Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 84

Fight On, Space Unicorns: Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction

[image error]

And now, a vital guest post from Michael Damian Thomas, co-editor of Uncanny Magazine along with Lynne M. Thomas, who wants to talk about their daughter, the political state of America, and the mission behind the new Disabled People Destroy Science-Fiction series — you will find the Kickstarter for that right here, so go click and go give.

* * *

The above picture is of my daughter, Caitlin, at her appointment to pick up her ankle-foot orthotics on November 8, 2016. Earlier that day, Caitlin voted with me. As we waited for her orthotist to finish grinding the orthotics to fit her, I told her our candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was about to become the first woman president.

That was her smile about HRC—a smile so magical I had to take a photo to share with the other HRC supporters in our lives who were about to experience this historic moment together.

Twelve hours later Caitlin was in bed, and we were all in tears.

Not because history was missed, but because we knew what this could mean for Caitlin’s life, and the lives of so many other people. A corrupt, treasonous, hateful, asshole conman was now going to be our president, with a Republican-controlled legislature. A man who made it very clear when he mocked reporter Serge Kovaleski how he felt about disabled people. A man who had no problem cutting off his own nephew’s 18-month-old child from medical insurance—a child with infantile spasms.

Caitlin had infantile spasms. It’s a main marker of her Aicardi syndrome. They’re violent, rare seizures that made her infant body fold repeatedly in half, causing brain damage with each spasm. They would happen over and over again (the worst series went for 45 minutes before the paramedics got Caitlin to the ER). The medicines which finally controlled her infantile spasms cost our health insurance $18,000 per month. Thankfully, we had insurance without lifetime caps and access to a Medicaid program, which was codified through the Affordable Care Act. This kept us from going bankrupt.

We have walked that fine edge of financial disaster for her entire life. Caitlin’s 2014 alone cost a million dollars, thanks in part to a spinal fusion surgery that vastly improved her quality of life. And now, because of the election, these hateful GOP assholes who wanted to destroy the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and so many other laws and programs for disabled people have the power to do so. Without these protections and programs, Caitlin wouldn’t have been able to live with us and thrive. Others, too, saw their lives in peril. They fought. National ADAPT claimed this summer, waging civil disobedience war against the GOP. Rooted in Rights published articles about the political struggles disabled Americans like Caitlin found themselves in.

What would happen to Caitlin if we lost? What could we do?

This was just our story as the year started. So many different groups of people were suddenly scared and in trouble: women, immigrants, POC, Muslims, Jews, queers, women, disabled people, and so many more. (My wife and I are both queer, and I’m also disabled.) As fascist white supremacists moved into power, we did Tweetstorms. We called our legislators constantly. We fought and tried not to collapse in discouragement. Often Lynne and I felt frustrated that we couldn’t do more.

Then a dear friend reminded us that we have a magazine. Uncanny Magazine, to be exact.

The Thomases have a history of pissing off the alt-right. Wired named two things Lynne edited in “The Books and Stories That Sparked a Culture War” for their Sad/Rabid Puppies’ article. Milo attacked these works and Lynne’s Hugo Awards on Breitbart. Some of our more political stories, like Brooke Bolander’s “Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies,” have gone viral and been nominated for numerous awards.

This is what we do. We help create and publish art that pisses hateful people off.

We decided it was time to get even louder.

Uncanny Magazine first started with a community coming together, which we named the Space Unicorn Ranger Corps after our Space Unicorn mascot, during our initial Kickstarter. Now, this community is getting politically active together, which is glorious.

We made an open call for Uncanny Resistance essays. People flooded us with pitches. We published essays that taught civil disobedience methods, how to run for office, how to lobby, and personal stories about how merely existing when you’re marginalized is a form of Resistance to this regime. Science Fiction and Fantasy fans and writers came together as a community in our pages, sharing information and support for the fight.

As part of this mission, we also took Lightspeed Magazine up on their offer to continue the Destroy series with Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction. We brought together an amazing team of disabled guest editors:

Editor-in-Chief/Fiction Editor: Dominik Parisien
Editor-in-Chief/Nonfiction Editor: Elsa Sjunneson-Henry
Reprint Editor: Judith Tarr
Poetry Editor: S. Qiouyi Lu
Personal Essays Editor: Nicolette Barischoff

As Co-Editor-in-Chief/Nonfiction Editor Elsa Sjunneson-Henry said:

Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction is a continuation of the Destroy series (now brought to people by Uncanny Magazine) in which we, disabled members of the science fiction community, will put ourselves where we belong: at the center of the story. Often, disabled people are an afterthought, a punchline, or simply forgotten in the face of new horizons, scientific discovery, or magical invention. We intend to destroy ableism and bring forth voices, narratives, and truths most important to disabled writers, editors, and creators with this special issue.

