspective of the antagonist.

As always, post your stories online, and drop a link in the comments below so we can read your work.

Share yours, read others.

You’ve got one week. Due by August 3rd, noon EST.

I’ll choose three random participants to receive a copy of my newest writing-related e-book, 500 Ways To Tell A Better Story. Now go forth, word-wranglers. Write your words.

Dan Goldman: The Terribleminds Interview

I met Dan a couple-few years ago at DIY Days in New York, and before I knew what was happening he was beaming high-grade hallucinogens into my heart using his laser-eyes, and then we spent the next 72 hours riding cloud dragons and fucking up corrupt politicians with robotic borer beetles and corn weevils. It’s also possible I just ate a bad salad and tripped balls in my own bedroom, but whatever. Dan’s an uber-creative, an artist and author, and he was kind enough to ingest a high-test dose of my interview nanites. Dan’s the man behind SHOOTING WAR and RED LIGHT PROPERTIES. His site: dangoldman.net. Him in the Twittertubes: @dan_goldman.

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.

“Where It Goes”

Spencer Tyrell was already late for work at the Cinnabon when he killed that pigeon.

His ratty Adidas pumped BMX pedals all the way up the boardwalk back to his old hood, now the upscale part of T-Beach. He squinted into the salty breeze, dodging open cracks where the sun baked open the asphalt like overdone cookies, bouncing his bike up onto sidewalk of The Promenade. Once it was Tanga Beach Drive, the street he used to live on, the street where he’d snapped the shinbone of Dana’s tequila-crazed hubby with a foot of steel pipe and he carried her upstairs into his crib, where she finally was his for a little while. Their run-down apartment building was bulldozed twelve days after his landlord evicted the last tenant, but Dana bulldozed him months before the real estate developers took a lucrative opportunity to re-zone T-Beach into gated communities. Dana followed her lucrative opportunity into some silver fox’s shiny BMW sedan and he never saw her again.

Now The Promenade was closed to cars to maximize commercial foot-traffic and tourists’ spendy-spendy. He whizzed past a NO BIKES sign under a NO SKATEBOARDS sign under a ZERO TOLERANCE FOR DRUGS sign. They liked to keep it perfect out here and not the scare the straights, pushing back the local T-Beach flavor of discarded needles and bloody condoms and stray puddles of bum-diarrhea another few blocks west, out of sight. Now this place had that generic glamour of California-as-seen-on-TV, stinking of fruitsy aromatherapy and uplifting-slash-oversincere rock ballads and perfectly-manifactured bedhead, that soft-focus lip-gloss American Dream.

The Cinnabon was eight blocks down The Promenade, a nice walk on foot but by bicycle a speedy tunnel-tour through most of America’s major mall-friendly brands of clothing, consumer electronics and chain restaurants. The Cinnabon sat at the ass end of it with the rest of the cheaper shit.

His phone beeped and it was Randy again, calling to see if he’d be coming into work at all today. This time he answered it: “Randy. I’m on my way, I’m passing The Cheesecake Factory right now.”

“Okay good; Michael already told me I have to fire you if you’re not here by nine-thirty on the dot. He means it this time.”

“I’ll see you in a minute.”

“Good… I also think maybe we should talk about–”

“I just passed the Pollos Hermanos now; can we do this in person?”

He hung up on Randy. Religious, naive, fat-assed Randy. If not for her giant white badunkadunk that made it impossible to pass her behind the Cinnabon counter without goosing it with a little dick-sauce, last night probably never would’ve happened. She’d declared herself a born-again virgin before taking the assistant manager position, but Spence remembered her when she was just another blunt-rolling easy beach chick. Whether she was totally against premarital sex now or just using it as another layer of professional makeup, she still grunted like a rutting sow last night after she tripped over the pallet-jack in the delivery truck and planted that oversized fuck-pillow right into his lap with a burning after-tremor of We Both Know What Happens Next. And for the record, she was the one who wanted it up the ass, which was surely what she needed to talk to Spence about. Spence grinned about it now, sniffed his fingers and spit on the sidewalk when a pigeon landed in front of him.

There were usually clouds of them in the thoroughfare, chittering underneath the café tables to catch falling muffin crumbs — filthy fucking things — but they always took off as he wheeled closer. Then this one stupid one landed directly in front of him, bobbed its retarded head a few times, looked up at Spence’s incoming front tire with just time enough for two red-eyed blinks. He tried to weave left around it but the dummy did the same and went right under the tire. He felt the bike bounce and the bird-bones crunch through the BMX’s frame, through the rubber-grip handles, and what was once a bird was now a broken tangle of still-lit life-systems now on nerve-fire, wrapped in feathers. The sound went up into his gut and down to his fingertips slow enough that by the time his fingers squeezed the handbrakes, the pigeon was smearing blood for a good two feet under his bike’s back wheel, the smell of burnt feathers and rubber back coming up over his shoulder.

Johnny Rockets diners dropped their burgers on either side of him, gasped in several languages, mommies covered their kids’ eyes. Spence stepped off the bike and let it coast past him a few feet before it clattered to the pavement. He went back to the bird. It was alive but in shock, cooing like nothing happened. A little blonde girl screamed and hid her face in her mother’s pushed-up cleavage.

