Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

Apple-Obsessed Author Fella

Year: 2012 (page 48 of 49)

January 11, 2012 / 11 Comments

How Will You Die?

The main character in my upcoming novel BLACKBIRDS can see how and when you’re going to die just by touching you. A little skin-to-skin contact and — *snaps fingers* — she knows.

And now I want to know how you’re going to die.

I’ve started a Tumblr page.

This Is How You Die (how-you-die.tumblr.com).

Think of this as a community storytelling and art project in the vein of, say, Postsecret.

This is what I want from you:

I want to know how you’re going to die.

This can be fantasy. This can be parody. This can be a meditation on the fear or power of death.

Maybe it’s how you want to die. Or are afraid to die. Or how you’ve always expected to die.

You can send it to me at terribleminds at gmail.

If you want to send something physical in the mail, email me and I can get you an address.

Or you can submit direct to the Tumblr: http://how-you-die.tumblr.com/submit

It can be straight text (preferably under 100 words; shorter is almost universally better).

But I’d also like a mix of other media if possible:

Photos, music, videos, postcards. Anything that tells a story of how you expect to die.

(Again, Postsecret is a good example as any if you need it.)

If you’ve got a Tumblr blog, I’d appreciate you following along.

I’ll keep running this up to and ideally beyond the BLACKBIRDS release on April 24th, 2012 (with the mighty Angry Robot Books). Keep your eyes peeled to that blog as I may do story snippets and giveaways for the book that you can’t find here. But mostly I hope you’ll keep in touch for the stories and the art the community creates.

Which means, it’s time for the disclaimer:

Whatever you send to me, you’re giving to me. I can do whatever I want with it. I can manipulate images and text and edit accordingly. I don’t want to say I own it — but by sending it over, you give me permission to use it as I see fit. Obviously if the time comes you need me to take something down, I will. And feel free to submit anonymously — I will be posting them all anonymously anyway.

Please spread the word.

Please participate.

And thanks!

January 10, 2012 / 85 Comments

25 Things Writers Should Know About Finding Their Voice

One of the questions that’s been driving me of late is, “Just what the hell is an author’s voice and how does he find it and what does he do with it once he has it? Does it make smoothies? Can you shout a dragon out of the sky like in Skyrim? Would you eat it with a goat, would you eat it in a boat?” So, I figured I’d take to the Bloggery Zone and see if I couldn’t conjure 25 things I think about a writer and his voice.

Behold my insipid majesty on the subject:

1. One Word: “Style”

The traditional definition of a writer’s “voice” is, simply put, that writer’s chosen style. “John Q. Snarlmonkey writes with snark and panache, using tons of ellipses and lots of capital letters and made-up words. I love Snarlmonkey’s voice.” Voice equals style. That’s the easy answer.

2. Except, Okay, Fine, It’s So Much More Than That

Seriously, fuck easy answers. Easy answers are for babies and oxygen-starved kittens. A writer’s voice is an incomprehensible and largely indefinable combo-pack of — well, of just about anything. Style, dialogue, tropes, themes, genres, sub-genres, ideas, characters, stereotypes, archetypes, word choice, grammatical violations, and so forth. Anybody who tells you that David Foster Wallace’s voice does not include his obsession with footnotes should be shoved into a cannon and fired into the mouth of a great white shark. Voice is not one thing. Is is, in fact, the summation of a writer.

3. Revised Definition, Then

The writer’s voice is the thing that marks the work as a creation of that writer and that writer only. You read a thing and you say, “This could not have been written by anybody else.” That is voice.

4. That Makes It Yours, Which Makes It Awesome

If you believe that old chestnut, no original stories exist and every character is just a remix of another character who came before. Maybe true, maybe not. What the fuck do I know? I’m a writer, which is another way of saying, “Makes poor life decisions.” What I do know, however, is that a writer gets to own her voice. It’s hers and hers alone. It is her fingerprint, her retinal scan, her indelible and never-replicable identity. The craft of being an author is knowing all the elements that go into a good story. But the art, ahhh, the art is in the arrangement. And that arrangement embodies your voice. How can you not love that?

