Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 281

Human Google Makes Twitter Chili

In case you missed it, once upon a time I wrote an article titled, "In Twitter We Trust." The article, found at The Escapist, basically posits the notion that our circle of trust — which comprises and completes that mystical thing we call "word-of-mouth" — is broadened greatly by use of social media. Further, it puts forth the idea that social media can, in a hive-mindy way, become what I call "Human Google."

Ask the Twitter hive-mind a question, get an answer.

Try it. It's good clean fun.

You can ask the hive-mind anything, really. How's that new movie? How do I spackle a hole in drywall? Pants, or no pants? Why does my right nipple excrete a fluid that could be described as both "buttery" and "Satanic?" Ask a question, get an answer. A perfect system.

The great thing about Human Google is that it offers us something that search engines generally don't — and maybe can't: meaningful filter. Google doesn't know me. It wants to. It thinks that some alchemical combination of data "cookies" defines me, but it doesn't. What defines me is, in part, my relationships to others. So, when I say to Google, "Hey, Google, what are the essential ingredients for chili?" it returns to me 180,000+ results. And even on the first page, it has my question wrong in spaces — it thinks I'm talking about chili powder, or Thai chilis, or Rozonda Thomas from the defunct R&B girl group, TLC. (Okay, it didn't really think I was talking about her until the fourth or fifth page.)

On the other hand, when I turn to Twitter and I say, "Hello, excellent humans of Twitter, please bequeath unto me the essential ingredients to chili," I get a flood of great answers.

What did I learn?

Well, I learned that chili recipes are as individual as the people who make it. I mean, snowflakes don't have shit on the uniqueness of chili. We're not talking subtle regional variants. We're talking straight up different animals. This goes well-beyond the Texas Versus Cincinnati cage match. This goes far past the muddy trenches of beans versus no beans. Ingredients given included, but were not limited to: ground beef, stew beef, steak, short rib, pork, bison, Italian sausage, chicken, chorizo, tomato sauce, tomato paste, pinto beans, kidney beans, chili beans, white beans, black beans, beer, Coca-Cola, Scotch, coffee, Jalapenos, Chipotles, Anaheims, Thai hots, bell peppers, sweet peppers, habaneros, Sriracha, Tabasco sauce, cinnamon, cumin, cilantro, onion, carrots, celery, giardiniera, garlic, lime juice, fish sauce, cocoa, melted chocolate, butternut squash, peanut butter, molasses, human souls, and dictators.

I now believe that there may be no more diverse a dish than a bowl of goddamn chili.

Anyway, this is what I put in my chili yesterday: ground round, ground pork, two sweet bell peppers, one yellow onion, two Jalapeno peppers, a small can of tomato paste, a medium can of diced tomatoes, a large can of tomato puree, one cup of dark black coffee, a 1/4 cup of apple cider vinegar, two TBs of Worcestershire sauce, two TBs of brown sugar, two bay leaves, a bunch of diced garlic (cooked with the meat), sweet smoky paprika, cumin, chili powder, cocoa chili powder, cayenne, ground pepper, a squirt of Sriracha. Simmer for six hours. At the end of it, top of fresh grated Havarti cheese (all I had on hand, but worked really well) and fresh lime juice.

Let me tell you — and this came from Justin Achilli and others, this suggestion — the lime juice is the fucking kicker, the corker, the game winner. I mean, it totally elevated the flavor profile of this chili. I will never again make chili without that final spurt of lime juice at the finish line.

Great stuff. And crowdsourced in part by the power of Human Google. Computers don't need to give us the answers. Computers can merely facilitate us giving one another the answers.

That, and really weird porn.

Worldbuilding Is A Kind Of Masturbation

I stand here planning for a new project, and this new project demands all manner of monstrous monstrousness (or, rather, creature-flavored creatureology), and in that, I want to wrap my head around the world in which the project's tale will take place. In doing so, I envision the task before me…

…which manifests as a deep dark hole waiting at my feet. Occasionally I see shapes squirming down there in the tenebrous depths: glinty flinty eyes and writhing labial squid beasts and snot-slick hell-squirrels flying little rotflcopters and other assorted hallucinations of one's infinite (and utterly diseased) mind. Horrific as it may sound, as a writer I am delighted by such morbid fantastical explorations and it is therefore quite tempting to leap boldly forth and pirouette in mid-air and plunge into that fictional chasm where the monsters lurk, where realms untold await, where the hell-squirrels worship their belching hell-squirrel god.

I could truly get lost in there.

I could wander its disturbed creative depths, a man lost in a maze of his own making.

Ah, but I am given pause. I have a story to tell, after all. I have a book to write from this. If I engage with my made-up world endlessly anon, then the book will never get done. And it is then that I am reminded (as I have said this in the past): worldbuilding is a kind of masturbation. It is not in and of itself a bad thing so much as it can be a fruitless endeavor given over only to the expression of onanistic narrative ejaculations — *fap fap fap* and blammo! Upon the page I eject my wad and leave behind in crumpled-up story tissues endless pages revealing the lineage of the unicorn-kings, the ancient language of the Flarnsmen of Jibeau, the secret geomantic architectural blueprints of the chattering hell-squirrels.

My thesis, then, is this:

Worldbuilding should be a slave to storytelling, not vice versa.

Okay, Squid Beast, What The Hell Does That Mean, Exactly?

It means, quite simply: in terms of doing any prep-work for your story, it behooves you to first conceive of the story you want to tell at all levels of complexity (from the barest level of boy meets girl to the more complex outline, treatment or synopsis) and then use the world to prop up your story. Worldbuilding can:

Fill in blanks, drive home theme, untangle plot knots, accentuate the characters, it can even bring about fresh and unexpected conflict. (It can probably do more, I just got lazy and stopped thinking about it.)

But my opinion  is that worldbuilding can only easily do these things for you if you let it serve the story (rather than putting a gun to the head of the story and forcing it to serve the setting).

Here There Be Hell-Squirrels: The Dangers Of World-Building

To be clear, I am not saying that worldbuilding is itself bad — how I could I possibly justify that as a guy who (much as I myself hate to do it) puts outlining and prep-work on a pedestal?

What I'm suggesting is that worldbuilding-before-story-conception threatens you, the intrepid penmonkey, with a number of perils which could ensnare your best efforts.

What perils, you ask?