[image error]

We are currently running the Kickstarter for Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction/Uncanny Magazine Year 4. (Above art by Galen Dara.) We will continue running essays, stories, and poems by people who Resist this regime. People who fight hate with art. People who come together as a community of artists and thinkers and find ways to push back, create the world we want to live in, and inspire others to do so, too.

For Caitlin. For everybody.

Please consider backing us if you have the means.

Fight on, Space Unicorns.

“This Isn’t Us”

I’ve seen that phrase a lot over the last couple days — this isn’t us, as if what happened in Charlottesville happened somewhere else, to someone else, in another country, on another planet.

But it didn’t. It happened here.

It didn’t happen here in a vacuum. It did not appear here, as if by random, as if by some Satanic intervention. It wasn’t a comet we didn’t see coming, it wasn’t a disease making a sudden zoonotic jump. This is in our, to borrow and subvert the phrase of those Nazi fucks, blood and soil. This is a nation whose land was stolen brutally and violently from its inhabitants. This is a nation whose backbone was built and straightened by black slaves brought here in chains. We spilled a lot of blood to get here. Blood in the dirt, blood and soil — not as the Nazi fuckos mean it, no, because they mean it to do with pride in their heritage and their white skin and their relationship to the rural land. Theirs is an idealized, beatific version where they’re simultaneously both the heroes and the victims of their own narrative. I mean it that we spilled a lot of blood — not ours — to make this nation, and that blood has soaked the soil, it’s been baked into who we are and where we came from. I mean that at times we have not been the heroes or the victims but rather, the villains in this narrative.

And no, no, I know, before someone out there says it, bite your tongue: please no NOT ME, NOT ALL OF US, I’M NOT LIKE THAT. Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t, but this is the land on which you stand. We are as a nation at our best when we recognize this, when we see the cruelty and viciousness that birthed this country and we work against it. When we struggle to repair what we broke, when we seek to salve the trauma we have brought, when we aim to rebalance the scales of privilege away from those who have it — as I said elsewhere, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing cisgendered non-disabled straight-ass white dudes that they could be victims of oppression. We are at our best not when we say this isn’t us, but rather, this is us, but we don’t want it to be. We are at our best when we are truthful to ourselves and our children as to how we got here and to the cost we made others pay — and the cost we continue to make them pay today.

White supremacy is here.

It’s not just the South.

It’s not just the margins, the fringe.

It isn’t new.

It’s the mortar holding together our bricks. What’s new(ish) is the overtness with which these weak, wormy people display their hate-fueled fake-ass victimization. The hoods are off. But it’s been here all along. More covert. More hidden. Hidden not just under white hoods but in business suits and in arrest records and in bank loans and in the secret language of privilege we speak. It’s been here, stoked by the rich and the powerful, used as a tool — a hack, really — to control the middle and working classes, to convince them that they are the victims of Outsiders, Others, Foreigners, instead of what they really are: dupes, rubes, marks for the con-men.

This is us. This is who we are.

But it’s never too late to change.

And change we must. We must rebuke the Nazis. We must recognize that hate speech is not free speech. We must chase down white supremacy not just as a tool of the emboldened fringe but as a benefit we have all inadvertently claimed by climbing the ladder of privilege built by those who came before us. Some of you may not see it. You may say, But I don’t feel privileged. And maybe, individually, you’re not. But as a group, we are. And even you, the Unprivileged, should ask yourself — if you put on a polo shirt and a red hat and joined a Neo-Nazi rally, what would happen to you? Would the cops beat you? Or would they shield you? If you lifted your hand in a Hitler salute, would the system rebuke you, or support you? Would you end up in jail? Would you get a beating and disappear, or a firm talking-to? Now, what if your skin color were different? Then what? Does that change your calculus? It should. It would. You’d be bloodied. You’d be in jail. Even if all you were doing was standing there with a phone, taking video.

Call it out. Shut it down. It’s trickle-down racism, from the White House down. We have to rip it out by the roots and (metaphorically) burn it.

And we also have to own it.

This is us.

This is America.

It was America 200 years ago.

It was America in the 1930s.

It’s America, today.

We can only fight it if we see it.

* * *

I feel like I’m supposed to do a call to action here — something to do instead of just something to read and to say. First, as a writer, my default call to action is to support marginalized creators. Go the extra distance. Buy and share their work. Don’t be blind to our differences, but celebrate them and elevate them. If you’re an SFF fan, and you’re looking for somewhere to start, I’d ask you to look up these authors and buy from them: Daniel Jose Older, N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Malka Older, Sarah Kuhn, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Saladin Ahmed, Ken Liu, Tananarive Due, Maurice Broaddus, Marjorie Liu, Alyssa Wong, Cassandra Khaw — the list goes on and on, and I’m barely just scratching the surface here. These are incredible storytellers whose work demands to be read.

[Like a ding-dong, I originally recommended you leave suggestions for authors in the comments below, and then helpfully closed comments to stave off Internet fuckwits. D’oh. Still keeping comments closed but will solicit new reading suggestions this week or next, apologies. That list above should get you started!]