5. Sometimes Voice Defies Penmonkey Law

I’m just going to say this: sometimes a writer’s voice breaks The Rules, capital T, capital R. A writer makes certain stylistic choices and those choices may be objectively incorrect. That may — key word: may — be one of the strands of memetic material that runs through the DNA of an author’s voice.

6. Don’t Mistake Bad Writing For Good Voice

That being said, bad writing is bad writing. Any stylistic hangnails should be minor and made with full awareness of why they need to exist: don’t write like a shit-heel and call it part of your writer’s voice. Crap writing is indefensible. Try to pull that one over on a seasoned editor and they will stab you in the gonads with a red pen. And you will have deserved it.

7. You Can’t Force It

Forcing your voice is a futile endeavor. Like trying to hammer a cat through a mousehole (which is totally not some weird new sex move, by the way — UNLESS IT IS). Voice is a component of practice and maturity. Same way you can’t concentrate really hard to make puberty come earlier (“Grow, pubes, grow!”), you cannot artificially and prematurely discover your voice. Writers must cultivate patience (or perhaps patience’s rude and grumpy cousin, stubbornness). You’ll get there. Your voice will come.

8. “It’s A Trick. Get An Axe.”

You can try to trick your voice into appearing early, try to overwrite or use purple prose or engage in stylistic flourishes that plum don’t belong. Don’t bother. It’s just peeing with someone else’s dick — it’ll feel weird and alien, like some critical component does not belong.

9. We First Must Mimic

When you first start writing, you write like those writers you read most frequently. Maybe you mean to. Maybe it’s an unconscious thing. But don’t fight it. It’s all part of the process.

10. Other Authors Are Spun Into Our DNA

Eventually we stop miming the style of others, but along the way we still break off parts of other authors and graft them to our own styles. Some parts must be kept. No harm in that — we shouldn’t be upset with our influences. Why turn away from those who got us here? Those whose voices mattered most? As long as their voice does not take over our own, we’re good. It’s okay if we are in part the culmination of other voices. Like I said before: the art is in the arrangement.

11. This Shit Takes A Long Time

You don’t find your voice overnight. It doesn’t just appear like the fucking Tooth Fairy. I don’t know that it’s a function of time or a function of how much you write or some mutant hybrid of each, but it’s a slow discovery. You’ll catch glimpses of it once in a while, and you’ll cultivate it without even meaning to — and then, one day, it’s like, boom. Your balls drop and there it is: your voice. Or, if you’re a girl, your… vagina blooms? I don’t know what happens with your lady-parts, having none myself. I should get a set, just to see.

12. Evolution And Mutation

Your writer’s voice, like your real voice, changes. One day you’re all fresh-and-squeaky, and then calendar pages whip off the wall and suddenly your voice is scratchy and dry like you’ve been gargling watch parts and cigarette butts for the last ten years. Read any given author over a period of time and you see this — you can witness the Auteur Theory in action as their voice squirms and shifts.

13. Beware The Cardboardization Of Your Work

Some will try to beat your voice back, like they’re thwacking a tiger with an umbrella in order to urge him back into the bush. (Also not a weird new sex move.) Again, if you’re confusing bad writing with good voice, okay, fine, let others — be they agents or editors or readers — judge your voice and find it wanting. But also beware what happens when they want to milk your words of what makes them special in order to make something more marketable. Your voice is one of the strongest and most complicated weapons in your arsenal. Do not give it up without a fight. Poll your intestinal flora. Check your gut. You’ll know.

14. Not Just How You Write, But Who You Are

We assume voice to be a thing built of technical components. That’s it, but only part of it. Your voice is also who you are. How you bleed and spit and scream on the page. You are your voice. Your voice is you.

15. The Sexy Tango Of Honesty and Authenticity

Be honest. Be forthright. Be authentic. You believe things. You know things. You question things. All this crazy shit needs to spill out of your head and end up on the page and in that — in the choices you make, choices that come from questions only you could’ve ever asked — your voice will bloom. Like a vagina. A blooming, fragrant vagina. I might be confusing “vaginas” with “flowers” again.

