S.A. Hunt's Blog, page 4

Outlaw Army Traders + NaNoSitMo Update

Howdy ho, friendly friends! You're probably wondering where I've been the past few weeks. Well, I hurt my back around the middle of November and couldn't do NaNoSitMo anymore. That disc I ruptured the year I went to Afghanistan? If I jar it too badly, I get injured. I think I rattled it a little too much doing all that jogging, and hopping down out of the back of our truck was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Anyway, now that I'm mostly better (I'll never truly be 100% until I can get some kind of permanent fix--surgery, maybe), I'm going to be getting off my butt again. Like I did with NaNo, I'll start out walking to town, and then I'll get back into jogging and/or biking.

In the meantime, I do have two projects I've been working on alongside editing Malus 2 and Outlaw King 4, and that's my /r/NoSleep horror serial "The Fear Suit" and my new merch shop, Outlaw Army Traders! You may have already seen the shop by following that Shop link up there in the header navigation. But if you haven't, I made some things like T-shirts, laptop bags, posters, mugs, and beer steins based on Outlaw King, Malus Domestica, and The Somnambulists!

​"The Fear Suit" is a short story that I'm uploading to Reddit's NoSleep horror community. It's about a group of friends that talk one of the others into putting on what turns out to be a cursed fursuit made out of a real bear skin--and now that he can't take it off, it's doing something...strange to him.

You can read it here, but -- AND THIS IS IMPORTANT! -- if you go there, do not mention me, S. A. Hunt, or any of my books. "Everything on NoSleep is a real story" (wink wink) and if you comment with my real name, it can break the immersion factor of the story for the other readers. For the purposes of that story, my name is Cody and I work in a bookstore, and the story I'm posting is something that's really happening to me as I post it.

With that caveat out of the way, I hope you enjoy the read! It's gonna get pretty crazy before it's over!

"Write What You Know," Not What You Do

​​If there’s one thing I see consistently, consistently misrepresented on the internet, it’s the writing advice Write What You Know.
​For example, Ken Kesey does not know what he is writing. Too many people think it’s “plumbers writing plumbers,” which is to say, they believe it’s the idea that Write What You Know means you must write characters that are in occupations that you yourself are currently doing, or have done in the past. They think that if you’re a dishwasher at a Mexican restaurant, you can only write stories about a dishwasher at a Mexican restaurant, or vice versa: you can only write stories about international espionage if you yourself have been an operative for the CIA or MI6.


No.


No, that’s not how it works. And inexperienced writers will fight you all day on this:“I hate this piece of writing advice! It's so stupid!”“It’s bullshit to think that I can only write about fur trappers in the Canadian wilderness if I’ve been a fur trapper myself!”"Don't write what you know! Make up something new!""If I write what I know, does that mean I can't write about things I don't know, like space travel or being a woman?""But what if I don't know anything?"“What do you mean? I can’t write about cannibal Martians if I’ve never tasted human flesh?”
No. That’s not what Write What You Know means. That snarky, quasi-revolutionary "make up something new" especially pisses me off. That line should tell you right there that whoever's saying that has no idea what they're talking about when they discuss WWYK. It has nothing to do with originality. Are you going to invent a new emotion? Then go ahead, muchacho, knock yourself out.

I’m sort of tired of explaining it to angry people. Let this blog post stand as a column against the weathers of time, a lighthouse in the dark fog of assumption, here for anyone and everyone to refer back to in times of uncertainty: Write What You Know is not about applying organically-learned occupational or academic knowledge to your writing. In fact, it’s the very opposite of that. You might say it's the reverse: applying your writing to knowledge.

What if I told you that you can research facts and processes without having to know them?the maximum depth to which a human body can dive in ocean water without dyinghow to change out a water heaterthe mating habits of the Canadian gooseChicago population growth over the course of a decadethe names of all the demons in the Ars Goetia.
You can look that shit up. You can look it all up, all of it, research the fuck out of it, and then, believe it or not, you can write an authentic ornithologist, or a necromancer, or a deep-sea treasure-hunter, or a census-taker, or an apartment-complex handyman. You can do that! You can do that, even though you’ve never been any of those things. You can write a character that’s an astronaut, even though you’ve never even stepped foot in an airport.

