Author: terribleminds (page 208 of 465)

So, yesterday I wrote a thing about the Hugos and the Sad/Rabid Puppies horseshit, and that got linked around a bit as this blog fortunately sometimes does.

One person linked to it on Facebook, a reader of mine who is a woman, and she tagged me directly, which is all good. And then an exchange happened — well, an “exchange” is a very polite way to refer to this abusive intrusion by some ambulatory pubic fire.

Now, I’m not saying this exchange is an example specifically of the Sad and Rabid Puppies — he seems to be a supporter of it, and I’ve seen this kind of thing before from some of those supporters, nominees, and also from the connected joy-buzzer parade of Gamer.Gate.

What I will say, though, is that this is a pretty good example of what women get online. Women and also persons of color, too — it’s thick with heinous fuckery.

What follows is a part of that exchange. It went on for a while with me and him after this snippet. Nothing productive came out of it, really, and it ended up being not worth the time arguing (though it is worth noting that he was a thousand times more polite to me and tried to excuse his behavior to her because she told him to fuck off — which, by the way, came well after he started with the misogynistic slut-shamey rape-culturey bullshit).

The woman consented to me publishing this snippet, though I’ve removed her name and image (and his, too — regardless of how much as I’d like to run him over the public cheese grater I don’t think that does anybody much good). What follows is, I dunno if it’s triggery, but it sure is shitty.

The red square is the human turd-bucket, though that will become quite clear.

I don’t have much call to action here, really — women already know this stuff goes on, and it’s not like I’m sharing something new. But men are sometimes surprised at this, and so it seems important to highlight once in a while that the Internet can get venomous really fast. While it’s not our job to ride in like SAVIOR MENFOLK to thwart the internet’s many ogres, at the same time, it’s important to be be aware of this stuff and support the good people online. Help make safe spaces here. Moderate the septic shitflingers out of existence. Report abuse. And also ask our social media providers to offer better ways to report and signal abuse online. It’s up to us to curate a better social media feed for everyone, and demand better.

Let me say this up front: if you’re a writer of any age or experience level, you need to be looking at your writing process. Always. Yesterday, today, tomorrow. You gaze into it to see if there’s anything you do to change it. Anything you can do to understand it better. You’re looking for bolts to tighten, widgets to wax, hedgehogs to tickle. Anything to fully weaponize your writing process.

You don’t do this to become some kind of CRASS FICTION FACTORY. This isn’t (necessarily) about becoming faster. It’s about getting better. Why wouldn’t you want to tell better stories? Why wouldn’t you want to refine your process and make the thing that you do easier, more fun, and more awesome? WHY DON’T YOU LIKE AWESOME THINGS.

*clears throat*

Anyway.

My process is this, roughly:

At 6AM, I get up. Like a vampire rising from death into monstrous revivification.

I make myself some coffee. Pourover, because there’s something meditative about it. And the coffee is fucking amazing — I don’t just drink coffee for the kick. I drink it because it’s delicious.

I also drink it black as a mirror at night.

I put the coffee in a carafe — this one, actually — to keep it warm all day.

THEN I GO TO THE SHED.

I get quick shit out of the way — any outstanding ASAP emails or tweets or silly stuff like that. Sam Sykes may be tweeting at me from the end of his day and the start of mine.

And then by 7AM, I get my ass to work.

I write in Microsoft Word. I’ve tried Scrivener, because people love it. It’s not my thing (though I am pleased if it is yours). Learning curve is too steep, it’s ugly as bad wallpaper, and I’m comfortable with a draft in Word going all the way through to the Track Changes stages of editing.

One small ritual ritual I have is, I have to make sure the font is right on the story.

Just a thing I gotta do. Probably the only “quirky” ritual component.

(That and the “bathing in goat’s blood” at 11:11AM every day.)

Eventually my son will be awake, and when he is, I am summoned by text message and then I head inside to do the whole breakfast thing, where he eats whatever it is that he wants to eat — pancakes or eggs or maybe he just wants to gnaw on the table like a nibbly bunny.

Then I walk with the dog every day and some days, run.

Then it’s back to the keyboard.

I write until I’m finished for the day, which is — nngh? Bare minimum, 2000 words in the day, but ideally I go above 3000. Like, for me, 2k is a barely passing grade. A D+ or something.

I write roughly 1000 words an hour. The first 1000 words is a bit sluggish, but the second 1000 words is where I usually move at a brisker, more limber pace.

I generally write for an hour, then take 15 minutes off to, y’know, fuck off in and around the Internet. I get on Twitter and TWEET THINGS. I get on Facebook and BOOK FACES. The usual.

I’m done writing new content by early afternoon, usually.

Then it’s onto lunch and whatever administrative or extraneous stuff needs a-doing. Outlines, emails, spreadsheets, finances, remembering where I put my pants.

I tend to do blog posts on weekends, though sometimes throughout the week too if there’s something that chafes my pee-hole enough that I have no choice but to write about it ASAFP.

Again, everything gets written right into MS Word.

And everything gets edited there, too.

First drafts get a look ideally from my agent, and then an another edit/polish (again: perfect world) before it gets catapulted into my editor’s eyeballs.

I track my day’s writing with a spreadsheet. I know if I’m over or under my daily goals. And I also know where I’m at according to my overall writing plan.

I tend to write a new novel ever one to four months. That’s first draft. Edits take longer.

And I think that’s it. That’s the process.

But now, I turn the question around to you. What is your process? How do you do it? How much time per day? Do you write every day? Whatever you feel like telling us about your writing process, I’m all ears. Like I said, I’m always a process monkey and it’s interesting to hear how everyone does it — no writer has the same writing process as the next. Some are similar; others are wildly different. Hell, just the quest to discover one’s writing process (similar to the quest to discover one’s voice) can be epic. Where are you at in this quest?

First and foremost, let’s just get this out of the way:

Congrats to the winners of last night’s Hugo Awards, including the Not The Hugo Award, the John W. Campbell award for new writer. Well done, all of you. Including up and coming sci-fi superstar, Noah Ward, who I’m sure is drunk somewhere right now, joy-barfing off a balcony.

And, also, to the Sad and Rabid Puppies, those charm school rejects who thought they could wrest control of the awards away from some mysterious vile cabal of PC CHORF SMOF SJWS, one likes to hope that last night was a demonstration of your noses being rubbed in the mess you made. I know, I know, “it’s about ethics in award nominating.”

*eyeroll so hard, neck snaps and head tumbles off of shoulders into dirt*

Listen, I’m not a big believer that awards are some kind of glorious, unshakable metric for the health or the merit of a genre or the books and authors inside it — I think, like most, I think it’s a good way to celebrate fandom and the industry and those people who have left footprints across the genre both big and small. It’s not the end-all be-all of anything, but they matter in their own way. And this year any hope of that happening was squirted out onto a rancid pee-pad thanks to those aforementioned charm school rejects.

All along, if the so-called “puppies” had just done a blog post like, “HEY WE THINK LOTS OF COOL FOLKS NEVER GET NOMINATED, SO LET’S GET TALK ABOUT THOSE FOLKS AND DON’T FORGET THAT YOU CAN NOMINATE ‘EM,” and then they did a big-ass reading list and not a slate, one expects the response would’ve been a vigorous shrug. But that’s not what they did. They came out of the gate swinging with a proper slate, a slate championing its diversity while actually working to undo the diversity of years past. (And fellas, a little pro-tip here: when your version of diversity includes those who are against diversity as a principle, you done fucked up. Making sure to include bigots and homophobes and other social malefactors is a pretty good way to show your true intentions. At the very least, it exposes you for the shitbirds you are.) They’ve been called on their bullshit time and time again throughout this awards season, called to the mat and challenged on every point, and not once did I see a successful or substantive rebuttal to those challenges. (I did, of course, see about 3,291 blog posts done in support of the Sad and Rabid Puppies, to which I might suggest that those writers actually remember that they’re probably supposed to be writing stories and not some never-ending screed-ifesto about SFF fandom.)

And of course, the Puppies locked arms with the worst amongst us: those human canker sores known as Gamer-Gate. (Next year, I hear the Puppies slate will be decided by Donald Trump’s skull merkin, worked like a puppet by the ghost of a drunk, racist Ayn Rand.)

Last night’s awards were a strong rebuttal against the SP/RP slate, because they didn’t get a single one of their nominations through to the actual stage and statue itself. In fact, in several categories, voters opted to fling the award out of the airlock and into the void of space rather than give it to undeserving nominees — or, at the very least, those nominees who were poisoned by their inclusion on the slate in the first place. (And here again, time to offer kudos to folks like Annie Bellet, Matthew David Surridge, and Marko Kloos for washing that stink off them. Because believe you me, that’s some stink, I admire them for wanting to freshen up.)

The Puppies continued to put forth this idea that they were finally reclaiming the Hugo Awards from some narrow slice of SFF readership — some toxic, politically-minded cult of secret governors who have throttled the award with their AGENDAS and IDEAS and I GUESS LOVE FOR THEIR FELLOW MAN, those monsters. And our righteous saviors seemed keen on breaking the back of that cult and finally, finally, the awards would be properly returned to the hands of real fans who appreciate that SFF should, I dunno, just be about white guys on rocketships and dragons having uncomplicated white guy adventures without any of that intellectual or social or political mess intruding upon the genre.

Except, that’s not how this works.

That’s not how any of this works.

As it turns out, when you attempt to identify the narrow slice and rip the votes away from them and into the hands of a wider audience of thousands, you actually learn that the wider audience of fans still don’t want the Puppies mucking up the award with their poo-caked paws. You learn that the fans will ride over the hills like an army, and they’ll lock arms and form a line that shan’t be crossed. The awards were positioned this year as finally being for the fans, and the fans showed up. And they thwacked the Puppies on the nose with rolled-up newspaper.

In other words?

You learn that the narrow slice may have not been so narrow, after all.

Also, as it turns out, the genre is often, maybe even always, political. Even when it’s not expressly so, fiction isn’t about some rote operational telling of stories. Science-fiction and fantasy, when operating well, serve as a bellwether for the world in which we live. It’s always been that way. Through history, we examine both the small books and films and comics and also the really popular ones to see what ideas and fears and yes even politics have seeped out of the public consciousness and conscience and into the stories that the public loves and shares. (Plus, a-doy, the Puppies were always a political slate. They forever claimed to want to extricate the genre from politics, which was the dumbest fake-out I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t even an act of artful misdirection. “I’m not stealing your hamburger,” they say, locking eyes with you as one big clumsy hand slides across the table noisily and indelicately steals your hamburger. When challenged on this, the thief offers the blistering rebuttal of, “…Nuh-uh.”)

The rebuke probably won’t stop the Puppies next year. But hopefully the same fans this year will come out for the nominating part, and not just the WHO GETS THE STATUE part, because that’ll be key to carrying this message through to the following season. At the very least, maybe it’ll spare us some drama, which overtook the award this go-round and, frankly, denied lots of folks a chance to get up on the stage (at Tobias Buckell’s place you can see who would’ve been on the menu had the Puppies not been a factor — that being a genuine fucking tragedy.) Hopefully the Puppies realize that they are marginal, and like Gamer-Gate aren’t puppies at all, but are rather a pack of sad dinosaurs shaking their tiny arms at the meteor above and these new wily mammals slinking around their clumsy, stompy feet. In a perfect world, next year we won’t hear their bleats and squawks of rage at a world that is changing. And in ten years, their existence will be a memory — fuel for our stories just as dinosaurs are fuel for the gas tanks in our automobiles.

I’m happy the awards experienced the push-back against the shitbirds.

I’m excited that fans and readers are maybe making a real representative push.

I’m sad that lots of folks near the ballot never got on it.

And I’m bothered that all this had to happen in the first place.

Just the same: fuck the Puppies.

The genre will keep on keeping on.

No matter what happens:

Go buy books.

Share the love of those books.

Talk about them. Give them to others. Get on social media and crow about them.

Don’t be afraid of ideas and politics and people who aren’t like you.

Embrace it. Come into the pool. The water’s warm. The drinks are cold.

The stories are amazing.

Read on.

Some folks have correctly noted that on some weekends, comment moderation slows to a crawl, and I’ll take the heat for that one. Let me tell you why that is and what’s going on here —

BEES.

Okay, not really bees.

First, comments by new users or by folks putting in links generally are left to moderation. That helps keep this website from becoming a septic shitbucket in terms of the comments section.

Second, I’ve been traveling a lot — once every week or two weeks, it seems — in support of ZER0ES. Which means I’m not actually in front of my computer, which leaves moderation of this website to my phone or iPad, which can be spotty at best.

Third, to prevent breaches of the site (or attempted breaches), my web provider makes it so that one cannot log on to this site unless from a trusted source. Traveling, therefore, means I have to add an exception to that list of trusted sources in order to even log on, which sometimes doesn’t happen in time to actually get comments moderated.

So, apologies for delays in moderating comments, folks!

It should ease up once the summer is over and my travel schedule lessens.

Thanks!

This challenge is a little different. I like doing some different things here now and again, so — instead of writing a story, I want you to create a character.

You can create the character in whatever mode you choose, with the one caveat:

Keep it under 250 words.

Encapsulate the character in that limit.

You can use a story to highlight the character.

Or just a clinical analysis of who the character is.

You can decide what makes a good character and what goes into this.

Then, next week, you will offer that character up onto the altar of the next flash fiction challenge — folks may borrow your character and take them on a test drive through a new piece of fiction.

Dig? Dug? Good.

You’ve got one week.

Write it at your blog.

Link back here.

Due by Friday, 8/28, noon EST.

NOW GO AND CREATE LIFE.

Hey, I’m presently doing an AMA (Ask Me Anything!) over at Reddit Books.

Go, ask stuff.

I’ll try to answer it.

Easy-peasy, nacho-cheesey.

Go ask me stuff.

And then hey, since I got you in the mood to click things:

NPR reviews ZER0ES:

“As his five hackers clash with each other, both personally and ideologically, at The Lodge, their growing awareness of the dark forces lurking behind the walls of the government — and of reality — kicks the suspense into high gear. Wendig is an ace at pacing, and he hurtles the reader through hacking sequences and action scenes with equal bang. It’s not an easy task to make a sitting-and-typing session feel nail-bitingly tense, but Zer0es‘ high-octane blend of nervy characters, dark humor and bristling dialogue carry the day. Even when he gets his geek on, his well-researched, efficiently-deployed technobabble never threatens to overwhelm.”

And so does BoingBoing:

“Chuck Wendig’s new technothriller Zeroes is a hacker misfit tale in the lineage of War Games and Sneakers, true to the spirit (and often, the minutae) of security work, and exciting as hell to boot.”

And so does the NY Daily News:

“Fans of recent Crichton and recent King will eat this bogus story up. And fans of early 2000s jargon will treasure it. The rest of us? Bored until the tale’s last 80 pages…. In “Zeroes,” Chuck Wendig upholds his reputation for irreverent, garbled language, but he fails to captivate his audience until the long-spun-yarn’s fruition. Literature’s underground shock jock relies too heavily on tween language, and not enough on nail-biting story structure. Instead, we’re left with a handful of Gilmore Girls whose snappy sarcasm and sappy stereotypes distract from an otherwise enticing sci-fi story.”

Wait, maybe don’t read that one. (And did he just ding me by comparing me to Stephen King and Gilmore Girls? Aren’t both of those things awesome? And what ‘recent Crichton’ is he talking about? Michael Crichton is no longer a living author. Is he writing novels from beyond?) (Also, am I really “literature’s underground shock jock?”) (I’m very confused?)

SFFWorld reviewed it, too:

“I’ve read only a fraction of Chuck’s prodigious output so I had some expectations – well drawn characters, great plotting, with a solid through line of sinister throughout. On those counts, I was not disappointed.”

And so did bad-ass authorperson E.C. Myers:

“From the very first page, it’s evident that Wendig is either secretly a world-class hacker in his own right, or he’s done so much research that he has become not only comfortable, but fluent in the technical and paranoia-fueled online world that hackers inhabit. Either way, he’s definitely on the NSA’s watchlist — but this book should be on their reading list as well, as Zer0es is an entertaining and timely addition to the subgenre.”

I also wrote a blog for Bookish: “Hacking Is Actually Kind Of Boring.”

I’m sure there’s more I’m missing but I’m a bit dazed and dizzy from travel and book launches and all that good stuff. Hopefully I’ll see some of you tomorrow night at WORD in Brooklyn at 7pm.

*falls over ded*