Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 93

The Problem With Blurbs (Or How I Got My Reading Groove Back)

This will be a disappointing post for some, and an apology, too.

I get a lot of requests for blurbs.

They roll in, at least one a week. And I am genuinely honored each time that anyone would ever consider having my dumb name devaluing their book from the inside or on its exterior. Bonus: I like helping writers, from eager novitiate to well-practiced word-herder. And I’ve been there. I’ve been the guy with a book in his hand, just asking another author, DO YOU LIKE-LIKE ME Y/N COOL LET’S GO TO THE PROM TOGETHER I mean ha ha will you blurb my book?

Blurbs are currency — I don’t mean currency in the way that cigarettes and toilet wine are in prison, we don’t trade them. I mean they’re currency for readers. Some readers admittedly probably don’t give a lick of spit who said what about what book, but for others, they see a blurb on a cover and think: “Well, if MY FAVORITE AUTHOR likes this book, then I too might like this book.” Of course, therein leads to a slightly new problem, whereupon an author of one type of book blurbs a book in a genre that author doesn’t write, and people then make assumptions based on the blurbed book (or the blurbing author). “Ah, a horror novelist blurbed this fantasy book, so it must be a horror-fantasy novel,” and then that’s not true, and a reader feels cheated.

Anyway, that’s really not the point.

Point is, I get a lot of these requests.

And I’m going to have to start turning them down.

It’s due to a confluence of reasons. First, I am not a zippy reader. Worse, I do not have a great deal of time for reading — I can carve out a little time in the BATTLESHED, and I snatch time at night before bed, but all in all, life with mounting deadlines and a five-year-old I want to spend time with means my reading time is precious. When I’m trying to read roughly a book a week for blurbing purposes, that’s literally all I’m reading (except for research books, when necessary). And it’s not that I’m reading bad books. Hardly! I’m reading great stuff. New stuff. Stuff I wouldn’t have necessarily gone out to buy on my own. And even still, I was having to turn stuff down just by dint of having too many other books to read-for-blurbs. Worse, though, is that I have a now-teetering TBR (to-be-read) pile that includes a whole lot of books I’d very much like to read for pleasure, but can’t get to because I’m trying to read books for blurbing. Which means I’m reading the books-for-blurbing fast, too fast, and they’re becoming more a point of contention and disappointment because I feel obligated to read those rather than read things I want to read. It ends up making them a chore, rather than a noble delight.

So.

Over the last couple weeks, I set aside books-for-blurbing and started to dig into that pile. I read a couple McCammon books that had been sitting on the back-burner. I started the new Kevin Hearne ARC (Plague of Giants) and the second Broken Earth book by Nora Jemisin. And suddenly, I’m in love with reading again. I feel lighter, more buoyant. I don’t feel like reading is an obligation or a stressor, but rather, a pleasure.

And I really needed that.

So, for the short term, my BLURB DOOR is closed. You can always ask, of course, but generally, the answer shall be no, sorry — and most blurb requests should be sent through my agent, Stacia Decker, anyway. Further, it means if you’re waiting for a blurb from me — *winces* — nnnyeah, you probably won’t get one at this point. The desire is high but the reality is, you probably don’t want me feeling that your book is a chore — even if it’s a beautiful, staggering, sublime read, I’ll still feel right now like it’s homework I’m turning in late.

I AM SORRY

*throws self on the altar*

*reads a couple books while up there*

Alex Segura: The Moments That Keep You Going As A Writer

Alex Segura is a good dude, but don’t tell him I said that, or he’ll get all OOH CHUCK LIKES ME about it, then he’ll want to have brunch and start a book club and ain’t nobody got time for that. He’s not only one of the architects behind the many comic properties at Archie, but he’s also a damn fine novelist. He wanted to talk a little bit about what it is that keeps you going as a writer.

* * *

Breaking news: writing is hard. It’s loaded with insecurity, rejection and silence. There are less painful, more lucrative careers that probably require less work. But, at the end of the day, those of us that stick it out and choose to peck at our keyboards daily do it because we love it. Because we’re passionate about the stories we want to tell.

But before I get too close to the Bummertown city limits, let me also say that writing creates some amazing moments. Moments where you think back and say, ‘Damn, I will never forget that.’ Like the first time you get to hold a printed copy of your book, or the first time you signed a copy for a fan or when you found out a teacher that inspired you as a kid is actually a fan of your work. That kind of stuff is rare, and spread out. But it matters. And it feels pretty good.

