Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 71

Macro Monday Magnifies The Moist Monster

Okay, that subject header sounds like I’m talking about one thing but I’m really talking about this thing. And before you click that link lemme just warn you — it’s a spider. I mean, not a real spider that will jump out of your screen and bite your face, but a spider photo, and it’s a spider covered in raindrops sitting on a flower. But some people are viciously arachnophobic, so I thought I’d hide it behind the jump there.

The same spider created the web in the header image above. The one that looks like something written in space in the language of raindrops.

Anyway.

HELLO.

I am back from BookCon and BEA, where I was able to rain copies of Damn Fine Story down on all those who would come near me — and as it turns out, many seemed to want the book, either because they knew what it was or because they were entranced by the monocled elk. So, if you have grabbed the book, or really any of my books, by garsh and by golly I could sure use the a review at the Review Location of your choice. Amazon! Goodreads! Carved onto the side of a mountain with a doom laser! Tattooed on your face! Whatever.

Here, for your service, have a creampuff:

Okay, it’s a photo of a creampuff, but you were okay with it not being real when it was a spider, so don’t complain now.

Let’s see, what other news nuggets of note?

Damn Fine Story will soon come to audio. More details when I have them.

Also coming to audio: The Raptor & The Wren and Vultures.

Zer0es is still a buck-ninety-nine.

Wanderers is out of copy-edits. Soon out for blurbs which is — ha ha, ohh man, that’s always a terrifying part of sending your book out.

Also, I’m really coming around to the idea of starting a Patreon/Drip (probably Drip) — it would focus on writing advice in an “advice column” way, where the column would, after a period of exclusivity, drift over here to the blog properly. I like the idea, but not sure how many readers here are really… interested in that? Give a shout in the comments if that’s a thing you’d dig.

And that’s it.

Have a good week.

Or don’t. I’m not your Mom.

I am your Weird Uncle though, so I feel I have some authority.

Flash Fiction Challenge: A Random Scattering Of Fresh Titles

BOOM. I’ll give you ten titles. You will either pick one of the ten or you will use a random number generator to select one, and then you will write some flash fiction paired to that title.

Get it? Got it? Great.

The titles are:

Crying in the Wind
The Dreamer’s Door
Mist and Light
The Hustler
Absent Elves
The Bridge and the Rose
The Dweller
The Reaper’s Rope
Into The Parlor We Screamed
Star Blight

(All randomly generated titles, by the by.)

Length: ~1500 words

Due by: Friday, June 8th, noon EST

Post at your online space.

Give us a link below to that post.

The end.

Fonda Lee: So, You Think You Know How To Write A Sequel

You cannot go wrong with Fonda Lee, as has been proven time and time again. That’s true with her books, and true with her guest posts here at terribleminds. And if you require further example, she’s back — this time, talking about how you think you know how to write a sequel, ha ha ha oh no. Ohhhh no.

* * *

STEP ONE: DELUSIONAL OPTIMISM

Congratulations! You wrote a book and now your publisher and your readers are eagerly clamoring for the sequel. No problem, you’ve got this. You spent a long time, maybe years, creating the world and developing the characters, so all the hard work is already done. Now you just have to continue the story, and you have plenty of ideas about how to do that because you cleverly left some threads untied in the first book and also scribbled some stuff on a Post-It note when your agent asked you for a summary of book two. Start by making an outline. Pat yourself on the back; it looks good. You’re a fucking professional now. Be sure to agree to an aggressive deadline. After all, the market rewards momentum and you don’t want to keep fans waiting!

STEP TWO: DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL

Huh. You were sailing along in your writing, humming a merry tune, but now something’s wrong. You’re doing what you’re supposed to, you’re continuing the story, but there’s a nagging suspicion growing in your gut that you’ve been following the figurative path with your eyes on your feet and now as you slowly raise your head, you realize the sun has gone down in the woods and the trail has vanished, and the glowing red eyes are beginning to circle round.

What happened, you ask yourself. You analyze your choices. The sequel you’re writing is too similar to the first book; you’re just retreading ground and not being inventive enough. Or it’s too different from the first book; you’re not delivering any of the stuff that readers will want after reading the series opener. You’re spending too much time dealing with the events of the first book. Or not spending enough. You have too many new characters. You have too few. You step back and compare what you’ve done so far with your first book. Terrible mistake. The first book—in all its edited, revised, beautifully published glory—is perfect. This is dog vomit. You decide you would like to burn the manuscript, pretend this never happened, and start on a new project about something completely different. You can’t. You’re committed not just to the sequel, but to the canon you’ve already written. Also, you’ve already spent the advance money. By writing the first book, you made a very nice, sturdy sandbox, and now you’re trapped in the damn sandbox, and no one can hear you claw at the inside surfaces with your bloody fingernails.

