Apple-Obsessed Author Fella
I’m in Chicago. Er, probably.
Unless my plane crashed, in which case, I’m dead.
Haunting one of you.
YOU KNOW WHICH ONE.
Meantime, I figure I’ll ask this question, generate some talky-talky:
Book promotion.
What works for you? As a reader? As a writer?
What totally fails as a book promo tactic?
First person to say, “Buying 100+ positive reviews” gets a pony.
And that pony will kick you in the jaw!
I’m at Worldcon/Chicon, where the name on the lips of all the writers is “science fiction/fantasy.”
So, that’s what you’ll write.
But that’s your only parameter this week.
The leash is off, the collar is loose.
1000 words. Up to.
Due by Friday the 7th, 12noon EST.
Post at your online space.
Link back here.
Go write, moon dwellers and dragon tamers.
Continuing the tradition here of posting interviews with storytellers of all stripes and polka dots, we’ve got Geek Bard John Anealio, also of the Functional Nerds podcast. He’s a funny dude, a smart man, and a kick-ass musician — fan of Jonathan Coulton? Do check out Mister Anealio’s work at johnanealio.com where you can download some free awesome music. Find him on the Twitters: @JohnAnealio. Oh, uhhh, also? JOHN TOTALLY DID A TERRIBLEMINDS SONG. You’ll find it in the interview, below.
I’ve been a music performer for 20 years now. I’ve played every type of venue that you can imagine: bars, coffee shops, restaurants, ice cream parlors, churches, VFW halls, hookah bars, book stores, libraries and more. The most memorable gig that I ever played was with a cover band at a strip club. Now, that sounds awesome, but it was actually horrible. First off, the name of the band was “Hoosier Daddy”. Second, we weren’t performing for the dancers, we were performing instead of the dancers. The owner of this club thought it was a great idea to give the dancers a night off and hire our crappy college cover band to perform as a substitute. We proceeded to play the pop hits of the day (we did a mean version of “Breakfast At Tiffanies”) to a never-ending stream of horny dudes who walked in the door and were wildly disappointed to discover that the regular entertainment was replaced by a quartet of flannel clad douche bags playing Goo Goo Dolls songs. By the end of our set, all four of us were hammered… and shirtless.
The capper to this story is that the gig was on the Saturday night before Easter and it was Daylight Savings Time Weekend. Oh, and I had to play guitar for a children’s choir mass the next day. Being sleep deprived, hungover and covered in glitter is no way to accompany children singing “We Gather Together”.
Lessons are learned through stories. A good storyteller not only entertains, but educates. I’ve been a teacher for almost as long as I’ve been a musician and students learn best through stories, even inane ones.
When performing, I like to tell little stories that help to give my songs context. A song can have a much greater impact if you prime the audience with a relevant story first.
Write with all five senses. A lot of songs, even great ones, are “feeling” songs. You know: “I love you baby”, “I need you”, “I want you”, “I can’t live without you”. This is fine, but there are a ga-zillion songs like this. I think one of the most powerful songwriting techniques is to describe the situation to the listener with all five senses. Even if it’s a straight up love song, describe what’s going on. Where are you? What do you see? What does she look like? What is she wearing? What do you hear? Cars in the street? Boardwalk creaking? A song on the radio? What do you smell? Salt water? Gasoline? What do you taste? What are you touching?
I think you can really take a listener on a journey if you do this. Ironically, I think the listener can feel so much more if you describe in sensory detail what’s going on, rather than just saying: “I feel like my heart is breaking”.
I was in a band with a drummer who was the primary songwriter. While discussing songwriting one day, he told me that: “real songwriters don’t use rhyming dictionaries”. Besides being an incredibly arrogant statement, that is truly horrible advice. Rhyming dictionaries not only help you construct better rhymes, they help you write better stories. They may reveal a word that can send the story of your song into a completely different direction that can make your tune much deeper and more memorable.
Flaws. Vulnerability. Ironically, a character’s weakness will reveal their strength. How someone deals with adversity and how they overcome their weaknesses ultimately proves how strong they are.
So many strong characters, but I’m going to go with Arlen from Peter V. Brett’s THE WARDED MAN. Such a relatable character that develops into an utter badass.
Sequence. If you take a song and put the second verse first and the first verse second, and it doesn’t really make a difference, then there’s no story. Each verse, each line should develop the characters and story. The first verse should introduce the situation and character(s). The subsequent verses should move the action forward. The bridge or break should present new information or look at the situation from a different point of view. Otherwise, it’s better to not have a bridge at all.
