Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 259

Your Big Reads Of 2012

Gaze forward with me — I want to start building my TBR pile for the coming year, and I'm going to squeeze your brains dry of wisdom to accomplish that feat.

Human Google, activate!

What books are coming out in 2012?

What are you looking forward to? And why?

Hey, if you're a writer and you happen to have a book dropping in 2012, don't hesitate to let us know.

If pre-order links are available, drop those in comments, too.

Books. 2012. Go.

25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing

I read this cool article last week — "30 Things To Stop Doing To Yourself" — and I thought, hey, heeeey, that's interesting. Writers might could use their own version of that. So, I started to cobble one together. And, of course, as most of these writing-related posts become, it ended up that for the most part I'm sitting here in the blog yelling at myself first and foremost.

That is, then, how you should read this: me, yelling at me. If you take away something from it, though?

Then go forth and kick your writing year in the teeth.

Onto the list.

1. Stop Running Away

Right here is your story. Your manuscript. Your career. So why the fuck are you running in the other direction? Your writing will never chase you — you need to chase your writing. If it's what you want, then pursue it. This isn't just true of your overall writing career, either. It's true of individual components. You want one thing but then constantly work to achieve its opposite. You say you want to write a novel but then go and write a bunch of short stories. You say you're going to write This script but then try to write That script instead. Pick a thing and work toward that thing.

2. Stop Stopping

Momentum is everything. Cut the brake lines. Careen wildly and unsteadily toward your goal. I hate to bludgeon you about the head and neck with a hammer forged in the volcanic fires of Mount Obvious, but the only way you can finish something is by not stopping. That story isn't going to unfuck itself.

3. Stop Writing In Someone Else's Voice

You have a voice. It's yours. Nobody else can claim it, and any attempts to mimic it will be fumbling and clumsy like two tweens trying to make out in a darkened broom closet. That's on you, too — don't try to write in somebody else's voice. Yes, okay, maybe you do this in the beginning. But strive past it. Stretch your muscles. Find your voice. This is going to be a big theme at the start of 2012 — discover those elements that comprise your voice, that put the author in your authority. Write in a way that only you can write.

4. Stop Worrying

Worry is some useless shit. It does nothing. It has no basis in reality. It's a vestigial emotion, useless as — as my father was wont to say — "tits on a boar hog." We worry about things that are well beyond our control. We worry about publishing trends or future advances or whether or not Barnes & Noble is going to shove a hand grenade up its own ass and go kablooey. That's not to say you can't identify future trouble spots and try to work around them — but that's not worrying. You recognize a roadblock and arrange a path around it — you don't chew your fingernails bloody worrying about it. Shut up. Calm down. Worry, begone.

5. Stop Hurrying

The rise of self-publishing has seen a comparative surge forward in quantity. As if we're all rushing forward to squat out as huge a litter of squalling word-babies as our fragile penmonkey uteruses (uteri?) can handle. Stories are like wine; they need time. So take the time. This isn't a hot dog eating contest. You're not being judged on how much you write but rather, how well you do it. Sure, there's a balance — you have to be generative, have to be swimming forward lest you sink like a stone and find remora fish mating inside your rectum. But generation and creativity should not come at the cost of quality. Give your stories and your career the time and patience it needs. Put differently: don't have a freak out, man.

6. Stop Waiting

I said "stop hurrying," not "stand still and fall asleep." Life rewards action, not inertia. What the fuck are you waiting for? To reap the rewards of the future, you must take action in the present. Do so now.

7. Stop Thinking It Should Be Easier

It's not going to get any easier, and why should it? Anything truly worth doing requires hella hard work. If climbing to the top of Kilimanjaro meant packing a light lunch and hopping in a climate-controlled elevator, it wouldn't really be that big a fucking deal, would it? You want to do This Writing Thing, then don't just expect hard work — be happy that it's a hard row to hoe and that you're just the, er, hoer to hoe it? I dunno. Don't look at me like that. AVERT YOUR GAZE, SCRUTINIZER. And get back to work.

8. Stop Deprioritizing Your Wordsmithy

You don't get to be a proper storyteller by putting it so far down your list it's nestled between "Complete the Iditarod (but with squirrels instead of dogs)" and "Two words: Merkin, Macrame." You want to do this shit, it better be some Top Five Shiznit, son. You know you're a writer because it's not just what you do, but rather, it's who you are. So why deprioritize that thing which forms part of your very identity?

