Last week’s challenge: “Smashing Sub-Genres.”

Ah, first a bit of administrative: I have finally picked my favorite “opening line” story from way back when (SO MANY ENTRIES, and so many good entries, too), and I’m gonna toss the ring onto the hat of Valerie Valdes. Valerie! You should email me at terribleminds at gmail dot com.

Now, onto the challenge.

I admit that I’m kind of a sucker for random generators of various types and stripes. And so I point you to this one — “Fantasy Character Concept” generator.

Click that, you’ll get five different concepts. (Example: “A desperate air pilot is trying to get a date.”) It gives you that short little bit about the character and part of their conflict or desire. Simple, elegant, and ripe for the picking in terms of a flash fiction challenge.

Choose one of those random concepts.

Write a story (~1000 words) about that character.

Post at your online space.

Link back here.

You’ve got one week — due by Friday the 24th, noon EST.

Please to enjoy.

I adore me some Patrick Hester. He’s a nice guy. He’s a smart dude. He writes a cracking tale. And he doesn’t throw things at my head very frequently. He’s got a new novella out, so I ask you to sit down and let him tell you about it. He’s got a laser gun, so. You might wanna hold still.

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

I’m the kid from Fresno who watched too much television, read way too many comic books, played D&D in the library at school with my friends, and always made a point of being home on Saturday nights to watch Doctor Who on PBS.  I’ve been writing stories since high school, but got serious about it in 2000.  Since then, I’ve written a lot, including two and a half novels last year alone.

I’m a writer, a blogger and a twice Hugo Nominated podcaster.  I produce and host the SFSignal.com (Hugo nominated in 2012 and 2013) and the FunctionalNerds.com (Parsec Award nominated) podcasts.  I also produce Mur Lafferty’s I Should Be Writing podcast.  I’m also nominated for a Hugo for Best Fanzine as an editor at SFSignal.com in 2012, which blows me away.  My novels are currently being shopped by my agent, and include the Samantha Kane Urban Fantasy series (Into the Fire, Cold as Ice and Shattered Earth), set in Denver (where I now live), and an Epic Fantasy series that begins with The Queen of Shadows.  I’ve been releasing some of my shorter fiction via Amazon this year, including Consumption, Witchcraft & Satyrs, and of course, the latest, a novella named Cahill’s Homecoming.  All of this Amazon stuff started, though, with the release of Conversations with my Cat, a humorous collection of entries from my blog that you, Chuck, suggested I put together as an eBook – so I did.  ‘Cuz, when Chuck freaking-Wendig tells you to do something, you listen.  And people have loved it, so, thank you!  I also have a couple of short stories out in the anthologies Space Battles: Full-Throttle Space Tales Volume 6 (First Contact) and An Uncommon Collection (Charisma).

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH.

Cord Cahill, Sentinel, returns to his home planet to discover the truth behind his sister’s death. What he finds changes him forever.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

I was sitting in the comfy chair one night, working on one of the Urban Fantasies, and realized that I hadn’t written any scifi in a while.  A long while.  One of the things I like to do as an exercise in writing, is to put two things together that don’t normally fit or that you wouldn’t normally think of as mashing together, and see what kind of story I can pull out of those two things. That’s how Consumption (I can’t tell you what one of the two things in that story are without ruining the story, but the other one is an old Iroquois legend about a ‘ghost-witch’), and Witchcraft & Satyrs came about – with the latter, I wanted to write a story that felt southern (my mother’s family is from Kentucky), so I set it in a small, rural Kentucky town, added a witch, beans and cornbread, homebrew, and then some creatures from Greek mythology – and it worked.  On this night, though, I wanted to write a space-based scifi story and, given that I love westerns, add in a western flair.  Cord Cahill was born.

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

It’s a mash-up of several of my favorite things: westerns, science fiction, John Wayne and serials.  I do intend to write many more Cord Cahill stories (may have, in fact, already written some… shhh….).  My love of serials come from watching Doctor Who (of course), and the movies and tv shows I used to watch with my grandmother, including The Lone Ranger, Zorro, The Charlie Chan Mysteries and anything from Agatha Christie.  There are nods throughout the story to different films, characters, actors and stories I have enjoyed throughout the years.  I added these little Easter eggs with the hope that anyone who may have seen or read them, would realize and recognize them.  Think of it like watching an episode of Castle and looking for Han Solo frozen in carbonite somewhere in the scene; not a distraction, just a neat little extra bit for fans of those stories or flicks.  (and yes, Han Solo does get placed in the background on Castle.)  But you don’t have to know any of that to enjoy the story.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING CAHILL’S HOMECOMING?

