Author: terribleminds (page 211 of 465)

0: none of this is true unless you find it to be true.

1. If you’re bored, we’re bored.

2. Characters at every level of the story want something — love, revenge, cake, whatever — and when we meet them we’d better soon know what that thing is. Especially if it’s cake. We can all get behind a character who will kill for cake. I’d kill for cake. Wouldn’t you?

3. Are the characters feeling safe? Good. Now make them feel unsafe.

4. Do something unexpected in the story. Yes, right now. If not now, then soon.

5. If the audience trusts you, dear storyteller, you done fucked up.

6. The best tension isn’t the kind that comes from cheap tricks or lurid manipulation — though hey, those things are totally fine, shut up — but from the feeling the reader gets from believing that the entire story is on unstable ground. This is a kind of existential tension, the fear that the audience doesn’t quite know the rules, hasn’t sussed out the laws of this place. That is the tension of the reader who wisely distrusts you.

7. When you do something unexpected in the story, it has to work in the character and the context and the confines of the story you’re already telling. It can’t be out of fucking nowhere — a cat doesn’t become a dog, but a dog can become a wolf, if you know what I mean. And if you don’t know what I mean then *gesticulates wildly* there did my flailing hand movement convince you?

8. What I mean is, storytelling is magic. It’s not the magic of sorcery — you’re not a Druid summoning swamp-elves from the murk. You’re a stage magician. Practiced in the art of illusion.

9. One of your greatest skills is misdirection. You seed the truth of the magic trick early on in the story. Then you convince the reader that the truth isn’t the truth at all — until the time comes to reveal. And okay yes fine sometimes you are a Druid summoning swamp-elves out of the murk. Sometimes writing is sacrifice, not magic trick. Sometimes it’s all of those things.

10. The story presents opportunities to pivot — to change the expectations. To change the overall shape of the thing even as you’re drawing it. These opportunities come at, roughly, 33%, 50%, 66%, and sometimes 75% through the story. Mark interesting story shifts at these times to battle the dread beast known as the Mushy Middle. Which is basically a blob of pink, sluggy mucus that will gladly bog your story down like gum on a hot fucking sidewalk.

11. We don’t give too much of a shit about Big Things in stories. THE IMPERIAL DRAGONSWANG HAS COMMANDED A DECREE THAT A SPACE RANGER MUST TRACK DOWN THE SOUZAPHONE OF UNHOLY SHITFIRE and yawn boo bored who gives a hot cup of soup about all that. We care about characters and their problems.

12. Love, hate, jealousy, life, death, betrayal, lies, revenge: these are the widgets, levers and flywheels that keep the story running, and that keep us coming back. Lubricate the gears with blood and tears.

13. You can do whatever you want in a story but you have to convince us why it works. You have to earn it. Every bit of a story has to dance for its dinner.

14. A problem with the end of the story is a problem with the start of your story.

15. Characters must earn their victories.

16. Characters must also earn their losses. These things do not happen in a vacuum.

17. If you want to know why your characters keep getting in the way of your plot, that’s because it’s the characters’ job to get in the way of your plot. The solution to this is discard the plot and let the characters be the characters. We don’t read books for plots. We think we do. But we’re also dumb. Characters are everything in a story. “It had a great plot” is the sign of a story that’s been over-engineered — like pancake batter you mixed too hard and now the resultant pancakes are as beaten down and lifeless as a pair of ratty underwear on a well-traveled highway.

18. Make me care. That’s your job. It’s not my job as a reader. Make me care.

19. We care about characters we understand. So: make me understand.

20. Pretend while writing that your job isn’t to tell a story but it’s to manipulate and emotionally injure the audience. Because that actually kinda is your job. You monster.

21. Every character is a rabbit hole. Every character goes all the way down if you let them. Not every character demands falling down that hole — but every character should feel like it’s possible. Every character should feel like they possess hidden depths and secret motivations and a great big history all their own.

22. Fuck you, be interesting.

23. “Write What You Know” isn’t an obligation. It’s an opportunity.

24. Try to be funny sometimes. Stories that have no humor at all feel like a brick to the mouth.

25. Humor is the hardest emotion to get right. Here’s a tip: don’t treat it like humor. Humor is funniest when the characters don’t find it funny. They’re not telling jokes. They’re not self-aware of the humor or the absurdity. To them, it’s dreadfully serious. Sure, YOU think it’s funny that they’re fighting a bunny rabbit with giant human nipples for eyes and loud, eruptive fart sounds every time it attacks, but THEY don’t think it’s funny and in fact they’re probably really terrified.