9. Stop Treating Your Body Like A Dumpster

The mind is the writer's best weapon. It is equal parts bullwhip, sniper rifle, and stiletto. If you treat your body like it's the sticky concrete floor in a porno theater (that's not a spilled milkshake) then all you're doing is dulling your most powerful weapon. The body fuels the mind. It should be "crap out," not "crap in." Stop bloating your body with awfulness. Eat well. Exercise. Elsewise you'll find your bullwhip's tied in knots, your stiletto's so dull it couldn't cut through a glob of canned pumpkin, and someone left peanut-butter-and-jelly in the barrel of your sniper rifle.

10. Stop The Moping And The Whining

Complaining — like worry, like regret, like that little knob on the toaster that tells you it'll make the toast darker — does nothing. (Doubly useless: complaining about complaining, which is what I'm doing here.) Blah blah blah, publishing, blah blah blah, Amazon, blah blah blah Hollywood. Stop boo-hooing. Don't like something? Fix it or forgive it. And move on to the next thing.

11. Stop Blaming Everyone Else

You hear a lot of blame going around — something-something gatekeepers, something-something too many self-published authors, something-something agency model. You're going to own your successes, and that means you're also going to need to own your errors. This career is yours. Yes, sometimes external factors will step in your way, but it's up to you how to react. Fuck blame. Roll around in responsibility like a dog rolling around in an elk miscarriage. Which, for the record, is something I've had a dog do, sooooo. Yeah. It was, uhhh, pretty nasty. Also: "Elk Miscarriage" is the name of my indie band.

12. Stop The Shame

Writers are often ashamed at who they are and what they do. Other people are out there fighting wars and fixing cars and destroying our country with poisonous loans — and here we are, sitting around in our footy-pajamas, writing about vampires and unicorns, about broken hearts and shattered jaws. A lot of the time we won't get much respect, but you know what? Fuck that. Take the respect. Writers and storytellers help make this world go around. We're just as much a part of the societal ecosystem as anybody else. Craft counts. Art matters. Stories are important. Freeze-frame high-five. Now have a beer and a shot of whisky and shove all your shame in a bag and burn it.

13. Stop Lamenting Your Mistakes

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you fucked up somewhere along the way. Who gives a donkey's duodenum? Shit happens. Shit washes off. Don't dwell. Don't sing lamentations to your errors. Repeat after me: learn and move on. Very few mistakes will haunt you till your end of days unless you let it haunt you. That is, unless your error was so egregious it can never be forgotten ("I wore a Hitler outfit as I went to every major publishing house in New York City and took a poop in every editor's desk drawer over the holiday. Also, I may have put it on Youtube and sent it to Galleycat. So… there's that").

14. Stop Playing It Safe

Let 2012 be the year of the risk. Nobody knows what's going on in the publishing industry, but we can be damn sure that what's going on with authors is that we're finding new ways to be empowered in this New Media Future, Motherfuckers (hereby known as NMFMF). What that means is, it's time to forget the old rules. Time to start questioning preconceived notions and established conventions. It's time to start taking some risks both in your career and in your storytelling. Throw open the doors. Kick down the walls of your uncomfortable box. Carpet bomb the Comfort Zone so that none other may dwell there.

15. Stop Trying To Control Shit You Can't Control

ALL THAT out there? All the industry shit and the reviews and the Amazonian business practices? The economy? The readers? You can't control any of that. You can respond to it. You can try to get ahead of it. But you can't control it. Control what you can, which is your writing and the management of your career.

16. Stop Doing One Thing

Diversification is the name of survival for all creatures: genetics relies on diversification. (Says the guy with no science background and little interest in Googling that idea to see if it holds any water at all.) Things are changing big in these next few years, from the rise of e-books to the collapse of traditional markets to the the galactic threat of Mecha-Gaiman. Diversity of form, format and genre will help ensure you stay alive in the coming entirely-made-up Pubpocalypse.

