Ben H. Winters's Blog, page 6

Announcing the 2014 Reverse Blog Tour

This new headshot was taken a couple weeks ago by Indianapolis photographer Mallory Talty.

As frequent readers of this blog will know, they do not exist, because there are no frequent readers of this blog. I like to keep my fans and friends up to date, but I’ve never really become a blogger, in the classical sense (although, can a medium two decades old have classical senses associated with it?), never having had the patience or the excess of articulable opinions necessary to keep up with the whole thing.

(I’ll tell you who is good at it though, and that is my aunt Ann.)

Good thing then that starting next Friday, June 20, this space will become a lot more exciting, at least for a month or two. To celebrate the launch of World of Trouble, the third and final book in the Last Policeman series, I have invited some of my favorite authors and human beings to contribute guest posts about topics of mutual interest.

Among those stopping by will be best-selling authors like Hugh Howey and Adam Sternbergh, plus old friends like Suzanne LaFleur and Gabe Roth and Ransom Riggs (all of whom also happen to be best-selling authors). I’ve invited sci-fi writers, mystery writers, composer/lyricists, journalists, professors—all manner of interesting folks. The current list of contributors is below, and I’ll maybe add the dates as I finalize things , if I ever finalize things. (I’m bad at finalizing things, just in general). I’ll probably add more people, too, if I can find more arms to twist. I’m calling the whole thing my 2014 Reverse Blog Tour, because a Blog Tour in the classical sense (cf earlier parenthetical question) is where an author visits a bunch of other people’s blogs, and here I’m doing the opposite—a bunch of other authors are coming here to play in my sandbox.

THIS new headshot was taken by my wife. Just try and guess what mountain is behind me.

Oh…AND I’ll be doing an actual blog tour starting July 7, and will soon have more info on that!

AND AND I’ll be doing an actual, real live, human in-the-flesh tour , starting July 12 here in Indianapolis, at Indy Reads Books on Mass Ave! Check the APPEARANCES page to see where else the official World of Trouble double-wide emblazoned megabus will be taking me. (Nota been: There is no such bus).

Here is the list of folks whose bylines you can look for on this site between June 20 and mid-August: Hugh Howey, Laura McHugh , Daniel Friedman, Abby Sher, Noah Berlatsky, Ransom Riggs, Adam Sternbergh, the songwriters Kerrigan and Lowdermilk, Suzanne LaFleur, Ethan Gilsdorf, Eric Smith, Gabriel Roth (not the one who plays bass in the Dap-Kings), Ian “Shakespeare’s Star Wars” Doescher, and Professor Joel Marks of the University of New Haven, an honest-to-goodness expert in the ethics of asteroid prevention.

It sounds like a fun party, right? Stay tuned.

 

 

Starting Is Hard

There is a unique emotional state that comes along with starting a new writing project, a constant moody swing behind glee and misery. The glee is uncomplicated, it comes from the new burst of confidence that exists only at the beginnings of exciting new things—it comes from the sense of freedom and unrestraint, banging out the easy parts, knocking them off like those first ten clues of the crossword—you’ve got your great idea, you pick it up and you just fucking go.

 

The misery is more multilayered. There is fear, of course, there is always a dense layer of fear—fear of failure, fear of other’s people’s reactions. Fear (if you’re coming off of one long immersive project) of not living up to what you’ve already done—fear, I think, of not TOPPING what you’ve already done.

 

But the other piece of the misery, the other part that I think is uniquely hard, comes from the painful friction of your ambition grinding against your ability: you know what you want it to be—the structure, the tone, the story—and you are discovering, every second, the muscles requires to make it that way. Trying to make the ACTUAL thing as good as the IMAGINED thing that already lives in your mind.

 

In other words: as soon as you think of an idea for a novel (or a play or a story or, I don’t know, an opera) you have two creatures existing at once in your writing life: over here you’ve got this fully formed perfect IDEAL of the thing, living fully realized in this abstract space where only you can see it—and at the same time, you have this tiny little ill-formed thing, mewling and coughing at you from the mostly blank page, and you’re trying to coax it to larger and larger life.

