Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 99

Flash Fiction Challenge: Acts Of Rebellion

Today’s challenge:

Write about rebellion.

That can mean whatever you need it to mean for the context of the story. Any genre is doable. As personal or as impersonal as one cares to make it.

You’ve got the standard 1000 words.

It shall be due by noon EST, on Friday, February 3rd.

Post at your online space, then give a link below. Do not post the story in the comments, and please do not email me the story. Just find a place to deposit it online, and drop a link for the rest of us.

Please to rebel.

Trust Me, I Don’t Wanna Talk About This Shit Either

I received a helpful — sorry, “helpful” — email that asked me to, and I quote, “get back to the writing advice, please.” The core idea of the email being that I’m spending too much time on the blog talking about other things (cough cough the bread and circuses of politics) and not enough time on talking to you about characters and commas and how to defeat the bleak unrelenting despair of being a creative human being.

Or, put differently, I am a monkey doing the wrong monkey dance.

So, though I’ve responded to this sort of thing before, I thought I’d take another moment to discuss this request and provide my response to it.

First, this blog is not a writing blog. It’s not any kind of a blog. It’s just a blog, which is to say, it’s a platform for me to squawk and gibber into the void. Further, like with most blogs, it’s free to you — though, be advised, it costs me a pretty penny to run. Free to you, not to me. Now, my books? They’re the opposite. Those are free for me to write, relatively, and cost you. Which is why my books are for you, and my blog is for me.

Second, I am presently wrapping up the writing of a new book (current title which is likely to change: DAMN GOOD STORY). It’s a crunchier, meatier book on storytelling than what you’d normally find here — it’s still silly, occasionally, but it’s a book that tries very hard to make sense of the art of storytelling. And that means I’m expending a lot of my writing/storytelling advice on that book — so, harder to muster it here, because it needs to go there.

Third, and I dunno if you’ve noticed this, but things are really going slippery in this country. We’re all in a tractor-trailer driving across a frozen lake, man. The back end has gone wobbly. We’re fishtailing here and the ice is fracturing underneath us as we rip forward. I don’t open the news and find much good there — it’s hard to say, OH, THANK GOD THEY’RE PUTTING GAG ORDERS ON VITAL GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS TO MAKE SURE THEY DON’T TALK TO THE PUBLIC, YOU KNOW, THE DEPARTMENTS THAT THE PUBLIC FUCKING FUNDS WITH OUR PUBLIC FUCKING MONEY. Our president and his press secretary get up there and spout easily disprovable lies (remember: the duck is a dog, you traitor).

I respect you not wanting me to talk about this.

Honestly, I don’t wanna talk about this shit either.

I’d rather talk about literally anything else. Otters! Bees! Cool new sex moves! Books I’ve read, movies I’ve watched, ancient beasts that I have hunted through eldritch wood! I would much rather talk about writing, or cursing, or arting harder, or poop jokes, or pee jokes (though at least there, our current president allows me to pull double-duty). But I wake up every day and I just peek at the news with one half-lidded eye through gently lifted Internet blinds and boom, it’s like that scene in Terminator 2 where the nuclear blast annihilates everything. OH GOD CHRIST IN SOCKS IT BURNS, IT BURNS. The news isn’t good. It’s not, “Hey, Congress did something nice today.” Or, “Wow, Trump gave a kitten some milk.” Instead you get WALLS FRAUD LIES MUSLIMS ILLEGALS TOMBSTONES OBAMACARE CARNAGE SEND IN THE FEDS.

I don’t want to talk about any of this.

I don’t want any of this.

Some of this is normal run-of-the-mill bad. Some of it is a guttering transmission bad.

Some of it is existentially bad.

So, on the one hand, I get what you’re saying. You want to come here, and maybe you want a vacation from the horror show. I grok that. I do. I want to be that port in your storm (wait that sounds sexier than I intend it). I want to be safe harbor from Satan’s Orgy. (Actually, let’s not diss Satan like that. This is much worse, and Satan’s probably pretty cool — after all, he hosts orgies.)