17. Stop Writing For "The Market"

To be clear, I don't mean, "stop writing for specific markets." That's silly advice. If you want to write for the Ladies' Home Journal, well, that's writing for a specific market. What I mean is, stop writing for The Market, capital T-M. The Market is an unknowable entity based on sales trends and educated guess-work and some kind of publishing haruspicy (at Penguin, they sacrifice actual penguins — true story!). Writing a novel takes long enough that writing for the market is a doomed mission, a leap into a dark chasm with the hopes that someone will build a bridge there before you fall through empty space. Which leads me to –

18. Stop Chasing Trends

Set the trends. Don't chase them like a dog chasing a Buick. Trends offer artists a series of diminishing returns — every iteration of a trend after the first is weaker than the last, as if each repetition is another ice cube plunked into a once strong glass of Scotch. You're just watering it down, man. Don't be a knock-off purse, a serial killer copycat, or just another fantasy echo of Tolkien. Do your own thing.

19. Stop Caring About What Other Writers Are Doing

They're going to do what they're going to do. You're not them. You don't want to be them and they don't want to be you. Why do what everyone else is doing? Let me reiterate: do your own thing.

20. Stop Caring So Much About The Publishing Industry

Know the industry, but don't be overwhelmed by it. The mortal man cannot change the weave and weft of cosmic forces; they are outside you. Examine the publishing industry too closely and it will ejaculate its demon ichor in your eye. And then you'll have to go to the eye doctor and he'll be all like, "You were staring too long at the publishing industry again, weren't you?" And you're like, "YES, fine," and he's like, "Well, I have drops for that, but they'll cost you," and you get out your checkbook and ask him how many zeroes you should fill in because you're a writer and don't have health care. *sob*

21. Stop Listening To What Won't Sell

You'll hear that. "I don't think this can sell." And shit, you know what? That might be right. Just the same — I'd bet that all the stories you remember, all the tales that came out of nowhere and kicked you in the junk drawer with their sheer possibility and potential, were stories that were once flagged with the "this won't sell" moniker. You'll always find someone to tell you what you can't do. What you shouldn't do. That's your job as a writer to prove them wrong. By sticking your fountain pen in their neck and drinking their blood. …uhh. I mean, "by writing the best damn story you can write." That's what I mean. That other thing was, you know. It was just metaphor. Totally. *hides inkwell filled with human blood*

22. Stop Overpromising And Overshooting

We want to do everything all at once. Grand plans! Sweeping gestures! Epic 23-book fantasy cycles! Don't overreach. Concentrate on what you can complete. Temper risk with reality.

23. Stop Leaving Yourself Off The Page

You are your stories and your stories are you. Who you are matters. Your experiences and feelings and opinions count. Put yourself on every page: a smear of heartsblood. If we cannot connect with our own stories, how can we expect anybody else to find that connection?

24. Stop Dreaming

Fuck dreaming. Start doing. Dreams are great — uh, for children. Dreams are intangible and uncertain looks into the future. Dreams are fanciful flights of improbability — pegasus wishes and the hopes of lonely robots. You're an adult, now. It's time to shit or get off the pot. It's time to wake up or stay dreaming. Let me say it again because I am nothing if not a fan of repetition: Fuck dreaming. Start doing.

25. Stop Being Afraid

Fear will kill you dead. You've nothing to be afraid of that a little preparation and pragmatism cannot kill. Everybody who wanted to be a writer and didn't become one failed based on one of two critical reasons: one, they were lazy, or two, they were afraid. Let's take for granted you're not lazy. That means you're afraid. Fear is nonsense. What do you think is going to happen? You're going to be eaten by tigers? Life will afford you lots of reasons to be afraid: bees, kidnappers, terrorism, being chewed apart by an escalator, Republicans, Snooki. But being a writer is nothing worthy of fear. It's worthy of praise. And triumph. And fireworks. And shotguns. And a box of wine. So shove fear aside — let fear be gnawed upon by escalators and tigers. Step up to the plate. Let this be your year.

* * *

Did you know that Chuck has a small army of writing-related e-books available? Each brined in a salty spice mix of profanity, inchoate rage, and liquor? Check 'em out, won't you?

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: "This Chorus Of Mirth And Madness"

Christmas came and Christmas went, and in the wake of Santa Jesus we found the flotsam and jetsam of a child's joy –what I'm saying is, our living room exploded and gave birth to a metric ass-ton of baby toys.

And now, over a week later, I'm left rocking back and forth. In the corner. Covered in a shellacking of dried saliva and carpet fibers, my fingers burned with battery acid as they tried desperately — and failed with equal desperation — to pluck AA batteries from their plastic cradles. My vision flits in and out. My muscles twitch with myoclonic spasms. I… hear things.

I hear the heretical hymns and blasphemous songs of a thousand insane toys.