 

The DIFFERENCE between those two things—between the gorgeous and complete thing you know that you want to create, and the trembling little fragile sickly thing that exists so far—the DISTANCE between those two places—that is one fraught and painful territory to be living in, is what I’m saying.

 

Can you tell I’m working on a new project? Can you tell it’s causing me some anxiety? Is everyone doing that teasing little gesture, where you pretend to play the tiny violin? That’s what I thought.

MORE things that changed my life

The nice folks at Crimespree magazine asked for five cultural artifacts (books, movies, music, etc.) that “changed my life,” and the list I came up with will surprise no one who has known me for any length of time: Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Ira Levin, John Le Carré.

this book will make your head fall off, it’s so good.

The only thing is, I’m a little mortified, reviewing the piece, at its conspicuous maleness. For the record, I could and probably should have included Patricia Highsmith (“The Talented Mr. Ripley” and its sequels), Hilary Mantel (“Wolf Hall”, “Bring up the Bodies”), Lucinda Williams (“Car Wheels on a Gravel Road”), George Eliot (“Middlemarch,” “Silas Marner”) and yes, Jane Austen (uh, “Sense and Sensibility”)

The great Ms. Austen, sans sea monsters.

It’s a fun thing to think about, for sure, works of art that changed your life, or at least changed your perception of yourself or of the world.

Anyway—shit, I forgot P.D. James. I gotta go back and add P.D. James!

 

Shirtless in Seattle

Big joy for me in Seattle on Friday night, where I had the great honor of winning the Philip K. Dick Award for science fiction for 2013, for my novel Countdown City.  

As I said, or tried haltingly to say, in accepting the award, I am especially grateful that the Last Policeman series has won this particular laurel, because A) I so love and admire Dick’s whole idiosyncratic, impossible oeuvre,  and because B) I didn’t set out to write science-fiction, it just ended up that way.

What I wanted was a way to tell a classic detective story in a surprising way, maybe to fold some new ideas into that genre—the mystery genre—and so I came to the world-ending asteroid business, and (as I’ve noted in the past) once you’ve got a world-ending asteroid in your book, it’s science fiction whether you like it or not.

Some of the works of Philip K. Dick. Look at those covers!

Let me be clear: I like it. I like the novels being labeled sci-fi, and I certainly like winning an award in the category. I hope it’s not too cliche to observe that what successful science-fiction novels do (like those of, for example, Philip K. Dick), is similar to what successful mystery novels do, which is to use the conventions of  genre as a lens through which to examine the ideas, the morality, the received wisdom, of the world we actually live in.

Anyway. Here on YouTube you can see me reading a selection from Countdown City at the award ceremony, and if you keep watching you can see me accept the award, after my new friend, the Japanese novelist Toh EnJoe, accepts the Special Citation for his insane multipart experimental novel The Self-Reference ENGINE.

Me, doing a reading, post-ceremony, in ill-matching shirt and suit.

(Side note: I have to ruefully acknowledge that in this clip I am wearing a short-sleeve salmon colored button-up shirt with my light-blue suit.  This sartorial nightmare was occasioned by Mr. Fancypants Award-Winning Writer having forgotten to pack a dress shirt for the ceremony. I would have felt more self-conscious in the moment, except this award was given out at NorWesCon, a sci-fi/fantasy convention, so there were literally people there dressed as orcs.)

 

Mystery writing / writing is a mystery

This is a very short blog entry that is really just to share one thing with you.

I’ve been doing research on the author Richard Price because on Thursday night I’m teaching his book (masterpiece, if you ask me) Clockers for my mystery fiction class at Butler.