On the other hand, sometimes it feels like when I get these messages, what you’re saying isn’t that you want an oasis in the shit-show, but rather, you want me to shut up about stuff. Because sometimes your emails have that vibe of disagreeability, as if it’s less that you don’t want to hear about politics and more you don’t want to hear my politics. You want me to do the monkey dance you like, not the monkey dance you don’t.

And while I respect that, I gotta do my monkey dance. Not yours.

So.

I’ll make a deal with you.

I’m going to keep talking about this stuff because, c’mon. This affects me and it affects people who are far more vulnerable than me, and it feels right to talk about. We have a Russian puppet Tyrannosaurus Rex barreling down on us — flanked by a Congress of eager velociraptors — and you want me to talk about something else? You’re telling me to shut up about the T-Rex, and I’m trying to warn you about the T-Rex. So, I’m going to keep talking about it — and if that bothers you that much, you are welcome to leap into the maw of the beast and end up as dinosaur shit.

The offer I’ll make is:

Yes, I’ll keep talking about other things, when I have them to talk about. And even when I’m shrieking and freaking out and loading the DINOSAUR TREBUCHET, I’ll still try to be funny or weird or otherwise “me” about the whole thing. I mean, hell, even this post has all the hallmarks of a good Wendig post, doesn’t it? Poop. Satan. Orgies. Dinosaur trebuchets. I’ll try to keep it all at least a little bit funny, because if the laughter dies, our souls die with it.

I’ll get back to the writing advice, relax. The monkey dance will evolve.

But I’m also gonna keep doing what I’m doing, and if you don’t like that, here’s your money back.

*opens pouch, upends invisible and non-existent coins into your open hands*

*last thing out of the pouch is a middle finger*

*and bees*

*so many bees*

The Duck Is A Dog And Other Alternative Facts

Sometimes I get on Twitter and I have a little fun.

Because if I can’t laugh, I’ll chew through this belt I keep biting.

Please to enjoy.

 

[View the story “The Duck Is A Dog, And Other Alternative Facts” on Storify]

Macro Monday Is Feelin’ A Little Buggy

Summer is a much better time to go poking around and taking macro photos outside — though winter yields its own bounty now and again. Still, going through some older photos, seems like a good time to pop in here and post a couple insect macros I missed. Not great photos in terms of their clarity, maybe, though I like the composition.

Or, if you want a little grubby millipedey critter coiled in a rotten stump:

There you go. Couple more buggy photos.

Though if you really want some great photos –

Shots from the Women’s March from every continent.

Beautiful and inspiring. Hope is back — so let’s keep it back. (We sadly were not able to attend any marches — the illness my son is just getting over is the illness my wife is now in the thick of, so it did not seem wise to go out and infect like, scads of people with viral nastiness.)

NOW GO FORTH AND CONQUER MONDAY, FOR IT INSULTED YOUR MOTHER

Flash Fiction Challenge: Hope In The Face Of Hopelessness

Today’s challenge is as apt as you want it to be — the theme of your as-yet-unwritten story must be, we need hope in the face of of hopelessness. It’s a bit dramatic-sounding, but themes are rarely served by a soft touch. So, that’s your task. Tackle a short piece of flash fiction that deals with that as its central theme: why we need hope in the face of its opposite.

You’ve got, mmm, let’s say 2000 words for this one.

Due by Friday, January 27th, noon EST.

Post online, give us a link below, etc.

No One’s Coming To Save Us, So We Have To Save Each Other

I set that as my 7AM reminder this morning.