A man in a polo shirt covered his cellhone and barked: “For God’s sake, put the thing out of its misery!” Spence glared at him and stepped over the bird, sinking to a squat over the twist of splayed feathers and splintered bone. The bird’s neck and head were untouched, bobbing back and forth above its ruined body, trying to understand.

The Promenade sounds dropped away until there was just the sea and the rustle of palm trees and the pigeon’s confused, frantic blinking. Spence leaned over it, blocking out the palm trees, blocking out the sun… blanketing the bird in his cooling shadow where it would die.

It locked its red-irised eyes with his as it shook, its gold-rimmed pupils dilated all the way. Without breaking his gaze, the pigeon slowly dipped its neck down until the tip of its beak tapped the sidewalk, a tiny red bubble inflating from its nostrils to the size of a grape before popping with a tiny mist. Its mouth opened and blood began to run out, pooling around its head. Spence leaned into closer, stared deeper into the black of the pigeon’s pupil and fell in.

There was wind on the backs of his legs as the sidewalk dropped away, the sun was swallowed, the California heat snuffed out. Wrapped in a blanket of cold black, Spence was there with the bird, was the bird, was a tired lick escaping his own ruined body to fall through a burning rollercoaster of sparks and stars and scars and hurt toward a faraway point of purple fire where there was music, a soft womblike music with notes made of cubes. It was almost as if-

Sun. Trees. A hand clapped on his shoulder, dark hairs sprouting off the knuckles. The bloop-squawk of a rentacop’s radio: “Sir, I’m gonna have to ask you to clear the Promenade thoroughfare; we’re sending maintenance over to clean up the bird.”

Spence stood up, sweating. His phone buzzed again in his pocket. He took it out, looked at the time (9:38) and the text message (DONT BOTHER COMING IN, FIRED). Picking up his bike, he wheeled it back around past the mangled pigeon, its black pupil now a dull, empty thing.

It was gone.

Why do you tell stories?

Probably as a survival instinct; growing up, everyday life was rarely as interesting as what was playing upstairs in my head, and even when it was, my thoughts and memories would spin around up there until they broke off from the reality and started to hop around on their own. I think I started “writing” by rolling around on the living room floor with He-Man toys: jumping off from the crappy cartoon’s mythology, I’d cooked up this single ongoing narrative that advanced itself one chapter every time I picked up the toys. When I finished my epic five years later with its inevitable cosmos-shattering conclusion, I packed up the toys and gave them to my younger cousin. That was my first THE END.

By default, my skull fills up with ideas and characters, especially when there’s some kind of water involved — washing dishes, taking showers, swimming, brushing teeth, sitting by the ocean — finished scenarios drop in from Nowhere to Right Here. Without the release of writing, these worlds don’t just magically dissolve just because I’m ignoring. I spent a few years here and there where I wasn’t ass-in-chair with any real discipline, and I started getting a bit koo-koo and had to write my way back out.

My undefinable “story-place” was always my favorite and unique part of myself, the part I wanted to show to other people, maybe even have them love me for it. As I got older, storytelling became a conscious choice, then a hobby, then a discipline, then a career… but in the end, this is how I want to do with my remaining time in this body.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

Have receptive and genuinely-interested Someone with whom you can verbally stumble through your ideas with. I tend to go deep inside myself while doing the actual writing and don’t talk about it with anyone until there’s lots of pages to read, but in a project’s formative stages, I lay in a dark bedroom with my brain racing and just talk my poor wife’s ears off about the new thing. She’s very patient and a great listener because she’s lived with me long enough to understand that in the process of my explaning the story to her, I’m actually connecting its dots in way I haven’t done yet in my document. Talking the pieces through is a vomit-document edit for me, and if her eyes light up by the end of my babbling, I know I’m on the right track and it’s time to start writing for real. Conversely, if she just shrugs or nods her head or starts blinking slowly, I know I’ve just lobbed a total turd at her.

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

All of Hollywood seems to rabid to mold every single story into the shape of Joseph Campbell’s “Heroic Journey”, and with cinema’s influence is strongly felt in modern writing, gaming and comics, it’s having a seriously laming-down effect on what is recognized as “good” in a story. Stories are supposed to free people, and this practice is limiting people’s imaginations on what they can expect from a story, where it can take them; there’s a reason so many things feel samey nowadays, with so many people are working off the same blueprint. Any undergrad Lit major can find Campbell’s structure in anything with enough Red Bull, but there are literally memos circulating between Hollywood studios, breaking it down to an actual Hero’s Journey Formula (when people say sci-fi or action movies are formulaic, this is literally that formula), where the Wise Mentor inspires the hero by page 35, etc. Even knowing that formula exists has ruined the experience of going to popcorn movies for me; sweeping music practically telegraphs the page number of the script where the Hero recites his “Crossing the 1st threshold/leaving behind the known” dialogue near the end of Act One. Eye roll.

My own tastes lean way more towards the slow-burn, delayed-gratification flavors of stories. I like my sex scenes fully-dressed with no touching but the eyes, I like my actors lumpy and real with personalities reminiscent of jerks I’ve known in my life who surprised me by doing something that earned my respect, I like giant and seemingly-disconnected tapestries of plotlines that are slowly and expertly drawn together until it’s clear there can be only one ending for everyone involved. These kinds of stories don’t compute when they’re run through the Heroic Formula… because they’re not just for young boys with daddy issues.