Do you think Anne Rice has any idea what it’s like to be a 1700-year-old vampire? Do you think Stephen King knows what it’s like to be a gunslinger in a medieval wasteland? What about Andy Weir? Do you think he’s been to Mars? Do you think Dan Simmons has his own farcaster portal, able to travel from Mars to Venus on a wordcount-powered tricycle?

Write What You Know is about diving deep into your memories, and using emotions, feelings, and physical sensations to make your writing more palpable, more authentic.

That’s not about filling your shit with information.

Like I said, you can do research for that. You can email professionals to ask for information about the processes they go through at work, or you can read their Wikipedia articles, or you can make a post at the /r/AskScience subforum at Reddit.

The purpose of Write What You Know is to INCREASE IMMERSION.

It’s not to supply your reader with statistics and processes. If I want to know what it’s like to grow potatoes, I’ll look that shit up. Sure, it makes the character sound like they know what they’re doing if you describe the farming of potatoes in faithful detail, but I can’t feel that. I’m not picturing the earthy-musty smell of the manure he spread as the rain kicks up the stink of old cow shit. I can’t hear the crunch of his hoe’s blade slamming into loose soil or the greasy slickness of his sweaty hands after a long day’s work at the rows. I can't taste the crunchy, salty French fries he made after the harvest.

I know how to farm potatoes now, but I don’t feel like I’ve been doing it alongside your character. I was not immersed in the story, because I was just reading a fucking how-to on growing potatoes. What if I'm from the Philippines and have no idea what potatoes are like? I just read an 80,000-word novel about a man that grows potatoes and I still have no idea what it's like to actually grow and eat my own potatoes. I know how, maybe? But I was not in that character's shoes. I watched him do it from the other side of the page, ten million miles away.

That’s what Write What You Know is.

Here’s an example: during the course of your story, your villain murders your protagonist’s spouse. Shoots her husband right in the forehead with a Desert Eagle pistol, shoves his corpse backward into the Grand Canyon. It’s not his fault. It was just his time to go; the story demanded loss, and you had to supply it.

Now it’s time to authenticate your protagonist’s shock and bereavement. That’s where Write What You Know comes in.

Maybe you’ve never lost your spouse. Maybe your husband or your wife is sitting across the room from you right now, quietly playing the latest Playstation game or eating dinner off of a TV tray. But what you have experienced is being dumped by someone you were convinced loved you with all their heart. Or maybe, like me, your stepfather died when you were a teenager and you had a front-row seat to your mother’s grief.

So you know what that bleak, desolate feeling of loss is like. You know what it’s like to have the rug of reality whipped out from under your feet. You know what it’s like to suddenly realize that this person will never again be a part of your life. You understand the source of that almost violent loneliness, you’ve felt the bruise it leaves on your heart. You know what it’s like to cry until your chest hurts and your shirt-collar is soaked in snot and tears, and you know what it’s like to think you’d be able to escape from this hideous screeching pain if you could just drum up the courage to take all the Tylenol in this bottle instead of just one. You've had occasion to think, "Don't leave me! Don't go where I can't follow!"

That’s some shit that you can’t look up on Wikipedia.

Now make me feel that sudden, shocking loss.

Then as your villain blows your character’s brains out and pushes their cooling corpse into the Grand Canyon, time slows and your protagonist forces herself to look over the handrail, to trace the body’s descent into the crevasse.

Maybe you know what it’s like to watch someone tumble down the side of a mountain, arms and legs loose and flailing, dirt and stones clattering down with them, until they slam into the bottom with a sickening crack of skull against stone. Maybe you were there when your friend broke his leg skiing, and you’ll never forget the sound his thighbone made as it broke against a pine tree. Maybe you were in the car accident that knocked your father unconscious and you know what it’s like to see his half-open eyes and slack, bloody face, and think, oh my God he's dead.

Bring the world your pain, feed them your joys. Serve up your own personal heart to your readers on a silver platter. Use your memories and experiences to give your worlds and characters texture.

That’s what Write What You Know means: texture.