First, as noted, it's quite easy to get lost in worldbuilding and do so endlessly without ever accomplishing anything of substance. When I recently stared down the barrel of this upcoming project, I opened my notefile and started furiously taking notes and then — an hour later, I was left to wonder, what the hell am I doing? None of this matters in terms of the story I want to tell. It's just piffle, waffle, kerfuffle, and other words ending in -ffle. Was it a fun distraction? Sure. It was lovely. As a pure creative exercise I guess it had some merit. But it did nothing to help me understand my story better. I was just playing with myself.

Second, a story offers you boundaries. You work on an outline or at least have an idea in your mind as to the story you want to tell, that story is like a fence or, better still, the dark lines of an image in a coloring book. You've created margins, and from that point, worldbuilding is about staying in the margins. If you lead with world creation, however, you're in danger of going so far astray that you have no focus, no purpose, no theme or mood or character hooks or whatever. It's like going to Home Depot and buying up the whole tool department just to hang a fucking painting. Rein yourself in, you frothy stallion, you.

Third, it's easy to become obligated to the storyworld over your story. "Oh," you say, "I worked so very hard on describing the psychic pseudo-cultural breeding habits of the unicorn-kings, and even though I don't really have any place for them exactly, I don't want to waste the 11,000 words I've expended on this subject. And so I shall include a chapter in my book about it. The reader will consider it bonus material!"

Fourth, and this is related to the last point: uncontrolled worldbuilding threatens to intrude upon your tale in the form of the much-and-correctly-reviled… infodump. "Here! I will now force-feed you the fruits of my world-building labors!" *splurch*

And Now A Deviation Into Kidney-Punching Fantasy Novels

I used to like fantasy novels as a kid, but less so these days. It's not that I don't still enjoy them — theoretically, I do — but rather that I never know when a good fantasy series is going to suddenly become mesmerized by its own worldbuilding. Too many novels devolve this way and go goo-goo ga-ga over their own sense of setting and culture. It drives me a bit buggy. A popular series of fantasy novels which rhymes with The Meal Of Wine or perhaps The Glockenspiel Of Crime started off at a rip-roaring pace. But then each book got slower and slower, trapped deeper and deeper in its own mire of story-world minutiae. By Book Number Seventy-Four-And-A-Half, the entire 1,242 page epic took place over seven minutes and spent approximately 14,000 words on the subject of fabric.

Then again, these books sold approximately one jizzillion copies, so maybe you shouldn't listen to me.

Writer Paul S. Kemp (whose website is here and who writes awesome Star Wars books using his mighty thews) said something interesting on Twitter yesterday, though: "Incidentally, one of the reasons I love Sword & Sorcery is the de-emphasis on worldbuilding and focus on characters." I say this without having devoted a great deal of effort to disprove it, but I agree with him. I think part of it is procedural: pulp writers didn't have a lot of time to dick around with worldbuilding. They just had to get their hands dirty and jump right in. Even still, it's an interesting lesson.

This Is Less True (And Perhaps Not True At All) If You're Writing Games

By the way, and maybe I should've said this earlier, I don't consider this lesson all that hearty if you're working on game narrative rather than something more linear. I've noted in the past that traditional storytelling is about communicating the story of the author, whereas game-based storytelling is about communicating–or, rather, facilitating–the story of the game player.

In that case, worldbuilding is king. I come from the roleplaying industry, and there it's very much about getting muddy in the trenches and talking up the crazy culture of vampire horticulture or about the designer drugs of mystic hobo hermaphrodites. There you have a license to sort of create wantonly, but in traditional storytelling you are more reined in.

How does this figure into transmedia? Uhhhh. Answer unclear, ask again later? No, really, I don't know. I think to some degree transmedia efforts sometimes feel hollow or shallow (or perhaps even shollow!) because they spend so much time on the worlds they build and so little time on the stories that drive the experience. Then again, if the transmedia components are largely game-based, well…

*throws down smoke bomb, avoids topic, lets you people talk about it*

I Like Italics

Seriously, just look around. Italics everywhere.

YMMV, IMHO, Bippity-Boppity-Boo

I'm not saying you cannot worldbuild.

I'm not saying you shouldn't worldbuild.

I am merely saying that the worlds you build should be in service to the stories you want to tell. You may choose to do otherwise, and you may in fact choose to do otherwise quite successfully. But, as always, terribleminds is very much about the writing life I happen to lead, and this is one of those things I believe about myself in terms of Getting The Job Done With Minimum Fuss And Narrative Masturbation.

Feel free to slip-and-slide down in the comments. Am I crazy? Am I full of shit? Am I onto something despite my crazy full-of-shittedness? Sound off, my little hell-squirrels.

Storytelling And The Art Of Sadness

Sadness is not a particularly jazzy topic, is it? It's actually rather enervating. You bring up "sadness" and it's not like — "Whoo! Haha! Fucking yes. Wendig is talking about sadness! Grief? Regret? Sorrow? Loss? Uhh, hello — yes, yes, yes and yes. Hot diggity dog! This is like an amusement park ride inside my brain!"

*rad guitar lick*

*fills pants with the effluence of joy*

Who the fuck wants to talk about sad shit? Blech. I don't know what day it is in your house, but it's Monday all up in mine, and on Monday, I'd much rather be looking forward to more delightful topics: "Yesterday, I had a wonderful spot of tea with a particularly irascible leprechaun and his wombat steed! The finger sandwiches were made of children's laughs! Unbridled wonder and pegasus dreams!"

Alas. It just ain't to be. Because today I want to talk about sadness in storytelling.

I'm going to say something now — a thing that is unproven and only barely thought of (shut up, it's Monday, I can hardly feel my legs), but slosh it around your brain-mouth, see how it tastes:

At the heart of every good story lurks sadness.

I've talked in the past about a story's "emotional core" (in a post where I also refer to it as the "narrative vagina"), but here I'm wondering if the emotional core has a core all its own — like the black cyanide seeds at the heart of an apple — and that core is composed of raw, unfiltered sadness.

I don't mean to suggest that sadness lurks at the heart of only sad stories — to that, I offer an exclamatory "duh!" and I roll my eyes and make jerk-off motions with both my hands, to which you then say, "Chuck, both hands? That's overkill, don't you think?" And I nod gamely and then cry into my big heaping bowl of Frankenberry cereal. (This should at least explain why my beard is both pink and milky.)

What the fuck was I talking about?