16. What You Add Versus What You Subtract

It’s easy to suggest that a writer’s voice is what’s there when you write unbidden, unrestrained by the shackles of grammar or good taste or, y’know, sobriety. But your voice is not only a summation of those things you let out the door — it’s also a calculation configuring those doors you keep closed. It’s about subtracting as well as adding — pruning as well as cultivating. Voice can be a matter of writing small just as easily as it can measure the boldness of your stroke. HA HA HA STROKE MASTURBATION um, nothing.

17. Look To Your Body Of Work, See The Voice Emerge

Voice is not just the result of a single sentence or paragraph or page. It’s not even the sum total of a whole story. It’s all your work laid out across the table like the bones and fossils of an unidentified carcass.

18. Listen To Your Voice — No, I Mean Your Actual Voice

There lurks an intimate connection between the written word and the spoken word. We pretend it’s not true, as if the written word is somehow higher up in the food chain, somehow more exalted, but that’s a big brass bucket brimming with bullshit. Language exists initially to communicate from person to person — it is born of speech and sound. Words aren’t just symbols: they’re really how we say things. And so it is that your actual voice matters in this regard. Listen to what you say and how you say things: your authorial voice lurks in this. You should endeavor to write at least in part how you speak. By doing that, you capture the essence of how you say things. Related: always read your work out loud.

19. The Banshee’s Scream

Voice matters. Voice is important. But at the end of the day, if it takes your story and drowns it in a hot stockpot of scalding soup, then you’ve done yourself a disservice. In the Great Cosmic Chain Of Telling Bad-Ass Motherfucking Stories, voice is subservient to story, not vice versa. Voice helps you tell the story at the same time story helps you find your voice. But no matter what, story is the pinnacle, the zenith, the apogee, and other words that mean the “tippy-top” of the narrative mountain.

20. Regular Like A Morning Constitutional

Consistency in voice matters. It should day to day, page after page, hold together. The only way this fails is if you’re uncertain. If you lose your shit. If you freak the fuck out.

21. Don’t Panic

Breathe easy. Loosen your mind sphincter. Don’t panic. It’s like with sex — think too much and too hard about it, you’ll short circuit a synapse and put the kibosh on the mood. Serenity serves the writer’s voice.

22. Where Writer’s Block Is Born, Screaming And Keening

I wonder if writer’s block is actually a thing born of not yet knowing your voice. If we’re here to assume that part of a writer’s voice is knowing what to say and how to say it, then not being sure of — or comfortable with — one’s voice would lead to the fear that spawns the poorly-named writer’s block. It seems sensible. Then again, so did running through that Arby’s naked last night, sauced to the gills on ecstasy and wine coolers. Maybe I’m not the best guy to listen to on what’s sensible.

23. Eventually You Stop Being Afraid Of Yourself

Writers are at the outset a scared species. It’s not our fault: we’re told that it’s a bad idea and unless we want to prepare for a life lived inside a palatial piano crate we should just buckle down and become accountants. And so I think there’s a lot of bad psychic voodoo that clogs the works, and until we start to clear that out, it’s really hard to find out who we are on the page and what our voice looks and sounds like. Finding your voice is then synonymous with losing the fear of not just writing but of being a writer.

24. The Confidence Game

Confidence is key. I’ll say no more than that: confidence is key.

25. Don’t Write Like Anybody Else

At the end of the day, take the opportunity to write like you want to write. Actually, it’s weirder and deeper than that — what I really mean is, write like you need to write. Your voice might be a component of confidence, but it also might be an accumulation of obsessions and foibles and fears and frailties and all the crazy moon-unit shit that makes us who we are. I’m going to quote from another terribleminds commenter, found last week at “25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing (Right Fucking Now)” — Amy Severson said: “When I finally realized that I was never going to write like the the authors I loved and just started writing how (and what) I wanted to, it was like someone blew out the little candle I was huddled under and flipped the switch on a dozen spotlights.” I think that says it all about a writer’s voice, don’t you?

* * *

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January 9, 2012 / 23 Comments

This Butternut Squash Soup Will Kick You In Your Butternuts

Recipe time.

Take one butternut squash.