I had one such moment on a day where things were, well, not great. It was sometime in October, 2013. I’d just gotten news that, while not surprising, derailed my professional life. My current job was moving from New York City – where I lived – to the west coast, where I didn’t live. I could follow my job to California, sure. But I didn’t think that was possible. It just wasn’t in the cards for me and my family then. That meant I would either be jobless or I had to try and find a job. Not ideal, especially because I dug my job. And jobs give you money which allows you to live.

On the bright side, my first novel – Silent City - had just come out. Like, that same day. It introduced the world to Pete Fernandez, a washed-up journalist with a drinking problem who finds himself embroiled in the search for a former coworker, which pulls him into a complex Miami criminal conspiracy. But, because the book had been published by a very, very, very small publisher, copies weren’t available to purchase online yet (this was the first printing of the book – it was later reprinted/repackaged by Polis Books, my current publisher, to coincide with the release of my second book, Down the Darkest Street…). There was an unexpected lag on Amazon and while I was hopeful it’d get fixed, it added another rain cloud to the day. Sure, #firstworldproblems, but still. My book was “out” but no one had copies yet. That’s some kind of top-level writer torture right there.

With all that, I left my midtown office into a pouring rainstorm, sans umbrella. As I stood outside the building, water pelting my flimsy raincoat I debated what to do. Go home and sulk? Or, as planned, hit up a reading discussion by crime writer (and TV writer for shows like The Wire and Treme, to name a few) George Pelecanos at the always-great Center for Fiction a few blocks away? I chose the latter. I’m not a good sulker.

Let me backtrack for a hot second: There would be no Silent City or Pete Fernandez without the work of George Pelecanos. Full stop. I’ve always loved mystery and crime fiction, from Sherlock Holmes to gangster tales to crime classics by Chandler, Hammett and so on. But there’s a handful of books that made me think about giving it a try myself. Those are special books for a writer, as you can probably guess. The list isn’t long: Laura Lippman’s Baltimore Blues, Dennis Lehane’s Darkness, Take My Hand, Michael Connelly’s The Black Echo, James Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere and, the book that kicked the door down for the entire batch: George Pelecanos’s A Firing Offense.

Nick Stefanos, the protagonist of Pelecanos’s first three books, is a fuck up. He works as the ad guy at Nutty Nathan’s, an appliance store in Washington, DC. He smokes too much pot, drinks a lot and goes to plenty of shows. He’s directionless and young. He likes loud, melodic and defiant music. He makes mistakes. I could relate to the guy. The books were sloppy, energetic and fearless. Reading the novels, you not only get a sense for Nick as a character, but for DC as a place, and you realize pretty fast that these books could only happen in this spot. I wondered if I could do the same for Miami. Eventually, my own PI, washed-up journalist Pete Fernandez was born. The early Pelecanos novels showed me what I wanted to do with my own work.

So, yeah, Pelecanos is an important writer to me. We all have one or two. The authors that made us decide we wanted to take a stab at this writing thing ourselves. The authors who wrote books that got us so jazzed about the work, so inspired, we decided to try it ourselves.

It seemed like the perfect antidote to what I was feeling – insecurity, fear, stress and confusion.

I’d seen Pelecanos speak a few times but never gotten the courage up to chat with him, beyond stammering a few things as he signed my book. At the Center for Fiction, he read from his new novel and took some questions from the audience. As his presentation was ending and the tables were set up for his signing, I slinked toward the exit. It was time to go. As great as the event was, maybe I did want to go home and sulk. Or at least think about The Future and What’s Next. But, as I cut through the signing area, I was intercepted by my friend, writer Jonathan Santlofer, who runs the Center for Fiction. He congratulated me on my book (though, he did note his copy hadn’t arrived – cringe!) and asked if I wanted to come upstairs to sit with George and a few of the Center’s students for a low-key conversation. I said sure. My brain screamed “HELL YES.” What happened next was more than I’d expected, as I and a handful of students got to listen to George hold court about writing, his career and his latest book, starring a new series character named Spero Lucas. It was a small group, no more than twelve, and the setting was intimate and quiet. It was like we were kicking back after a nice meal with friends. George (can i call him that?) was affable, relaxed and humble. This was a guy who’d worked hard, every day, until he got his break – then he worked harder. The guy sitting before us had written nineteen novels, worked on TV shows and films, but still put in the hours every day like he was a hungry newcomer. Inspirational was an understatement.