Oh! Right. Sadness doesn't merely lurk at the heart of sad stories, but rather, at the heart — the heart's heart — of all stories. Or, at least, all good ones. The sadness needn't be overt or outright. It doesn't have to be the driving force behind a protagonist's goals and desires, but it feels like it should still be there, behind the scenes. Let's take two films that are not ostensibly sad and find the sadness in them.

First up: DIE HARD.

Die Hard is not what anybody would call a "sad movie," unless you're someone who gets choked up at the needless loss of yet another charming, smarmy German terrorist-thief. Ultimately, it's a tense, kick-ass, high-octane and sometimes hilarious action movie. It is, in some ways, the Big Daddy of all actioners.

And yet, I posit that at the heart of the film nests a squirming knot of sadness.

Think about the motivations behind the protagonist: John McClane hasn't seen his wife in a while because they are ultimately distant and estranged. They have children who are with her, not him. He's a guy who's too good at his job, and she's a lady who's too good at hers, and we get the sense that only some kind of cataclysmic movement is going to shatter their pride and get these two crazy kids back together.

Holy shit, that's fucking sad, man. Isn't it? Broken marriage? Disrupted family? The sadness is only exacerbated when their first meeting ends with a fight which is in turn interrupted by, ohhh, a bunch of cranky Germans with automatic weaponry.

Then you have Powell, who is a sad sack if ever there was one. He's not pathetic, not exactly, but his story is tragic: he shoots a kid, ends up at a desk afraid to use his gun, gets fat, is played mostly as comic relief until we realize at the heart of this underdog is a goddamn police dog — loyal and ready to come off the leash.

Note that the story doesn't have to end on sadness — I'm just saying that sadness has to be in there, it has to be in the mix, it has to live at the very nucleus of your fiction.

Second not-sad-but-secretly-actually-sad: STAR WARS.

Sure, sure, at it's heart is a giddy yahoo space opera galactic romp across the Cosmic Wild West, but goddamn, you peel back the skin and you find a lot of sadness in there across both trilogies: in the "first" movie (A New Hope), we're punched in the face by sad news time and time again. Dead father (who, okay, isn't so much dead as he is evil machine guy)! Crispy aunt and uncle! Exploding Alderaan! Tortured princess! Sacrificial mentor! Porkins asplodes into bacon bits! The other films don't lack for sadness, either: Daddy issues, dead Yoda, murdered children, lost limbs, executed Jedi, a mother who gets… I dunno, molested by Sand People, and so on, and so forth. Sadness runs rampant.

Shit, the very end of Return of the Jedi features what is ultimately a happy triumph over evil, but even buried in that is a deeply sad and common human experience: a son's death-bed reconciliation with his estranged father. Yes, the reconciliation is ultimately a positive thing, but it is an event supercharged with the power of regret and grief. Makes you blubber and weep.

Sadness is a powerful storytelling component.

So. What does this mean for you, the storyteller?

I think it means this: when you embark upon a story, you should ask yourself, "What sadness lurks at the heart of this tale?" Find it. Dig for it. If none exists, create it. It's a fucked up thing we have to do — manufacturing sadness — but it's ultimately as necessary to good fiction as conflict. In fact, one might wonder if sadness is the secret impulsion that fuels good narrative conflict.

Find the sadness. And keep looking for it as you write, too. Nothing is more powerful to us than grief and loss — we then look to the storyteller to answer a fundamental question of, can we overcome it, or will it overcome us? What can be done with sadness? How will we ever reconcile grief and tragedy?

What I'm trying to say is –

Happy Monday, everyone!

(Feel free to throw more examples below in the comments — or, alternately, challenge the assertion. Is sadness really a necessary component to good storytelling? Or am I just talking out of my ass?)

The Carnival Of Pimpage Is Open

As noted yesterday in my missive of squawks and hoots, I think it's important to use the Internet for good as well as evil. Here, then, is another expression of that.

Put on your pimp hat (mine is denim fringe). Whip out your pimp cane (mine is topped with a golden dodo skull). Slip on your pimp slippers (mine are made from the hide of a rare lavender ermine who, as a baby ermine, was fed a constant diet of smooth jazz). Because it's time to do some pimping.

I want you to pimp somebody or something.

Not yourself. Not one of your own projects.

The work of another. A blog post. A book. A game. A tweet.

Or, if not their work, fuck it, just say something awesome about somebody. Regale the world with tales, tales about your pimp target's kind ways, tremendous hands, humorous outlook, and truly magnificent genitals.

I will use my time on the pimp floor to point you once more to author Robert McCammon.

McCammon is why I write.

I won't sit here and regale you with an obsequious soliloquy of why he will rock your eyeface because, frankly, I already did that shit (no, seriously, blog post right here).

I'll merely note this: the man, once retired from writing because the industry tried to pigeonhole him, is back with new books that you damn well better pre-order.

First up: THE FIVE, his first true horror novel in a while, about a rock band? And an Iraq war vet? Not sure where it goes from there, but if it's from McCammon, it's going to get twisted. You can pre-order the book over at Subterranean Press.

Second up: THE HUNTER IN THE WOODS revisits the Nazi-killing werewolf spy, Michael Gallatin in a series of short stories and novellas. (If you haven't read the novel featuring Gallatin, THE WOLF'S HOUR, do that immediately or be cast out of my drum circle.) Once again, you can pre-order this collection over yonder hills at Subterranean Press.

This is actually also a good time to note that Subterranean Press has an impressive list of other pre-orders, which features kick-ass writers such as Ray Bradbury, China Mieville, John Scalzi and Joe Lansdale. They are one of my favorite small publishers.

So, there you go. The pimp-doors are open.

Pimp-walk your ass inside and get to pimpin'.

How We Speak On The Internet Matters

Yesterday, Will Hindmarch — a writer, game designer and thinker I respect dearly — said something smart on Twitter (which for him is not uncommon). He said, "I think how you write something makes a difference, especially when you're doling out writing and creative advice."

This is somewhat perpendicular to another meme that's going around, which is a question over the value of negativity on these here frothy Intertubes. Lots of questions abound: can critique find a healthy place on the Internet? Is there any value to negative reviews? Should negative reviews be constructive instead of destructive? Should we build up and not tear down? Should we be, as the saying goes, a fountain, not a drain? (Related reading: "Do You Like Anything?" At the Seven Keys of Ventoozlar.)

