Year: 2013 (page 38 of 66)

Sometimes you get a book that has some buzz with it, a book you really want to tear into soon as you get a chance — for me, this is one of them, because it sounds right in my narrative sweet spot. Here’s author John Mantooth talking about his newest, The Year Of The Storm:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

I’m a southern boy, born in Georgia, raised in Alabama.  I’m a dad, a husband, a teacher, and a writer.  In past lives I coached basketball, drove a school bus, played bass in a rock and roll band, and loafed with such effortless grace some observers called it sublime (others called it something else).

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

Nine months after Danny’s mother and sister disappear in the woods behind his house, a tortured Vietnam vet shows up at his door claiming to know their whereabouts.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

I think it comes from wanting to write a story that actually explains where missing people go.  I mean, I think I know where they go.  Logic tells us that a missing person has moved on with their life somewhere else, been abducted, or they’ve been murdered.  Illogically, I’ve always wanted there to be another option.  I wanted there to be a “slip” that people sometimes could stumble upon, and when they did, it would take them somewhere else, some “other” world.  So, I suppose that’s why I wrote the story.  That, and I had an old painting that one of my grandmother’s sisters had done years ago that captured my imagination.  It was of a little cabin at dusk, sitting on the outskirts of what appeared to be a swamp.  That painting influenced the book probably more than anything else.

HOW IS THIS A STORY ONLY YOU COULD’VE WRITTEN?

Oh that’s a tough one.  I suppose I’d say it’s southern, it’s gritty, and it has a speculative element.  It also has a sort of hopefulness in the face of the hard (and inevitable) knowledge that the world can be a cruel and unforgiving place.  I don’t necessarily set out to get that in my stories, and I hesitate to call it a theme, but it’s difficult to read any of my work without getting at least a whiff of it.  I like to think of it as a sort of tough grace.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING THE YEAR OF THE STORM?

The ending.  I must have rewritten it a dozen times, and when I say the ending, I mean the last fourth of the book.  Endings are extremely difficult for me.  It was important that the ending didn’t just resolve the action of the story, but also resolved or at least attempted to resolve the over arching emotional concerns of the novel.  This was especially challenging because this novel called for a touch of ambiguity to tie it all together.  But yeah, the ending kicked my ass.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING THE YEAR OF THE STORM?

I learned that I can get it right.  I think in the past when a novel got hard, I just quit and moved on to something else.  I learned that this is a terrible mistake because whatever you move on to is going to be just as hard in time.  You have to work through the difficulties.  Take a small break if necessary, but don’t abandon it.  Others probably have different opinions on this, but for me, I’ve got to push through and make it the story I envisioned.  Starting another story isn’t a solution.  It’s a delaying tactic.  Every story is hard in its own way.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT THE YEAR OF THE STORM?

I love the narrative voice.  It’s told by an adult looking back on his childhood.  I think it’s a voice I do particularly well.  It seems natural to me, easy to write.  I also love the setting.  It’s no particular place except rural Alabama, but when I reread sections, I feel like I got it right, if not in specifics, at least in tone.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

Write it faster.  The book took me three years.  Part of that was a result of teaching full time, having small kids, and getting my master’s in library science.  My kids are older now.  The master’s is done.  The next one is going to be faster.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

This takes place near the opening of the novel.  Danny, the narrator, wonders if the strange man in his front yard might somehow be related to the legends he’d grown up hearing.

“I’d been hearing the stories about these woods since I was a kid. Most of them were the generic campfire variety, the same urban legends reshuffled and personalized for different times, different settings, but one story was more than that. One story had the ring of authenticity. It was unique to these woods, and unlike the tales of hook hands and insane asylum escapees, it never seemed to fade away. Two girls, Tina and Rachel, lost in the woods behind our house. I grew up knowing their names just like I knew anything else. They were a part of the landscape, a part of the place where I lived. It didn’t matter if I’d never seen them or heard them speak or even gotten the whole story straight about their disappearances. I felt their presences intimately, and their loss settled on the woods like a heavy fog. When I walked through the darkest parts behind my house near dusk, sometimes I thought I saw them in the gloom, floating, transparent, made from spiders’ webs and dying streaks of light mingled with shadow. Their sad visages slithering round tree trunks and drifting past blooming moonvines. I shuddered, thinking that the man responsible for these disappearances might be standing in my front yard.”