Let’s say your character is an astronaut and they’re floating in an abandoned space station, running out of air. Have you ever been in a situation where your source of oxygen was being cut off? Maybe when you were sixteen, you were swimming at the river with your uncle and your floatie raft got hooked by a stick and deflated. You almost drowned because you got tangled in that ripped raft. You understand what that OH GOD I’M GOING TO DIE panic is like, because you’ve been there, floating six feet under the surface of a river, sucking on that last lungful of air.

Now take that memory and make me feel your character’s panic. Make me, your Constant Reader, understand what it’s like to know you are about to die from lack of oxygen. Your hands are jittery and weak, making it hard to turn all the dials and replace the torn hose in your spacesuit. There are black spots at the edges of your vision, making it hard to see. Your heart’s hammering so hard it’s making your throat throb against the collar of your space suit.

Write What You Know means that you need to use your experience as an almost-drowning victim to make me, as the reader, feel like I am about to run out of air.

It’s part and parcel of “show, don’t tell”. Really, when you get right down to it, “write what you know” and “show, don’t tell” are almost the same thing; they’re more or less pointing you down the same road. And this road is called IMMERSION. Make me understand your pain, your excitement, your love, your loss, your grief, your melancholy, not just your knowledge or processes. 

NaNoSitMo Day 12 & 13

(National No Sitting Month. Since I just finished my fifth novel, instead of writing for NaNoWriMo I'm getting off my ass and getting some sorely-needed exercise.)

​Ahoy hoy! Yesterday instead of running, I walked to town to pick up some groceries and see if the dollar store had anything I could sleep on, since my air mattress is going flat.

These two pictures are back-to-back Google street view pictures; I took the first, turned around, and took the second. They depict the entirety of my hometown of Lyerly, Georgia; the vanishing points of both pictures, where the highway dwindles away, are the city limits.
I don't know when these pictures were taken; the watermark says 2015, but there should be a Dollar General there where that red building is with the trucks parked like eerie talismans in front of it. There's also some new construction beside the old glove factory to the left of the picture below--a condemned old bank was knocked down and replaced with a small parking lot and a bright white concrete patio/ramp that doesn't really go anywhere.

​My route is just about a two-mile walk over some hills, a couple stretches of country road through some cow pastures and a trestle bridge. It's a nice walk, or would be if it weren't for the stray dogs and people that drive like a bat out of hell. It's a narrow road with a lot of blind curves.

That green patch next to the highway on the image above is the park where I go to write in the summer. Below is Lyerly Dam, the bridge I walk across and the put-in point where I went kayaking over the summer.
Here's a link for the route if you want to look at it in Street View. It starts at my mom's house and ends at the post office where I take my signed copies of Outlaw King and Malus Domestica to mail out.

When I got there I didn't find anything to sleep on, so I just got some food and sat on the new patio thing across the street from the dollar store, eating Pringles and drinking coffee, watching the traffic go up and down 114. Mainly people just passing through going someplace else. Don't blame em.
The dogs didn't hassle me too much...only on the way back, and then it was only really one of them. And I was on foot, so they didn't come after me; if I'm on my bike, they'll try to bite me and drag me off again, but if I'm walking they stay in the yard and bark.

Today (Friday the 13th) I put on my FiveFingers and jogged the other way, toward Hwy 100. To my surprise I made it all the way to Lon Reynolds Drive before I had to slow down and catch my breath for a second--I'm improving! My calves carried me just fine, and I'm not rubber-legged now. I should be fine in the morning.

I just got my first crit notes back on Malus Domestica II this evening. I'm going to try to work on them next week and then I'll be looking for beta-readers if anybody is interested in that.

NaNoSitmo Day 11

Day Eleven! You're probably wondering where the previous week went. Well, Friday I got up late and then had to run errands, and by the time I got home it was too late to go out and run thanks to the time change.

That night the bottom fell out--it rained non-stop Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. I survived a spot of pneumonia a couple years ago and I don't plan on taking another whack at it, so I decided to play it safe and stay inside. This let my calves rest a little bit more anyway, so it turned out to be for the best.

