Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 256

Is Free A Price We Can Pay?

It seems that every book these days — or, at least, every self-published book — is popping up free for a short period of time, an act driven by inclusion in the exclusive Amazon KDP Select program.

I did it with SHOTGUN GRAVY, as you may have seen. To report back on the experiment, the novella has once more gone back to its two or three sales a day mark. The sales basically went like this: after going free for just over a day, the novella moved around 5200 copies. Then, after the promo ended, I sold (daily): 70, 4, 89, 48, 36, 13, then it we're back to the two or three sales per day. During the time SG spiked, my other e-books mysteriously dipped for a couple days but then raged back strong thereafter. During that stretch, it netted be about 20 new reviews. So, I'm willing to call it a success.

And I'm not yet sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

The results were a good thing. But it's the ramifications of those results that has me feeling wibbly-wobbly.

Here's where I'm a bit troubled.

First, the fact we're now seeing a new type of authorial self-promotion (my book is free! hurry up and not pay for it!) is troubling if only because I fear we're just contributing to the overall noise — and it's noise that spreads an intrinsic notion about the value of our work, which is to say, it maybe ain't worth that much. This noise also helps to set up expectation: "If I wait around long enough, this book might just show up free for a couple days." So, where before readers were becoming trained to wait for a sale — "Oh, now the book is $2.99 instead of $4.99, or now just a buck" — they're instead waiting for it to cost them absolutely zero.

Second, the boost in sales that comes out of this process is effectively a cheat. It's an exploit like you'd find in a multiplayer game. It's not based on human word-of-mouth, it's based on a programmatic exploitation of Amazon's recommendation system — a system that is inscrutable and unpredictable. Amazon may intend for it to work that way so, in this sense it's not strictly an exploit — but my point is that it's based on an algorithm of recommendations rather than actual recommendations. Moreover, if that algorithm becomes dominated by this mode of juggling books to the top, then those books that are not participating may have a harder time finding a place in that already-unknowable and potentially-overcrowded recommendation system. Right? So, not only is this "free product exploit to boost sales" trick creating a potential ecosystem of lowered expectations in a story's value (because a buck wasn't cheap enough!), it's also enforcing a programmatic ecosystem where if your book does not participate, it doesn't get to play in the Reindeer Games with all the other once-free books.

Third, we're reinforcing the notion that Amazon is the 800-lb. gorilla in the room — except now, Amazon is becoming the 800-lb. mecha-gorilla in the room (now with rapid-fire gatling gun arms!). I already sell minimally on the Nook and most authors I talk to have the same experience. On the one hand, that coffin's already got eight nails in it. On the other hand, if our aggregated Amazon exclusivity hammers in that ninth and final nail, that means Barnes & Noble officially fails to be a competitor (which is as much their fault as anybody's, to be clear). And a book publishing ecosystem that loses both of its main players (in Borders and B&N) is a troubled one. Up until this point, Amazon has been very author-friendly. Outside a few little stumbles and bumbles, they're pretty good to authors and offer a genuine benefit. Amazon has changed publishing and how authors reach audiences. But, Amazon is a company. I hold no illusions that they do this to be warm and fuzzy. They're making friends with authors so as to shank publishers in the kidneys. What happens when bookstores and publishers finally die, gurgling in their own lung-blood? Will authors continue to get a great deal in that ecosystem? Self-publishers who scream and cry about publisher monopoly plainly do not understand monopolies. Amazon has the ability to become just such a monopoly.

Let me be clear — I used the promotion, it worked, and I'm fairly happy with the results. I'm not knocking it nor am I knocking any who seek to access that exploit. You do what you have to do. If your unknown book is now known due to this process, then that's a clear win.

My fear is that it's a win in the short term. But that there may be harm in the long-term.

(As a sidenote, if you've nabbed a free book from an author and then read that book, you should do something to pay the author back: leave a review or buy other books by that author. It's only fair.)

Curious to hear your thoughts — I'm not settled on any of this (how can you be, with the ground moving so swiftly beneath our feet?), and for all I know this represents just another step toward an authorial Renaissance. On the other hand, I worry we're cutting out one middle-man for another, except this one is a faceless insane Amazon algorithm that lives in the dark and seeks to undo all existence with his cybernetic Hands-of-Atropos. Snip, snip.

You tell me. Have you tried the free thing either as author or reader? How'd it work for you? What are your thoughts and fears over all this? Talk it out. Curious to unpack this, see where authors of all stripes stand.

Oh! One more thing:

If you're a self-published author, you know that one of the hardest things to come by is data.

So, go fill out this self-publishing survey. Please?

Flash Fiction Challenge: The Unlikable Protagonist

Last week's challenge — "One Small Story In Seven Acts" — is deserving of your penetrating stare.

Next week, I've got a post queued up about protagonists.

And, in one portion of this post, I discuss the power of the unlikable protagonist.

The balance is writing an unlikable protagonist that still remains compelling — we still find some reason to keep reading, and we may even find empathy or sympathy with that character.

Even if we don't want to "go out and get a beer with him."

So, that's your task.

You've got up to 1000 words to write a tale featuring an unlikable protagonist that still remains readable and compelling. Having this as a flash fiction challenge offers up one bonus and one disadvantage: the disadvantage is that you won't have more than those one thousand words to establish the complexities an unlikable protagonist might need. The bonus, however, is that flash fiction is short — you can get away with a lot more because you're not expecting that the reader will have to hang with your story for 300 pages.

Get to it, ink-slingers.

One week is all you've got. Challenge ends at noon EST on Friday the 17th. The drill is the same: post your story somewhere on the web, link back here in the comments so that we can all come and read.

Martha Wells: The Terribleminds Interview

Martha Wells is no slouch when it comes to writing — her first novel, The Element of Fire, landed with Tor in 1993 and her most recent novels, The Cloud Roads and The Serpent Sea are out now with Night Shade. That fails to mention the many short stories and non-fiction pieces, too. She submitted herself to the recent fusillade of questions here at terribleminds, so please give her a warm welcome. And someone get her a margarita. You can find her website here — MarthaWells.com — and she's on Twitter (@marthawells1).

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.

Before I got married, I lived in a fourplex in the end unit next to a small grove of trees. It was part of a single row of fourplexes that backed onto a wide open field with some clumps of trees, then a highway, and then more fields and trees. (It was not a good place to live for a single woman, since if a murderer was looking to murder someone, this was pretty much the first apartment they would break into. It had everything but an "easy murdering here" sign.)

One Friday in the summer I had a terrible sinus headache so left work early and went home. It was late afternoon and I was sitting in the living room trying to write and noticing my headache was getting worse. I also noticed my elderly cat, who normally sat next to me on the couch, had gotten down under a heavy wooden endtable. Then I heard someone banging on the doors of the apartments. I didn't think anything of it at first, because this area sort of specialized in randomly drunken college students, but the knocking was coming closer, like the person was banging on every door, then finally my door. I looked through the peephole and saw it was a woman who lived a few apartments down so I opened it. She said, "THERE IS A TORNADO IN THE FIELD BEHIND THE HOUSE. I THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW."

I said, "THANK YOU." I knew it was true, even though the sun was still out and the wind wasn't bad, and there had been nothing in the weather report, and the only real sign of it was the pressure in my sinuses and elderly cat's survival instinct. (This became a big deal in town later, that there had literally been no warning of this thing.) She ran away and I shut the door, and ran through the living room and the little hall to the kitchen where, framed perfectly in the sliding glass doors, was the biggest freaking tornado in the world. This was the only time in my life (so far) where I said "Oh my God" and really really meant it.