I asked a question – about music in fiction – and likened his early work to the great post-punk albums I loved in my own college years, like the Replacements. I said his early books had the same verve and energy you’d find on records like Let It Be or Hootenanry. He smiled knowingly. I felt like we had a connection. Like I’d tapped into a secret, pirate radio station. I was speaking his language. His eyes lit up for a moment. He was flattered, it seemed, and he talked a little bit about the boldness of youth and how much fun he’d had writing those books. In that brief moment, he seemed glad I got it. I got what his books were going for. Or maybe I was just reading too much into a polite exchange. I’ll stick to the former. Soon, the questions fizzled out and it was time to go.

As the students packed their stuff and wandered off, some taking a minute to shake George’s hand in thanks, I hung back and waited. When it seemed like I had an opening, I sheepishly went up to him and let him know that his words – just then and years before, on the printed page – had meant a lot to me, and that his work motivated to write my own. He seemed genuinely touched, in the way people are when something intense cuts into a fairly routine situation. He thanked me and seemed to think that was it, and started to turn away. Before he could, I pulled out a copy of Silent City. My only copy of the book. Like I said, my publisher was a pretty small outfit and there’d been some shipping delays. I didn’t have author or review copies yet. I just had this one, tattered book I’d been clinging to like a talisman: proof of concept. Concrete evidence that I’d gone from theoretical writer to real writer. So this one copy — that was it. It was the only proof I had that I’d written a novel. But that didn’t matter to me in the moment. This was an opportunity. A sign. A moment that had to be seized.

As writers, we don’t get a lot of moments like these. Moments where things line up and we get to look back and appreciate what we’ve done, and turn around and look at the future with some optimism. A lot of the day-to-day is loaded with stress, rejection, please-love-me posturing and loneliness. It is not a profession I would suggest to someone who doesn’t take criticism well, that’s for sure. But that’s what makes the good times so meaningful. The times when you realize why you do this, why you sit alone for hours pecking away at your keyboard in the dark, telling a story first for yourself, then for everyone else. We do this stuff because we have to, and I’d probably write books for myself alone if that was the extent of my audience. But it’s nice, hell, it’s essential, to sometimes feel like you’re pushing that boulder up the hill for a reason.

I don’t remember exactly what I blurted out. It probably ran parallel with what I’ve written here, except shorter, less eloquent and littered with plenty of ums and uhs. But the gist was there: your writing inspired mine, and here’s the proof.

I handed him the copy and, without even thinking to sign it, said he could have it. That I wanted him to have it. What happened next is seared into my memory, and I hope I never forget it. I watched him hold the book and nod approvingly—hell, maybe politely, but it was positive nonetheless. The book, despite being novel-length, was slim, the pages packed tight in terms of design. The design gave the entire novel a cramped, impacted feeling. You could maybe fit the book in your coat pocket if you jammed it in. He held it up to the light and smiled. “Short and sweet. Pulpy. Just the way I like it.” We shook hands. I didn’t tell him it was my only copy. I felt like that might sully the moment. Might make it seem more forced when it really wasn’t.

I thanked Jonathan and walked out into that cold, rainy New York City evening. I didn’t have a copy of the book I’d just published anymore, even though a few months before it felt like something I’d cling to forever. I also had no idea where my career was going, which would normally send me into a spiral of panic and stress. But I’ll tell you what: it felt like I was walking on air.

***

Alex Segura is a crime novelist and comic book writer. He is the author of the Pete Fernandez Miami Mystery series, which includes Silent City, Down the Darkest Street and the newly-released Dangerous Ends, published by Polis Books. You can find him on Twitter at @alex_segura or at his website.

Alex Segura: Website | Twitter

Dangerous Ends: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Macro Monday Appears In A Snap (Wexley)

Macro shots of toys are such fun. That one is a snap of, ahem, Snap Wexley holding his blaster.

Before we do anything else, let us dispense with the winners of the first official Macro Mystery contest — again, if you missed it, the answers to what the photos depicted are:

1. dead leaf

2. dirty icicle

3. dish draining / drying rack for kids

4. the lip of a Chemex

5. decrepit baseball

6. tip of whipped cream can

7. metal handle of umbrella (with rain on it)

8. little cairns of baby powder

9. ice crystals on chocolate ice cream

10. raspberry sauce dripping from fork tines

11. this was a hard one — back engines of Transformer toy, Jetfire

12. wine sediment and stain at bottom of wine glass

13. wet shower scrubby

14. ice and frost on car windshield

15. waterdrop on blueberry

Picking a winner was hard, because three of you got a number of them very specifically, but then were really close — in the ballpark — on some other entries.

So, I’m listing three of you:

MARSHA

SEWHITEBOOKS

and KWPECH.

