Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 42

Kevin Hearne: Five Things I Learned Writing Ink & Sigil

Al MacBharrais is both blessed and cursed. He is blessed with an extraordinary white moustache, an appreciation for craft cocktails—and a most unique magical talent. He can cast spells with magically enchanted ink and he uses his gifts to protect our world from rogue minions of various pantheons, especially the Fae.

But he is also cursed. Anyone who hears his voice will begin to feel an inexplicable hatred for Al, so he can only communicate through the written word or speech apps. And his apprentices keep dying in peculiar freak accidents. As his personal life crumbles around him, he devotes his life to his work, all the while trying to crack the secret of his curse.

But when his latest apprentice, Gordie, turns up dead in his Glasgow flat, Al discovers evidence that Gordie was living a secret life of crime. Now Al is forced to play detective—while avoiding actual detectives who are wondering why death seems to always follow Al. Investigating his apprentice’s death will take him through Scotland’s magical underworld, and he’ll need the help of a mischievous hobgoblin if he’s to survive.

Glasgow is a remarkable city

Edinburgh and the Highlands get a lot of attention when folks think of visiting Scotland—and for good reason—but Glasgow has layers, like ogres and onions and parfaits. It’s the third-largest city in the UK behind London and Birmingham, but far more affordable. It has universities, plural; a 37-acre Necropolis full of spooky Victorian-era gravesites and mausoleums for all the goth vibes you need; multiple football teams to cheer (and fight) for; an eldritch organ in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum; master distillers of whisky and gin that are the envy of the world; and it used to be that all the New World’s tobacco was shipped to Glasgow first and from there to the rest of the European continent. That was a whole lot of money and cancer. It was quite the industrial hub in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the shipbuilding industry was huge for a long time, but when it collapsed a few decades ago, the city population basically halved from 1.2 million to 600k—part of what makes housing more reasonable there. Now there’s a lot of finance and tech stuff happening in Glasgow, and the city has this wonderful richness of varied architecture and community owing to its long history coexisting alongside modern buildings. Basically it’s a fantastic city in which to set an urban fantasy, because pretty much anything can happen there.

There are thousands of recipes for ink and lots of them are flammable

Accidental fires and property damage were so common in the old days that inkmakers had to do their thing outside city walls on a calm day in case shit went bad. The main culprit behind the ruckus was boiling linseed oil, which smells really terrible, produces toxic vapors, and can explode at any time. Without heating the oil sufficiently beforehand, the ink would dry too slowly, absorb oxygen, and polymerize like rubber. The industrial process now is much safer, but doing it the old-fashioned way is flirting with spontaneously combustible doom.

I learned a lot about the history of inkmaking from Ink by Ted Bishop, which I highly recommend as a good start, and it has an extensive bibliography for further reading. The widespread use of bugs (like cochineal) and squishy ocean creatures for pigments was especially surprising to me. (If you’ve ever eaten food that’s red or worn lipstick, you’ve probably been consuming or smearing uponst thy lips the colorful guts of bugs who like prickly pear cacti.) A tiny fraction of the research I did wound up being used in the book; it was a gigantic lovely rabbit hole that operates as deep background for everything Al does, and some of it that I didn’t use for the first book will likely find a place later in the series.

Public transport is pretty rad

I’ve lived in places without a decent public transport system most all my life, so whenever I’m in a city that has it, I’m easily impressed. Glasgow has a small subway that circles around the city core, but also has a rail and bus system that allows people to get around pretty well without a car—which is what we did as tourists. Most impressively, regular routes get you out of the city to charming wee villages that typically offer an old stone church, a pub, lots of sheep, and a claim that either William Wallace or Rob Roy MacGregor had been there once, which is probably true since it’s not a gigantic country and those dudes got around. The relative ease of getting around both rural and urban areas without owning a vehicle showed me that my protagonist didn’t need a car. Taxis and hitchhiking would pick up the slack whenever public transport and a stretch of the legs couldn’t handle the journey.

Haggis is freaking delicious

For reals. And I love neeps and tatties too. It gets portrayed as this stuff you only eat on a dare, and yeah, I admit I winced the first time I tried it because it had been built up in my head as A Gross Thing You Will Only Try Once, but damn, I liked it. A lot. Had it as often as I could while I was there, because it is not widely available outside of Scotland.

Now, as a counterpoint: I am not a fan of black pudding, because I tried that too and it did unkind things to my palate. Super happy for everyone who likes it, though! You can have mine. I’ll trade you for your haggis. Dang, I really need to find some where I’m at now. I miss it.

The accents are pure brilliant

Most Americans’ familiarity with the Scottish accent comes from Shrek and other entertainment, but spend some time in Scotland and you’ll recognize that there are a wide range of accents throughout the country. The Glaswegian (or Weegie) accent is its own thing, but fifty miles away in Edinburgh you get a completely different sound. Since the Weegie accent and dialect is distinct from other areas of Scotland, I needed an expert reader from Glasgow to take a look at the manuscript ahead of time and make corrections. One word that had to go that people often associate with Scotland: Laddie. I was told that word might get used in the country here and there, but was not really a thing that Weegies say. Also, calling someone a jammy bastard has absolutely nothing to do with jam or even pajamas.

I didn’t try to reproduce everything you hear—that would be a gargantuan task—but I did settle on a few words and phrases to consistently render the way a Weegie might say them to provide the flavor of the language while (hopefully) keeping it easy to read. Of course, you can listen to the audiobook narrated by Luke Daniels and appreciate the accents that way.

***

Kevin Hearne hugs trees, pets doggies, and rocks out to heavy metal. He also thinks tacos are a pretty nifty idea. He is the author of A Plague of Giants and the New York Times bestselling The Iron Druid Chronicles series.

Kevin Hearne: Website | Instagram | Twitter

Ink & Sigil: Bookshop.org | Indiebound | Amazon | More

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Christopher Brown: Five Things I Learned Writing Failed State

In the aftermath of a second American revolution, peace rests on a fragile truce. The old regime has been deposed, but the ex-president has vanished, escaping justice for his crimes. Some believe he is dead. Others fear he is in hiding, gathering forces. As the factions in Washington work to restore order, Donny Kimoe is in court to settle old scores—and pay his own debts come due.

Meanwhile, the rebels Donny once defended are exacting their own kind of justice. In the ruins of New Orleans, they are building a green utopia—and kidnapping their defeated adversaries to pay for it. The newest hostage is the young heiress to a fortune made from plundering the country—and the daughter of one of Donny’s oldest friends. In a desperate gambit to save his own skin, Donny switches sides to defend her before the show trial. If he fails, so will the truce, dragging the country back into violence. But by taking the case, he risks his last chance to expose the atrocities of the dictatorship—and being tried for his own crimes against the revolution.