1. “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” by Richard Thompson http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0kJdrfzjAg
2. “Red Barchetta” by Rush http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djVGhqvl_8A
3. “Another Auld Lang Syne” by Dan Fogelberg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar9Ip7pSqEg
There are so many amazing singer/songwriters out there that most people have never heard of. I can’t pick just one. Here are three:
1. Kelly Joe Phelps
2. Peter Mulvey
3. Jeffrey Foucault
In my opinion, these are the three best singer/songwriter/guitarists performing folk music these days. They all had a profound impact on my own writing, guitar playing and performing. If you like literate story songs, soulful singing and stunning acoustic guitar work, then you can’t go wrong with any of these guys. Pop their names into YouTube and prepare to kill a few hours.
All of them. Let me clarify. Back in the day, TV shows used to have theme songs that would really lay out the story behind the show. Nowadays, songs are put into movies to evoke a feeling. Lyrically, they usually have very little to do with the source material. “Live to Rise” by Soundgarden was the theme song to The Avengers movie. It has nothing to do with The Avengers! Hey Marvel, why not hire Jonathan Coulton, Kirby Krackle or me to write a song that is actually about The Avengers? I work cheap.
Wake up at 5:30am. Get to the day job (elementary school music teacher) at 6:30am. Do my creative work from 6:30am to 8:30am before my students and co-workers arrive. During this two hour period, I’ll work on recording and editing whatever my latest song is. Fortunately, we live in a world where you can make a pretty professional recording with a good mic, audio interface and laptop. I teach my morning classes from 8:30am to 11:30am. I continue working on my song during my lunch hour. I get home at around 4pm and take care of my son until about 6:30. After dinner, I do about an hour at the gym. I usually try to put another hour of work on the song in before I go to bed.
I actually wrote a tune and recorded it. Here’s the link: Terrible Mind Song If you are so inclined, you can click the share/embed button to get the code to embed the player widget within the blog post.
If you look inside his terrible mind
You’re bound to be offended
So don’t look inside the terrible mind
Of the man they call Chuck Wendig
CONTROL POINT by Myke Cole. Blackhawk Down meets the X-Men. If you dig military sci-fi, D&D and the afformentioned X-Men then you will love this book.
Appoggiatura: which is a type of musical grace note. I just like the way it sounds.
Cock-wad: I find myself yelling this when I get angry these days. Sometimes I shorten it to wad, which seems even more vulgar for some reason.
I’m a beer and wine kind of guy. If I want to catch a buzz quicker, than I’d say red wine. If I had to pick a favorite based on taste, I’d go with a nice beer like a Blue Moon or a Sam Adams.
The ability to bore the robots to death with my endless, narcissistic blathering. I’m also an excellent swing dancer.
Good question. I want to continue churning out good songs and releasing singles, albums and E.P.s. I have lots of awesome spec-fic author friends. It makes me want to do more collaborative work. Perhaps a concept album tied to a novel, like what Rush just did with Kevin J. Anderson for CLOCKWORK ANGELS. Maybe some sort of trans-media thing. I don’t know. I’m excited to have the opportunity to work on any of it.
Book trailers are notoriously ineffective.
Not necessarily crappy (though I’ve seen my share of those, too) — but usually ineffective in the sense that, it’s not selling me on the book. Hell, most of the time I’m not even sitting down to watch it because I happened to hear you put two words –“book” and “trailer” — together, and I know what means.
You say “book trailer,” klaxons go off. Sirens. A randy goat-man comes up and kicks me in the junk drawer.
A couple-few weeks back on The Twitters, I asked what it was that made an effective book trailer. Not a quality one — because many are quality and yet offer no effect (again, that effect being, “makes me want to run out to the store and throw all my money at your book”). As it is that we so often define things by their negative, a handful of elements kept popping up:
First, that book trailers sometimes looked amateurish. Even if the book trailer had quality in one area (say, the filming), it had poor quality in another (acting). Or, it’s just a right awful shit-fest from start to finish — and a truly bad trailer will go a very long way toward not merely failing to sell the book but making sure I’ll never ever read that book, not even with someone else’s stolen eyes.
Second, if it was a live-action trailer, it was selling the movie of the book better than it was a book. It’s using a visual medium to sell a rather inert and bulky block of text.
Third, and related to the first, actors used to portray characters have now “become” those characters in the minds of the viewer. So, where before the book is a wide open orgy of imagination, suddenly the book trailer starts nailing elements to the walls and the floors and it limits your, erm, “creative orgy partners” to a few actors instead of the infinite carousel of faces and body-types whirling around inside your skull.