For me, it’s always the ‘science’ in science fiction that trips me up.  And not because I don’t obsess over it to get it right (cuz I do), but because I know WE ALL OBSESS OVER IT!  I can’t tell you how many times my writing group has digressed into long debates over some bit of technology, real or imagined, in a story and how it does, or doesn’t, make sense.  So when I add things like faster than light travel, integrated cybernetic body implants and AI’s, all of which exist in Cord Cahill’s world, I always pause to consider how the reader will respond.  The trick is not letting those pauses become walls between you and finishing the story – which has happened to me more often than I like to admit.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING CAHILL’S HOMECOMING?

Going back to my point above about the science in scifi, I don’t want people to focus on the science so much that it distracts them from what’s important; the characters.  The science fiction – that’s the setting.  I establish in the first paragraph where we are, what the level of technology is, and then I run with the characters because that’s what’s important to me, and really, that’s what is going to be important to the reader.  A reader isn’t going to identify and connect with a faster than light drive, but they will connect with an older brother trying to do right by his family, a sister who set him on the right path, a husband grieving the death of his wife, and parents who just wanted to give their children something more than they ever had themselves.  These are the stories I want to write, and the science fiction element and setting needs to lend itself to telling those stories, not detract from it.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT CAHILL’S HOMECOMING?

I love it all.  It’s everything I wanted from this character and this story.  Cord is damaged and he doesn’t even realize it.  By the end, he does.  The question becomes, is it too late?

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

I went through several rewrites, so I’m not sure there is anything I would do differently that I haven’t already tried, except maybe to get it done a little quicker.  (I think the first version was written in 2009…

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

If I have to choose one, it’s a flashback memory.  Returning home, Cord is confronted with a lot of memories.  One in particular stands out when he is reminded of the time he and his girlfriend were caught in a compromising position at a dance.  The father of his girlfriend wanted Cord’s father to punish him severely, but Cord’s father saw it as two teenagers full of hormones ‘exploring’.  That isn’t to say Cord won’t be punished, though, and when his father informs him that he will be kept so busy with chores and duties on the family ranch that he won’t have time for any other such explorations to happen, Cord objects.  His father tries to set him straight.

 “I’m not a little kid.  I’m a man!”

His father laughed at that.  “You’re a man now, Cord?  Poking a girl in the hay don’t make you a man,” he said, pushing his finger into Cord’s chest for emphasis.  “If you’re a man, then are you going to grow up and start acting like one instead of running around like a damned fool?  Fighting, stealing horses for joy rides in the desert, painting your little brother white head to toe and convincing him to run through town pretending to be a ghost, and now this mess with the Spalding girl?  These are not the actions of a man, Cord, they’re the actions of a boy acting out. I won’t be here forever, and I’m getting tired of waiting for you to step up and show me the kind of man you’ll be.  Are you going to be the kind that skates through life, always running away from responsibilities, or the kind people can count on and know that he will be there for them, for his family?  When you figure that out, that’s the day you will be a man, Cord Cahill.  That’s the day when you’ll show me and everyone else who you are.”

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

I continue to write, tell stories.  I’m polishing up the Epic Fantasy right now, and I’m 40,000 words in on a Space Opera I’m pitching as ‘the Hunt for Red October in space’.  I intend to write more Cord Cahill stories, and work on more short stories to release via Amazon.  Folks who sign up for my email list on atfmb.com get to see those stories for free before I put them on Amazon.  Hopefully, the novels I’ve written will be out there soon, too.

Thanks to you for spurring me on to try the Amazon route, and for posting this on your blog.  I really appreciate it, Chuck!

If folks are interested in more from me, I have some links:

Patrick Hester: Blog / SFSignal / Functional Nerds / Kirkus / @atfmb

Cahill’s Homecoming: Amazon / Barnes & Noble

(early warning: contains a great deal of caps lock)

The goal of promoting your work is to entice people to be interested in that work.

It is a soft hand in a silk glove.

Possibly stroking my neck or, if I’m really into it, working mah nips.

Your promotional efforts are not a fist punching me in my junk drawer.