I hear them when I wake.

I hear them when I sleep.

I no longer can distinguish between day and night, between up and down.

I have gone mad.

* * *

As it was the child's first Christmas, that meant that everyone felt inclined to Go Big Or Go Home in terms of providing the tiny human with gifted amusement. That includes us, of course — we, too, procured for him a bounty of entertainment even though he's got the attention span of an epileptic cricket and frankly is capable of achieving maximum delight from Tupperware containers, paper towels, or his own wriggling feet.

That said, buying toys for a new child is everybody's right, and I'd dare not rob anyone of that pleasure.

The bounty included such plastic idols of childish wonder as:

Blocks; balls; some kind of baby-sized faux-laptop; Elmo; a talking puppy; an electronic plastic "book;" a learning station that features such disparate items as a phone and a book and a piano and, I dunno, an autopsy station or something; a thing that might be best described as a "musical lawnmower;" another set of blocks; rings; wibbly-wobbly bean-shaped things; and so forth.

This is all wonderful and we are of course thankful to have these things.

It's just…

You need to understand:

These things all make noise.

They all make noise.

THEY ALL MAKE NOISE.

The blocks squeak! The balls rattle! The puppy barks and talks about his ear and his feet and his paw and tells the baby he loves him! The book sings songs and barks and meows and baa's and bleeps and blorps! Everything is a cacophony of saxophones and ABCs and 123s and and bings and dings and ringing phones and chimes and rhymes and timing tones and next thing you know your ears are bleeding and you've developed this tic and you smell the stink of burning flowers before you fugue out and stab the mailman.

* * *

The toys, they are impatient.

And they reward impatience, reveling in it.

B-Dub, he likes to crawl around and lay resplendent amongst his booty, flailing his limbs so that his hand punches one toy and his leg kicks another and then he'll flop up and over like a breaching whale and crash his head into another toy.  Each punch-kick-headbutt elicits a brand new sound. But the sounds will gladly interrupt other sounds — just as one is beginning to dig into a chorus of the ABCs or Hey Diddle Diddle, the baby hits another button and then another sound or song begins. And trust me, these things are All Buttons. Every little widget and hinge and plastic nubbin does something — every tiny insubstantial movement or event sets off a chain reaction of musical bedlam. If the baby just breathes near one of them it's suddenly lighting up like a fucking rocket booster and singing some song about a happy froggy.

It sings the song of madness. Our house sounds like this:

Hey diddle diddle the cat and the –

BAAAAA!

Bing!

A B C D E F –

Meow! Meow! Meow!

*guitar riff*

I Love You!

Mary had a little –

Ruff ruff!

Foot!

Hey diddle –

Yellow foot!

*saxophone smooth jazz*

It's learning time!

It's learning –

It's learn –

Ruff ruff!

And meanwhile it's all lights and vibrations and suddenly I'm starting to stroke out and wonder, "Sweet Christ on a Crumbly Cracker, is this why kids have ADD?" Then I wipe the nosebleed and pass out.

* * *

If you leave the toys alone long enough, they get… angry.

They're like the toys from Toy Story: they demand to be played with. Each toy addicted to play, fun-junkies who just can't get enough, man. The toy phone will ring, tell you it has a call. The book will beg to be opened, beg to be played with, hungry for storytime. The puppy wants the baby to know: I love you, baby who I just met yesterday, baby who's name I don't know, baby who punches me and bites me and who later ignores me, I love you so much I'd kill for you.

You turn the puppy off and he goes silent.

But even the slightest vibration returns him to life.

You sneeze two rooms away and the puppy's back.

I love you, you hear.

The toy, talking to nobody.

It's a trap, you think.

* * *

One rhyme:

"Ring around the rosie / The doggy chase the kitty / Husha, husha / We all fall down."

What the fuck is that?

What happened to the pocket full of goddamn posies?

Rosie and Kitty don't rhyme!

…or maybe they do.

Maybe I've just lost my mind.

*blubber whimper sob*

* * *

A B C D E F G H I

Meow

Ring around the rosie

Ding ding ding

Riiiiiing riiiiing

Open! Close!

Ruff Ruff

Ear! Blue ear!

Elmo sleepy.

Up! Down!

IA IA CTHULHU FTHNAGN

I AM THE SONG THE WORLD SINGS WHEN IT DIES

KALI MA KALI MA KALI MA SHAKTI DE

THE ANGELS WENT SCREAMING INTO MOLTEN PLASTIC AS THE DEVIL LAUGHED

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA

It's learning time!