I set it because, I dunno, maybe up until this point I’ve been hanging onto a loose and fraying thread that clearly, surely, some savior force would come in and reverse what was coming. The vote would prove to be rigged. The “OMG RUSSIA DID IT” investigation would advance to the point of no return. Obama would rip off Comey’s mask and reveal Old Man Giuliani underneath, who would’ve gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you crazy Millennials. Joe Biden would challenge malarky-havin’ Comrade Dumpkov to a ski contest on the K2 and he would win the day against the rich punks for all us underdogs and underachievers. I dunno what the fuck I thought was going to happen. Probably nothing, but maybe something.

Maybe?

Please?

Yeah, no.

No one is coming. Our plane crashed, and we’re alive, and no help is on its way.

That sounds dramatic, I know, especially to people who think this isn’t a big deal — but we’re staring down the barrel of a president whose stated intent is to sand down nearly every foothold we’ve gained in the last several decades. Worse, he’s got the run of the table with a Congress who has already begun their monstrous rending and flaying. Everything’s on the chopping block: women’s rights, health care, the free market, arts, humanities, science, education, national parks, bald eagles, anyone who has ever been marginalized, you, me, all of humanity, the whole fucking planet. Pounds of flesh cut from those who cannot afford to lose them, and given over to the vampire kings above us who want to bleed us all dry. It’s not dramatic to think that, at the very best, we’re going to experience an existential tumult over the next four years. At the worst, I dunno. At the worst we get hill cannibals, probably. Nuclear hill cannibals.

No one is coming.

But we are alive.

And we are together.

That means something. I don’t mean that in a glib, WE ARE THE WORLD way, I don’t mean it to be some kind of shallow sing-a-long. I mean that our president — the one who comes with the biggest winking-butthole-asterisk of all time by being a president who won by losing, who won with the help of shady Kremlin no-good-niks, who won by surfing to the White House on a churning tide of sexual assault and racism and inane non-policies, who still hasn’t filled most positions, who wants to fill his cabinet with the swamp monsters he exposed by draining the swamp — our president is way the fuck outnumbered. This is our asterisk president. This is a president who we didn’t earn, who didn’t win, who has a historically low approval rating and a historically high disapproval rating. He works for us, and we outnumber him by heroic numbers.

That’s a real thing. That’s truth. It’s not arguable that he’s surrounded by a miasma of illegitimacy. He can earn his way out of that — he can clear the fog by doing right for all Americans, not just the richest among us — but let’s be clear, the likelihood of that happening creates betting odds no gambler would take.

No one is coming.

But we are alive.

And we are together, and we can save each other.

You’ll say to me now, what does that mean? What does that mean, we can save each other?

My honest answer is, I don’t yet know. Not really. Because I don’t know what’s coming down the pike. I know the next four years will be contentious, but I don’t know if they’ll be ruinous or simply bizarre. But here’s what I think it means.

I think it means we can be there for each other. And we can be kind. We can help each other up.

It means we can use what power we have to help those who have less power.

It means making each other laugh, because oh Sweet Saint Fuck, we’re gonna need to laugh.

It means staying involved, and keeping up the pressure, and using our voice and our vote not just for our behalf but for the behalf of our neighbors.

It means sharing the things we love: art and books and movies, quotes and images and ideas.

It means knowing who our enemies are, and pointing our metaphorical weapons to those outside the trench, not to those hunkering down in the mud alongside us.

It means kitten pictures and dog videos and other forms of random comfort, and of course what I mean is otters, because fuck yeah, otters, you can’t deny the healing power of otters.

It means turning an ear to listen and offering a shoulder to cry on and letting people just wordlessly shriek at or near you for as long as they need it.

It means working around the system to find new ways to keep each other afloat — it means giving money to the ACLU or Sierra Club or it means demanding our companies do better for us even when our government won’t, it means finding loopholes and trapdoors that help us to help each other, it means empowering others to do the work when it’s work we can’t do ourselves.

It means harnessing the one-two-punch power of Critical Thinking and Empathy, which not coincidentally are also the names of each of Uncle Joe Biden’s malarky-thumpin’ fists.

It means being good stewards of this planet because we all share it, and no matter what the administration wants you to believe, it’s our responsibility not to fuck it up.