Don’t even get me started on heroes with fucking daddy issues.

All right, loaded question but it’s a necessary one: what’s wrong with comics today? Particularly regarding the aspect of storytelling.

Man, don’t even get me started on what’s wrong with comics. Despite the all-rumbling all-media noise of Comic-Con, the actual comics industry is still barely one unto itself. In order to make a living doing comics in the US, you’re either doing work on corporate super-heroes you don’t own (really just IP-generators for media and merchandise) or creating issue-specific “literary graphic novels” for the book trade. Occasional phenomena like The Walking Dead or Scott Pilgrim aside, there’s no large publishing apparatus in place for creator-owned work that falls in-between those two poles. If you’re dubbed “too mainstream to be indy/literary and too indy/literary to be mainstream,” your publishing options instantly narrow to maybe four publishing houses that handle material in that middle space, but only one or two of them will pay you up front for it. Otherwise, you’re a bootstrapping DIY creator, self-publishing digitally and/or in print by whatever means necessary.

Back when you could buy comic books at the drugstore/7-11/supermarket, they were firmly part of the zeitgeist; now they’re only sold in specialty stores… which means that people who don’t go out of their way to comic shops won’t find your work unless it’s adapted into another medium. Going DIY on the web can make up for that in terms of audience, but it also means you’ve got to have that second business of selling t-shirts/posters/coffee mugs to stay afloat. Digital devices with comic storefront apps like Comixology are changing that, but not to the point where the digital sales alone sustain the indy creator (yet).

Regarding the visual storytelling part of the equation, there ain’t nothing broken about comics these days… the work is cooler today than ever. Some of the smartest visual storytellers working in comics are breaking new ground right now. That’s the fishhook in my lip that keeps me coming back: watching them all cross-pollinate and mutate and metastasize like techno genres. And with comics jumping from pages to screens, there’s innovative shit popping off in every direction, whether it’s in the comic shops (like the new Love & Rockets or Casanova), in bookstore graphic novels (Alison Bechdel or One Soul or King City), in web browsers (Thrillbent and Never Mind the Bullets) or on iPad screens (Operation Ajax and Bottom of the Ninth). Creatively, comics are exploding… and I’m with all my creator friends in the hope that when the dust settles, the new disrupted marketplace serves us cartoonists creating our own thing better than what came before.

What, then, is the trick to telling a good story in a comic medium?

Letting the script and the art tango until they become a single organism. That’s what you shoot for telling stories with words and pictures: that synthesis. That’s when the room around you drops away and you enter the comic’s own reality, when you literally hear the dialogue spoken, smell the rain, feel the impact… not from descriptions alone but how your brain synthesizes the other senses.

But there’s a balance in that tango too: don’t overwrite the script. Trust the artwork to carry its half of the equation and the script the other; they have to be equal halves for the story to come alive.

What is Red Light Properties and where does it come from?

RED LIGHT PROPERTIES is my comic series about haunted real estate, rocky marriage and the joyful middle finger that says “I told you so.” It comes from living in a few haunted apartments over the years and listening to my realtor mother narrate the implosion of the South Florida real estate market under the subprime mortgage bubble, and connecting those with a family-run Miami realty office. Clairvoyant Jude Tobin, both owner and exorcist, found his niche in selling “previously-haunted” houses. But in order to bump up his abilities enough to enter the spirit world and get those ghosts to fuck off, he has to ingest heroic amounts of hallucinogens daily so his wife Cecilia can list and sell the cleaned properties. This leaves him straddling the Membrane between life and death, riding a constant drug-induced fire-house of deceased peoples’ stories and regrets that has to stand between him and his family if he has any chance of keeping the bills paid and the lights on.

RLP is rooted in that ooooogy 4am feeling when you’re in your house and you just know you’re not alone. There’s someone standing right there in the doorway watching you sleep; you can still feel them but you can’t see them with your eyes. With this series, I get to experiment with digital comics while talking about life, death, America, consciousness and the modern family in dramatic horror stories that contain nuggets of my own life: growing up in Miami, experiments with drugs, broken relationships, all swirled together into a Ben & Jerry’s flavor all my own.

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

An understanding of failure. So few people in life get what they really want that how they wear their failure becomes the petri dish in which their stories grow. Of course, in order to write failure, you have to know desire… but the degree to which their desires keep slipping through a character’s fingers makes them so human to me.

A great example of a strong character is Walter Berglund, the husband in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. He’s a mousy liberal intellectual who bore the burden of being the responsible son in family of alcoholic fuckups who needed him to survive. He met his wife in college, who loved his roommate and eventually warmed (or settled) for him, and he built his life around her and their kids according to his own principles. His whole existence becomes a chain of failures and opportunities to grow as Walter begins to break free of the family that doesn’t seem to respect the quiet strength of his intelligence or the anger at the core of his idea of what it is to be a Man.

Don’t get me wrong: he’s a total asshole too, pissy and judgmental and too tight-lipped to be any good at running a family of his own. But by the end of the novel, you’ve seen Walter through his own eyes and through his wife Patty’s, felt his frustrations and anger and tenderness for her, for their kids, their friends and neighbors, and his frustrations at ignorance of the the world around him that rejects intellectualism for instant gratification. I scoffed at Walter until I understood him, then I feared for him as he tore it all apart and sank, cheered for him when he seemed to figure it out again and I’m not gonna spoil anything here. He’s not even the most interesting person in the novel; it’s such a goddamn rich read, it deserves every drop of the praise it’s garnered.