Dazed and at a loss, you get on the Internet hoping for panda videos. Hey, people are talking about your first book! It’s doing well, getting good reviews, being nominated for awards, going into subsequent printings! You despair; you can’t possibly deliver a sequel that will live up. Or there’s silence; the first book’s not doing as well as you’d hoped. You despair; no one is going to read your second book anyway, so all you’re struggles are for nothing. You see-saw between these two states multiple times in a single day. You call up your writer friends. Oh yeah, they say, didn’t we tell you? Writing the sequel is a bitch. No, you scream, you didn’t tell me! No one told me! This is supposed to be easier! You rend your hair and crawl under the table.

STEP THREE: UNDERSTANDING THE NATURE OF SEQUELS

Okay, you’ve calmed down with the narcotic substance of your choice and have emerged from under the table to re-evaluate your situation. Slowly, you come to the realization that sequels are a unique challenge: You’re trying to write a new story (difficult at the best of times) within the scope of a larger story. You need to stay true to the events and the characters of the first book while also bringing in new elements, raising the stakes, and going deeper into the layers of the narrative, all at the same time. All with the shadow of public expectation hovering over you.

Take heart; you haven’t become a shittier writer between your first and second book. This is hard stuff and you haven’t faced this particular set of constraints and pressures before. Take a deep breath. You can do this. There are people who believe in you: your agent, your editor, your readers—they believe in you. To start with, let go of your first book. Just a little. You need some mental distance from it and how it’s performing. Stop reading reviews of what people liked and didn’t like about it and what they want or don’t want in the sequel. Pretend someone else wrote that book and you’re picking up where they left off. You can’t lose sight of the story canon that’s been established, but this new book is its own thing. What’s the story you want to tell now?

The characters, wherever they were at the end of the first book, need new goals and story arcs and/or new layers or complications in the motivations they’ve carried forward. The plot needs to make sense in the context of what’s already happened but also go in fresh and unexpected directions. Think about some of the best movie sequels: Terminator 2 flipped expectations by making the villain of the first movie the hero of the second. The tone of The Empire Strikes Back is dramatically different from the space opera candy of A New Hope. The Godfather Part II cut back in time. Alien was an atmospheric horror story; Aliens was a rousing action flick.

Put yourself in the sequel’s shoes for a minute. Just as every villain is the hero of their own story, the sequel doesn’t think of itself as a second player. The sequel thinks of the first book as the opener, and itself as the main event. “Thanks for warming up the crowd for me, buddy, let me take over from here,” says your sequel, confidently throwing its cape over its shoulder. Sequel acknowledges what was cool about First Book, but it isn’t afraid to do its own thing. With that in mind, you stop obsessing over writing a good sequel, and focus on simply writing a good story.

STEP FOUR: ALL THE WORK AND HALF THE FUN

You recommit. You write the damn book. You rewrite it. You revise it. Many times. You probably go through more drafts than you did with the first book (but you set that fact aside, because you’ve resolved to stop comparing this manuscript to the first book, remember?) You’re under time pressure, but if you need to, you ask for an extension because it’s more important that the book is good than that it’s released on a precise schedule, no matter what they say.

At last, you’re done. It was a ton of work, and guess what? The sequel will likely less attention that the first book did, especially if the first was your debut. Odds are it will get less hype, fewer trade and reader reviews, lower sales, and have less chance of being nominated for awards. Woop-de- friggin’-do! So…why do people do this again? Why don’t we all write standalones?

Because the reward for both the author and the reader is just too good to pass up: a chance to go back to a world we’ve fallen in love with, to spend more time with characters who’ve captured our hearts, to tell a bigger story on a bigger canvas, to answer the burning question, “What happens next?” With luck, your badass sequel goes out into the world and makes your existing readers very happy, and to the new readers, it says, “Hey, you’re missing out, but you can still get in on the party. Let me introduce you to my buddy over here, First Book.”

Ahhh, you did it, you wrote a sequel! Flush with victory, you sit down to write the third book!

Don’t talk to me about the third book.

* * *

Fonda Lee’s new young adult science fiction novel, Cross Fire, is the sequel to Exo, which was a Junior Library Guild Selection and Andre Norton Award finalist. Fonda is also the author of the YA novel Zeroboxer. Her recent adult debut, the fantasy saga Jade City, was a finalist for the Nebula and Locus Awards and named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s Books, Syfy Wire, Den of Geek, and the Verge.

