Author: terribleminds (page 155 of 452)

In the face of impossible odds, can one girl stem the tides of war?

It has been six months since clockwork engineer Petra Wade destroyed an automaton designed for battle, narrowly escaping with her life. But her troubles are far from over. Her partner on the project, Emmerich Goss, has been sent away to France, and his father, Julian, is still determined that a war machine will be built. Forced to create a new device, Petra subtly sabotages the design in the hopes of delaying the war, but sabotage like this isn’t just risky: it’s treason. And with a soldier, Braith, assigned to watch her every move, it may not be long before Julian finds out what she’s done.

Now she just has to survive long enough to find another way to stop the war before her sabotage is discovered and she’s sentenced to hang for crimes against the empire. But Julian’s plans go far deeper than she ever realized … war is on the horizon, and it will take everything Petra has to stop it in this fast-paced, thrilling sequel to The Brass Giant.

* * *

SEQUELS ARE JUST PLAIN HARD.

This is one of those undeniable truths that should be carved into stone somewhere. Stonehenge seems like a good bet.

Before I started writing this book, I’d read on various writing blogs and heard from a number of authors that sequels are difficult to write, especially second books in a series. But there is a difference in hearing this difficulty secondhand and being buried waist-deep in the trenches with nothing but a rusty fountain pen and an open vein, fruitlessly carving letters into the mud before the rain can wash them away. I never expected writing a sequel would be easy, but I also had the experience of having already written a couple of books, so I figured it would be no more difficult than those were. Let this serve as a warning: Don’t get cocky. You may have written and published a book (or several!) and think you have this whole writing thing under control, but it’s a terrible terrible lie. Sequels will test you. They will destroy you.

Second books feel like an artless slog. And even when you finally make it to the end, there is an even more horrible truth to be learned: every book from now on is going to be like this. Writing a book isn’t easy. It doesn’t get easier just because you think you know what you’re doing. The more you know, the harder it is, because you recognize just how badly you suck at this whole storytelling thing, and you know that there’s no easy way forward except to trudge right through and hope for the best.

You can hope that you’ll learn something with each new story, that you’ll improve with each new draft, but sometimes, you feel like the kid in art class who mistook a pile of steaming shit for finger paint and now you have a brown mess smeared across the canvas instead of a pretty rainbow. But at this point, you’re invested. All you can do is keep going, shit or not, and make the best goddamn shit-brown rainbow your clumsy fingers can smear onto the page.

And on that note…

TODDLERS AND WRITING TIME DO NOT PEACEFULLY COEXIST.

(Nailed that segue, amirite?)

This novel took me roughly eighteen months to write and edit to completion, the timing of which just so happened to coincide with my daughter’s burgeoning toddlerdom. As a result, this book took twice as many months as the first book to produce, working twice as many hours. Sometimes, I was able to work during her naptime. Sometimes, I could write while she watched an hour of television. Sometimes, I had to work into the wee hours of the morning with a cold mug of forgotten coffee in front of me because it was literally the only time I could focus long enough to get a scene finished.

In fact, this single blog post has already taken me a couple of days to write, scribbled during episodes of Blue’s Clues, naptime, and in the hours between her bedtime and mine.

Writing and editing an entire novel on that schedule is akin to madness.

I just wish I had known years ago just how much having a kid would change my ability to write. I wouldn’t trade my little dude for anything, but man, I wasted a lot of good, solid writing time pre-motherhood. Lesson learned, I guess?

WRITING WITH YOUR AUDIENCE IN MIND IS A GOOD THING… UNTIL IT’S NOT.

Not only is writing a book hard enough on its own—doubly so when trying to write with a toddler in the house—but writing a sequel to a book that is already published and gathering reviews is its own level of torture-hell.

I was about halfway done with the first draft of The Guild Conspiracy when book one in the series came out, and let me tell you… trying to write a sequel while also reading early reviews of your first book is not conducive to being confident in your writing.

(I know, I know… everyone and their great aunt advises against reading your own reviews. Those same people probably advise against looking at your Amazon rankings every day, too. And yay for the authors who can ignore things like sales and reviews and star ratings. I am not one of those authors. I do not get to share in your blissful ignorance.)

One of the top writing tips doled out by writers and publishers alike is to write to your audience. At its most basic level, that just means knowing who you’re writing for and what they like and how to give them something new and different while also giving them what they want to read. Simple, right? Well, with a second book in a series, your audience isn’t this vague, ideal focus group anymore. They’re an actual, living, breathing entity—no longer the people you want to reach with your words, but the people you have reached. You flung the first book out into the world, and there are people who have held it in their hands and turned its pages and read its words. Some of them enjoyed it. Some of them hated it. Some of them think you can’t write worth a damn.

But they exist now, and you want to do your best make them happy.

This is a dangerous road.