I say these two points are perpendicular because I think they hit an intersection point. (They hit this intersection point after dodging all the rampant pornography, Justin Bieber fan pages, Justin Bieber hate pages, political rhetoric, and funny YouTube videos where some skateboarder accidentally skateboards his way into the whirring turbine of a 747 airliner — this is, after all, the Internet and the Internet is home to 90% Alice In Wonderland-style nonsense and madness and maybe 10% of sane, semi-rational discourse.)

The intersection of those two ideas, for me, really ends up with: how we speak on the Internet matters.

It matters when you're talking about writing or game design advice.

It matters when you're offering critique or review.

It matters when you're writing dumb-ass crazy person blog posts like I do, here.

It matters on Twitter. It matters on Facebook. It just plain matters.

At first I was going to say that all this remains especially true for creators: after all, our value is in what we create, and we can only give the world our creations if the world wants them, and the world may not want our shit if they think we're just a gaggle of blustery fuckwipes. ("Blustery Fuckwipes" is not the name of my band, my album, my first novel, or my autobiography. It is the name of my pet ferret, who wears goggles and an aviator's hat. "Blustery Fuckwipes," I say, "Take us to to Mach Speed so that we may catch the Chartreuse Baron in his Sopwith Ultra-Thousand!" No, I don't know. Shut up.) But it's not just true for us. It's true for everybody. Everybody is selling something. Everybody is looking for work. For friends. For loved ones. For something. And how we speak on the Internet has an effect on all of that.

In this day and age, the Internet isn't just a reasonable facsimile of real life but rather, a substitute for it. People spend as much time online as they do off of it, and while that merits a whole other discussion, it doesn't change the reality that a great deal of our social discourse is here. It's not outside our doors. It's on our computer monitors. The people online aren't avatars or characters. They're actual human beings like the same blubbery skin-bags you see at the grocery store or the malt shoppe or the dildo emporium.

Now, I think the knee-jerk response to this revelation is a kind of paranoid uncertainty (which I've felt keenly in the past) — "I shouldn't present a strong opinion because then I'll make people mad." But that's not it, either. Because our opinions are important. Whether it's about a movie we saw or about labor unions or abortion or the publishing industry or whatever, our opinions frame us and tell the world who we are.

So no, I don't think we should be afraid of critique or review, nor do I think we should be afraid of having opinions or giving advice. I just think that how we convey that matters. The message matters most, but what that message purports to be — what supposed truth it delivers — can't matter if it's poorly put forth.

Here's an example, then, of how it matters:

Yesterday, Colleen Lindsay called me and said that she wanted to talk to me about taking a look at her Sekrit Projekt. She said, right off the bat, that she wanted to connect with me because she thought that I was funny and fairly upbeat and — well, wasn't a constant wearer of Internet Cranky Pants. Now, I'll grant that some of you might be furrowing your brow — after all, I'm the guy who says things like Why Your Self-Published Book Might Suck A Bag Of Dicks. Or, PC Gaming Can Punch A Baby Seal. I'm not Doctor Thumbs-Up over here. I'm not Joe Smileynuts. That being said, I do endeavor to put forth a certain attitude in even my most extreme rhetoric — an attitude that aims to be self-deprecating, imperfect, funny, and that allows room for me to be the wrong-headed asshole. I have strong opinions, but I do not try to present those strong opinions as if they are also bulletproof. Do I misstep? Sure. I strive to do better.

Anyway. Them's my Saturday morning rambles. For a long time I kind of worried that strong opinions were the concern, but I'm coming to terms that having opinions isn't the problem, but rather, it's how we give those opinions out. We can pitch them at people's heads like frozen shit-balls, or we can make some effort to deliver them so that they don't put out somebody's eye in the process.

This is all of course provided your opinion isn't, "I like to stomp babies" or "I loathe Algerians and I think we should institute a pogrom." Some opinions won't hold water no matter how nicely you frame them.

(To go back to the beginning, I assume that Will was referring in some way to this post that asserts that game designers are somehow playtesting incorrectly, as if such a thing were possible. I read that article and to me, it's very much an example of what I'm talking about. It felt pedantic and cranky. I found a few snidbits of wisdom in there, but I had to read it a couple times just to get past the bad attitude. It's like hiding pretty little pearls in a bucket filled with thorns and snakes. Don't make me reach in there to find your wisdom because that does nothing to earn anybody's respect.)

"I Don't Drink Anymore"

This is my own entry into the SHACKLETON'S SCOTCH flash fiction challenge I posed yesterday. You… are going to get in on this challenge, right? You know you want to.

She stands outside the brownstone under sodium light.

The bruises have begun to fade. The cuts – on her lips and chin, across her brow, on her hands – have long-crusted over. She's going to have the limp for a while, but oh well.

The case in her hands is heavy. But worth it. Because it's her way back in.

Jack answers the door. Is he happy to see her? Or just puzzled?

"Amanda," he says.

"I know you love Scotch," is the first thing to come out of her mouth even though she hasn't seen him for years, and she thrusts the case up and hopes he'll take it. "This isn't just Scotch, though, this is the real deal, a, a, a really rare…" She's nervous. She shouldn't be nervous. Given everything. But she imagines the kiss—their first in a long time, the first since everything happened."I went through a lot to get it for you."

* * *

The spider monkey screamed and kicked her in the face, sending up a spray of sweat.

Another leapt onto her back, hooting and shrieking.

Amanda grabbed the one from behind, used him like a reaper's scythe to knock the other monkey's feet out from under, letting go as she completed the move so they both bowled into one another. They crashed into the corner of the courtyard, knocking over a terracotta pot of reedy Cyperus papyrus. The pair of gangly primates clambered atop one another, hissing, and in the deep of their throats she saw the winking red light.

"What is it you want?" Kebir said, stroking the fennec fox that stood on his bony left shoulder the way an angel might perch on a pin. The gun in his hand pointed at her heart.

"I want Delacroix," she said.

Kebir crossed the space between them. He pressed the gun between her breasts.

"But you don't know where he is."

"I know he's here. In Tangiers."

Kebir smiled. His gums were puckered and pulled away from the teeth. "If only I would tell you where."

His eyes went wide as he realized: Amanda had the khanjar knife with its camel bone handle against Kebir's manhood. Kebir sighs.

"…Delacroix is beneath Benhaddou."