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

Working on the next novel.  I’m not going to say what it’s about because I’m superstitious like that and don’t want to jinx it.

Thanks for the interview, Chuck!

John Mantooth: Website / @busfulloflosers

The Year Of The Storm: Amazon / B&N

Comes a time in every writer’s life that he’s gotta look at the work in front of him and he’s got to say, “This thing is thick with peacocks. Pretty, pretty peacocks.”

Then he’s gottta take a meat cleaver and start cutting up those pretty, pretty peacocks*.

Because those peacocks, pretty as they are, stand out. They’ve got them ostentatious tails. Those little tickly tiaras of alien antenna-feathers. They’re a color blue you don’t see anywhere except blue raspberry popsicles. They preen. They preen all the goddamn time. And they strut around like they own the place. They warble like motherfuckers. And, if we’re being honest, they shit up everything. They’re just shitting machines, those peacocks.

Of course, all this is me being metaphorical.

What I’m saying is, you write a story, you’re eventually going to come across some darlings.

Darlings are those elements of your story that fulfill two qualifications: first, you love them dearly, and second, your love isn’t enough to justify their existence. Some people misconstrue the darling. They say, “If you love it, kill it,” which is fucked up advice from any angle (“I LOVE YOU, HONEY, BUT SOME WRITER ONLINE SAID I HAVE TO MURDER YOU NOW”). Don’t destroy the parts of your work you love just because you love them.

No, we must destroy those things that we love that also unfortunately don’t belong.

Like, say, an ugly hat everyone tells you will get you beat up.

And you’re like, “But it’s fantastic. It has a propeller. And it houses squirrels.”

And everyone’s like, “But squirrels are pests.”

But you don’t listen and you walk outside the house and then a bunch of squirrel-hating squirrelophobes come out of the shrubs and beat you half to death with mailbox posts. And then your friends are like “We told you so. We told you about that hat.”

Point is, your love is not enough to save these darlings.

They are too precious to live.

Now, I like to dispense great heaps and mounds of dubious writing advice here in the vaunted halls of Terribleminds University, and the majority of that advice comes from my own (mis)adventures with the written word, and this one is no different. And so I present to you:

A TRUE TALE OF DARLING-KILLING

So, as you may have heard (since I was pretty noisy about it, sorry):

THE BLUE BLAZES is now out.

This book took a lot of work to bring out of my head. I swung for the fences on this one. It was at the time the longest thing I’d ever written, topping out at 100,000 words. It’s got an immeasurable fuck-sack of world-building in there — I tried not to borrow too much from previous sources and instead conjured my own version of what Hell would look like under the streets and tunnels of New York City (and, in some ways, above it, too). Between the gangs, the crime families, the Sandhog union, the goblins, the snakefaces, the daemon families —

Well, there’s a lot of stuff I threw at the wall.

And by golly, I loved it all.

I mean, sometimes I hated it, as is a writer’s wont. You careen drunkenly between obsessive love and infernal hate for your work on a daily — shit, even hourly — basis. But for the most part what I was throwing out was stuff I liked and was ready to defend by its end.

Case in point, the first:

The open and close of the book.

The first and last chapters of the book you (er, hopefully) have in your hands is not the first and last chapters as I wrote them initially. When I wrote them I wanted to introduce Mookie as a kind of monster figure, a human minotaur at the heart of his own labyrinth, right? An unexpected protagonist. So, I had this drunk guy (an outsider, really) who’d been kicked out of his house by his wife stumble into Mookie’s not-actually-open bar looking for a drink. And Mookie basically scares the shit out of him and kicks his ass a little and is about to throw him out — but there’s this moment where the two sad-sacks recognize each other’s sad-sackedness and while they don’t exactly commiserate, Mookie and he share a drink.