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

Book: Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

Comic: Orc Stain by James Stokoe (Image Comics)

Film: Never Let Me Go

Game: Red Dead Redemption

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

It varies, but today it’s “chirisosu.” I read this recently on a menu in a Japanese restaurant — it’s Nihongo-phonetics for “chili sauce” — but I just can’t stop saying it. At first I proclaimed it’d be my next DJ name, now it’ll probably the name of my next pet or child.

Not to discount the versatility of “fuck”… but there’s a raw power to “cunt” that remains unmatched in American English. You probably flinched as I typed it just now, because “cunt” still upsets most people when you say it in the States. You don’t just throw it around if you want to live amongst the normals without altering your reputation. Any 12 year-old kid can drop f-bombs that he learned from playing Grand Theft Auto IV.

Living in Brazil’s opened up a whole new universe of profanity; there are apparently 200+ slang terms for “vagina” in use in Brazil (but only ~60 for “penis” which tells you much about who’s doing the cussing). Of course, I’m not outside cursing in the street with the yahoos; I’m usually upstairs in my studio writing and cursing in English.

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

There’s a very serious Japanese cocktail bar that I love in New York City called Angel’s Share; it’s hidden behind on unmarked door in a casual izakaya, and they make a cocktail called an “Old Oak” (cask-aged Venezuelan rum, sherry, orange bitters, one large ice cube). It’s smooth and woody and tastes like The Gilded Age. If I was still living in NYC, that would be my yay-I-just-finished-another-project celebratory drink: an Old Oak in front of their big window, looking down at the city flowing by.

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

I’m a believer in the inevitable post-human future, so why would I fight the robots when I could score some upgrades for my monkey-meat instead?

For starters, I want memory upgrades and external data storage, replacement HD bionic eyes with 200X zoom and wider-spectrum vision that can record/upload video. Also definitely need replacement ankles (mine are shot to shit after years of skateboarding injuries). I also want one of those neck-ports where I can download new skills like languages and martial arts. And also a DVR for my subconscious to record my dreams; I could make some serious Robo-Duckets with that feature to buy more upgrades. Robo-Santa… are you listening?

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

Since January, I’ve been working with a screenwriting partner to develop my comic series RED LIGHT PROPERTIES as live-action TV show, which has been a full-on education for me as well as a lot of fun, but now it’s suddenly June and I haven’t drawn any new Red Light Properties comics yet this year. But before I start producing new RLP stories, I’m going to finish remastering the first two hundred pages that I originally produced for Tor.com with an eye towards producing the hardcover print edition that everyone’s been asking for. After that, there will new RLP comics as my Scrivener binder is fit to burst with new stories of the Tobins, which will continue to be digital-first until I get a better offer. Right now the comics are published to iTunes, Kindle Fire and Comixology (and coming any minute to Nook, Kobo and Google Play).

I’ve also been serializing a non-fiction memoir about my move from New York City down to São Paulo, Brazil to take a stab at living as a “creative web node” called Toucannuí [read: toucan + ennui] that’s running on the Trip City website every Friday. It’s a blend of travel/food writing, family stories and memoir; I’m about halfway through the whole book now and it’ll be available as a physical/digital book when I’m done.

Also on my plate is my first novel, a story about a broken family that spans two contents and features an alien intelligence. It doesn’t have a title yet but I’m incredibly jazzed about it; my first love (even above comics) is writing prose, and this flower’s been threatening to bloom my entire life. More details when I can share them.

I’m also flexing my new TV/film muscles by writing screenplays and developing a handful new comics projects for other cool cat artists to draw.

Toucannui. How’s it feel to write prose? No visual? No image? What’s that transition like? Anything to do with your own geographical transitions?

Writing prose is actually my first love, and it’s always come easier for me than drawing comics. I still struggle daily to render my own scripts into artwork and being able to do that heavy lifting with just the words is a dream. I started writing short stories after my fifth-grade teacher gave me a dog-eared Bradbury paperback; making comics out of them was something I got into seriously in my mid-twenties.

As I started work on RED LIGHT PROPERTIES (it was originally commissioned by Tor.com), I moved from New York City down to São Paulo, Brazil with my wife (her native city) in search of a different kind of life. There is nothing better than living abroad to jux your compass and drop your armor, re-mold yourself to fit a different cultural shape. Over the course of my time here, some of my artist pals back in Brooklyn started an online salon called Trip City and invited me to contribute; when I sat down to write, what came out of me was a memoir of my time living in Brazil called TOUCANNUÍ. I fantasized for many years about living abroad and working for the same clients in the US no matter where my laptop was plugged in; now I’m documenting the less-shiny realities of that dream as the backdrop of a travelogue through Brazilian culture.

Being in Brazil’s been inspiring as hell, especially getting outside of the city of São Paulo (which is surprisingly conservative for a megapolis of 20 million); it’s the big and unspeakably beautiful Brazilian nature that I prefer. It’s full of history and folktales and strange fruits and animals. I’ve unearthed a few large Brazil-based stories here that I’ve got in the rock tumbler now, one of them will be my first prose novel (for which I’ll be taking a slow boat up the Amazon soon for dirty-fingernails research).