Ruff ruff!

* * *

All the while, as the chorus of mirth and madness plays on, the baby is hyper-crawling his way toward anything that's not actually a toy. For all the bounty that exists, he's happy trying to eat a ball of lint or head-butt the couch. Or, best of all, track down the actual dog, a dog who he perhaps loves more than anything in this world. I'm sure as my wife and I slowly descend into the caverns of lunacy, the boy will discover our drool-slick bodies supine on the floor and he will find great amusement in playing with our twitching fingers, our slackened jaws, our tightly-curled toesy-woesies.

And the toys will sing an electronic dirge to mark our mind-death.

Flash Fiction Challenge: Revenge Of The Sub-Genre Mash-Up

Last week's challenge — "Christmas In A Strange Place" — is live and deserving of your eyeballs. So, make with the clicky-clicky.

Someone the other day cited the sub-genre mash-up challenges — where I offer up a short list of weird sub-genres and you must choose two and force them to have sweet sweet story babies that result in the birth of your flash fiction response — and I thought, yes, yes, it's been a while, hasn't it?

And so here we are, again.

From this list of six sub-genres, choose two. Then mash them together into a single piece of flash fiction, no more than 1000-words long. Here, then, is the list:

Dystopian Sci-Fi!

Cozy Mysteries!

Slasher or Serial Killer!

Lost World!

Spy Fiction!

Bodice Ripper!

Not sure what one or some of these mean?

Demand answers from the Lords of Google.

You have one week. Till Friday, January 6th. 2012, baby.

Go forth, rock it big, and I'll see you kids next year. Have a killer rest of 2011, penmonkeys.

What Do You Want To See From Terribleminds?

So, the new year looms and I start to slowly, groggily come out of my holiday coma (just before I tackle New Year's Eve and guzzle liquor with friends) to start prepping the terribleminds Kickstarter for the New Year. The Kickstarter, as noted, will in part go toward making this site financially viable, but it will also have a concrete goal of updating this site somewhat (a terribleminds 2.0, if you will).

What I'm asking is, what do you want to see here in the new year?

Both in terms of content and in terms of changes to the actual site itself.

I do plan on putting up an e-store with merch. Though I'd love to know what kind of merch you'd be interested in seeing? Any suggestions would be appreciated and high-fived and sloppily-tongue-kissed.

But really, I'm talking about anything: what would make your terribleminds reading experience a better one? Give a shout. I'll see if it goes on the list.

2011 In The Rearview, 2012 In The Mirror Of My Shades

Looking back, staring forward. Standing on this head-of-the-pin moment between two years — an arbitrary distinction, perhaps, from when one calendar becomes useless and a new one must be hung, but a distinction just the same and a fine enough moment to pause and reflect.

Personally, it's been a good year. Nah, fuck that, it's been a great year.

Double Dead hit shelves. And is, I'm told, selling well. Well enough where — well, I won't spoil any of that news right now, but oh, there shall be news. Blackbirds and its protagonist, Miriam Black, found a home after a small but confidence-boosting bidding war, and now sits comfortably nestled in the arms of an Angry Robot. Further, it has a jaw-dropping cover that still geeks me out to this day. (You can totally read the first chapter of that book at the Angry Robot site, by the by.) The transmedia project I co-wrote with Lance Weiler, Collapsus, got nominated for an International Digital Emmy. Our short film, Pandemic (watch here!) was at Sundance and continues to get lots of attention.

I also self-published this year — six books starting last January. Sales have, on the whole, been excellent. Curiously, they're weakest for my fictional offerings. Shotgun Gravy sold well in the beginning but has since tapered off — I've got Bait Dog waiting in the wings to receive a good clean polish, but I want to see if I can get some more readers on board with Atlanta Burns #1 first. We'll see.

I read some fucking awesome books, too. I'm a picky finicky dickhead of a reader, but this year has been a bounty of great books –Robert McCammon's The Five and Hunter In The Woods; Christa Faust's Money Shot and Choke Hold and Hoodtown; Adam Christopher's Empire State; Anthony Neil Smith's Choke On Your Lies; Duane Swierzcynski's Fun and Games; Lauren Beukes' Zoo City; Matthew McBride's Frank Sinatra In A Blender; Matt Forbeck's Carpathia; John Hornor's Southern Gods; Stephen Blackmoore's City of the Lost and Dead Things (the bad-ass sequel, and it's a toss up as to whether it or Zoo City were my year's favorite reads). Certainly some I'm missing.