Then he kicks him out and the scene with Mookie’s daughter ensues.

Cut to the end where Mookie comes back to the bar and he’s alone — but he turns on the OPEN sign and who wanders in at midnight but that same guy, and we see how he ended up, and then there’s the hint of some commiseration. Two sad bastards. Drinking.

I liked it. It did things I dug. It bookended the piece.

And it didn’t work.

It took up too much time. It delayed the story. It was perpendicular to the point of the tale — while it leaned on some of the themes, thematic embrace is by no means enough for me. It has to do more to survive. Every inch of the work has to be willing to work double-duty lest it get:

A HOWITZER TO THE FACE.

It was easy enough to get rid of. He was a peripheral character. He had two chapters.

His death was clean and elegant. Extracting the body: effortless.

And then came Cassie Morgan.

Cassie was a full-fledged supporting character — a top-tier one, at that. She was daughter to Sandhog Davey Morgan, this young girl trying to prove herself among the Sandhogs but in doing so accidentally falls in with Mookie and his grim mission.  I had her in there as a surrogate daughter to Mookie — a foil to Nora, the real daughter, the daughter trying to hurt him.

She ended up in like, the whole goddamn book. She was everywhere. Instrumental in parts. Wound through the plot, braided in with other characters. And yet…

She had very little agency. She felt swept along.

Her journey felt incomplete.

And I was like, “Okay, that’s fine, I’ll just… fix it.” And as I tried to fix it — untangling the snarled threads, really — I just ended up knotting things up worse. Until at the end I was like a cat who had strangled itself half-to-death with its own ball of yarn. It was ugly business.

I realized that as a character, she felt redundant. I already had a daughter figure: Mookie’s actual daughter, Nora. Nora needed more page-time. Nora needed a complete arc that didn’t duplicate beats found in Cassie’s tale. Cassie felt peripheral. A hanger-on; a poser in the tale.

BUT I LIKED CASSIE. She was fun! Plucky! Tough! And… and…

And finally I said to my agent, “I think I need to let Cassie go.”

And she had the class not to say, “I knew this all along but you needed to figure this out on your own because otherwise you just would’ve made frowny-faces.”

She instead agreed politely.

And thus began the unsnarling, the untangling. I had to cut free the knots that formed from the enmeshing of Cassie into the plot. This is harder than you think. It’s not so simple as just summoning her name through the Find Text spell and quietly excising her from the tapestry — she had cause and effect. She was wedded to events, objects, timelines. Every snip saw another piece threaten to unravel — and I had to retie all the threads that connected to her originally.

It was messy.

I hated it.

I did it anyway.

And the book felt tighter. More meaningful. It put more emphasis on Nora. It gave the story more room, more pep, didn’t feel like it was tripping on its own characters.

It was an essential darling to murder.

A critical peacock to behead and put on display for all the other pretty, pretty peacocks.

So, my advice to you is the same that I have to take — this is the medicine, folks:

Kill your darlings. Two to the chest. One to the head. Shed your tears but never look back.

* —> P.S. we used to have a peacock growing up and it was murdered by a raccoon which is very sad so I don’t actually condone ACTUAL PEACOCK MURDER.

HOLY CRAP IT’S OUT SOUND THE ALARM BURN ALL THE PANTS DRINK ALL THE LIQUOR DO CLUMSY PIROUETTES IN A PRETTY MEADOW AHHHHHH

Ahem.

As noted elsewhere today, The Blue Blazes is now out in the world.

It’s on shelves. Lurking there. Waiting for your eager touch.

And I’m lurking here, waiting to capture that eager touch on film.

More to the point, it’s time for a contest, baby!

Here’s how this works (the short version):

I want you to take a photograph of you with your copy of The Blue Blazes.