I went and got elderly cat and we hid in the downstairs bathroom (an extremely inadequate equivalent to a basement but it was all I had) and waited. Except I couldn't wait. I had to see where it was. So I went to the kitchen and looked out the glass door again, and the sucker was gone.

Or at least, I couldn't see it. I crept outside like I was expecting it to jump me from the bushes, and looked around. No tornado. Then I looked up.

Seeing a tornado from the side is bad, but seeing it hovering over you is much worse. And I've heard people say that they're afraid they wouldn't recognize a tornado if they saw one, but believe me, in that moment there is no mistake. From directly below it is a horrible huge round wrong, very wrong, fundamentally wrong thing in the sky, and there is no iota of doubt in your body about what it is or that it wants to kill you.

The upshot is, the tornado did not murder me. I went back in the house to huddle in the bathroom. The tornado went away to bounce happily around town horrifying the crap out of people but did not actually kill anybody. It was looking for an audience, apparently, because it hovered over the university baseball stadium while a game was in progress. Then it wandered off back to Hell, where it probably lives in a happy threesome with Hurricanes Ike and Katrina.

Why do you tell stories?

There are a lot of reasons, but I think it all boils down to a need for communication. As a kid, I had a lot of issues with feeling isolated, feeling like an observer and not a participant in life, feeling like no one was listening to me. Making up imaginary worlds and people to entertain myself made me feel better, but what really helped was being able to tell a story and express what was going on inside me, even if I was expressing it through a completely different person who was blue and lived on another planet with three moons or whatever.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

When I work with people who are first beginning to write, one of the most common mistakes I see is when they make a character too passive. Usually this comes from the writer trying to figure out how the character would react to different situations, and instead of asking what the character would do, they ask what they would do instead. If you're a tiny person with asthma, for example, your reactions and survival instincts are going to be completely different from someone who is an experienced detective, or a big beardy guy with a sword, or someone who has tentacles and lives underwater. You have to learn to step outside yourself and think like a different person, and a lot of people who want to write have trouble making that step at first. It's like running someone else's software on your hardware. Even if you're a more experienced writer, and you're having trouble with a tricky characterization, it's worth it to step back and think "am I really in this character's head, or is she so different from me that I'm shying away from what she would really do in this situation?"

Who's your favorite character you've ever written and why? Related: favorite character you didn't write?

My favorite character that was also the most difficult to write was Nicholas Valiarde, from "The Death of the Necromancer."  He was a little bit of a sociopath, so his reactions to every situation were so different from what a normal person's would have been.  It took a lot of work to get him right, but I was proud of the way he turned out.  He also showed up again in "The Ships of Air" and "The Gate of Gods" about thirty years older, so writing the older version of him was interesting and difficult too.  His daughter Tremaine, who is the main character of the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy, is probably my second favorite.

Favorite character I didn't write: I'm going to go with a recent favorite and say Zaboo from The Guild.  He is so much like the very young fan boys that I've known, so funny and smart and clueless all at the same time, and Sandeep Parikh plays him perfectly.  It's been a treat watching the character grow up a bit over the five seasons of the show.

What's great about being a writer, and conversely, what sucks about it?

It's great in that it's fun in so many different ways. I love making up places and people, and getting stories out there to be read, and seeing how other people interpret what I've written.

It sucks because it can be a lonely job, sometimes. I think it's less lonely now, with the internet where it's very easy to connect with other writers every day and see you all have the same problems. But I have to spend a lot of time inside my own head, and that can be very isolating. Also, no matter how thick a skin you develop, when you put your work out there, it really does leave you vulnerable in a lot of ways. If you've been a writer for any length of time, you get used to rejection, but even knowing that it's inevitable, and will continue to be inevitable throughout your career, it's still sometimes hard. It makes you feel like crap and but you have to get up and stagger out and go get some more, and you know you have to do it over and over again.

What's the trick to writing good fantasy?

I wish I knew!  Ha, ha, anyway, what I try to do is write worlds and characters that I'm really excited about.  I try to come up with worlds that feel like they have infinite possibilities, where you don't know what might be around the next corner or in the next valley.  And I try to think of interesting ways for my characters to explore those worlds.

You see writing advice telling you to never try to chase trends, that you should write what resonates with you, and I think that's really true.  I end up writing about things that publishers don't think will sell, but I think I'd do a bad job writing about the things they do think will sell.  So I'm just happy to write about my own weird stuff.

You've got a hefty writing resume under your belt — what've been the trials and triumphs of trying to get published over the years?

The biggest triumph of all was probably selling my first novel, "The Element of Fire", which was published in 1993 by Tor.  It took me a year to write and I got a lot of "oh isn't it cute, she thinks she's writing a novel!"  I was around 27 when I was writing it, and people tended to assume I should be writing romance, and not a created world fantasy based on 17th century France with swordfighting and wheellocks and explosions.  The other big triumph was my third novel, "The Death of the Necromancer," getting on the Nebula ballot in 1998.  It was actually a very stressful time, as my mother had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, so the Nebula nomination was one of the few good things that happened that year.

The trials have mostly been in trying to stay published.  After "The Death of the Necromancer" came out, Avon was bought by HarperColins, and while I still had a contract for four subsequent novels, my original editor there was promoted and then left the company before most of the books were published.  There was also a problem with the cover of "Wheel of the Infinite," my fourth novel.  The main character's skin color was dark brown, and when the publisher did the original cover printing, they made her gray.  I didn't find out about this until later, but fortunately the artist, Donato Giancola, put his foot down and made them change her back to brown.

I had a career crash in 2006, after my trilogy ("The Wizard Hunters," "The Ships of Air," "The Gate of Gods") came out.  They were steampunkish with a giant ocean liner and airships, but that was before steampunk was popular.  The books got good reviews, but very little promotion, and didn't do well.  After that I was still writing, but nobody was buying.  I did get to do two media tie-ins in 2006 and 2007 for my favorite TV show, which was a lot of fun and a creative change that I really needed.  Then I had to look for another agent, and queried one agency only to be told they were only interested in seeing work from established writers.  Being told that nine novels did not make me established enough was a big low point.

I think it did help to get my early backlist, "The Element of Fire," "City of Bones," and "Wheel of the Infinite," back out as ebooks.  I didn't sell another new fantasy novel until "The Cloud Roads" and "The Serpent Sea" sold to Night Shade Books in 2010.   That was a pretty big triumph, too.

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

Favorite word: Rollicking. I didn't get to see the cover copy before my first novel was published, and I guess fulsome would be the best way to describe it. It used the word "rollicking." Probably it was just in there once but in my head it was in there maybe 400 times. It made the book sound like a comedy, which it really wasn't. There was a lot of death and sarcasm, but I guess the editor thought saying that in so many words would put people off.

Favorite curse word: I wish I had something more original but the truth is it's just "fuck." It's the word of my Id.

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

I like margaritas (tequila, triple sec, and lime, on the rocks or straight up, with salt) but get drunk on them very quickly, because I'm a total lightweight. I recently discovered hard cider, and that's really more my speed.

You don't get away with mentioning tequila here without a followup question — got a favorite brand of tequila?

I tend to stick with Jose Cuervo, because pretty much every place has it.  If my tummy cooperates, I'd love to try some of the ones that are aged more than a year.  I'm not sure how different they'll taste, but it will be fun finding out.

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

It's tough to pick just one. I'm going to go with an older fantasy novel: The Birthgrave, by Tanith Lee, which was her first published novel and came out in 1975. It's a created world novel, where a woman wakes up in a tomb in a strange city under a volcano, with no idea who she is, and goes on a journey through a strange landscape. It's dark and rich and vivid and there's a lot of sex, especially when you read it when you're 11 years old and somewhat too young for it. It was a big influence on me.