* * *

"It looks… old," Jack says. He doesn't take the case. Her arms tremble.

"It's not just old. It's rare." She smiles. "Rarest of the rare. Like you. Like us."

* * *

She had Delacroix by his wife-beater, her knee in his pumpkin gut, his blubbering head held over a yawning chasm. Beneath him, giant stone gears boomed and growled as they turned. Stones from beneath him tumbled into the abyss, swiftly pulverized by the hungry cogs.

"You know what I want!" she yelled over the din.

"I don't have it! I told you! Please."

Behind them, streams of sand whispered from above: a shard of earth tumbled and shattered. The bodies of the robot soldiers lay half-buried.

The whole place was coming down. All the trip-wires and trigger stones. Leading to this. But she wasn't going to think about that now.

"Who?" she asked. "Who."

"Krüger! I sold it to Krüger." He wept. It gave her pause, this grown man crying so. It was all he needed. His pudgy hand shot out, grabbing a fistful of sand and throwing it in her eyes. Amanda toppled from his prodigious body, her vision watery, blinking away the stinging sand-born tears, and by the time she could again see, Delacroix was ducking down a hidden side-passage, the wall closing fast behind him.

It didn't matter. She had a name. And it explained so much. The monkeys. The robots.

* * *

He wasn't taking it. She didn't understand.

"It's really been a long time," he says. He looks then over his shoulder. What is he looking for? She imagines making love to him again. How sweet it will be.

* * *

Krüger danced around the room with the eyedropper, pirouetting this way, waltzing that way. He tilted his handsome head back, extending his tongue, and then placed a drop of amber liquid there. Krüger was like a child catching snowflakes. He laughed.

Then: a tap-shuffle-slide over to his wall of super-soldiers. Nine of them. Each a Frankenstein stitching of flesh, plastic, and metal. Krüger grabbed the jaw of one, yanking it downward. He squeezed the eyedropper's bulb and dropped a liquid dot in the soldier's mouth.

Slowly, the cyborg's eyes opened and focused. The half-man shifted in his bonds.

Krüger sashayed to the next in line, whistling.

But he didn't make it. The butt of a rifle cracked him in the back of the head.

He looked up from the ground. Amanda eased the mouth of the .30-30 against his throat.

"You look like hell," Krüger said.

She did. Split lip. Blood from a forehead gash. Worse, she still had the limp from escaping the collapsing tomb beneath Aït Benhaddou. Krüger's tower defenses were top-notch.

"I'm taking Shackleton's Scotch," she said.

"Without it, how will I fuel my beautiful babies?"

She shrugged. "You won't. I need it for someone."

"Do I see love in your eye?"

That old romantic. "You do."

"Then you may have it." He laughed, but then suddenly yelled: "Kill her!"

The super-soldier puffed out his chest, snapping the metal bar holding him in place. The cyborg screamed, a metallic wail—

Bang.

Amanda put a bullet in his eye.

The cyborg fell like a stack of teacups.

Krüger looked crushed. "Sorry," she told him, then kicked him in the face.

* * *

"I don't drink anymore," Jack says, retreating a step.

"No, wait," she says, laughing because this suddenly seems so absurd. "This is Shackleton's Scotch. Lost. Preserved in the Antarctic ice for 100 years. Nobody else is going to taste this. Nobody but you and me." She feels her heart sink. "You love Scotch."

The door opens behind him. A little girl no older than three runs out—all pigtails and footy pajamas and freckle-cheeks—and hugs his leg. "Daddy, Daddy, story-time!"

"It really has been a long time," he says again, and she's not sure if it's an apology or an explanation or what. But then he retreats another step, and another, and he and the little girl go back inside and the door closes with a gentle, hesitant click.

"I love you," Amanda says to the door. She leaves the case on the steps.

Shackleton's Scotch: A Flash Fiction Challenge

This is the stuff that flash fiction is made of, kids.

Your reading material: "Explorers' Century-Old Whisky Found In Antarctic."

When Ernest Shackleton abandoned the trip 100 miles from its completion, he left behind his whisky. And they just found it. Someone's going to drink it. They might even try to replicate it.

It's an awesome story all by itself.

But seems to me that from this seed-bed of awesomeness can grow a kick-ass tale.

So, you've got 1000 words.

The story should be in some way directly or obliquely tied to the notion of "Shackleton's Scotch."

Doesn't matter if the story is genre or otherwise. Just make it awesome.

Write it up on your own personal bloggery-spaces, then toss the link here in the comments.

No prize. No voting. Just write a kick-ass flash fiction tale because you want to write a kick-ass flash fiction tale. If you're asking yourself why do it… well, nobody's making you. But this is a good place to reveal your fiction and show off some skills. Also a good place to forge community and connections — not in a professional exploitation way but in the, "Hey, I've never read your stuff before, it's awesome, I want to have your word babies" way.

You've got one week. We'll revisit this topic next Friday (1/25), see what came up and out of your diseased little minds. Jump right in with both feet. Shackleton's Scotch.

Go.

Time To Talk About The Thing About That Teacher

This is what I imagine it's like to be a teacher in America:

It's like trying to bring God to the apes. You don't descend into their habitat but rather, ship the apes by bus to you. There, you try illuminate the apes — or chimps, or orangutans — and deliver wisdom unto them, but let's be honest: apes don't give a grunting squat about God or any illumination you aim to give them. They're apes, for Chrissakes. They just want to fling shit and pick ticks and eat bananas and ball each other. Because they are apes. And so day in, day out, you try your hardest to "get through" to these ooking primates, and every once in a while you manage to connect with one and you think, "That one, that one may just evolve into higher creature." But for the most of the time, you're just scrubbing ape poop out of your hair and trying to remember exactly which one of them taught the others to play with matches. After a few years of this, you're either a hardened cynic, a battle-torn skeptic, a who-gives-a-shit-laissez-faire pacifist or a twitching pee-stained educator with ape-caused Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I say this having been one of those apes.

I was a pretty good student and, frankly, not that bad of a kid. Even still, school kinda sucked. I didn't want to be there. Few of my fellow students wanted to be there. Already that's a barrier for the teacher: even your best and brightest students would rather be anywhere else in the world.

So, I'm sympathetic to teachers. I do not doubt that it can be rewarding, and I also know that some teachers in this area get paid pretty well (too well, if you read and believe all the angry "We Hate Teachers" signs), but even still, anybody who would paint for you a picture that teaching is some kind of joyous cakewalk has never washed chimpanzee vomit out of their knickers.