In the stunning follow-up to Exo, Earth’s century of peace as a colony of an alien race has been shattered. As the government navigates peace talks with the human terrorist group Sapience, Donovan Reyes tries to put his life back together and return to his duty as a member of the security forces. But a new order comes from the home planet: withdraw. Earth has proven too costly and unstable to maintain as a colony, so the aliens, along with a small selection of humans, begin to make plans to leave. As word of the withdrawal spreads through the galaxy, Earth suddenly becomes vulnerable to a takeover from other alien races. Invaders who do not seek to live in harmony with humans, but to ravage and destroy the planet for its resources.

As a galactic invasion threatens, Donovan realizes that Sapience holds the key that could stop the pending war. Yet in order to save Earth, all species will have to work together, and Donovan might just have to make the ultimate sacrifice to convince them. But can one person save an entire planet from total extinction?

Fonda Lee: Website | Twitter

Crossfire: Exo Excerpt | Indiebound | Amazon | B&N | Powells (Signed Copies)

[image error]

Macro Montuesday Is Back From The Heat Death Of The Universe

I HAVE RETURNED FROM THE DESERT, HAVING HAD A VISION OF A BUNCH OF WEIRDO AUTHORS GATHERING THERE TO DRINK FANCY COCKTAILS AND TALK NERD SHIT and lo, it was good.

I met those randos above, which include, from L to R: Brandon Sanderson, Mark Coal, James Joyce, Stevia McGee, and me in the center: Chnurk Mandog.

*checks notes*

Okay that can’t be right.

Fine fine fine, it’s a handful of WONDERPALS, the storytellers: Sam Sykes, Myke Cole, Aaron Mahnke, and Delilah S. Dawson. We were loosed onto the streets of the city to roam and wreak havoc. (Oh and P.S., Aaron Mahnke’s newest Lore tome is out today. Go grabby Wicked Mortals — print or e-book. Don’t make me come over there.)

Seriously, Phoenix Comic-Con — wait, Comic Fest? — wait, Fan Fusion? — was rad. Such a wonderful crowd of fans and writers, really some of my favorite people in the whole damn universe. Trips like this make me realize how lucky I am to do what I do and to surround myself with such talented, kind, and utterly strange people.

*throws mug to the ground; it shatters*

ANOTHER, I SAY.

(More photos below.)

Let’s see, what else is going on?

OOH OOH OOH, Tor.com revealed the newest and last Miriam Black cover — Vultures, which comes out in January 2019, now has what has easily become one of my favorite covers of all my books, courtesy of Adam Doyle. Tor has the exclusive. They also have the exclusive cover copy/story description — but I’ll warn you, if you’re not caught up, it’s hella spoilery. Good news is, you can bop over and see the cover without reading that. But it will give away the events of prior books, as the last book in a series ultimately must. Vultures is not a book to read if you’ve not read the five books that precede it.

I also have some cover designs rolling in for Wanderers, and some ARCs have already started to go out — even though the book doesn’t come out until April of next year, Del Rey wants to get an early promotional jump, so that’s exciting. I’ll show the cover when we’ve settle on one but it is looking really amazing. I’m honestly nervous to have people read the book.

Hm. What else?

Some nice sales or price-drops on my books in digital —

Blackbirds is now $5.99.

Invasive is also $5.99, but also is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited.

Zer0es is on sale for $1.99 — not sure how long that lasts, so go grabby grabby.

And I think that’s it.

More photos from the con below:

(photo courtesy of either Kris Morris or Janelle Badali — not sure which of them took the shot!)

Macro Monday’s New Band Name Is Skull Angel, Pass It On

SKULL ANGEL, SUCKERS. Bow down and worship.

Or something.

This week I’m off to Phoenix Comic Fest, and I can’t seem to access their schedule on their site? So I’m gonna post my (tentative, subject to change) schedule here in the hopes that it will help you Arizona-dwelling pop culture vultures.

HERE BE MY SKED-YOOL, YARRRR

Wednesday, May 23rd

7:00PM-8:00PM

Elevengeddon: A Multi-Author SciFi Event — seriously, tons of authors going to this free SFF bookish event, mega authors like Daniel Jose Older and John Scalzi and VE Schwab and Delilah Dawson and, of course, me bringing down the grade curve.

Please note: you do not need to be attending PHXCF to come to this!

