2015: Looking Back, Looking Forward

I don't do a lot of reflection over the new year. For me, the time for that is in February, right around my birthday. I like to take a couple of days, get away from it all, and do a postmortem of the year gone by while setting goals for the next. Still, it's hard not to feel thoughtful and a little sad, looking back at 2014.

It was a painful year for so many, and we said goodbye to so many lives that never should have been lost. I don't have to go into a recap of tragedies: you lived it, too. Sometimes it feels like the whole of civilization is one big ongoing quest to find new and innovative ways to be shitty to one another.

But it's not all bad. For every sorrow, for every abuse, a groundswell of outrage rises to meet it. People saying "no, that's wrong, it shouldn't happen, and that's not the world I want to live in". Sometimes even that feels hopeless, like it's just screaming into the wind, but you know what? At least we're not screaming alone.

I'm an entertainer, first and foremost. My job is to write books that hopefully give you a little thrill, maybe a laugh or a shiver, and pull you away from the troubles of the world for a while. I don't write "message fiction," that is, stories that exist for the sole purpose of trumpeting a social issue or political platform, because "message fiction" inevitably fails at being a good story (and a good story is what you pay your five bucks to get).

Of course, I try to talk about things I care about. Things that make me angry, things that make me worried, things I think you should be angry and worried about, too. That's the tricky divide that every storyteller faces: a good book has to be written from a place of passion. It just has to be. If I don't care, I can't make you care. At the same time, the story has to come first, and it has to be rooted in theme. I'd much rather show how a real-world problem impacts my characters' lives, and what they do about the conflict that results, than write you a polemic.

And believe me, I wrestle with this shit constantly, I think most writers do. Like I said Tuesday, I plan to spend more time thinking about issues of representation and voice -- not as some stupid "here's a list of minorities, better make sure we have them all in every book" checklist, see the point about "message fiction" above -- but because authentic voices and authentic lives make for kick-ass stories. As Chuck Wendig says, art harder, motherfuckers.

Wanna know a secret? A recurring character in the Daniel Faust series is transgendered. Why has it never come up? Because it's not important to the plot. Every time I've tried to write it in, it feels either arbitrary or check-list-y, so I cut the dialogue. In the wake of Leelah Alcorn's suicide, and seeing just how much shit transgendered teens have to endure, now I'm wondering if that's the right choice. Maybe fiction needs more cool transgendered people doing cool action-hero stuff, so maybe some kid going through hell can pick up a book and say "Hey, here's somebody like me, and they're doing okay."

(I mean, as okay as anybody ever gets in Faust's world. C'mon. These are not healthy people.)

So these are things I think about, in the vain hope of finding a right answer. My driving goal, though, is the same in 2015 as it was in 2014: to keep upping my game, writing good books, and keeping you smiling. Or cringing. Or shivering. Sometimes? All three at once. There's nothing like a laugh-cringe-shiver trifecta.

I'll have news on Faust book four, A Plain-Dealing Villain, very soon: it'll be in your hands by the end of the month. Then we can look ahead to the Winter's Reach followup, the second Revanche Cycle novel, which I'm hammering away at right now.

But tonight is New Year's Eve, so I'm going to cook a steak, pour a glass of wine, and enjoy a quiet night away from the madness of the world. Be good or be wicked, as your preference dictates, and if you go out tonight please have a designated driver. Let's not start 2015 off with any more bad news.

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