Author: terribleminds (page 158 of 454)

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.

Hayley Stone: Website | Twitter | Facebook | Tumblr

Machinations: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Goodreads

the fuzziest, happiest dragon you ever did see SHUT UP SHE IS TOO A DRAGON

I said a thing last year about social media being a misunderstood opportunity for writers and blah blah blah social media is about connecting and not selling.

You should go read that.

Because I’d like to expand on it a little bit.

Writer Christa Desir tweeted from a conference that Random House gives its authors a social media grade, which is to suggest that social media is important to a writer’s existence. (I for one would like to know my social media grade. Also my liquor consumption grade, my self-doubt score, and the percentages that show just exactly how much of an impostor I actually am. GET ON THAT, PUBLISHERS.) I have no idea if this idea is in any way malevolent or misguided on the part of the publisher — I’ll go ahead and be optimistic and assume that the grade is not to judge or diminish an author but simply to show authors who might could use a little coaching on social media. Because on social media you can do some good or you can do some ill-ass evil, and hey, maybe it’s a good thing to help people understand what it means to be a writer-person in the online world. (Thanks go to Christa for putting this stuff out there, by the way, because this one of the ways that author social media is best: writers sharing information with other writers.)

Anyway.

I’d like to say some things regarding writers hoping to use social media to sell books and expand their audiences — well, first, I’d say that please do realize that every friend or follower is also not a 1:1 reader. Meaning, they read your tweets, not your books. They may eventually come over to reading your books, or they may have started as a reader of books and then segued into being a reader of tweets, but it’s not an automagic process. People don’t follow you on Twitter or Instagram and suddenly become MINDSLAVES TO YOUR WRITING. Your words are not a meme-based parasite that drives them to seek your words in other quantity. (I’m working on that, but so far the science has failed me.) Often enough, though, we pretend this is the case. That social media success is the same as book success, or that one follows the other, or that they’re intimately connected — two forces cosmically joined in word-squishing fornication.

The success of your book does not rely upon social media.

And the success of your social media does not rely upon your book.

The two flirt with each other. But they are not perfectly bound.

I’d like you to consider the success of your book in RPG (role-playing game) terms.

As someone who has played many an RPG (in paper and on screens) and who has written them, too, I actually think that RPGs inadvertently model life’s many progressions fairly well — not in a literal way, but in a metaphorical way, which is why I say “model.” RPGs provide a kind of framework for thinking about how we interact with the world and how we move through it, gaining cool new kung-fu moves as we go along the way. (I’ve long thought that writing a non-fiction book about Life Lessons Gained From D&D would be a cool project.) Part of this is that much of life is down to luck. Life is down to random chance, to a confluence of atoms, to lots of coincidences big and small elbowing into one another. But luck isn’t dumb. Luck is smart. You can actively pursue luck. It’s not roulette, where your choice is literally up to the whims of the universe. It’s poker — where you take the cards you’ve been dealt and then you make decisions and take actions based on those cards in order to maximize your chances. In some RPGs, luck is literally a stat. You can use it in a variety of ways to help achieve your goals.

So.

Let’s say that over there is a dragon. This dragon represents the success of your book.

You want to slay that dragon. That is the task before you. Slay the dragon and then slit his belly and gold comes pouring out because, I dunno, this dragon eats gold, shut up. The gold is a royalty from your book sales. Dragon dead. Book a bestseller. Huzzah and hooray, let’s go to the tavern and get fucking sloppyshite on Kobold Piss Whiskey and Dwarven-Forged Ale.

In game terms, the way you mechanically slay a dragon is you have an attack roll — you roll one or several dice and the dice determine if you hit. Your dice are likely modified by your skills, and they are likely modified by the weapon you hold in hand. You make one or several attack rolls to murder that dragon, because apparently the greatest desire of a fantasy traveler is to fuck up a poor, gold-eating dragon, you monster.

Generally, in games, you have various ways to modify that roll. You cast a spell on you or your weapon. You train your skills. You sharpen the blade. You spend some kind of expendable resource (Willpower, Luck, Confidence, whatever) to add dice or numbers to the roll — all in order to increase your advantage in order to slay the dragon. Your success is ultimately still random, right? You try and you win or fail based on the whims of the dice. Ah! But, you do these things in order to increase the chance of your success and reduce the chance of your failure.

Now, you pretty much need some kind of weapon to slay the dragon. You might be able to use your bare hands and punch the dragon to death, but if that’s your strategy, I’m gonna go ahead and assume you have an incredibly low chance to hit and an incredibly high chance of the dragon burning you to a glob of charred fat before promptly shoving you between two horses and gobbling you right up (for this is the dragon’s favorite kind of sandwich). Your chance of success via DRAGON-PUNCHING is so low it is approaching zero. Sure, you probably heard tell of some guy who did it, but that guy is not your model, he is a MYTHIC OUTLIER.

So, assume you need a sword.

In book-writin’ terms, that sword is your book.

You can go into dragonbattle with a shitty wooden sword — a fucking crap-ass book, in other words — or you can go into battle with the best goddamn sword you can muster, which is to say, the best goddamn book you can write. But you need a sword. You need a book.

Having a great sword is no guarantor of beating the dragon. But it ups your chances. And having a great book offers no guarantee of that book being a slam-bang success — oh, if only it were. Many books are published that are great… and they suck the pipe before taking a big ol’ dirt-nap. Many books are published that are terrible and those books end up as New York Times bestsellers. (This is where someone chimes in: LIKE YOUR BOOKS, SUCK WENDIG, and then we all have a merry chuckle before I command the dragon to eat your ass like it’s a goat salad.)

You can, as a wannabe dragonslayer, do things to up your chances of doing more damage — like I said, cast a spell, sharpen the blade, whatever. And you can, as a wordslinger, up your chances of making your book a success. One of the things that provides a positive modifier to your book-publishing dice roll is engaging with social media in a positive way. And that can mean whatever it means. It may mean engaging with fans in a cool, not shitty way. It may mean sharing things you love. It might mean just being funny and sincere and the best version of yourself. It means, most likely, occasionally promoting yourself and your book without then hitting people in the mouth and crotch with the news of your book. (Note too that social media can also end up as a negative modifier — if you are a super-shitty-dick-person on Twitter and you shellac the social media frequencies with your smug spunk and a sheen of fermented crappiness, there is a very good bet that you have just harmed your chances at your book succeeding.)

There exist a few important takeaways here —

First, social media modifies the blade — but it is not itself the blade. I’ve heard tales where people have gotten book deals based purely off their social media followings and have maybe even found success that way. Like the knight who wanted to punch the dragon to death, assume once again that what you’re looking at is a MYTHIC OUTLIER. (Our writing careers will be filled with tales of mythic outliers — authors who credit random tasks as the progenitor of success, as if the results of those actions were JUST GOOD OLD-FASHION WISDOM rather than the product of divinely-inspired luck. We saw this to a degree with the tide of self-publishing: those who found success there were suddenly building churches to the cause rather than accepting that what they did was just one way up the mountain.)

Second, modifiers are non-essential components. All you need are YOU and the SWORD. Yes, it’s not a bad idea to add modifiers — but what’s essential is the book, not the social media around the book. If you’re frantic about social media and how it effects you and your book sales, calm thy nipples. Also, not everyone is great at social media, so remember again it can become a negative modifier instead of a positive one.

Third, social media is not the only modifier available to you. Assume that a wide variety of things contribute: marketing, advertising, book cover, book description, shelf placement, and so forth. Plus, you’re also playing to unseen targets: cultural zeitgeist, for instance. Sometimes a book is a hole-in-one simply by dint of it speaking to some unrealized human frequency. Sometimes a book fails because it is out-of-sync with that frequency. But there exist other ways to modify, is my point. You needn’t rely on social media. And if a publisher wants you to rely on social media, you should cast that publisher a wary eye.

Fourth, and building off that last point…

One final and vital modifier to the DRAGONSLAYING BOOKSELLING dice roll is the huge modifier your publisher brings. Actually, it may be better not to view the publisher’s efforts as a modifier but rather as them bringing a whole dragonslaying party to the battle. With a good publisher and a strong effort, you are no longer alone in this fight. You’ve got an elf archer, a demon cleric, a dwarven accountant, a berserker baboon whose ass shoots lightning — whatever. Hell, a really epic publisher effort might mean you’re bringing an entire ARMY to bear against the dragon. Sure, the dragon might still eat every last one of you for lunch, but I’d rather go to dragonwar with a hundred knights than just me, a chainmail codpiece, and a steel blade. It’s your name on the book, so you get to look like the lone hero, but it doesn’t need to be that way in reality. (How this applies to self-publishers: you aren’t just the writer. You’re author-publisher. You bring to bear a team of people to the task, just as a larger publisher would.)

Go forth.

Write the book.

Slay the dragon.

Be the best version of yourself.

The end.

* * *

Gonzo Writing Book Bundle! Eight books. Normally $20.00, but with coupon code DRAGONPUNCHER, you’ll knock that cost down 25%, to $15.00. Sale runs until Monday, 8/15.

There you go.

*clink*

(That’s a Not Your Grandmother’s Greyhound from Bolete in Bethlehem, PA.)

Some quickie news spoogings, here and now:

Crimespree Magazine reviews INVASIVE, saying in part:

“INVASIVE is one part locked room mystery, one part 1950’s monster movie, and one part cutting-edge scientific thriller. All parts thrown together like a literary Swedish chef. 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…”

Not only will I be doing an INVASIVE launch week event at Doylestown Books (8/17, 6:30PM, details here), I’ll also be helping relaunch Let’s Play Books in Emmaus on Thursday, Sept 22nd, at 7PM (deets here) and also the relaunch of Main Point Books in Wayne, PA on 9/10 at 2PM (deets). If you’re in the tristate area, I hope to see you at one of these. Also on launch week — I’ll be running a cool contest. With prizes. FOR STUFF. Get excited. No, I mean it, get excited. *stares at you until you get excited* *waits* *stares harder*

And hey finally — didja see, didja see? I’m a spotlight guest at NYCC’s book con this year! Ha ha ha! I continue to fool the world by convincing them I’m a legitimate writer! Suckers. Anyway. COME SAY HI.

And I think that’s it.

All the news that’s fit to print. Even though this isn’t print. It’s digital. Everything is digital now. I’m digital. You’re digital. THIS IS THE MATRIX OH GOD WE’RE ALL FOOD FOR BATTERY SPIDERS I need another drink

AND WE’RE BACK.

Sorry — I was away for the last couple weeks.

Which is how I’m leading into today’s flash fiction challenge! Drum roll please: I’d like you to write a story about a vacation. This can be in any genre. Horror, sci-fi, fantasy, romance, whatever. Whatever it is, it must be set in and around a vacation (though your interpretation of that is as flexible as your creativity).

Length: 1500 words

Due by: Friday, August 5th, noon EST.

Post at your online space.

Drop a link to it in the comments below.

ENJOY YOUR TRIP.

Gen Con did something pretty great this year, which is to say, it made sure to ensure gender parity across its guests and featured speakers and also started to address other disparities, too. Some of you may know that I cut my teeth in the paper RPG industry, working for over a decade with White Wolf and other game companies — I know too then that the game industry’s audience and its creators are wildly diverse, even as the industry often only chose to actively reflect the white guys like, well, yours truly. A.A. George wanted to write a little bit about what Gen Con has done this year in order to hype you up for what is likely to be a great con. (I won’t be there, razza frazza sadness. Maybe next year!) Here goes:

* * *

Gen Con: one of the oldest and largest gaming conventions in the world, where many important and famous members of the industry meet and mingle with casual hobbyists in an epic tribute to all things geeky. From trends in design to the hottest new releases, what happens here reflects what’s happening in analogue gaming.

This year I had the pleasure of sitting on the committee that chose the Guest of Honor and Industry Insider Featured Speakers at Gen Con.

Selecting the Featured Speakers was a fantastic – if daunting – challenge. An incredible pool of veteran and award-winning designers, organizers, writers, academics, artists, critics, and activists applied in droves for one of these coveted spots. This was Gen Con and we had to get it right.

The result? A beautiful testament to what gaming was, is, and will be: a powerful line-up of voices that represent decades of experience in the industry as well as emerging, innovative, and disruptive voices that are changing how we look at, understand, and play games.

Here are three reasons why the Guest of Honor and Industry Insider Featured Speaker panels can’t be missed:

1) You will meet many of the most talented and exciting people working in gaming today. Mike Pondsmith, the creator of Cyberpunk, Castle Falkenstein and a host of other games is the Guest of Honor this year. He is the founder of R. Talsorian Games, previously an Xbox design manager, former president of GAMA, and a rockstar speaker. Mike Pondsmith is a living legend.

