Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 258

The NaNoWriMo Epilogue: "Miles To Go Before You Sleep"

(Related: "25 Things You Should Know About Your Completed Novel.")

Maybe you finished — er, excuse me, "won" — your NaNoWriMo novel.

That's good. You should be beaming. Chest puffed out. Fists on cocked hips. Cheeks ruddy from neighbors and parents pinching them. Your pride is well-earned. Bask in it its triumphant musk.

On the other hand, maybe you didn't finish — er, excuse me, "you lost" — NaNoWriMo this year.

That's good, too. I see you there, blustery and stammering — "Buh-buh-buh but how is it good that I didn't finish what I started? What's happening? Why is my face numb? Who took my shirt off?"

My message to both of you is the same.

You're not done.

I know. You want to be done. If you finished, you want to slam it down, freeze-frame high-five yourself, and then go have an egg cream. If you didn't finish, you want to delete the file, close the drawer, and pretend that none of this shame spiral ever happened. To both of you: bzzt. Wrongo, word-nerds.

You're not done.

Writing a book is a war. What you just did was experience only one of the many battles in fighting that war: muddy in the trenches, crawling through the ejected blood of your cohorts, the stink of burning ink slithering up your nose like so many grave-worms. Maybe you won this battle. Maybe you lost. But the war goes on, friend-o. The typewriter keeps chattering. The story keeps struggling to be born. The screams of forgotten characters echo (echo echo) across the battlefield.

If you finished, well — ahem, be advised that the definition of "finished" is as loose as a blown-out butthole. One draft doth not a novel make, my friend. You may have many drafts minor and major ahead of you, some featuring subtle tweaks, others offering full-bore double-barrel rewrites. You've got beta readers and editors and reading the book aloud and putting it through its cruel and measured paces.

If you didn't finish, c'mon. C'mon. Did you really think that November was the only month you're allowed to write a novel? Do you believe that come November, all us novelists are let out of our hermetically-sealed mountain cottages and we bound down the snowy expanse, our fingers eager to taste keyboards and Bic pens for the 30 days we're allowed to tell proper stories? November is but one month out of 12, and if you're a true-blue writer you'll wish you had 13 of those motherfuckers in which to keep boot-stomping your novels into the clay. On December 1st, you know what you can do? Keep writing.

For the sweet sake of Saint Fuck, keep on writing.

NaNoWriMo? Just a costume. And now the costume has come off and it's time to decide if this thing is real or if this thing was just a scarecrow with all his stuffing gone soft. If you didn't get a taste for the bug, that's okay. Hell, that's actually a good thing — our lives are best lived when we take things into our corner and try them out to see if we like them. If you never tried spinach, goat cheese, snowboarding, ear-candling or bondage, how would you know if you liked it? If it was truly for you? You wouldn't. So, you brought novel-writing into your world and maybe it didn't pan out. No harm, no foul. High-five for trying.

But maybe the bug bit you. Maybe this isn't just a costume at all, but rather, it's your real flesh, your true face. That means it's all up in you. You can't rip the face off. You won't find any vaccine.

You're a writer now.

Which means you gotta keep on writing. You're like the bus from Speed: you either write or you explode.

Now you've got a malformed lump of story in front of you. A novel, fully-formed or missing parts. It's a beautiful thing, a weird little word-baby that needs your love. He's squirming and squalling and if you don't help him out he'll wither away and disappear — and then all your work, your NaNoWriMo gestational period, will have gone to waste.

Keep writing. Start editing. Raise your word-baby until it's a proper story.

And keep coming back to terribleminds as we talk about hammering your work on the anvil, forging your tale into a blade that will chop the audience's boredom in twain.

So — I want to ask those of you who did NaNoWriMo this year:

How'd it go?

Finish? Not finish?

Will you keep on working on it?

How well did NaNo fit your writing style (or vice versa)?

Final thoughts on the National Novel Writing Month?

25 Things You Should Know About Your Completed Novel

So. You wrote a book. There it sits before you, whether on the screen or printed out: a city sculpted from the face of a raw and ragged cliff. Epic, I know. Dizzying, even. It's okay if you want to throw up. Go ahead. Nobody's watching. HA HA HA HA WE ALL JUST SAW YOU THROW UP HA HA HA — ha, er, oh, sorry.

That was cruel.

You've got a book and it's time you ask: "Now what?"

Consult this list of 25 and maybe you'll find the answer.

1. You Have Gone Where Other "Writers" Have Failed To Go

Failed writers — "failure" being only an indication of never having finished a fucking thing — are everywhere. Kick over a log, rip off a panel of drywall, open the trunk of a long-forgotten car and there they are. Like swarming roaches or starving raccoons. Already you've separated yourself from them just by the dint of having completed a novel-length work. You're not done, of course: this is just the beginning. But find comfort in the fact that you just leveled up. Ding!

2. Welcome To Novel Club

If this is your first night at novel club, you have to write. …no, wait, that's not it. If this is your first novel, as in, you've never ever written a novel before, it helps to have your expectations in check. One's first novel threatens to be a "trunk novel" — as in, a novel best kept in the dark and not dragged out into the light for all to see. Realism is unpopular, and cheerleading is easy, but trust me: not every book one writes demands a place on the stage. I say this as a guy who has six completed novels (and an infinity of unfinished ones) shelved away in some dark murky corner of my hard drive where all the creatures have gone blind and pale. I sometimes hear the sentiment that self-publishing obviates the existence of the trunk novels, that we can all barf up our half-digested literary meals into the marketplace, but that's a level of insane I cannot quite parse. Just because I can sell any jizz-caked gym-sock on eBay doesn't mean I should.

3. Trunk Novels Need Extra Love

That said, trunk novels don't need to be relegated to the burn pile — but, in my experience, they need a lot of extra attention and TLC. No, not the pop trio starring T-Boz, Left-Eye, and The Other One. They cannot help you with your novel. Point is, a first novel is no different from the first time you do anything: build a chair, bake a cake, go to an orgy. Unless you're some kind of prodigy, you're not going to nail it the first time out of the gate — you used the wrong hammer, the wrong cake flour, the wrong industrial-grade sexual lubricant. If you really believe in a trunk novel, then just know you're likely to pump a lot of extra work into it. Don't worry: the next novels will be easier. Probably. Shut up.