Of course, the biggest and craziest and most wonderful thing was the birth of this little dude:

The boy is a constant source of amusement and adoration, and even when he's not sleeping or karate kicking me in the trachea or accidentally drooling into my open mouth (seriously, that just happened the other day), he's an endless delight and so cute he'll turn even the hardest charcoal hearts into a big gooey wad of marshmallow fluff. We love him very much. I mean, duh.

Of course, a month before my son was born and a few days after my birthday, my dog of 13 years, Yaga, passed away. That was hard on us and sometimes, still is (I had a dream the other night I was playing with him in the snow — both a wonderful dream to have, and sad to wake up from and realize that it wasn't quite true), and it was strange that in the span of a single month my dog died and my son was born. Parity and opposition: life and death in all its finery.

Not everything worked out perfectly. The television pilot officially fell through with TNT, and our film project has momentum, but it's the momentum of a slowly-rolling kickball rather than the pinball's swiftness we'd hope for. Almost had an LA agent; that didn't quite click. Some friendships were made stronger this year. Some were decidedly not. Life progresses just the same.

I've said in the past and I'll say again: I don't truck with regret. Regret is perhaps one of the most worthless emotions we have as humans — we are who we are and all the moments and choices and happenstance has formed the equation that adds up to the sum of us. For good or bad, for better or for worse. Like who you are? Keep on keeping on. Don't like it? Change something. But don't get mired in regret. Your boots will get stuck there and you soon start to realize that it has no value, offers no function. Regret doesn't let you rewrite anything. You don't get a mulligan. It's one thing to find a lesson and to learn from it, but regret is something altogether more insidious and, at the same time, worthless.

So, fuck regret in the ear with a meerschaum pipe. Mostly because I wanted to say "meerschaum."

Onward, then, to 2012.

What will that bring?

Well, I can't know for sure.

Blackbirds and its sequel, Mockingbird, will land.

I'll continue to self-publish. I've got a novel — a creepy li'l something called The Altar — that begs to have the DIY treatment, I think. The outline is done, I just need to write it. (I make it sound so easy! Yeah. No.)

I'm almost halfway through Dinocalypse Now, the Spirit of the Century novel for Evil Hat. It features love triangles and professorial apes and psychic dinosaur goodness. It's a challenge to write, honestly — a good challenge, but a challenge just the same.

Speaking of Evil Hat, I've got a wealth of stories in from the Don't Rest Your Head anthology, called Don't Read This Book. Got some great authors on that one, so keep your grapes peeled.

I've got more plans for the website (Kickstarter, quite possibly) and for some other writing books that both do and do not come out of posts here on the blog.

More to come, more to come.

Thanks all for coming here and making for a great 2011.

Here's to 2012, then.

What's on your agenda for the new year?

Top 25 Terribleminds Posts Of 2011

This blog has seen its readership swell like a shoulder suffering from bursitis, like a river-sunk corpse, like me at Christmastime. (MMM COOKIES THEN BOURBON THEN COOKIES WHY PANTS NO FIT NOW FALL ASLEEP UNDER TREE ZZZZ) I mean, for real — in 2011, readership here almost quadrupled. I'm not sure if you're here because you think the site is funny or offers wisdom or simply because you like when I make poop jokes and say "motherfucker," but whatever the reason, I'm happy you're here.

It's always interesting to see which posts strike a chord and which don't — which ones catch fire and go "viral" via sites like Stumbleupon or what-have-you. Most of these top posts of the year come from this year, which is cool. A few standbys from 2010 show up again (dang, that Beware of Writer post keeps popping up here and there), but most of these are from the last 12 months. Plainly, the "Lists of 25″ posts are popular — I know some folks don't like "list" blog posts, and to them I apologize. It's just, lists are easily digestible online reading. You can read and skip and easily break a single post down into digestible snidbits. It also, for me, forces me to put more content in a given post. Each item needs to be packed with potent writer-flavored antioxidants, so (as with Twitter) it demands a certain brevity.

Anyway. Here, then, are the top 25 posts of the year here at jolly old terribleminds.

Thanks for coming by here, you silly little marmosets, you. I should ask:

What was your favorite post of the year?