They’re ugly, I know. They look like the decapitated — and also featureless — head of Charlie Brown’s dog, Snoopy. Did I need to say that first part? “Charlie Brown’s dog?” You already know who Snoopy is, don’t you? You presumably haven’t been living under a lichen-encrusted rock somewhere. Have you?

Oh, fair warning: I’ve been drinking.

Talisker, if you care to know. As everybody calls it, “the “salted caramel of Scotches.”

(Nobody calls it that.)

Where were we?

Ah. Right.

Take one butternut squash.

Peel it. I used a peeler but you might want to use a pearl-handled straight razor or some other serial killer implement. Peeling a butternut squash is a serious dick-pain because the skin is tough and the curves are awkward — it’s like you’re trying to make love to some kind of goblin creature. (It’s nothing like that. Settle down.) Just peel the goddamn squash, already.

Chop it in half. Bisect Snoopy’s head.

Scoop out the Snoopy brains seeds and assorted tangled tentacle-bits.

Do what you like with those. Roast the seeds. Use the mangled innards as a vegetarian merkin.

Then —

Take your two halves of the squash-flesh (“Squashflesh” was my nickname in Sunday School), and then chop them into cubes that are roughly equivalent to one another. Perfection has little value here. Just get close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades and call it a day.

Oh, right, the oven.

Set your Food Furnace to a toasty 375 degrees.

You’ve chopped the squash, now it’s time to do the same to a medium-sized onion. Sweet onion if you can manage. You want to avoid any of the unpleasant varietals of onion. No butt onions, doom onions, Hitler onions, mucus onions — all of those are no-no onions. Leave those at the store where they belong. Only sweet onions may apply. Which is coincidentally what the hand-painted sign above my bed says! If you know what I mean! Right? Right? Yeah? Yeah!

*funky sex-jazz ensues*

The onion doesn’t need a lot of delicate attention. Just — you know, fucking chop that sonofabitch.

Both onion and squash will — nay, must! — go into a roasting pan.

I line mine with the magical substance known as “non-stick foil,” which is like a gift sent by the gods. Quite literally, in fact. Zeus staple-gunned a box of this stuff to the back of a dead mermaid and left it at my door. That Zeus! Him and all his silly back-slappers. He should get a sitcom, that guy. I propose we call it “That Zeus!” — it is, in fact, critical that the exclamation point remain intact so that in the show’s logo we may instead draw the exclamation point as a jagged lightning bolt. It’s how Zeus would want it.

Where was I?

Oh, right.

Take one butternut squash.

Wait, we’ve already done that part?

Right! Roasting pan. Throw your vegges into a roasting pan, splash with a liberal dollop of olive oil, shake it around and rub it down and get all the vegetables properly lubed, as if they are about to be shoved into a very tight orifice (they are not, however, so please re-affix your pants to your undertorso).

On top of the now-glistening veggies will go:

A sprinkling of salt.

A dash of cayenne pepper.

A dash of cracked black pepper.

A naughty coating of herbes de provence, which is an herb blend of — I don’t know, a bunch of herbs. Including some herb named “savory,” which I’m pretty sure people just made up.

Into the oven! One hour. Or till it just starts to caramelize. You don’t want it to go too far into that process — just enough to bring the sugary goodness out. Stand vigil.

When they’re done, get out a stock pot. Pop into the stockpot some oil, some chopped carrots, some chopped celery. I did two of each — two ribs of celery, two… what’s a unit that measures carrots? If celery gets “ribs,” what do carrots get? Noses, I guess. I mean, that’s what you use for snowmen. But they also look phallic? Just the same, “two dicks of carrot” just sounds gross.

So, two ribs of celery, two noses of carrot.

Oh! And some fresh chopped garlic.

Start to cook that. Soften it up a little bit.

Dump your oven-roasted squash-and-onion blend into the pot.

Toss in:

Two cups of chicken broth.

Two tablespoons of apple cider (edited to add: vinegar).

Set that all to simmer, cook for… you know, not long? I don’t care. Five, ten minutes. Don’t get nuts with it. Just enough time to have a bottle of wine, read a magazine, kill a dude.

Time to get out your Blender-of-Choice.