Example:

I am not really a huge Star Trek fan, but fuck, I’m interested in seeing the newest one because despite the 87 different teasers, trailers, commercials, teasers-for-teasers, teasers-for-trailers, trailers for featurettes about the making of the teaser trailers, it looks pretty cool.

Except, there’s this half-ass transmedia campaign called ARE YOU THE 1701 or something which is about, I dunno, blah blah blah the Enterprise and something-something Instagram and — you know, whatever. Every once in a while I am compelled by a truly inventive trans- or social-media campaign, but this one, ehh. Yawn. Snore. Poop noise.

NOT THAT IT FUCKING MATTERS because while I’ve never signed up for this campaign nor have I ever intimated my interest online anywhere at any point I continue to be assailed by marketing emails from this campaign. Which, you know, in the grand scheme of First World Problems is not a particularly big one, true. And here you’re saying, “Well, just unsubscribe, you lazy douche-sicle,” and I’m like, I’M TRYING TO DO THAT BUT IT WON’T LET ME. I give it all the email addresses I currently possess — including the one it sends its emails to — and it’s like, “Nope, we don’t have that shit on record, sorry, please enjoy more of our Star Trek spam HAR HAR HAR.” Then it belches in Klingon and shoots a phaser up my pee-hole.

It makes me mad enough I want to hate-avoid the film. Which isn’t fair to the filmmakers or the movie or the movie theater people or anybody except whatever insane promotional programmer ensured that I’m getting email from Paramount about crap that I didn’t ask for —

AND CANNOT ESCAPE.

Here’s the lesson: marketing and promotion should never be a kick to the face. It should never be unearned or unasked for. It should not be unavoidable.

This goes to any website that has anything that auto-plays ever. Sound. Music. Movie. Animation. If I’m sitting here at the ass-crack of dawn, sipping coffee, and I go to your website and get a blaring loud commercial for fucking Floor Wax and it wakes my toddler up I will find your house and shit on your pets.

This goes to all you authors out there who randomly DM people on Twitter: HEY PERSON I DON’T KNOW I GOT THIS BOOK MOVIE COMIC GAME KICKSTARTER BLOG POST THAT I THINK YOU MIGHT LIKE FOR NO REASON BECAUSE I DON’T KNOW YOU LET ME UNCEREMONIOUSLY HAMMER YOU ABOUT THE HEAD AND NECK WITH IT.

This goes to all your authors who spam me with: “Hey I think you might like my blog post on writer’s block / self-publishing / bacon enemas / donkey shows / blargleflargle [insert link I’m never going to click here].” At first I’m like, “Oh, are they actually talking to me,” but then I see they’ve sent the same goddamn message to 150 other people oh, and they follow like, 35,000 people and yet I’m not one of them.

Pay attention:

Unwanted and invasive advertisement doesn’t work. We skip past commercials. We close any window that pops up that tries to elbow its message into our brains. Marketing and promotion needs to seduce us, and it does not seduce us with a hand grenade to the face.

MY RANT IS NOW OVER YOU MAY RETURN TO YOUR HOMES.

P.S. JUST TO REITERATE WE REALLY DON’T NEED 184 DIFFERENT TRAILERS FOR YOUR BIG SUMMER MOVIES I’M LOOKING AT YOU IRON MAN 3

1. Pantser Versus Plotter: The Cage Match

The story goes that most writers are either pantsers (which regrettably has nothing to do with writing sans pants) or plotters (which has nothing to do with plotting the fictional in-narrative demises of those who have offended you). We either jump into the story by the so-called seat of our pants, or we rigorously plot and scheme every detail of the story before we ever pen the first sentence. It’s a bit of a false dichotomy, as many writers fall somewhere in the middle. Even a “pantser” can make use of an outline without still feeling pantsless and fancy-free.

2. No One Outline Style Exists

Remember that classic outline you did in junior high? Roman numerals? Lowercase alphabet? Lists of raw, unrefined tedium? Scrap that shit, robot. Nobody’s telling you to do that outline—unless that outline is what you do. For every writer, an outline style exists. It’s up to you to find which method suits you. (And if you’re looking for options, you can find a host of them right here in 25 Ways To Plot, Plan And Prep Your Story.)