You can also put money to the cause:

Southern Poverty Law Center. Also check out their list of flags and hate symbols used in Charlottesville.

Hell, Sara Benincasa already did a lot of the work on this one, putting together a fantastic list of where to donate in the wake of recent events.

I’m torn on recommending the ACLU at this point — on the one hand, I recognize that their support for freedom of speech has to by necessity cut both ways, and having principles means sticking to them even when they’re inconvenient. On the other hand, I can’t emotionally get behind cheerleading them for protecting Nazi speech, because you ask me, Nazi speech is hate speech, and hate speech isn’t free.

Also author Celeste Ng talks about contacting your reps, talk to the police, talk to your family, your kids, your friends, everyone.

Be good to each other.

Be better than who we are.

Be better, even more, than who we were and how we got here.

Comments closed, because c’mon.

Flash Fiction Challenge: The Last Sentence Is Needed

Your task this week is simple:

I want you to come up with a single sentence.

Just one.

No more than thirteen words long.

This sentence is meant to be the end of a story. The last sentence.

You can deposit this sentence in the comments below.

Again: just one, please.

Not a whole story.

Just one sentence — the end to an as-yet-incomplete story.

Do this by next Friday, the 18th, noon EST.

Begin.

PSA To Writers: Don’t Be A Shit-Flinging Gibbon

Here is a thing that sometimes happens to me and other authors who feature a not-insignificant footprint online or in the “industry,” as it were:

Some rando writer randos into my social media feed and tries to pick a fight. Or shits on fellow authors, or drums up some kind of fake-ass anti-me campaign or — you know, basically, the equivalent to reaching into the overfull diaper that sags around their hips and hurling a glob of whatever feces their body produces on any given day. The behavior of a shit-flinging gibbon.

Now, a shit-flinging gibbon hopes to accomplish attention for itself. It throws shit because it knows no other way to get that attention. The gibbon’s most valuable asset, ahem, is its foul colonic matter, so that’s the resource it has at hand.

Thing is, you’re not a shit-flinging gibbon.

You’re a writer.

Your most valuable asset is, ideally, your writing.

If it’s not, that’s a problem. A problem with you, to be clear, and not a problem with the rest of the world. It rests squarely upon your shoulders.

If your best way to get attention for yourself is to throw shit instead of write a damn good book, you are a troll, not a professional writer.

Your best advertising for yourself as a writer is to write the best book you can write.

Your best advertising for the last book you wrote is the next book.

Your best boost to your career is to be the best version of yourself. Online, in-person, all-around — summon the ideal version of yourself and present that face to the world, to your potential audience. That is how you earn your audience. You don’t build them. Your audience isn’t a fucking chair. They are a group of people who you can, in part, earn as readers and as fans. (I say in part because you can never please everybody, nor should you try.)

If the best version of yourself is a shit-flinging gibbon, you’re in trouble.

And certainly someone here is saying, But you just said you can’t please everybody, so why can’t I just be a shit-flinging gibbon? Well, you can be. It’s an option. It’s a tactic. It’s just a bad one. It’s one that leads with a broken foot. You’re saying, “I’m a writer,” and yet, you’re not leading with your work. You’re leading with antics. You’re leading with a toddler tantrum. No book will earn the love of a whole audience, but the book is still the point. And shit-flinging gibbons are not excellent sellers of, or writers of, books.

Now, most of you, I assume, are not shit-flinging gibbons. Your judgment is dubious — after all, you come here to read whatever hot piffle comes belching up out of my thought-hole — but at the very least, I safely assume few of you are monkeys who fling poo. And despite this, the overarching lesson is still true: most writing problems are solved by writing.

Having a problem getting traction in the book you’re working on? Write your way through it. Put words on paper. Agitate the writing with writing.

Having a problem even still? Rewrite it.

Having a problem marketing this book? Write the next book.

Having a problem with author drama or publishing nonsense? Distract yourself by, yep, you guessed it, writing something.

Can’t sell this book? Write another book.

Writing is a key to a door. It is a finely-crafted, articulate key. It is the best and shiniest artifact in your arsenal. Yes, you can try to kick the door down. Yes, you can try to bash it open with another author’s head. But your own writing is the best key you have, so use it.

No, it’s not a skeleton key. It doesn’t open all doors. Sometimes the act of writing is also about not writing — about waiting, ruminating, outlining, reading, living, about punching frozen beef, about drinking gin-and-tonics, about hunting whales and ingesting whole hummingbirds and okay you know what, I think I lost the narrative thread here a little. Point being, writing isn’t always about writing.

But the career, overall, is.

This is true however you publish, whatever you write.

Writing begets writing. Writing sells writing.

Writing is an act of doing. It is an act of making.

It is also an act of persevering.

And surviving.