It means creating art and telling stories because stories have power, stories help us through, stories provide a narrative for those of us now and those who come later.

It means helping ourselves and practicing self-care because sometimes before you help someone else with their oxygen mask you gotta make sure yours is on nice and tight.

It means whatever it means going forward.

I’ll be here at the blog and online if you wanna swing by and say hi. Hope you’re doing okay. Fuck the inauguration. Go to a protest. Check out a museum. Read a book. I’ll see you on the other side.

p.s. fuck international fascism

Hacking At The Roots Of The Tree

Some folks asked for my Twitter thread the other day about Betsy DeVos and the array of unqualified cabinet members to be somewhere more easily shareable, so here it is.

Share as you see fit.

(Storify link here if you’d prefer to read it that way.)

 

[View the story “Hacking At The Roots Of The Tree” on Storify]

PSA: Fake Donald Trump Is Maybe Not Your Best Marketing Plan

Yesterday, an author — a bestselling author — went around and did a series of tweets with fake Donald Trump tweets, and these fake tweets were Donald Trump mocking this author’s book. One of those tweets has since gone around the ol’ retweet carousel around 12,000 times. In part because it was retweeted by a number of celebrities, most of whom seemed to believe that it was real. If you look at the tweet and its responses, this is a common theme — a lot of people thought it was real. Which isn’t surprising, because that’s the angle, isn’t it? Trump on any day of the week might be using his global platform as president-elect to (sigh) rant and rail at everything from automakers to world leaders to Saturday Night Live. Listen, let’s be real: if Trump one morning decided to tweet rant about like, penguins, it would not shock any of us. (“Penguins. Totally biased!! Tiny flipers and cant fly. SAD”). It wouldn’t shock us because his Twitter feed is a lunatic’s parade of rage and hurt butts, a constant pouty stream of fragile ego shrieking and wailing from between the bars of its wrought iron cage.

So, to see Obama one day talk about how important books are to him, and what writing has meant for him (seriously, he promoted The Three-Body Problem, holy shit awesome), and then the next day to see Trump railing on some random author’s book — it’s legit believable.

It’s just not true. That’s the first part of the PSA. I’m seeing it go around, so please know:

That Trump tweet is fake.

The author likely didn’t mean any harm here (though since being called on it, it would’ve been nice to see the tweets deleted or at least a public addendum suggesting that they were, indeed, fake). I assume he meant it as something halfway between a joke and a marketing ploy. And I’m sympathetic, because hey, getting word out about your book — even as a bestselling author — is a grim, strange magic. Having something go viral around your book has value, at least in getting attention — ideally, it also gets sales. Hell, I’m helping him with the job just by talking about it. I didn’t know about his book before yesterday, and now I do.

Since that time, though, not only has the tweet gone around the world a couple times, I’ve now seen other writers trying the same thing — mostly on Facebook, actually — again in the vague hopes of I guess doing a bit and also serving the Marketing Gods. And, just as with the original tweet, I’m seeing some people take the bait and think it’s real.

Here’s why this is probably not an ideal marketing strategy.

First, we live in an age of fake news, and sure, I get that maybe you’re trying to lean into that and use that as leverage for so-called “satire” (by the way, satire and marketing ploys don’t go together, and once something is a marketing ploy, it ceases to be satire). But this isn’t The Onion. This isn’t sharp, incisive comedy that is clearly fake. This looks like fake news, and people believed it as such, and even in a world where Comrade Dumpkov is who he is, it’s dangerous to put more kooky words into his mouth and to distract from the reality of the many actually awful things he says. Don’t headfuck us further. We have enough shit to worry about.