I will send a big tower of books to the person with my favorite photo.

Here’s how this works (the long version):

Go get The Blue Blazes. Physical copy probably makes a prettier photo, but you can do a digital copy on the e-reader of your choice (long as I can tell what book it is). Get your picture taken with the book. Send me that picture to terribleminds at gmail dot com.

You can obviously just do a picture of you standing there with the book, looking morose, and hey, maybe you won’t have much competition and you’ll sail into the sunset as the winner by default. But note that with this photo you are trying to appease my bizarre sensibilities. I am drunk and untrustworthy and you are trying to amuse and/or impress me in some capacity. I AM THE EMPEROR IN THE ARENA AND I WILL GIVE YOU A THUMBS UP OR A THUMBS DOWN. Thumbs up gets the prize. Thumbs down gets eaten by a flock of deranged cassowaries.

So: a funny picture! A dramatic picture! Sexy! Disturbing! Something! Anything! Surprise me!

The winner — who must, I am afraid, live in the United States because shipping on this collection is going to be an unruly bear — will get a package of books by yours truly that includes:

Blackbirds (UK trade paperback)

Mockingbird (UK trade paperback)

Under the Empyrean Sky: Heartland #1 (ARC paperback)

Unclean Spirits: Gods & Monsters #1 (trade paperback)

Double Dead (trade paperback)

Dinocalypse Now: Book #1 (trade paperback)

Beyond Dinocalypse: Book #2 (hardcover)

Bait Dog (hardcover Kickstarter edition)

Don’t Read This Book (paperback; anthology I edited)

Fireside Issue #1 (features my Atlanta Burns short, “Emerald Lakes”)

Human Tales (features my short, “The Toll”)

I will, of course, devalue all of these with my signature if you so desire.

That right there is 11 books.

And one of those books is the not-yet-released Under the Empyrean Sky, my cornpunk YA which John Hornor Jacobs calls a mash-up of Star Wars and Grapes of Wrath.

So: go take a picture of you with The Blue Blazes.

Send me the photographic evidence (either send me the file or a link to it).

Send it to terribleminds at gmail dot com.

I will share my favorites on this very blog.

I will choose one among my favorites to get the big-ass book stack above.

You have one week to get me that photo!

Ends next Tuesday, June 4th, at noon EST.

EDIT: International participants are allowed and NOW (as of 6/4) do not have to pay shipping! You can thank the magnanimous Angry Robot overlords (Lee Harris in specific) for this — and, so I’m also extending the contest by another 12 hours to accommodate any international folks who want in. So, that means you have until 11:59PM tonight to get your photos to me.

The Blue Blazes is now available!

Let’s just dispense with your procurement options:

Amazon

Amazon UK

B&N

Indiebound

The Story

Mookie Pearl is a Blazehead — a user of the mystical drug known as Cerulean, a drug whose high tears away the veil of normalcy and reveals all the horrors and pleasures of the Underworld and its ilk. And Mookie knows a thing or two about the Underworld: he’s a knee-breaking thug who works for the Organization, a criminal coalition of gangs and crime families who control all of New York City’s illicit activities. Mookie protects the criminal underworld’s Cerulean trade from the threats of the mythic and monstrous Underworld beneath their feet — from gobbos, snakefaces, trogbodies, rogue molemen, and human cultists driven mad by the labyrinth.

Mookie’s already rough life gets a whole lot rougher when his own teenage daughter Nora (AKA “Persephone”) takes a run at him and his business, trying to peel away part of the Blue trade for herself — in the process, helping to reveal a far more sinister plot that pits the denizens of the Great Below against the citizens of New York City.

Featuring: Family drama, action, fantasy, profanity, tender emotion, burgeoning love, Sandhog monster-hunters (Local 147 represent!), roller derby girl gangs, the dead folk of the subterranean town of Daisypusher, ancient god-worms (or are they worm-gods?), charcuterie, demon families, gobbos, trogbodies, snakefaces, half-and-halfs, milk spiders, cankerpedes, roach-rats, gelled wastes, mystical pigment drugs (Cerulean! Viridian! Vermilion! Ochre! Caput Mortuum!), and a zombie stunt driver on a Hell-bound four-wheeler.