4. It Ain't A Batch Of Brownies, Pal

The mindset you have about your novel matters. It's best to view every novel (or script, or any story) as a work-in-progress. This isn't a batch of brownies: you make those brownies and they come out of the oven, you're done. Game over. You can't keep working on them. Best you can do is cover them in extra icing and hope that stops them from tasting like asbestos shingles. A novel, however, is always at only one stage of its evolution — you the author are as a god, helping urge forth the little trilobite to grow fins and then lungs and then legs and then learn how to use iPhones and make funny cat videos. The novel is always able to change, always able to grow new limbs and see its organs spontaneously rearrange.

5. Cool Those Heels, Flash

A writer who is impatient is a writer who probably has health issues, which explains why I've had seven blood-squirting aneurysms since beginning this career. Just the same, embrace patience. Novels, like wine, need time. It's easy and understandable to finish a novel and want to see it Out There somehow — but you need to chillax. Do people still say that? Chillax? Maybe they should say "rechill" instead. Just rechill, homeslice. Anyway. Resist the urge to close the book on your book and consider it done. Don't send it to agents, publishers, or into the marketplace. Let the bottle breathe.

6. If You Love Something, Set It Free

Also: if you hate something, set it free. You need distance from this novel. You need to remove yourself from its presence long enough to discard your love of certain part and your distaste for others until you can approach the book as if… well, as if someone else entirely wrote the damn thing. You need to reach that time when you can look at the book and say, "I forgot I even wrote this part." That may be a week. That may be two months. For me it's like, four hours, because I have a brain like a colander.

7. Discover Why It's Your Book

You wrote this book. So it needs to feel like you wrote it. That's what a lot of revision is secretly about — yes, yes, of course it's about confirming quality and creating sense out of nonsense but it's also about discovering why this is a book no one else but you could've written. This is the time where the clay is soft and your hands make deep prints. This is when you own the book. Because if someone else could've written it, then what's the fucking point?

8. The Answer: "As Many As It Takes, Motherfucker"

The question: "How many rewrites do I need to do?"

9. Written By The Shaman, Adopted By The Tribe

The writer is the shaman. He's the whackadude goofed up on funny jungle mushrooms who steps behind the curtain that separates worlds and there he does battle with ghosts and ideas and returns to our world with the story of what happened in that secret space. That's what you've got now: the result of your battle with invisible entities. But now the tribe must adopt your story, and it's the tribe that improves your work: beta-readers and buddies, agents and editors. A novel that exists all on its own is not as strong as it could be: your novel should be the product of many eyes and many thoughts. It takes a village, not a village idiot.

10. Criticism Is A Conversation

Criticism is good for your book. Tumbled rocks are polished by agitation, and so too will your tale be sharpened and shined by the rough stone and hard grit of criticism. Criticism is a necessary conversation to have. No criticism is absolute, and many pieces of criticism combat one another. But that's why this is a conversation and not writ law: you the author must consider and respond. One thing I can say about criticism is, even when you don't agree with the solution, often you should look for core problems. The true power of criticism is not when it gives you answers but rather when it helps you understand the questions.

11. Spare Change

Writers who are afraid of change are writers who will trip over their own ego and fall into a mud-walled pit where they are eaten by muskrats. Once again, this is a mindset issue: be ready to take what you have and smash it apart. As it runs the gauntlet, it is beaten by batons and whipped with willow branches and drubbed by double dildos. Each step the book takes a beating and with each beating its flesh and bones change. That's a good thing. That's a proper thing. You must be willing to embrace change from behind. You must give change a gentle and eager reacharound.

12. Novel, Thy Name Is Legion

When going into the "edit cycle" of your novel, it may be easier to view the story not as a single entity but rather a series of moving parts. A house is not just a house: it's hinges and pipes and floorboards and water heaters and restless ghosts and sex swings and fiberglass insulation and hungry mice. You don't edit a giant hunk of word-meat called a novel: you butcher it in pieces and parts.

13. A Tail So Long You Might Trip Over It

A novel is also not a short-lived creature — the very act of creating a novel is way more than the month or the year it took to write that first draft. Time invested now equates to, ideally, readers earned later.

14. How To Edit Your Shit

I won't bludgeon you with the reiterated details, but I'll just point you to this: Edit Your Shit Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. Make with the clicky-clicky and whip out the hatchet and the scalpel.

15. Interface With Your Intestinal Flora

When is your book done? You've no test. No way to objectively say, "Ahh, here we are, this bird is fully-cooked and heated to an internal temperature of 666 degrees." You can certainly listen to others, but at the end of the day the one voice you have to listen to is your own: check your gut. Use your instincts.

16. As A Human Person With A Book, You Have Options

It's easy to see the doom in the publishing realm: lowered advances and no more bookstores and the fact that they now take writers out to pasture and shoot them for their meat (so I hear). But you merely need to peel back the pessimistic subdermis and see that things are changing fast. Often for the author, not against the author. Self-publishing is only one small part of that equation. What I'm saying is, that book you just finished? It has options now that did not exist for it five years ago. That is a feature, not a bug.

17. The Value Of An Agent

An agent is, ideally, a shepherd for book and writer. The agent helps the manuscript cross the deadly savage territory of our ruined earth and, at the end of its journey, helps it get the best seat on the rocketship to Mars. An agent does more than just sell the book — the agent helps identify opportunity, maximize one's earning, and help push the book into other realms by pimping the book's rights. Do you need an agent? No. Will an agent help? A good one will, mos def.

18. A Meh Agent Reps The Book, A Good Agent Reps The Writer

Some agents are, simply put, feculent turd-heads. They don't respond, they jerk around authors, they mock writers and act every bit the vile gatekeeper. But that doesn't mean agents are bad. No group is without its malefactors: whether we're talking hotel maids or astronauts, some amongst them are shitbirds. That doesn't mean it's time to disavow all hotel maids or astronauts. Here's, for me, the line between a good agent and a ennnhh-one: the *poop noise* agent wears blinders and cares only about a single book, but the good agent sees a single book as one part of a writer's overall value. The good agent cultivates the writer.