To save the future, Donny has to gamble his own. The only way out is to find the evidence that will get both sides back to the table, and secure a more lasting peace. To do that, Donny must betray his clients’ secrets. Including one explosive secret hidden in the ruins, the discovery of which could extinguish the last hope for a better tomorrow—or, if Donny plays it right, keep it burning.

Utopia means nowhere, but you can write your way there

There’s a scene early in 1969’s Easy Rider where the protagonists, Wyatt and Billy, visit a commune—the home of a hitchhiker they pick up after their big score. It’s really a series of scenes of life in the commune—young people hanging out, trying to live by their own new rules and be self-sufficient. Free love and free food.  Critics often refer to it as one of the weaker sections of the movie, but I don’t think the movie would really work without it. It’s a vision of utopia that provides a counterbalance to the all-American dystopia the rest of the movie travels through. Its memory is there in the negative space of the abrupt ending. But conventional wisdom would say you couldn’t make a whole movie branching off that scene.

I watched that movie again as I was beginning work on my new novel Failed State, trying to find good examples of fictional utopias in popular entertainment. When I pitched my editor three years ago on the idea of a mash-up of the legal thriller with the dystopian novel—“Better Call Saul meets 1984”—he dug the idea enough to ask for a proposal for two books, set in the same world as 2017’s Tropic of Kansas. The proposal for the first book was fully fleshed out, and became 2019’s dystopian Rule of Capture, whose story of a burned out defense lawyer defending protesters imprisoned for their politics in a country gone mad seems more topical now than I could have imagined. For the second book, I had a plot mapped out, but all I really knew was that I wanted to make it more utopian—to realize in fiction the better world the characters had been fighting and dying for in the previous books.

Dystopia is easy, in the sense that all you really have to do is look around and report on the messed-up things people do to each other and their environment in real life, and putting your characters into those situations creates instant drama.

Utopia is harder. Utopia means nowhere, a setting that’s like the Talking Heads song about Heaven: “a place where nothing ever happens.” The novel is a literary form driven by conflict, and focused on the experience of the individual in society. Writing one about people living in harmony, or one that transcends the idea of the self to focus on community as protagonist, is a challenging undertaking. But science fiction is the literature of the possible. It has unique tools to tackle those sorts of problems. And in a world where the very idea of the future seems to have mostly disappeared, in part because it’s so hard to even get a fix on the present, the idea of imagining a world we would really want to live in seems like a worthy undertaking. It’s something we talk about doing in the field more than we actually do it.

One path is to break out of the constraints of novelistic form. You can write utopia as political theory, as design fiction, or even as a kind of nature writing. But the most common path is to craft a compromised utopia, one that has made different tradeoffs, and is in tension with the world around it, or threats from within. That’s the solution of masterpieces of utopian SF like Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge, and of more recent efforts like Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway and the Wakanda of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther.  Works like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road find a glimmer of utopian possibility in the grimmest dystopia—it’s the place the characters are trying to get to, even if it’s just a religious vision or a wishful mirage, and that tiny kernel of hope is what carries the reader and the characters through the difficult journey. In Mad Max: Fury Road, the characters find their way across the wasteland to the feminist ecotopia they seek, only to learn it has been destroyed by climate change. So they return to the warlord dystopia they came from—the one place that still has clean water—and realize a similar vision through popular uprising.

Utopia is not a place. It’s a decision.

The ending is the beginning

The dramatic inversion that results from that decision can help you rethink narrative norms. Like how many of those stories of survivors roaming the vine-covered ruins of our civilization are not as dystopian as you thought. They are expressions of secret wishes. The resurgence of nature is the return to our nature. And behind the Hobbesian fights that usually drive the stories set in those places is a recognition that they could be the restoration of Eden.

My first published story was a weird little slipstream riff about a gamer who builds a post-apocalyptic diorama of the town where he lives, and then drowns it with a garden hose. In Failed State, I went back to that place—with a real city drowned by climate change, populated by characters who embrace the resulting rewilding. It was a way to solve the fundamental science fictional conundrum that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than a real change in the political system. The uncomfortable truth lurking in our post-apocalyptic fictions is that the “end of the world” is the path to real change. And that end is really just the beginning—one that starts with imagining things like, if you could go back to the dawn of the agricultural revolution and get a do-over, how would you structure human society to make it more just, or more ecologically sound? That’s the kind of speculative project SF was made for. No one book can solve those problems, but it can come back with soundings from other paths.   

Peace can be your conflict

As I began working on Failed State, I thought I had an easy way to guarantee the conflict the story needed to work as a novel, by introducing the one character type no utopia ever has—a lawyer.  There are no lawyers in utopia, because a society without conflict doesn’t need them. Or so they want you to believe. The truth is that almost all utopias are founded on codes so strict that they acquire the characteristics of religion, like the one the Lawgiver administers in the original Planet of the Apes movies. Those societies have no lawyers because they permit no disagreements. Introduce a character who challenges the infallibility of the utopian code, and you have all the conflict you need. It’s what Shevek does in LeGuin’s Dispossessed, even though the laws he’s trained in are the laws of physics. But the utopian framing surprised me again—by reminding me that the real purpose of lawyers is not to create conflict, but to solve it. Most lawyer stories are driven by the competitive win-lose binaries of litigation. A utopian legal thriller, I learned, is about brokering peace.

The best happy endings are sad

The endpoint of a utopian story can still be compromised, or non-redemptive. Just because you get the genie in the bottle doesn’t mean it won’t get back out. Classics like The Oresteia and Njal’s Saga tell the story of how societies ruled by blood feuds finally achieve peace by brokering settlements and trapping the spirit of vengeance in a system that resolves disputes without violence. But the struggle never ends—the characters by the end of those stories are just too tired and hurt to fight any more, and finally have acquired the wisdom to realize there’s got to be a better way. Peace is only really appreciated by those who have been through war, and the real secret to writing compelling stories of communities in harmony is to endow your characters with memory of the alternatives.

“We blew it, man”

The original script for Easy Rider had a happy ending. Captain America and the Cowboy ride off to their Florida paradise. The creators realized, one presumes, that was not true to the world of their story. And the ending they shot is a powerful one, an ending that kind of ended the whole idea of the Sixties with a literal bang. But there’s an untraveled third path lurking in there, in the scene where they leave the commune, watching the naive hippies planting seeds in fallow-looking ground and arguing between themselves whether the commune will make it. History argues they won’t—they will run out of resources, start fighting, have one of the founders turn into David Koresh. Failed State would argue they get on the wrong path as soon as they start planting seeds. But it’s interesting to imagine what kind of success could be possible for such an experiment, especially if it were informed by 21st century inclusivity and understanding.

In a world that feels more dystopian by the day, there’s tremendous opportunity for the reinvigoration of the utopian imagination. Not just because we need more hopeful futures to work toward. Solving the problems of craft that impede utopian storytelling can help you write your way to real artistic innovation—even if the perfection you are chasing can never be reached, in fiction or in real life. 