If you are one of these three, bounce me an email @ terribleminds at gmail.

What else is going on?

Again, I’ll be at Star Wars Celebration this next week. Loose schedule here.

Speaking of Star Wars, I’m also going to be a part of one of the coolest projects ever: From A Certain Point of View, a charity anthology that tells 40 different stories from 40 different characters experiencing the events of Star Wars: A New Hope — released for the 40th anniversary of that film. It’s got an unholy host of awesome people attached, including COOL HUMANS like Adam Christopher, Delilah S. Dawson, Daniel Older, Nnedi Okorafor, Mur Lafferty, Jason Fry, Madeline Roux, Gary Whitta, Rae Carson, EK Johnston, and more.

Also, I finally realized my dream of appearing in the (digital) pages of Playboy magazine, where I am featured nude and greased up, beard-wrestling with Fellow Author John Hornor Jacobs — sadly, though, they felt our lubricated grappling was “just too sexy” for the magazine and that several people in the office who were handling those files had to be taken to the hospital for “the vapors.” As such, they instead decided to run an interview I did with JHJ about his work.

Go forth and have yourself a Merry Little Monday.

Flash Fiction Challenge: The End Of A Long Journey

That title sounds like I’m shuttering the flash fiction challenges forever, but I promise, that’s not the case — no, instead, I want you to use that idea as this week’s prompt.

What I mean is this:

I want you to write the end of a long journey.

That can mean whatever it needs to mean in the context of your story.

The story can be any genre.

The tricky bit here will be — how can you get in a beginning, a middle, and an end for what is ostensibly the period of a narrative consisting only the end? It’ll require you to bring some skills to bear to make it work, to give us all the information we need, and to make it more than a snapshot in time or just a vignette.

Length: ~1500 words

Due by: 4/14, Friday, noon EST

Post the story online.

Link to it in the comments below.

A News Dart To The Neck

AHOY-HOY, WORD-NERDS.

I got sidelined with some excess travel this week — was supposed to come home on Monday from California, but “weather” in Atlanta kept me in California until Tuesday, instead. As such, I didn’t get around to tallying the winners to the Mystery Macro Monday contest. I’ll announce those winners this Monday, but here’s what the photos actually were, for the record:

1. dead leaf

2. dirty icicle

3. dish draining / drying rack for kids

4. the lip of a Chemex

5. decrepit baseball

6. tip of whipped cream can

7. metal handle of umbrella (with rain on it)

8. little cairns of baby powder

9. ice crystals on chocolate ice cream

10. raspberry sauce dripping from fork tines

11. this was a hard one — back engines of Transformer toy, Jetfire

12. wine sediment and stain at bottom of wine glass

13. wet shower scrubby

14. ice and frost on car windshield

15. waterdrop on blueberry

Winners announced this coming Monday.

LET’S SEE, WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON.

Celebrate Good Times, C’mon

In a week, I leave for my first Star Wars Celebration — holy crap, I’m slathered in nerd-froth over that one. (Also slathered in nerd-froth: the Great Ewok Defense of 2017, FYI.) I don’t believe they’ve released proper schedules yet (to my surprise), but when it pops, it’ll pop up here at the blog and at the Celebration website. Hope to see you there!

(Actually, looking at the site, it looks like some panels are up, just not curated under the guest names as yet. So, here’s a rough accounting of where I’ll be –)

Thursday, 4/13:

1:00 – 2:00 PM: Signing in B&N Booth #2022

2:30 – 3:30 PM: I’ll Take Droids for $500, Obi-Wan — a trivia game show with me and Timothy Zahn and one lucky audience guest member. Hosted by awesome narrator Marc Thompson! Location: W304, 3rd floor.

5:00 – 6:00 PM: Star Wars University: “A Small Group Of Characters Can Change The Whole Galaxy,” a character-writing panel taught by me. Location: W300, 3rd floor.

Friday, 4/14: 

11:00 AM – 12:00 PM: Signing, Del Rey Booth, #2522 — posters!

3:00 – 4:00 PM: Signing, B&N Booth #2022

Saturday, 4/15:

1:00 – 2:00 PM: Del Rey Books, Behind the Scenes, hosted by Amy Ratcliff, featuring me, Elizabeth Schaefer, Delilah S. Dawson, Christie Golden, Timothy Zahn — discussing present and future projects. Loc: W304, 3rd floor.

4:30 – 5:30 PM: Signing, B&N Booth #2022

Sunday, 4/16:

10:30 – 11:30 AM: Signing, Del Rey Booth #2522 — signing with Christie Golden and Delilah S. Dawson — bonus posters!