19. The Value Of A Publisher

A publisher will do all the things for your book that will get it ready for the marketplace — and, to be clear, the marketplace puts commerce above art, for better or for worse. Somebody needs to handle cover design and marketing and all those critical book-whore duties. Don't want to do those yourself? Don't feel equipped for such tasks? Then your book needs a proper publisher.

20. Stop Punching Yourself In The Face For Our Entertainment

Some writers are so eager to have their book Out There that they will do anything — and that means signing raw deal contracts, contracts that might as well be rolled up into a baton and used to smack the writer across the bridge of his bad-doggy nose. I've heard horror stories of unscrupulous publishing entities playing havoc with a writer's rights and even that writer's career. Eff that in the ay, emmer-effer. Protect yourself. Don't sign away your book without knowing what you're getting out of the situation. Oh, and by the way: once again the value of an agent is made irrevocably clear.

21. The Value Of A Smaller Publisher

A smaller publisher does what a bigger publisher does, though often with a shorter reach — but also with a more personal and less corporate touch. Bigger publishers are cruise-ships: big behemoths that have great power but are slow to turn. Smaller publishers are smaller boats: less power, yes, but can turn on a dime and respond to changes far more swiftly.

22. Any Good Partner Helps You Cultivate Your Vision, Not Theirs

Whoever you choose to partner with, from agent to editor to publishers big and small, know that the value of that partnership is best expressed by how much they want to help bring your vision to life rather than bringing to bear some external vision. They are on your team: you are not on theirs. Also, they should give you candy. Because candy is awesome. In other news: I'm kind of hungry.

23. The Value Of Self-Publishing

Relative freedom, that's the value. The gate is open. You're a free range creature who has the pick of the pasture. Of course, you're out there potentially all by your lonesome, too — a fox wants to come up and turn you into a pile of blood and feathers, that's his right, because hey, no fences, no gates. But it's your life, little chicken. The cover, the content, the quality — it's all up to you and nobody can tell you otherwise.

24. Self-Publishing Is Not Your Own Personal Flea Market

Just the same, the freedom of self-publishing should not be interpreted as a wide open marketplace where you can just march into Target and start selling your crummy ill-cobbled wares next to brand name items ("I MADE AN ANTLER LAMP YOU SHOULD BUY IT"). Self-publishing is about competing and surpassing, not about confirming everybody's worst inclinations and ensuring that self-publishing is just another word for "a very public slush pile." Your book isn't second-hand goods. Treat it with respect and give it the time and effort it needs no matter what form of publishing you choose to embrace.

25. For Now, Take A Moment, Bask In Your Awesomeness

Hey, fuck all this waffling white noise, forget all this badgering buzz — you just wrote a book. Holy shit. No, wait, let's do that in all caps: HOLY SHIT. You just took a great big unformed hunk of intellectual rock and carved it into shape, into form, into the very face of story. That's incredible. The fact you can create a whole new world and brand new people inside it — and you can create them out of, uhhh, ohh, I dunno, NOTHING — is no small ordeal. That's epic business and you should pat yourself on the back and have a cookie and drop acid and do the Snoopy dance until you pass out. For now: celebrate. Come back to this list later. It'll be here when you need it.

* * *

Want another booze-soaked, profanity-laden shotgun blast of dubious writing advice?

Try: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY

$4.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Or its sequel: REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

And: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING

$0.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Or the newest: 500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Transmissions From Baby-Town: "Feeding Time At The Baby Paddock"

Somebody — and I won't name names, but he's the tiny dude over there in the high chair, ahem — is now eating solid food. And by "solid" I of course mean "pureed into a largely non-solid state." It's not like he's eating turkey legs or shelling pistachios. Though, given the way this kid eats, it would not surprise me.

Just the same, I thought, it's time to talk about feeding the baby.

Those of you with weak constitutions, troubled hearts or a fear of adorable small people…

TURN AWAY NOW.

* * *

I didn't teach him this.

In fact, unless Santa Claus or some other fairy being is secretly involved, I don't think anybody taught him this — but somehow he knows. He's been studying us eating and from the first time I scooped a blob of pureed pears onto his baby-sized purple pastel spoon, he's been ready. He opened his ravenous maw wide and blinked at me with those big blue eyes (the same eyes that are cute enough to prevent us from dropping him off at the local recycling center) and was ready to eat. No coaxing needed. No dabbing a little on his lips to be like, "Mmm, see? No, no, I know, it features none of the pillowy comfort of a boob, but hey! Apples!" None of that. He just opened his mouth and was ready to go and no training was necessary.

Humans are impressive machines.

If only potty-training will be this easy.

* * *

The kid, he hungers.

You know Jabba the Hutt? How his slug tongue licks the lips and he gleefully pops that screaming squirming tadpole thing into the foul slit that monster calls a mouth?

Yeah, that's my son.

* * *

NO STOP GRABBING THE SPOON

Okay, fine, grab the spoon.

Now his hands are sticky. And they'll be sticky all day because somehow, perfectly cleaning an infant's fingers is impossible. Later I'll wonder, "How did this clump of food end up behind my ear? Was I sleep-eating again? Did someone slip me some Ambien? What the hell is it?" *taste* "Mmm. Peas."

* * *

I cannot feed him fast enough.

They say his stomach is as big as his fist and he's not exactly a huge kid — he's lean, lanky, but not heavy.

So, when he wolfs down two full containers of food and then another two or three servings of rice cereal, I worry. This can't be natural, I think. Kid's got a tapeworm. Hell, he might have a stomach full of screeching baby falcons. But the doctor and all the baby books say, "Keep feeding him when he's hungry," but his hunger knows no bounds. I half expect to look under his high chair and see that it's all just fallen through him, dropped through some empty space and onto the floor.

If I don't feed him fast enough, he makes… impatient noises.

MMM. NNNNGH. AHHHH.

* * *

OKAY OKAY I'M HURRYING

If he had teeth he'd bite at the air — clack clack clack.

* * *

Peas, though. He doesn't like peas. He eats peas, he gets this face like, "Did you just spit in my mouth? What is this? Rubber cement? Pencil shavings? Goose poop? Fuck is wrong with you people?"

A genetic component, perhaps. I hated peas as a kid, too. From pureed peas onward. My mother says I could eat a glob of food and if there were peas in it I'd eat the rest of the food and then spit out the individual peas as if I was just cleaning them, making them shiny for someone else. Ptoo, ptoo, ptoo.