Christopher Brown: Website

Failed State: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N | HarperCollins

No, Writing For IP Is Not Soulless

[image error]So, I take it someone on Twitter said something about IP books being soulless.

Or maybe they said it about the writers of those books?

I dunno. Whatever.

Now, as someone who has written at least a little bit of IP, I take exception to that — while also recognizing that the person wasn’t likely trying to make a problematic point, and was not expecting the internet to fall on their head, but that’s Twitter for you. It is a wasteland where nuance goes to die. As I am increasingly wont to say, Twitter is the place where somebody was wrong on the internet. Then someone was mad on the internet. Then you were mad on the internet. Then you were wrong on the internet. And that cycle just kinda goes and goes. It’s like a dunk tank where you’re dunking people and then getting dunked for dunking on people and then as you’re being dunked you still find other people down in the deep to dunk on, until everyone is drowning down in Dunktown.

It’s why I’m making this point here on The Blog, where I can more (exhaustively, wordily, eye-rollingly) make my point instead of having to condense it into an amuse-bouche course of fine points that will somehow go viral and end up being wadded up into a ball of broken glass and fired at my house.

Anyway.

So, while fully recognizing the person may have very well been trying to champion original work instead of “IP” work, I do think it’s worth talking a little bit about IP work.

To clarify, for those not in the know, IP work means Intellectual Property, which is already a bit of a misnomer because all work is intellectual property — it’s just here, the locus of who owns that work is different. When I write my own book, I am the Intellectual Property Owner. When I write for, say, A Big Brand About Spaceship Wizards, I am for sure not the property owner.

Right?

Right.

So, is writing for IP soulless?

Well, first, and obviously, no.

And here is why that is:

Because our souls and our hearts are probably why we’re doing IP work in the first place.

Let’s unpack that.

Is it for the money? Probably not. Sometimes the money is fine but it’s usually in the low-to-middle end of the pool, and it’s also money you can’t capitalize on much — most don’t give you royalties at all, and if they do, they’re more like the ghost of royalties, some fading phantasm, some monetary specter rattling its chains-made-of-coins around your authorial piggy bank. Further, because you are (as discussed) decidedly not the owner, you cannot continue to monetize the work — you can’t sell foreign rights, or game rights, or TV/film, or comics, or whatever other ancillary rights are available to the owner of that property. I mean, that property owner will! But you won’t get a piece of it. Even if something you wrote trickles into those other rights and license extensions, like a game or a film. Some contracts do offer mechanisms for that trickle, but it’s increasingly few-and-far-between, and I’d argue is a bit abusive. In fact, the contracts for such work are often considerably onerous, punishing for the author and heavily favoring The Brand. One contract I signed for a Big Science-Fiction Brand had boilerplate stipulations in there that said they could take your work, chisel your name off of it, not pay you, and still publish that shit anyway. And they don’t negotiate away from that boilerplate. It’s often carved into stone.

Is it for the glory? You might think so, but the glory doesn’t last — that golden glow is quick to fade. Some people even look down on IP authors, as evidenced by the need to defend the work as “not soulless” in the first damn place. (This has changed a lot in the last decade or so, where writing for a Big Brand has come with a little more cachet than it used to.) The Brand doesn’t love you, and most fandoms are diffuse and hard to parse, especially online — they are fans (or “””fans,””” depending) of The Brand, but that doesn’t make them fans of you. And further, it’s quite likely they won’t become fans of you, either. And if the fandom is, ahh, let’s go with vigorous, you might end up at the bottom of a pig chute funneling a great deal of toxic effluence your way just for daring to write in the world in the first place.

Is it for the fun? It can be. But it ain’t a picnic, either. You’re likely going to have to race to meet unreasonable deadlines while simultaneously having to have “meetings” (like the kind you have in an office, ew) about the work, and this can be doubly so if you’re both trying to please a publisher and please a Brand who aren’t in agreement already, and it can be triply confusing when The Brand has a lot of cooks already crammed in its kitchen so now you’re fielding notes from twelve different people, none of whom agree with one another. And again, all on a very tight timeline. (I famously had to write the first draft of my book in my Spaceship Wizard book in 30 days. Say what you will about that book, but I did my damnedest to produce something of love and value in that timeframe.) And the fun also goes back to the former point about being in the crosshairs of the various schisms and sects within fandom — and because it’s your name on the book, they assume you somehow literally overtook the brand and used its as your own personal sandbox. (Or, in their view, litter box.) All while failing to see that nothing goes in those pages without tacit approval from The Gods of The Brand.

Is it for the opportunity? It can be, but that opportunity is dubious. Sure, it might lead to more work, but it also might just lead to more IP work, because sometimes in the creative industries a thing you do too many times can become Your Brand. And that means writing for Brands can become Your Brand. Will you hit list? Maybe, but with most IP, probably not — only a select few really seem to juggle their way up there.

Here you might be saying, well, it’s all downside, but my point is that it’s really not all downside — because the one upside is, you get to write in a space you love. You get to put your heart into a storyworld that has influenced you in some way — you’re giving back to it, you’re owning a little postage-stamp-sized piece of creative real estate in a narrative that fed you. And that’s the reward, which is…

Well, sorta the opposite of soulless.

Is there an argument to be made that the Corporations that own the Big Brands are soulless? I guess, sure. Is there an argument that they’re exploiting writers? Sure, there’s that, too. Publishers can be exploitative all on their own, and then the Big Brands can be exploitative of the publishers (because the publishers don’t own the Brands, remember), which means it’s a trickle down effect of pissing on the writer’s head. But even here it’s worth noting that for all claims of soullessness, most of the people working on these books outside the author are also there for love — they’re fans as much as any of the readers. They care. They give it their all. They put their hearts and certainly their souls into the work, too.

Is there an argument that Your Original Work is better than IP Work? There is an argument for that, though I won’t always necessarily make it it or even agree with it. It’s probably better for you if you own the work in the long-run, but IP work can be a smart, calculated choice. Is there more cultural value to Original Work than IP Work? Maybe in a broad sense, but I certainly don’t think so at the individual book level — I can’t tell you how many people have come up to me to tell me they read my Big Starforce Battle books and it either got them reading again or it was the first book their teenager really got into or it moved them in some fundamental way. (Hell, one couple named their baby after one of the characters. And yes, I did indeed autograph that baby.) So I don’t think there’s much value in a pissing match between Branded Work and Original Work. We put our backs into it either way, and hope to write something of merit regardless.

Is there an argument that you shouldn’t write for a Big Brand if you’re offered the chance? That’s up to you, obviously, and my experiences are mine and mine alone, though I am of a mind that writers in these cases are usually the ones with all the pressure and all the work and too little of the reward — but even that is again an argument not to bag on the writers or their books, because honestly, they’re just doing their best with what they have, and often under really weird circumstances going on behind the scenes. I know some hilarious tales and also horror stories from behind the IP walls where writers have gone through mad bureaucratic dances that would give you spinny whirly puke-up-your-shoes vertigo. You’d hear some of these stories and say, “That shouldn’t be legal,” and haha, it is, because they signed the contract. It isn’t okay, but it’s definitely fine. But if it’s a thing you wanna do, and there’s a chance to do it, go for it.