The Shriek of the Thunderbird

I’m over at B&N talking about the new Miriam Black book in an interview: “Breaking Hearts and Cheating Death with Miriam Black.”

Also, there’s a new excerpt of the book over at Daily Dead. Warning: contains vultures.

To those who have read the book, haha, ahem, sorry about that ending.

Also, if you’ve read it, I could use a review somewhere if you so choose. Honestly, I fear the book coming out just one wee little week after Empire’s End was not great for it, and I strongly suspect it got more than a little lost in the Star Wars shuffle. If you are free to check it out and leave a review of the novel somewhere, I will love you forever. And by forever, I mean roughly one week, but that one week will feel like forever, because my love is just that powerful. Or scary. Powerful and/or scary. Whatever, shut up.

Wondercon Wrap-Up

I didn’t know what I was going to get with Wondercon.

I honestly feared it was going to be more like SDCC — just a sweaty steamy throng of geek miasma as everyone packs in, elbow-to-elbow, slowly shuffling like the damned and dying through an exhibition hall.

But it was pretty fucking awesome.

Okay, the plus and the minus is that there’s almost no significant publishing presence there, not in terms of novels. Comics, yes! Not publishing proper, though. So, very little infrastructure and not a high volume of novelists attending — but but but, that also lets you stand out as a writer, and I had some of the best fan interactions at this con. And the panels were pretty packed. It was great. Bonus: it’s in California, and even though Anaheim is kind of like what would happen if Disney had a baby with a shopping mall and turned it into a town, it’s still warm and laden with palm-trees, so. All in all, a big, throbbing thumbs-up to Wondercon.

Thanks for having me there, everyone.

The Great Ewok Defense of 2017

Twitter being Twitter means it’s an excellent place to rant about all sorts of things: politics and food and life and children and oh yeah also Ewoks. I found it randomly vital to leap to an impassioned, if sudden, defense of Ewoks yesterday, and I’ve gone ahead and Storified the shit out of it. Please to enjoy. Or despise it, I don’t care, it’s your life, man.

[View the story “The Great Ewok Defense of 2017″ on Storify]

Joseph D. Carriker, Jr.: Five Things You Didn’t Know About Life as a Queer Superhero

”In this thoughtful take on comic book tropes, queerness and superpowers intersect…. Everything comes together to create a real page-turning adventure in a setting that begs for further exploration.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review

”Before you know it, Sacred Band builds a new reality around you – rich, detailed, with a seductive, immersive vernacular, it crosses the globe with confident, queer themes in a world of new media, new magic, and new metahumans.” — Steve Orlando, author of Midnighter, Justice League America

The golden age of heroes is decades past. The government could not condone vigilantism and now metahumans are just citizens, albeit citizens with incredible talent, who are assisted in achieving normal lives (including finding good fits for their talents employment-wise) by a federal agency. Rusty may have been a kid during that glorious age but he remembers his idol, Sentinel, saving lives and righting wrongs until he was outed in an incredible scandal that forced him into isolation. When a gay friend of Rusty living in the Ukraine goes missing, Rusty is forced to acknowledge that while the world’s governments claim that super teams are outdated and replaced by legal law enforcement, there are simply some places where the law doesn t protect everyone–so he manages to find and recruit Sentinel to help him find his friend. But the disappearance of the friend is merely one move in a terrible plot against queer youth. A team of supers may be old-fashioned, but this may be a battle requiring some incredible reinforcements.

Your Queerness is Magnified in the Public Eye

A super powered individual who happens to be queer will seemingly always have that queerness integrated into public opinion about who they are. When Sentinel — the flying, super strong leader of the Champions during the age of superheroes a couple of decades ago — was outed against his will, every narrative the media focused on from that point included the fact that he was gay. From very conservative talk pieces asking if he was truly a fit role model for American youth to liberal political groups who simply assumed that he was now a default part of their political activism, Sentinel was given no choice in his narrative from that point on.

Your Queerness Works Against You Sometimes

Though this particular point is something that nearly all queer people understand and have experienced to one degree or another, its effects are very pronounced with super powered individuals. In the wake of the international scandal involving Sentinel, Llorona feared that her queerness would only alienate her in her work. As such, she subsumed her personal identity into her efforts, becoming one of the best-known and most active members of the Golden Cross, an international relief organization that mobilizes super powered volunteers to deal with natural and wartime disaster mitigation and engages in missions of mercy, some of which take place where it is illegal or even dangerous to be openly queer. Of course, the grief attached to that past and to her super powered origins make that all the easier — there are some things that she wants to forget, and if philanthropic work helps her do that, then that’s what she’s thrown herself into.

Others Take Your Queerness as Permission to Intrude

The details of a queer super powered person’s private life become inexorably attached to their deeds. It doesn’t matter that Deosil is a very respected pagan blogger and public speaker, with a unique view about how her elemental powers fit into her spirituality and esoteric practices. An interview with her is all too often taken as carte blanche to ask about her private medical history as a trans woman and even the name she was assigned at birth, even by very well-meaning interviewers. The fact that none of these have anything to do with her calling — or with her later super heroics — is moot. Her personal queerness seems to always be taken for granted as an open topic because of her presence in the public sphere.

Your Queerness Can “Sully” Your Superheroics

Just as with celebrities, public super powered individuals’ youthful indiscretions are fodder for consumption and gossip. As a new adult, Gauss may have made some decisions he now regrets, but unlike so many others who’ve dabbled in adult entertainment, there is no way anyone is going to let him forget about that particular blue movie he made. After all, he was the first super powered individual to star in one! As a result, he knows that as far as the public is concerned, he’ll always have that one performance lurking in his background, despite what feats of heroism he may also perform.

Your Queer Activism Overwhelms Your Identity Sometimes

A super powered individual who does choose to engage in political discourse of some kind may find that work overwhelms who they are. When the action film star Optic was drummed out of the military’s Project: Seraph at the revelation of his queerness, he took up the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the American military as his cause célèbre. And though he got to see success while acting as the poster boy for that effort — and even managed to leverage that public regard into a career in film — that activism has led to a lot of assumptions about the realities of his sexuality and identity, ones that he’s not even entirely sure how to manage.

At the end of the day, Sacred Band is totally about a group of costumed superheroes righting wrongs and beating up bad guys. But I also hope it’s about putting into context the lived experiences that some queer folk have, in a way that makes them accessible and maybe even enjoyable to read about. In a lot of ways, Sacred Band is one author giving himself over to that old “write what you know” wisdom-nugget, and seeing what comes out the other side of doing so. Hopefully the end result is enjoyable and memorable, and also true, in its own fashion.

(I am also willing to admit that though I did not set out to write a book that would allow me to use the hashtag #superqueeroes from the start, I take no shame in admitting a great deal of pleasure doing so ever since.)

* * *

Joseph Carriker is the developer for Green Ronin’s A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying, as well as the adjunct Chronicle System line of game supplements.

He has been writing in the gaming industry for sixteen years now, and has worked on a variety of game lines over those years, including most of White Wolf/Onyx Path’s World of Darkness, Exalted and Scion lines, Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition line, and Green Ronin’s Blue Rose and Mutants & Masterminds in addition to his work on A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying.

He is an outspoken queer gamer, having helped organize and take part in the annual Queer as a Three-Sided Die panels at GenCon. He has also just published his first novel, Sacred Band. Joseph lives in Portland, Oregon with his two partners A.J. and Chillos, and likes to believe he does his part in Keeping Portland Weird.

Joseph D. Carriker, Jr.: Website

Sacred Band: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

You Can Write At Any Age

Alyssa Wong, who is awesome and just double-fisted a couple of Hugo nominations for her continued stellar work, posted the other day on Twitter:

We are so obsessed with youth & success stories. “I published my first novel at 19! This bestseller is in his 20s!” I wonder about that.

— Alyssa Wong (੭ㅇㅅㅇ❀) (@crashwong) April 3, 2017

I wonder about it, too.

I wonder if it’s the result of a youth-obsessed focus, or a dismissal of age and experience, or if it’s something that offers a narrative — and when we see a narrative, true or false or partly-imagined, we give it the spotlight whether or not it’s deserving of one.

You should go to her tweet and read a lot of the responses.

What you’ll see, quite correctly, is a lot of authors who came to this game seemingly late — in their 30s, 40s, even 50s. I had my first published novel hit shelves when I was 36 — and I’ve written 20 total, since then, in the last four years. That’s not meant to be a boast, though I’m obviously happy with it. I can’t speak to the quality of those books, I can only speak to the fact that by most metrics, I am a successful author, though certainly not anywhere near the most successful, and not even as successful as I hope to one day be.

There’s a whole lot of stuff going on here to unpack, and it’s surely worth unpacking. First, it’s not odd that authors find success in later years, because writing and storytelling is often one created on a wave of experience, discipline, and focus, and those things are sometimes likelier to come with age. You live more, you do more, you know more (even as you know less), and so there’s simply more to say. When you have more to say, that cup is brimming over, and it spills out onto the page, and ta-da, you write it all down and contextualize it through (again) narrative. That’s not to say you don’t have a lot to say when you’re young, either: I was fired up and full of shit when I was younger, and wrote a whole lot, too. I just didn’t have much success with it in the novel sense, because I was still working my way through how to write a novel. I instead turned it to short fiction or to freelance game writing, and that worked fine.

Point is, your age is pretty irrelevant when it comes to writing and storytelling. It’s not about how old you are. It’s about who you are, and what you’ve got to say, and how willing and able you are to say it. Maybe age brings confidence and a certain unfuckwithable-ness. Maybe youth brings fire and vigor. I dunno. We’re all gonna die. That’s a fact. Not a one of us is immortal — EXCEPT YOU, DRACULA JOE, I SEE YOU OVER THERE DRINKING THE BLOOD OF THE NUBILE. For the rest of us, this carousel ends at some point, and so we fill our lives ideally with as much purpose as we can while we can. If you wanna be a writer, then hey, that means writing. That’s your purpose. That’s your legacy. A tombstone made of stories.

Write if you’re gonna write.

You’re never too old to write.

And you’re also never too young to start.

But don’t wait. That’s the caution. That’s the danger.

Don’t sit on it. Even if you’re likelier to be more successful later, that later-in-life success is often built on the heaps and mounds of a lot of unsung, unpublished work in your youth. Use that time to build a mountain of glorious failures and fuck-ups. You only get to know what you’re doing by not knowing what you’re doing. You only get to the rarified air of success by climbing that mountain of shit work and fuck-uppery. It’s not a waste of time to write badly. It’s no waste to write in the wrong direction. The path may be circuitous, but the path is still the path. And writing is how you walk it.

The work won’t come to you.

You gotta go do the work.

That’s true whether you’re 16 or you’re 60.

So go do the work and stop worrying about age.

Better yet, don’t compare yourself to others. There’s always somebody out there doing it differently, and doing it better. Always someone younger, older, with more books, more awards, better sales, nicer hair, whatever. What they do isn’t what you do. Who they are isn’t who you are. Their path ain’t your path. Scrap all that worry and write.

Aliette de Bodard: In Defense Of Uncanny Punctuation

Picture credits: Kalaiarasy, “Durian: the King of Fruits, Malaysia”

It is time for Aliette de Bodard, author of the newly-released The House of Binding Thorns, to speak of uncanny punctuation. Adjust your semi-colons. Prepare your emdashes. 

* * *

(With thanks to Fran Wilde)

Semicolons are a bit like durians.

Now, I don’t mean that they’re a fruit, that they’re spiky or that they have a particularly distinctive (and lovely!) smell. What I mean is that they seem to be a hate-it-or-love proposition among writers: some people will fight to the death on their behalf, and some others will immediately turn away in disgust when presented with them.

I’m in the camp of people who love durian, and you can have a guess as to where I fall on semicolons!

All right, I’ll give you a clue. Here’s a formative text I read as a child: the beginning of Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, describing hero d’Artagnan.

A young man — we can sketch his portrait at a dash. Imagine to yourself a Don Quixote of eighteen; a Don Quixote without his corselet, without his coat of mail, without his cuisses; a Don Quixote clothed in a woollen doublet, the blue color of which had faded into a nameless shade between lees of wine and a heavenly azure; face long and brown; high cheek bones, a sign of sagacity; the maxillary muscles enormously developed, an infallible sign by which a Gascon may always be detected, even without his cap–and our young man wore a cap set off with a sort of feather; the eye open and intelligent; the nose hooked, but finely chiseled.

And a passage a little further on:

[Athos] added that he did not know either M. or Mme. Bonacieux; that he had never spoken to the one or the other; that he had come, at about ten o’clock in the evening, to pay a visit to his friend M. d’Artagnan, but that till that hour he had been at M. de Treville’s, where he had dined.

(…)

Athos was then sent to the cardinal; but unfortunately the cardinal was at the Louvre with the king.

This is where my love affairs with semicolons started, and I’m afraid it’s never really abated. Rule #1 of my personal operating manual: if you’re going to steal, steal from the best, and it’s hard to argue with the author of The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, and countless other classics I reread so much the binding started giving out.