SO YOU SHOULD COME

The Poisoned Pen Bookstore

4014 N Goldwater Blvd

Scottsdale, AZ 85251

Thursday, May 24

1:30PM-2:30PM

PANEL: It’s a Mystery

Location: North 125AB

Description: You don’t have to be the World’s Greatest Detective to attend this panel. Guest Authors will clue you in on the most compelling mystery stories.

4:30PM-5:30PM

SIGNING

Location: North 124AB

With Melinda Snodgrass, Sylvain Neuvel, Jason Fry

6:00PM-7:00PM

SIGNING

Location: Del Rey Booth #1697

With Jason Fry

Friday, May 25

10:30AM-11:30AM

PANEL: It’s the End of the World As We Know It – Apocalyptic Fiction

Location: North 126C

Description: There’s something utterly fascinating about the end of the world. What would it be like to survive the end of civilization and how would we start to rebuild?

12:00PM-12:45PM

SIGNING

Location: Changing Hands Author Signing Area

With Emily Devenport, Alexandrea Monir

8:00PM-11:30PM

EVENT: Drinks with Creators!

Location: North 120CD

Join authors and other creators for a glass or two in an informal setting. Door prizes, giveaways and raffles to support Kids Need To Read.

Saturday, May 26

12:00PM-1:00PM

PANEL: Writers Pay Homage to Their Forerunners

Location: North 126AB

Description: Join Chuck Wendig, Gail Carriger, Katherine Arden and Myke Cole as they talk about the writers that influenced them most.

1:45PM-2:45PM

SIGNING

With Gail Carriger, Myke Cole

Location: North 124AB

3:00PM-4:00PM

SIGNING

Location: Del Rey Booth #1697

With Aaron Mahnke

4:30PM-5:30PM

PANEL: Writers Would You Rather

Location: 126AB

Description: “Would You Rather” is a hilarious game where your favorite authors get asked questions like, “Would you rather have magic powers only activated by eating kittens or magic powers that could only affect someone’s butt?” In previous years, this game has generated raucous laughter and exposed some interesting things about what our authors would rather do.

Panelists: Chuck Wendig, Scott Sigler

5:45PM-6:45PM

SIGNING

With Alexandra Monir, Melinda Snodgrass and Kristi Charish

Location: North 124AB

Sunday, May 27

10:30AM-11:30AM

PANEL: Star Wars Books

Location: North 126AB

Description: Meet the authors of your favorite stories set A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far Far Away….

Panelists: Jason Fry, Daniel Jose Older, Chuck Wendig, Alan Dean Foster

12:00PM-1:00PM

SIGNING: Star Wars

Location: Del Rey Signing Booth #1697

With Jason Fry, Daniel Jose Older, Chuck Wendig, Delilah Dawson

So that’s that for me in Phoenix. Come say hi! Even if you’re not in Phoenix, get there! Hop a plane! A train! A trans-dimensional desert portal! Or just drop acid and hallucinate me!

It’ll be great.

Also, what else is new?

My run on TUROK has been collected in a trade paperback — TUROK: BLOOD HUNT. So, hey, go get it if you feel so inclined.

I’m told too that a Miriam Black cover reveal is in the works for this week.

SyFy.com has an article talking about Chewbacca and his family, and I’m all up in it talking about the Han and Chewie dynamic going on in the Aftermath trilogy.

And I think that’s it.

Here’s another high-test dose of weird macro photos, enjoy:

Flash Fiction Challenge: Thy Name Is Vengeance

I wrote on Twitter this week that one of the chief themes behind the current MCU films is that revenge runs counter to heroism — Tony, Thor, Star-Lord, they fall prey to revenge and it causes them to derail their goals and fail the mission(s) at hand.

I want you to write a story of revenge.

How it ends up is all on you — I’m not asking you to confirm the thesis that it runs counter to heroics, that’s the MCU thing. You can do different, if you choose, but I think a good revenge tale always makes for interesting reading, and fitting it int0 1000 words is an extra special challenge.

Length: ~1000 words

Due by: Friday, May 25th, noon EST

Post online.

Give a link below.

(Also note that next week there won’t be a flash fiction challenge — I used to try to schedule them while I’m gone, but lately WordPress has had scheduling issues, and gives me an error when I try to schedule half my posts for some reason, and they never go up. I’ll be in Phoenix, AZ, for the Phoenix Comic-Fest.)

The Wendigo Configuration: Eat The Sandwich, Join The Cult

I should rewind.