Is this me saying I’d never write IP again? I’ll never say never, but it’s not on my menu of hopes or dreams, because I really like writing my own stuff, owning my own stuff, and living off it — and it offers a long gravy train of opportunity long after even one book lands on shelves, a gravy train that belongs to someone else if it’s work for a big IP. But maybe if it were from a storyworld I loved, like A:tLA, or Gremlins, or Cabin Boy (aka the Chris Elliotverse).

But again, all this is to say our books are not at all soulless. We put in the work and the love, and we do it because the most tangible reward is the joy of getting to play in the storyworlds we adore. And I’ll say too that despite what you may get online, often going to a convention or comic-con and meeting the readers and fans in person is a truly wondrous thing — they bring love to the table, matching yours with their own, and that’s also why we do it. We do it for the love. Our hearts and our souls are very much present.

Wanderers Nominated For A Dragon Award

AHOY THERE. My computer is still gently melting in the corner of my office, and so a new computer has been summoned from the ether, but that’ll take a week or two. But in the meantime I swiped my wife’s laptop (shh don’t tell her) to update the blog with the news that Wanderers has been nominated for a Dragon Award. And that, alongside a pretty cracking ballot of sci-fi books too — I mean, hello, Annalee Newitz, John Scalzi, Tamsyn Muir, Tade Thompson, Alix Harrow, Martha Wells, and holy crap, Margaret Atwood. And it’s a fan award, too, so it’s nice for a book to be regarded by readers and fans of the genre.

(And I guess you can still register to vote, too?)

Anywho — yay, and thanks!

Also, looks like you can pre-order You Can Do Anything, Magic Skeleton now from Amazon, if you so choose. It comes out in April. And yesterday it was the number one new release in *checks notes* German Poetry, so that’s nice. I’ve always wanted to be a bestselling German Poet, and now me and Natalie Metzger have achieved our goal.

And here’s the full cover now, lookin RILL PRITTY.

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And with that, I’m out. Don’t forget, you can also find me on Instagram a little more these days, because everything is covered in shit and set on fire, and sometimes it’s nice to look at people’s dogs, meals, flowers, and birds.

LATER NERDS

Ferrett Steinmetz: A Messy, Incomprehensible, And Unfathomable Endeavor

Let’s be clear: A Messy, Incomprehensible, And Unfathomable Endeavor, would be a very good book title. Also extra points if it’s the title to a book about 2020. BUT I DIGRESS. And now, a guest post from Ferrett Steinmetz that is about code, and stories, and more than that, too. Enjoy!

***

We all know the internet is a burbling cesspool of questionable decisions – but I’m not talking about the anti-vaxxer Qanons fucking with your Facebook feed.

I’m talking about the code that runs your web pages.

The funny thing is, in science fiction, technology usually just works – unlike real life. You never see Captain Picard bellowed “SORRY, WHAT WAS THAT?!?” at a pixelated image of a Klingon as he tries to establish a streaming videoconference, but I bet your Zoom calls have had a couple of whammies. Artoo never freezes in the middle of bickering with Threepio before Luke sighs and reboots him.

Yet our technologies come with a pre-baked level of uncertainty, don’t they? Twitter is up most days, but every few months it’ll mysteriously shit the bed for a few hours… and maybe the app you use to view Twitter will crash, or slow down to the point of uselessness, or just not send that clever bon mot you tossed off on the toilet.

Why is that?

It’s because code, by and large, is a messy, incomprehensible, and unfathomable endeavor.

Trust me, I’m a programmer. And the outside world seems to view us programmers as Scotty the Engineer, who’s so familiar with every Jefferies tube in the Enterprise that he can tell them apart by smell. When your PlayStation 4 bricks, surely there’s some engineer at Sony who understood exactly why the blue light stopped glowing.

But…

Have you seen how much technology there is out there?

You could study your cell phone for thirty years and still not understand it fully. There’s the deep arcana of the operating system, and the delightful physics involved in your touchscreen, and the network protocols that allow it to talk to other web pages, and the SDKs that create the apps, and the API calls those apps use to get data….

And that presumes everything stays still! I told you it’d take thirty years to understand every aspect of your smartphone, but I’ll note that Apple’s made a major upgrade to the iPhone operating system every year. As a programmer, you’re inundated with upgrades, updates, new standards, better software development tools, zero-day security risks.

There’s no way any human could keep up with all of it.

We all want to believe in Scotty, the all-knowing programmer. But lots of programmers are more like stoned wizards, frantically scanning the grimoires of Stack Overflow to find three lines of commands to type in blindly, because they’re C# programmers and this is a DevOps task. When we tell you to reboot your computer, we’re not blowing you off – sometimes rebooting the system does fix things, and we don’t know why. Almost every serious technician I know has encountered a bug that cropped up, then mysteriously went away, for no reason that anyone could explain.

It’s not that programmers are dumb. (Though, let’s be honest, some are.) It’s that getting any non-trivial program to work nowadays involves resting it on multiple layers of unfamiliar technology written by fallible human beings. (Also see: some dumb programmers.) You hope it all works smoothly, but you know there will be glitches. Not every day, maybe not even often, but… enough.

That is the reality of modern technology.

And Automatic Reload is about what happens when that technology is used to kill people.

Now, on some levels, Automatic Reload is pretty well-worn territory – it features a cyborg hero bristling with armed prosthetics, packing multiple redundant targeting systems that can pick off enemies before their slow, slow nervous systems have time to react.

The problem is, his computerized weaponry operates far faster than he could hope to intervene. If he gets into a firefight with another body-hacker, his enemy will be dead – or he will – before he knows it. As it is, the first sign he’s in danger is usually his mechanized limbs flinging him to one side as he yelps in confusion.

So all he can do is program in parameters – frantically trying to explain to his computer, well in advance of combat, what looks like an enemy. And even in Automatic Reload’s near-future world, image-processing is still not necessarily a perfect technique. So the difficulty of defining “Who gets a bullet to the dome” in precise terms, on top of the usual software bugs, gets extremely tricky. 

And if his programming’s not up to snuff, well… He just shot a kid in the face.

Our protagonist – Mat, his name is Mat – has accidentally gotten people killed in the past, and is determined never to do it again, a morality that puts him way ahead of his bodyhacker mercenary friends. They’re generally “We’re in a war zone, anything that gets in our way should be toast.”

Mat is trying to be a hero.

Mat is trying to rescue innocent people on his missions.