* * *

JESUS CHRIST STOP LOOKING AT THE DOG SHE'S NOT FEEDING YOU I AM

* * *

Baby food is delicious.

I squeezed out some mango puree and tasted it and immediately wanted to stir in some rum, toss it in a fruity glass with a swirly straw and guzzle that bad-boy down. No wonder the kid loves this stuff.

I mean, this strawberry-apple puree? I'd kill a dude for a second taste.

Though, yesterday I saw some of the meat-based baby foods at Target.

The "ham" puree has a color exactly that of Caucasian flesh.

As if it's a jar of ground-up pink-cheeked street urchin.

I think we're going to hold off on giving him meats for as long as we can.

* * *

OH MY GOD KID YOU LOOK LIKE A GLAZED DONUT

* * *

The poop changes once you start feeding them.

It comes more often, for one thing.

Really, though, it starts looking like proper poop. No longer a mysterious mud-glop in a soft white shell — now it's human waste. It's what you or I do, just on a smaller scale. The glory days are over.

Oh, I know, here I am another parent talking about baby poop but suck it, that's what we have to deal with. People talk about their experiences and new parents experience a whole lotta poop. You grow eerily and wearily comfortable with human effluence. You ever have someone pee in your face?

Have a baby. You'll see.

* * *

HOLY CRAP HOW THE HELL DID YOU GET FOOD ON YOUR EYELID

* * *

His one hand grabs for the spoon. The other hand floats in the air like he's conducting some kind of baby-food symphony. And his head bobs and weaves like he's a drunken Stevie Wonder.

* * *

Soon, I think we'll start making food for him. Get a rocking blender, something like a Vita-Mix, and just go to town. A lot of the store-bought food comes in crazy combos: for Thanksgiving, we gave him sweet potatoes + pumpkin + apple + blueberries, all in one squeezable food-tube. I'm oddly excited for the ability to mix up batches of whatever combos I choose. Spinach! Apples! Papaya! Wood grubs! Alpo! Caramel sauce! Bacon! NOM NOM NOM.

And yes, he really does like spinach.

* * *

All my years of video game training have led me to this.

Sure, there's a technique — food on the end of the spoon, go in high, use his upper lip to kind of shear the food into his mouth, let him suck off the rest, then use the spoon to scrape the remaining goo off his lips.

But he keeps it interesting. He'll open up reaaaaal biiiiig and just as you get close — BOOM — the hangar doors slam shut and the airplane crashes and the food is a casualty crammed against his face.

Or he'll pivot to look at the dog.

Or he'll try to be an active eater and lunge for the food.

You can't fall asleep on this job. No automatic behaviors will do.

The kid, he's squirrelly.

* * *

OH THE HUMANITY IT'S IN YOUR NOSE

* * *

He keeps eating

and eating

and eating.

I'm half-tempted to shoot a goat and throw it on the tray.

Just to see.

Just to see.

* * *

The doctor tells us it's time to start feeding him more than once a day. Three times. Meal times. Brekkie, lunch, dinner. It strikes you at times like this: oh shit, he's like a real person.

This isn't a dream. He's not a puppy.

Deep breath.

* * *

I bet he'd eat that goat.

* * *

OH GOD THE GOAT BLOOD IS IN YOUR HAIR

* * *

When we're done eating, I approach his face as if the washcloth is a shark — I even make the JAWS music, dun-dun, duunnn-duuun — though it would be far easier if I could just drop him in the driveway and hose him off with the power-washer. Then I clean the tray and plant toys before him. He loves toys, now. It's amazing how fast the changes occur with these wee little humans. Now he can drag himself toward things half-a-room away. Now he shoots out an arm and grabs things like some kind of snake-trained ninja. Now he studies objects and does more than just bang them into his head or shove them into his mouth.

Now he eats solid food.

Now he's six months old.

* * *

Why I love feeding the boy:

Because it's my time with him. I mean, I have a lot of time with him but it's a time I can plop him down and his eyes are eerily focused on me and my Magical Spoon and I get to play the role of nurturing food-dude — after all, it's not like I can breastfeed him or anything. (And no, I have not tried, weirdo.)

I like that time. Even when he shellacs his own eye shut with smashed carrots or gnaws on the food tray or turns his head at the last second thus ensuring I jam a dollop of prunes into his ear. I like the fundamental connection of parent-and-child, the uncomplicated rigors of I have food and you want this food and we are father and son and let's laugh as you accidentally snort mashed banana into your brain.

It's a sweet time and a highlight of my day and I cherish it.

I mean, don't tell him that.

Tell Us Three Things About Blackbloom

I'll be picking the choices from the Geography of Blackbloom later today — but for now, let's get started on the next challenge, shall we? This time, an easy one –

Tell me three things about Blackbloom.

Three status quo things.

Can be about anything at all: religion, commerce, society, creatures, history, diplomacy, culture, geography, climate, whatever. Can be very broad or very specific. Feel free to incorporate what we already know.

Certainly don't countermand what we know, if you can help it.

You must give three things — not one, not two, but three. One entry of three only, if you please.

Deadline is December 9th, by noon.

Put all of your "things" in the comments below.

Then, in two weeks, I'll pick — well, as many as needed!

Go forth and build worlds, you architects of the divine.

Black Friday: Ninety-Nine Cent Fiction

Ahem.

*does the jaunty salesman dance*

Both SHOTGUN GRAVY and IRREGULAR CREATURES are on sale for $0.99 until the reprehensibly-named "Cyber-Monday." Which is, of course, the day we all become Cybermen and have cybersex with other travelers within cyberspace. Or something? I dunno.

The Blackbloom posts will come later today! Keep your grapes peeled.

Shotgun Gravy

A girl. Her friends. Some bullies. A shotgun. It doesn't go well.

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Irregular Creatures

Short story collection feature tales of strange beasties and mythological mutants: flying cats, demon strippers, magical hobos, sad mermaids, giant chickens, and oh-so-much more.

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The Day In Which We Give Thanks (And High-Five Diabetes)

Ahh, turkey day.

Day of excess. Day of family. Day of tryptophan. Day of carbs. Day of gratitude.

