Paul Michael Anderson's Blog: The Dumping Ground, Part Deux, page 5

(#SomeoneElseSaturday Crossover!) Dispatches from the Goodreads Reading Challenge Wastelands: Jonathan Maberry’s Assassin’s Code

(QUICK NOTE THAT I BEGIN EVERY WASTELAND DISPATCH WITH:

(Last year, 2016, I found myself struggling to get through a book as quickly or with as much enjoyment as I used to.  No shade thrown on those books, but my life had become busier and it was easier to read io9 or cruise my Facebook newsfeed than crack open a book.  I didn’t like that and the Goodreads Reading Challenge seemed like a nifty way to get my head back in the game.  Of course, after setting my challenge, I realized I had way o...

Thirteen Days to the Suicide Woods: Day 1 — The Call of the Void

Go check this out, friend-Os (and thanks for Jessica McHugh, since I just appropriated that term): Bracken’s my main man–I lavished praise on his novel STRANDED in my last post–and he has his own collection coming out this month: 13 VIEWS OF THE SUICIDE WOODS. (We promised each other that our next collections will have sunnier, if still evocative, titles). Over the next few weeks, he’s going to be giving some inside-baseball on the stories, which is something that I always wanted to do, but I...

Let’s Start a Thing: Someone Else Saturday (Chrome-embossed cover first edition in tri-color format)

Don’t look at me like that about the title of this post; I was a comic book kid of the ’90s.

Anyway.

Unless you’re an iconic writer whose every word gets adapted into a film that’ll at least make its budget back, you’re on social media, whorin’ yourself out like your pimp is three seconds from going Wayne Brady on your ass.

If you have any kind of soul, it feels kinda icky, like binge-watching Toddlers & Tiaras (don’t ever watch that).  Also, it might not be all that effective–people get numb...

Dispatches from the Goodreads Reading Challenge Wasteland: Jonathan Maberry’s The King of Plagues

(QUICK NOTE THAT I BEGIN EVERY WASTELAND DISPATCH WITH:

(Last year, 2016, I found myself struggling to get through a book as quickly or with as much enjoyment as I used to.  No shade thrown on those books, but my life had become busier and it was easier to read io9 or cruise my Facebook newsfeed than crack open a book.  I didn’t like that and the Goodreads Reading Challenge seemed like a nifty way to get my head back in the game.  Of course, after setting my challenge, I realized I had way o...

This Is Not a Playlist

About a week ago, the redoubtable Adrian Shotbolt (aka The Grim Reader; he always threw Bones Are Made to be Broken a good review last year) asked me about how music influenced my writing and I jumped at that topic in half a minute.  Music is huge with me, to the point that for a significant portion of my teens and twenties, I was an insufferable prick about it.

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Don’t worry–I’ve gotten better.  (“At being a dick, Anderson?” someone yells in the back?  Like, dude–what are you even doing here...

Dispatches from the Goodreads Reading Challenge Wastelands: Jonathan Maberry’s The Dragon Factory

(Quick note: Last year, 2016, I found myself struggling to get through a book as quickly or with as much enjoyment as I used to.  No shade thrown on those books, but my life had become busier and it was easier to read io9 or cruise my Facebook newsfeed than crack open a book.  I didn’t like that and the Goodreads Reading Challenge seemed like a nifty way to get my head back in the game.  Of course, after setting my challenge, I realized I had way overshot my count in comparison to others–some...

Beta-Reading and Not Being a Nice Person: A Primer

The biggest and best lesson I ever took away from the writer’s group I attended years ago was this: Don’t be the nice guy.

This would seem counter intuitive, I guess.  People usually attend a writer’s group to find a welcome space for a creative endeavor, a place where they can “be” writers–whatever the fuck that means–and to seek encouragement.

The writer’s group I attended between 2006 and 2010 did not subscribe to that theory.  Thank god.

See, this writer’s group had a simple theory behind...

Dispatches from the Goodreads Reading Challenge Wastelands: Bracken MacLeod’s Stranded

(Quick note: Last year, 2016, I found myself struggling to get through a book as quickly or with as much enjoyment as I used to.  No shade thrown on those books, but my life had become busier and it was easier to read io9 or cruise my Facebook newsfeed than crack open a book.  I didn’t like that and the Goodreads Reading Challenge seemed like a nifty way to get my head back in the game.  Of course, after setting my challenge, I realized I had way overshot my count in comparison to others–some...

Dispatches from the Goodreads Reading Challenge Wasteland: Neil Gaiman’s The View from the Cheap Seats

(Quick note: Last year, 2016, I found myself struggling to get through a book as quickly or with as much enjoyment as I used to.  No shade thrown on those books, but my life had become busier and it was easier to read io9 or cruise my Facebook newsfeed than crack open a book.  I didn’t like that and the Goodreads Reading Challenge seemed like a nifty way to get my head back in the game.  Of course, after setting my challenge, I realized I had way overshot my count in comparison to others–some of them reviewers, for Christ’s sake–so this became what will hopefully be a fun, year-long experiment on crashing and burning.

(But, on a related note, I’ve always wanted to see how I read over the course of a year, what my tastes were depending on the time of year, the circumstances, etc.

(So, here’s Dispatches from the Goodreads Reading Challenge Wastelands.)

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There’s this thing when reading Neil Gaiman–you know you’re reading Neil Gaiman.  His voice, his word choice, his construction of prose or even just sentences–they are, from beginning to end, Neil.  This is a rare feat–many writers, trying to be as direct as possible, struggle to maintain their own voice, finding it just enough to avoid the inescapable “drone”.  Few can be direct and still be flourishing.  Neil can do it.  Harlan Ellison can do it.  Joe Hill can do it more than his father, in my view (these are all my view…duh).