Fourth, other trailers were too simple. A few image stills, sliding text, creepy music — BOOM. BUY THIS BOOK. THE CREEPY MUSIC TELLS YOU TO. YOU’VE JUST BEEN INCEPTIONED, MOTHERFUCKER. Except, not really. As such, it does the opposite of the live-action trailers — it fails to engage any of the wonder of the book and ends up being so boring it’s like clumsy missionary sex with an old fishmonger.
Other smaller complaints popped up.
Some trailers are too long. Some too short. Some don’t match stylistically. Are they an advertisement? A short film? Are they just a tremendous sick-bucket of wasted time?
I asked around behind the scenes: “Should I do a book trailer for Blackbirds and Mockingbird?”
The answer was a robust shaking of the head. “Don’t waste the time. Don’t waste the money.”
And at first I was like, “Yeah.” I mean, we have minimal data whether book trailers work, right? And it’s not like authors make super-huge bank anyway, so — my initial thought was, “Eff that in the bee-hole.”
But it nagged at me.
I thought, “Okay, those things that are a problem for book trailers, you don’t have to do those things.” As we tell our toddler, B-Dub, “That’s yucky. Blech. Ptoo. Don’t eat that.”
No movie. No actor. No creepy music and straight text. And definitely don’t make it suck.
I figured there were a couple ways to go.
Book trailers that are funny have been good. Even amateurish book trailers are fine in this case — hell, the more amateurish they are, sometimes the funnier they become. And an idea popped inside my head and I thought, “Hey, I’m a funny guy.” (This is where you correct me and start pelting me with cat turds and I run off the stage crying into my bonnet.) Then I thought, “Oh, hey, people like to hear me curse, and the Miriam Black books are full of all manner of pickled vulgarity.” So, I pulled out all the naughty sayings I could find and strung ’em together like a series of very dirty, very angry Christmas ornaments, and the script sounded absurd, insane, and… kinda funny. My initial thought was to get a bunch of other authors and fans reading the script and I’d supercut that sumbitch together, but, y’know, no time.
Instead, I read it myself. You probably saw that trailer — it’s right here.
But I had a second trailer in mind. This trailer would be pure voiceover with… something in the background. Text, or images, or… I don’t even know. And the trailer wouldn’t sell the books so much as sell the character — she’s the angry, chain-smoking cornerstone of the series, and so it seems wisest to push her. And I’m a storyteller, so I thought, the smartest way to play it would be to tell a new story. A very small “flash fiction” story, written like a script, a first-person script, and use that to sell the character. So, I wrote a couple short pieces but my favorite was the one that was a bonafide story and was in fact not from Miriam’s POV — it was from a man who met Miriam and what that means for the man.
At this point I’d already had an offer on the table from my Alpha Clone, Dan O’Shea, to read something of mine and record it — anything at all. So I told him what I was thinking of for this trailer and I tossed him the audio file and in like, ten minutes, I had the first recording. He did a second for me and it was like — it was like gold. My wife listened to it and I watched her just fall into that voice (he’s got a sexy, grizzled, broken-glass-and-cigarettes voice, that guy). It blew me away. (It was then I wondered: could someone do an audio book trailer? Why couldn’t you? *files for later*)
I was also talking to a director at that point, Alan Stewart, about how to make this happen and the cost and all that, and initially we’d talked about getting an actor to play Miriam to do a thing where she read all the profanity or maybe did a speech about your death, playing off the core tenet of the series (touch you = find out your demise), but again, that means putting a specific Miriam into people’s heads. I didn’t want to do that. (Not without big bank from selling the film or TV rights, anyway.) So, I passed him the voiceover and Alan had this idea for kinetic text, and —
Well. I’ve posted the trailer down at the bottom of this post. Some of you may have seen it already because I was geeking about it hard yesterday, but before you view it, some questions for you.
What makes an effective book trailer? Or an ineffective one?
What are some book trailers you’ve liked?
Have you ever been convinced to buy a book via the trailer?
What are some particularly bad ones you’ve seen (if you care to share)?
And, feel free to let me know if this new trailer, below, does the trick. Be honest. Polite, but honest.
Second trailer for BLACKBIRDS and MOCKINGBIRD.
Second trailer for BLACKBIRDS and MOCKINGBIRD.
Featuring a brand new piece of Miriam Black flash fiction.
Written words by me.
Spoken by Dan O’Shea.
Directed and animated by Alan Stewart.
Alan did a bang-up job with this. I’m really, really blown away.