A lot of writers simply can’t hack it, so they quit. The road ahead and behind you is littered with the corpses of writers who just couldn’t hack it. (And spoiler alert, some of them are the desiccated carcasses of shit-flinging gibbons.) They couldn’t deal, so they gave up and gave in.

Writing is you not quitting. It’s you taking a bite and digging your teeth deeper like a cranky-ass bulldog who refuses to let go. It isn’t you being a crap-tossing primate.

Be the best version of yourself.

Let your writing be the guide.

Write the greatest damn book you can write.

And don’t be a shitty monkey.

The end.

Sometimes Storytelling Is Just Resource Management

Once upon a time I had a vision in my head of what being an author was like.

I imagined that I would wake up at the crack of noon, and I would roll out of bed and then ruminate on the complexities of the past, the present, the future. I would Think Very Hard about Big Ideas, and then I would go to the fertile garden of my word processor and gaze upon the word-seeds I had left the day before, and there, they would bloom, carrying forth the fruit of my Big Ideas — fruit that whose skin would rupture and it would leak the sweet juices of my Pure Nourishing Genius across the page.

Then I wrote a story longer than 2,000 words and became immediately divested of this bullshit notion. To clarify, I don’t mean that writing is not about big ideas, or that storytelling is not a conveyance and mechanism for those ideas, but rather, that in the day-to-day, this isn’t what writing or storytelling is about.

No, it’s about resource management.

Like, we’ve all had jobs. Regular, normal-ass jobs. (Or normal ass-jobs? Hm.) Jobs where you juggle tasks and complete them on time. Jobs where you have to keep track of random shit and make sure some kind of process or production stays orderly. Maybe you put things into a spreadsheet or you arrange widgets and dongles or you make sandwiches as a sandwich artisan.

All good. All normal. No shame in dongle-sandwich management.

Life, too, is this way — my adult life is constantly about managing things. Am I wearing pants? Am I where I’m supposed to be? Have I put food in my body? Where are my pants again? Having a child only increased this, because suddenly I’m worry about a tinier, less-responsible version of me. Is he eating food? Is he eating the right kind of food? Am I committing to his physical, emotional and intellectual nourishment? Where is he? Right now, seriously, where is he? Is he under the couch? He might be under the couch. He might be in the ducts, like John McClane. Did he poop today? This is legitimately a thing you have to think about with kids. Their poop. Did they do it? Did it look okay? Are you feeding them the right amount of poop fuel and is it resulting in proper poopification? You just don’t know. But you always have to check.

Job, life, it’s all resource management. Hell, even video games are like this. Wandering around Mass Effect is a constant act of, “Well, I found another pair of space pants, what do I do with these? I found seven Krogan whatchamafuckits, will I use them to upgrade my sniper rifle or will I spend them for research points in order to build space toilets on this disreputable planet I found, or maybe I’ll just sell them for space drugs.”

Storytelling, I had hoped was different.

Spoiler warning: it ain’t that different.

Writing a story is often just an act of resource management.

What I mean is this:

I am often forced to be focused on basic logistics for a story. My questions are ceaselessly dull. Where are the characters? Can they have gotten there in that time frame? Wait, have they slept? What are they holding? Could they have that? Wait, does that character know enough about that thing to accurately speak about it? What’s today’s date? When is it? Where am I? Where are the characters’ pants? Are they space pants? Do they need seven whatchamafuckits to defeat the seller of space drugs? Did the characters poop today?

Worse, the writing itself is subject to resource management: did I use that word too many times? Should this chapter follow that chapter? Is there a jump in time that will help? Am I establishing a good rhythm, with differently-sized sentences and paragraphs nestled up against one another? Am I breaking this chapter up, or leaving it long, or what? Do I need more space drugs? ARE MY WORDS TOTAL POOP TODAY?

Storytelling has its own abstract resources, too. You want tension, but you don’t want too much of it — overuse it, and it becomes overwrought, listless, expected. Conflict can’t just be one thing, it needs to come in a rainbow of fucking flavors. You never want just one plot, you need multiple plots, driven by stories, circumstances, conflicts creating conflicts, scenes creating scenes. It all has to flow together. It has to have a narrative rhythm just as your words need a rhythm of language. More resources, more management, and more poop, probably, I dunno.

I note this for a few reasons.

First, because it was on my mind and what’s on my mind often gets frothily reduced, like a fine sauce, on this here blog.

Second, because I think it’s important to hold minimal illusions about what the day-to-day job entails, and sometimes this job entails not merely herding cats but rather, WRESTLING MANY HERDS OF THE AFOREMENTIONED CATS, meaning, it requires juggling lots of internal narrative data. We often see writing and story spoken of in this high-minded and occasionally impractical way, but that’s rarely what really goes into the nitty-gritty of it.