3. Preparation H

Writing a novel, a script, a comic series, a TV show, a video game, a magnum transmedia pornographic opus told over Instagram — well, it’s all rather difficult. Writing a story can feel like a box of overturned ferrets running this way and that, and there you are, trying to wrangle them up while also simultaneously juggling bitey piranha. It’s easy to find the writing of a story quite simply overwhelming. An outline is meant to help you prepare against that inevitability by having the story broken out into its constituent pieces before you begin. It’s no different than, before cooking, laying out all your tools and ingredients (called the mise en place, or simply, “the meez”). Think of an outline as your “meez.”

4. The Confidence Game

Sometimes what kills us is a lack of confidence in our storytelling. We get hip-deep and everything seems to unravel like a ruptured testicle (yes, testicles really do unravel, you’re totally welcome). You suddenly feel like you don’t know where this is going. Plot doesn’t make sense. Characters are running around like sticky-fingered toddlers. The whole narrative is like a 10-car-pileup on the highway. Your story hasn’t proven itself, but an outline serves as the proving grounds. You take the story and break it apart before you even begin — so, by the time you do put the first sentence down, you have confidence in the tale you’re about to tell. Confidence is the writer’s keystone; an outline can lend you that confidence.

5. Stop Building The Parachute On The Way Down

A lack of an outline means you’re burdening yourself with more work than is perhaps necessary. You’re jumping out of the plane and trying to stitch the parachute in mid-air, working furiously so you don’t explode like a blood sausage when you smack into the hard and unforgiving earth. Further, what happens is, you finish the first draft (tens of thousands of words) and what you suddenly find is that this is basically one big outline anyway, because you’re going to have to edit and rewrite the damn thing. An outline tends to save you from the head-exploding bowel-evacuating frustration of having to do that because you’ve already gone through the effort to arrange the story. A little work up front may save you a metric fuckity-ton later on.

6. The Tired (But True!) Map Metaphor

Let’s say you’re taking a trip. You’re driving cross-country to a specific location—a relative’s house, a famous restaurant, Big Dan Don’s Baboon Bondage Barn, whatever. You don’t just wake up, jump in the car, and go. You pack your bags. You get your shit together: food, first-aid, road flares, baboon mask. Then you plan the trip. You get a map. Or you plug the address into the GPS. Finally, you take the trip. Writing a story is like taking a trip. Why not prepare for it?

7. Sometimes, Your GPS Will Steer You Into A Bridge Abutment

Okay, to be fair, sometimes a GPS will have you turn sharply left and crash into an orphanage. The lesson here is that your GPS is not sacred. And neither, as it turns out, is your outline.

8. The Outline Can Be A Pair Of Handcuffs

So, you’re taking this trip. You’re driving across the country. You know you’re supposed to stay on the highway, but holy fuck, the highway is boring. Endless macadam. Hypnotizing guardrails. Blah. Bleagh. Snooze. So, you see an exit ahead for a back road that takes you to Brother Esau’s Amish Muskrat Circus. Ah, but that’s not on your map. Do you drive on past? Stick to the plan? No! You stop! Because Motherfucking Muskrat Circus! Your outline is the same way. No plan survives contact with the enemy, and while you’re writing you’re going to see new things and have new ideas and make crazy connections that are simply not in the outline. Make them. Take the exit! Try new things! Don’t let the outline be a pair of shackles. Unless you’re into that. You’re the one going to the Bondage Barn, not me. Nice baboon mask, by the way.

9. A Good Outline Demands Flexibility

It’s okay to leave room in your outline for things to change. It’s even okay to leave sections of your outline with big blinky question marks and hastily scrawled notes like NO I DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS HERE BUT IT INVOLVES VAMPIRE SEX AND KARATE. An outline must bend with the winds of change, but it must not break.

10. Awooga Awooga Alert Alert

Plot is a twisty motherfucker. It loops around on itself and before you know it, the thing’s crass contortions have left you with plot holes so big you could lose a horse in one. An outline is an excellent tool for hunting down those pesky voids and vacancies early so you can cinch the plot tighter in order for those holes to close up — or, at least, can remain hidden from view. An outline fixes your plot problems before you have 80,000 words of them staring you down.

11. An Architect Should Know How To Swing A Fucking Hammer

Having some understanding of how a story fits together can be helpful when outlining your story. It’s not critical, but grokking the way a story rises and falls and reaches its apex can give you beats and goals to aim toward when outlining. Might I recommend “25 Things You Should Know About Story Structure?” No? TOO BAD DOING IT ANYWAY HA HA HA JERKWEED.