And Dan’s voice is just the gritty gravely throat-grab I was hoping for.
Thanks, all.
Follow Dan on Twitter (he’s got a pair of novels, PENANCE and MAMMON forthcoming from Exhibit A, and you’ll see him here next week with a brand new short story set in the world of that novel).
Follow Alan on Twitter. See his other work on Vimeo. His About.Me page.
(Be advised: I’m doing another Reddit AMA all day today, so swing by and ask me, well, anything.)
I’ll dispense with the self-promo bloggerel right now:
HOLY CRAP MOCKINGBIRD IS OUT
*jumps up and down, froths at the mouth, kicks computer monitor through the window, throws up on self*
Available for in print and e-book at:
Now, on with the post.
Staring down the barrel of a “next in the series” is some tricky shit, hoss. You can feel the Sword of Expectations dangling above your head, held there by a little length of underwear elastic, the blade bobbing and swaying and ever-ready to fall. People who read the first one have certain parameters in mind. You want to deliver on the promises made in the first book but you want to exceed them, punching and kicking the walls of your self-built box so you can deliver something bigger, stranger, different without being too different, the same without being too much the same.
This book is that, for me — it takes Miriam, throws her into a more active role regarding her dread psychic ability of touching people and seeing how and when they’re going to die. She’s been trying for the last year to live a normal life and, well, that’s like dressing up a wolverine in a chef’s coat and hoping he’ll cook you dinner instead of biting your face. But Miriam finds herself on a slippery slope that starts with a teacher suffering from powerful hypochondria and ends with a serial killer of young girls. Miriam must race against the clock and her own worst instincts to solve murders before they happen, lest these girls die. In the first book, it was all about Miriam deciding if she even wanted to tackle fate one last time to save the life of Louis. In the second book, she’s armed with one more rule. She knows how to divert the waters of fate, and that means throwing into the stream one big motherfucking rock.
But can she do that? Will she? Is that really who she is, and if so, what the hell does that mean?
With the second book you want to take the questions asked in the first and bring them forward. You’ve answered some of those questions but in fiction, answers just breed more questions. That’s what a second book must really become: the natural evolution of our Q&A regarding the character and her story.
So, in Mockingbird it’s a question of, who is Miriam Black? What does she want to become? Can she try to live a normal life? (Short answer: no.) Is she a drifter? A thief? A problem-solver? A killer?
Some people are just going to pick the book up, blissfully unaware that there exists a “book one.” And so there’s another tricksy part of the “next in the series” equation — you want to write for all the people who read the first one, but you also want to give enough in the book that it stands on its own. (Ideally, Mockingbird does. I hope?) You want to make it so reading the first book isn’t a chore, isn’t a necessity, but instead offers the reward of backtracking through a story. You find this in television, or in comics — jump in late, you get the pleasure of one day starting at the beginning to see how everything got to be the way it is.
But you also can’t write only for those people.
It’s a balance. It’s the “episodic” versus “serialized” thing — some books, shows, comics get that right.
Many do not.
It’s a tightrope walk.
The first book took me way too many years to write.
The sequel took me 30 days.
And it’s longer. Mockingbird is a bigger book — bigger in all ways. Page count. Character. Plot.
I attribute the swiftness of the writing to a couple things.
One of those things is THE BLUE METH.
Wait, no, I mean — one of those things is the outline. I’ve long said that I am a pantser by heart but a plotter by necessity and this book is proof of that. I scrawled an incomprehensible-to-anyone-but-me roadmap of the novel from Point A to Point Holy Fuck What’s Wrong With You, and man, having that map was so freeing. I didn’t have to follow it every day, but on most days I merely had to look at the map and say, “Here’s where I am, and here’s where I need to go,” and boom, the day of writing was easy-breezy. Given that I don’t write fiction on weekends, that means I was pretty easily churning out 3-4k words a day.
For me, outlines are like vitamins. Nobody wants to take ’em.
But when I do, I feel better. So, I do.
The other thing I attribute the ease of writing this book is THE BLUE M… er, sorry, is “knowing thy character.” Miriam Black, for better or for worse, is a character who has roosted in the eaves of my brain-barn. She’s up there. I can’t get her out, not with a shock-rod and a catch-pole. She’s sitting there, smoking and cursing at me and telling me all the inventive ways people suck the pipe.
My characters don’t always take up permanent real estate inside my mind. Some do. Others don’t. (Atlanta Burns has, for instance.) But she has. I always know which way Miriam will jump. The things she says — which are usually horrible — pour out without any effort. I know things about her and her life that may one day show up in books — or maybe they don’t.