Your work is both personal and political. Should writers be less afraid of doing that? Any dangers of going too personal or too political?

Of course; writers shouldn’t be afraid of anything but chirping crickets. As an artist, it’s your function in this world to reach in and pull out the oozing, beating Truth of Things that make a story worth reading. That pulsing Truth can be pulled from the outside world or from within you, it can be disguised with frilly fictions or naked and dimpled, but I just don’t connect to stories driven by high-concept plot instead of by the desires of its characters. To me, that’s the difference between art and product.

The danger in doing political work that I’ve faced in my own experience is the work’s shelf life. I did a black-hearted day-after-tomorrow graphic novel about the War on Terror called SHOOTING WAR that came out in 2007 and took place in a 2011 where John McCain was president. It was scary then, it’s a little funny now; going from “possible future” to “alternate history” definitely dulls the teeth. I think the book will grow more relevant the further away we get from “the moment” until it stands on its own as a time capsule of our Iraq War zeitgeist.

On the other hand, doing personal work (in the emotional sense) is only dangerous when people assume that everything you write is autobiographical — it’s the default setting now in our tweet-your-breakfast-and-Instagram-your-poops digital culture. I’ve always liked my work to speak for itself… but I still get readers asking me if I really donkey-punched my lovely wife (as one of my characters did to his lover) no matter how many times I have to flick them repeatedly in the nose and yell “FICTION! FICTION!”

Ladling Love Upon Your Local Indie Bookstore

The reports of the bookstore’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

If you ask me, bookstores aren’t dead. They’re not even dying. And it’s not about print books (which are, by the way, also not dying — they’re not just as prominent as they once were): it’s about bookstores offering something that no online shopping experience ever can. It’s about bookstores bringing to the table an experience — which can be anything, really, but possibly involves coffee, tall shelves, pretty covers, author events, signed copies of books, rare releases, and maybe one or two homeless dudes who wandered in from outside. (Hey, Amazon will never offer us the “random homeless guy” experience. Though, now as I say that, Jeff Bezos is descending into the darkness of his laboratory to concoct some kind of digital hobo initiative — “Old Ciggy Jim has a Hobo Ranking of #4588! Beat that, Bindle Dan!”)

Let’s be clear: not every independent bookstore is worth saving by dint of it being an independent bookstore. Some bring nothing to the table that you can’t already get elsewhere (the answer to what an indie bookstore offers can never be “just books,” because that is a realm in which they cannot compete). But many others are wonderful, weird places — great staff, fine events, eclectic selections, nice design, the finest homeless around. So, with that being said, here’s what I want from you:

I’d like you to sing the praises of an indie bookstore you love.

Maybe it’s local to you. Or at least within driving distance.

Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s one you found in another city and you want to praise it with mighty hymns.

Tell me about your favorite indie bookstore.

Part of this is because: hey, I wanna celebrate those bookstores.

Another part is entirely selfish. Because you can bet I’m taking notes as to places I may one day stop to sign books, give readings, shake hands, kiss babies, and eradicate the growing Hobo Menace.

You.

Favorite bookstores.

Give ‘em some love.

25 Things You Should Know About Antagonists

1. Real People With People Problems

Antagonists are just people. Er, unless they’re insane sex-bots, sentient washing machines, serial killer dinosaurs, or hyper-intelligent window treatments. But even then, we need to treat them like people. People with wants, needs, fears, motivations. People with families and friends and their own enemies. They’re full-blooded, full-bodied characters. They’re not single-minded villains twirling greasy mustaches.

2. Meaning, They’re Not Just Fuel For The Plot Engine

Character is the driver. Plot is the getaway car. Character drives plot; plot does not drive character. The antagonist isn’t just here as a rock in the stream diverting the plot-churned waters — he does not exist in service to a sequence of events but rather, he exists to change them, sway them, turn them to a sequence he wants — a sequence that stands in opposition to the protagonist. For opposition is key.

3. Like I Just Said, Opposition Is Key

Jeez, weren’t you paying attention? EYES ON ME, SOLDIER. Anyway. The antagonist opposes the protagonist. Theirs are clashing motivations. They possess needs and wants that exist in defiance of one another. The protagonist wants to free the slaves; the antagonist wants to keep them and the power they provide. The protagonist wants to rescue the hostages; the antagonist wants to keep the hostages, or worse, kill ‘em. The protagonist wants a chalupa; the antagonist has stolen ALL THE CHALUPAS. The antagonist can oppose the main character directly, seeking to undo her efforts; or the antagonist can oppose her indirectly, coming at the story at an oblique angle (but still clashing with our protagonist character). But the point is the same no matter how you slice it: the antagonist stands in the way of the protagonist’s goals.

4. I Like Kittens, You Punch Kittens, Now We Fight!

The antagonist is the foil of the protagonist in the very fabric of his character, too — theirs are contrasting personas. At the simplest level, this is heroism versus villainy, but can (and should) go deeper than that. The protagonist is a drunk; the antagonist is a proponent of clean living. The protagonist is a rational woman; the antagonist is a religious zealot. The protagonist likes Batman, PBS, and whiskey. The antagonist likes Spider-Man, telenovelas, and Zima. Character traits existing in disharmony. Thesis, antithesis.