This year, the holidays are different for me. I don't want to say I fell out of touch with the holidays, but the once bright and burnished edge had grown dull, its edge gone soft — there's only so many times you can celebrate these holidays before it all starts to feel a little samey-samey, a little, "All right, I know how this is going to go, and it's nice, and I'm not complaining, but maybe next year we could have some fireworks or hula dancers or some shit. Maybe? Anybody? No? Okay."

This year, I have a son. And while he will not experience the full-bore joy-assault of these holidays given that he's a wee six-months-old, I still get to vicariously place my eyeballs inside his eyeballs and witness the whole thing anew. The old dried skin of holidays past is flaking off like so much snow, like so much flaky pumpkin pie crust, and the skin beneath is bright and pink and soft and untouched by the calluses formed by so much reiterative experience.

Baby's first Thanksgiving, then. That's what I'm thankful for. Thankful for the whole baby experience, obviously. The boy's a weird little wonder. He sings weird baby whale songs at night. He squeaks and laughs when you do unexpected things (a couple weeks ago, it was tearing celery, yesterday it was my mother-in-law tipping over a toy giraffe). He bounces. He tries to walk. He's half-crawling now, dragging himself across the floor. He can sit up by himself for three seconds. Can stand up by himself if you give him something to hold onto. He grabs everything. He flings it to the floor or — in a true choose-your-own-adventure-mode — pops it in his mouth. He eats a bucketload of baby food now — he just keeps opening his mouth waiting for more to be delivered to his nom-nom unit. He's cute. He's weird. He's our son. And I'm thankful for him and for my wife and the dog and my whole wonderful family unit.

Even through the crying jags and sleepless nights and diapers so laden and leaden you could use one to bludgeon a bear, even through all the madness and confusion and wibbly-wobbly schedules –

I'm thankful.

Of course, just as it's important we give thanks, I think it's also important we sometimes vent spleen. Because one cannot know light without first tasting darkness. Therefore, one cannot know gratitude unless he knows its opposite: face-melting incoherent rage.

No, seriously, I'm not all that spleen-venty this year, but here's two things that are tickling my pink parts with a rusted wire brush: first, my goddamn glasses broke. Oh, no, not like, one of the important parts — not the lens, not the frame, not the part that hangs over my ear. No, one of the little nose guards. Not just the pad, though, but the whole little tiny micro-nubbin to which the pad connects. Snapped right off. And now my glasses sit lopsided. And constantly irritate that part of the bridge of my nose. First world problems, I recognize, but GNARRGGGHSSSRBLE it's under my sin.

Number two: TV commercials. I avoid commercials whenever possible, but I'm amazed at how often commercials now focus on users-of-said-products who are just total dicks to one another. One assumes that I'm supposed to find that the people on the screen using the products advertised are meant to be proxies of me, the target of said advertising. And yet, so many of these potential proxies are awful humans. Mean to family, mean to friends, dicking each other over, basically execrable human beings. They steal each other's candy bars and lie to one another and torment their children. So, there you go. I hate awful people in commercials who do not receive their comeuppance.

I also hate the new Old Navy commercial, which makes use of the term "Gobblepalooza."

Which is really quite porny, if you ask me.

Well, whatever.

If you feel so inclined, do drop into the comments and tell us:

a) One thing for which you're thankful

b) One thing which earns your ire and demands a right good spleen-venting!

DO IT DO IT NOW OR THE TURKEY GETS IT

Ohh. Ohh. Too late. Turkey got it.

Happy Thanksgiving, tmeeps.

That One Writer Who Changed Everything For You

Anne McCaffrey passed away at age 85, and it's always sad when the world loses a great author. I'd only read one of her books (the first Pern) and liked it well enough, but it was a long time ago and for some reason I responded better to Dune at the time. But I know her work really inspired and affected a lot of readers and future writers, and that's a powerful thing.

So, it seems a good time to devote some air time to those writers that really affected you, whose work still resonates with you, whose work maybe changed you in some fashion.

I say "one writer," but that doesn't really need to be the case. Can be one, can be several.

So: who?

What writers affected you deeply, straight through the heart and clean to the soul?

How? Why? What books? What was the effect of those books?

Honor them here if you are so inclined.

25 Reasons Readers Will Quit Reading Your Story

I'm a total prick when it comes to reading these days. Novels, comics, scripts, anything. Having a writing career and a six-month-old child and a burgeoning heroin er pornography er  Skyrim habit leaves me with less time to read than I'd like — so, when I hunker down over a story, my first (and admittedly worst) inclination is to actively seek reasons to put it down. Seriously. Imagine you came to my door and were selling cookies or Bibles or weird rhino-based aphrodesiacs and you open the door and there I stand with a pistol in your face and I'm all like, "Make your pitch, but say one wrong thing — if you even blink in a way I find disagreeable — then I'm going to shoot your face through your head."

I went to a Christopher Moore signing way back when and the man said something there that stuck with me, and I'm paraphrasing the exact details but the notion remains true just the same:

If you can get someone to finish the first page, they'll finish the second. If they finish the second page, they'll get to page ten. If they get to page ten they'll get to page 30, if they get to page 30 they'll get to the halfway point of the book, and so on and so forth. The idea is that with each page of strong writing and good storytelling you're buying time from the reader on credit. And your credit line increases the further they get and the more completely you grab the reader's attention.

Lose their attention and they're going to put that book down. And go do something else, since we are creatures bombarded with entertainment choices, from games to Netflix to sports to coked-up monkey fights in the back alley behind the methadone clinic.

Last week I told you the reasons you'll keep readers hooked, but now comes the time to look at the reasons you might lose your readers. These are, at least for me, the reasons I'll close your book and not return.

1. At Best: First Chapter, At Worst: First Page

If I'm feeling gracious, I'll give you the first chapter to lose me. If I'm in a bad mood, you've got one page. Maybe less. In fact, that's often how I determine what new books I'll pick up: I'll read the first couple pages of a Kindle sample or of the book in the store. I'll know then and there if this is a book I'm going to want to read or want to drop-kick into a barrel fire. A first page or chapter that doesn't hook me — doesn't introduce an engaging premise or a fascinating character or fails to wow me with its seductive prose — tells me the rest of the book isn't going to be much better. Make those first pages count. It'd be like going out on a blind date dressed in your ugliest outfit. "I know. The Spongebob cardigan and my old dirty Cherokee moccassins do not a strong impression make, but if you just get to know me…" BZZT. Wrongo, mutant. I'm not going to take the time to get to know you. Please leave, you smell like sour cabbage.