Unfortunately Sunday I rearranged my bedroom and must have done something to my air mattress when I moved it, because now it won't hold any air. Monday, Tuesday, and this morning I've been reinflating it every night and waking up on the floor every morning. Guess I'll have to remedy that somehow. I wish I could find where the air is coming out, but it's such a slow leak that I can't hear the puncture, if there even is one. I'm not convinced it's not the valve.

Yesterday, Tuesday, the sun came back out, and even though the roads were still wet and covered in slimy dead leaves, I decided to strap the FiveFingers back on and head out. It's finally starting to get cold, an oddity for the middle of November. Usually it's already cool in October, but I guess that's the way the world is now. Somebody said something about El Nino, but that sounds like an excuse to me.

On the way, I ran into my neighbor / cousin / family friend Lightning,* a country boy in his 60s or 70s, checking the mailbox and hobbling around with a cane. Apparently he'd recently had back surgery. As I was standing there talking to him, one of his friends pulled up on a motorcycle, a Santa Claus-looking old fella on a pearl-white Harley, and they "shot the shit" for a few minutes. Presently I offered my future assistance, bid them adieu, and went back to my circuit.

This run wore my legs out again, but I guess that's to be expected--I haven't really done much running since I timed out of the Army a couple years ago, so I'm seriously rusty. At least this time I got in some more sprints, and I'm not as sweaty or busted as I was the first couple times.

It's actually a good thing I'm taking a break right now, because it's given me some space to do some brainstorming and planning.

When I return to it, I'm jumping right back into Outlaw King 4 (tentative title "Wordslinger"). I'm almost 20,000 words into it right now, and I've got an idea as to how I'm going to begin it: a huge Equilibrium-style action sequence where the gunslinger Walter single-handedly assaults the Organon's desert compound and its battalion of private-security contractors. I haven't written the scene yet, and I'm looking forward to it.

Outlaw 4 is going to be a hell of a thing. I've got some pretty crazy stuff planned out for this, plenty of insane visuals, more feels, and hellacious fights. And after that's done, I'm going to go back and write Normand's tale in The Fiddle and The Fire.

*I have no idea what his real name is. I've known him all my life. This entire neighborhood, as are many neighborhoods in rural Georgia, is basically one big extended family.

NaNoSitMo Day 4-5

I overdid it on Day 3 and blew my calves out, so I took the 4th off. I've been walking funny ever since.

I can't let myself backslide, though, so instead of wearing the FiveFingers again, I put on a pair of socks and sneakers and ran heel-toe to keep the tension off my calf muscle. That seemed to do the trick, since I actually ran most of the way. Running on it seemed to knock a lot of the pain out, and after an iffy start I actually managed quite well and even did a few sprints.

It was almost too late to go; it had been dark, rainish, and dreary all day, but when I went out about 5:30pm or so, the sky was this dull, bruisey, beautiful mix of brown, purple, and gray. It cast a cool tint all over the forest and made it look like a creepy supernatural thriller movie.

Maybe I should take my brother's dog tomorrow. He doesn't get enough exercise.

Part of the reason I waited so late was because I was fiddling around in Photoshop. I don't remember what did it, but I was inspired to make some spaghetti-western-style recovers of the Outlaw King series. What do you think?

NaNoSitMo Day 3

Day 3. It was still overcast and gross outside, lots of puddles and wet leaves, but I stepped outside for a jog anyway. I made lunch before I left because I knew I'd be too bandy-legged and tired when I got back to stand in the kitchen fooling around with food. Chicken salad with mini-pepperoni and green olives. Not the best post-workout food, perhaps, but it was all I had and it was light.

It's still hot in November, enough to get mobbed by mosquitoes; they were all over me as soon as I stepped outside. I'd meant to get a pedometer at the store when I went to the post office yesterday, but I forgot. Guess I'll just have to wing it.

Probably walked more than I ran, but I've been sedentary for a long time. It's going to take patience to ease back into running regularly. The road was extremely busy for some reason today, too--I was constantly stepping out into the mud and grass to keep away from the cars. I wore my FiveFingers. They're the best for running because they give you the most foot control, and since I have the weak right ankle from my hellacious sprain in Basic Training, I need something with no heel and a thin sole. Stepped on a few poky pebbles, but it was worth it not to roll my ankle again.