Last week I said, “Hey, you should eat this sandwich.”

And many of you did. Between Twitter and Facebook I stopped counting at 50 attempts by folks to make and enjoy the sandwich, and countable on one hand were those who didn’t actually like it. Those who did like it have joined me at my new cult compound, where we eat the holy sandwich — now dubbed THE WENDIGO, by the way — and we play cornhole (tee-hee) and sing camp songs and go canoeing and also sacrifice the unrighteous to the Antediluvian Sandwich Gods that live underneath the compound and who have been recently awakened by the glory of so many Sanctified Sandwich Eaters having been summoned by the tasty, tasty Wendigo. Or something. I ate some more yard mushrooms so a lot of this might not be real?

WHATEVER.

Again, to remind you, the now-official Wendigo Sandwich is this:

The Wendigo

Bacon

Peanut butter (crunchy or smooth, but not sweetened, and not too goopy-oily)

Mayonnaise (Duke’s is king, don’t @ me)

Pickles (sweet or dill, your call).

Put it on the bread of your choice (I like sourdough).

BUT OF COURSE, a cult is nothing without its DELICIOUS SCHISMS and SCRUMPTIOUS HERESIES, and in this cult, we welcome such deviations, because we are a cult of deviants. And so, I offer the following Wendigo Configurations, and please feel free to make and try your own, popping them into the comments below. (Sidenote: The Wendigo Configurations is my favorite Robert Ludlum thriller and also the best Mumford & Sons album.)

The Vegandigo

The sandwich is close to being vegan as-is —

Pickles? Easy vegan.

Mayo? Not vegan, but use vegan mayo (Just Mayo).

Peanut butter? Easy vegan.

Bread? I say try it with Dave’s Killer White Bread.

And bacon is already vegan, so there you go.

*receives note*

Apparently bacon is not vegan? AGREE TO DISAGREE.

But okay fine, use tempeh bacon or, for bonus XP, try shiitake bacon.

The When Duck Go

Not a fan of pork?

The cult has you covered.

Use duck bacon.

Because duck bacon is fucking nomworthy, y’all.

I use D’Artagnan brand when I’m not near a fancy farmer’s market.

The Boot-Up-Your-Back-Endigo

This is the sandwich, only, spicy.

How you make it spicy is up to you, but here’s my preferred way to kick it the fuck up and make it perform excellent BDSM with your mouth:

Mayo, same. Bread, same. Bacon, same.

Peanut butter? Okay, spicy peanut butters do exist, but you’re gonna just go ahead and make your own — take a couple tablespoons of peanut butter and whisk into it a teaspoon of chili oil and a teaspoon of gochujang. Whisk that shit together.

Feel free to up the spice quantity for, well, a spicier peanut sauce.

Then, the pickles.

Wickles pickles.

Trust me on this one.

The Spamdigo

Replace bacon with Spam. Make the Spam extra crispy, which I did not do at first, as you can see here in this photo:

Which means yeah, you gotta fry that business. Thin slice. Fry till crisp.

And don’t bring your SPAM SHAME to me — Spam is delicious, and your noxious nose-pinching when I talk about it is classist and you should be ashamed. Not to say you need to like it! But if you’re all elite about it, yeah, you can stow that. Spam is great when fried.

The Spicy Spamdigo

Same thing as above, but dip it in gochujang as you eat it.

Just do it.

The Scalzwendigo

Ditch the bread, stick it all in a burrito, instead.

The Blendigo

Take all of it and put it in a high-test blender and make a smoothie okay ha ha ha Jesus Christ don’t do this this might be a bridge too far even for me.

The Drunken Wendigo: Cocktail Edition

Can we make a cocktail out of this thing? Probably not, but by golly, let’s try.

For bread, we want rye whiskey.

For peanut butter, we shall infuse the rye with peanuts. Let’s go with honey roasted peanuts, for the sweetness. You can also make them yourself, by the way. Then take a cup of them and put them in, I dunno, eight ounces of rye. Or sixteen? I dunno, whatever, we’re making this up as we go and you’re not going to do it anyway. Let it sit for as long as you can muster, maybe 24 hours, then strain a couple times (cheesecloth is your pal).

So, let’s go with 2 oz of whiskey? Maybe 1.5?

For mayo, we’ll do an egg white and lemon juice. (The logic being, mayo is an aioli, and your basic aioli contains egg and lemon.)