Third, because I think maybe a lot of big Hollywood films have actively lost sight of this kind of important resource management, and they treat the narrative resources cheaply to score a lazy impact — so sad when I watch big movies and find a hundred different plotholes or worse, aren’t sure how a thing is actually happening, all because I think the storytellers forgot to track the narrative data. They become so consumed with spectacle that they fail to remember how things need to actually make sense at the most basic level. Storytelling can be about pomp and circumstance, but the moment we stop believing in the basic reality of it is the moment all the pomp and circumstance deflate like a sad erection.

Fourth and finally because you do still need to transcend this — you’re managing resources but at the end of the day, a story isn’t a spreadsheet, it isn’t logistics, it’s something grander, greater, squirmier, stranger. You must get the data and details right, you must force it to make sense, and then you go beyond it. Only when your ducks are in their proverbial row do you transcend those details and find a way to arrange everything for maximum emotional or thematic impact.

But it’s okay that in the trenches, it’s about crude logic and basic arrangement.

Let that be okay.

Don’t sweat it.

Get it right, then go bigger.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to find my pants and go buy more space drugs.

* * *

[image error]

Coming soon:

DAMN FINE STORY: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

by Chuck Wendig, from Writer’s Digest, October 17th

A new writing/storytelling book by yours truly! All about the fiddly bits of storytelling — creating great characters, growing narrative organically, identifying and creating theme. Hope you dig it.

Pre-order now:

Indiebound

Amazon

B&N

(Come see me launch the book on October 17th at Borderlands in San Francisco with Kevin Hearne launching the amazing Plague of Giants and Fran Wilde supporting her sublime Bone Universe books! 6pm!)

Macro Monday Has A Lot To Say About Invasive Species, Apparently

Here’s a fun thing that happened:

All weekend I’ve taken to doing some random long-needed yardwork, one task of which involved attacking the invasive grasses that have, well, invaded our property. These grasses were once ornamental, procured by someone somewhere — a neighbor, our home’s former owner, some random Forest Hobo — and they bought them from Home Depot or Lowe’s or some other proprietor of invasive plants masquerading as friendly landscaping greenery. They planted these grasses. These grasses spread like emerald fire across the roads, driveways, forests.

These grasses form a pretty significant root ball, too, so they’re incredibly hard to remove.

So, I decided I was going to tackle one particularly massive patch, see what kind of damage I could do. Our weedwhacker with the blade attachment wasn’t working, though — I cleaned the spark plug and checked the filter and whispered the secret words into the motor, but still nothing. I decided to get my very own blade attachment: A MACHETE.

Machete in hand, I went to attack the grass.

I was successful not only in chopping the shit out of the grass, but given how much it has been raining lately, I was able to rip up several of the root-wads right out of the damp earth. (Sidenote: we seem to have stolen the PNW’s weather, as it is unseasonably cold and rainy — right now it’s 60 degrees. In August. Sorry Seattle and Portland! I know that you’re presently on fire and stuff. I blame those wacky climate hoaxsters, The Chinese.)

So, that was good fun, but now I am in pain. The backs of my thighs feel like Ivan Drago has been using them as punching bags. Sitting down is an exercise in sudden, unexpected misery. But it came from being productive, so I’ll take it, and also, SCREW YOU INVASIVE GRASSES.

The next day, a tree fell. And it fell in part across the road, so I went down to take a look — initially I assumed it was going to be one of our ash trees. We have problems with the (also invasive) emerald ash borer around here. (Sidenote: you can inoculate your trees against them, even if the ash borer has already begun to attack the tree. Used to be that it was a thousand bucks per tree, but I guess the patent expired or something, and now it’s produced by other companies for around a hundred bucks a pop. You literally poison the tree to poison the bug. Doesn’t hurt the tree. Kills the bug.) But this tree was very leafy and green, so I went over to it and started lopping some branches and moving stuff off the road, and then I was like, “Hey what are these green berries on the tree that’s weird,” and then I was like, “Hey you know what has berries, poison ivy, and I’ve never seen the berries but this surely can’t be poison ivy, because the leaves are huge, and they’re not in groups of thr… wait no they are in groups of three wait this tree is dead it’s just colonized by so much poison ivy it looks like it’s alive oh shit oh shit.”

I went home.

I scrubbed and scrubbed.

I used gritty soap and then Tecnu soap and then showered.

And this morning my right arm looks like I’m wearing a shirt made of poison ivy.

So that’s fun.

YAY NATURE.

Curiously, though much of my weekend was spent dealing with invasive species (including cutting down invasive Tree of Heaven trees and killing the invasive bug that eats them, the lanternfly), poison ivy is not actually invasive. It’s part of a healthy forest ecosystem, and shores up the ground against erosion. It’s also a fucking shitty asshole dick. *itch itch itch*

*scratch scratch scratch*

SO ANYWAY HEY HI WHAT ELSE IS UP.

I told you about those cool book sales. They’re still ongoing.

You saw Turok #1, right?

And since we’re talking about invasive things, hey, don’t forget that book I wrote about ants, ants, ants: INVASIVE.

Did you remember that I’m at the Writer’s Digest conference in NY on the 18th, 19th, and 20th? I’m on a couple panels — one about worldbuilding and another about building an audience with a blog. (That last one is tricky, and I am likely to offer controversial opinions about both building audiences and making bloggery.)

Also reminder that I’ll be in SF, Portland and Seattle with Kevin Hearne and Fran Wilde on October 17th, 18th, and 19th, respectively.

OKAY BRING ON THE MONDAY MACROS

please to enjoy these new photos taken by yours truly

*chops off arm in the meantime*

Some Book Sales To Sail You Into The Weekend

[image error]

If you are so inclined, a number of my books are on sale, presently, at Amazon.

You will find that the following books are only $0.99 in e-book:

Atlanta Burns (Book 1)

Atlanta Burns: The Hunt (Book 2)

Under the Empyrean Sky (Heartland, Book 1)

Blightborn (Heartland, Book 2)

The Harvest (Heartland, Book 3).

(Or if you want the series links: Atlanta Burns and Heartland series.)

So that’s like, five books for under five bucks.

In Atlanta Burns, you will find a young girl who goes toe-to-toe with small-town Nazis running a dog-fighting ring.

In the Heartland books you will find bloodthirsty corn created by rich people in their flying cities — and you’ll find the hardscrabble Heartlanders living down below who plan on freeing themselves from their skyborn oppressors. Steinbeck meets Star Wars.

You can also add audio, I believe, to each for $1.99.

Also looks like the Invasive paperback ($5.99) and Blackbirds paperback ($7.13) are both on sale, too — oh! And the Invasive e-book has dropped down to $6.99. So that’s nice.

What I’m trying to say is, go buy my books or I’ll keep bothering you.

*stares*

*stares harder*

*entire face breaks out into hundreds of eyes, all of which stare at you*

*ants rain upon you*

Flash Fiction Challenge: Behold The Magic Realism Bot

Someone suggested this one to me this week, and I sadly forget who (apologies!) — but there is a Twitter account called MAGICAL REALISM BOT. I don’t know if it’s really a bot or someone is actually creating or curating it, but it doesn’t matter.

Because it is brilliant.

Especially as fodder for flash fiction.

So, go look at it.

Pick a tweet.

Write a short story based on that tweet.

That’s it.

Go do it.

Length: ~1500 words

Due by: Friday, August 11th, noon EST

Post online.

Give us a link in the comments.

The end.

Adam Christopher: Retro-Futurism (Or, The Very Serious Business Of Pulp Fiction)

Behold! A guest post from a good friend and a great writer, the mighty man with two first names, Mister Adam Christopher —

* * *

A few years back I was on a WorldCon panel with m’learned host Mr. Wendig and fellow author Stephen Blackmore, and we were tasked with discussing the subject of pulp fiction. I remember having a lot of fun, but I’m not entirely sure we ever managed to get to the bottom of what the term “pulp” actually meant, at least not in the context of modern science fiction. Okay, yes, originally, way back in the 1920s and 1930s, it literally referred to the paper fiction magazines were published on – cheap, low-quality pulp newsprint – and then because everybody in the history of everything is a snob, the quality of the paper somehow became confused with the quality of the stories on which they were printed and pulp fiction became a synonym for, well, crap. This was low-grade mass-produced nonsense for people who didn’t read the important books that other people pretended to read, stories deliberately designed by evil publishing overlords to entertain and enthral and – gasp! – excite.

Heaven forfend stories should be fun.

And sure, a lot of pulp sci-fi was written very quickly – the prolific Gardner Fox apparently wrote ten stories a week, using his morning and evening commutes to outline and his lunchtime to edit. A lot of pulp fiction is, well, not of a high quality, but considering the enormous volume produced – at its peak, reading pulp fiction magazines was actually the number one leisure pastime in America – the hit rate probably adhered to the standard bell curve.

I’d argue that reading pulp sci-fi now is no less entertaining than it was seventy years ago, but while our understanding of science and technology is infinitely more advanced than it was back then, I don’t think that needs to have any impact on our enjoyment of the original material.

More than that, I don’t think it can, or should, stop us from creating new fiction in the same vein. For some reason, there’s a secret rule of science fiction that says it has to be set in the future, but as we should all know by now, writing rules are there to be ignored, if not laughed out of the building.

It was with this in mind that I set about writing a series about a robot assassin working in Hollywood, California, 1965. In the world of the Ray Electromatic Mysteries, the robot revolution came and went in the 1950s – while robots and artificial intelligence were useful things, it turned out that people didn’t like robots taking their jobs, so the whole thing was canned – and Ray finds himself as the last robot in the world. Programmed to be a private detective, he was re-programmed by his profit-motivated supercomputer boss, Ada, to be a hitman, after she figured out that you could make more money from killing people than helping them.

That’s the concept, and it’s a simple one. What was harder was, if you’ll pardon the pun, the execution. Because now I found myself having to write a series of science fiction novels set not in the future, but in the past.

There’s a temptation here to, well, take the piss, as they say here in the UK – to mock or make fun of the genre. To our modern eyes, the science of the 1960s can be both amazing and ridiculously quaint – we managed the incredible feat of landing people on the moon using the most complex machines ever invented, yet a one megabyte hard drive was the size of a small truck and people weren’t really sure that computers had a place in the home.

But I wasn’t writing comedy. Far from it. I was writing Raymond Chandler’s lost science fiction stories, imaginary tales set in the near future of his beloved Los Angeles. To that end, Raymond Electromatic and his boss Ada had to be high-tech, state-of-the-art visions of progress.

To make these stories work, there was only one thing to do. I had to take it all very, very seriously, taking it as an established historical fact that there were robots in the 1950s and 1960s. Some were simple drones or factory machines, but others were human-like, powered by true AIs, able to take over whole sections of industry and business to allow the people they replace live that much-promised life of automated leisure.

From that, I could build the world and my protagonist. Raymond Electromatic was the last robot off the production line, a special project personally overseen by robotics mastermind Professor Thornton. So, Ray was special – more independent, able to live and work alone in the big city. The key to his success was his memory tape, a remarkable piece of hyper-miniaturisation that allowed an entire day of experiences and data to be recorded onto a small reel-to-reel magnetic tape installed in Ray’s chest. At the end of each day, the full tape is swapped out for a clean one, and he can get back to work.

Of course, the side effect of this is that he doesn’t remember anything about what he’s done, but this is the bleeding edge of science. Some obstacles are just insurmountable… and in Ray’s case, having a short-term memory problem is a pretty good insurance policy for their operation. And if Ray is a technological wonder, his boss Ada is nothing short of a miracle. A supercomputer the size of a room, Ada is the brains of the operation – and being immobile, her memory banks have a considerably larger capacity than Ray’s.

But this isn’t a pastiche. Sure, it’s fun – coming up with suitably archaic yet futuristic technology for the books is a blast – but this is science fiction. Ray may be a wiseguy but he kills people for a living, and the seedy underbelly of Hollywood is a very dangerous place.

So what does that make Killing Is My Business? It’s a slice of retro-futurism wrapped inside a hardboiled, Chandleresque crime novel – but it’s also a serious science fiction novel.

Just one set in the glorious future of 1965.

* * *

Adam Christopher’s debut novel Empire State was SciFiNow’s Book of the Year and a Financial Times Book of the Year. The author of Made To Kill, Standard Hollywood Depravity and Killing Is My Business, Adam’s other novels include Seven Wonders, The Age Atomic and The Burning Dark. Adam has also written the official tie-in novels for the hit CBS television show Elementary, and the award-winning Dishonored video game franchise, and with Chuck Wendig, wrote The Shield for Dark Circle/Archie Comics. Adam is also a contributor to the Star Wars: From A Certain Point Of View 40th anniversary anthology. Born in New Zealand, Adam has lived in Great Britain since 2006.

Adam Christopher: Website | Twitter

Killing Is My Business: Amazon | Indiebound | B&N

 

Vivian Shaw: Five Things I Learned Writing Strange Practice

Meet Greta Helsing, doctor to the undead.

Dr. Greta Helsing has inherited the family’s highly specialized, and highly peculiar, medical practice. She treats the undead for a host of ills – vocal strain in banshees, arthritis in barrow-wights, and entropy in mummies.

It’s a quiet, supernatural-adjacent life, until a sect of murderous monks emerges, killing human and undead Londoners alike. As terror takes hold of the city, Greta must use her unusual skills to stop the cult if she hopes to save her practice, and her life.

* * *
1. Your friends’ patience and feedback is worth its weight in something considerably rarer than gold.

I’ve been writing since I was about ten or eleven, and did a whole bunch of novels and novellas before the age of fifteen, bits of some of which survive to this day in dot-matrix printout form, but I’ve spent the past decade actively involved in the world of fanfiction, where beta readers are a major part of the writing process. I have at least three people to whom I send fic chapters for feedback before posting them online, and the information I get from those people is invaluable to making the fic the best it can be — but those fic chapters are generally short, i.e. 1-2K each, and there’s never more than about twenty of them to any given story. It’s a time commitment on the reader’s part, but not an enormous one. When I started writing Strange Practice in earnest, I was lucky enough to be able to have my same beta readers look over the novel as it developed, and their patience and support and advice as I struggled with various bits of it were absolutely vital to the end result.

If you can — and some writers absolutely cannot stand having people view a work in progress, but if you can  — having someone else read over a scene or a chapter and tell you specifically if a thing is working, or if they are getting what it is you want the reader to be getting, is incredibly useful. For me, I pretty much want my readers to check my work day by day or chapter by chapter, because if I mess something up and continue to build on the thing that is messed up, I’ll have a lot of extra work to do in the next round of edits. If I can catch the thing when it first happens, then the edit will be less onerous and I will have done it right the first time. This feeds into #5, below: this is advice for people who feel okay with this, not blanket commandment that thou shalt do the thing.

2. Having written chunks of a book several times before is both an advantage and a considerable drawback to writing it again.

I originally wrote the book that would become Strange Practice in 2004 as a National Novel Writing Month entry, and then it sat around on various hard drives and in the back of my mind for about a decade while some of the characters in it were borrowed for various other applications (and evolved during the process). In 2014 I dusted it off, stripped it down to the skeleton, and began re-writing it almost completely. The result was a kind of patchwork Frankenbook which needed a lot of work to make it coherent and cohesive, and when in the fullness of time it actually went through the process of professional editing I found that this patchwork structure made the edits extremely difficult. In addition, I had a kind of emotional connection with the older parts of the book, the ones I had written years and years ago, and being made to cut or to change those parts felt a little bit like breaking off bits of myself, even if the end result was drastic improvement. (Thank you, Lindsey, editor par excellence, you were right about restructuring the opening.)

With the sequel, Dreadful Company, I started completely from scratch, which meant I didn’t have to put together bits of pre-existing book into a coherent whole, but it also meant I am having to write the whole thing from scratch, all the bits of it. (2.1: start a lot earlier than you think you will need to. Trust me on this.)

3. Google Street View is your friend (unless, of course, you’re independently wealthy and able to travel the world for research purposes).

I’m a little obsessive about research. Nothing annoys me more in fiction than an author who clearly has not bothered to do the research, or who has done a little bit and then proceeded either to misinterpret it or completely ignore any further evidence to the contrary. This means that when I’m writing a story set in a place that I don’t actually have the opportunity to explore in person, I need to know what my characters would be seeing/surrounded by at any given time, location by location. Enter Google Street View, which allows me to get an accurate mental picture of the streets and buildings from several thousand miles and six time-zone hours ago.

I use GSV to scout for locations before working out where to set particular scenes, and I use it to verify that I haven’t done something both hilarious and impossible with my description of the geography. Google has even done some even more extraordinarily awesome work inside particular landmarks: you can tour the British Museum and the Paris Opera House click by click, floor by floor, getting the sightlines and the layout exactly as they are in reality. Sometimes I really do love living in the future.

4. Do the kind of research where you will, afterward, be able to write an intro chapter to a textbook on your version of magic — and then cut almost every detail of that out again so as not to lose your audience.

Along with doing the goddamn research, one of the most important things to me in the process of worldbuilding is internal consistency: if you’re going to use magic, great, but you have to think quite hard about the rules that govern that magic, how it works, what happens when you do it wrong, etc., and then you have to make sure that the magic in your story adheres to those rules.

For the Greta Helsing universe I spent a long time talking to people who know physics in order to come up with some believable and coherent rules for a system of magic. Mine works along quite similar lines to physics, particles and strong/weak forces and spin and so on, and I had a fantastic time writing a scene in the book where one character gives the others a basic lecture about it — and of course, during edits, almost all of that detail got cut. You need to know how it works, but you don’t need to make sure your entire audience could score 80% or above on a pop quiz.

5. Prescriptivism is shit.

This one I knew already — but the vast and contradictory body of How To Write Properly literature is, in my opinion, largely unhelpful and sometimes actively counterproductive. Everyone’s process is different, and even an individual author’s process can differ from day to day based on God knows how many variables — their mood, the things they’ve had to do already that day, what they’d rather be doing, what the cat just knocked over, etc. Some people write better to a word count —  I have to get 2K done today — and some go by page number — I have to write ten pages today — and some go by content — I have to get through this scene — and all of these are exactly as valid as the next.

With Strange Practice, because large chunks of it were already present and needed only to be rewritten, word and page count weren’t very useful to me in terms of measuring my progress. With Dreadful Company I am finding that the word count is much more effective as a motivational metric: I want to get to X number of words this week, which means I need to do at least Y number of words a day. It all depends on the situation, and the prevailing atmosphere of you must write Like This or you are doing it Wrong is not something I subscribe to. Budding writers who don’t find themselves able to stick to one classification or another can feel like they’re failing, which is one of the world’s least motivational experiences, and established writers who don’t fit into, or stay in, the classifications tend to resent being told they ought to.

The best advice I can give anyone who wants to be a writer is write, and don’t stop, even if people are nasty to you about it, even if you don’t think you’re doing it right, even if you don’t think anyone will ever want to read it: don’t stop. Because you’re making a thing that’s new, and every time you write words down you are getting better at it, and that itself is a kind of magic no pseudo-physics technobabble can describe.

* * *

Vivian Shaw: Website | Twitter

Strange Practices: Amazon | Indiebound | Hachette