The Featured Speakers boasts a star-studded cast.

Wesley Schneider is the editor-in-chief of Paizo, co-creator of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, author of Pathfinder Tales: Bloodbound, and is developing a game supplement for Vampire Hunter D.

Katherine Alejandra Cross is a PhD student in sociology at CUNY, a cultural critic who has written for Rolling Stone and Bitch Magazine, and a game critic whose work has appeared in Gamasutra, Polygon, and Offworld, and a professional speaker who has spoken at conferences like GDC and SXSW.

Jessica Price is the project manager at Paizo, a writer and director of the animated series Nanovor, which has garnered over a million views on Youtube, a writer and producer for Microsoft’s Kinect launch portfolio, and a writer for State of Decay 2.

Emily Care Boss is a game theorist, editor, writer and award winning game designer, founder of Black & Green Games and co-designer of Bubblegumshoe.

Anna Kreider is a game designer, illustrator, diversity consultant, and activist who has worked for Onyx Path, Green Ronin, and Wizards of the Coast and whose industry-watched blog Go Make Me A Sandwich has had more than two million views.

Kathryn Hymes, co-founder of Thorny Games, is an award-winning game designer who did her Masters in Applied Mathematics at Stanford, was the first computational linguist hired by Facebook, and utilized gamification strategies at Foursquare.

Hakan Seyalioglu is a Fulbright Scholar with a PhD in Mathematics with a focus in Cryptography from UCLA, a software engineer at Google working on Youtube and Google Play, and the co-founder of Thorny Games.

And so many more amazing speakers!

2) You’re going to consume a fantastic lineup of panels on a wide range of topics that will make you question your assumptions and look at gaming in new ways:

RPGs are more mainstream than ever, but many of us have stories about a game that went bad and how a potential player lost interest in the hobby. Making RPGs Welcoming To New Players will teach you what you need to know to ensure new players feel invited, welcomed and eager to come back to the table.

Want to know how to include sex in games from a woman’s perspective? Right There On The Kitchen Table: Sex in RPGs brings in three great female writers and designers who understand the complexities of representing sex in gaming.

Are you an aspiring game designer who wants to learn game development using established systems? Hacking As Other: Minority Game Design is a fantastic workshop that helped launch some great new games, including the hotly anticipated Bluebeard’s Bride.

So many RPGs are designed around fighting. But roleplay is more than the melees. Beyond Combat will open up a whole universe of gaming without all the battles.

Roleplaying is all about putting ourselves in other people’s shoes, understanding a different perspective. But how do we tell stories that are outside of our own lived experiences? Designing With Empathy will give you the tools to approach sensitive and challenging topics to create memorable, powerful play.

Are you a victim of imposter syndrome and feel paralyzed in the creative process? 5 Ways of Finding Your Spark will reignite your passion, your belief in yourself and your creative powers.

Writers and designers have struggled with creating honest and authentic trans characters. Three talented trans women will show you the way to making your stories and games ring true in Writing Trans Characters For Games & Fiction.

We all have powerful, personal stories inside of us. But telling them is tricky, sometimes even scary! Storytelling & Self-Censorship will give you the tools to tell incredible, intimate stories through gaming.

And many more!

3) You will be part of the gaming zeitgeist! This year’s Industry Insider Featured Speakers famously made history for finally reaching gender parity, capturing the spotlight in news outlets ranging from the BBC and the Washington Post to BoingBoing and Tor.com. It’s a game-changing year for Gen Con and you will get to be part of this special moment in history, hearing from the women and men who are making gaming relevant and exciting to wider audiences than ever before.

This is only a taste of the enormous talent, knowledge, and experience that the Featured Speakers have to offer you. Gen Con’s Speaker slate is spotlighting the Microsofts of the gaming world – industry giants who represent the foundation of modern gaming side by side with the Teslas of the gaming world – exciting, cutting-edge, inventive industry pioneers who are shaking up and expanding what gaming can be. Simply being in the same room with these people will open your mind to new possibilities, inspire your own gaming dreams, and help lead you down a path to one day join them as a future Gen Con Featured Speaker!

If you’re used to being told, “gaming can’t do that,” or “you can’t do that,” this year’s Gen Con will show you, “yes we can,” and “yes gaming can!”