Second, there’s the creepy shine of exploitative opportunism here, because just days before, Trump attacked Civil Rights icon, John Lewis, and as a result, that icon’s sales jumped per book by a figure in the hundreds of thousands of percent. Trump is a guy who says, fuck bees, and tomorrow, everybody’s a beekeeper. Trump tells you to eat Trump Steaks and it’s like, okay, those are poison, don’t touch those, you’d be better off eating one of those Mr. Clean Magic Erasers. But the timing here is bad. You don’t really want to come across as an author who thinks, Hey, I can be just like John Lewis, and I’ll fake Trump trash-talking me, right? Even if that’s not what the author thought, it vibes that way. John Lewis is an American icon, and what he had to go through to get here, where he gets yelled at by a bloated ego-buffoon is not currency for you, for me, for any of us. Look at it a different way: would you somehow tweak and twist Black Lives Matter into a way to sell your book? Would you say BOOK LIVES MATTER to sell your book? Do you see where that starts to feel sorta gross, how it feels itchy and uncomfortable using real life and real suffering as rungs on a ladder?

Third, Trump is bad people. He’s advocated sexual assault, he’s advocated banning people based on their religion, he yells at Civil Rights icons and makes racist assumptions about their districts — I’m sure in his quieter hours, he kills and eats bald eagles while wiping his ass with the Constitution. So, looking at him, I have a hard time seeing opportunity. I have a hard time seeing him as a good marketing platform, especially because that platform would springboard from his horribleness. His awfulness isn’t a tool. If you could imagine yourself going back in time and using Actual Hitler as a way to sell your book or your widget or your whatever, then don’t do it with Actual Trump, either. We’re having a hard enough time with this guy, with fake news, with toxicity across social media to try to trade-off on that as some kind of marketing tactic. Again, that’s probably not what that author was doing here. Maybe it was, in all honesty, just a joke. Certainly I’ve made jokes about Comrade Dumpkov, and will continue to, because if we can’t laugh then we’ll chew through the rebar we have to bite on to repress the existential scream that continues to try to escape our faces. But this tweet has gotten bigger than just a joke, and maybe there are better ways. If you’re an author considering aping this tactic, nnnnyeah don’t? And if you’re the author who used the tactic in the first place, maybe now’s a good time to deal with those tweets?

For the rest of us, it is once again a good time to remember that there’s a lot of fakey-fakey stuff out there, and some of it doesn’t mean to be harmful, some of it definitely does, and it’s on us to stay vigilant and keep an eye on verifying what we read and what we spread around.

Macro Monday Is Light As A Feather

I have little reason to post that feather, I suppose, except to remind you still that Blackbirds remains $1.99 for your electronic reading doojiggers:

At B&N, Amazon, Apple, Kobo and Google Play.

And as a shiny special bonus, there’s a very nice review at Publishers Weekly for Thunderbird: “This gritty, full-throttle series is what urban fantasy is all about, with bitter humor rounding out lyrical writing. It’s easy to root for this mouthy, rude, insensitive, but innately good young woman, and her story hits the reader like a double shot of rotgut.” It also gets a shout-out at B&N’s 25 SFF books to read in 2017, so yay.

And that’s it for now.

Go forth and good luck.

Pre-order Thunderbird now: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Sarah Gailey: Get Rich Or Die Trying — On Repealing The ACA

Fellow awesome writer person Sarah Gailey had some stuff to say about the class eugenics that lurk unspoken in the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and if you know Sarah, you know that what she writes is worth reading. Just check out her work at Tor.com, or her upcoming novella (omg hippos), River of Teeth. 

Healthcare is essential to human life.

Without it, people die. Babies die. Mothers die. Kids with allergies die. Grandfathers with pancreatic cancer die. People with disabilities die. A steelworker who gets his hand crushed, a farmer who gets bitten by a snake, a teacher who has a heart attack. Without doctors and medicine and treatment, people who get sick or injured die.

This is the endgame of the ACA repeal: death for those who can’t afford insurance and who can’t privately pay for healthcare. Death for the poor, death for the unemployed, death for the newly self-employed entrepreneur, death for the laborer with three part-time jobs and no benefits. Death for the widow who relied on her late husband’s insurance; death for the orphan who was a dependent. Death for the infant whose mother couldn’t afford birth control or prenatal care. Wealth or death: those are the choices.