My book Automatic Reload is about a lot of things, really. It’s clearly about the ethics of technology. It’s about the unique flavor of PTSD cropping up in drone pilots now, from people who are responsible for the technology that killed people even if they weren’t really there for it.

And, weirdly, it’s a romance. Because on one of his missions, Mat is tasked to deliver a package, and it turns out the package is a genetically engineered killing machine – or, rather, someone who’s about to be brainwashed to become a genetically engineered killing machine. A good Catholic girl named Silvia who suffers from panic attacks, which is not at all a good thing to have when her newly-reformed body can instinctively snap necks.

They both have mental disorders, serious ones, and a large part of Automatic Reload is about how two very differently fucked-up people can come to love and support each other.

(Even if no love can necessarily fix a serious mental illness. But having someone who understands your mushy brain-parts can be a great help.)

Yet for the purposes of this essay, Automatic Reload is about the stress of being a programmer, magnified. Because we’re not Scotty. We’re barely keeping up, constantly inhaling documentation, trying to keep our online shops safe and your data secure. What we need to know expands exponentially every year- and while it’s often a fun challenge, there are days when the site is down and everyone’s all up in your Slack channel asking “WTF MATE FIX IT NOW FIX IT FIX IT” and you’re desperately searching Stack Overflow for some arcane error message to discover the last mention of this esoteric code was DenverCoder9, posting in 2014 in a thread that was never resolved.

Automatic Reload is about what it’s like to be a programmer in the future, which is to say it’s about what it’s like to be a programmer now, which is to say a lot of guesswork and a lot of Googling, but with a lot more guns.

And, hopefully, just enough of a splash of romance to make it all worthwhile.

Ferrett Steinmetz: Website

Automatic Reload: Indiebound | Bookshop | Amazon

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David Mack: I Come Not To Praise My Series, But To Bury It

And now, a guest post by a friend of the blog, and someone who has crossed the boundaries of spec-fic to write for tie-in projects and his own original work — David Mack.

***

When I embarked upon the writing of my Dark Arts series for Tor Books, it was a labor of love.

By 2014, I had already spent several years contemplating the series’ first novel, The Midnight Front, and shaping it in my imagination. When I was finally able to commit its first story to the page, it felt like a dream made manifest. In 2015, after my agent found Dark Arts a home with a three-book deal at Tor Books, I envisioned a bright future for my literary creation.

Unfortunately, I soon learned that not all dreams come true.

Despite receiving generally good reviews from readers, landing on some prominent “Best of…” lists, and its second volume being nominated for a Dragon Award, the Dark Arts series never found its way onto any of the bestseller lists or received nominations for any of the genre’s major awards. Consequently, I knew before I started writing its third book, The Shadow Commission — out now from Tor Books — that it would be my series’ last.

I had conceived of Dark Arts as being open-ended, with each book moving ahead into a different decade, enabling my characters to get into historical hijinks across the entire latter half of the twentieth century. Less than a year after the release of its first book, however, I was tasked with bringing my saga to an end.

It felt odd. Knowing that there would be no further adventures for these characters after book three made me think differently about its story. I became less interested in building up my characters’ fictional world because I knew I would soon be burning it all down. I felt like I had failed my characters, as if their lives and narratives were coming to bloody ends because I didn’t know how to sell their tales in numbers strong enough to stay alive in the modern marketplace.

Only now, in hindsight, do I see that my disappointments affected the course of this book’s story.

For those who plan to read The Shadow Commission — SPOILERS FOLLOW:

One of the recurring themes of the novel is that its main character, Cade Martin, believes he has failed his apprentices. Not because he didn’t do a good job of teaching them magick, but because he doesn’t adequately prepare them for the true scale of the horror that awaits them, and because when that evil arrives he is unable to save many of their lives.

The key motif of The Shadow Commission is betrayal. It’s about how we betray ourselves, how we betray the trust of those who depend upon us when we succumb to fear, and how the things we say and do might drive others to betray us. It’s also about how we atone for those sins.

By the end of The Shadow Commission, several of the series’ major and recurring characters are slain. I don’t think I would have gone on quite so ruthless a killing spree in the book’s final chapters if I’d had any reason to think the series might continue. But when I saw the final curtain falling, the last glimmer of limelight fading away, I thought it reasonable to want to meet my series’ end with a certain Grand Guignol-style flair.

It’s been nearly eighteen months since I finished writing The Shadow Commission. After I turned in its manuscript, I lost over a year of my life and career to a depression that left me unable to put words on pages. I’m still digging my way out of that pit of despair, struggling to give form to new ideas, new labors of love, as well as working on fresh literary ideas for Star Trek.

In that context, trying to gin up excitement to promote the end of my Dark Arts series feels like a bittersweet obligation, if I’m to be honest. I did my best to craft an exciting book, to take my characters to new places, to change their lives and their respective relationships to their milieu, and to make it feel like a satisfying ending to their saga, while leaving open the door for future tales, just in case a miracle should occur and lead to the series’ revival.

But if penning this trilogy about magic born of Faustian bargains has taught me anything, it’s that there are no miracles — and that everything ends.

So it is that I hurl these words like a fistful of cold earth atop the grave of my Dark Arts series and move on to my next dream, whispering to myself all the while: memento mori.

***

David Mack is the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty-six novels of science fiction, fantasy, and adventure. Mack’s writing credits span several media, including television (for episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), short fiction, and comic books. He currently works as a consultant for two animated Star Trek television series, Lower Decks and Prodigy. His new novel The Shadow Commission is available now from Tor Books.

The Shadow Commission: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound | Powell’s

Visit the author’s site. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

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Caroline Leavitt: Five Things I Learned Writing With Or Without You

New York Times Bestselling author Caroline Leavitt’s 12th novel, With or Without You is a Public Library Association Buzz Book and A Publisher’s Weekly Fall Book of Note, and already has a starred Kirkus and Booklist raves that it “Packs an emotional wallop.” About three peoples’ lives that all disrupted when one comes out of a coma with both a personality change and a prodigious new talent, it’s a suspenseful literary look at love, fame and its discontents, who we are, and who we would like to be. Her work has appeared in The Daily Beast, New York magazine, Modern Love in the New York Times, The Millions, Poets & Writers and more.

***

Writing sometimes makes, rather than heals trauma, before it makes things okay again.

My novels tend to gestate for years before I know enough to write them.  Twenty-four years ago I was in a medical coma myself for 3 weeks, and in the hospital not expected to survive for 3 months, and then home and sick for a year. But they had given me memory blockers so I wouldn’t remember the trauma, so when I did get well, I couldn’t process what I had been through. I had all sorts of PTSD things going on. Certain colors or smells would make me break out into a panic attack, and I was afraid to go to sleep. When I asked my family and friends who had been around, they were so traumatized, they couldn’t speak about any of it without getting really, really upset.

A friend of mine, a shrink, told me to write it out, that the brain doesn’t know the difference, that people in hypnosis will shiver if they are told it is freezing.  So I did, writing this novel Coming Back to Me, about a woman just like me who goes in coma after a child. And it didn’t heal me.