12. Macro To Micro

You can go as big and broad or as tiny and micromanagey as you want when it comes to outlining. Some folks outline just the tentpoles of their fiction—“These five things need to happen for the story to make sense” Others detail every beat of the story—“And then Martha makes a broccoli frittata, summoning the Doom Angels.” Do as you and the story demands.

13. Consider At Least Marking The Major Acts

In film, a story is said to have three acts (though some folks wisely break that second act up into two “sub-acts” bisected by the midpoint of the tale). Generally, most stories conform in some fashion to the three-act-structure, even if only in the loosest way — as such, it’s worth looking at the major acts of your story and giving them each a paragraph just so you have some sense where the larger narrative is going. You’d be amazed at what clarity you bring to a story when you write it out in three paragraphs (Beginning, Middle, and End).

14. Outline As You Go

Not comfortable with doing one big hunka-hunka-burning-outline right at the outset? Ta-da, outline as you go. Boom! Solved it. YOU OWE ME MONEY NOW. Ahem. What I’m trying to say is, every week, outline for the week ahead but no further. This keeps you flexible and still makes it feel that you’ve still got some mystery and majesty ahead of you around the corner of every cliff’s edge. Hell, you could even outline only the next day — stop writing today, outline tomorrow’s writing before you begin. Just to get a base.

15. Sometimes You’re An Outliner And You Don’t Know It

I tried writing one novel, Blackbirds, over the course of several years. And the story just kept wandering around like an old person lost at K-Mart. It felt aimless, formless, like I couldn’t quite get it to make sense, couldn’t get the damn thing to add up and become a proper story. Eventually, while in a mentorship with a screenwriter, he told me to outline it. I said, “HA HA SILLY MAN I AM A NOVELIST WE DO NOT OUTLINE FOR IT WILL THIEVE THE BREATH FROM GOD AND OTHER SUCH POMPOSITIES.” And he said, “No, really, outline.” And I groused and grumbled and kicked the can and punched my locker and finally I sat down and took my medicine. I finished the novel a few short months later and that novel later became my first original novel debut. I am a pantser by heart, but a plotter by necessity.

16. The Power Of The Re-Outline (And The Re-Re-Outline)

I outline before I write. Then, when it comes time to edit, I re-outline before committing any major rewrites. I do this because things have changed — both in terms of what I wrote and what I’m going to write. I outline the novel I just wrote (the re-outline), then I outline the planned changes (the re-re-outline). It sounds like a lot of work. It takes me less than a day to do it. And it feels like hell to do, but I’m always happy for having done it.

17. See Also: The Retroactive Outline

Some folks never do an outline up front — they let their first draft (or the “zero draft,” as it is sometimes known) be the pukey, sloppy technicolor supergeyser of nonsense and then they take that giant pile of quantum hullaballoo and from it pull a proper outline before attempting to rewrite. This may take you a bit longer but if the result is a story you’re happy with, then holy shit, go forth and do it. Every process you choose should be in service to getting the best story in the way that feels most… well, I was going to say comfortable, but really, comfort is fucking forgettable in the face of great fiction, so let’s go with effective, instead.

18. Most Programs Have Some Kind Of Outline Function

Most writing programs come built with some manner of outlining function — Word’s is pretty barebones but a program like Scrivener has a very robust outline engine built into it, allowing the outline to eventually become the table of contents. You can also look for programs (OmniOutliner, for instance) that handle outlining as its sole (often robust) function. Consider me a big fan of outlining on my iPad with the Index Card app — an app that also syncs up nicely with Scrivener, if that interests you.

19. Some Outlines Are More Expressly Visual

Hey, nobody said an outline had to be all text-on-screen. Maybe you draw mind-maps on a whiteboard. Maybe you string together photos you found on Flickr. Maybe you mark your up-beats and down-beats in the narrative with little smiley faces or frowny faces, respectively. Get crazy. Break out the fingerpaints. The sidewalk chalk. OUTLINE YOUR NOVEL IN THE SCAREDY URINE OF YOUR FOES. Whoa. I mean. What? I didn’t say anything.

20. Help You Unstick A Stuck Story

You’re toodling along on your pantsed story, and everything going fine until one day it isn’t. You’re stuck. Boots in the narrative pigshit. You have some choices. One choice is to sit there in the poopy mire, crying into the fetid muck. The other choice is to backtrack and outline the story you’ve written so far and the story ahead. The value of this approach is that you don’t need to outline at the fore of the draft and maybe you never need to outline — ah, but if you get stuck, the outline makes a mighty tidy lever to get you free.