26. Do not write any scenes involving bunny rabbits with giant human nipples or farts. What is wrong with you. Why would you do that? Don’t listen to me. Don’t listen to anything I’m saying.

27. Every scene is multipurpose.

28. A scene moves the plot.

29. A scene gives us more about the characters.

30. A scene dials up or dials back tension.

31. A scene sets the mood and pings the theme.

32. If a scene doesn’t do all of these things, then consider punting the scene out of the airlock. Watch it scream soundlessly into the void of the stars. Cackle and laugh, for ejecting unworthy parts of our story is as much a cause for joy as writing the worthy stuff.

33. Characters are not role models. Characters should never ever ever be role models.

34. The audience doesn’t have to like the character. They have to believe in, care about, and be willing to live with the character for as long as the story exists. When you violate these things, the reader may close the book and never again open it. And then they’ll probably do something else.

35. There’s always something else for the reader to be doing. You are not competing against other writers or other books, but you are competing against the infinity of options open to your audience: games, toys, social media, sex, sex toys, sex games, corn murder, bee wrangling, monkey punching, gambling, sex gambling, exotic drugs created from household cleaners, falcon training, sex falcon training. Treat your reader as exalted. They have given you money and time. Do not punish them for their choice.

36. No part of the story is an island. All connects. Chekhov’s Gun is not about a gun, but about any element you introduce that must come back to haunt the story somehow. Everything returns.

37. Embrace dramatic irony: when the audience knows something characters don’t.

38. Every scene, every chapter, every part of the story — make sure to be answering questions and then asking new ones. Mystery is an open door we cannot help but walk through. The question mark is shaped like a hook for a reason.

39. Stories are a combination of entertainment and enlightenment.

40. Theme is the argument that the story is trying to make. Theme is a deep well of secret water feeding the roots and beasts of the narrative above. Theme is what your story is really about. Not the plot. Not the “WELL IT’S ABOUT THREE PENGUINS WHO GO ON A ROAD TRIP TO FIND THEIR BEST FRIEND, A LOST PIZZA DELIVERY ROBOT NAMED JIMJAM 9000.” It’s the deeper meaning of that. It’s what the story is really saying. You have beliefs. You have ideas. Use them. Mine them. Whisper them between words and sentences.

41. End chapters interestingly. Which means with uncertainty, suspense, excitement. Lace the end of a chapter with the equivalent of narrative heroin. Readers will turn a page to get the next hit.

42. But don’t always give them the next hit. Keep them waiting. Tantric storytelling. They want you to keep driving straight. So, for a little while, take a hard right. Make them want it harder. Give the audience a straining story boner. Narrative blue balls or whatever the equivalent to lady blue balls is. Cerulean Clitoris, perhaps.

43. Listen to how people tell stories.

44. Listen to how people tell jokes.

45. When characters speak we should ideally know who’s speaking even if there are no dialogue tags to identify them.

46. But please still use dialogue tags. Just use them sparingly. Remember too that dialogue and action speed up the narrative, while description and exposition slow it down.

47. Stories are written, not read, but in our heads we’re still reading them out loud. Which I know doesn’t make sense (OUT LOUD but IN OUR HEAD) and yet I don’t care. Life is full of abstractions and impossibilities. Get used to it, sucker.

48. The stakes of a story are what can be won or lost by all the characters and even by the world itself. Establish stakes early. Complicate the stakes throughout. Change them, even, if you must. But if you change them they must become bigger and worse, not smaller and easier.

49. Embrace Pyrrhic Victory: characters can win, but must ask, at what cost?

50. Don’t meander. Don’t wander aimlessly like a baby escaping the crib. You can wander a little — a butterfly temporarily drunk on nectar. But have a point. Have a direction. Be like a wasp diving toward its prey. Quick with a sting.

51. If you don’t have a point or a direction, try outlining. Even if you’re in the middle of the story — outline the road behind and the path ahead. Try it. Just fucking try it. Don’t look at me like that. I know you don’t want to do it but life isn’t about doing all the things we want and none of the things we don’t. I don’t want to have to go to the DMV or the post office but sometimes we just have to swallow our medicine and quit grousing about it. *flicks you in the nose*

52. Let the characters talk as long as they want to.

53. Be prepared to cut a lot of what the characters say.

54. If you don’t know who a character is, write extraneous chapters with them. Chapters that don’t matter at all and may not even be real. They’re just exercises. Take the character on a test drive.