5. Like Krishna, Except A Total Jerkoff

The antagonist is the avatar of conflict. He causes it. His character embodies it. The antagonist is there to push and pull the sequence of events into an arrangement that pleases him. He makes trouble for the protagonist. He is the one upping the stakes. He is the one changing the game and making it harder.

6. Antagonists Think They’re The Protagonists

The antagonist is the hero in his own story. In fact, your story’s protagonist is the antagonist’s antagonist. BOOM DID I BLOW YOUR MIND? People who do bad things often justify their own actions as being somehow positive — Hitler wasn’t just a troll on an international scale. He thought he was the savior of mankind and that his deeply shitty agenda was justified. This isn’t to say that the antagonist’s desires must be noble (“I had to kill all those people to save the orphanage!”), only that he will have convinced himself of his own nobility. The antagonist thinks he’s right. And doing the right thing. Even when it’s awful.

7. Evil For The Sake Of Evil Is Yawntastic, Snoretacular

Antagonists who do evil just to do evil are basically big fucking cartoons. They’re Snidely Whiplash. They’re Cobra Commander. They’re Pageant Moms, Nancy Grace, Rush Limbaugh. In other words: boring, unbelievable, and totally untenable. Give them motivations beyond “being the biggest dick I can be.” Yes, you can in certain modes and stories get away with this (see: Batman’s Joker, or nearly any killer in slasher films), but it’s hard, and it puts an even greater weight on the shoulders of the protagonist.

8. The Motivations Of Awful People

Antagonists must possess believable motivations. And a motivation is the thing we tell ourselves — right? A racist doesn’t act just because he thinks people of other races should experience pain. Racism is far more deeply rooted and often glossed over with justifications — they don’t need to be good motivations or healthy ones, but we need to believe in them. Or, at least, we need to believe that the antagonist believes them. Ask yourself: what does the antagonist tell himself? How does he sleep at night?

9. Black Hats, White Hats, Can’t We All Just Get Along?

All villains are antagonists. But not all antagonists are villains. “Villain” is a perfectly suitable character type in many genre stories: the serial killer, the evil wizard, the twinkly-dick vampire, whatever. But real life doesn’t always offer up “bad guys” (though we’d sure like to see it that way, ahemcoughcough DICKCHENEY hackwheeze). Antagonists can (and often should) fall into that gray zone instead of the bullshit black-and-white dichotomy. Want an example? In First Blood, John Rambo is the protagonist and Sheriff Teasle is the antagonist — but Teasle’s not a “bad guy.” Wrong in a lot of ways, but not villainous.

10. Nemeses And Arch-Enemies

Earlier I referenced antagonists that oppose the protagonist directly — as in, the antagonist has a real firm boner when it comes to fucking with the protagonist (“I peed on your bed, kicked over your houseplants, and skunked all your beer! Ha ha ha, eat a dick, Dave! Again I am triumphant!”). An antagonist of this nature is, of course, a nemesis or arch-enemy of the protagonist.

11. Vivisect Your Favorite Antagonists In Pop Culture

You want to know what goes into a good antagonist, look no further than the stories and pop culture properties you love dearly. Why is Hannibal Lecter a great antagonist? Is he? What about Darth Vader, Voldemort, Khan, Gollum, Norman Bates, Hans Gruber, Annie Wilkes, Prince Zuko, Marlo Stanfield, the Cobra Kai Sensei John Kreese, the monkey from Monkey Shines, or Rob Schneider?

12. Now Look To Your Own Life

Turn now from pop culture and instead look to your own life. Identify your own personal antagonists. Then realize that these are infinitely more complex and sympathetic than you find in a lot of fiction. Our parents are often our antagonists through our teenage years; but they don’t start that way and they often don’t end that way. And oh what a powerful and valuable lesson that is. Now, take it one step further: try to see if you’ve ever been somebody’s antagonist. Surely you have? Your parents probably saw you as one. A teacher, maybe. A forgotten friend. A bullied kid. A sibling. Bring what you discover there into your storytelling. Find the complexity within the antagonist; we don’t need sympathy for the antagonists necessarily, but we demand empathy. If we cannot understand them, then we will not believe in them. More on that soon.

13. Write From Within The Enemy Camp

Write from the antagonist’s point-of-view. Maybe this is something that goes into the story itself, or maybe it’s just an exercise betwixt you and yourownself. But you gotta get all up in them guts, son. You have to wear the antagonist’s skin and use his mind like a helmet. Unpleasant, perhaps, but necessary.

14. Holding Hands With Monsters

We need to sit with the antagonist, too — as the audience, we may not need to, erm, “get all up in them guts,” but we do need time spent with the antagonist for them to bloom as a fully-formed figure in our mind. Give us time with the antagonist away from the main character so that we can see who they are, what they want, why they do what they do. Force us to babysit the monster.

15. Over-Powered Is Under-Interesting

God-like uber-antagonists who never lose and who know everything there is to know and who are forever one step ahead of the game are just as dull as a protagonist who features the same over-powered qualities. (Worse, an antagonist of this particular caliber must often be trumped on a technicality.) It’s called “a game of cat-and-mouse,” not “a game where the mouse goes up against an orbital laser built by Jesus.” Though, now that I say that out loud, I’m pretty sure my next book will prominently feature a Jesus-built orbital laser. Dibs! DIBS. I called dibs. Get away from that idea or I’ll stab you with a barbecue fork.

