Author: terribleminds (page 164 of 480)

These are weird days for the country — hell, the world — and I think as writers it behooves us to look at our place and what our work means or can mean in the context of this changing landscape. Betsy had some thoughts in that direction, so here she is to talk about it:

* * *

A few years ago I wrote a book called The Silver Scar. I’ve been joking since it sold if He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named got elected, at least Alt-America would be awesome publicity for my future thriller featuring a pagan eco-terrorist and a Christian soldier trying to stop a crusade in a balkanized United States run by martial neo-Christian Churches. Alas, Scar doesn’t come out until 2018, so it’ll have to wait for its big promotional moment in the sun, which at the rate the EPA plans to roll back its regulations might be burning much hotter by then.

But I have another book out February 21, the conclusion to my Seven Eyes trilogy, called Enemy. It’s about this chronically depressed prince who suffers a coup by an upstart, spoiled lord and then has to find his missing queen, figure out how to live with magic that blinds him, and fight a foreign invasion. Cheerful stuff, right?

While it’s uncomfortable to talk about your own book at any time, it feels trite along about now even though this is my actual job. It’s been worrying me, the relevance my fantasy novel has in Alt-America. What does Draken have to do with daily slap-fights between the government and the press or fake massacres because the real ones apparently aren’t bad enough? It doesn’t feel like enough somehow, like I should have written a different book with a theme more pertinent to the times. This insecurity fits right in with my fear that We the People aren’t enough to save our democracy… not loyal enough, radical enough, liberal enough, conservative enough, smart enough, pragmatic enough.

And then my kids marched with their fellow high schoolers the week of the election.

Millions of people around the world protested peaceably the day after the Inauguration.

Millions other people with chronic depression, people with other conditions, people with no conditions started speaking and getting heard. Daily Dissent on Facebook. Senate offices swamped with phone calls. More protests with signs that read, “See you next weekend.”

There is inspiration and energy all around us, which only makes me feel worse about discussing my new book.

But when I revisited the flap copy, I realized with no little shock that two years ago I accidentally wrote a story in which every rational and irrational fear I’ve had since the election happens to Draken. Akrasia is a nation of several races of immigrants and all the prejudices and privileges of diversity. After spending years building bridges among the people, he loses his family, his home, his future. Women lose their rights to fight, to own, to be more than just ancillary to men. Friends are disappeared or murdered for being the wrong race or in the wrong place. His country loses all its hard-won stability and safety.

Overnight, Draken goes from prince to enemy of the state. It takes him a while to sort out facts from lies, danger from paranoia. It takes him longer to realize who he is actually fighting. But the strides he made before are not gone; only the path has changed. The people who want peace and happiness for all are still out there, waiting for their opportunity. Just like our own people are still here, wanting our world to be the best it can be.

Since the election I’ve been reading and reading like a madwoman, always with a book in my hand. I haven’t been that way since I was a teenager doing my best to ignore a world I failed to understand, a world of sharp edges and barbed words. It’s not a bad tactic to avoid reality. Frodo, Adam Dalgliesh, Miss Marple, and all the rest were good friends to me then. They let me into their worlds when no one would let me into my own. They taught me how to be a part of things when I had no practical experience.

I’ve realized again how story bolsters us through harrowing times. We can relate; we’re all trying to write our own. Immigrants are trying to rewrite their own lives into happier stories of security, safety, family, and growth. Parents are trying to write the world around their kids into something they can live well inside, and write the kids into people who can live well inside the real world. The government is trying to rewrite the US into something… else.

Writers, hell. We’re just trying to write anything at all, reality be damned and truth revered.

But that’s the crutch of the thing, right? Stories matter. Right now it might be the stories skirting reality which matter most of all.

Fantasy tends to sell well during wartime. Fantasy is a reflection of our world painted in more brilliant shades. The sun burns hotter, the blood runs redder, the tropes are tropier. But the heroes shine brighter, too. We aren’t at war yet, not like some people say.