Some Strange Combination Of: Hellboy, Sin City, Goodfellas, Dante, Lovecraft, Neverwhere

OH AND HEY LOOK A CONTEST

Read The First 50 Pages

(If the above plug-in doesn’t work, try this link.)

What Others Have Said

“The Blue Blazes is exactly my kind of supernatural mob crime novel: dark and visceral, with an everyman hero to root for and Lovecraftian god-horror to keep you awake at night… this is the good stuff, right here.” — Adam Christopher, author of Empire State and The Age Atomic

“There’s something gloriously unhinged about the crazy mix of fantasy, horror and crime-fic that is The Blue Blazes. It’s dark and darkly funny, full of outrageously gory scenes and larger-than-life characters.” — Tor.com

“This is gritty urban fantasy as it should be done. Wendig has once again pulled that inimitable magic out of the bag and created something splendidly unique. The action is so thick at times that you might need to check you’re still breathing, and the twists keep on coming. So much fun that, like the five occulted pigments, it should be illegal.” — This Is Horror

“Another thing is that Wendig makes Nora about more than her estranged relationship with her father. Female characters in SFF who can stand their own against their male counterparts, especially as integral characters, are sadly not as common as we’d like them to be. Which is where Nora steps in, and challenges all perceptions about who and what she is. As I’ve said, within the narrative, she’s an actor and not a reactor, and for me this makes her into a very vital character, someone who packs a wallop of character-agency. Her scenes in The Blue Blazes are some of the highlights of the novel.” — Shadowhawk, The Founding Fields

“Wendig writes with blunt force choreography, full of brutally disturbing descriptions, and wrecking ball action. Noir sensibilities are in full force here, and Wendig uses them brilliantly to craft a portrait of a New York that is at the same time instantly recognizable and disturbingly alien.” — The 52 Review

“Seamlessly blending urban fantasy, crime noir and artisanal butchery, The Blue Blazes is one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time. It’s an exciting twist on the normal urban fantasy tropes, one that breathes some new life into Urban Fantasy’s blood-drinking corpse.” — BuzzyMag

“The Blue Blazes is a fun, fast-paced novel that blends the best of noir, a Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual, and melodrama into something special.” — Fantasy Faction

“In the end, The Blue Blazes is a blast, an awesome, smartly written novel that far exceeds the sum of its parts and transcends those things with which it is similar to be an excellent novel on its own merits. Sure to end up on my favorite reads list at the end of this year.” — SFFWorld

“Suffice it to say that Chuck Wendig has moved from one of the many Un-Heard-Of-So-Don’t-Care seats in the back of my brain to occupying a spot in the far less populated Important-Writers section up front.” — Elf-Machines From Hyperspace

“The world of The Blue Blazes is fantastic – think Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere written as a mob book – and as Wendig slowly reveals more and more of the demonic underbelly of New York you can’t help but go along for the ride. At turns creepy and horrifying (but always entertaining), The Blue Blazes is a must-read. I’m kicking myself for not checking out Wendig’s work before now. Don’t make the same mistake I did.” — All Things Urban Fantasy

“The Blue Blazes shows us Hell in Technicolor, and each pigment jumps straight off the page in High Definition Wendig-Vision. It’s brilliant stuff, and I just hope there’s more to come from Mookie Pearl and the five pigments of the Underworld.” — Wilders Book Reviews

“In a credit to Wendig for how well he portrays this dysfunctional little family unit, I found myself hooked on their relationship and biting my nails by the end of the story, eager to find out what becomes of them.” — Over The Effing Rainbow

Tobias Buckell wrote a very smart and rational post (FEATURING CHARTS) about survivorship bias in self-publishing. Go read it. I’ll wait. I like the post a lot — Buckell frequently tickles my sweet spot in terms of being moderate and looking at the pro’s and con’s of both sides of the publishing fence (as I attempted to do here in this rather lengthy post.) I’d maybe argue that Smashwords isn’t the shining ideal in terms of data — but it’s also the only data we have.