2. Typos And Errors

Pay attention, self-publishers: if your work is riddled with typos or grammatical errors, you've gone and ruined it. Doesn't matter how inventive your story is if you cannot communicate it using the essential tools a writer is given. You can have the coolest idea for a house in the world but if you hand in blueprints drawn in shaky crayon I'm not going to let you build it for me. Bad craft kills good stories.

3. Introducing: Mister Snoozeworthy And Missus Snorebucket

Ugh. Nothing worse than a character duller than pre-chewed cardboard. Characters without strong motivation? Characters who are passive rather than active (meaning they experience the story rather than drive the story)? Characters who are indistinguishable from one another (or worse, indistinguishable from a room swathed in beige paint)? Blech. Blargh. Fnuh. No. This, by the way, is the danger of the Everyman protagonist: go too generic and "common man experience" and you rob from the character all the things that make him interesting and unique.

4. Prose Limp And Lifeless As Driveway Earthworms

You know when it rains, all those sad earthworms come crawling out and then when the rains pass the asphalt is littered with the lifeless gray water-logged mush of worm carcasses? Yeah, don't let your prose be that. Don't let your prose be as interesting as gray worms on gray macadam on a gray day. Bring life to language. Look at the shape it takes on the page. Find variety. Take risks. Most important: be confident. Wishy-washy prose that refuses to assert itself and relies on junk language and passive constructions to convey a story is prose that might choke that very story.

5. Awk! Awk! Awk!

Awkward language: when the quality and clarity of your prose fails to meet the intention of the writer. Put differently, it's when your writing is clunky, clumsy, and the greatest sin of all, unclear. If I don't know what you're trying to tell me, I will put a bullet in your book's brain and bury it out by the marigolds.

6. A Web Spun By A Drunken Spider

Confusing and illogical plots stop me dead. Newsflash: I need to know what's going on. And what's going on needs to actually make some fucking sense. I don't want to feel like I'm machete-chopping my way through your snarled and tangled pubic thatch just to get to the good stuff.

7. All Answers, No Questions

Certain things kill the mystery in a new relationship. It's why on the first date you don't leave the bathroom door open and let your potential new mate see you, erm, taking out the biological garbage. "I need to go change into something comfortable. And I also have to poop. Wanna watch?" The mystery is dead. The romance? Stabbed in the face by too much information. "TMI" applies to fiction, too — if I'm reading your book and you're hellbound to give away all the secrets and answers right from word one, then I'm going to catch the whiff of narrative desperation and end the date early. Don't let your book show me its poop-squat.

8. Too Many Questions, Not Enough Answers

On the other hand, too much mystery spoils the soup. "What's in this stew?" "I'm not telling." "It tastes weird. Is this a fingernail?" "Wouldn't you like to know." Yes. Yes, actually, I would like to know." Look at a TV show like Lost, which for the first several seasons introduced a freaky new mystery every episode but failed to address, um, any of the prior mysteries. There comes a point when you as the reader become pretty sure the storyteller is just fucking with you, and while that's the storyteller's job, it's also the storyteller's job to mask that role. I don't want to feel like the storyteller is behind me spitting in my hair.

9. My Character Will Now Infodump Into Your Mouth

Expositional dialogue. Where characters explain everything that's going on, even to those inside the story that don't need the update. AKA AYKB: "As You Know, Bob." Heavy exposition is like stealing all the oxygen from the room. You stole all the air for yourself and left the reader none at all. Bonafide story killer.

10. Carpet Doesn't Match The Curtains

Internal consistency means something for writers. All the parts have to play well together — if you've got tone running with scissors and plot running the other way with a bucket on his head, and the dialogue doesn't match the characters and the theme feels like it's been hastily staplegunned to the story's head, readers feel that. They know that the stars are out of alignment. And if they're like me, they'll drop your book like it's a soup can full of cranky bees.

11. The Broken Mirror Effect

I had this problem recently with a draft of a novel: all the plot pieces made sense, they just didn't work together to carry the overall story forward. No throughline could be felt — each was a sad little boat bobbling independently of all the other boats, no lash nor chain connecting them, each drifting in separate directions. It felt, as my agent put it, episodic: and she's right. Put differently, a story is best when it's like a wolf-pack rather than a herd of cats. The wolf pack features separate wolves who move together. The cat-herd has no unity and each cat scatters. Because cats can be real dicks.

12. Rolling In The Same Muddy Wheel Ruts

If I feel like I've seen this before — that the story doesn't even make a go at being original and is just another vampire tween romance or Bourne Identity rip-off or sexy equine cyborg erotica — then I'm done, I'm out, game over, goodbye. Bring something new to the table, even if what's "new" is in the arrangement.

13. Strangled All The Fun With Dirty Lampcord

Every story needn't be a laugh riot. It's not even humor I'm looking for. But if your story fails to have even the tiniest glimmer of fun in it, I must politely eject. Even the darkest and most nihilistic tales need that little starburst of fun or humor — not only to break up the darkness but also to serve as contrast to the darkness. The darkness is meaningless if we don't have any light for comparison.

14. It's A Problem-Free Colostomy: Spoon-Up-My-Bottom

(Sung to the tune of, Hakuna Matata.) Just as yeast thrives on sugar and babies thrive on the sleepless frustration of their parents, a story and its readers thrive on conflict. Conflict is essential to a story, and yet it's far too often I read stories that feel like the conflict has all the sturm und drang of a ball-less scrotum. "John wanted a robot pony and so he went and bought a robot pony" is a story, yes, but it's a piss-poor one. Conflict is the fuel that drives the narrative engine. If your conflict is tepid and soft, the narrative will be, too. Which means: DELETED.

15. The Tiger Changes Its Stripes

Story pivots and narrative shifts are good. Usually. A story that defies what it's been all along and becomes something entirely different can work and can be totally rock-awesome: but it can also betray the audience. (The book did well, so this is a clear example of how subjective this stuff is, but a book that did this to me was THE PASSAGE. No spoilers but mid-way through the tale experiences a dramatic shift, so much so it felt like an entirely different and possibly unrelated book. That horse bucked me into the mud.)