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

I'm pretty ruthless. If a zombie was trying to eat me, or my family, or my friends, or my cats, or my neighbors, or random people or cats on the street, I would make that sucker regret it. I could think of a lot of terrible things to do to zombies. Zombies better stay the hell away.

You've committed crimes against humanity. They caught you. You get one last meal.

This is another tough one. I can think of a lot of choices, but there's a Mexican restaurant near where I live which makes sopes topped with shredded beef brisket, lettuce, tomatillo salsa and sour cream that I crave randomly a lot. That would be a pretty good last meal.

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

I just finished a new fantasy novel a few days ago. It's the third book in a series that started with "The Cloud Roads" last year and "The Serpent Sea" which just came out from Night Shade Books. I know I'm about to start working on another fantasy novel, but have no idea which one of several semi-developed projects I want to move from back burner to front burner yet. I'm not under contract to anybody for anything at the moment, so the possibilities are wide open. I just know I want to write fantasy.

Tell us about The Cloud Roads and its subsequent sequels. Why are these books only you could've written?

"The Cloud Roads" is about a shapeshifter named Moon, who is an orphan with no real idea where he came from.  The species he most closely resembles are predators that feed on other intelligent species and destroy whole cities, so he can't show anyone who he really is.  He lives in a world with a lot of wildly different races and cultures, but he's never come across his own people.  When he does find them, he has to face the fact that he might be too different and never fit in.  Plus the colony of his people that he encounters is under attack and may be dying out, their social system is complicated and scary, and his role in it is not an easy one.  "The Cloud Roads" is about finally finding the place where you belong, and "The Serpent Sea" and the third book are more about the work it takes to actually stay there, when you've been alone for too long.

It took two years for "The Cloud Roads" to find a publisher, and it was rejected a lot.  I was surprised by this, because I thought, hey, it's got dragon-like shapeshifters, and flying around, and adventure and fighting and gender role reversal and air battles and magic and sex and paranoia and cannibalism, publishers will love that!  Turns out not so much.  But Night Shade Books was willing to take a chance on it and "The Serpent Sea," and I'm very grateful.  So far the books have gotten some great reviews, which is a big relief.

I don't know that only I could have written them, but I think I could only have written them now, after all the different experiences I've had, if that makes sense.  I don't think I could have written these books earlier in my career.  I've always been aware that I'm still learning how to write as I go along.  I think everybody who does new and different things is still learning.  I'm mainly still learning to push myself to make things bigger and stranger and further out of my comfort zone.

No Go For The Terribleminds Kickstarter

Alas — there shall be no terribleminds Kickstarter. Though I pitched it as a finite creative project with a start and finish (meaning, a total revamp and redesign of the site to enhance user functionality), they still deemed it a life-funding project. Which is a shame (and I disagree with the assessment), but there it is.

So, now to puzzle what else I can/should Kickstart.

The two options on the table so far:

a) a Bait Dog Kickstarter (i.e. the next Atlanta Burns story, this one a full novel)

b) an original writing book featuring brand new non-blog content geared toward storytelling in all its forms — loose title, The Penmonkey's Guide To Giving Good Story.

Third options would include other novels I have kicking around, but I'm not yet willing to put them on the table yet. Still need to noodle some of those and the paths they might take.

Taking opinions if you have any.

Two Girls And One Search Term Bingo

It's been a while since the last Search Term Bingo. I blame the slowly-growing evil found in the dread hearts of the LORDS OF GOOGLE. Since encrypting search terms for those logged into any Google service, I get like, minimal deliciousness in terms of freaky weird-ass search terms. They still come in — but now I have to wait longer to collect a good spread of 'em. So, here goes — another troubling round of those search terms people used to find this website. Behold the lunacy. And enjoy.

fucking with hadge cuck

Hey, whoa, no. You don't fuck with Hadge Cuck. You go stomping on his hill barrow and that big ass motherfucker will come out and beat your shitcan to death with his club, a club he made from ox bones and dragon cocks. Hadge Cuck bested Gilgamesh in a game of mighty kickball. Hadge Cuck breathes the breath of a thousand cigar-smoking ravens. What's the old rhyme? "Hadge Cuck come, Hadge Cuck crush, Hadge Cuck punch your bones to mush!" Repeat after me: DO NOT FUCK WITH HADGE CUCK.

what is the no 1 things all writers need

A helper monkey. A little capuchin monkey that sits in a wastebasket near your desk and whenever you need something, you just ring that little ding-a-ling bell. "Monkey! Get me a cappucino! Monkey! Get me whiskey for my cappucino! Monkey! Deliver unto me my naughty magazines!"

don't worry my dad has a beard

Well, thank god for that. I was worried there for a minute. I was all like, "Oh my god, the economy is really wobbly and houses are being foreclosed upon and our freedoms are being stripped away from us a little bit every day and Israel might attack Iran and someone's inventing a weaponized bird-flu right now and for some reason that new TV show with Rob Schneider is really popular and that means the Mayans were right," but then you come along and remind me that your dad has a beard. We're all good here. Whew.

my beard makes me fat

No, that wreath of Krispy Kreme donuts you inhaled made you fat. Your beard just makes you awesome.

enema beard

Officially my new pirate name. "Yarrr, olde Cap'n Enemabeard hid his treasure of Tampax Pearl reward points somewhere here on this dirty New Jersey beach, yarrrr! Get to searchin' ye scurvy helper monkeys!"

i'm on google at best buy lolololol

First up, you're an idiot. Second up, you're an idiot. Third up, who gives a shit? Fourth up, multiple LOL's strung together is fucking stupid. What does it mean? "I'm laughing out loud out loud out loud out loud?" For the record, I think we're all done with "LOL." It's over. You're not really laughing out loud. You're laughing on the Internet and, frankly, probably not even smiling. This goes double to all you yahoos who choose to insert "LOL" after every sentence whether or not it's worthy of humor. "I installed a new ceiling fan today lol. I need to express my chihuahua's anal glands lol. My mom has face cancer lol." Stop it. Just stop it. Someone pry the "L" and "O" keys from your keyboard. Dingbat.

wendig slept with my religion

I did no such thing. Unless you mean that fling with Zoroastrianism? Yeah, we hooked up. We did some handsy stuff, some mouth stuff, but I wouldn't call it "sleeping with." Dang, are you Zoroastrian? Sorry.

where does chuck wendig live?

Well, that's not a terrifying search term at all. Here, I'll answer this for you: I live on the moon. Me and Newt Gingrich. He's on the dark side. Me on the light. Every thousand years we battle. Now stop looking.

chuck wemdog

First time I've heard that one. I've seen Chuck Wending Winding Wedding — I've even seen Wangdang. Seriously. But never "Wemdog." If you see my at a convention or something, run toward me with a high-five at the ready and then stick out your tongue and go, "WASSUUUUP WEMDOOOOOG!" And then as you get within the proper distance I will kick you in the kneecap and push you into a potted plant using your own momentum. Because I'm actually a ninja. Please don't tell anybody. This blog isn't public, right?

frisky dimplebuns

Hey! This was my nickname back at Kilimanjaro base camp. Those wacky sherpas. Chasing each other around and playing a funny game of grab-ass, shoving snow down everybody's pants! Ha ha ha! What fun.

5 words you should use in every story

Here goes. Ready?

"Breeches."

"Titmouse."

"Byzantine."

"Chapstick."