Actually kinda looking forward to doing it again tomorrow. I don't want to be big again. When I enlisted, I was big, and I don't ever want to be that heavy again, ever. I went from 240 to 166. I lost so much weight I didn't get included in the weight loss congrats portion of my company's Basic graduation because nobody believed me when I told them I lost that much weight.

It feels good to be in shape, too. I'm beginning to feel old and creaky, and not taking care of my fitness makes it ten times worse. Besides, I want to go see my girlfriend Jessica at some point, and she deserves a taken-care-of Me, I think.

NaNoSitMo Day 2

I didn’t get outside yesterday because it was raining like—as my mother is wont to say—“pouring piss out of a boot.” Today was little better, a misty-fuggy hot rain that turned Georgia into the depths of the Amazon and made my beard all kinky and woolly.

I packed the five copies of Malus Domestica in my backpack and headed to the post office in my old Army poncho. It’s about a two-and-a-half mile walk, which isn’t much, but it’s all hills and curves, bad enough that walking is actually more strenuous than taking the bicycle. On the bike you can do some coasting, especially on the big long hill 1/3 of the way out.

International postage is a bitch.

Anyway, the seams in my socks gave me blisters on my pinky toes and my hips started grinding on the way back, but overall I’m looking forward to this. Here’s hoping someone doesn’t pull a Stephen King on me out there on the road.

I don't know if I'm going to go there tomorrow but at some point this month I'd like to walk out to the Pinhoti Trail trailhead rest stop and look around. If there's a power outlet, maybe I'll start walking out there next spring to sit by myself and write. I won't have to worry about scaring the moms and joggers at the park with my creepy beardy automatically-a-sexmonster-because-I'm-an-unmarried-man-alone-at-the-park face, at any rate.

NaNoSitMo

​I am gaining weight again.

If you don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, it’s an abbreviation of “National Novel Writing Month,” in which a metric fuck-ton of people all decide at the same time to write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November.

But since I just finished the first draft of Malus Domestica II and I’m on a little bit of a hiatus at the moment before I knuckle down on the manuscript for Outlaw King 4 (already in progress), I’ve decided to do something different: “NaNoSitMo”. National No-Sitting Month. While you folks pound out the prose, I’m hopefully going to be whipping my ass back into shape. Unless one of the maniacs screeching up and down this road out here plows me over like Mr. King.

Tomorrow I have to carry the books from my Goodreads giveaway to the post office and mail them off. It’s a long walk, with a lot of hills and curves, and should prove a worthy start to a month of being more active.

Instead of logging my wordcounts, I’m going to pop in here and record how the month is going so far. Gonna take it easy at first since I’ve been so sedentary from working, and work up to jogging every day. Hopefully it doesn’t rain too much—it’s been raining fairly heavily, on and off, and very dreary, for about a week now.

If I had a FitBit I’d wear one…but they’re expensive, so I’ll be making do with a pedometer.

Giveaway: addendum

Because I am a stupid, I ordered the books to my house instead of sending them straight to the printers. So the books I'll be giving away on GoodReads will be signed, and they'll each include four custom bookmarks.

Malus Domestica GoodReads Giveaway

Malus Domestica GoodReads Giveaway!

.goodreadsGiveawayWidget { color: #555; font-family: georgia, serif; font-weight: normal; text-align: left; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; background: white; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidget p { margin: 0 0 .5em !important; padding: 0; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidgetEnterLink { display: inline-block; color: #181818; background-color: #F6F6EE; border: 1px solid #9D8A78; border-radius: 3px; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; outline: none; font-size: 13px; padding: 8px 12px; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidgetEnterLink:hover { color: #181818; background-color: #F7F2ED; border: 1px solid #AFAFAF; text-decoration: none; } Goodreads Book Giveaway Malus Domesticaby S.A. Hunt

Giveaway ends October 31, 2015.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway
Guess what, folks? I'm running a giveaway for a physical paperback copy of Malus Domestica on GoodReads. It starts on the 17th. I'll be sending a book to five people on Halloween (or the night after? not sure how the notification will work).

​If you're interested in that--or perhaps you know a bookworm that's into horror and might like a good "meaty, satisfying" read for this Halloween--well, just click "Enter Giveaway" to enter!