I found this quote in an interview with him and it just about knocked my head off. One of the great true things I’ve heard said about writing…

“I have to be a little intimidated by what I’m writing about. I have to feel a little bit like I don’t think I can do this, I don’t think I can master this, I don’t think I can get under the skin of this, because when you’re a little scared, you’re bringing everything to the table because you’re not sure you can do it unless you bust your balls and really, really get into it. Terror keeps you slender. I need a sense of awe.”

That’s probably true of all art forms, and maybe all things that require effort to yield something complex and complete: “when you’re a little scared, you’re bringing everything to the table.”

In other words, when it’s hard you know you’re doing it right.

Can you tell I’m working out the idea for a new book? Can you tell it’s making me feel various complicated emotions, ranging from joy to terror?

The other thing that happened today was that I had a call with the marketing department at Quirk Books (or as I like to call her, Nicole) to discuss this summer’s little book tour in support of World of Trouble: The Last Policeman Book III. We’ll be announcing all the dates soon.

 

 

Cover uncovered

Hey, here’s the cover of the third and final book in the Last Policeman series, World of Trouble.  Let me know what you think!

You can see the rest of the book (the part that comes after the cover) on July 15, although you should feel free to preorder it any time.

 

How to Write a Novel

(This quick piece originally appeared on the website of the Indiana Authors Award, where I am privileged to serve as a panelist this year)

One of the new and joyful things about my life since moving to Indy a couple years ago is getting to hang out at Butler, where I have been privileged to work as an adjunct professor in the MFA program in writing. It means I get to pal around with cool novelists like Dan Barden and Mike Dahlie and Allison Lynn, but also that I’ve had to think seriously about a very hard question, which is how do you teach people to write?

Don’t get me wrong. You can learn to write. In fact, you should—writing is not, I repeat not, a magical inborn gift that grows inside the lucky few, or that only emerges when the muse deigns to descend from the heavens and blow her golden trumpet or blah blah blah. Nothing drives me so bonkers as the romantic gauzy idea of the writer as conduit, rather than creator, as if writers (especially fiction writers and poets) just lounge and loaf, Whitman-like, under shady trees until the words appear, illuminated and glistening and syntacticly impeccable.

Nonsense! (As Agatha Christie would say: jiggery-pokery!) Writing, like all things worth doing, requires skill and training and practice.

But then how do you teach it? There is no secret to writing a book.

Or, rather, there a thousand overlapping and interlocking secrets, including “come up with a good idea,” “make a good outline,” “know when to ignore your outline,” “get a good night’s sleep,” and “stop checking your email so much.” Also “trust your instincts,” “know when your instincts are misleading you,” “conflict is the engine of narrative,” “don’t worry so much about what other people think,” and “stop checking Facebook so much.”

See? There are a lot of things to learn. One can never finish learning all the things there are to learn, which means you should probably just start writing and find your way forward—which is another not-too-shabby piece of advice. But the best—the very best—piece of writing instruction I think I’ve got is to learn to read. And I don’t just mean achieving functional literacy (although I am a big, big fan of achieving functional literacy, which is why I love Indy Reads), I mean learning to live inside a piece of fiction. Love a book or hate it, you need to learn to see how the writer built the thing—to walk around in there and see where the beams and the posts are, see where the stairs creak and why, see how many windows there are and how the light comes in.

A lot (most?) of what I know about being funny in fiction I learned from Charles Dickens; a lot (most?) of what I know about the slow build of suspense I learned from Patricia Highsmith. What I teach my students (I hope) is to learn occasionally from me; frequently from their fellow students; and most of all and always from books and authors.

That’s why you always see writers at libraries. They want to be surrounded by books and authors, like pandas want to be surrounded by bamboo. Go to the Central Library in downtown Indy, on any given day, (or any other library or any other day) and you’ll likely see them, hunched over tables, pecking away, surrounded by the stacks—the writers in their natural habitat. Don’t get too close, or they might get spooked and spill their coffee. One of them will be me.