Mine is, as of very recently, a Vitamix 5200. Refurb. We’d resisted the Vitamix for a long time because, well, they’re not cheap. It’s hard to justify that kind of money for a fucking blender. Thing is, I’ve hated all the blenders I’ve owned outside my immersion stick, and also we have a baby and I wanted to make baby food and blah blah blah. Long story beheaded and delimbed and made short: we bought a Vitamix.

Worth it.

Let me say that again in italics:

Worth it.

Let me say that again in all caps:

WORTH IT.

That crazy bastard will blend up anything.

Sure, it’s so loud it sounds like someone is mowing the lawn inside my brain, but hey, fuck it. It blends. It blends anything. It blends fast. Efficiently. I could probably use it to split the atom if I needed to. And because it’s so fast and so insane, you can use it to make hot soup or freeze ice cream or, I dunno, grind the bones of your foes into flour for a little recipe I call “Enemy Bread.”

Not “Enema Bread.”

That’s… different.

Point is: choose your blender, and blend the soup.

Until it’s smooth and creamy. Like my supple thighs.

Now, back into the stockpot. Simmer. Pour in: 1/2 cup of heavy cream, or enough heavy cream so that your taste-buds do a happy dance, but not so much heavy cream that your arteries harden into little brittle sesame sticks. The soup at this point should be velvety and sweet and delicious.

I did two more things to the soup (calm down, my pants were on), but you don’t need to.

First, I cooked up some country ground sausage and put it into play. I like to chew my soup. If my soup’s too liquidy, I feel like an old person — I figure I’ve got plenty of years where I’ll be drinking my food through a bendy straw, so why start now?

Second, I “melted” (not really melted) some leeks. I did this in duck-fat and red wine vinegar. Chop your leeks into little o-rings, wash the dirt and grime out of there, put into a pan and sweat the leaks in the duck fat and a splash of vinegar for 8-10 minutes until tender.

I plopped the leeks right on top of the soup in the middle.

Floating there. A little leeky island.

Anyway. There you you go. Butternut squash soup. With sausage and melted leeks.

Your mouth can thank me later.

…that sounds like I’m asking for oral favors, but that’s not at all what I mean. I mean your lips can form the words “thank you” and then your vocal chords can express your gratitude.

And then you can buy me a pony.

That Zeus!

January 6, 2012 / 115 Comments

Flash Fiction Challenge: Song Shuffle Stories

Some administrative stuff — first, don’t hesitate to run your eyeballs over last week’s challenge, “Revenge Of The The Sub-Genre Mash-Up.” Some very cool and bizarre-o stories there that deserve your unswerving gaze. Second, regarding Blackbloom: Blackbloom is not dead, but I am putting it on hold in order to take a look at some new ways of handling it. Not only were the last two challenges a bit wan in terms of content but my time as of late is busy enough where it’s difficult for me to properly give the challenge the time it deserves. Oh, and I worry that it took the focus off the flash fiction challenges too much by alternating week to week? I don’t know. More on that soon-ish, I hope.

This week’s challenge is based off of music.

Your music, actually.

Go to Your Favorite Music Player. Dig out your digital music collection.

Maybe this is iTunes or Spotify, or use Pandora if you’d rather go that way.

Hit SHUFFLE, then “Play.”

Meaning, let a random song come bubbling up out of nothing.

The title to this song is the title to your story.

Use the song for inspiration, too, if you feel so inclined.

Let’s tighten up the word count a little, too —

You only have 500 words this time.

Once again, the deadline is a week: noon EST on Friday (DUN DUN DUN) the 13th. Any genre will do. Post at your blog or whatever Internet space you’ve carved out, and link here so we can all come gaze at your fictional offerings on the terribleminds altar. Some folks ask what they do if they don’t have a blog? You can post direct to comments here, but that often looks shitty in terms of formatting. You can try Google+ or Tumblr. Or, get an easy Blogspot or WordPress blog on a lark.

Crank some tunes. Splatter some ink.

See you on the other side.