16. Death, The Thief Of Conflict

A character dies without meaning or purpose in the story? I'm jarred, jostled, shaken, speechless. And not always in a sexy, erotic asphyxiation kind of way. Listen, if one of the primary reasons I'm digging your story is a particular character and then you rob me of that character without warning or meaning, you might lose me. Yes, random and senseless death can have a purpose, but not easily, and not often. If we are to assume that the character is the vehicle by which the reader travels through the story, then a sudden death of such a character is akin to us wrecking our vehicle. A bad call, Ripley. A bad call.

17. Giant Paragraphs Smashing Into Other Giant Paragraphs

RAAAAR PARAGRAPH SMASH. Your prose is not a boulder to drop on somebody's head. I'm not saying long paragraphs are by themselves a problem — sometimes, it's what's for dinner. But if every page is naught but a neverending series of cement blocks comprising turgid prose, then you haven't written a novel: you've written the literary equivalent to a hot Ambien toddy. (Though with fewer hallucinogenic freak-outs, sadly.) Characters don't need to speak in lectures. Describing a rocking chair or a cab driver should not take you half-a-chapter. The shape of the prose on the page matters; it should show variety, have erratic and inconsistent shape. Beware massive text blocks. Like boat anchors they drag the story's momentum.

18. Copypasta

If I feel like your characters are stereotypes — Hooker with a heart of gold! Tortured angsty good-guy vampire! Pantsless author who rants about booze and profanity! — then I'm out. I will wipe my hands of your trite and tepid tale and go, I dunno, drink tequila and curse at the skies. The way you elevate characters out of stereotype is to make them complex and layered. Defy convention!

19. A Hollow Emotional Core

We all need to relate to your story and the characters that populate it. We have various in-roads toward such identification but one key one is the tale's emotional core. We're emotional creatures and so it becomes easy to find a common thread — no, I may not understand what it's like to be a mailman or a secret agent or a sapient moon-tree, but if those characters play off of common emotional hooks (jealousy, rage, triumph, bliss, etc.) then we're good. The problem is when I can't find that in a story: some tales are too guarded and refuse to let me in. They're all action, with everything living on the surface. No, thank you.

20. All The Energy Of An Incontinent Basset Hound

If your story ambles about like an old man out on a Sunday walk (or worse, a Sunday drive), then your story has all the urgency of feeding pigeons. And feeding pigeons is not a particularly urgent activity, unless of course the pigeons are bloodthirsty and what you're feeding them is bullets. (I'd totally read that.) Stories need to feel urgent: you're capturing these moments for a reason.

21. Don't Want To Shack Up With These Characters

Characters don't need to be likable, but they must be livable — I'm hanging with them for 300 pages (or in a film, two hours) and so they must be someone I want to hang out with. Truly vile characters? Execrable fuckers? Boring dillholes? Characters who do things that completely turn me off? That's how you lose me. My studio apartment with the clanging pipes and the tricky faucets goes from "charming and quaint" to "I'm packing my bags" soon as it's infested with roaches. By the way, I don't really live in a studio apartment. I live in a treehouse. With a goat-faced gentleman named Professor Hoofstomp Q. Whiskerchinny!

22. Busted-Ass Broke-Down POV

Who's talking? Did we switch characters? Different POV? Did that just jump from first to third? Are we in someone's head now? Wait, did Betty rescue John, or did John rescue Betty? Keep track of your goddamn POV, people. Like I said before, keeping a reader in the story is like keeping a fish on the line: you go cocking up the point-of-view and you'll set me free. Giving me plenty of time to go gloomily play with myself.

23. A Pulled Punch Sandwich

I can feel when an author is pulling punches, when the story is the narrative equivalent of lobbing softballs. This isn't about being edgy or hardcore, I only mean to suggest that I know when the author is treating his plot and his characters — and, by proxy, the audience — gingerly. He's not taking any risks. No danger in plot, no conflict for the characters, no risk in the prose one writes. Go big or go the fuck home. Every book is in competition with every other book, movie, comic book, porn movie, and breakfast cereal in existence. Put your back and your heart into it, goddamnit. Stop phoning it in.

24. I'm Not Your Audience

Sometimes, the break-up is like a real life break-up: "It's not you. It's me." I'm just not digging your story because it's not mine to dig. And that's okay. You can't please everybody. I mean, I can. Because I have fingers like French ticklers and seven hundred tongues. You, however, are beholden to your mortal form.

25. It's Just A Bad Book

On the other end, sometimes like a real life break-up it's all your goddamn fault. Once again this is leveled more squarely at self-publishers, but it's also (if with reduced frequency) true of some "traditionally" published novels — a bad book is a bad book. What I'm talking about is genuine dog-fuck writing, shit-basket characters, a spastic control of language, a fumbling numb-nutted grasp of grammar and spelling, and an overall muffin-headed window-licking approach to storytelling. Not subjectively bad, mind you, but objectively terrible. If I see a book like this, obviously, clearly, plainly I must escape it's foul mire and put the book down. In fact, if any of you see a book like this, it should be killed with fire, and the ashes should be shoved in a hermetically-sealed tube and then launched into the heart of a volcano.

Your turn. Do me a favor: get down into the comments and tell the world what reasons you have for putting a book down. What have you encountered that's stopped your reading enjoyment dead?

* * *

Want another booze-soaked, profanity-laden shotgun blast of dubious writing advice?

Try: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY

$4.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Or its sequel: REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

And: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING

$0.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

Or the newest: 500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

When Life Gives You Dragons, Make Dragonade: Scenes From Skyrim

It's night.

A light snow falls.

I'm on a quest with — well, I forget his name. Farklas? Firkas? Whatever it is, we've just exited some skanky hoarfrost grotto after cleaning the place out of whatever assholes lurked within.

Then I hear it — thwip — the sound of an arrow narrowly missing my skull.

I see Farkleberry run off. Which means, of course, he's running towards danger.

Next thing I know, we're ascending some steps just as some bandits are descending and oh, it's on, it's on like Donkey Kong playing Ping Pong while eating Egg Foo Yong. I'm targeting shadows in the dark with my bow. Notch an arrow. Time slows. Pop. Bandit's head snaps back with an arrow in the cheek. Eat a dick, bandit. Eat a big old arrow-shaped dick.