21. No, Outlining Does Not Steal Your Magic

Writers are beholden to many fancy myths. “The Muse! My characters talk to me! I’d just die if I couldn’t write!” The myth of how an outline robs you of your creative juju is one of them. I don’t want to defeat your magic. I don’t want to suggest that writing and storytelling isn’t magic — because hot damn, it really is, sometimes. The myth isn’t about the magic; the myth is that the magic is so fickle that something so instrumental as an outline will somehow diminish it. If after outlining a story you think the thunder has been stolen and you don’t want to write it anymore, that’s a problem with you or your story, not with the loss of its presumed magic. An outline can never detail everything. It’ll never excise the magic of all the things that go into the actual day-to-day writing. If that magic is gone, either your story didn’t have it in the first place, or you’re looking for excuses not to write the fucking thing.

22. Calm Down, Nobody’s Got A Gun To Your Head

Nobody’s making you outline. Relax.

23. Oops, Except Maybe This Gun Right Here, Click, Boom

Okay, somebody might actually make you outline. I had one publisher who demanded a chapter-by-chapter outline before committing to the project. I’ve also had to hand in outlines for various film or transmedia projects. Someone might actually ask you to outline at some point, and when they do, you probably shouldn’t freak out as if someone just set your cat on fire.

24. It’s One More Tool For The Toolbox

Look at it this way: even if you don’t like outlining and don’t really plan on using it, it’s a skill that’s useful to learn just the same. Not every tool in the toolbox will see constant or even regular use, but it’s still nice to have in store for when the shit hits the fan and you need to ratchetblast the rimjob or maladjust the whangdoodle.

25. Everybody Has A Process, So Find Yours

No one process for planning your story is going to work. What works for me won’t work for you. Hell, what works for one of your stories may not even work for the next. Try things. Explore. Experiment. This isn’t math. It isn’t beholden to an easy equation with a guaranteed output. Find the outline style that suits you. Look at it this way: it’s like eating your vegetables. You might try kale and think it tastes like ursine toilet paper. Or you might try it and think it’s the best thing since bacon underwear. Try the outline. Maybe it helps, maybe it doesn’t.

It only works if you try.

Want another hot tasty dose of dubious writing advice?

500 WAYS TO TELL A BETTER STORY:

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER:

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500 MORE WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER:

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING:

$0.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY:

$4.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY:

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

I’m muddling my way through a post on the power of word-of-mouth and as a writer of the hybrid variety (I get great gas mileage), I wonder:

What gets you to read a book?

We worry so much about marketing and promotion, about guest blog posts and book trailers and interviews and signings and readings and Q&As and panel talks and nude fireman calendars and beard-wrestling competitions and cupcake bake-offs — further, so much it is is expected, it is assumed that these things are What We Do and it’s maybe not often enough that people ask If They Work.

They may! They may, indeed.

But I want to know.

And while I don’t mind hearing from the writers on this as to what works for you I am more inclined to hear from the readers on what exactly gets you to pick up a book. An advertisement? A reading? A funny tweet? Free swag? A recommendation from a friend? A NUDE FIREMAN CALENDAR WITH ME, A BIG HOSE, AND A SLUMBERING DALMATION? (I hope the answer to that is “yes” because I just ordered like, 10,000 of these things.)

What works for you?

What gets you first to try a book?

Then to buy that book?

Last week’s challenge: “Five Random Sentences“

Below is a list of 20 subgenres.

I want you to roll a d20 twice — or click a random number generator twice between 1 and 20 — and that will give you two subgenres. (Sure, you can choose them instead, but that means YOU HATE FUN.)

Smash those two subgenres into one story.

Write that story. Around 1000 words. Post at your online space. Link back here through the comments. Due by next Friday, May 17th, at noon EST.

Here’s the list of subgenres.

1. Men’s Adventure
2. Splatterpunk
3. Fairy Tale
4. New Weird
5. Space Opera
6. Southern Gothic
7. BDSM Erotica
8. Superhero
9. Sword & Sorcery
10. Noir
11. Dystopia
12. Sci-Fi Humor or Satire
13. Lovecraftian
14. Haunted House
15. Cyberpunk
16. Steampunk
17. Detective
18. Post-Apocalyptic
19. Weird West
20. Technothriller