For pickles…

*deep breath*

Well, okay, if we’re being authentic, you probably want a shot of pickle juice in there. And pickle juice cocktails are actually a thing, soooo. I’d keep the quantity of it low — a half-ounce, maybe. I’ve had pickling juice in a martini and it was way too intense. If you wanna go with just vinegar, instead, you could use apple cider vinegar or aged balsamic vinegar for its sweetness.

You’re basically making a weird whiskey sour.

My guess is you’d put all this shit in a shaker — 1.5 oz of your peanut-infused whiskey, a half ounce of pickle juice or vinegar, the white from one egg, half ounce of lemon juice, and if you didn’t use honey-roasted peanuts in the whiskey then add a bit of sweetness (in the form of honey or maple syrup). Shake shake shake, Senora, shake it all the time. With ice. When cold, pour into a glass. Then you… drink it? I guess?

This started as a joke but it could maybe work…

Testing is required, I think.

Your Turn, Cultist

Got a variant on The Wendigo? Pop it in the comments below. Note that for it to be a proper variant it must still ultimately look like the sandwich — you can’t say, “My variant is tuna, ketchup, Havarti cheese, and bees,” because that’s a whole different sandwich. You’re looking to take one, maybe two of the ingredients, and tweak them by a degree or two — so it resembles the original without being the original.

GET TO WORK, MY CULINARY CULTISTS

Macro Monday Is Wandering Widely

That photo is of a dandelion gone to seed after a light rain. Gives me the vibe of a UFO coming down though — lights and beams and abduction. That also might be the weird mushrooms in the yard I ate? They just looked so tantalizing!

MISTER STARK I DON’T FEEL SO GOOD

Anyway.

Not much going on here except I am eyeballs-deep into a copy-edit of WANDERERS, a book that will soon have cover copy I can share and also a cover I can share — right now I kinda pitch it as “What if Stephen King and Michael Crichton wrote an epic-length Black Mirror episode?” but that’s not quite right. And saying it’s The Stand meets Station Eleven isn’t quite right either. It’s a little bit The Passage? I dunno. It’s big. It’s sprawly. It’s scary. It has a lot of surprises.

And coming soon too: a cover and copy reveal for Vultures, the sixth (and final, holy shit) Miriam Black novel. That cover I have, and it’s one of the greatest covers I have of all my books — it pops. Adam Doyle knocked it out of the park. Cover release, I think, next week.

Also next week?

I’m at Phoenix Comicfest! I don’t think the schedule there is firmed up, so I’ll share mine next Monday. But be advised that, even if you’re not attending the show, you can attend ELEVENGEDDON, which is a huuuuuuge author event at the Poisoned Pen bookstore. Takes place next Wednesday, 7pm, and contains the following authors (and more):

Myke Cole

Emily Devenport

Cory Doctorow

Jason Fry

Aaron Mahnke

Sylvain Neuvel

K. Arsenault Rivera

John Scalzi

Victoria (V.E.) Schwab

Scott Sigler

Charles Soule

Chuck Wendig

Sam Sykes

That’s a lotta damn talent in one room. I only hope I don’t bring the quality down.

Details here.

Beyond that? The copy-edit calls, all y’all.

HAVE A GOOD WEEK, FRANDOS.

Flash Fiction Challenge: Real Estate

Real estate is fascinating. The buying and selling of houses. The buying and selling of homes — not just a place you rest your head, but for some, your heart. And then there’s the potentially criminal aspect. Or the callous capitalist aspect.

And then if you contextualize it across genres — real estate horror, real estate sci-fi, real estate in fantasy, what the hell does that look like?

I dunno. You tell me.

Your job this week is to write about real estate.

In some way.

In some fashion.

Make this strange topic interesting in whatever context you find interesting.

Length: ~1000 words.

Due by: Friday, May 18th, noon EST

Post the story at your online space.

Drop a link to said story in the comments.

Stacey Filak: Five Things I Learned Writing The Queen Underneath

[image error]Yigris is a city divided by more than just ideals. Above, ruled by a patriarchal and controlling society has long relied on the matriarchal Under, home of thieves, whores, and assassins for more than just financial gain. When the rulers of Above and Under are both murdered on the same day, their heirs apparent must work together to save their country and themselves. 

Gemma, the new Queen of Under, faces loss, betrayal, grief and a transformation into the queen she must be. Tollan, the young King of Above has an even more personal crisis. He’s fallen in love with Elam, a young man trained as a sex-priest in Under, while his city burns and a war threatens to consume them all.  And if that wasn’t enough, his mother, a pirate queen who abandoned him years before, has just sailed into port. 

My instincts are crap.