Constantly worrying about how a book will be received by readers while you’re still writing it is a one-way ticket to crippling self-doubt. I agonized daily over how certain characters and plot points might be received by the readers of my first book. I second-guessed myself. I tried to please everyone who left a negative review. I tried to please everyone who left a positive review. I lost track of the story I wanted to write and ended up with a book that tried to do too much and accomplished too little.

It wasn’t until several months later, on my second revision of the novel, when the reviews of my first book were no longer fresh in my mind and I’d had some time to mellow for a bit, that I finally reined myself back in and was able to focus on the story as it should have been.

Which brings me to my next point…

NEVER LOSE SIGHT OF YOUR STORY.

Never compromise the story’s integrity for the sake of anything other than your own personal vision for what the story should accomplish. This should be obvious, but after suffering from the kind of crippling self-doubt and second-guessing that comes from trying to write a book for literally everyone but myself, it needs to be said. Loudly.

I could have saved myself a lot of angst and multiple revisions had I only trusted in my original vision for the story and stuck to it from beginning to end. Lesson learned.

EVERYONE AND THEIR GRANDMA HAS ADVICE ON HOW TO FINISH YOUR BOOK.

Literally the only person in my life who did not at one time weigh in on how I should be writing or editing my book was the aforementioned toddler who made sure I never got more than five minutes to write said book.

I am a very honest person. If someone asks me how my writing is going, I don’t plaster on a manic grin and say “fine” while internally screaming for someone to free me from this misery. I usually answer with “oh, you know, I’m actually having a bit of a hard time with the chapter that I’m working on right now,” which understandably leads to whoever I’m talking to giving me their two cents on what I should be doing based on this or that blog article they read, or what they would do if they were writing a book. Which they aren’t. And haven’t. Ever. Because they aren’t a writer.

I appreciate the advice from fellow writers, even if it doesn’t jive 100% with my process, but from non-writers… I know it comes from a place of well-meaning, but telling me to stop worrying about getting the dialogue just right and just move on to the next thing… or, you know if you put this much effort into a new story instead of editing the same one four times, you’d have five times as many books out by now… it’s not helpful. It’s really not.

(I hear this enough from my inner voice. I don’t need to hear it out loud, thanks.)

I struggle with my craft. I work hard at it. I want to improve with everything I write. I don’t want to be the kid who turns in a shit-smeared canvas. I want to be the kid who turns in a masterpiece—even if that means having to scrape away layer after layer of dried fecal matter when I realize my mistake and then starting over with the right materials. (Man, I am really dragging this poop-art metaphor through the whole thing, I guess.)

The point is: Writing is hard. It’s meant to be hard. That means you’re trying to get better at it. And if you learn something in the process, like this here list of things you just read, then rest assured… you’re on the right track.

***

Bio: Brooke Johnson is a stay-at-home mom and tea-loving author. As the jack-of-all-trades bard of the family, she journeys through life with her husband, daughter, and dog. She currently resides in Northwest Arkansas but hopes one day to live somewhere a bit more mountainous.

(Note: Brooke is doing an AMA on Reddit today!)

Brooke Johnson: Website | Twitter | Tumblr | Facebook

The Guild Conspiracy: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Goodreads

OMG YOU GUYS I just finished Stranger Things. I know, I know, I’m slow, I’m late, I’m sorry. (I can’t binge watch TV anymore, much as I’d like to. Having a writing career + a five-year-old + some vague attempt at doing something other than sitting on my boot-ox means I can’t Hoover up a whole TV season into my brain over a weekend.)

The review is: I liked it. A lot. Maybe even loved it a little. It’s not without flaws, mind you. I thought what would be better than a review would be one of those posts where I dissect the thing a little bit, and talk about what might be some interesting takeaways for writers and storytellers.

SO LET’S DO THIS.

*loads up the wrist rocket*

*eats some Eggo waffles*

*summons the Demogorgon*

(Oh, real quick, some of this will feature vague, generic spoilers. I won’t spoil plot details, exactly, but some of what I discuss gives a shape of the show and the events that unspool within it.)

1. Creating empathy and redemption for characters you hate is fucking awesome and you should do it. Example: Steve. Fucking Steve. You watch the show, you hate Steve. You want Steve to get his salad tossed by the Demogorgon. And then, the show does this thing where it’s like, HEY, MAYBE STEVE IS A SHITHEAD BUT NOT A TOTAL SHITHEAD OH DAMN DID STEVE JUST REDEEM HIMSELF? The secondary lesson here is, to surprise the audience you don’t necessarily need some tricky turny plot twist. You can surprise the audience by revealing more of a character — by making them more than the trope. The Steve trope is that he’s every 1980s well-coiffed rich kid bully, but the show gives you more. I don’t know that it rounds him out in a really big way, but it’s a nice turn and it shows that subverting expectations and tropes can be a turn all its own — and one that’s more organic than most shitty plot twists. But here’s one of the interesting tricks to making an unlikable (or at least not-so-easy-to-like) character work: make them an underdog. Joyce is not exactly the most commendable mother up front, but we like her because she’s down on her luck. Hopper is a cop besieged by demons and he’s a brusque, blunt asshole — but again, we’re looking at an underdog, here. Ah, but Steve isn’t an underdog, and so we hate him — until later, when he becomes an underdog and suddenly we like him more, don’t we?

2. But, on the other side of the equation, if you decide to create one of those mustache-twisting villains — you know, a Palpatine who is evil because, I dunno, evil is cool, basically? — then you need to give them a suitable send-off. The show gives us a one-dimensional villain, then never really does anything interesting with it. And that character’s demise is so quick and so hasty it fails to give us the one thing you can really get from such an unsophisticated villain: the satisfaction of a just and righteous end.

3. The show does a lot of good with character agency, by which I mean, it is characters who create problems, who escalate the problems, and who inevitably complicate and then fix the problems. Characters want things, and in pursuit of those things, they fuck up and fail and then succeed as heroes. They push the plot. The plot doesn’t push them. Except…

4. The show occasionally drops out of this mode and then has characters act outside themselves to service the plot. They betray their own emotional intelligence, their own logic, and they do this in order to perform actions that seem necessary to move the plot along. (Example: two characters are out monster hunting, and one randomly disappears and doesn’t answer the other one yelling, and then that other one decides to just, oh, I dunno, crawl into a tree stump because sure, that seems like a good idea. Another example: a protagonist near the end commits an odd, out-of-character betrayal for no other reason than to tidy up the plot and create conflict.) Problem is, when the show does so right by its characters that when it does wrong? It is keenly, almost painfully felt. It is a break in the consistency and constancy of these characters.

5. Similar is true for how the show handles some of its women characters. It handles some of them, like Joyce, so well that when it totally fails Barb, boy howdy is that a glaring issue. It’s like running your thumb along a smooth wooden railing and then — AMBUSH SPLINTER.

6. A lot of TV shows would milk the story for as many episodes as it can. This one is a lean eight episodes, and it works. (Hell, I could’ve taken another 1-2 episodes.) It’s a good example to keep it trim, tight, tell the story using as few narrative building blocks as you can muster.

7. A novel translates best to television format, if you’re concerned about moving one to the other. A novel doesn’t fit well with a film — novels are stories in big, roomy containers. Shoving them into a movie format isn’t impossible, but it’s like trying to squeeze into your Prom Tux twenty years later. You’ve got too much history around your middle and trying to strain into a pair of powder blue suit pants is a good way to rip a seam in shame. Stranger Things — though not based on a novel! — is almost literally a novel in TV format. Episodes translate well to chapters, and each gets a name as in a horror novel. It feels in this way nostalgic not really to the 1980s, but more to the horror novels (even moreso than the films) of the 1980s. It captures the aesthetics of those movies, but it seizes on the narrative of the novels of that decade.

8. Everything is a remix, and that’s okay. Stranger Things leans into this harder than most, and wears its influences (Poltergeist! Stephen King! The Stand! The Goonies! Pretty much any sci-fi/horror film from the 1980s!) right there on its sleeve. It proves that it’s less about how original you are and more about how you rearrange the puzzle pieces to show a different image.

9. FUCK YEAH ROLEPLAYING GAMES. You wanna learn to tell stories? You need to play in — and eventually serve as DM/GM/Storyteller for — a roleplaying game session. It will tell you so much about how to set up the plot but to let the characters tell the story, it will tell you so much about not forcing things, it will teach you so much about how to keep people’s attention and what it means to thrill them or betray the intentions of the narrative. And it’s so awesome that D&D is a legit component to the story, not just as a nostalgic eye-wink but as a literal plot and character connection to the story. RPGs demand their day in the sun.

10. The ending to Stranger Things wraps almost everything up. This is key! It’s something too few shows do, now. Some have described Stranger Things ending on a cliffhanger, but a cliffhanger is where the whole plot stops and you think it’s gone over the cliff. This show wraps… pretty much everything up, and it leaves a few hanging threads that the show could either grab in S2, or it could… not. It’s the right mix. Leave us satisfied with the answer, but lay a few more questions out on the table oh-so-casually, as if it’s just a plate of cookies. Take a cookie or don’t, up to you — the dinner was still delicious.

I don’t read novels like I used to.

I want to, but can’t. That’s for a lot of reasons — for one, it’s time. I write a lot. I have a five-year-old. Life intrudes. My reading is also broader, now. Writing comics means I read more comics. I also do a lot of research and read non-fiction — more non-fic than fic, I think. The other thing, though, is that I know how the sausage is made. I know because I make it every day. My hands are unctuous with narrative pigfat. I find that as you do a thing more and more, you become more persnickety about that overall thing. Example: there’s a farm-to-table ice cream place not far from us, and the owner has very strong opinions about ice cream. Who gets it wrong, who gets it right, what techniques are best, or laziest, or who is sexier, BEN or JERRY. I don’t have those kinds of strong opinions about ice cream because fuck you, it’s ice cream. Bad ice cream is better than no ice cream. Shove it in my bone-cave. All of it. NOW PLEASE.

But! I have strong reactions to novels. Stronger than I used to. I’m like a stage magician where it’s harder to fool me with your magic because I know all the tricks. I can see the misdirection coming a mile away. That means I probably start and put down four novels for every one that I pick up and finish. I don’t throw those first four down in rage before urinating upon them. I just quietly set the book aside, say “This book is not for me,” and then I urinate on it. No rage at all. Only smug beneficence paired with my steaming asparagus pee!

Kidding, kidding. No pee.

But I thought, okay, it might be interesting to unpack a little bit why I pick up some books and then put them down after five, ten, thirty pages. This is true of manuscripts both published and unpublished. And it’s important to note here that none of what I’m about to say is gospel. Some of these books reached shelves. Many of these books do very well despite what I’m telling you here. Which is to say, the list of reasons I’m about to give are intensely personal to me and not in any way good guidelines to follow. Why even include them? First, because I want to unpack it for my own curiosity (and this blog is for me before it is for you), and second because maybe the conversation will trigger something in your thoughts about your own work, or it’ll inspire some interesting and spirited conversation in the comments below.

(I encourage you to use the comments to answer the question: what makes you put down a book?)

Let’s begin.

1. I just don’t want to read it. This isn’t a helpful comment by any stretch of the imagination but it’s vital I get it out there — sometimes, I pick up a book, I start a book, and it’s a puzzle piece whose nubbins and divots don’t line up with mine. Book’s not for me. I’m not for it. End of story.

2. I have no context. None. Zero. Crafting the first thirty or so pages of a book is itself a vital and elusive art. You are required to pack so much into so little while at the same time not overdoing it. But the greatest thing missing from too many books is context. Books that begin with characters just doing shit or saying shit or thinking shit are fine — but from the first page, I want context. I don’t need all the details, but I need some sense of what’s going on and why. I need to be rooted in the story fast as you can get me there. You can meander, but goddamnit, meander with purpose. I need to know why you’re writing it, why the character is here, and why I should give a hot cup of fuck in the first place. This isn’t easy to do! Writing those early pages is a combat landing in terms of narrative — you’ve got to pull us all the way from the atmosphere to the ground in a thousand words. It’s hard, but WE NEEDS THE CONTEXT, PRECIOUS. *gums a fish*

3. Another thing I need that you’re not giving me: stakes. This is tied into the context. But if I don’t know the stakes — what can be won, what can be lost, what’s on the table — then why am I reading? Why are we here? Where are my pants?

4. Too much action. Once again, this is tied a little into the context problem, but I really hate books where I start them and suddenly we’re thrown into BULLETS WHIZZING AND KARATE WHALES AND A THOUSAND CREAMY PASTRY NINJAS and it’s five pages of cool-ass katana action and yet I have no idea what’s happening. Every punch is clear as day, but the motivation behind the scene or sequence is invisible. Realize that the mechanisms for resolving conflict are not the same as the conflict. A fistfight is not a conflict. Why they’re punching the beefy fuck out of each other? That’s the conflict. Jealousy. Stolen property. Revenge. Whatever. Conflict is the reason behind the fight, not the fight itself.

5. The book is all surface. A story isn’t just one thing. It can’t just be what you see, what you read — it has innumerable added layers, all invisible but still keenly felt. Like, okay, consider a sports car. The fanciest fastest motherfucker you can think of. The love child of a Lamborghini and a SR-71 jet. That car isn’t a model. It’s more than its frame and its paint job. Some of the interior you can see: seats, dashboard, steering wheel. Some parts you can see only if you look hard: the engine under the hood, the dead guy in the trunk. (I know cars like that don’t have trunks you can use to store dead bodies, but just play pretend.) Other parts will never be seen by you: the engine’s deepest interior, or the endless human and machine hours put into designing the car and the engine and the experience of the car. The car is more than just its function, too. It has style. It has a vibe. Designers don’t just plunk down a seat thinking, WELL THE DRIVER NEEDS TO SIT. It’s that, but then it transcends function. It becomes, how do we want the driver to feel? How do we want him to look in his own head and to other drivers? The car has a theme, a mood, it has a message. Your story is like that — or, it should be. It can’t just be CHARACTERS SAY SHIT AND DO SHIT. That’s there, but it’s just the paint job. A story operating without deeper layers is a shallow narrative, and I ain’t got time for that.

6. The characters all sound the same.

7. The book starts off too, um, genre-shellacked. What I mean is, if it’s sci-fi, it’s loaded for bear with bewildering sciencey stuff, or if it’s fantasy it’s all funky names with magical apostrophes, or if it’s horror it’s more interested in soaking the pages in raw, red gore and horror tropes. Context is king, yet again. Character is everything. Root me in the character. Make me care. Then layer in the genre elements. It’s like a cake — it’s easy to make icing taste good, but too much of it is gross. (Don’t tell this to my son, who will vacuum the icing into his maw while discarding the cake part. The little barbarian.) The cake is the foundation. It’s what holds up the rest of the stuff. Cake is character, character is cake. Now I’m hungry. I want cake. Someone get me cake. YOU THERE IN THE THIRD ROW. CAKE ME. NOW.

8. Speaking of genre, I’ll put a book down if it feels too samey-samey. It’s not that you can’t do interesting things with well-wrought tropes, but usually, I can tell when you’ve performed the narrative equivalent of a Human Centipede — where you digest one kind of fiction and then excrete that fiction back out into the world. It’s like Taco Bell — you’re just renting it and returning it to the ecosystem without actually processing it. I’d rather you make the genre yours. I’d rather you read more broadly and bring outside influence to the work.

9. No voice at all. This is a personal preference, to be clear — some readers want an author who disappears into the background. I don’t. I want the author to emerge a little, like a shadow in the rain. Sometimes that means word choice or sentence construction or rhythm. Sometimes it’s in the themes that present themselves. The book isn’t ALL YOU, ALL THE TIME, but I still want to see your bloody fingerprints at the margins of the page. I’ll put it this way: Dan Brown’s work is, to me, about as cardboardy as it comes. No harm or foul, because hey, his books are whiz-bang successes. But then you look at someone like Stephen King, whose work always reads like Stephen King. His ease of storytelling doesn’t betray his voice. Daniel Jose Older’s work feels like Daniel Jose Older’s work. Victoria Schwab’s work feels like — drum roll please — Victoria Schwab’s work. (I like these authors because when I read their work, it’s not that I know what I’m in for, it’s that I know I’m in the company of a capable, confident storyteller. Some authors view this as a brand, but a brand is about a pre-existing set of chosen permutations — a brand is about comfort. I want voice. I want to trust in the story even as it brings me discomfort.)

10. Too much voice will kill my interest, too. Comes a point where you gotta get out of the way of your own story. (Again: Stephen King is amazing at this. His work feels like his work, but he’s also not tap-dancing in front of the tale — he sits very comfortably behind the curtain.) Your story isn’t a stunt. It isn’t a stage. You’re playing drums, not playing lead guitar.

11. I’m bored. I get bored easily, to be clear. In this day and age, I’ve got a lot of very dumb stuff competing for my attention and I fall prey to it too easily — it’s a lot easier to check Twitter than read a novel. People could read a book, or they could hunt Pokemon. At the same time, though, I don’t think it’s an unfair ask when I say it’s important a story be interesting. One of the most vital goals of a storyteller is to capture attention. It’s like trapping a fly in a cup. It is necessary to be able to — from the first sentence — snap your fingers and hypnotize me with the tale at hand. And that means being interesting. The question of what’s interesting, however, is a many-headed, snarly beast, but at the very least, look to how one tells a story in person. Think about how you would keep people’s attention. How would you spark their interest? How might you give them just enough to keep listening? Worry, danger, conflict, desire. Imagine telling a story in such a way that if you just quit in the middle of a sentence, you’d leave people hanging with a HOLY SHIT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT look on their dumbfounded faces. Write a book like that.

12 . The balance of mystery is off. Mystery is tricky. Every mystery is a question mark, and as I am all-too-fond of repeating, a question mark is shaped like a hook for a reason. It sticks in you and pulls you along. But too many question marks and you’re pulled into asplodey viscera like that guy from Hellraiser. We need mystery early on — little mysteries that tease us forward without overwhelming. Or one big mystery that will cast its void-like shadow over everything. We still need a rope to feel for in the dark, though — something we use to pull ourselves a long. Too many questions, too much mystery, and we feel lost. We have no rope, no anchor. We have only hooks and darkness. And also cake. What I mean is, I’m still hungry for cake, you bastards.

13. Not enough cake in your story.

13. Fine, here’s a real #13: JESUS GOD THIS BOOK IS SLOW. I don’t need every book to have thriller pacing, though I admit I do prefer a snappier, zippier narrative. But while I do not require your book to read like it’s duct-taped to the back of a cheetah fixed with some manner of rectal rocket, I do want to feel like we’re getting somewhere in a way that respects the story and respects the time of the reader. Some books I read I feel like that stormtrooper on Tatooine — “Move along, old man in a landspeeder. Go on, just go, c’mon. Vertical pedal on the right, Grandpa Kenobi, chop-chop.” A story is liquid. A story moves. It doesn’t need to be a raging rapids, but don’t let it be a stagnant puddle. That’s how you get mosquitoes.

14. The story is too busy, too early. Cleave to simplicity. Simple goals are better than complicated ones. You can build up to bigger conflicts, but at the fore, think conflicts that are primal, that are easily parsed by the largest number of us. A lost child. Revenge for a death. Grieving over someone gone. Broken love. Simple, forthright things will grab us and root us. Common, fundamental problems are key — then you can spin them in whatever way fits the story (A DRAGON WANTS REVENGE ON A LIVING STARSHIP BECAUSE IT KILLED HIS ROBOT LOVER). Start small. Begin simple. Complexity comes later.

15. Also, this is true with language, too. If your book’s language is muddy or bombastic, I’ll check right out. Aim for clarity above any kind of GRAND MAJESTY OF THE HUMAN TONGUE. You’re not trying to impress us with frippery. Writing is a mechanism. It is a means to an end. Writing conveys more than itself. Writing is a conveyance for story, for idea, for character, for theme, for vision. Seek substance over style. Pursue precision in language over a noisy parade of words.

16. The character has done something I hate. And this is a weird thing, because it’s not a character’s job to be likable or to perform actions perfectly in line with my own morality, but if by page five I find out he’s a puppy-kicking baby-shitting rapist, I’m done. Sorry. Maybe this is a tale of his redemption or maybe you just want me to empathize with this horrible person, and that’s fair. I’m just not going to do it. I don’t need characters to be likable. I do, however, need them to be livable — meaning, I need to find some reason to want to live with that individual for 300+ pages. Some things are dealbreakers, though, and a character who is too vile or somehow unredeemable by my own metric… then I just can’t stay in the story.

17. Whoa, way too heavy a hand with the worldbuilding, pal. Ease back on the infinite details, okay? The worldbuilding should serve the story. The story is not just a vehicle for worldbuilding. I want to eat a meal, not stare at the plate. The plate can be lovely! You can work very hard on the plate. But not, I’m afraid, at the cost of the food that sits upon it.

18. Similar to the above? Your book has way, way too much exposition. Exposition is not the devil. We like exposition… ennnh, within reason. I like to treat exposition as if it’s a dirty necessity. It is an unpleasant act that must be fulfilled — it is, in a way, like air travel. Nobody likes air travel. These days, air travel is basically just SKY BUS, full of as many dubious weirdos, like that guy who keeps taking off his shoes, or that other guy who sweats hoagie oil, or those people who were somehow allowed to bring on a Tupperware tub of warm sauerkraut. But if you wanna get to that place you wanna go: you hop on the plane and you get it over with. Exposition is an act that is best served by figuring out how little of it you can get away with while still serving and continuing the tale. Get in. Get out. Get it over with.

19. OH MY GOD I AM BEING CRUSHED BY THESE WALLS OF TEXT. Stories are beholden to rhythm. Short sentences, long sentences, diverse paragraphs, mixed-up word choice. But if I open a book and it’s just one epic paragraph after another, after another, after another, my eyes start to become tired. I pee myself and pass out. It’s not a good scene.

20. I’m confused. No idea what’s happening. Have to keep backtracking to find out.

21. I gain no sense of why now? Every story you write should begin with that essential question: why is this story happening now? If we are to assume that a story is a break in the status quo — and to my mind, stories are exactly that — then the timing of the story is vital. What precipitated the narrative? What events inside the story make it necessary, and necessary at this moment? Did someone just steal the Death Star plans? Is this a Christmas party set in a building just as German terrorist-thieves are about to initiate an, erm, hostile takeover? Has there been a wedding? A funeral? A discovery? An attack? HAS THERE BEEN AN AWAKENING AND HAVE YOU FELT IT? Some stories lack an answer to that question, why now, and I can feel it. It undercuts the urgency of the tale. And urgency is everything. Creating urgency makes the story feel vital and it keeps people reading. (Lending the narrative that urgency is a lesson unto itself, of course.)

22. Not enough sodomy. Okay, just seeing if you’re still reading. But seriously: cake and sodomy.

22. Okay, real #22 — the plot exists outside the characters. They do not control it. They do not contribute to it. Nobody is directing it but you, the Overarching God-Author. You’re like a railroading DM who has the adventure set one way and any time the party wants to try something different (“We’d like to make friends with the Demogorgon!”) you short-circuit and punch the plot to do what you want it to do, not what feels natural to the characters, their motivations, and their actions. Plot should be internal, growing into the narrative like coral, like bones, but yours is external: it’s all exoskeleton, all scaffolding.

23. The plot exists only because of stupid, wrong people and their very bad, very stinky decisions. I’m not saying characters cannot and should not make mistakes. Characters needn’t — and shouldn’t — be perfect. But if the plot only exists because they’re jerky dumdums who just make jerky dumdum decisions, then ennnnyyeaaaah not for me. I prefer you treat your characters as if they’re all intelligent with respect to their own worlds. That doesn’t mean high-IQ. It doesn’t mean a plumber knows how to build a fucking teleporter. It just means within respect to their own life and experience they have some smarts going on.

24. Your characters aren’t acting like people. They’re acting like plot devices. This is related to #22 and #23, but what I mean is, you can feel how they’re acting against logic and their own emotional intelligence to further plot points. They keep secrets when keeping secrets is neither prudent nor interesting — it’s just that the secret is what keeps the plot alive. They lie when it makes no sense to lie. They perform actions like the victims in the horror movie, just stumbling into danger because they need to die to chain to the next scene in the sequence of events.

25. Everything is just a series of scenes. Scenes need to connect. They are bound by a throughline. But yours just feel like disconnected bits — vignettes and moments and setpieces that have been placed next to each other but given no connection. They are rooms without doors or windows.

* * *

INVASIVE:

“Think Thomas Harris’ Will Graham and Clarice Starling rolled into one and pitched on the knife’s edge of a scenario that makes Jurassic Park look like a carnival ride. Another rip-roaring, deeply paranoid thriller about the reasons to fear the future.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Out 8/16. Preorder now:

Indiebound

Amazon

B&N

Get it? Fun guy? Fun gi? Fungi? Mushroom?

SHUT UP

DON’T JUDGE ME

*runs crying into the bathroom*

*slams door*

Anyway.

Short post today. Gotta hit the pavement running and crank out some more of the VENOM AND WHISKEY blend that is Miriam Black, book five. Next week is Invasive and I’ll have a cool TAKE A PHOTO WITH YOU AND INVASIVE AND WIN SOME STUFFS contest coming up next week. (Preorder Invasive now, if you so desire: Indiebound, Amazon, B&N.) Ooh, also, Crimespree Magazine did a review of Invasive here, and said of it:

“Invasive is one part locked room mystery, one part 1950’s monster movie, and one part cutting-edge scientific thriller… The story twists and turns like the hiking trails that circle the island. Hannah Stander is the world’s only hope for survival against an unspeakable horror…”

Pop Culture Beast said of the book:

“Wendig has outdone himself with Invasive. It’s a creepy crawly masterpiece of suspense and genetic horror.”

Also, if you’re not watching Stranger Things, go watch Stranger Things. It’s far from a perfect show — it occasionally dips into PLOT OVER CHARACTER territory and sometimes fails a few of its women characters — but it is the closest thing to a Stephen King novel translated to television. We haven’t seen the final episode yet, but ye gods, is it a spooky delight.

IT IS TIME ONCE AGAIN. We shall force subgenres to have little story babies.

I will give you 20 subgenres. You will pick two from the list either using a d20 or random number generator (or use tea leaves or badger guts or something), then you will write a short story that mashes up those two subgenres.

Length: We’ll say 2000 words.

Due by: Next Friday (8/12), noon EST.

Post at your online space.

Link to it in the comments below. So we can all read it!

THE SUBGENRE LIST:

1. Kaiju
2. Cli-Fi (Climate Change Fiction)
3. Gothic
4. Shapeshifter
5. Weird West
6. Fairy Tale or Fable
7. Body Horror
8. Sword & Sorcery
9. Whodunit?
10. Military Sci-Fi
11. Comic Fantasy
12. Creature Feature
13. Superhero
14. Bodice Ripper
15. Heist / Caper
16. Magical Realism
17. Parallel Universe
18. Noir
19. Time Travel
20. Musical

The machines have risen, but not out of malice. They were simply following a command: to stop the endless wars that have plagued the world throughout history. Their solution was perfectly logical. To end the fighting, they decided to end the human race.

A potent symbol of the resistance, Rhona Long has served on the front lines of the conflict since the first Machinations began—until she is killed during a rescue mission gone wrong. Now Rhona awakens to find herself transported to a new body, complete with her DNA, her personality, even her memories. She is a clone . . . of herself.

Trapped in the shadow of the life she once knew, the reincarnated Rhona must find her place among old friends and newfound enemies—and quickly. For the machines are inching closer to exterminating humans for good. And only Rhona, whoever she is now, can save them.

*** 

When Something’s Wrong, Fix It

Full disclosure: I’m a pantser or, as the cool kids call it, a discovery writer. I begin my stories without any or very little idea of where I’m going, and what will happen. This suits me because I like the experience of a story unfolding before me in a spontaneous, fluid way, getting as near to a reader’s perspective as possible. Of course, it also forces me to rely on my gut a lot of the time. Which is totally cool and never causes any problems.

Oh, wait. No. The opposite of that.

Being a discovery writer is all about instinct — knowing when something is working, and when it’s not. Example: Machinations features a small, barely-there love triangle. In the first draft, it was much more prominent and complicated, but even still I went in with a good notion of who I wanted the main character, Rhona, to end up with. Rhona had other ideas.

Even before I typed the last words, I knew I was on the wrong track. I had the niggling feeling that I was forcing it. But I was already committed; I’d written so many words, you see. Surely I could spin this resolution without having to do a major rewrite? Turns out, my doubts had weight, and I later had to do a lot of rewriting to fix the romantic subplot.

I know a lot of writing advice cautions against rereading and editing while working on a first draft—and sometimes rightfully so—but for myself, it’s impossible for me to move forward when I know there’s a mess behind me that I’m going to have to clean up later. Since then, when I’m certain something is wrong and I have a good idea how to fix it, I simply go back and do so. Saves a lot of heartache down the line.

Muses Are Fickle, But Discipline’s a Bro

There’s a reason a lot of professional authors recommend keeping a consistent writing routine: because it freaking works.

My daily word count goal while writing Machinations was 1,000 words (500 minimum, if I was feeling really off or had to revise). It took me about five and a half months, I only maybe missed a few days here are there, and often wrote more than my goal. Part of the reason I worked so stringently was because I was trying to prove to myself that I could write a novel without the high-intensity challenge and excitement of NaNoWriMo (which, previously, had been the only time I’d finished a novel).

Passion and inspiration are great to have, and necessary to begin, but on the days where the doubt is crippling, habit and discipline will get you through more than some imaginary Grecian goddesses.

Word Count Ranges Exist For a Reason

Come with me, if you will, on a brief journey to my early querying days…

[Insert wavy flashback transition]

Thoughts, at the time of initial querying, c. 2012: yes, your book is outside the typical word count range, but you are a special snowflake and this story is so good and there’s not a single thing you can or should cut. Agents will definitely overlook the fact that you’re 15,000 words over what is generally acceptable for debut authors in your genre. I mentioned the snowflake thing, right?

Reality: Form rejections.

I can’t know for sure, but I suspect a lot of my early rejections were based off the book’s lengthy word count. More to the point, later when I finally decided to roll up my sleeves and axed over 16,000 words to bring it into an acceptable range, I found that it improved the pacing of the story drastically and tidied up some character arcs. I also started getting full requests from agents.

The moral of the story? Don’t hold on so tightly to your words and pride that you’re unwilling to whip the ms into the shape it needs to be in for readers.

(There are exceptions to adhering to word count ranges, of course; a good story always trumps everything else. Still, if you’re over, it might be a good idea to take another look and see if that chapter where your MC takes a long walk and ponders the nature of existence is really necessary to the plot.)

Just Because It’s Hard Doesn’t Mean It Isn’t Worth Doing*

For about a year and a half after finishing the first draft and my aborted querying attempt, I left Machinations alone to collect proverbial dust, consigned to the oblivion of my hard drive. I was convinced it would become another “trunk” novel. Not because it wasn’t any good—friends agreed that it was fun and entertaining—but because the effort involved to fix it, to make it good enough to appeal to agents… well, it seemed like too much work.

I’m embarrassed to admit that now, but at the time, I had all sorts of justifications for setting the manuscript aside. It wasn’t “hard” enough for sci-fi. The voice wasn’t mature enough. I would do better with my next story. Blah blah blah…

So often it seems much easier to move on to a fresh project than tinker around with an old one with all its flaws. New ideas always look incandescent, full of promise, whereas once you’ve put actual words on the page, a story becomes chained to the hard reality of art. No art is perfect, because perfection doesn’t exist. (The saying “art is never finished, you’re just finished with it” also comes to mind.)

Maybe leaving Machinations alone for so long gave me necessary perspective on the story, enough to make the edits it required when I finally returned. Maybe I wasted time. I certainly didn’t complete another novel in between, though I tried. Either way, I eventually toughened up, got in there, and revised. And revised. It wasn’t easy, but it was worth it.

* I stole this expression from my grandma, but don’t worry. She’s cool with it.

My English Teacher Was Wrong (And Yours Might Be, Too)

Two of the most damaging beliefs I ever received about books came from an English teacher I had in high school. The first was, “If you know every word in a book, it’s beneath you.” And the second was, “If it’s entertaining, it’s not good literature.”

Not coincidentally, that’s also what my inner editor sounded like throughout drafting Machinations. Along with pointing out punctuation and grammar errors, my inner editor laughingly questioned whether my book would be considered “good literature” because it featured so much humor, because it was bright and fun and—gasp!—entertaining.

True: Machinations isn’t high-brow. It won’t make you go to the dictionary every other page—but so what? That’s not the instrument by which I measure a good book, and it’s not the book I wanted to write either. I wanted to write an adventurous, character-driven story that asked big questions about love and identity. A book readers could enjoy and come away feeling good about by the end.

It took me a long time to drown out that teacher’s voice and see the worth in what I was writing. And you know what? With all the darkness in the world today, I think creating fiction that allows people an escape hatch from the real world is as noble a goal as any.

***

Bio: Hayley Stone has lived her entire life in sunny California, where the weather is usually perfect and nothing as exciting as a robot apocalypse ever happens. When not reading or writing, she freelances as a graphic designer, falls in love with videogame characters, and analyzes buildings for velociraptor entry points. She holds a bachelor’s degree in history and a minor in German from California State University, Sacramento. Machinations is her debut novel.

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