#TwitterFiction recap

What follows is the full text of the “story” I posted today as part of the #TwitterFiction festival:

 

 

This is not the story I’m supposed to be writing. (#TwitterFiction 1/66)

 

Nor is it a story I particularly WANT to be writing.(#TwitterFiction 2/66)

 

I pitched @TwFictionFest (&wrote) a tense multi-character hour long drama called Free Charlton Connors (#TwitterFiction 3/66)

 

The tale of a desperate man named Atlee Connors who seizes a bank to demand his bro’s release from prison. (#TwitterFiction 4/66)

 

In the story,”@AtleeConnors” live-tweets as he takes hostages, negotiates w/ cops. etc. (#TwitterFiction 5/66)

 

I was excited about it. (Excited & nervous) (#TwitterFiction 6/66)

 

But then two weird things happened, related to this story (#TwitterFiction 7/66)…

 

…which together pitched me into a spiral of confusion and dread (#TwitterFiction 8/66)

 

[Preface this by saying that I am under the BEST circumstances a welter of self-doubt and uncertainty (#TwitterFiction 9/66)]

 

First of 2 incidents: Mon. eve., checked phone during #LegoMovie, had email from man named “Atlee Connors” (#TwitterFiction 10/66)

 

[Same name as character from my planned story)  (#TwitterFiction 11/66)]

 

Email was sent vis the Contact Form on my website (BenHWinters.com) (#TwitterFiction 12/66)

 

It was the WEIRDEST AND MOST AWFUL communication I’ve ever received. (#TwitterFiction 13/66)

 

Basically someone sent this guy a link to publicity about @TWFictionFest and my story http://twitterfictionfestival.com/schedule/hostage-situation-real-time/?timezone_string=America/New_York— (#TwitterFiction 14/66)

 

—and he is super pissed. Also deranged. And ALL CAPS. (Next 2 tweets quote the email NSFW).  (#TwitterFiction 15/66)

 

quote 1 DEAR FUCKING LIAR & THIEF BEN H. WINTERS THERE IS NO SHAME AND PEOPLE FUCKING DIE FOR SHIT  (#TwitterFiction 16/66)

 

quote 2: YOU ARE A COWARD TO USE REAL PEOPLE’S HEARTS FOR SPORT I FUCK YOU YOU GET STOMPED  (#TwitterFiction 17/66)

 

The rest I kid u not is about the dude’s plumbing company being audited & how the government hates True Christians (#TwitterFiction 18/66)

 

There are people prob who would shrug this of thing off, but I AM NOT ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE (#TwitterFiction 19/66)

 

I read the email over and over in deepening panic and horror. I felt sick. (#TwitterFiction 20/66)

 

I considered a polite return email (“dear clearly insane man, thanks for taking the time…) (#TwitterFiction 21/66)

 

I considered changing the name of my story or the character “Atlee Connors”(#TwitterFiction 22/66)

 

But I couldn’t just change name of 1 character, since 2 lead characters are BROTHERS…(#TwitterFiction 23/66)

 

and the TITLE of the story has their last name in it (#TwitterFiction 24/66)

 

AND I’d set up all these fake Twitter handles (inc. @AtleeConnors), they’d been “cleared” by @TwFictionFestival… (#TwitterFiction 25/66)

 

AND the whole thing had been publicized by me & @TwFictionFestival & @QuirkBooks, posted on schedule etc (#TwitterFiction 26/66)

 

AND I had already changed my whole story idea & had to resubmit to @TwFictionFesival once already! (#TwitterFiction 27/66)

 

[And had  felt REALLY bad about it: I’m conflict-averse, nervous about how I’m seen as a writer & a professional) (#TwitterFiction 28/66)]

 

Considered consoling possibility that angry email was fake (joke by @ADamZucker? @BWesthoff? @EricSmithRocks?) (#TwitterFiction 29/66)

 

But not in character for most of my friends. Stayed up late gripped with anxiety. Do I have ENEMIES? (#TwitterFiction 30/66)

Tues. morning I defaulted to lifelong habit of cowardice & inertial: archived crazy email, did nothing. (#TwitterFiction 31/66)