And yet we are. Lucky for us there are thousands of books full of other worlds in which the protagonist who makes a difference is unlikely, as unlikely as you or I. Even princes like Draken are unlikely; he’s got a truckload of fears and faults holding him back from doing the things that matter. I know I do.

Far be it from me to offer anyone advice on how to change the world into a better place. I’m a storyteller, not a life coach. But I will say this. When Draken is made powerless and realizes he has become the enemy, he focuses on what small thing he can do, and he does it with a vengeance. I don’t think he’s an anomaly. I think there is something each of us can do, maybe small, even accidental, and it will matter. It will add up.

* * *

Everything Draken thinks he knows is wrong.

The last time Draken traveled Akrasia, he was the highest lord in the land. His journey before that was eased by royal favor and the grace of the gods. This time is different. His adopted country buckling under attack from religious fanatics and his Queen presumed dead, Draken must flee a deadly coup by an upstart lord. Bitter from fighting an insurmountable war and losing the life he’s built, he lets the ghosts of past mistakes drive him into vigilante revenge. But Draken is about to learn gods and wars have a way of catching up to a man.

Betsy Dornbusch: Website | Twitter

Enemy: Amazon | B&N | Powells

I am astonished these days by the bold-faced ballsiness of the Republican hypocrisy.

My jaw is perpetually on the floor. It’s not even attached anymore. It’s just a jawbone resting at my feet, as my tongue flops and flips around my rent-open face in moist gesticulations that fail to properly explain the sheer what-the-fuckery I’m forever feeling.

It’s probably always been there, this hypocrisy. Maybe it was better hidden, once upon a time. And certainly no political entity is without its duplicities and insincerities — but what we’re seeing now, what is paraded before us daily by both the administration and by Congress, is like satire written by an angry eight-year-old. It’s so clumsy, so on-the-nose, that no one would ever let the story air because it feels like a chimpanzee’s attempt at parody. Irony is dead. It’s six-feet-deep. Political humor is harder now than ever, because how do you make fun of a clown?

Every time I turn on on the news or even glimpse at Twitter, I see more and newer hypocrisies whipping fast past my eyes, scrolling like the list of side effects you’d get on a commercial for dick pills. It’s dizzying: an ever-growing display of towering horseshit so vertiginous that to attempt to climb it would be positively fucking Sisyphean. You’d never make it to the top. You’d forever be sliding back down as another shovel-load whaps you in the face.

They say they care about families, but then they rip them apart and deny them aid. They call women “hosts,” removing their personage, their choice, their access to care. They love unborn kids but somehow hate the women that give birth to them. Eat shit, Moms. They only want what’s in those uteruses, not the uteruses themselves. And once you’re born, ha ha, double fuck you, kid. Fuck your education. Fuck your health. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, they say only after they’ve bought up all the bootstraps for themselves and closed the bootstrap factories and what the fuck is a bootstrap, anyway?

They speak about individual responsibility, but can’t even show up for their own fucking town halls. They won’t be accountable to anything or anyone, but you, you have to be accountable for everything — even for them. When they say individual responsibility, they mean fuck you, do it yourself. Fuck the safety net. Fuck the general health and well-being of the nation. They got theirs, man. They mean that they won’t help you. The government’s very job is one of communal responsibility, but they have absolved themselves of that role and given it only to you. And how far down does that rabbit hole go? Will we be our kids’ only teachers? Are we our own doctors? Is the road outside my house mine and mine alone to build and to fix? They want to hold only their enemies accountable. They’ll investigate Hillary for decades after she’s dead, but they won’t cast one suspiciously-slitted eye toward Trump, toward Russia, toward every pay-for-play drip of corruption that erodes the bedrock of our government’s ability to self-regulate.

They talk about freedom, but the freedom they want isn’t for you. The freedom you want is the freedom to be able to drink clean water, to breathe clean air, to buy products that won’t kill you, to buy insurance that won’t bankrupt you, to invest in a future that helps you instead of hurts you. The freedom they want is for themselves. The freedom they champion isn’t yours, it belongs to big business. They want businesses to have the freedom to poison your air and your water, to lie to you, to tie you up with loopholes like nooses, to savage your investments and your future earnings. They want the freedom to take advantage of you, and they’ll sell that as your freedom, too. Don’t you want the choice to be lied to, to be cheated, to be ruined? What freedom! What choice! Ah, yes, just as our Founding Fathers wanted: the liberty of empowering others to fuck you from every angle. Isn’t that in the Bill of Rights? Can we get it in there somewhere?

They talk about being fiscally conservative, but then they spend money like they can just print more. (And our president thinks we can just print more.) It’ll cost more for our Comrade-in-Chief to go golfing than for the entire National Endowment for the Arts budget. The president has the fiscal discipline of a drunken gambling addict.

They talk about being stewards of the land, then take a flamethrower to the EPA, try to sell off the national parks, refuse to acknowledge climate change, and eradicate environmental protections — including streams. Because fuck streams, right? Streams have had it too good for too long.

They want you to pay your taxes, even though our president is proud of having never paid his.

They bark about voter fraud, then gerrymander the shit out of everything, rigging the game with a hundred thumbs holding down their side of the scale.

They climb to their seat of power on a ladder whose rungs are fashioned from fake news, and then once they’re up there, they look down at you and say, you’re the fake news. Everything you want, fake. Everything you are, fake. You don’t even exist if you disagree. Did you protest? You were paid. Did you show up at a town hall? You’re not a constituent. You’re a unicorn. A snowflake in need of a safe space.

And yet, they call us snowflakes, but melt under the tiniest light of scrutiny, under the smallest agitation. The moment anyone disagrees, they retreat to their own safe spaces, close and lock the doors, turn off all the lights, lower all the blinds so they can peer out until we’re gone.

The evil circus peanut who sits in the highest chair in the land decries liberal Hollywood elites while being himself a liberal Hollywood elite. We must do more with less, the man says as he goes to one of his like, seven fucking White Houses to hold a rally for an election in four years that doesn’t even have an opponent.

They talk about making America great, as if Americans weren’t already great.

They vilify illegal immigrants, as if we weren’t all illegal immigrants — as if this isn’t a country built first on native land that wasn’t ours, then second on the backs of black slaves who we stole and enslaved and tried to treat more like livestock than as human beings. They try to demonstrate how great this America is, but then those who come here to share in its greatness are cast aside, are sent away, are rounded up and torn from their families and told they don’t belong here. They claim to serve an America for all Americans, but it’s not — it’s for a very narrow slice, for the richest and whitest and straightest, for the healthiest, for the abled, for the men, for the companies, for themselves. Even the white working class gets fucked even as they’re told they’re not, because they still have to drink the water and breathe the air. They vote for the right to poison the water, you drink the water, you get cancer, but fuck your health, and fuck your kids if they’re born with a defect, that’s America, now, buddy. The freedom they want is to get what’s theirs from your pocket and pay no price for it even as you wither and weep at their feet. The freedom they want is to rob you blind then point to The Other and say, they did it, over there, it wasn’t us. We look just like you. You could be rich someday. Wouldn’t that be nice? It’s them over there. The welfare queens. The foreigners. The terrorists and the rapists. Not us. Never us.

They make hats and shirts that say AMERICA but whose tags say CHINA.

All the while, that word America in their mouths like a Bible verse on the tongue of the Devil. God Bless America, they say as they pick up their axes and chop at the roots of this tree. We’re good Christians, they say, as they do yet another un-Christian thing, because I’m sure it was Jesus who said fuck you, I got mine. Piss on compassion. To hell with empathy. These hypocrites cut away at the foundation of all the things we need to be a smart, healthy, successful country. They attack science. They hack at education. They want to chop your healthcare to splinters. They destroy debate. They slit the throat of every fact they don’t want you to know. They call the media the opposition, the enemy. They claim that truth is fake. The truth that we are at greater danger from white nationalist terror than from radical Muslim terror? Fake. The truth that we have nothing to fear from refugees, and that they are already extremely vetted? Fake. The truth that transgender individuals are not the harassers but in fact, the harassed? Fakeity-fake-fake, they say. The sky is red, ham is a fruit, pray for the family of Shazaam Berenstein, a survivor of the Bowling Green Massacre who then went on to die in the Swedish Event.

Their hypocrisy only grows — swelling like a tumor, diverting blood-flow away from healthy organs and to itself, because that’s how a cancer grows. A cancer is your body in rebellion. A cancer is rogue cells bypassing the checks and balances of your biology. This is that. Their hypocrisy is a symptom, though. And like with all symptoms, we must not ignore it.

We must treat the disease. Inoculate against the bullshit.

They will not hold themselves accountable.

So we must.

We must demand they do better.

We must demand our media be the watchdog.

We must resist their duplicity and their lies.

Courage in this strange time, folks. Stay frosty. Remain vigilant. Hang together.

Comments closed because, really, c’mon.

I am asked sometimes how I do it.

Write books, they mean. Or finish books. Or finish a trilogy, or jump from Miriam Black to Star Wars, or switch from novels to comics and back again.

And obviously the mechanical answer to that is, you sit and you fucking do it. You say, I’m going to fucking do this thing, and then that’s the thing you try very hard to do. As I said on Twitter today, the ditch ain’t dug till you dig the damn ditch. Beyond that, I can offer a bevy of other answers, many personal to the author and not entirely applicable to every other author, and those answers deal with how you prepare the work, how you outline, how you treat characters and embrace process and whether or not you listen to music while you write or whether or not you get gin-drunk and punch a bear before you write. Or, or, or. Everybody’s different. Everybody’s got their way up, down, or through the mountain. Writers aren’t precious snowflakes until they are.

But there’s a deeper truth going on that I find vital. And it’s this:

You’re always thisgoddamnclose to failing.

Now, the nice way to put it would be: writing means taking risks. Risks are — *bites lip, narrows eyes, smolders generally* — sexy. Nngh. Yeah. Take a risk with me, baby. Drive fast. Live loose. Eat raw cookie dough naked in the saddle of a galloping velociraptor. Boom. Risks. Yes.

But I don’t necessarily want this to be sexy.

I want you to understand, some of the best — and, likely, some of the worst — fiction was written by tap-dancing right on that line separating success and failure. Or, moreover, tap-dancing across the ombre gradient that shows the swiftly sliding scale that carries a work from mediocre to good to amazing to oh fuck it’s shit now, it’s all shit, it tried to jump across the widening chasm and it fell down into the fissure and was promptly eaten by cave lizards.

Let’s talk a little about cooking.

What? I know, shut up, just — just follow the bouncing ball.

You grill a steak, what happens? You apply intense heat very quickly — you want it just right, just perfect. You want it juicy and pink on the inside, tender as anything, but on the exterior you want some color, maybe a little char. Not crispy, but done right on the outside, while almost not at all on the inside. Tender, but not mushy. Thing is, that moment of perfection is about as long as an avocado’s window of ripeness — it’s like, a minute, maybe less. You cook that steak one minute too long, and you’ve lost it. You don’t cook it enough, and you never get to where you want it. (And by the way, if you’re one of those people who wants a steak well-done, just go and eat a shoe. A burned shoe. Do not waste your money on a good steak by charring it to the consistency of an asbestos roof shingle. You monster.) A perfect steak is a golden moment. Go beyond that moment, and its deliciousness swiftly dwindles toward utter disappointment.

Or, you’re making a soup, a stew, a chili, whatever. You add spices and salt and different flavor components — you give it a taste, okay, needs more, you taste again, needs more, still not right, so you try something. You add an unusual spice, or a little vinegar, or a mystic bezoar taken from the bile duct of a young chupacabra. It’s a risk. You can’t add it without potentially ruining it, but without it — ennngh, it just isn’t right. So, you march up to that line, you stare down into the bubbling broth, and you add the ingredient. You hope you didn’t just fuck it all up. Maybe you did. Or maybe you just elevated it to something sublime.

I’m not saying anything particularly new here. The cliche, true enough as many cliches are, is no risk, no reward. Just the same, what often marks some of the greatest fiction — or, put differently, some of your favorite fiction — is a willingness on the part of the creator to take those risks, to march into the gloom of uncertainty into a place where every step might lead to a sucking mire or a starveling beastie. Some of the best work is done when it’s done by an author who knows what they’re about to do is not precisely advisable, or entirely safe, and yet they say, fuck it, fuck this, fuck that shit, I’m doing it anyway, motherfuckers. They broke a rule. They took a thing long past its expected arc. They blew up a trope or juked right when everyone else would’ve gone left. They tried something new, and it either pays off or it fails spectacularly. And honestly I’d rather read something that fails spectacularly than something that just kind of… putters along in the manner of an elderly dachshund.

Tempt failure.

March right up to it. Always write as if you’re about to fall on your face. Add fire. Bring the char. Toss in a weird ingredient. I wrote several meh books before I finally hit with Blackbirds — and when I hit with Blackbirds, it was because I had lost the capacity to care about fucking up. I felt I had already tried everything safe, everything expected. I’d already walked all the paths and followed every map and I still wasn’t writing anything of substance, so I chugged some whiskey, bit a belt, and went hard into that story because I felt like I had nothing to lose. I no longer cared if I failed. That allowed me to no longer be hesitant, to dismiss the fear of failure because I certainly wasn’t succeeding — hard-charging into that unseen fog was liberating, and it produced not only a successful book, but one whose series continues today. Using present tense inside Star Wars was controversial, in part because tie-in-fiction tends to not go that way. Some hated that choice, some loved it, and that’s where I’d rather be. I’d rather be in a place where some people love the book and some people despise it instead of everyone saying, “It was fine, sure, it was a book, and I read it, and now I forget it.”

Just as the stakes for your characters should be raised and complicated, twisted and transformed, so should you view your own stakes as storyteller.

Write unafraid. Do not be tempted by the comfort of mediocrity. Yeah, you’re going to fuck it up sometimes. (Though mind that unlike with a steak or with a stew, the book can be revised and rewritten.) Yes, your efforts to do something that is uniquely you and totally untested will sometimes lead to a narrative car crash. That is as it should be. I’d rather you drive me, the reader, at top speed into a wall then slowly sputter down a quiet street at 25MPH.

Your best authorial self is always one about to ruin the story.

That sounds bad, but I don’t think that it is.

Take the risks.

Get ready to mess it all up.

Leap toward foolishness the way a stunt pilot plunges the plane toward the ground.

Always be leaning toward failure. Get ready to fall. Tell stories that are bold and strange. Make moves that feel dangerous and uncertain. Confidently assert your own chaos as you discard fucks over your shoulder like a cruel child plucking the legs from a captive centipede.

I want you to go for it.

Whatever it is you’re afraid of, go for it.

Whatever fears you have, step over them.

Whatever twists you can take, take them.

Sometimes this thing we do, it’s an act of closing your eyes and falling backward and hoping that the story reaches out with the hands of the audience and it catches you. And sometimes, that won’t happen. Sometimes you’ll crack your head like an egg on the pavement. But fuck it, fall anyway. Trust yourself. Enjoy the plunge.

Woo!

It’s done.

It’s here.

*deep breath*

*long exhale*

Finally, the epic tale of one liverwurst burrito can be told.

*checks notes*

Wait, that’s not right at all.

OH OH OH I KNOW I KNOW

It’s time for Star Wars: Aftermath: Empire’s End: Wait I Added An Additional Colon And Now I Don’t Know What Comes After It So Let’s Just Say, Uh, Um, Journey To The Last Jedi?

Star Wars: Empire’s End: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

The first Aftermath came out a year and a half ago in September of 2015, with me starting that novel only the January prior, and in that time I’ve written three of these things, and I honestly couldn’t be more pleased. It’s like I got to pick a literal star in this awesome galaxy and say, boop, that one’s mine. I get to own a little bit of narrative real estate in what is arguably the biggest pop culture storyworld of all time, one that I grew up with, one in which I have been brining and pickling myself since I was four years old. When someone comes up and hands you a metaphorical bowcaster and says, “We need you to finish off the Imperial Empire, so figure out how to work that thing and get to business,” yeah, yeah, hell yes I’m going to do it.

Occasionally, ahem, the journey has been a little fraught — some reaction to the first book in particular was rougher than I anticipated, and some of that is chalk-uppable to hey, not every book is for every reader, and I don’t necessarily write in the standard “tie-in fiction” style what with the present tense and such. Some of it was due to, er, other social forces, and then those social forces somehow manifested like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man except this one was a giant Evil Circus Peanut and then I guess oops we elected him president.

Back then I wasn’t actually sure if I wanted to write more Star Wars, but it’s been such a heady rush, and the team at Del Rey is aces, so I’d totally jump back in if invited. Meanwhile, if you want to check this one, it’s got all kinds of stuff. Hutts! Space battles! Maybe a Gungan! Jakku (that junkyard?)! Han and Leia! An auspicious birth! A huggable, cuddly murder-death-droid! References! Interludes! Sinjir being Sinjir! Wookiees! Stars! Wars! And more.

If you wanna read a short interview with me over at Sci-Fi Now about the experience, you may do so by making with the clicky-clicky.

Otherwise, please to enjoy the book.

I’ll see you on the other side of the war.

Comments may contain spoilers, so please be advised.

So, though the weather was arguably a lot nicer this week than it should’ve been — I mean, it’s the middle of fucking February, usually the most heinous of the winter months, and here it’s 70 degrees out and I’m eating ice cream and wearing short sleeves — I still managed to toodle around inside the house and take some MYSTERIOUS MACRO PHOTOS.

I’ll pop that bounty in below, but real quick:

Hey, tomorrow, it’s Empire’s End.

Then next Tuesday, it’s Miriam Black’s latest, Thunderbird.

Star Wars: Empire’s End: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Thunderbird: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Also a reminder that I’m doing an event this Saturday in support of both at one of the greatest bookstores in the land, Let’s Play Books, in Emmaus, PA. 4pm on the 25th, details here. (The event is listed as 4pm – 4:45pm, but I have full confidence it’s not going to be 45 minutes only — I’ll be there long as you need me to be.)

AND NOW, MACRO WEIRDNESS. Part of the fun here will be to look at these and to try to figure out what you’re even looking at. It’s a mystery! Get in the van, Scoob! Zoinks!

Okay, so, a couple weeks ago I asked you guys to come up with three-word titles, and you did, in spectacular fashion. It fueled last week’s challenge.

And, because you were prolific and I am nothing if not a tremendously lazy human being, I’m going to dip back into the well for another ten titles. Pick one or use a random number generator to choose, then write a piece of short fiction to go along with the title.

One change this time around is my picks for title are not random —

I’m hand-picking ten that sound interesting.

Also, we’ll up the word count a little.

Get writing, word-nerds.

Length: ~1500 words

Due by: Friday, Feb 24th, noon EST

Post online, give us a link in the comments.

Your ten titles to choose from (title creators in parentheses) are:

1. She Broke Gods (thomasmhewlett)
2. Gunslinger Ridge Experiment (EGUW)
3. Wolves of Sorrow (powerjacob)
4. Tomorrow’s Mirror Today (stephen cowles)
5. Stars That Bleed (kirajessup)
6. To Forbidden Passengers (lydie h)
7. The Porcelain Cat (d.moulou)
8. It Wants In (mollons)
9. Sincerely, Your Mortician (AN)
10. Burr Edge Jitterbug (m. oniker)