The first two manuscripts that I wrote when I finally got “serious” about writing, I went with my gut. Every character, every interaction, every setting, every bit of those books was created entirely by instinct. And then, I did the thing and sent the book out to agents and crossed my fingers and prayed to every god that would have me. And invariably, the response I got was “The writing is great, but the story is pretty basic. I’ve read this before, and it’s not what I’m looking for on my list.” So when I started writing TQU, I made a conscious effort to go against my gut. I pushed aside my ingrained tendencies and inserted a hefty helping of the exact opposite of my gut instinct. It wasn’t just my heroine that got a makeover. The heroes became men who had feelings, who learned to express them, and weren’t afraid to appear soft. They even cry, on occasion. If I was leaning towards using a trope, I turned it on its head. My whore-with-a-heart-of-gold is a man and a priest. My sexy heroine is a plus-sized woman who isn’t ashamed of her body or speaking her mind. And the prince is neither equipped to become King, nor is he a man seeking a damsel in distress. I chose to embrace the opposite of my instincts, and in doing so, I created something different. Something new. In choosing to approach the book in this manner, I was forced to face my own ingrained culpability in the systemic -isms that perpetuate in our society. I was forced to examine why I felt compelled to write a certain scene or a certain character, and what life would be like in a society where things don’t look the same as they do in our world. And though the exercise sometimes chaffed against my usual mindset, it opened my eyes to limitless possibilities, and I hope that Yigris is better for it.

Backup, Backup, Backup!

When I was 65,000 words or so into the first draft of TQU, my laptop crashed. I was writing in Scrivener at the time and I was unaware of the incompatibility of Scrivener to with Google Drive. So, while I thought I’d been backing up effectively, when I logged back onto my traitorous laptop, I learned different. The manuscript was gone. 100% erased from my hard drive, garbled nonsense in my Google Drive. And suddenly, like the revelations of a hundred prophets, I knew that if I’d finished that book, it’d be published, and all my dreams would come true.

I wasn’t a very pleasant person, that day. I was basically a one-woman soap opera, running through the entire range of human emotion all at once. If I’d had super-powers that day, I expect it would be my Super Villain origin story. So obviously, I panicked. I contacted every person I knew that had ever touched a computer and finally, a friend of mine said that I should call Google directly. After about 12 hours, several shots of liquor to calm my nerves, and the assistance of an incredibly understanding guy who worked at Google named Hutch, he was able to help me access a plain text, unformatted version of the manuscript. He emailed the file to me and told me to print right away, because he couldn’t guarantee that the manuscript wouldn’t disappear entirely. I printed out the 200+ pages and sobbed like a baby. Hutch had saved my future bestseller.

I spent a month retyping and reformatting the manuscript, and for obvious reasons, I started using Dropbox. (I also stopped using Scrivener because I had nightmares about it for a while. One day, I’ll be brave enough to give it another try.) In the end, those prophetic panicked thoughts were right. This was the book I would sell and debut with. It was the book of my dreams. And I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that had I truly lost that manuscript, I don’t know if I could have done it again. It might be that Hutch saved my writing career.

Writing isn’t about how you write, it’s about what you write.

When I first started writing TQU, I was a stay-at-home mom, with three of my four kids in school full-time. I had oodles of hours to write. Sometimes whole days, spread out before me like a picnic blanket, waiting for me to dig in. And I was one of those writers who believed, down to my bones, that I would only be able to do the publishing thing if I forced myself to write. Every. Single. Day.

By the time I had finished a first draft and a couple rounds of revisions, my youngest was in school. I had sent it out into the interwebs to hopefully snag an agent, and it was time for me to get back into the world of the employed. So I went back to work. At first, I worked part-time, and I signed with my agent about 6 months after going back at work.

I hadn’t written a useable word in six months.

Then we revised and sent it out on submission and waited, as you do. For me, it was about a year before the whisper of an offer came through. Then another several months doing an R&R, and finally, after nearly 18 months, an offer. I still hadn’t written a damn thing.

And there I was, having just accepted a full-time promotion and having sold my debut novel (yay!) and I started to think, ‘Maybe I’ve only got this one book in me.’

After innumerable rounds of revisions, when the stress of ‘will it sell or will it die?’ had disappeared, I finally began to chip away at a new idea. And you know what?