16. (But We Won’t Buy “Under-Powered,” Either)

The antagonist has to be a real challenge, just the same. Weak-kneed noodle-spined dumb-fuck antagonists need not apply. Give the protagonist something to do. A believable foe goes a long way, especially one that has some advantage over our main character — we want to worry that the antagonist can’t be beaten. Not because he’s a hyper-powered god-like genius, but because he’s just that much smarter, stronger, and more capable than our hero. Lack of antagonistic power means a lack of tension. So, uhh, don’t do that.

17. Still Abide By The Rules And Laws Of The Storyworld

The protagonist must work within the storyworld — the antagonist must, too. All the characters are chained to the world you create. The antagonist may exploit the storyworld, may circumvent the rules in some fashion, but it is not in ignorance of those rules as much as a character-driven contravention of them.

18. Chatty Cathy Clip Your Strings

“Ahh, Mister James Q. Clark Kent Bondwalker, Jr. — now that I have you dangling over a pit of a starveling toddlers covered in the bloody marrow-jam of the bones of their gummed-to-death opponents, let me bore you with the the entire breadth and depth of my plan! I will share for you my motivations, my weaknesses, and give for you a glimpse of my end-game. Do I expect you to talk, Mister Bondwalker? No. I expect you to die. And, failing that, I expect you to use my confession against me at a later date because that’s what the Villain Manual suggests is most likely to happen.” Get done with chatty tell-don’t-show antagonists. No more villains who over-share expository details. Ugh.

19. Freak Me Out By Forcing Me To Emotionally Connect

Once, just once, put me on the same page as the antagonist. He can be vile as fuck — a kitten-kicker, a baby-puncher, a drives-too-slow-in-the-left-lane, ejaculates-in-coin-return-slots kind of dude. But then, make me connect with him: something he does, something he believes, should be something I would do, something I believe. Or connect me to his past — help me understand why he jizzes on public phones and karate-chops puppies. Empathy is powerful stuff. Connect me to the protagonist and I identify with his struggle. Connect me with the antagonist and I identify — even if in a fleeting way — with his villainy.

20. Antagapalooza

Worth noting: just as you can have multiple main characters, you can have multiple antagonists. An ensemble of opponents works — it just requires balance to make sure they all get enough story-time.

21. Arctagonist

The antagonist can have an arc. Should have an arc, actually. An antagonist doesn’t start at Point A and end at Point A. He changes and grows (or sometimes shrinks), same as the protagonist. Don’t assume the antagonist needs to be a static, unswerving face of conflict — have his character shift with changing conditions, have his madness deepen, his hatred or pain worsen, his zealotry catch like a grease-fire.

21. Ideas And Institutions And Other Non-Charactery Antagonists

An antagonist needn’t actually be a character — an antagonist can be an idea (“racism”), an institution (“the CIA”), a natural force (“Another Paul Blart movie”). Zombies probably count as this sort of antagonist — they’re relatively faceless and on par with a hurricane or disease. Just the same, antagonism always deserves the face of some character — a character championing an idea (dragon-wizard poo-bah of the KKK!), working for the institution (callous field agent!), or complicating the natural force (Kevin James!).

23. The “Kick The Cat” Moment

In Blake Snyder’s books, he speaks of giving the hero a “Save the Cat” moment — meaning, we get to rally behind the protagonist early on as we get to see just what he’s capable of because, y’know, he rescues the cat from the tree (metaphorically). Antagonists need the reverse: one requires a “Kick the Cat” moment (see also: “Detonate the Puppy,” “Machine Gun the Dolphin,” or “Force the Baby Seal to Watch a Marathon of the Real Houswives of Fucking Anywhere Ever” moment). We need to see just why the antagonist is the antagonist — show us an act that reveals for us the depths of his trouble-making, his hatred, his perversion of the ethical laws and social mores of man.

24. Let The Antagonist Win

Let the antagonist win. Maybe not at the end, but periodically, throughout. Let him break Batman’s back, or kill a hostage, or take all the toilet paper off the roll and *crash of thunder* fail to replace it.

25. Love To Hate, Hate To Love

If you ignore everything else I wrote here (and for all I know, you will, you sonofabitch) then at least absorb this with your squirming storytelling cilia: the biggest and best test of an antagonist is that I want to a) love to hate them and/or b) hate to love them. Do either or both and it’s a major win. If you make me love them and I feel uncomfortable about that? You win. If you make me despise them and I love despising them the way a dog loves to roll around in roadkill? You win again. I hate that I love Hans Gruber. I love that I hate every Nazi in every Indiana Jones movie. For fuck’s sake, make me feel something.

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

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Transmissions From Toddler-Town: “Just A Ride”

(song by Jem: “Just A Ride”)

(best viewed, y’know, biggified)

The Obligatory Dark Knight Rises Post

Great movie. As I get older, I have a harder and harder time appreciating four-color rock-em-sock-em fests like The Avengers (which I liked, before you yell at me) and for me the Nolan Batman run has been one where the superhero story has been upgraded to feel like it’s by adults, for adults. It doesn’t ignore the reality of what Batman is — it keeps the creepy bits where “rich dude dresses up like vigilante to defend city from psychopathic terrorists and criminals” fairly well intact. It doesn’t look away from that discomfort.

As every story is a lesson to other storytellers, let’s peel away the Bat Nipples and look deeper into what I think worked about the film, and a little bit into what maybe didn’t work so well.

Some very mild general spoilers below. (Can’t promise the comments are a safe zone, though.)

Getting The Bat Right

Batman’s a hard dude to get right.

You gotta balance the vigilante with the billionaire. You have to keep his past in the front windshield while still not focusing so heavily on it that it becomes mawkish and obvious. You have to acknowledge his heroism while also acknowledging (at least a wee bit) his derangement. You have to see how he walks a line between psycho-conservative and radical liberal. You need to find the human in the suit.

This film does all that. Somehow juggling it all in a film where, surprisingly, Batman is not getting the majority of screen-time. This isn’t a movie about Batman, not really. It’s a movie about Gotham.

Be advised: I now really want to write Batman. So, somebody make that happen.

Batman Not About Batman

Most Batman stories give you too much Batman. And any time they spend time on other characters, hey, you just want to get back to Bats. Not here. TDKR goes long periods without ever visiting Mister Wayne, and this is a feature, not a bug. The film is populated with an incredibly strong supporting cast — not just in terms of acting but in writing (and more on that in a moment). By focusing on the characters orbiting Batman and by taking a long hard look at a city under siege, you start to get Batman. Batman is made stronger by those who carry him up — both narratively in the plot and metaphorically as a character.

Further, it ensures that when you do see Wayne/Batman, you’re so geeked out you’re doing the equivalent of the pee-pee dance inside your head. By limiting Batman, the strength of the character shines through.

He’s more potent that way.

And never overwhelms.

Complex Character

Good characters have alarming moments of weakness. Bad characters have troubling moments of nobility. Some characters vacillate so you don’t really know where to pin them — good, bad, selfish, assholes, not assholes, and so forth. It’s a wonderful tango — the script doesn’t give us four-color comic book characters. The script lets each character possess a million colors apiece — and just as many shades of gray.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is this film’s winner, by the way. He is its throughline.

Start The Story Late

The story doesn’t spend a lot of time getting you up to speed. A lot has changed since we last visited Gotham and the story isn’t interested in playing catch-up: in fact, it leaps forward with some things being big question marks in the hopes and trust (correctly placed) that the audience will play detective and stay invested. It works. As such, what could be a very boggy beginning is as lean as it could possibly be.

Earned Distrust

I don’t want to trust my storytellers. I want a storyteller to show me that I can’t trust him. You can’t trust Nolan and that’s fucking phenomenal. I want him to do things to the character and the storyworld — and, by proxy, to me the poor little quivering audience member gnawing his fingernails down to the bloody quick — that aren’t right. I basically want all my storytellers to be Verbal Kint from The Usual Suspects.

Every Hit Hurts

In this kind of movie, characters need to feel pain. Not merely physical, but the pain of unkept emotions, of betrayals, of lost love and all of that. Bruce Wayne’s transformation into Batman only works if that pain is palpable — and we feel it in every twist of the film and every bone-shattering Bane punch.

Twists That Work

The film gets a bit twisty now and again. And every twist works. Why? Because Nolan isn’t just trolling us — he sets up each twist with a good two or three beats before hand so when it comes, you think, “Oh, see, he’s been showing me this the whole time, and I either didn’t get why, or he did some other misdirecting voodoo and I stopped thinking about it.” This is the man that made The Prestige, after all.

Some folks wanted The Riddler in this film.

Nolan is the Riddler in this film.

Overtold, On The Nose

If I had to be honest, while the front of the film is as lean as it probably could be, it still suffers from a characters overtelling the story — not so much to catch us up but to tell us their feelings on plot events.

It feels on-the-nose at times, like they’re mouthpieces for certain beliefs or otherwise want to be oh so very earnest, and it feels stilted and stunted. That goes away over time, but the front of the film is heavy with it.

The Sound Mix

Holy shitty sound mix, Batman.

I saw it in IMAX — which is to say, “IMAX” in quotations because it’s kinda half-a-dick IMAX — and the sound was a deep bass crotch-punch. Impactful! But muddy. And it meant Bane often sounded like this:

“VAAASH WASH SHA SHATMAN ECKONING WAH SHA VASHHHH”

He talks like he has poop in his mouth.

I probably missed about 25% of what that dude said.

I lost dialogue from other characters, too — any character speaking at a low, deep register was in danger of saying words that became naught but a thunder rumble to my ears.

These are top-shelf theaters and I still get better sound at home. And not for a ton of money, either.

So?

I liked it.

Really great movie.

I have a very strong visceral (meaning positive) reaction to the second film, and wasn’t a huge fan of the first one, but this one ties all three together into a single storyline. And while I maybe enjoyed the second one more, this one might actually be the better story. Not sure yet. More ruminating needed.

OH! And I would totally watch a Nolan-made Catwoman movie with Hathaway in the role.

Hathaway, as a sidenote, is my ideal Miriam Black, for those who have read Blackbirds.

(Though Lizzy Caplan is sometimes Miriam now, too.)

(This is really apropos of nothing so I’ll shut up.)