So years passed, and I was still afraid to go to sleep and I began to think that maybe my mistake had been writing about someone like me, that maybe I needed to write about Stella, who unlike me, is aware and remembers EVERYTHING. And unlike me, she wakes with a personality change and brilliant new creative ability. Writing Stella, experiencing what I hadn’t been able to before, healedme in so many ways. When I finished my first coma novel, I was sad. But I wrote With or Without You, I felt this incredible sense of wonder and hope. And yeah, happiness, too, because I was freed of that past and I had come to realize that the mind is more incredible than we can imagine.

Hysteria sometimes is a good omen.

Here I am, with a month to go before my novel is due, and I am sitting in my writing office, pages spread around me, hysterically crying. Nothing seems to be working. The characters I worked so hard on feel flat to me and I want to slap them. The writing seems truncated to me and I don’t know how to fix it. I sob until my husband comes in and as soon as he sees the scene and the pages, the alarm on his face relaxes. He puts one arm around me. “You always do this,” he says gently. He tells me it is the calm before the storm that puts a finish on the work, and guess what, he’s right. He leaves me to it, and I begin to remap out scenes, to reorganize, to ask myself constant questions about what people are doing and why. Oh yeah, it takes me the whole month but at the end, I’m exhausted, and while I remain unsure about whether or not I’ve written a good book (I leave that for my agent and editor to tell me), I at least know that I’ve done absolutely everything I can to get the story to work and for right now, anyway, I’m done, I’m done, I’m done.

If I call backstory something else, then I can get it to work.

I’ve always had a huge backstory problem. Give me a character and I tend to want to go back generations. Every editor I’ve had has tried to pull me back from that, but I’ve been stubborn. But this book, my old Algonquin editor had left and I had a new one, Chuck Adams, and the first thing he said was, “We have to work on your backstory issue.” I panicked. A lot.

We did a lot of talking, a lot of rewrites, and finally, frustrated, I cut up all the backstory and spread it on the floor to see what needed to be there and why. And to my astonishment, I realized it wasn’t the backstory that was the problem, it was where I was putting it.

You want to think of your novel as one narrative driving line, but that line can trigger things in the past, and when those things are triggered, they change the character in that present driving line and then it works!

For example, one of my characters, Libby, a doctor and Stella’s best friend, is haunted by her past. She believes she caused her little brother’s death. To get the full impact of that, I was sure we had to live through that day along with young Libby, we had to feel everything she was feeling. But where was I going to put it? I couldn’t just have Libby be talking to Stella and saying, “Oh, by the way, let me tell you the story of what happened to my baby brother,” and then go off for half an hour about it.So then I began to think of triggers. Libby and Stella have a falling out about something major, and unable to cope, Libby goes to see a shrink, and it’s the shrink who tells her she has to go back to her old neighborhood and find out what really happened. We’re still in the present but while Libby is alone and traveling , she tells us about that day, as if it is front story, and happening, so we feel the trauma. Then, when she gets to the place, in the present narrative line, she talks to a few people, and when she discovers new information about that day, she is totally changed.

I don’t have to love my characters but I have to understand them.

In the beginning was Simon, in his forties, a once famous rock and roller with women hurling themselves at him, but now age has come calling. He puts mascara on his gray temples, he works out so he can fit into the same lucky jeans he wore when he was twenty, and he’s so desperate for his new big break that Stella, his longtime partner and very practical nurse, is ready to leave him.

When I showed initial pages to other people, the comments were always the same: Simon’s a jerk. Why doesn’t Stella boot him out? What a big baby. Simon was really the thorniest character I had to write.

Usually I adore my characters from the get-go, but Simon was a tougher nut to crack, mostly because his rock star persona isn’t one I’ve ever liked. So I began to feel it was both my job to come to love him and to make readers love him, too. I dug deeper. What was it that had happened to him in his past to make him this way? What was his “save the cat” moment (you know, when the killer stops his killing to rush into a house and save a kitten?) I began to post photos of hin around my office to feel like I was living with him. I asked him questions: What do you really need?” and then let him just tell me. And I began to realize that he had grown up under parents who didn’t think music—or he—were worthwhile. And then it struck me. Simon just wants to be seen and loved, and all of the music biz was just a barrier to that instead of the gateway he thought it was. And also, he loved Stella. He began to grow up. And by the end of the book, Simon was someone in my life and in my heart.

In writing about fame, I discovered it didn’t mean what I thought it did.

I thought I had made peace with the whole idea of fame and not fame. My first novel made me the flavor of the month and I thought it would always be that way, but it wasn’t. My publisher went out of business! I had a 3-book deal where the major publisher did no promotion and I had no sales. I got another 3-book deal, and it happened again, and making things more difficult for me was the fact that all my writing friends were building real careers, winning prizes, getting known.  When my 9th novel was rejected on contract, I was sure my career was over. Who was going to buy a book from someone with no sales? I cried, and then a friend suggested an editor for me, and to my surprise, she bought that unspecial book. Even more unexpected, it got into 6 printings before it was published and became a New York Times Bestseller its second week. My next novel with Algonquin was also a NYT bestseller, but it didn’t feel the way I thought it would. I still was desperate for more, more, more.

But the unhappier Simon was with his life, the more I realized I had to stop doing what he was doing—checking every place for reviews or news of me, comparing myself nonstop to every other writer on the planet, wondering every second what people thought of me. In writing about Simon, I realized, that his issue was fame was really an identity issues, a wound from childhood that he had to heal if he wanted to have a happier, saner life. And as I wrote that for him, I realized that was my issue, too and I needed to dig deeper into it.

Simon’s not famous. I don’t consider myself famous. But because of With or Without You, we’re both happy, and that makes all the difference to both of us.

Caroline Leavitt: Website

With or Without You: Indiebound | Bookshop | Amazon

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Sparks From The Robot’s Ears, But Also, Look At This Cool Thing

[image error]Just a li’l head’s up: my computer has fritzed the fuck out. General consensus is, a failure of the logic board (a metaphor for this whole country, if you ask me) — but for our purposes let’s just imagine a robot whose square head is barfing sparks from every orifice, and then it falls into a bed, and then it shits that bed. (Relax, robot shit is just a sudden shotgun clatter of rusty gears. Embarrassing for them, but a mild curiosity for us meatbags.)

So, forgive me if you need something right now — I’m going to be a little slow to see and deal with. (I’m working on my iPad, which actually does surprisingly okay as a computer replacement, especially with Word on it. But it’s not all the way there.)