I wrote another book. Sometimes I wrote for eighteen hours on both Saturday and Sunday, every weekend for a month. And sometimes I didn’t even open the document for four weeks. But eventually, it became a book shaped thing, and I realized that I didn’t have to write every single day to be a writer. I have to write when the ideas won’t simmer anymore and come to a boil. I have to write when I’m able to devote my thought processes to the project at hand, and not the one that hasn’t sold, or the one that I need to revise. I have to write when my job or my kids or my yard work or any of the other responsibilities I have aren’t dragging at my thoughts. Sometimes that happens every day, and sometimes it doesn’t happen for a month, but the fact is, just because my life gets in the way sometimes does not mean that I’m not a writer. If book shaped things eventually come out of my brain, then I am, by definition, a writer.

Pick well the hills you choose to die on.

Just like any baby writer, I had no idea the level of revisions that would need to be tackled before my book would ever see the light of day. Despite being told, time and time again, that I’d have to revise until I couldn’t stand the sight of my own manuscript, I just wasn’t quite prepared for professional revisions. And just like all writers, there were plots, scenes and characters that ended up laying on the revision floor – plots scenes and characters that I loved — elements of the story that I thought were load bearing walls. But there was one thing that, for me, wasn’t up for discussion. It was a minor part of the story. Not even a support wall. But it was an element that I had included for the girl I once was, who had never read that type of scene when she was young. A scene that I needed to exist but had never encountered. And my editor didn’t think it belonged. It wasn’t necessarily a YA theme, and I understood that. But I stood on top of that hill, sword (or pen) in hand, and chose not to budge. It was a risk, since I had no reputation or backlist to support my demands. I argued my case, and explained my reasons, and in the end, my editor came to understand my reasoning. When readers hit that scene, they might shrug and wonder what it’s doing in a YA book, or they might read it and know someone that it has happened to, and understand, just a little. And someday, those young women may be older women who experience something similar, and I want them to know that it can happen to anyone – even heroines – and that it can be overcome. It would have been easy to prune that storyline from the novel, but for me, it was a hill worth dying on. It wasn’t a story I wanted to tell without it.

This isn’t your mother’s YA.

Which leads me to my final point. We live in a world where teen activists are leading the charge for common sense gun control. We live in an America where TEEN VOGUE is doing some of the most subversive and hard-hitting journalism in the nation. We live in a society where young people aren’t protected from the outside world – it’s projected straight into their brain, twenty-four hours a day — via the internet, social media, and traditional media. There has never been a more difficult time to be a teenager, in my opinion.

And like most people my age, my first instinct was to call TQU an adult novel. Despite the fact that many of the characters were just figuring out their place in the world – a clear element in YA – my gut argued otherwise. My instincts said that the nature of the story — the sexual content, the violence, the societal messages – were too dark, and too mature for a YA novel. But as I’ve already stated above, my instincts are garbage. My agent said it was YA. My editor said it was YA. Even my kids said it was YA.

And then I thought back to the books I was reading when I was a “young adult.” Books like ARE YOU THERE, GOD? IT’S ME, MARGARET and THE OUTSIDERS. Books that my mom had thought were a little too mature for me. And then, when I got sneakier, I was reading THE THORN BIRDS and FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC, books that probably were to mature for me. So, here’s the thing. Young adults have always read the controversial, the dark, and the stories that push the envelope. From TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD to THE KITE RUNNER, SPEAK to THE HANDMAID’S TALE, YA has always been on the edge of what’s “allowed.” Today, we are seeing some of the most progressive leaps in media happening in Young Adult publishing – books like DEAR MARTIN and THE HATE YOU GIVE, THE ART OF STARVING and THE BELLES. Add to that the fact that today’s young people are vastly more informed, vastly more active in the world, and vastly more affected by the world at large, and you begin to see that the teenagers of today can handle things that I couldn’t have dreamed of at their age. Unfortunately, they’ve already been forced to.

When I first finished writing TQU, my gut reaction was, “I don’t want this to just be a YA novel.” But like I said, my instincts are crap, and the more I learn about the teens of today, the more I want to shout, “Hell, yes. This is a YA novel.” I can only hope that I’ve written something to inspire, encourage, or entertain the teenaged superheroes in our midst, because we’ve left them to do the heavy lifting.

* * *

Stacey Filak was born in a small town in Michigan, where she dreamed of hero’s quests, epic battles, and publishing a book. At least a couple of things have come true. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with her husband and four children, and a menagerie of pop-culture named pets. She manages a veterinary clinic as her day job and aspires to someday write something that means as much to someone else as her childhood favorites mean to her. THE QUEEN UNDERNEATH is her first book. 

Stacey Filak: Website

The Queen Underneath: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N