And so we come to this news story.

Basic gist: teacher writes a mostly anonymous blog about all kinds of stuff and sometimes writes about educational woes — she calls out whiny, lazy kids and their buddy-buddy parents. Someone (a parent?) finds the blog, casts it far and wide, brings it to the attention of the school board and principal, and wham, the teacher is escorted from the building and may end up getting fired.

Do I think her blog was the best idea? No, I guess not.

Do I think she's wrong? Ehhh. No, no, I do not.

I am not a teacher. I do not spend day in and day out with kids. But this teacher? She teaches at my old high school. I remember what we shitheads were like back then, and I wouldn't blame the teachers for getting all frowny-faced about us. And for fear of sounding like an old man (kids today with their video music and their cocaine hoverboards!), I think kids today are a lot worse than when I was a brash young snotwipe.

Kids are worse today because my generation of aforementioned brash young snotwipes are having kids, and given how most generations are watered-down piss-poor facsimiles of their elders, well, this isn't good news. I go out in public too often and where once I saw parents controlling children – because they are children — I now see parents locked in weak-kneed negotiations. We were in Hawaii and we were at this lighthouse slash bird sanctuary and these parents come up with their poor little squalling toddler who is throwing an epic mega ultra shit-fit… and what was their response?

It was not:

a) To soothe the child by making parental soothing noises — "Shhh. Shhh."

b) To be firm and disciplined — "Stop crying or I give your sister to the gulls."

It was, instead:

c) To say, "If you don't stop crying, we're going to have to begin a timeout situation."

What the fuck does that mean? I'm sorry, are you trying to use adult logic and terminology to calm a blubbering toddler? Has that worked in any universe? Are you negotiating? What the fuck is "we're going to have to begin a timeout situation?" Hell, that wouldn't even calm me down, and I'm in my mid-30s. You tell me that, I will kick you into the ocean.

The toddler didn't stop because the toddler had no idea what Daddy was even saying. No, the end result was that the toddler kept crying and the parents didn't even make good on their vaguely-worded, generic threat — they just brought the kid to the lighthouse, tantrum-be-damned. Meaningless threat. Zero consequence.

The other thing is, parents never want to admit their kids are, y'know, kids. Imperfect in many ways. They'd much rather spend time defending them (and by proxy, their crap-fuck parenting skills) rather than by correcting problems. When something went goofy when I was a kid, my parents did not rush to my defense. They wanted to know what the hell I did wrong. You know why they did that? Because I probably did some stupid shit. I did stuff wrong all the time! Because I was a kid!

A dumb, chimpy, hormone-addled lackwit.

I'm not saying that parents should be backhanding their kids down the cellar steps or that the only answer is tough love and no compassion — I think parents should stand by their children when it is called for and I think parents should be sympathetic to the fact that being a kid kind of blows. But that doesn't mean defending bad behavior. That doesn't mean kissing their ass. That doesn't mean doing their work for them, or excusing their worst instincts or training them to be entitled little jerk-mongers. (Yes, a "jerk-monger" is one who sells jerks at the market. Shut up, you.)

Ten, twenty years ago, a teacher who called out her students like that would've stirred the same shit-bloom of shame, except some of that shame would be reserved for the kids who caused it. Parents would go to their kids and ask, "Are you giving Mrs. So-And-So a hard time? Are you? Is it you she's talking about? Goddamnit, don't make me slap the peas and carrots of your mouth." Nowadays, parents see this and they immediately rush to bury the teacher because — let's be honest — she's telling the truth and they can't bear the sting of reality carping on about their bullshit parenting.

I applaud the teacher. Do I think her attitude is totally awesome? No, probably not. But is it dishonest? Sure ain't. And in teaching, and in raising our kids — and actually, in practically all levels of American discourse — the one thing we could use more of in our mouths is a fist full of honest medicine.

Then again, what the hell do I know? I am neither parent (yet) nor teacher.

Curious to hear your thoughts on this whole mess. Chime in if you so feel like it.

And no, I'm not talking about all parents, and I'm probably not talking to you, so don't get offended. I mean, okay, you're allowed to get offended, I wouldn't be mad at you for that, but seriously: not worth it.

The $0.99 Sale: Results Are In

So, as you may know, over the Valentine's Day weekend I went ahead and slapped IRREGULAR CREATURES up on Amazon for a wee widdle dollar (or, rather, a penny shy).

How'd it do? Was it worth it?

Numbers-wise, here's the poop:

Between Friday and Monday, I sold 124 copies. Numerically, not bad. I mean, considering that after the first explosive week of sales I've been doing 40 sales a week, seeing a four-day jump that equals thrice that number is pretty good. Of course, that's just in copies sold.

Money made is fine enough, but nowhere near what I would've earned had the price been $2.99 — earning thirty cents per sale as opposed to two bucks per sale is a significant drop. Then again, would I have sold 124 copies at $2.99? No. No way.

Ranking-wise, looks like the book got into the top 2000 at Amazon Kindle store. It did better on its first day of sales, when it made it up to #824. It was a good leap, but I was hoping for better.

Here are some larger conclusions — do with them as you will:

Ninety-Nine Cent E-Books Are The Same Kind Of "Problem" As Pirated Books

Piracy is viewed as a problem because it represents lost revenue, except the problem with that, erm, problem is that it avoids the reality: those pirates were probably never going to be real customers. The $0.99 book issue has a similar throughline: those who bought at $0.99 but not at $2.99 could be viewed as lost revenue. Except, smart money says most of them were never going to buy at the higher price. In this way, they represent exactly the revenue they should represent, and further, ideally represent "new readers." And that leads to this next point right here…

Low Cost Is About New Readers

I just want to sequester that thought away from the others — stick it in a cage, zap it with cattle-prods, and make it dance.You put something out there at that $$, it's about gaining eyes and, ideally, fans.

In a perfect world, you're then training those fans that your work has value, regardless of what that value is. A buck is a dirt-floor price for fiction, but free is a lot worse. This isn't scientific thinking, but my feeling is this: you give something away for free, readers understand its value, which is essentially nothing. You sell something for any price, even a low price, they at least understand that the value of the work is in cash and coin. It isn't garbage. It isn't floor-sweepings. I think any money given is meaningful in this regard.