BUT BUT BUT

Hey, here’s a cool thing —

The cover to YOU CAN DO ANYTHING, MAGIC SKELETON, has popped up online at Rizzoli Books, if you care to see it. Having a hard time dropping in the graphic, but you can see the book cover and the description of it here. The words are by me, the art is by the amazing Natalie Metzger — really, my words are a very silly part of this book, but the art? THE ART. The art! I can’t wait you to see the various possums, or the sharks, or the wolf container? Seriously, don’t buy it for my shenanigans. You’re gonna want it for the art.

OKAY THAT’S IT FOR NOW.

More soon, when I’m less technologically hobbled!

Wanderers Is the Kindle Daily Deal Today, August 3rd

[image error]Psst. PSST. If you were looking to get hold of a big-ass bison bludgeoner of a book but didn’t want the actual physical book with which to bludgeon bisons*, then I note that the book is available on Kindle today for a mere TWO BUCKS and NINETY-NINE PENNIES, except these are digital pennies, because real pennies are apparently in shortage. But at the very least, it’s an 800 page book, so you’re getting some narrative bang for your electronic buck. Epic sci-fi horror! Warning: may contain pandemic and also I may have accidentally predicted some parts of our future. (Kidding, the stuff I predicted was stuff we all knew was coming, because the call was coming from inside the house this whole damn time, which is why it’s particularly execrable that our “””president””” decided to undercut and undo every protection we had against coming catastrophe.)

Here’s the link.

Though of course if you still want it in print, there’s Indiebound and Bookshop.org.

Or, check it out through your local library.

There is a content warning, and I’ve concealed it behind a ROT13 filter so that those who desire the warning can simply unscramble it by c/p’ing the encrypted text into the window at rot13.com.

Pbagrag jneavat: fhvpvqny vqrngvba, fhvpvqr, gbegher, enpvfz naq ovtbgel, qvfphffvbaf bs zragny urnygu naq zragny vyyarff, tha ivbyrapr, naq n tencuvpny qrfpevcgvba bs Z/Z encr (sbhaq ba cc 434-435 bs gur uneqonpx, ng gur raq bs puncgre 50).

And now, a big bucket of praise for the book, because I am not above bragging.

*how many bisons could a bison bludgeoner bison if a bison bludgeoner could bludgeon bison?

***

A decadent rock star. A deeply religious radio host. A disgraced scientist. And a teenage girl who may be the world’s last hope. From the mind of Chuck Wendig comes “a magnum opus . . . a story about survival that’s not just about you and me, but all of us, together” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

NOMINATED FOR THE BRAM STOKER AWARD AND THE LOCUS

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • NPR • The Guardian • Kirkus Reviews • Publishers Weekly • Library Journal • Polygon

Shana wakes up one morning to discover her little sister in the grip of a strange malady. She appears to be sleepwalking. She cannot talk and cannot be woken up. And she is heading with inexorable determination to a destination that only she knows. But Shana and her sister are not alone. Soon they are joined by a flock of sleepwalkers from across America, on the same mysterious journey. And like Shana, there are other “shepherds” who follow the flock to protect their friends and family on the long dark road ahead.

For as the sleepwalking phenomenon awakens terror and violence in America, the real danger may not be the epidemic but the fear of it. With society collapsing all around them—and an ultraviolent militia threatening to exterminate them—the fate of the sleepwalkers depends on unraveling the mystery behind the epidemic. The terrifying secret will either tear the nation apart—or bring the survivors together to remake a shattered world.

Praise for Wanderers

“The book’s nearly 800 pages fly effortlessly by and offer both first-class entertainment and a clear-eyed view of the forces dividing contemporary society. As I finished this one, I found myself thinking: Where has this guy been all my life?” — Washington Post

“Wendig takes science, politics, horror, and science fiction and blended them into an outstanding story about the human spirit in times of turmoil, claiming a spot on the list of must-read apocalyptic novels while doing so.” — Gabino Iglesias, NPR

“This career-defining epic deserves its inevitable comparisons to Stephen King’s The Stand.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A suspenseful, twisty, satisfying, surprising, thought-provoking epic.”—Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Run Away

“A true tour de force.”—Erin Morgenstern, New York Times bestselling author of The Night Circus

“A masterpiece with prose as sharp and heartbreaking as Station Eleven.”—Peng Shepherd, author of The Book of M

“A magnum opus . . . It reminded me of Stephen King’s The Stand—but dare I say, this story is even better.”—James Rollins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Crucible   

“An inventive, fierce, uncompromising, stay-up-way-past-bedtime masterwork.”—Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World 

“An American epic for these times.”—Charles Soule, author of The Oracle Year

“Wanderers is amazing—huge, current, both broad and intensely personal, blending the contemplative apocalypse of Station Eleven with the compulsive readability of the best thrillers.”—Django Wexler, author of the Shadow Campaigns series

“A riveting examination of America.”—Scott Sigler, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Generations Trilogy

“If you ever wanted to know what America’s soul might look like, here’s its biography.”—Rin Chupeco, author of The Bone Witch

“With Wanderers, Chuck Wendig levels up—and when you consider the high level he was already writing at, that’s saying something.” —John Scalzi, New York Times bestselling author of The Consuming Fire

“A tsunami of a novel.”—Meg Gardiner, Edgar Award-winning author of Into the Black Nowhere

“A defining moment in speculative fiction.”—Adam Christopher, author of Empire State and Made to Kill

“Trust me: You’re not ready for this book.”—Delilah S. Dawson, New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Phasma

“An astounding adventure.”—Fran Wilde, Hugo-, Nebula-, and World Fantasy finalist and award-winning author of the Bone Universe trilogy

“Utterly brilliant and frighteningly plausible.”—Kat Howard, Alex Award-winning author of An Unkindness of Magicians

“Beautiful and harrowing—and timely as hell.”—Richard Kadrey, New York Times bestselling author of The Grand Dark

“A harrowing portrait of an unraveling America . . . terrifyingly prophetic.”—Christopher Golden, New York Times bestselling author of Ararat and The Pandora Room

“A brilliant, Hollywood-blockbuster of a novel.”—Peter Clines, author of Dead Moon and Paradox Bound

“Approach Wanderers like it’s a primetime television series, along the lines of The Passage [or] Lost. . . . Make Wanderers a summer reading priority; you won’t regret it.”—Book Riot

“Wendig is clearly wrestling with some of the demons of our time, resulting in a story that is ambitious, bold, and worthy of attention.” — Kirkus (starred review)

“A powerful story about humanity, technology, and the survival of the world. Comparisons to Stephen King’s The Stand are warranted, as Wendig shatters the boundaries of speculative and literary fiction…” — Library Journal (starred review)

“It’s not easy to write the end of the world. With Wanderers, Chuck Wendig has mastered it.” — Bookpage (starred review)

“Wanderers is OUTSTANDING. Wanderers excites me. You want well-developed characters and complex relationships? Read Wanderers. You want grounded sci-fi that ranks up there with bookstagram faves like #Recursion and #StationEleven? Read Wanderers. You want twists and turns and edge-of-your-seat action? Read Wanderers.” — Jordy’s Book Club

“An imaginative and absorbing work of speculative fiction.” — Booklist

Lisa Braxton: Five Things I Learned Writing The Talking Drum

It is 1971. The fictional city of Bellport, Massachusetts, is in decline with an urban redevelopment project on the horizon expected to transform this dying factory town into a thriving economic center. This planned transformation has a profound effect on the residents who live in Bellport as their own personal transformations take place.