While this may sound harsh, it shouldn’t be surprising. The social Darwinism that drives so much of America’s rhetoric — the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps narrative that undergirds the American Dream — makes a snug fit with the consequences of the ACA repeal. This is the comfort of the wealthy: those who can’t afford healthcare can’t afford it because they’re lazy. They didn’t try hard enough, so when they die, they have only themselves to blame.

“If you can’t afford treatment, you don’t get treatment.” This is the basic concept that drives opposition to universal healthcare — and yet, even that blunt statement flinches away from the true conclusion of its execution. The true conclusion is this: “if you can’t afford treatment, you deserve to die.” Those who can’t afford antibiotics will die of fevers. Those who can’t afford dental care will die of rotten teeth. Those who can’t afford chemotherapy will die of cancer.

In this scenario, the poverty that American morality has always scorned becomes a capital offense; the pursuit of wealth, a necessary route to survival. Never mind that wealth is overwhelmingly concentrated in populations of privileged white people with family legacies that are rooted in the exploitation of those who benefit from the programs like the ACA — never mind that. [8 people hold as much wealth as 3.6 billion — cdw] The bottom line is this: those who are not wealthy enough to afford the cost of healthcare will be eliminated.

How could this be allowed to happen? How, in our nation, which we call the wealthiest, the greatest, the strongest nation on earth? How could we propose to allow millions of citizens to go without the medical care they need? How?

Well. Let’s talk about eugenics.

For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, eugenics is a horrific application of selective breeding. To understand selective breeding, imagine a gardener who wants all of his pea plants to have purple flowers on them. He would have to weed out the pea plants with white flowers on them, and plant only seeds from the plants with purple flowers.

In 1937, a guy named Frederick Osborn proposed that the principles of selective breeding should be applied to the social order: encourage people with desirable traits to reproduce, and sterilize “undesirables” to remove their genes from the pool. Osborn’s ideas were heavily tied into the rhetoric of social Darwinism, which suggests that the law of natural selection applies to modern society: only the strong deserve to survive.

Many will rightly associate this concept with fascism and particularly with Nazi Germany — but it cannot be forgotten that eugenics was popular throughout the Western world, and particularly in the United States, during the early 20th century. Our country participated in the “removal” of traits which the government deemed undesirable — traits which included mental illness, physical disability, nonwhite heritage, and any sexual identity other than heterosexual. In 1927, the United States Supreme Court passed Buck v. Bell, which effectively legalized compulsory sterilization. Individuals were sterilized against their will, incapacitated, or killed under the euphemism of ‘euthanasia’.

Today, this practice is widely considered to be unethical, dehumanizing, and morally repugnant. The repeal of the ACA brings it to the forefront of American society, hidden behind a thin veil of capitalist ideology.

Does this embody the national character Americans claim to have? We call ourselves “the greatest nation in the world,” and “the land of opportunity.” We pride ourselves on our immense national wealth. We claim to have a social, political, and economic system upon which all others should be modeled — and yet we are debating a proposition that would leave millions of Americans at risk of death due to a lack of coverage. And so it is that we must ask ourselves: does an American morality that leaves the uninsured to die embody the universal right to life that is promised in the second sentence of our Declaration of Independence?

No. Instead, it embodies the darkest facet of the American perspective on capitalism: that citizens are justified only by their earnings, and that without justification through labor and wealth, the life of a citizen is not the concern of the American government. This is the America that we so consistently look away from: the America whose constitution was written solely for the benefit of landed white men. The America that pioneered early eugenics; the America that, years before Hitler’s rise to power, began attempting to rid itself of “undesirables.”

Today, those citizens who are not wealthy are being declared undesirable by the ACA repeal.

And we know what happens to undesirables.