Whatever the case, new readers — if your work engages and connects — are likely to stick around for future releases. I don't say this having any evidence beyond my own known patterns, but I suspect it's true.

I also suspect that ghosts are real, and that UFOs sometimes steal our Bigfeet.

So, I might not be the guy you want to listen to.

Always Let People Give You More

A few people bought the book at the Amazon price, and then wanted to ensure I got more $$ out of the deal. Further, some eschewed the Kindle purchase and just went to buy the (full-price) PDF. Feels like you should always leave room for fans to support you in ways beyond funneling money through a distributor.

Self-Promotion Is Still Hard

It's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's irritating (to myself and surely to others) becoming my own mouthpiece again and again. It's bad enough I'm trying to generate energy for this blog and for Flickr photos and whatever else — suddenly I'm like, "Now you buy my shit!" And, for better or for worse it feels all the more salacious because I'm asking for your filthy wonderful lucre. On the other hand, shit doggity-damn, it works. Whenever I tweeted (which usually resulted in a number of retweets from followers, which was awesome and deserves a bucket of thanks), I got a spike in sales. I mean, a visible, sudden spike. So, it sucks being a whore, but being a whore also works.

The Amazon Sales Ranking Is Still Determined By A Crazy Robot

I'm sure there's some kind of logic or sanity in there somewhere, in much the same way SkyNet had a "plan" when it nuked all of mankind and invented Terminators. But my mushy human brain just doesn't understand it. Sometimes a leap in sales would register — other times a leap in sales would hamper the ranking. Beware Amazon's crazy ranking robot. Best to ignore it because, uhhh, it's gone insane.

What If You Stop Looking At E-Books As Individual Items?

If I have seven I Dream Of Jeannie-themed buttplugs, and they cost me $10 a pop and I sell 'em at $20, then I make $10 a pop. If I reduce my costs, I may sell more, but once they're gone, they're gone — I cannot sell anymore, and my sales potential is squandered. (Or something — let me remind you that I am a writer with middling math and/or business skills.)

The same cannot be said of e-books. My audience is theoretically limitless. Each e-book sold does not represent an e-book lost out of my inventory. I'm selling the equivalent of an imaginary friend.

Let's look at my overall sales in the past month, right? I made around $5 – $15 a day in sales every day, earning $2 or so on each sale. Fine. Easy enough.

When I started the V-Day sale, on the first day I earned almost $30, and on subsequent days went back to the $5-15 range. I sold a lot more "copies," but (for the most part) made the same amount of money.

If you stop looking at each sale as a lost e-book and instead look at the collective sales, the $0.99 is easier to swallow. I'm increasing my readership and, frankly, still making the same money. Now, again, in what I will crassly refer to as Normal Business Practices, that ain't great — "increased consumer base" should translate to "bigger money." Here, it doesn't, but I'm also not losing anything, really. I don't have overhead costs, I don't have inventory, I don't have a dwindling supply.

Forgive me if this makes no sense — I'm merely saying that if you look at e-book sales as a collective process with rewards that go beyond the individual sale, then a reduced price feels more valuable.

On The Other Hand

A buck is still too damn cheap for the book. For any book, really.

It's why I don't know if I'd recommend that price consistently. Feels like a good sale price. Besides, you start at ninety-nine cents, you can never incentivize by reducing the price temporarily or permanently.

Then again, what the fuck do I know?

The Apple Eats Amazon Kerfuffle

I don't have much to say right now about the "Apple Shanks The Kindle App In The Prison Shower" situation, because Tobias Buckell says them for me. Go there and read his wisdom.

Only thing I will say: if you're planning on self-publishing, may be either a good time to hurry up and do it or sit back and wait for the two giant Godzilla monsters to fight it the fuck out.

The Writer's Survival Guide

The writer is a complex animal. We are grotesque mutations — irregular creatures, as I have noted — that form a crass menagerie, a mad bestiary. A writer possesses the lion's mane, the horse's hoof, the unicorn's horn, the moonbat's milky nipples. We're dangerous animals, bred as chimera, confused as to who we are or what good we may do for the world.  The world is home, quite frankly, to too many of us. We have bred wantonly, and now we are everywhere. Our creative heritage is watered down with liquor and insanity. We're like designer dogs. We're a Poodle crossed with a Weimaraner crossed with a Pomeranian. We are the Poomaraner. The Weipooranian. The Pomaranadoodle. Possibly rabid. Definitely bewildered.

Or, put more succinctly, beware of writer.

Just as you should beware of us, we should also beware of us. The writer's life is a strange one. Sitting alone. Talking to made-up people. Watching our little tragedies and comedies unfold until all we're left with is a page of repeated text: "All Writing And No Porn Makes Jack A Dull Facebook Update."

You do this day in, day out, you start to feel a little nuts.

The rejections. The fictions. The criticisms. Endless words. Myriad characters. So much time.

And so I give unto you: coping mechanisms. Fellow penmonkeys, compatriot wordslingers, if you want to do this job and not end up shellacked in your own snot-froth while hanging from the ceiling fan — if you are to survive at all with your mind and spirit intact — then you must do as I say. Do not deviate, lest you be struck down by your own lunacy.

These, then, are your survival skills, your coping mechanisms.

Something Something Peter Principle

Blah blah blah, every employee rises to his own level of incompetence.

This isn't that, exactly. But it sounded good.

Here's what you need to do: you need to realize that worse writers than you have succeeded in ways you simply have not. Find a writer who is, by your estimation, a talentless gasbag, a semi-sentient fungus that can barely string together a paragraph much less a whole goddamn novel.

The more popular and successful this writer is, the better.

At first this may seem disheartening — "They gave a million-dollar book deal to one of the baby zoo pandas!?" — but that's not the point, oh no. The point is to take comfort that you can do better. We obviously tend to read writers who inspire us, who move us, who we feel possess talent that is otherwise insurmountable. Pshh. Fuck that narwhal right in the blowhole. You need to realize that some truly incompetent and incapable writers have risen — which means that if those muck-slurping sea monkeys can do it, well what the hell, why can't you?

Yes, of course this is ludicrously petty. Which is why we don't do it in public, so please go take down that blog post where you mewl and moan about Dan Brown.

We do it in our minds. It's called "mental masturbation."

It is a critical coping skill.

Something Something The Opposite Of That Thing I Just Said

We also need writers who inspire us, so don't lose that sense of wonderment, of purpose, of writers who are our Sherpas. I mean, we do this for a reason. We don't write because we want to aspire to the level of a brain-damaged ostrich holding a pen in its crooked beak but we write because other storytellers have moved us with their stories and their telling of the aforementioned stories.

If you're banging your head against the wall and wondering why you ever chose this madman's profession, dig out an old favorite book. Pick a chapter. Read it. Soak in it. Absorb a lesson. Revel in the words. Rub it on your body like a loofah, lathering yourself up with the cleansing soap bubbles of inspiration.

You Cannot Milk A Dead Goat

Sometimes, you need to walk away from the writing. Some writers I know, myself included, will stay down in the word mines far longer than they should, obsessively chipping away the walls looking for one last story gem, one last character diamond. Only thing you're doing is driving yourself nuts. Get the hell out of there. The canary died three hours back. Then its flesh dissolved, leaving only a greasy smear in the cage.

You can only get so much value out of a given day of work. Set a course for your daily word count. Do your work, then stop, pause, consider. Keep going if if the juice is there — but if it's not, don't lose your shit. You did your work. Exhausting your internal juju is like intellectual strip-mining. You gain nothing but the scouring and erosion of your creative resources. Get out of your skull.

Beer, Bacon, Meth, Wine, Coffee, Cookie Dough, Hookers

I drink coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon, wine at night.

I'm not saying writers should become chemically addicted to a whole bunch of shit, but hey, it's better than soiling your pants and attacking the mailman with a camping hatchet.

For God's Sake Do Not Hang Out With Other Writers

Didn't you hear me? We're all crazy. Don't hang out in little writer tribes. At least, not on a steady basis. It's incestuous! It's like putting a band together, except every band member is a paranoid schizophrenic. Talk to people that aren't writers. Hang out with a park ranger or some shit. An accountant. A painter. A ninja. A detective. Or what about a detective who is also a painter? And who has a park ranger ninja cohort? See? You can't get that kind of awesomeness by hanging out with other writers. There's a story in there!

Seriously, though, other writers are good people, and yes, from time to time you want to get together and talk the business. But other times, you need to get out of that headspace. Free yourself.

The Publishing Industry Will Explode Your Brain-Tits

Should I have hyphenated "Brain-Tits?" I thought about just going with "Braintits." But that almost looks like "Braintitis," which is probably some kind of swelling of the brain disorder. Of course, that's probably apt, isn't it? Publishing? Brain-swelling. Yeah. I thought so, too.

What I'm saying is, the publishing industry is interesting and all, and sure, you can be served well by knowing its Ins and Outs. But don't focus long on it because it's like staring into the unblinking Eye of Mordor (which, for the record, looks like a lava vagina). Gaze too long and you cannot look away. It's like that quote by that German dude: "Gaze too long into the Abyss and before too long you realize you're never going to get a book deal and then you wanna  jump into the hungry mouth of a lava vagina."

You will go nuts trying to figure out the publishing industry. Pull back. Relax.

Write the best book you can write.

Start there. Worry later.

Beware The Superinfo Cyberhighway

The Internet has gravity. It will suck you in. Sure, it's fun. It's a great place to spend time. And read about book deals. And about other writers. And their success. And then you go on Amazon and you see all the books that aren't yours. Next thing you know, you're curled up on the floor, your iPad held tight in your arthritic talons. Your pants are in the corner. They're smoldering, as if recently on fire.

The Internet is not always a healthy place. It is a place of rank negativity. Escape Cyberspace. Take the next exit off the Information Superhighway. Realize that nobody calls it "Cyberspace" or the "Information Superhighway" anymore. (They should really combine them for maximum coolness: The Infospace Cyberway! Or The Superinfo Cyberhighway!)

Leave your house. Let the sun fill your body with Vitamin D or whatever other voodoo vitamins the Big Fiery Sky Ball lends to us pale-fleshed writer-types. Take a fucking walk, for God's sake.

Writing Isn't Always About Reading

You don't get new stories from old stories. You get new stories by closing your manuscript and going out and doing some shit. Big adventures, small adventures. Jury duty, Krav Maga, art museums, squid wrestling, garden planting, squirrel killing, windsurfing, long drives, long walks, making love to a grizzled longshoreman, whatever it can be.

Should you read? Of course. You're a writer. Should you do more than read? Well, duh. Books aren't just about writing. They're about stories. Stories are about life.

Live life, lest you have no stories to tell of your own.

Set A Not Insane Metric For Success

Writers are notorious for creating unhealthy watermarks for success.

"If I don't have a novel published by the time I'm 31, I'm going to swallow a grenade."

"If my first book is not a bestseller after the first ten minutes, I will hate myself so hard my bowels rupture."

"If the writing I do today is not the best writing anybody has done ever, then I'm just going to quit this writing thing and go drown myself in a sewer treatment tank, hopefully choking to death on used condoms."

Writers are afforded advantages few others manage: we are gifted with the power of the do-over and the take-back. If I'm a pilot and I fuck up, I may have just killed everybody on board by crashing into the Washington Monument. If I fuck up my day's writing, I get to go back and fix it. And fix it some more. And fix it again and again until I'm happy or someone gives me money for it.

Set simple targets for success. Just finishing something is a thing that a lot of writers can barely manage.

CTFO: Chill The Fuck Out

Like I said, we're all a little crazy, yeah? We can be intense, depressive, fiery, passionate, shameful, horrible, mean, obsequious, and like, a triple dozen other adjectives. It's good to be that way sometimes, but writers, we tend to burn hot and fast like a road flare: everything is now or never, glorious or awful, everything or nothing. To that, I say:

Chill out. Calm down. Relax.

Do some Yoga. Take a swim. Pop your cookies alone or with a friend. Get a head massage. Drink some Ayahuasca and go fight the Jaguar King to learn your spirit name. Wait, maybe don't do that last one.

I'm just saying, do you feel your heart palpitating? Do you feel suddenly overcome by uninvited worry and embarrassment? Shhh. Shhhh. Realize that this doesn't matter. None of this matters. You're not saving the world. You're just telling stories. That's supposed to be awesome, not awful. Stop shitting your pants. Stop creating false dichotomies and crazy expectations.

Seriously.

Chill the fuck out.

Then, when you're easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy, get back in the game and do some writing, will you?