But knowing her through and through makes her very, very easy to write.
Which is probably a bad thing, in retrospect.
I continue to submit that likability is not a meaningful trait in fiction. We must like spending time with the character, but that doesn’t mean we need to like them personally. I don’t need to get a beer with my president or my protagonist. That being said, you do want to advance a character somewhat, to evolve her story and her persona, and for Miriam that was a two-fold path.
First, I wanted to make her more understandable. More sympathetic by dint of her being wholly active and in control of her destiny (in a book where, quite literally, few can say the same thing). In this book Miriam isn’t just serving her own selfish whims — though those are, erm, still there — but she’s actively trying to change something she has no right or reason to change. She’s trying to help save girls who will one day be murdered. Girls she doesn’t much like. (Girls who remind Miriam of Miriam, truth be told.)
But I also wanted to take that sympathy and turn it on its ear. A “more active Miriam” is fucking scary. Because a determined Miriam is no longer a bear trap you step into, but rather, a bullet coming at your face.
So, on one hand, I’m softening Miriam.
On the other hand, I’m just softening the metal so she can be turned into a sharper blade.
This book features a serial killer. I’ll say no more about the plot details of that — because it gets a little twisty, as the identity of said killer is an OMG QUESTION MARK THE RIDDLER’S BEEN HERE OH NOES. What I will say is, the serial killer is deeply fucked. The killer does things that freaked me out. And I wrote it. It came from my own head.
And yet, I always know that the danger of a serial killer is that they’re woefully redundant and that the horrible things that they do are meaningless (and even cartoonish) if done poorly.
You have to remember that serial killers are people, too.
They come from somewhere. They have mothers and fathers and people they love.
They likely have some super-tangled brain-wires, but they’re still people. They have an agenda. They’re not just killing because they like pain and death and blah blah blah. That may be true in real life, but in fiction, you need more. You need meat on dem bones, and that was my goal here: to make the serial killer, well, not sympathetic, but to put in place a plan, a plot, a scary-ass WTF motive.
Twists, man. Another thing that can go dreadfully wrong in a story.
Mockingbird has a couple notable twists in it.
I’m always wary of doing that and yet, at the same time, I fucking love doing that. Twists are great. Fiction works best when you can subvert the expectations of the reader. When you can show them something they didn’t expect but on retrospect, should have. Right? That last part is key. You’ve set up the pieces and shown them what is a kind of narrative optical llusion that things seem like they’ll turn right but all along you’ve been showing them why the story needs to turn left. Tricks don’t work when they come flying out of nowhere (“Oh no! The serial killer is the monkey butler! Though we’ve never seen nor heard of a monkey butler before! I guess I just have to take it on good faith! Damn you, monkey butler!”).
It’s a lot of fun hijacking the reader’s brain.
Twists are a part of that, I think. Small twists and big twists.
First, I want to make you feel something. Emotion. I want you invested. I want you happy and sad, hurt and healed. I don’t mean in the larger scope — I don’t expect to be gut-punching you five years after you put the book down. But I do want, whilst caught in the throes of reading, for you to feel something. Anything at all. (Er, anything except the urge to throw the book in the toilet where you will then urinate upon it.)
Second, I want you to think. For me, these two books break my noodle in certain ways — soon as you start getting into lofty notions like fate and free will, I get excited. My gears start turning immediately. And I want your gears to turn, too. Mockingbird I think ups the ante a bit by incorporating bits about poetry and mythology into the story. More grist for the thought mill.
Third, I want to shock and surprise you. I don’t mean “shock” as in “gross you out” — though that’s one viable option. I like stories that surprise, that do things I’d never expect. I think a good story takes risks. It fucks with your head a little; it presents you with two doors and then goes out a window, instead. My favorite fiction has always surprised me. So I aim to do the same.
That’s the last thing I learned.
Something isn’t right with my noggin.
But that’s okay.
Because I’m hoping something isn’t right with your noggin, either, for reading the book and — hopefully! — liking it. I think writers are all a little goofy in the head, and maybe that’s a good thing.
Hopefully you’ll check out Mockingbird today (and if you’re looking for an incentive to check out Blackbirds, it’s under five bucks for your Kindlemaschine). If you do check out either book, I hope you dig it and that it’s a book worthy of you telling a friend or three or maybe writing a review. We authors live and die by your recommendations and your love of the books you read, so for that, thank you.
At the very least, I’d sure like it if you spread the word.
Because I loved writing this book and I hope people love reading it.
You can read the first 50+ pages of Mockingbird here, for free:
