Year: 2018 (page 18 of 32)

BOOM. I’ll give you ten titles. You will either pick one of the ten or you will use a random number generator to select one, and then you will write some flash fiction paired to that title.

Get it? Got it? Great.

The titles are:

1. Crying in the Wind
2. The Dreamer’s Door
3. Mist and Light
4. The Hustler
5. Absent Elves
6. The Bridge and the Rose
7. The Dweller
8. The Reaper’s Rope
9. Into The Parlor We Screamed
10. Star Blight

(All randomly generated titles, by the by.)

Length: ~1500 words

Due by: Friday, June 8th, noon EST

Post at your online space.

Give us a link below to that post.

The end.

You cannot go wrong with Fonda Lee, as has been proven time and time again. That’s true with her books, and true with her guest posts here at terribleminds. And if you require further example, she’s back — this time, talking about how you think you know how to write a sequel, ha ha ha oh no. Ohhhh no.

* * *

STEP ONE: DELUSIONAL OPTIMISM

Congratulations! You wrote a book and now your publisher and your readers are eagerly clamoring for the sequel. No problem, you’ve got this. You spent a long time, maybe years, creating the world and developing the characters, so all the hard work is already done. Now you just have to continue the story, and you have plenty of ideas about how to do that because you cleverly left some threads untied in the first book and also scribbled some stuff on a Post-It note when your agent asked you for a summary of book two. Start by making an outline. Pat yourself on the back; it looks good. You’re a fucking professional now. Be sure to agree to an aggressive deadline. After all, the market rewards momentum and you don’t want to keep fans waiting!

STEP TWO: DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL

Huh. You were sailing along in your writing, humming a merry tune, but now something’s wrong. You’re doing what you’re supposed to, you’re continuing the story, but there’s a nagging suspicion growing in your gut that you’ve been following the figurative path with your eyes on your feet and now as you slowly raise your head, you realize the sun has gone down in the woods and the trail has vanished, and the glowing red eyes are beginning to circle round.

What happened, you ask yourself. You analyze your choices. The sequel you’re writing is too similar to the first book; you’re just retreading ground and not being inventive enough. Or it’s too different from the first book; you’re not delivering any of the stuff that readers will want after reading the series opener. You’re spending too much time dealing with the events of the first book. Or not spending enough. You have too many new characters. You have too few. You step back and compare what you’ve done so far with your first book. Terrible mistake. The first book—in all its edited, revised, beautifully published glory—is perfect. This is dog vomit. You decide you would like to burn the manuscript, pretend this never happened, and start on a new project about something completely different. You can’t. You’re committed not just to the sequel, but to the canon you’ve already written. Also, you’ve already spent the advance money. By writing the first book, you made a very nice, sturdy sandbox, and now you’re trapped in the damn sandbox, and no one can hear you claw at the inside surfaces with your bloody fingernails.

Dazed and at a loss, you get on the Internet hoping for panda videos. Hey, people are talking about your first book! It’s doing well, getting good reviews, being nominated for awards, going into subsequent printings! You despair; you can’t possibly deliver a sequel that will live up. Or there’s silence; the first book’s not doing as well as you’d hoped. You despair; no one is going to read your second book anyway, so all you’re struggles are for nothing. You see-saw between these two states multiple times in a single day. You call up your writer friends. Oh yeah, they say, didn’t we tell you? Writing the sequel is a bitch. No, you scream, you didn’t tell me! No one told me! This is supposed to be easier! You rend your hair and crawl under the table.

STEP THREE: UNDERSTANDING THE NATURE OF SEQUELS

Okay, you’ve calmed down with the narcotic substance of your choice and have emerged from under the table to re-evaluate your situation. Slowly, you come to the realization that sequels are a unique challenge: You’re trying to write a new story (difficult at the best of times) within the scope of a larger story. You need to stay true to the events and the characters of the first book while also bringing in new elements, raising the stakes, and going deeper into the layers of the narrative, all at the same time. All with the shadow of public expectation hovering over you.

Take heart; you haven’t become a shittier writer between your first and second book. This is hard stuff and you haven’t faced this particular set of constraints and pressures before. Take a deep breath. You can do this. There are people who believe in you: your agent, your editor, your readers—they believe in you. To start with, let go of your first book. Just a little. You need some mental distance from it and how it’s performing. Stop reading reviews of what people liked and didn’t like about it and what they want or don’t want in the sequel. Pretend someone else wrote that book and you’re picking up where they left off. You can’t lose sight of the story canon that’s been established, but this new book is its own thing. What’s the story you want to tell now?

The characters, wherever they were at the end of the first book, need new goals and story arcs and/or new layers or complications in the motivations they’ve carried forward. The plot needs to make sense in the context of what’s already happened but also go in fresh and unexpected directions. Think about some of the best movie sequels: Terminator 2 flipped expectations by making the villain of the first movie the hero of the second. The tone of The Empire Strikes Back is dramatically different from the space opera candy of A New Hope. The Godfather Part II cut back in time. Alien was an atmospheric horror story; Aliens was a rousing action flick.

Put yourself in the sequel’s shoes for a minute. Just as every villain is the hero of their own story, the sequel doesn’t think of itself as a second player. The sequel thinks of the first book as the opener, and itself as the main event. “Thanks for warming up the crowd for me, buddy, let me take over from here,” says your sequel, confidently throwing its cape over its shoulder. Sequel acknowledges what was cool about First Book, but it isn’t afraid to do its own thing. With that in mind, you stop obsessing over writing a good sequel, and focus on simply writing a good story.

STEP FOUR: ALL THE WORK AND HALF THE FUN

You recommit. You write the damn book. You rewrite it. You revise it. Many times. You probably go through more drafts than you did with the first book (but you set that fact aside, because you’ve resolved to stop comparing this manuscript to the first book, remember?) You’re under time pressure, but if you need to, you ask for an extension because it’s more important that the book is good than that it’s released on a precise schedule, no matter what they say.

At last, you’re done. It was a ton of work, and guess what? The sequel will likely less attention that the first book did, especially if the first was your debut. Odds are it will get less hype, fewer trade and reader reviews, lower sales, and have less chance of being nominated for awards. Woop-de- friggin’-do! So…why do people do this again? Why don’t we all write standalones?

Because the reward for both the author and the reader is just too good to pass up: a chance to go back to a world we’ve fallen in love with, to spend more time with characters who’ve captured our hearts, to tell a bigger story on a bigger canvas, to answer the burning question, “What happens next?” With luck, your badass sequel goes out into the world and makes your existing readers very happy, and to the new readers, it says, “Hey, you’re missing out, but you can still get in on the party. Let me introduce you to my buddy over here, First Book.”

Ahhh, you did it, you wrote a sequel! Flush with victory, you sit down to write the third book!

Don’t talk to me about the third book.

* * *

Fonda Lee’s new young adult science fiction novel, Cross Fire, is the sequel to Exo, which was a Junior Library Guild Selection and Andre Norton Award finalist. Fonda is also the author of the YA novel Zeroboxer. Her recent adult debut, the fantasy saga Jade City, was a finalist for the Nebula and Locus Awards and named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s Books, Syfy Wire, Den of Geek, and the Verge.

In the stunning follow-up to Exo, Earth’s century of peace as a colony of an alien race has been shattered. As the government navigates peace talks with the human terrorist group Sapience, Donovan Reyes tries to put his life back together and return to his duty as a member of the security forces. But a new order comes from the home planet: withdraw. Earth has proven too costly and unstable to maintain as a colony, so the aliens, along with a small selection of humans, begin to make plans to leave. As word of the withdrawal spreads through the galaxy, Earth suddenly becomes vulnerable to a takeover from other alien races. Invaders who do not seek to live in harmony with humans, but to ravage and destroy the planet for its resources.

As a galactic invasion threatens, Donovan realizes that Sapience holds the key that could stop the pending war. Yet in order to save Earth, all species will have to work together, and Donovan might just have to make the ultimate sacrifice to convince them. But can one person save an entire planet from total extinction?

Fonda Lee: Website | Twitter

Crossfire: Exo Excerpt | Indiebound | Amazon | B&N | Powells (Signed Copies)

I HAVE RETURNED FROM THE DESERT, HAVING HAD A VISION OF A BUNCH OF WEIRDO AUTHORS GATHERING THERE TO DRINK FANCY COCKTAILS AND TALK NERD SHIT and lo, it was good.

I met those randos above, which include, from L to R: Brandon Sanderson, Mark Coal, James Joyce, Stevia McGee, and me in the center: Chnurk Mandog.

*checks notes*

Okay that can’t be right.

Fine fine fine, it’s a handful of WONDERPALS, the storytellers: Sam Sykes, Myke Cole, Aaron Mahnke, and Delilah S. Dawson. We were loosed onto the streets of the city to roam and wreak havoc. (Oh and P.S., Aaron Mahnke’s newest Lore tome is out today. Go grabby Wicked Mortals — print or e-book. Don’t make me come over there.)

Seriously, Phoenix Comic-Con — wait, Comic Fest? — wait, Fan Fusion? — was rad. Such a wonderful crowd of fans and writers, really some of my favorite people in the whole damn universe. Trips like this make me realize how lucky I am to do what I do and to surround myself with such talented, kind, and utterly strange people.

*throws mug to the ground; it shatters*

ANOTHER, I SAY.

(More photos below.)

Let’s see, what else is going on?

OOH OOH OOH, Tor.com revealed the newest and last Miriam Black cover — Vultures, which comes out in January 2019, now has what has easily become one of my favorite covers of all my books, courtesy of Adam Doyle. Tor has the exclusive. They also have the exclusive cover copy/story description — but I’ll warn you, if you’re not caught up, it’s hella spoilery. Good news is, you can bop over and see the cover without reading that. But it will give away the events of prior books, as the last book in a series ultimately must. Vultures is not a book to read if you’ve not read the five books that precede it.

I also have some cover designs rolling in for Wanderers, and some ARCs have already started to go out — even though the book doesn’t come out until April of next year, Del Rey wants to get an early promotional jump, so that’s exciting. I’ll show the cover when we’ve settle on one but it is looking really amazing. I’m honestly nervous to have people read the book.

Hm. What else?

Some nice sales or price-drops on my books in digital —

Blackbirds is now $5.99.

Invasive is also $5.99, but also is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited.

Zer0es is on sale for $1.99 — not sure how long that lasts, so go grabby grabby.

And I think that’s it.

More photos from the con below:

(photo courtesy of either Kris Morris or Janelle Badali — not sure which of them took the shot!)

SKULL ANGEL, SUCKERS. Bow down and worship.

Or something.

This week I’m off to Phoenix Comic Fest, and I can’t seem to access their schedule on their site? So I’m gonna post my (tentative, subject to change) schedule here in the hopes that it will help you Arizona-dwelling pop culture vultures.

HERE BE MY SKED-YOOL, YARRRR

Wednesday, May 23rd

7:00PM-8:00PM

Elevengeddon: A Multi-Author SciFi Event — seriously, tons of authors going to this free SFF bookish event, mega authors like Daniel Jose Older and John Scalzi and VE Schwab and Delilah Dawson and, of course, me bringing down the grade curve.

Please note: you do not need to be attending PHXCF to come to this!

SO YOU SHOULD COME

The Poisoned Pen Bookstore
4014 N Goldwater Blvd
Scottsdale, AZ 85251

Thursday, May 24

1:30PM-2:30PM

PANEL: It’s a Mystery

Location: North 125AB

Description: You don’t have to be the World’s Greatest Detective to attend this panel. Guest Authors will clue you in on the most compelling mystery stories.

4:30PM-5:30PM

SIGNING

Location: North 124AB

With Melinda Snodgrass, Sylvain Neuvel, Jason Fry

6:00PM-7:00PM

SIGNING

Location: Del Rey Booth #1697

With Jason Fry

Friday, May 25

10:30AM-11:30AM

PANEL: It’s the End of the World As We Know It – Apocalyptic Fiction

Location: North 126C

Description: There’s something utterly fascinating about the end of the world. What would it be like to survive the end of civilization and how would we start to rebuild?

12:00PM-12:45PM

SIGNING

Location: Changing Hands Author Signing Area

With Emily Devenport, Alexandrea Monir

8:00PM-11:30PM

EVENT: Drinks with Creators!

Location: North 120CD

Join authors and other creators for a glass or two in an informal setting. Door prizes, giveaways and raffles to support Kids Need To Read.

Saturday, May 26

12:00PM-1:00PM

PANEL: Writers Pay Homage to Their Forerunners

Location: North 126AB

Description: Join Chuck Wendig, Gail Carriger, Katherine Arden and Myke Cole as they talk about the writers that influenced them most.

1:45PM-2:45PM

SIGNING

With Gail Carriger, Myke Cole

Location: North 124AB

3:00PM-4:00PM

SIGNING

Location: Del Rey Booth #1697

With Aaron Mahnke

4:30PM-5:30PM

PANEL: Writers Would You Rather

Location: 126AB

Description: “Would You Rather” is a hilarious game where your favorite authors get asked questions like, “Would you rather have magic powers only activated by eating kittens or magic powers that could only affect someone’s butt?” In previous years, this game has generated raucous laughter and exposed some interesting things about what our authors would rather do.

Panelists: Chuck Wendig, Scott Sigler

5:45PM-6:45PM

SIGNING

With Alexandra Monir, Melinda Snodgrass and Kristi Charish

Location: North 124AB

Sunday, May 27

10:30AM-11:30AM

PANEL: Star Wars Books

Location: North 126AB

Description: Meet the authors of your favorite stories set A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far Far Away….

Panelists: Jason Fry, Daniel Jose Older, Chuck Wendig, Alan Dean Foster

12:00PM-1:00PM

SIGNING: Star Wars

Location: Del Rey Signing Booth #1697

With Jason Fry, Daniel Jose Older, Chuck Wendig, Delilah Dawson

So that’s that for me in Phoenix. Come say hi! Even if you’re not in Phoenix, get there! Hop a plane! A train! A trans-dimensional desert portal! Or just drop acid and hallucinate me!

It’ll be great.

Also, what else is new?

My run on TUROK has been collected in a trade paperback — TUROK: BLOOD HUNT. So, hey, go get it if you feel so inclined.

I’m told too that a Miriam Black cover reveal is in the works for this week.

SyFy.com has an article talking about Chewbacca and his family, and I’m all up in it talking about the Han and Chewie dynamic going on in the Aftermath trilogy.

And I think that’s it.

Here’s another high-test dose of weird macro photos, enjoy:

I wrote on Twitter this week that one of the chief themes behind the current MCU films is that revenge runs counter to heroism — Tony, Thor, Star-Lord, they fall prey to revenge and it causes them to derail their goals and fail the mission(s) at hand.

I want you to write a story of revenge.

How it ends up is all on you — I’m not asking you to confirm the thesis that it runs counter to heroics, that’s the MCU thing. You can do different, if you choose, but I think a good revenge tale always makes for interesting reading, and fitting it int0 1000 words is an extra special challenge.

Length: ~1000 words

Due by: Friday, May 25th, noon EST

Post online.

Give a link below.

(Also note that next week there won’t be a flash fiction challenge — I used to try to schedule them while I’m gone, but lately WordPress has had scheduling issues, and gives me an error when I try to schedule half my posts for some reason, and they never go up. I’ll be in Phoenix, AZ, for the Phoenix Comic-Fest.)

I should rewind.

Last week I said, “Hey, you should eat this sandwich.”

And many of you did. Between Twitter and Facebook I stopped counting at 50 attempts by folks to make and enjoy the sandwich, and countable on one hand were those who didn’t actually like it. Those who did like it have joined me at my new cult compound, where we eat the holy sandwich — now dubbed THE WENDIGO, by the way — and we play cornhole (tee-hee) and sing camp songs and go canoeing and also sacrifice the unrighteous to the Antediluvian Sandwich Gods that live underneath the compound and who have been recently awakened by the glory of so many Sanctified Sandwich Eaters having been summoned by the tasty, tasty Wendigo. Or something. I ate some more yard mushrooms so a lot of this might not be real?

WHATEVER.

Again, to remind you, the now-official Wendigo Sandwich is this:

The Wendigo

Bacon

Peanut butter (crunchy or smooth, but not sweetened, and not too goopy-oily)

Mayonnaise (Duke’s is king, don’t @ me)

Pickles (sweet or dill, your call).

Put it on the bread of your choice (I like sourdough).

BUT OF COURSE, a cult is nothing without its DELICIOUS SCHISMS and SCRUMPTIOUS HERESIES, and in this cult, we welcome such deviations, because we are a cult of deviants. And so, I offer the following Wendigo Configurations, and please feel free to make and try your own, popping them into the comments below. (Sidenote: The Wendigo Configurations is my favorite Robert Ludlum thriller and also the best Mumford & Sons album.)

The Vegandigo

The sandwich is close to being vegan as-is —

Pickles? Easy vegan.

Mayo? Not vegan, but use vegan mayo (Just Mayo).

Peanut butter? Easy vegan.

Bread? I say try it with Dave’s Killer White Bread.

And bacon is already vegan, so there you go.

*receives note*

Apparently bacon is not vegan? AGREE TO DISAGREE.

But okay fine, use tempeh bacon or, for bonus XP, try shiitake bacon.

The When Duck Go

Not a fan of pork?

The cult has you covered.

Use duck bacon.

Because duck bacon is fucking nomworthy, y’all.

I use D’Artagnan brand when I’m not near a fancy farmer’s market.

The Boot-Up-Your-Back-Endigo

This is the sandwich, only, spicy.

How you make it spicy is up to you, but here’s my preferred way to kick it the fuck up and make it perform excellent BDSM with your mouth:

Mayo, same. Bread, same. Bacon, same.

Peanut butter? Okay, spicy peanut butters do exist, but you’re gonna just go ahead and make your own — take a couple tablespoons of peanut butter and whisk into it a teaspoon of chili oil and a teaspoon of gochujang. Whisk that shit together.

Feel free to up the spice quantity for, well, a spicier peanut sauce.

Then, the pickles.

Wickles pickles.

Trust me on this one.

The Spamdigo

Replace bacon with Spam. Make the Spam extra crispy, which I did not do at first, as you can see here in this photo:

Which means yeah, you gotta fry that business. Thin slice. Fry till crisp.

And don’t bring your SPAM SHAME to me — Spam is delicious, and your noxious nose-pinching when I talk about it is classist and you should be ashamed. Not to say you need to like it! But if you’re all elite about it, yeah, you can stow that. Spam is great when fried.

The Spicy Spamdigo

Same thing as above, but dip it in gochujang as you eat it.

Just do it.

The Scalzwendigo

Ditch the bread, stick it all in a burrito, instead.

The Blendigo

Take all of it and put it in a high-test blender and make a smoothie okay ha ha ha Jesus Christ don’t do this this might be a bridge too far even for me.

The Drunken Wendigo: Cocktail Edition

Can we make a cocktail out of this thing? Probably not, but by golly, let’s try.

For bread, we want rye whiskey.

For peanut butter, we shall infuse the rye with peanuts. Let’s go with honey roasted peanuts, for the sweetness. You can also make them yourself, by the way. Then take a cup of them and put them in, I dunno, eight ounces of rye. Or sixteen? I dunno, whatever, we’re making this up as we go and you’re not going to do it anyway. Let it sit for as long as you can muster, maybe 24 hours, then strain a couple times (cheesecloth is your pal).

So, let’s go with 2 oz of whiskey? Maybe 1.5?

For mayo, we’ll do an egg white and lemon juice. (The logic being, mayo is an aioli, and your basic aioli contains egg and lemon.)

For pickles…

*deep breath*

Well, okay, if we’re being authentic, you probably want a shot of pickle juice in there. And pickle juice cocktails are actually a thing, soooo. I’d keep the quantity of it low — a half-ounce, maybe. I’ve had pickling juice in a martini and it was way too intense. If you wanna go with just vinegar, instead, you could use apple cider vinegar or aged balsamic vinegar for its sweetness.

You’re basically making a weird whiskey sour.

My guess is you’d put all this shit in a shaker — 1.5 oz of your peanut-infused whiskey, a half ounce of pickle juice or vinegar, the white from one egg, half ounce of lemon juice, and if you didn’t use honey-roasted peanuts in the whiskey then add a bit of sweetness (in the form of honey or maple syrup). Shake shake shake, Senora, shake it all the time. With ice. When cold, pour into a glass. Then you… drink it? I guess?

This started as a joke but it could maybe work…

Testing is required, I think.

Your Turn, Cultist

Got a variant on The Wendigo? Pop it in the comments below. Note that for it to be a proper variant it must still ultimately look like the sandwich — you can’t say, “My variant is tuna, ketchup, Havarti cheese, and bees,” because that’s a whole different sandwich. You’re looking to take one, maybe two of the ingredients, and tweak them by a degree or two — so it resembles the original without being the original.

GET TO WORK, MY CULINARY CULTISTS