1. 25 Things Every Writer Should Know

2. 25 Things You Should Know About Character

3. Beware Of Writer

4. 25 Ways To Fuck With Your Characters

5. Turning Writers Into Motherfucking Rock Stars

6. Why Your Novel Won't Get Published

7. 25 Things You Should Know About NaNoWriMo

8. Why Your Self-Published Book May Suck A Bag Of Dicks

9. Six Signs You're Not Ready To Be A Professional Writer

10. No, Seriously, I'm Not Fucking Around, You Really Don't Want To Be A Writer

11. 25 Things You Should Know About Storytelling

12. 25 Things You Should Know About Dialogue

13. Of Google-Plus And Circle Jerks

14. NaNoWhoNow? NaNoWriMo Dos And Don'ts

15. 25 Things You Should Know About Self-Publishing

16. 25 Ways To Become A Better Writer

17. 25 Things Writers Should Know About Rejection

18. 25 Things You Should Know About Plot

19. 25 Things You Should Know About Writing A Novel

20. How To Tell If You're A Writer

21. Lies Writers Tell

22. 25 Things You Should Know About Writing Horror

23. 25 Things Writers Should Know About Social Media

24. 25 Ways To Plot, Plan and Prep Your Story

25. Why Writers Drink

Your Top Three Books Of The Year?

Let's assume that now that the holidays have largely come and gone, folks have received e-readers aplenty. I don't have data on this, but I'm guessing it's true — I bet the Kindles were flying out of the Amazon warehouses like the whirring death-blades of Krull. (That's right. A Krull reference. Suck on that, Internet.)

So. Seems like a good time to, before the new year rises out of the desert sands and opens its jagged maw to swallow us and digest us in a belly thick with temporal juices, revisit the books you read this year.

Your top three reads this year?

Doesn't have to be books published in 2011.

Go.

Flash Fiction Challenge: "Christmas In A Strange Place"

First up, last week's challenge — "The Unexplainable Photo" — is live and worth checking out. Killer stories there. If you're looking for the next Blackbloom challenge this week — there shan't be one at present. The last challenge received only tepid response (I think eight total entries), which isn't enough to sustain the challenge. My hope (assumption?) is that the holidays maybe cut into the Blackbloom stuff, so I'll try again with the worldbuilding challenge in the new year. Check back in another two weeks. (Which means, the Create-Your-Own-Myth challenge is still open.)

For now, then, it's all flash fiction challenges, all the way down –

Today's challenge is simple enough.

The challenge is the phrase, "Christmas in a strange place."

What does that mean? I dunno. Prison? A distant moon? An underwater base? A WWII submarine? Your call. That's why it's a challenge, after all. Oh, except the challenge is heightened:

You've got till tomorrow, Christmas Eve, by noon EST, to write.

Not a week, then.

Merely one day.

You have up to 1000 words, as usual. Any genre. Post at your blog, make sure we have a link. By now I expect you know the drill, but there it is, just the same.

One random participant will receive… well, I don't know what. A holiday gift of sorts.

Now get to writing, my little elves and reindeer.

December 22nd

Was four years ago today that my father passed away, and I wrote a little something about it in one of my e-books, Revenge of the Penmonkey. Thought I'd take a piece out of that introduction and pop it here, talk a little bit about my father's death and what that meant for me as a writer. It's still a weird day for me and I guess that'll never change — my father died during the holidays and so did his father (a grandfather I never met) and I know that troubled him every time this season came sneaking up on us. Well, whatever the case, here's that thing I wrote. Thanks for reading.

* * *

A lot of stories are, at the heart, Daddy Issue stories. Star Wars. Lost. Hell, remember that scene in Die Hard where John McClane finds out that Hans Gruber is his father? I'm pretty sure I have that right.

This one is no different.

It's not unique to writers, this story. Everybody's got someone in their hearts they're trying to appease. Or live up to. Or blame for their troubles. Often a parent. Or a parental figure. Or even a child.

Even when I'd finally left the day job and concentrated on writing full-time, my Dad never really seemed all that interested in hearing about my work, though he had let go of that old harangue about writing not being a real job. I figured, okay, we've reached a peaceful stalemate, here. I'll keep doing what I do, and he'll pretend I do something else and never the twain shall meet.