And, "Rosewater."

how to congratulate a published author

A gift basket. This gift basket should feature:

a) seven tiny bottles of whiskey

b) seven other tiny bottles of whiskey

c) chocolate of some ilk

d) an index card that reads: YOU'RE #1 IN THE AMAZON RANKING OF MY HEART

e) a bookmark shaped like a chihuahua

f) a fancy pen

g) a six-pack of five-hour-energy drink

h) an orange

i) an index card that reads: GET BACK TO WORK YOU FUCKING MONKEY

dolly parton baboons

She does have huge "baboons," yes. I will now refer to a lady's chesty bounty as "blouse baboons." Men, you are not exempt. Your dangle-rods will now be called, "pants-dwelling proboscis monkeys."

Please update all records.

i want to put meth in my butthole

I guess that's one way to do it. Is the normal meth high not strong enough for you that you need to go shoving it up your no-no tunnel? You're pretty hardcore. "Hey, man, you got any crystal?" "I SHOVED IT ALL UP MY POOPER HA HA HA HA HA" *vacuums the entire state of Ohio, then dies*

elk semen macaroni and cheese

Oh, hey, thanks, now I'm going to be scraping vomit out of my keyboard for a month. (Is that corn? Why is there always corn?) Maybe this is coming up on a future episode of Fear Factor. I read an interview with the woman who drank donkey semen on that episode that mysteriously fled the NBC schedule, and it was about as obvious an interview as you could get. "Uhh, it was really gross and I kept throwing up and it tasted kind of grassy and semeny and it was hot and flies kept landing on it between sips." Yeah, uhhh, you just drank donkey semen. On television. For an episode that might not even air. And now you're telling us all about it. What did you think it was going to taste like? A caramel macchiato?

This should be our Darwin test. We should administer this test to everybody. "I will give you one hundred dollars if you drink this cup of hot, fly-specked donkey semen."

Anybody who reaches for the glass receives a crisp hundred-dollar-bill and then is dropped through a trap-door into a pit filled with starving grizzly bears who have been trained to use machetes.

"lord of the rings" "he ejaculated"

I kind of wish those were reversed. "He ejaculated Lord of the Rings."

"Nnnggh, nnngh, nnnnnnnggggh."

*squee*

"Hey, look, Boromir!"

I made this for you, Internet:

shotguns + robotics

Two great tastes that taste great together. Also, this is what the Mayans were talking about. At the end of their prophecies, all the pictographs end in a picture of a robot holding a shotgun.

aliens and carbohydrates

Two great tastes that — eh, maybe not so much. If you wanna lose weight, you need to cut out carbohydrates, but eat more aliens. Oh, these Alpha Centaurians? Delicious! They're filled with pudding!

we both know you're not in outer fucking space

I like to imagine that this is the voicemail left on a husband's phone by his betrayed wife. "We both know you're not in outer fucking space, Dave. That's right. I found out you're not a secret astronaut with the Newt Gingrish Take Back The Moon program. Guess what? Your mother told me. You're just a plumber from Secaucus. I know you're not in space — you're over that slut Debbie's house again, aren't you? She smells like a mall perfume counter, Dave. I'm just… I'm just disgusted by you. You know what? You can go to the moon, you sonofabitch." Click. Divorce. Done. MARRIAGE LOST.

evolution is obsolete piss like a monkey

Is this the tactic that the Creationists are taking now? I don't think that makes much sense at all.

ask a shotgun

Do not ask for advice from a shotgun. He has the same answer to every question.

"What stocks should I buy?" BOOM.

"What qualities make for a good mate?" BANG!

"I just found out my husband Dave isn't really an astronaut. What do I do?" KACHOOM.

what do fish have to do with anything?

Nothing, probably. Fuck 'em. Just get rid of those assholes. Stinking up all our oceans with their fish poop.

piranha eats its own feces poops

See? Fish poop. Though I guess the piranha should be rewarded for eating his own mess. Maybe if we humans were so brave as the piranha we wouldn't have to ruin the planet with our corrosive toilet industry. Did you know that for every toilet that we make, seven bald eagles explode? I read that.

good beginnings with dairy goats

MY FAVORITE PBS PROGRAM EVER.

i can see purple pulsating purple

I will take whatever toxic gourd juice you're drinking, please. Two cups.

One for me, one for my imaginary pal, Mister Tinklepants.

rabbit stew gives me diarrhea

Where did you find this rabbit stew, exactly? "I was out walking around and I was just kicking up pieces of cardboard and knocking around a few old soup cans and next thing I know this hobo comes out of the sewer grate and hands me a bubbly frothy pot of rabbit stew! It was delicious, but gave me the trots something fierce." You shouldn't be wolfing down rabbit stew of dubious age and origin, dummy.

crotch crutch

Dang, if you need a crutch for your crotch, color me impressed. You must have a tremendous wang. Like, the size of a rifle case. And I can see how you'd break a dick that size. You probably get — no pun intended — cocky with a schwanz like that. You're out there breaking boards to impress the ladies, or using it as a bat during slow-pitch softball. Eventually you're going to bust that sucker in half and, sure enough, need a crutch. Good for you, huge-dicked dude. Way to swing for the fences.

does your ass feels offended

No, but my silky nipples do.

story boobs battle challenge crush milk

This is actually what they called "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" in Malaysia.

save a hundred lives and you're a nurse

I thought it was harder — or maybe easier? — than that.

old photo of a pterodactyl

Taken by what? A caveman Polaroid?

ugh whiskey always ruins my night

Then you're doing it wrong.

people with fruit for heads in a circle

I guess I need another cup of that toxic gourd juice, because I'm not seeing that, yet.

things you do not say aloud

Pick any part of this blog post and that's a good place to start.

25 Reasons That Writers Are Bug-Fuck Nuts

It seems like a good time for a spiritual successor to my earlier "Beware of Writer" posts — this time, jacked into the popular "25 Things" format here that all you cats and kittens seem to like. Plus, it's sometimes good to speak to the non-writers out there, let 'em know why we get that spooky glint in our eyes once in a while. You wanna know why we're a little wacky? I gotcher 25 reasons right here.

1. We Destroy Our Imaginary Friends

Authors invent people. Out of thin air. They reach into the moist and dewy folds of the invisible thought vagina and from that squishy space birth people who have never existed, and who will never exist. We give ourselves — and by proxy, the audience — reasons to care about these people. They become our imaginary friends. Then we take our imaginary friends and fuck them over ten ways till Tuesday. "This is Dave. We all like Dave. Good hair. Nice teeth. We can all relate to Dave. Uh-oh! Dave's wife just left him. Stole the kids. And now he's being hunted by a serial killer from the moon! HA HA HA HA SUCK A DICK DAVE."

2. We Specialize In Creative Ways To Die

We're basically murderers who just don't have the balls to actually go out and kill some motherfuckers. It's not just stories about aliens chomping on people's guts or thugs stabbing other thugs — books and films and comic books are showcases for every form of misery and doom one could imagine. Once in a while you'll be walking along and suddenly a thought will strike you: "I wonder if I could work it into a story where some dude gets his guts vacuumed out his boothole by an out-of-control Roomba. I bet I could. Time to murder some non-existent humans. To the writermobile!"

3. Behold The Bad News Boner

It's not just murder. It's all kinds of bad news. Bus crash! Small town swallowed by avalanche! Exploding nuns! Deadly form of herpes escapes lab on the back of a carnivorous shark-llama hybrid! Oh noes! Bad news! Yay! I want to rub it all over my body like a cream or unguent! I want to wear its stink and huff the stench of cataclysm and catstrophe to get me jacked up for my next story! Exclamation points! Can't stop!

4. "I Was Once Born With A Tail!"

We are trained to be gifted liars. Anybody who writes fiction — or works for Fox News — is tasked with the job of convincing others that Things That Are Absolutely Not True are, in fact, Totally Fucking True. Our entire job is predicated on being good at spinning a complicated web of deception. Truth? Bo-ring. Lies? High-five! Lies make Story Jesus giggle as if you're tickling his tummy. I imagine all writers have those moments where they're sitting around their office, pantsless, an empty whiskey bottle spinning idly at their feet — they rub their eyes and mutter, "I don't know what's real and what's fake anymore." Then the writer hops on his rocket unicorn and goes to buy a cat-burger from the fish-faced Atlantean fellow down on Bumbershoot Street. See? The lies just fall out of me. Like chewing gum from a dead man's mouth.

5. Quiet Loners

Whenever they find some whackaloon with a collection of severed heads in his freezer, they always trot out the neighbors and you get that classic line: "He was always so quiet." And the assumption becomes, oh, that seemingly nice-and-quiet chap next door needed his quiet time because he was too busy with his hobby of decapitating dudes. On the other hand: hey, maybe him being quiet and alone all the time made him crazy. Maybe you spend too long cooped up with yourself the carpet starts moving and the wallpaper shifts and the room starts to whisper, You know what would be awesome? A sweet-ass collection of severed heads. Get on that. This is probably a good time to remind you that writers happen to spend a lot of time alone and cooped up with themselves. Just, uhh, putting that out there. What, this old thing? Just a hacksaw.

6. The Grotto Of Insanity

Our office spaces soon begin to reflect our quiet and lonely — and inevitably crazy — lifestyle. Teetering towers of books that threaten to crush us. Pens laying everywhere (and if you're me, half of them are chewed on, the toxic ink and plastics long settled into my body). Over there, a plate of what may have once been a burrito but now looks like a brain made of fungus. Next to it, a small handgun. Next to that, a dead pigeon. Underneath the desk, a noisy pile of Red Bull cans, liquor bottles, and ammunition casings. Behind us, a cabinet full of freeze-dried severed heads. Our offices inevitably turn into wombs, that is, if wombs were responsible for birthing the raw stuff of crazy into the world.

7. The Nexus Of Madness Is Atop Our Wibbly-Wobbly Necks

If you think our offices are the domicile of the insane, you should see the inside of our heads. It's the asylum from 12 Monkeys all up in these motherfuckers. And we live here all the goddamn time. No escape!

8. Creativity Is Seen As A Commodity Of The Lazy And Insane

You tell most people what you do and you get this look — it's a look that perfectly contains a tempest of information, a tangle of thoughts (and none of them good). You get a mixture of, Oh, he's one of those, or, Look, another hipster-slacker-socialist-asshole stealing all our precious unemployment, or, He doesn't look like he's starving so he must have a trust fund keeping him alive, or, Ugh, that's not a real job. Swamp logger, that's a real job. Writer's just something you say when you like to smoke drugs all day. It's really quite disheartening. You get those looks often enough it starts to crack your egg a little bit, dontcha know?

9. The Love-Me Hate-Me Two-Step

Here, then, is the critical dichotomy of our process: we have to love an idea so much we're willing to spend the great deal of time shoveling it into the world, and then we have to switch gears and learn to hate the thing we just created in order to improve it. We puff up our ego, then lance it with a hot pin. It's like giving birth to a child who you love with all your heart until you throw him out into the icy woods with a note pinned to his chest reading: this is how you learn to survive, you little turd. Writers are the tragedy and comedy masks whirling about, trading places again and again. And it's all a bit barmy, innit?

10. Caffeine Poisoning

Writers drink so much caffeine that eventually the synapses start to break down like wires chewed by starving squirrels. And then those starving squirrels make a ratty nest of old leaves and smelly yarn inside our heads. We end up as gutted automatons piloted by a tribe of twitchy squirrels. Metaphorically.

11. Alcohol Poisoning

Coffee, then liquor, then coffee, then liquor. Okay, yes, I know, not every writer is a pickled booze-sponge, but some drink enough for all, I suspect. All that booze affects the liver and just as the liver is kind of the bouncer for the human body, detoxing all that bad voodoo, Plato felt that another function of the liver was to keep in check a human's darkest emotions. Meaning, the liver's purpose was to bottle up all the crazy. And what do writers do? OBLITERATE THE LIVER WITH DRINK. Be free, little crazies! Be free!

12. "I Got A Bad Case Of The Penmonkeys, Man"

We're addicts for our wordsmithy. Over time, it just happens. One day you've been writing so long that when a day comes you don't put words to paper it feels like that space between your heart and your guts is filled with a cluster of bitey eels that want out, and the only way to give them egress is to start writing again. We're word-junkies, man. Ink-slingers. Fiction fiends. The only cure is another taste of that sweet story.

13. Control Freaks With Nothing To Control

Inside our stories, we're gods among mortals — our hands are on all the buttons and switches. Outside our stories, we control a big bag of Dick Butkus. We don't control publisher advances, book placement, trends, reviews, or that weird little deranged robot that computes the Amazon recommendation algorithms.

14. Crazy Money!

Yeah, by "crazy money" I don't mean "money in such quantity it's totally awesome," but rather, "money that arrives in wildly inconsistent sums and on a madman's schedule." You hit this point where, okay, you have to learn to survive from January to March on this royalty check of $7.53, and then in March you're supposed to get like, ten grand or something, but then that ten grand doesn't show up until June, and when you get it you forget you need to buy groceries and instead buy like, a Wave Runner instead. Yeah. See? Nutty.

15. Books Books I Love Books Books Books Mmm Books

The one thing that e-readers have robbed from us is the ability to throw all the books we own into a room and roll around on them, naked. I mean, okay, sure, I can do that with an e-reader, but eventually someone's going to pick it up and be like, "Is this a testicle-print on my Kindle?" What I'm saying is, some people hoard clothing, cats, fast food containers, ninja weapons, exotic primates — but writers hoard books. And eventually all those books — each a storehouse of utter unreality — bleeds into our brains via creative osmosis. Either that or they fall on us, crushing our weak little writer bodies beneath.

16. We Are Distracted For A Reason

It's not new to suggest that writers are easily distracted: we've all gotten lost in an endless labyrinth of cat videos (and at the center of that labyrinth is a cat dressed like a minotaur, and he's all like I CAN HAZ COW HED OH NOES THESEUS and — dang, LOLcats jokes just don't cut it anymore, do they?). But here's why we're easily distracted: because our brains know it's bad for us to stare at a screen full of tiny words all day. Our brain is telling us to look at something — anything — other than those tiny little ant-like words. It is unnatural to stare at words in this way. It nibbles holes in our gray matter.

17. The Internet Is Full Of Ragehate, And We Dive In, Headfirst

Once upon a time, authors would get reviews that were insightful, incisive critiques — "The author's masterful use of language is sadly handicapped by a plot whose events fail to properly resolve." Now we have to put up with internet vitriol like you'd find on the likes of a YouTube video where a guy gets hit in the nuts with a tricycle: "THIS BOOK IS FUKKIN STUPID IT BLOWS GIRAFFES THE AWTHOR IS A TARDCART." And then they probably call you a racial or sexual epithet. It's like asking for insightful criticism during a Call of Duty match on Xbox Live. It does little good for one's sanity.

18. The English Language Makes As Much Sense As Snivel Bliff Fleekum Hork

Okay, this one is a little biased toward those writing in the English tongue, but seriously, trying to know all the rules in and around the composition of the English language will give you a goddamn nosebleed. Looking at all the rules — and then memorizing all the bizarre-o exceptions — makes you want to go back to the days of communicating with clicks and burps. Related: Brian Regan knows the real "I-before-E" rule.

19. At Some Point We Tried Really Hard To Understand The Publishing Industry

Predicting trends, imagining advances, contemplating the agency model, trying to figure out why anybody would publish any book by Billy Ray Cyrus ever — all this does is plunge your mind into the roiling black soup of unmitigated chaos. You can tell the moment any author's sanity snapped, because it goes like this: "My book's been out on submission for seven years, and now they're publishing a book of scat marks written by that greasy orangutan, Snooki?" Listen hard enough, you hear a *plink* — that's the sound of the little pubic hair holding the last vestiges of that author's sanity together.

20. That Might Be Scurvy

No, that's not the latest spin-off band by They Might Be Giants — it's because we don't have enough money for food and health insurance and because we didn't eat a couple oranges now we're losing our teeth and fingernails and turning into some raving froth-mouthed version of the Brundlefly.

21. Me Me Me Me Me Me Me Me? Me!

It is in our makeup to be desperate for attention. We write our books, our films, our articles, and we're not writing them so that we can just read them back to ourselves and have a jolly good laugh. We want you to read them, too. And you. And you! And you over there, hiding behind the shrubs. The more attention we get, the more successful we become — or, at least, feel. The ironic part is, many aren't comfortable with that attention and yet seek it like junkies. Which, you guessed it, makes us a wee smidgen bit crazy.

22. Amazon Rankings

Click. Clickity-click. Refresh refresh. "Did my ranking go up? Or down? Or up? Or down? It stayed the same. What does that mean? Did I sell enough to stay afloat? Are the rankings broken? How often do they update? Is my book doing better than that other book? Is that good? Or bad? My finger is getting a blister. MY ENTIRE SELF-WORTH IS PINNED TO THIS GODDAMN NUMBER. *sob*" Click. Click. Refresh refresh.

23. The Idea Plague

Ask a writer: "Where do you get your ideas from?" And the writer will reply: "How do you make yours stop?" Then he'll bat at his hair as if it's on fire. I can't walk ten feet without thinking of a new novel or script idea. It's an idea that will almost certainly never yield fruit — which means I'm essentially committing an act of literary Onanism. So much idea-seed spilled on the floor. Infertile and inert. And smells like Clorox.

24. We Hang Out With Other Writers

Crazy people hanging out with other crazy people just creates a crazy people feedback loop where the crazy recirculates again and again like a bad stink in an old car. Crazy begets crazy begets crazy.

25. It's Cool-Cool To Be Cray-Cray

Most writers aren't actually crazy — but we certainly feel that way sometimes and furthermore, a helluva lot of our authorial forebears were definitely a bit, ahhh, unstable (Hemingway! Hunter S. Thompson! Emily Dickinson! Sylvia Plath!). As such, we're cast into a realm where it's okay, even expected, that our creative pursuits mark us on the charts between "a little bit eccentric" and "crazier than a shithouse chimp."

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The epic mega-book: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY

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Tunes For The Penmonkey

I don't tend to listen to much music while writing. Editing, sometimes — or, maybe during prep. But during writing, I like things quiet. Chill. Shhhhh.

But! But, I've been playing with music a little bit — not so much during the writing but before it to get pumped up and "in the mood" and then at punctuated points during the actual process.

Which makes me want to ask you people:

Do you listen to music when you write?

What do you listen to?

A deeper, more granular question would be:

Given that different music is valuable to different writing moods or to writing different scenes, what do you like to write when working on certain types of scenes? Say, when you're writing action? Or drama? Or sex? Or ACTION DRAMA SEX? (That will be the name of my memoir, by the way. Look for it in the year 2034. Provided we all survive the Hyperborean Sharkpocalypse of 2032.)

So.

You.

Music.

Writing.

What's the score?

Pun not intended until now.

Flash Fiction Challenge: One Small Story In Seven Acts

The "write in the present tense" challenge is just wrapping up. Won't you check it out?

Earlier this week I was all like, "Blah blah blah, here's 25 things about story structure."

And in there I offered one particular structure for a story –

A seven-act spread.

There I wrote:

Behold, a rough seven-act structure: Intro (duh) –> Problem or Attack (duh) –> Initial Struggle (character first tussles with source of conflict) –> Complications (conflict worsens, deepens, changes) –> Failed Attempts (oops, that didn't work) –> Major Crisis (holy goatfucker shitbomb, everything's gone pear-shaped) –> Climax and Resolution (duh).

…and now I want to see those seven acts put into play.

In a 1000-word example of flash fiction.

From you.

Yes, that's right. I want you to take your 1000 words and orchestrate a full seven-act arc from intro all the way to the climax and resolution, not missing a step in the middle.

You have, as always, one week. February 10th by noon EST.

Post your story at your blog or online somewhere, then drop a link to the comments so we can find it.

One story.

Seven acts.

Get writing.

Myke Cole: The Terribleminds Interview

All I gotta say is, Myke Cole? Bonafide bad-ass. Furthermore, an all-around nice guy. He's also a guy with a book out this week — the military-meets-magic CONTROL POINT (AKA "Black Hawk Down" meets the "X-Men"). I managed to get a moment of Myke's time in between, I dunno, punching tanks and playing Frisbee Golf with landmines, and here he sits down and submits to the terribleminds interview. Read it, and then visit his site — MykeCole-dot-com — and follow him on Twitter (@MykeCole).

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.

During my first tour in Baghdad, I was sitting in my hooch at around 0200. I couldn't sleep, so I was playing Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on my laptop. It was over 100 degrees, so I was sitting in my underwear.

Whoosh. Bang. Whoosh. Bang. Incoming rounds. From the sound and the shivering impact, I guessed they were 107s.

And I panic. Instead of doing what you should do (hit the deck), I grab my go-bag and my pistol and go flying out of the hooch, racing for the bunker, making myself a giant upright target for any low-flying shrapnel.

A round comes in danger-close, just on the other side of a cinder-block wall. It doesn't detonate, but the bang is loud and the shaking so dramatic that I can swear that it did (if it had, I surely would have died).

The attack is over. I'm lying in the dirt, completely coated in dust. My ears are ringing and there's a cloud of sulphur/cordite hanging over me. I'm only wearing underwear. I have no idea where my go-bag and weapon are. I think I may have pissed myself.

I'm one of the lucky guys who has a cellphone. When it rings, I find my go-bag.

It's my mom. She's calling to let me know how frightened she is that I'm in Iraq.

Why do you tell stories?

To communicate. To get a reaction. To know that other people are hearing what I have to say and that it is impacting them. I am no Emily Dickenson and I absolutely cannot understand people who operate like that.

I also do it to pay back. Stories saved me, reared me, created me. They are the reason I live. I know there are people out there who are the same way. They need them as much as I do. If I can add to the body of work that makes lives wonderful, then I have truly done something worthwhile.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

Cowboy up. Novels don't write themselves. Don't wait for your muse. Don't wait until you "have the time." Don't wait for inspiration to strike. Don't worry about whether or not you're wasting your time, or if you suck. Shut the hell up, and get to work.

What's great about being a writer, and conversely, what sucks about it?

I'm going to Confusion (a convention in Detroit) this coming weekend. At that con, I will be sitting down with many of my favorite authors: Peter V. Brett, Patrick Rothfuss, Brent Weeks, Joe Abercrombie, Scott Lynch.

We will be playing a game of 1st edition D&D, with a classic Gygax-written module, probably KEEP ON THE BORDERLANDS.

The fact that I get to do crap like that is, frankly, transcendent.

The worst thing is poverty. Even with a major book deal, full-time writing is uncertain at best. If it weren't for the health insurance and slight income stream I get from serving in the reserve, I would be homeless. I frequently tell people that I love everything about my life except for how poor I am. But I also firmly believe that money is the easy-part and you can figure that out eventually.

I suspect a lot of authors are or were gamers — tabletop in particular. What did gaming teach you about writing and storytelling? Positive or negative lessons.

I was *just* talking about this last night. I really feel that DM'ing D&D campaigns taught me incredibly important lessons about storytelling. I played with Peter V. Brett in college and watched him craft incredible campaigns that were as engaging as any novel, and then I tried to match them. You have to be willing to do a TON of worldbuilding that your "readers" will never see. I would pour hours into drafting incredibly detailed NPCs, only to have my players just come out and kill them without so much as saying hello. You also have to willing to change course on a dime. Your players can just decide that they don't want to open that door when the campaign DEMANDS that they OPEN THAT F*&KING DOOR! That agility is critical to being a good novelist.

That author game sounds fucking phenomenal. Let's extend that. If you could play D&D with, say, five different authors (living or dead), who would they be?

Oh wow:

- Gary Gygax (yes, he's an author, by god).

- George R. R. Martin.

- Richard K. Morgan

- Naomi Novik

- Ernest Cline

And the module? Tomb of Horrors. Because I'm fantasizing, there'll be this mind-ray that makes us all forget the module, so that none of us know where any of the traps are and how to get around them.

I get to be the Human Paladin. With at least a +3 Holy Avenger. That's very important. Dude. Seriously. I'm not f$#king around here.

Gaming is big in the military, or so I hear. What other games have you played?

Gaming is HUGE in the military, as is all other SFF-genre loving activities (most importantly, reading). I love any tabletop word game (Scrabble and Boggle) and also the classic board/card games (San Juan, Puerto Rico, Carcassonne and Settlers of Cataan. Though, I should admit that I'm new to some of them). Talisman (with all its expansions) is OUTSTANDING.

I will play Magic if someone brings their decks, but I don't own any of my own.

Then, there's wargaming. I am a big fan of historical ancients/medieval games (I prefer 15mm) and my favorite rule set for that is DBA. I don't really do napoleonic, but I will if I have a good mentor.

And, of course, there's Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. There are no words for how unspeakably cool that universe is.

But the most important thing in gaming is the players. I really don't care what I'm playing, so long as I'm at a table with a bunch of really cool people who are fun to hang out with.

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

My favorite word, hands down, is "Contact." There are SO many awesome meanings and implications, both science-fictional, military, and every day.

My favorite curse is "Balls." I know, it's not technically a curse, but I like the fact that it can be used in both positive and negative ways.

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

Hard cider (best I've ever hard is Hornsby's). I love going to the UK because they take it seriously there. In America, if I have a drink with my sailors and order a hard cider, inevitably one of my chiefs will ask, "Why don't you just order a Flirtini, sir?"

Okay, so, tell us about CONTROL POINT — what is it, and why did you write it?

CONTROL POINT is a book that asks the basic question "What if the modern, counterinsurgency-focused military had magic? What would a fire-team look like if you had 2 riflemen, a support-weapon and a sorcerer?" Now that's the fun squee part "how does an Apache helicopter gunship match up against a Roc?" But it also raises bigger issues about the nature of big bureaucracies and how they handle sudden and dramatic social change. A lot of these questions were asked by the X-Men comic book series. I expand on those in SHADOW OPS.

I wrote the book because I was walking around the Pentagon in 1998, wondering how these regulation obsessed bureaucrats would handle magic. What if the monsters from D&D were real? How would the law deal with that? Those questions HOUNDED me. CONTROL POINT was my way of getting them to shut up.

How is CONTROL POINT a book only you could've written?

I'm probably flattering myself here, but I feel like I have a somewhat unique blend of loving-to-write, nerd-roots and military experience. I have been to war and responded to major domestic disasters. I am raised on comic books, D&D and mass-market/spinner-wire-rack fantasy novels. I have been writing all my life. I am sure there are lots of folks with two of those attributes. But all three? Well, maybe so. Maybe CONTROL POINT *isn't* a book that only I could've written. But I'm the guy who wrote it. Here's hoping folks are happy with that.

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

Book: Peter V. Brett's Demon Cycle series, which is (so far) The Warded Man and The Desert Spear. He is, hands-down, one of the best writers I've ever read. I frequently use those books to woo non-fantasy readers who I am trying to get into genre, and it has never failed me.

Comic Book: Ed Brubaker's Captain America Omnibus. It's as thick as a phonebook, and you'll wish it were twice as long.

Film: Les Pactes des Loupes (The Brotherhood of the Wolf). Watch the extended edition, in French, with sub-titles.

Game: Sword and Sworcery for the iPad. Beautiful, haunting and the Jim Guthrie soundtrack doesn't hurt either.

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

I've been to Iraq 3 times. I was a responder to both the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and Hurricane Irene. Crisis is what I do. I'm a good shot and was a competitive swordsman in my halcyon days, both in kendo and the SCA. If there's a guy you want on your six when the chips are down and the undead come calling, I'm him.

You've committed crimes against humanity. They caught you. You get one last meal.

A NYC deli style BLT, but only because they're held together with those little plastic swords you see in cocktails. I'd use that to carve up the place and escape.

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

I've just turned in FORTRESS FRONTIER, the sequel to CONTROL POINT. I have recently been commission to write a novella in a media tie-in universe, and hopefully that will lead to novels. I am turning and burning on my efforts to get the comic book and video game industries interested in my work. A Hollywood agency has picked up CONTROL POINT and is trying to get film/TV folks interested in it. The long and short is this: I want to be able to write full-time, in genre, without having to do anything else besides serve in the reserve (which I love), for the rest of my days. A failure scenario sees me having to go back to a full-time day job.

Okay, so, tell us about CONTROL POINT — what is it, and why did you write it?



* CONTROL POINT is a book that asks the basic question "What if the modern, counterinsurgency-focused military had magic? What would a fire-team look like if you had 2 riflemen, a support-weapon and a sorcerer?" Now that's the fun squee part "how does an Apache helicopter gunship match up against a Roc?" But it also raises bigger issues about the nature of big bureaucracies and how they handle sudden and dramatic social change. A lot of these questions were asked by the X-Men comic book series. I expand on those in SHADOW OPS.
I wrote the book because I was walking around the Pentagon in 1998, wondering how these regulation obsessed bureaucrats would handle magic. What if the monsters from D&D were real? How would the law deal with that? Those questions HOUNDED me. CONTROL POINT was my way of getting them to shut up.
How is CONTROL POINT a book only you could've written?
* I'm probably flattering myself here, but I feel like I have a somewhat unique blend of loving-to-write, nerd-roots and military experience. I have been to war and responded to major domestic disasters. I am raised on comic books, D&D and mass-market/spinner-wire-rack fantasy novels. I have been writing all my life. I am sure there are lots of folks with two of those attributes. But all three? Well, maybe so. Maybe CONTROL POINT *isn't* a book that only I could've written. But I'm the guy who wrote it. Here's hoping folks are happy with that.
Ah, you're a gamer. I suspect a lot of authors are or were gamers — tabletop in particular. What did gaming teach you about writing and storytelling? Positive or negative lessons.
* I was *just* talking about this last night. I really feel that DM'ing D&D campaigns taught me incredibly important lessons about storytelling. I played with Peter V. Brett  in college and watched him craft incredible campaigns that were as engaging as any novel, and then I tried to match them. You have to be willing to do a TON of worldbuilding that your "readers" will never see. I would pour hours into drafting incredibly detailed NPCs, only to have my players just come out and kill them without so much as saying hello. You also have to willing to change course on a dime. Your players can just decide that they don't want to open that door when the campaign DEMANDS that they OPEN THAT F*&KING DOOR! That agility is critical to being a good novelist.
That game with the other authors sounds fucking phenomenal. So let's extend that out — if you could play D&D with, say, five different authors (living or dead), who would they be?
* Oh wow:
- Gary Gygax (yes, he's an author, by god).
- George R. R. Martin.
- Richard K. Morgan
- Naomi Novik
- Ernest Cline
And the module? Tomb of Horrors. Because I'm fantasizing, there'll be this mind-ray that makes us all forget the module, so that none of us know where any of the traps are and how to get around them.
I get to be the Human Paladin. With at least a +3 Holy Avenger. That's very important. Dude. Seriously. I'm not f$#king around here.
Gaming is big in the military, or so I hear. What other games do you or have you played?
* Gaming is HUGE in the military, as is all other SFF-genre loving activities (most importantly, reading). I love any tabletop word game (Scrabble and Boggle) and also the classic board/card games (San Juan, Puerto Rico, Carcassonne and Settlers of Cataan. Though, I should admit that I'm new to some of them). Talisman (with all its expansions) is OUTSTANDING.
I will play Magic if someone brings their decks, but I don't own any of my own.
Then, there's wargaming. I am a big fan of historical ancients/medieval games (I prefer 15mm) and my favorite rule set for that is DBA. I don't really do napoleonic, but I will if I have a good mentor.
And, of course, there's Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. There are no words for how unspeakably cool that universe is.
But the most important thing in gaming is the players. I really don't care what I'm playing, so long as I'm at a table with a bunch of really cool people who are fun to hang out with.

The Experiment Ends (And Other News)

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As noted on Monday, I was trying a little experiment: I flung my Atlanta Burns novella, SHOTGUN GRAVY, up onto Amazon's exclusive Kindle "KDP Select" program which purports to offer authors two key benefits: first, the ability to take part in Kindle lending which further grants authors access to a large "pot" of money monthly; second, the advantage (or, some might say, "advantage") of putting your work up online for free.

As of late, a number of folks have noticed a phenomenon. You put your work up for free, and then when it once more re-enters paid gravity, suddenly the book becomes a Purchasing Magnet whereupon droves and flocks and herds and gaggles of Amazon readers come out of the woodwork to buy the recently-free book. A lot of authors have been attempting to jump this promotion's bones (evidenced by the sudden flurry of "My work is free suddenly!" broadcasts).

Well, I figured, let's try it.

SHOTGUN GRAVY's a novella that did well in its first month but kind of tapered off — it gets a sale or three a day, which is fine and adds to the whole pile, but it's not exactly a rocketship to the money moon. Further, if I'm going to justify putting out the sequel, BAIT DOG, I figured I damn well better get the book into people's hands. Free or not.

I originally put the book up for five days. You only get one five-day-period during your 90-day reign of exclusivity, however — so, I figured, I'd better chop it down to two.

Here's how it went.

Putting the book up for free amassed a sudden burst of books distributed (I dare not use the word "sold" since, well, you don't pay for a free book with anything but a stab of your finger on a mouse button). Right out of the gate, had about 100 people nab the book. Which was curious — where the hell did they come from? Are they real people? I don't even know.

Over the course of the next 24 hours, I amassed over 5000 copies distributed free to readers. A nice enough number. Happy to have the book on a heap of Kindles, though one supposes that a good percentage of those will never read the book — perhaps I'm being cynical, but I know that the less I pay for a book, the lower it falls in my To-Be-Read pile. By yesterday morning, the book had reached #44 in the Top 100 Free and so I thought, now's a good time to cut short the five days to two days. I went to end it thinking that I'd still get two full days of the promo — but within 30 minutes of asking the promo to end, it ended, lickity-split.

Which is fine, but I didn't expect it to work that fast. Amazon can be notorious for veeeeeery sloooowly updating things — even a simple price change can take up to 48 hours to populate.

So, then. Results?

I did not initially see any boost in sales. Hour or two went by and the e-book didn't move one whit. But then, ping — a sale. Okay, fine. Then another, and another. Steadily — and slowly, mind — the e-book sold about 60 copies. (This is as of 7:00PM last night.) It's since not moved again in about an hour. The book crested to Amazon ranking #1,793. Further, it garnered another six reviews during that period (all four- and five-star).

(I'd politely ask that if you procured my book — or any book! — for free, leave a review upon reading it?)

Now, many have reported that a bigger sales boost occurs two to three days after the free promo ends. Not sure if that'll happen here, but I'm damn sure gonna keep my eyes peeled.

Assessment of results?

Good, I guess. I'm happy to have the novella in the hands of 5000 more theoretical readers. I would have preferred they pay the buck for it, but if that means I've got more folks willing to chip in for BAIT DOG or other work of mine, that's great.

This leads to the question, did I experience a sales boost of my other e-books?

I did not.

Quite the contrary, actually.

Soon as I triggered the free promo, my e-book sales over that two-day period were cleanly halved in twain. That's kinda weird. I mean, I have no evidence that it has anything to do with the free promo — why would it? Surely it's coincidence. Only thing I can think of is that there seems to exist some strange internal Amazon promotional algorithm that us Human Beings cannot access lest it overload our mental circuitry. Something about how books achieve rankings and show up under other books and appear on the main page and so on and so forth. If this is true, one could theorize that triggering the SG free promo… I dunno, rearranged the promotional eggs in the digital egg basket Amazon built for me.

Which makes little sense, but there it is.

We'll see if sales rebound. Gods, I hope so — January has been a really stupendous month in terms of getting the e-books out there. Which leads me to…

Brand New E-Book Promo

Buy any of the following books on writing:

CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY

REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY

500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER

And I'll comp you a copy of:

250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING.

If you procure via PDF, you don't need to do anything. You'll get 250 Things automatically.

If you procure via other methods (Amazon, B&N), send me proof of purchase to:

terribleminds at gmail.

Other Stuff

Let's see, let's see…

Just finished the first official (third unofficial) draft of MOCKINGBIRD. Off to the Robot!

Will today also finish the first draft of DINOCALYPSE NOW.

The Washington Post calls me a "death blogger" and "macabre mastermind" in a piece about my collaborative storytelling and art Tumblr project, This Is How You Die. Reminder, of course, that the How You Die blog is always taking submissions — text, photo, song, art of any variety, all about how you might die. (More information here.)

I also get a shout-out at Huffington Post courtesy of Amy Edelman and Melissa Foster in a piece called, "The Big Reasons Indie Authors Aren't Taken Seriously."

BLACKBIRDS gets its first official review (from Fantasy Nibbles, tee hee) — and it's glowing! ("…a truly unforgettable heroine driving the action. The writing is razor sharp throughout, and I'm genuinely concerned that I might be a little bit messed up for enjoying this one so much.")

Oh, and then the book gets another glowing review from New York Journal of Books! Woo. ("Author, screenwriter, and writing advice guru Chuck Wendig creates a compelling tale with an even more compelling protagonist in Miriam Black: a tough, street wise survivor who finally escapes her troubled childhood only to find that she can't escape herself. Despite her fairly macabre lifestyle, Miriam has a strength and sarcastic wit that makes her very likeable and strangely sympathetic.")

And My Bookish Ways throws DOUBLE DEAD into the review machine and gives it a 5 outta 5, baby. ("Double Dead is a terrifying, violent, American road trip through zombie hell.")

Finally, TALES FROM THE FAR WEST — a rad-ass Wild West Wuxia mash-up short story collection based on Gareth Skarka's Far West storyworld drops in e-book format (and soon, print). I'm in here surrounded by some of my favorite people — Will Hindmarch, Eddy Webb, Ari Marmell, Matt Forbeck, Jason Blair. My story — "Riding the Thunderbird" — is about a girl, an outlaw, and a herd of storming thunderbirds.