I've no idea where Tackleberry is.

But then I hear it — a shriek.

It's familiar but I've little time to think about it. I've got some blue-glowing magic-slinging knob-gobbler all up in my grill, trying to chill my bones with his ice-doom magic.

Then: the shriek again.

The shriek is no longer distant — it is upon us.

FWOOSH.

The screen lights up with fire! What the fuck? I stagger backward out of the flame, see the wizardy knob-gobbler is being roasted right there on the spot by a whooshing plume of flame.

Flame coming from a dragon's mouth. A dragon that landed, ohh, about ten feet away from me.

Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit.

I backpedal. Screaming like a little girl that just got peed on by a tiger at the zoo (and yes, I've seen that, and it is indeed a story for another time). I let fly with arrows, many as I can sling into the dragon's skull.

The dragon takes flight once more. My arrows find no purchase as he soars into the sky.

And suddenly all is quiet: the bandits are gone or dead. Fucklas is gone, too — I've no idea where he is.

But one thing I know: I'm not letting this dragon get away. Because if I kill this dragon, I can eat his soul like it's a big bowl of dragon-flavored ice cream. And from it, I can gain power: the power to breathe fucking fire. I want that. I need that. So, I spy the dragon in the sky, and I give chase.

The dragon lands in the distance. The beast illuminated by his own fiery breath, breath that blasts against some lone warrior standing against the draconian wretch –

Oh, holy shit. It's Scott Farkus.

I bolt toward him in time to see him fall.

The dragon spies me. Takes flight. Circles. Again evading my arrows. Thwip thwip thwip.

Then — boom.

Beast behind me. I'm burning. On fire. All parts of me, going crispy.

I run. I'm not ready for this. I'm almost out of health potions. My life dwindles. But the dragon, ohhh, he's quite persistent, and this motherfucker is up again and soaring above my head, and here I am stumbling around in the dark, panting and out of breath, and suddenly the dragon lands directly in front of me –

And then I see two shapes. One to my right. One to my left.

Huge shambling shadows.

I've stumbled into the middle of two massive wooly mammoths.

As an aside, it appears mammoths care little for dragons. I don't know why this is, precisely. Perhaps because mammoths received swirlies from said dragon in elementary school? Maybe the dragon ate all the mammoth's candy, or stole his keys, or pooped in the mammoth's chafing dish. Maybe it's just because mammoths are flammable as fuck and see dragons as a natural enemy.

Whatever the reason, the two mammoths — both high-powered Snuffalupaguses each — decide to get in on the action. Much to the chagrin of the dragon. The two mammoths tear the dragon a new asshole as I sit comfortably ensconced between my two shaggy impromptu bodyguards, flinging arrows into the hell-lizard. And my final arrow pierces the dragon's head. The beast falls. His body catches fire and his essence is vacuumed into my body.

That, to me, is the essence of Skyrim.

The game does what I like games to do in terms of storytelling: it lets me assemble the story of my own telling. I don't mind a game that has its own story to tell, but the games to which I really respond are the ones that give me all the pieces and let me put them together according to my own style of play. It cedes some narrative authority to me.

It's in this way that the Elder Scrolls games have a lot in common with Minecraft, actually — both say, "Hey. Here's a giant world. The map you have is incomplete. Feel free to wander around. Do the things we suggest. Or don't. We don't care. This is your world — we just put it here. Build. Craft. Fight. Run. Oh, and watch out — the monsters come out at night." Hell, both games have dragons, now. Minecraft obviously takes the Elder Scrolls freedom and amps it up, but is also removes all external narrative elements. Skyrim has a story to tell; it just doesn't care if you participate. Minecraft is rudderless, an entirely unregulated narrative experience.

If Minecraft is Skyrim's spiritual cousin, then in a sense, Dragon Age I & II is Skyrim's opposite — not in a bad way, mind, but in a way that's worth noting. Where Skyrim puts before you an open world whose every physical and geographical component is a story-building element, Dragon Age (and other Bioware RPGs) offers a closed world with limited pathways whose game is in how you piece together the pre-defined story elements. In Dragon Age, the story is the game. (Which is its own kind of awesome.)

Skyrim says, "We have this big story and all these little stories and you can weave in and out of them or avoid them all day long. The map is big. Your legs work. Go find adventure."

Dragon Age says, "We have this big story and all these little stories and you cannot escape them but what you can do is fiddle with the pieces and put them together in the order and fashion you desire. The map is small and the path is limited but the story is rich, so wade in and we'll give you adventure."

Both approaches are brilliant.

But right now, I'm excited by the overall openness of Skyrim. As evidenced by my account above. The above example is by no means the only random thing that occurred. Every session, a new weird adventure I stumble into. Some guy runs up to me on the road and tells me he wants to give me something for safe-keeping, but then a bandit chief descends from a steep hill and cleaves the dude in the head with an axe, killing him in one blow. Or I'm trudging toward an icy mountain temple and there on the path is a howling, pissed off ice troll and he chases me down toward one of the mountain altars and there at the altar is a pilgrim praying and suddenly she's up and chopping into the troll with an axe that crackles with electricity. (She dies, of course. And I pillage her zap-axe.)

So grows the wonder of an open world with seemingly endless corners of things to do, monsters to slay, stories to experience, and wooly mammoth gangstas who will help you fuck up a bad-ass dragon.

Flash Fiction Challenge: "Frog Powder Seagull Tower Scissors"

And here we are again.

It is time, my little scrunchies, to conjure for the world another dab, another dollop, of some flash fiction.

Once again, you have five words to play with:

Frog

Powder

Seagull

Tower

Scissors.

You need to choose only one of those five words.

Yes, that's right. Only one.

That one word must feature prominently in your fiction, whether directly or as a clear and forthright inspiration. You do not have 1,000 words but rather, you have 100. A hundred words, no more. That way, nobody will be taken away from NaNoWriMo if they're participating for more than a mere handful of words.

Any genre will do.

Post your entries into the comment section below.

You've got till Friday, Black Friday, to turn in your entries. By noon EST.

I'm going to pick my favorite out of the bunch. That person will get both SHOTGUN GRAVY and IRREGULAR CREATURES as e-books. I'll pick the winner sometime that following weekend.

Get to writing, fictioneers.