So, it was with great pleasure, I’d finally gotten a chance to read The View from the Cheap Seats, a collection of Neil’s nonfiction work.  The book doesn’t have everything from Neil that isn’t story-based, but it offers a nice overview of the past thirty years.  There are introductions (some of which I’d read prior to this), articles, musings, speeches.

Those looking for a “Gaiman story” will be dissatisfied, but for those looking for his dissection of what makes art work, or why you shouldn’t be bothered by the winning or losing of awards, or how to manage oneself on a creative endeavor will find themselves very satisfied.  I found myself nodding when he dissected the purpose of awards in his keynote speeches, finding kinship when he discussed Imposter Syndrome (the idea that you’ve somehow tricked everyone into liking your art, which makes you successful, but all will ultimately be turned over to someone who actually deserves it, leaving you stuck getting a real job), and explained how the people you meet, even the most unlikely of people, will help you build the life you become.

He’s chattier than a Stephen King nonfiction book (Danse Macabre or On Writing), making the subjects sound more like conversations.  This can be a strength or a hindrance, depending on what you “want” from Neil Gaiman.

For me, though, it was just fine.  Just what I wanted and needed this week.

Next, Bracken Macleod’s Stranded.

Bones Are Made to be Broken makes the Stoker prelim ballot (and I never react well to good things)

So, yesterday, the preliminary ballot for the Bram Stoker Awards was released, first to members via e-mail, who then disseminated it to social media and various genre websites.  I began to hear about it via a break at work, when my Facebook account kept blowing up, being repeated tagged in things, but never seeing why.  I finally messaged a friend about the list and got the info.

Bones Are Made to be Broken the titular novella of my collection–and one of the two original pieces in the book–had been selected in the Long Fiction category.

You often hear the cliche “his mind was blown” but this was my first time ever encountering it.  I told a colleague that the rest of my day was shot because I was trying to, in a strange way, figure out what the fuck had happened.  And the tags and congrats just kept on fucking coming.

I’m a natural pessimist, so while the reviews have been ridiculously positive, the blurbs were given freely (and were spectacular), and, at the beginning of it, Michael Bailey believed the stories were good–I kept all of that at arm’s length.  A part of me legit believed (and believes) that I somehow managed to hornswaggle these people.  This isn’t humble-brag.  I struggle with not feeling like a twat when saying thank you for a gift, let alone people going to some length to sing the praises of a bunch of goddamned stories I wrote.

And people say I’m an egotist.  Scratch an egotist and find a neurotically batshit person.

It’s also not humble-brag when I say that I didn’t expect to make any kind of list, prelim or otherwise.  A few people made sure to point out to me that they were recommending this story or that story or the collection to the recommended reading list and that was nice and I put it out of my head.  I tend to click over to Goodreads or the Amazon listing for Bones for reading reviews a bit obsessively, but when it comes to people saying, “Read this!” on some kind of list, I tend to act dismissively.  Thanks! I say, or That’s Awesome!  and I feel like a twat, like I don’t mean it (though I do) and the other person thinks the same.

So!  What happens now?  Well, a mailer will be going out to all Horror Writers Association members which will include links or copies of the balloted works.  Between now and at some point in February, this prelim ballot will be narrowed down to a Final Ballot of five works and it is those works that will be considered “Bram Stoker Award nominees”.  From there, it’s on to the Awards Ceremony at Stokercon.

Do I think I’ll make the ballot?  Oh, who the hell knows and I’m not even going to bother trying.  In all the categories, I’m digging how eccentric the choices are (how many times does Stephen King need to be nominated, y’know? He’s got more awards than the Trump White House has assholes).  Moreover, I’m just not bothered.  It’ll be fine, either way.

Here’s the secret to awards, gang–told by someone who has never won one, so you know I’m an expert.  I’m not, but Neil Gaiman is.  He said, as part of a keynote speech at an awards ceremony, that awards are only about professionals in a certain field coming together and selecting a handful of pieces that these professionals believe are representative of their field.  That’s it.  You won’t suddenly become rich and famous, or get laid with any increasing regularity, or look suddenly hotter in the mirror.  Some people get resentful if they don’t “win” or they aren’t even “nominated” and I just don’t get why.  The handful of pieces selected as being representative doesn’t mean that nothing else can’t be representative.  That’s the rub, friends.  Awards are nice, awards may make some people go “Hmm, cool”, but that’s all they are and, really, all they should be.  Anyone who’s looking for more is probably doing the art for the wrong reasons.

I didn’t, and I suspect no  one else on the list, write to get awards.  We wrote our pieces, our potentially representative pieces, because we wanted to.  They were stories we wanted to tell, with no other thought beyond that.  The people who do it for the recognition, or to try to get rich, or get laid–they never last, nor should they.  Fuck those people.  They clog the channels.

So, it goes like this–if Bones Are Made to be Broken ends up being a nominee, that’s fucking righteous.  If it doesn’t–well, the story and the book are still out there, aren’t they? And that’s pretty goddamned awesome, too. People are reading it.  People are liking it.  People, hopefully, are talking about it with others, who may pick it up themselves.  Some of them tell me about this.

And I’m grateful.  Honestly, even if I feel like a twat.

(Side note – as an outsider who’s not in the HWA, I was very pleased at the prelim ballot.  Not everything I loved made it onto the list [seriously, go buy Paper Tigers RIGHT FUCKING NOW GODDAMMIT THIS IS MY FAVORITE NOVEL OF 2016], but it was interesting enough that I can just nod my head and go, “That’ll do, pig.”)

You can pick up Bones Are Made to be Broken here.

And, if you like what you read, write a quick review on Goodreads and Amazon.  I don’t just mean Bones–although, yes, yes, do review that–but all the books you read.  Spread the word.  Talk to people about what turns your dials.

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