Semicolons help my prose by letting it breathe. I like long sentences, and there are cases when a comma won’t necessarily do, because I need a hierarchy of pauses: if you look above at the first sentence I quoted, you can see that using only commas would have made it very confusing. It could have been punctuated slightly differently, by removing nearly all the commas and replacing the semicolons by commas (aka “downsizing”, a trick I often use when I need to prune out semicolons), but it wouldn’t have been the same sentence, either (actually, parts of it would need to be rewritten). The way it’s punctuated makes it flow differently.

I also like rhythm in my shorter sentences, and there are also cases where I need a longer pause than that indicated by a simple comma.

For instance, here, in my book The House of Binding Thorns:

You’re jealous, Thuan thought. They’re closer; closer than you are to your mother.

I could most certainly get away with a comma instead of the semicolon, but the text doesn’t quite read the same. The longer pause means the last clause has a stronger highlight, and that’s exactly what I need here, as it’s the key to the relationship between the characters. I could also have used a period for emphasis, but again it’s not the same effect.

The most common objection to use of semicolons I see is that they’re clunky; the second most common is that their usage should conform to style guides such as The Chicago Manual of Style, or various grammar manuals.

I did say I was in the camp of fighting to the death for semicolons, right? Let me get out my trusty sword [1].

All right. *flourishes sword in a vaguely threatening manner* [2] First off, no such thing as clunky: to be sure, you can use semicolons to excess (true story: all my drafts go through a semicolon removal pass where I ruthlessly uproot the tangle of excessive punctuation in order to let the remaining semicolons and em-dashes shine [3]). But to simply remove them altogether from the writing vocabulary is a little like saying you’re never going to use a drill with a hammer action to affix something to a wall — it’s fine until you actually hit the concrete wall!

And second off… Rigid grammar is possibly fine for non-fiction, when the prose is meant not to get in the way of the content. But fiction is about the prose (in many ways it is the prose). The existence of the prose is a defining difference between fiction and other media such as movies. It’s very easy to set the scene in a movie by panning over a background, impossible to go as fast or give quite the same impression using prose. But prose can get into a character’s head and render thoughts into words seamlessly, whereas movies have to resort to voiceovers for this.

Writers can make a deliberate choice to not let the prose get in the way of the plot (which is a prose choice, not a natural or necessarily desirable thing. It really depends on the story and the writer). I’m subscribing to the “nice effects in prose” school of thought: I like my prose poetic, an integral part of building atmosphere. Usage manuals aren’t meant for novels–or no one would ever have written Les Misérables or Ulysses, or even Ursula Le Guin’s or Patricia McKillip’s books; and for me, if rigid grammar gets in the way of prose, then I know where I stand [4].

Rule #N in my operating manual [5]: be ready to bend or break the rules if a. fully aware of the consequences and b. sufficiently experienced. In fact, for me rule #(N+1) is “breaking the rules is often necessary.” Novels are vast and complicated and organic, and you can’t write one by ticking checkboxes or following all the rules on some invisible list.

Writing fiction is when I play with prose. It’s not a demonstration of how good I am at using the language “correctly” (I got over that when I left high school!); it’s a demonstration of how good I am at using it, full stop. It’s about stretching the language if needed, in service to the work.

Rule #(N+2): semicolons really are like durians. I really like using them, and you will pry them out of my cold dead hands.

What about you? What do you think about semicolons? How do you use them (or not!) in your own writing?

*assumes battle stance*

*gathers up allies*

Sketch: Fran Wilde

[1] It is actually my sword, though it’s a ceremonial one associated with my alma mater.

[2] I have a sword. I never said that I knew how to use said sword!

[3] The quick and dirty way to remove semicolons: am I ready to break up the sentence? If yes, replace with a period. If not, can I replace it with a comma (and possibly suppress commas to help legibility)? If still not satisfactory, would a colon help?

[4] I’ve kept my sword. One can never be too careful.

[5] Shh. I’ve lost count of how many rules I actually have.

* * *

Aliette de Bodard: Website | Twitter

The House of Binding Thorns: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Flash Fiction Challenge: One-Word Titles

I’m going to give you ten one-word titles.

You will pick one, either by choice or by random generator, to be the title of a piece of flash fiction for this week’s flash fiction challenge.

You’ve got ~1000 words, due by Friday, April 7th, noon EST.

Post the story online.

Link back here.

Here are the ten one-word titles.

Do not combine them.

Do not speak them aloud because they may be a magic spell or launch codes.

CHOOSE.

Holiday
Undulate
Juniper
Jumper
Permanence
Ossuary
Supernumerary
Sidereal
Bushcraft
Tourmaline