 

I got back to work on new novel + putting finishing touches on “Free Charlton Connors” (#TwitterFiction 32/66)

 

I worked at @IndyCENLibrary—tried to work—working under the dark shadow of “real” Atlee Connors (#TwitterFiction 33/66)

 

Thinking will he see the story? How will he feel when I show “him” murdering strangers, blowing up a bank? (#TwitterFiction 34/66)

 

AND THEN WHEN I LEFT @IndyCENLibrary A MAN RUSHED ME ON THE STEPS (#TwitterFiction 35/66)

 

Skinny dude/shaking hands/ overalls/matted hair/pale skin/ twitchy eyes. Pushes me against library pillar (#TwitterFiction 36/66)

 

He comes right up in my face, grabs my shirt with both hands. His teeth are all fucked up. (#TwitterFiction 37/66)

 

Backstory: I have written tons of violence but have NO experience. I am a coward. Dread discomfort let alone pain (#TwitterFiction 38/66)

 

Dude has got some kind of kitchen knife peeking blade-first out of the front pocket of his overalls. (#TwitterFiction 39/66)

 

And Of COURSE i’m thinking “It’s him! It’s him! It’s Atlee Connors!” (#TwitterFiction 40/66)

 

Worst part (except for the knife): The dude is shouting “Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare!”. Over and over. (#TwitterFiction 41/66)

 

Just raving, muttering and raving; prob. schizophrenic or paranoid, maybe coming down off something or going up. (#TwitterFiction 42/66)

 

But to me, at that moment—and now, still, sort of—I was convinced. “Holy shit it’s him.” (#TwitterFiction 43/66)

 

“I’m sorry,” I said. Pure cowardice. Pure fear. “I’m really sorry. It’s OK. It’s OK.” I was TERRIFIED.  (#TwitterFiction 44/66)

 

At last he lets go and spits on steps & stalks down steps of the library (#TwitterFiction 45/66).

 

I clutch the side of the building, trembling, in the shadow of the donut sculpture. (#TwitterFiction 46/66)

 

Driving home my panic slowly subsided & gave way to melancholy; a well of grief & confusion opened up inside me. (#TwitterFiction 47/66)

 

I was sure of it—it was impossible, but I was SURE that the man on the steps was the man who had emailed me— (#TwitterFiction 48/66)

 

& I was sure moreover that he would torment me forever, because from his (madman’s) perspective I was his NEMESIS (#TwitterFiction 49/66)

 

I’d picked his name at random & implicated him in a crime he was innocent of—a crime which had never existed (#TwitterFiction 50/66)

 

I’d stepped across some line separating make-believe from reality, & the prospect filled me with sadness and horror (#TwitterFiction 51/66)

 

I felt as if I had invented a character who’d become real— (#TwitterFiction 52/66)

 

—an avatar of all my anxiety about being a writer, trying to make a living in a world of pretend (#TwitterFiction 53/66)

 

It was like from Grimm’s or Poe or @StephenKing: the murderous double, the dark self made flesh & given a weapon (#TwitterFiction 54/66)

 

I was lost in these complicated shadows, feeling obscurely scared, baffled, defeated, lost— (#TwitterFiction 55/66)

 

—certain I had to back out of @TwFictionFestival, maybe I had to back out of being a writer in general— (#TwitterFiction 56/66)

 

When I realized that THE GUY HAD STOLEN MY WALLET. (#TwitterFiction 57/66)

 

I laughed. I mean, I freaked out, but I laughed. (#TwitterFiction 58/66)

 

Here I was, contemplating the Borgesian oddness of my situation, mulling the blurred line between truth & fiction (#TwitterFiction 59/66)—

 

Having a little narcissistic writerly pity party for myself— (#TwitterFiction 60/66)

 

& my tormentor was back at library park using my 65 bucks and chance to get high! (#TwitterFiction 61/66)

 