Cut to a couple years later. I was by that point married and the wife and I took a trip to visit my Dad at his new house in Colorado. We fished and drank margaritas and drove ATVs and hit up every lunatic yard sale we could find in the desert and the mountains and all was well.

Then came the day I met George. George, my father's closest friend out West, maybe all over. I'd met him once before but only briefly. The wife and I returned from an ATV trip out in the BLM lands that adjoined my father's property and there stood George in the driveway, shootin' the shit with Dad.

We went up and started talking to George and he jumped right into talking about my writing. Animatedly. About my script work in particular but also the novels and the freelancing. He knew about all of it. Details I wouldn't have thought my father retained, much less shared with anybody else. Then George said, "Oh, your Dad always talks about all the great things you're doing, he's so proud of what you've accomplished."

Blink, blink.

Awestruck.

Now, maybe you get this, maybe you don't. But to me, a son hearing that his father is proud of him—especially a father who has never been particularly forthcoming with that information—is like trumpets and fireworks and parading elephants and a marching band going through your head oomphing out your favorite song. It's equal parts epiphany and apotheosis as all the tumblers in your lock fall into place and a big door opens up and inside the frame of that door is your father and, gods and little fishes, he's actually proud of you. Proud enough to tell his friends about you.

It was a big moment. It was, as alcoholics describe it, a moment of clarity.

Crystalline, clean, revitalizing.

I felt like I was no longer fighting to prove something, but rather, to live up to something.

From that point forward writing became more about the promise than the protest.

 

* * *

 

Dad died about a year later. Prostate cancer that was allowed to get out of control. Got into the lymph and then took off like a shot. They thought they had it under control but it had found its way into an unholy host of his organs and things weren't looking so hot.

In the hospital, we revisited a lot of the old stories, but I got to hear new ones, too. Like how he was involved in a knife fight at a bar, or how he helped accidentally start a small riot at Veterans Stadium during a Phillies game (and was banned fruitlessly from Phillies games in the future). A theme found its way into those stories: all the fights my father had been in. Because this was another fight, this scrap with cancer, this tangle with Death. He'd won all his skirmishes in the past and, we all imagined he'd win this skirmish, too. Worse for wear, but alive just the same.

It was maybe a week later that they put him on hospice care. My wife, my sister and I went to see him and it was really quite strange because that day everybody and their mother showed up at his house—all uncoordinated, all unbeknownest to one another. Family and co-workers and old friends.

He looked like a ghost. Could barely speak. I don't know what meds they had him on but they were serious. At a point he lurched upright and decided to go upstairs and my uncle went with him while I waited at the bottom of the stairs. My uncle called my name. I went up. Found my father sitting there in his room, just starting to slump over.

I went to one side of him, my uncle on the other. I held the old man. Touched his neck. Felt his pulse literally stop. And then he lurched up, took a great big heaving intake of breath, as if he were emerging from the bracing waters of a frozen pond—

And that was it. Last breath. He was gone. We lifted him up and carried him to his bed and… you could tell that he wasn't in there anymore.

 

* * *

 

Kind of fucked me up for a while, his death. It came on the heels of other deaths, too—both grandmothers, a beloved aunt. I channeled it into my writing, though not necessarily consciously. I just know that in my 20s I was only peripherally aware of death but suddenly it was something I was forced to deal with in a very big and very real way, and further, was forced to realize that I, too, was going to die some day.

I don't want to create some kind of object lesson out of my father's passing—it should be enough that he led and left this life, but just the same, I can't help but find some kind of truth in there. Dad was a man who lived for his retirement. He always had his eye on that prize, always looking to the end game, and willing to endure whatever career miseries he had to endure because at the end of the tunnel was pension and social security and Colorado and hunting whenever he wanted to and the freedom to travel. And the real shame of it is, he only made it a couple-few years into that retirement, and that was that. Game over.

That's a telling thing, a sad lesson not just for writers, but for anybody. And I recognize that it's a lesson of some privelege, but the lesson remains true just the same: you can't live for what's coming, you have to live for what's going on now. Because you don't have any guarantees that tomorrow you won't fall down a sinkhole or catch pneumonia or be crushed beneath a chunk of frozen shit falling off the underside of a 747 passing overhead. Life is sometimes long, but it's also short at the same time. We only get one turn on the carousel. And so it behooves you to try to be the best person you can right now. It demands you try to go out and do the things that make you happy—not tomorrow, but today.

Because nobody knows what tomorrow may bring, or if it will come at all.