Sydney Stallworth steps away from her fellowship and law studies at an elite university to support husband Malachi’s dream of opening a business in the heart of the black community of his hometown, Bellport.

For Omar Bassari, an immigrant from Senegal, Bellport is where he will establish his drumming career and the launching pad from which he will spread African culture across the world, while trying to hold onto his marriage.

Della Tolliver has built a fragile sanctuary in Bellport for herself, boyfriend Kwamé Rodriguez, and daughter Jasmine, a troubled child prone to nightmares and outbursts.

Tensions rise as the demolition date moves closer, plans for gentrification are laid out, and the pace of suspicious fires picks up. The residents find themselves at odds with a political system manipulating their lives and question the future of their relationships.

***

MARRIAGE THERAPY DOESN’T HAVE TO INVOLVE A THERAPIST, JUST THE RIGHT KIND OF DOCTOR

My husband and I were having a tough time. I had been working on my novel for years, grinding out one draft after another, sending out sample pages to literary agents, getting no response, or getting the canned response email rejection or a few nibbles in which an agent asked to see additional pages and then would later tell me that my work wasn’t “the right fit.” I’d burst into tears, punch the sofa cushions and cry on my husband’s shoulder. At the same time, my husband was having a similar response from potential employers. He’d been out of work for more than a year and either got no interviews, interviews that went nowhere, or interviews that seemed to go somewhere…and then silence. In desperation to get my novel to sell, I scanned a list of “book doctors” who charged upwards of $100 per hour. Unwilling to spend that kind of money, I brainstormed until it occurred to me that I could get hubby to be the doctor. After all, he was a newspaper reporter for more than 20 years and did consultation for a fellow journalist whose book ended up on the New York Times bestseller list. My husband took the job, didn’t charge me a dime, and as they say, the rest is history.

THE BEST RESEARCH CAN OCCUR WHILE HOLDING A FORK AND KNIFE

Who says that research can’t be fun? It doesn’t have to involve poring over dusty old back breaking tomes at the public library, spooling rolls of microfilm onto rickety old projectors, or watching documentaries until you’re bleary eyed. Once I decided that one of my main characters was going to be a Senegalese restaurant owner and his nephew was going to be a drummer who’s very good at making Senegalese dishes, I took a trip into town to try the cuisine at the local Senegalese restaurant. The chef prepared the most succulent pork chops I’ve ever had and I still think about the lamb stew. Several trips to the restaurant helped me to realistically portray the meals in the story. I even prepared the lamb stew at home and it was nearly as good as the restaurant version.

BANGING ON A DRUM IS HARDER THAN YOU THINK

In my continuing effort to accurately portray my drummer, I signed up for a drumming circle led by a master drummer from Guinea. Even though I’d already taken an adult education course, I soon realized what a leap it was to take a master class.

Seventy-five-plus students showed up, drums in tow, ready to learn new rhythms from a musician they revered. The student seated next to me kept grumbling, “People who aren’t serious about this should stay home!” I wondered if he’d figured me out, that I was an imposter, not a real drummer. I could feel my shoulders slumping in a ridiculous effort to make myself invisible.

The room went silent as the master drummer played a combination of rhythms. He beckoned us to repeat them. On the beat, he slowly strutted around the large circle, inspecting our hands closely, nodding and smiling slightly when he was pleased, narrowing his eyes when a tone or slap was made without confidence.

As I feared, as he was making his rounds, he paused in front of me, raised a hand to get everyone to stop playing and worked with me one-on-one. After he tried again and again to set me on the right path I finally confessed in a weak voice: “I’m not a real drummer. I’m a writer wanting to learn to play to create a drummer for my novel.” He gave me a smile and continued circling the room. When he came back around to me, he paused again. Was I hitting the drum wrong? Apparently not. He gave me a flirtatious wink and kept going.

TAXIS AND MANUSCRIPTS DON’T MIX

I was on a business trip to a convention in Chicago and brought my laptop with me that had a copy of my manuscript on it. I was feverishly working on the manuscript whenever I had a chance—at the airport gate, the hotel room, on the airport shuttle. One afternoon after leaving the convention center, my boss and I took a taxi back to our hotel. I was so exhausted that it wasn’t until we were out of the taxi and in the lobby of the hotel that I realized that I’d left my computer bag in the trunk of the taxi. I was practically hyperventilating. The only copy I had of the manuscript was on that laptop. I hadn’t backed up the file. Keep in mind I wasn’t concerned about the loss of my work files. Of course, I hadn’t bothered to take note of the driver’s name or the taxi number. I did remember the name of the taxi company, however, but calls there didn’t help. Eventually, it occurred to me that the driver was likely making a continuous loop from the convention center to the hotel. I stood out front and waited. Sure enough, he eventually returned and I got my laptop back. Whew!

I COULD HAVE BEEN A DANCE INSTRUCTOR

Maybe not the kind of instructor who opens up a school, teaches ballet, tap, and jazz, and conducts recitals, but a halfway decent choreographer of fight scenes. In The Talking Drum I have a scene in which my drummer gets into a wrestling match of sorts with his wife. There’s a bowl of lobster stew involved, an herbal aphrodisiac in a jar, a wall-dial-style mounted telephone with an extra lengthy cord, and a pepper grinder. The drummer’s wife discovers that he is trying to insert some of the herbs into her bowl of stew and assumes he’s up to something sinister. They get into a tussle that involves a bear hug, squeezing of wrists, squirming, her using all of her weight to knock him against the refrigerator door with the palms of her hands, the jar of herbs flying out of his hand. I actually spent a good hour in my kitchen choreographing the scene, acting it out to make sure the two characters could actually go through those motions. In another scene, my drummer gets into a bar fight, pounces on the guy seated next to him and is eventually kicked out of the bar by a bouncer in a bum’s rush. That required some choreography on my part as well. I didn’t spend time in a bar going through the paces, but I think it nonetheless came out pretty believable in the published work.

***

Lisa Braxton is the author of The Talking Drum, published in June 2020 by Inanna Publications, and a recipient of a 2020 Outstanding Literary Award from the National Association of Black Journalists. She is a fellow of Kimbilio, a fellowship for fiction writers of the African diaspora, and an Emmy-nominated former television journalist, an essayist, and short story writer. She received Honorable Mention in Writer’s Digest magazine’s 84th and 86th annual writing contests in the inspirational essay category.

Lisa Braxton: Website | Twitter | Instagram

The Talking Drum: Amazon | Inanna Publications