This post generated some very interesting discussion over at Facebook, and one commenter there (who I like) said the following: “…if you have a thousand authors on the traditional path who make zilch, and a thousand authors on the indie path who publish their own book and make just a dollar, you know what? The indies are doing better. Something is better than nothing.”

Now, this is an idea I’ve seen put out there before.

It’s interesting.

But I don’t buy it.

Let’s pull this apart a little bit.

First, traditional authors don’t generally make zilch, though I understand the point — you don’t “choose” to traditionally publish so much as you “choose” to try to traditionally publish, and if you fail, you make no money. The suggestion here then is that indie publishers will at least make a dollar — which is maybe true, but you could just as easily lose money on a self-publishing endeavor presuming you start out right and invest some money (cover, editing, design, marketing, whatever). And generally speaking, those who are actually publishing traditionally are doing so with an advance in hand — usually north of five grand.

Second, that word again that keeps popping up — “better.” Like it’s a tug-of-war and one side wants to win. (Or, more appropriately to how it often feels: like it’s a big ol’ stinky-winky dick-waving contest MY PUBLISHING IS BIGGER THAN YOUR PUBLISHING *waggle waggle waggle*.) Let’s all take a deep breath and say it: neither path is better than the other. They’re two very viable options and different authors will do better walking divergent paths. We don’t all have to march lockstep and drink the fucking Flavor-Aid and pick one cult over another. Embrace publishing agonisticism. Don’t judge. You’re not better. I’m not better. The schoolyard finger-pointing is eye-rollingly tiresome at this point.

Third, the indication that “better” is bound up with “money” — but then at the same time suggesting that a few bucks here and there is “better than nothing.” Bare minimum is not a great selling point for anything and it’s not a very good reason to self-publish. We self-publish for a variety of reasons — control, risk, cutting out middle-men, etc. — but one of them should not be “I really need a roll of quarters for the downstairs laundry.”

Listen, if you have a book, and it’s done, you can try to hold out for the traditional advance or you can take a shot at generating some income now with self-publishing. Neither is wrong. Neither is a guarantee. You may make no money, a moderate amount of money, or enough money to build a house out of actual money (“MY FLOOR IS TILED WITH SUSAN B. ANTHONY DOLLARS, MY CURTAINS ARE STITCHED-TOGETHER BENJAMINS, AND MY JACUZZI SPITS OUT MOLTEN ZINC FROM MELTED PENNIES — wait, don’t get the jacuzzi, it’s just for show”).

But don’t judge others for the path they take. Find what works for you, what suits you, and do it. We should all be very happy that these options exist, by the way — self-publishers should be happy that traditional publishing is still an option. Why? Because if that goes away, the incentive to keep self-publishers happy by companies like Amazon fades away. A rich, diverse playing field means more people are finding success all over.

Look at it another way: some people will want to sell their own lemonade, some people would rather work for a lemonade company, others still would rather formulate their own lemonade recipe and sell that through a lemonade recipe distributor (okay, we’re probably entering the stuff of fiction here — LEMONPUNK, BABY), but you get my point. We wouldn’t want everyone to have to punch a time clock just as we wouldn’t want everyone to have to start their own entrepreneurial businesses. It’s all good. Relax.

Oh, and last point: don’t automatically listen to what somebody tells you as what you “should” do. Think. Process. Weigh the options. Personal anecdote time (meaning, works for me, not for you): I had an easy time getting an agent for Blackbirds but a hard time selling it to a publisher at first. And I heard along the way the cries to self-publish. (And oh did I consider it.) Then, even after I had gotten the deal, the occasional comment persisted — I should’ve self-published, it would’ve earned me more than the standard genre fiction advance. Blah blah blah.