And so there you have it, dear Twitter: the story of a desperate man named Atlee Connors. (#TwitterFiction 62/66)

 

Not the SAME story of a desperate man named Atlee Connors that I had planned, but it’s better. I think it’s better. (#TwitterFiction 63/66)

 

I think it has something to tell us, though I’ll be damned if I know what. (#TwitterFiction 64/66)

 

The only moral of the story I can think of is: that dude’s got my Geico card, which has my address on it. (#TwitterFiction 65/66)

 

So if this is the last tweet I ever send…you know why. (#TwitterFiction 66/66)

 

 

A bold experiment

I am not, as I have said  (most recently in this interview) particularly adept at the whole social media world, but I was nevertheless delighted to be asked to be a “featured author” in the upcoming Twitter Fiction Festival.

I am always game for a—well, a game—a challenge—a fun new way to tell a story.  

The story I’ll be telling—tweeting—is called Free Charlton Connors. It plays out in real time over one hour, as a desperate man takes over a bank demanding that his brother be released from  prison.  It’s a classic multiple-POV kind of story, with five different narrators weaving the tale from their varying and overlapping and sometimes contradictory points of view.

To play along you’ll need to be online and on Twitter from 2 to 3 pm on Thursday, March 13. 

AND sometime before then, follow these Twitter accounts:

@AtleeMiller (that’s the man who has taken over the bank, demanding his brother’s release, and has hostages with him in the vault)

@UplandNB14thSt (that’s the official account for the bank)

@UplandPD (the local police)

@USPDanvers (the official account for the federal penitentiary where Charlton Connors is serving a life sentence for a murder he may or may not have committed)

@UplandBEE (the local newspaper)

So come play along, and let me know what you think! (And be sure to check out the listings for the rest of the festival — the line up is quite remarkable, and includes friends of mine like the admirably twitter-savvy Eric Smith.)

Here is the official description of my story, from the festival homepage:

“Free Charlton Connors” is a crime story that plays out in real time over the course of one tense daylight hour. Atlee Connors (@AtleeConnors) is a “regular guy” who has barricaded himself inside the bank vault at a branch of Upland National Bank (@UplandNB14thSt), with six hostages and a bomb strapped to his chest, demanding the release of his “wrongfully convicted” brother Charlton, who is being held in solitary confinement at nearby United States Penitentiary, Danvers. Local police (@UplandPD) enter into a dialog with @AtleeConnors—who insists on communicating only over Twitter—even as the hardline warden (@USPDanvers) is flatly rejecting Charlton’s release. A local newspaper reporter (@UplandBee) is on the scene, and her reports add color—and contradictory information—to what’s coming from the cops and from Atlee in the vault. One way or another, Free Charlton Connors is a story that ends with a bang.
 

 

 

So please tell

The End is Nigh (in more ways than one)

On March 1 you’ll be able to read The End is Nigh, the first in a series of apocalypse-themed short story collections, edited by John Joseph Adams, who publishes Lightspeed Magazine, and Hugh Howey , who wrote Wool and a bunch of other hugely popular sci-fi books. I love the story I wrote for this first volume– it’s called BRING HER TO ME (the all-caps is part of the title)—and the best part is that there are two more volumes to come, so I’ll get to continue the tale with two more stories. You can preorder The End Is Nigh, which also features contributions from Robin Wasserman, Jake Kerr, and a ton of other science-fiction authors, at this page.

And speaking of completing trilogies…World of Trouble, the third and final book in the Last Policeman series, is approaching the point of no return: it is being copyedited by the good folks at Quirk Books, while I do my final pass, which I call the “read the whole thing out loud to my cat” pass. (You can actually see said cat, and all my other writing accoutrements, in this picture). That book will be available on July 15 but you can order it now. Thanks to everyone who kept  asking me how it was going. Like all books, it was going real bad, then for a while it was great, then it was TERRIBLE, and now I think it’s pretty good. Ask me again next week, OK?

I’ll have a cover mockup to show you one of these days.