January 5, 2012 / 20 Comments

Stephen Blackmoore: “Terror And The Debut Author”

Today, a guest post from the mighty Stephen Motherfucking Blackmoore, debut author extraordinaire. He’s got this book out now, CITY OF THE LOST. I read this book and blurbed it, saying, “Bruja, demons, bloodsuckers, the living dead and bucketloads of bloody magic – you’ll find all of those in CITY OF THE LOST, but the real magic is how Blackmoore deftly breathes secret supernatural life into the City of Angels. This is an auspicious debut that’s at turns violent, hilarious, and tragic. Can’t wait make a return trip to Blackmoore’s voodoo version of L.A.” — I genuinely truly loved this book. What’s doubly fucked up is how Blackmoore only ups the ante with the coming sequel, DEAD THINGS, a book so good I want to read it twice. And I don’t read many books twice. So, here is the author resplendent in his glory — give him your ear, and if you trust me to steer you straight, give him your money, too.

As of the time of this posting my first novel, CITY OF THE LOST, a noir urban fantasy, will have been out for two days.

I’m writing this on Monday, the day before it officially comes out and I have no idea what the sales will look like, if people will pan it, or even if they’ll buy it. It’s gotten some good press. Kirkus liked it. Romantic Times, surprisingly, reviewed it, and unsurprisingly, hated it. It was on the January recommended reading list for L.A. Magazine. Got some good stuff over on Rex Robot and My Bookish Ways and I hear The Qwillery enjoyed it.

One guy on Goodreads couldn’t get past all the swearing, but a lot of other people seemed to dig it. There are, as yet, no Amazon reviews.

Tomorrow night, Friday, January 6th, I will be having my book launch at Mysterious Galaxy, my first book signing ever, in Redondo Beach, California and on Saturday afternoon, January 7th, at 2:00 I’m signing at their store in San Diego. If all goes as planned I’ll be doing the same in San Francisco sometime in February at Borderlands Books.

I have never been in the public eye as much as I am right now. It may not be much, and it might not even be a blip on the radar, but it’s a hell of a lot more than I’ve been in the past and though I keep expecting to be terrified, keep thinking I should be terrified, I’m not.

Have you ever gone skydiving? I recommend it. Provided everything goes right, and even if it goes wrong, I suppose, it’s one of the most awe-inspiring things a person can experience.

I went on a tandem jump years ago. Which means I was strapped to a guy who was going to do most of the work of not leaving a crater or a wide, red smear when we hit the ground. That or static line is really the only way you’re going to go out your first time without a lot of prep and training. And even then there will be someone holding onto you most of the way down.

The entire time I kept expecting to freak out. Driving out there, sitting through the “Don’t Panic, You’re Probably Not Going To Die,” training video and pep talk, signing the waivers, getting into the plane. Every step of the way I kept thinking, “I’m going to lose my shit any second now.” But I didn’t.

At 12,000 feet up in the air, they opened the door.

From that high up, from that wide a field of view, the world doesn’t look right. All sense of space is, oddly, gone. You’re too high up to get vertigo. You don’t have those visual frames of reference that tell you just how far up you really are. 12,000 feet is just a number.

I thought, “This is the coolest shit ever.”

And I jumped.

Free fall is a trip. You don’t really need to breathe so much as just leave your mouth open. The air will shove itself into your lungs whether you like it or not. You’re in the throes of gravity. It is surprisingly loud.

This experience with the book is a lot like that jump. Only without being strapped to someone who’s going to keep me from cratering when I hit the ground. This time it’s all me.

At no point during that jump was I afraid and I think I’ve finally figured out why.

It was about jumping out of an airplane. It was never about reaching the ground safely.

I hear a lot of things from a lot of people about what I should do and what I have to do to make this book “successful.” I’m sure they’re all right. Some of those are things I’ll do. Some of them aren’t.

But it’s not about being successful. It’s not about reaching the ground safely.

It’s all about jumping.

January 4, 2012 / 49 Comments

Your Big Reads Of 2012

Gaze forward with me — I want to start building my TBR pile for the coming year, and I’m going to squeeze your brains dry of wisdom to accomplish that feat.

Human Google, activate!

What books are coming out in 2012?

What are you looking forward to? And why?

Hey, if you’re a writer and you happen to have a book dropping in 2012, don’t hesitate to let us know.

If pre-order links are available, drop those in comments, too.

Books. 2012. Go.

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