Now, I don’t have any time travel devices handy (Delorean, Police Box, cosmic treadmill, temporal suppository) — but since that time, I’ve sold the rights of the book to a handful of foreign markets (with another undergoing bidding even now) and have sold the film/TV rights (one day I look forward to that announcement because it’s damn exciting). And I’ve made more money on that book and its sequel than you would imagine. I’m still making money on that book. And it was a small genre release that continues to do nice — if not overwhelming — numbers in the marketplace.

The point isn’t that I did that and you should do that, too. The only thing that I did that I hope you’ll emulate is that I looked long and hard at it and made the decision I felt best suited me as a writer and the book I had written. It paid off.

The point is that I’m happy with the choice I made. I’m glad I didn’t pull the trigger and just publish it in the same way I’m glad I didn’t publish any of the five novels I’d written before that one (which is another piece of fucked-up frequently-seen self-publisher advice: “Just press publish! Better to make money than to sit in a drawer somewhere!”). Some turds are better flushed, people. My earlier books were stinkers — unfit for public shaming.

Further, I’m glad I did self-publish my Atlanta Burns series. Because that led me to new audience, new skills, and to new opportunities (Kickstarter, Amazon Children’s).

Let each writer and each writer’s book find its own path.

Examine all sides. Look to the failures and the successes.

Then jump.

The End.

* — be advised, Tobias invented the word “Booksplaining.” Please incorporate it into your publishing slang going forward or you will be violently Tasered THANK YOU GOODBYE.

Book blurbs are strange territory for a writer: we go to other authors and solicit from them the time to read our (as yet unpublished) stories and the effort and marketing savvy to write a capable sales blurb for the book (which will go on the cover, inside the cover, or on the web).

You hate to even ask for blurbs because you’re forced to blacken your shame sensors with the heel of a boot just to get up the gumption to ask other authors (many of whom are writers you respect, even adore) to kind of become… advertising shills for your book.

They, as the authors granting blurbs, are ideally hoping to be curators in a way similar to (if also larger than) the retweet — the hope on Twitter is that someone retweets something because it’s content they find interesting and compelling, not because of some kind of back-scratching favor. And so it is with blurbs: you want that author not to provide a blurb to you or anybody else as a favor but because they actually want potential readers (including their own) to see that they have given it something of a seal of approval.

As a blurb writer it’s like, well, okay, I don’t just want to sound like a shill — “Better than Cats! I’ll read it again and again!” — and you want to put a little bit of your voice into it but not so much you’re sounding like you want to show off a fucking promotional blurb. It’s not all about you, right? And you certainly don’t want to put anything that could even sniff a little bit of negativity (“Brilliant book despite its poopy third act!”), nor do you want to cram it into a niche (“Canadian meth addicts will love it!”). You want to say something about the book without it sounding really generic (“It is a book that has many words put together in great sentences!”) but also don’t want to get specific (“ROSEBUD IS A FUCKING SLED”).

So, blurbs are weird. Asking for them. Writing them.

It gets even weirder when you consider that sometimes, authors don’t even write the blurbs. (Sometimes editors or agents will write them on behalf of authors who may or may not have even read the books.) And sometimes blurbs are culled from reviews or statements online. And, once in a blue moon, you see one of those blurbs from a mega-star author on a not-mega-star book (“This book was the holy tits!” — J.K. Rowling) and you’re like, how the hell did that happen? Did someone have incriminating evidence? Did they get J.K. Rowling really drunk one night on creme de menthe and they recorded whatever insane blurbs fell out of her mouth? Is there some other J.K. Rowling? Maybe some hair stylist from Reseda?

Anyway.

Couple questions, then.

Writers: what do you want in a blurb? And what do you aim for when you write one?

Readers: what do you like in a blurb? What catches your attention and sells the book? Further: are there any authors whose blurbs carry significant weight with you — and why?