55. Invoke every paragraph with threat and uncertainty. Even safety should feel a little bit unsafe. As if things are good right now, but they might not be — *checks watch* — any second.

56. Storytelling is the balancing act of telling just enough to keep the reader reading, but also keeping information away from them in order to — you guessed it — keep them reading.

57. Reveal too much and a story becomes boring.

58. Fail to reveal enough and a story becomes bewildering.

59. Stop reading only in the genre you’re writing. That is the Human Centipede effect of genre. (AKA, “Gobblepoop,” or “Poopgobble.”) Just eating the genre and shitting it back into the mouths of the audience. So gross. Don’t do it.

60. Characters must make mistakes. But they cannot make only mistakes. They must have triumphs, too. A story isn’t an endless array of failure and disaster — we must have some sense of success to know why it must above all else (and against all odds) not be lost.

61. Stories can be therapy. But they mustn’t read like therapy.

62. Characters operate with or against each other. Parallel or perpendicular.

63. Characters who run parallel to the other characters may change and run perpendicular. This is how drama and conflict is born. Opposing desires, motivations, needs. Characters in competition.

64. Characters do not operate in a straight line. Forget plot. Think of it as a web of characters — they exist at every intersection. Over here, Dave does shit and tugs on the web and that has effects all the way on the other side. And now Shirley hates him. And Jimjam 9000 wants to murder them all and turn them into delicious Human Pizza.

65. Challenge the characters and the storyworld at every step. Take things away. Pit them against each other. Challenge their beliefs by the events they undergo.

66. The best villains are the ones we adore despite how much we hate and fear them.

67. The order of operations — the sequence of revelation inside the narrative — can heighten tension and suspense. Consider in what order you tell the reader things.

68. Point-of-view is our gateway in — it is a character-facing part of the story. Choice of POV impacts mystery, conflict, tension. It limits what can be known to your benefit and to your disadvantage. It exists at every level of the story and so its choice matters greatly.

69. If you’re having trouble with the story, switch from one POV to another. First to third, third to first. Intimate to impersonal. Or jump characters inside the text. Let us live with another character for a while. Demonstrate the character web that I was talking about.

70. If the opening of your story sucks, it’s dead. It’s like taking a first step and then twisting your ankle and falling face-first into a puddle of steaming horse piss. It’s awkward and everybody will laugh and nobody will believe in you ever again. Get the opening right.

71. Get the rest of your story right, too. Take the time to make it sing.

72. When in doubt, break your story up into segments. Parts, books, chapters, sequences, episodes, whatever. Maybe you use these so that the reader can see them (PART THREE: THE BUTTSTOMPENING. SEQUENCE FOUR: THE REVENGE OF STORG AND JAPERTHA). Maybe you spackle over the seams so they remain unseen. But a story is easier to envision when it’s less a sprawly, monstrous thing and more a thing you can get your hands around. For strangling. What? I didn’t say strangling. You said strangling.

73. Cause and effect. Action and consequence. This is the blood and bone of storytelling. Character wants shit, does shit, shit happens. Character discovers character is not the only character in the world and is in fact in a universe dominated by many other characters who want shit, too.

74. If you wanna know how to do any one thing about storytelling better, find a story (book, comic, movie, game, whatever) that you think does it well, then read it again and again and cut it apart with scalpel and hatchet until you think you know why it works. Then read it again. Then try to emulate. Then after all that try to do it your own way.

75. Fuck your fear. Write confidently. Go big, bold, weird. We don’t want timid storytellers.

76. Cut stupid shit. If the characters are being stupid, stop them. The audience learns to despise truly foolish characters — especially when those foolish characters are foolish only because the plot demands. Let them fail smartly. Let them make intelligent mistakes, not dumb ones.

77. Characters do not act according to “plot.” They don’t know there’s a plot. They only know what they want and what they’re willing to do or lose to get it. Full stop.

78. If you’re taking too long to get somewhere in the story, stop now and figure out how to get there faster. Stick a rocket booster up the tale’s ass and light the fuse.

79. Try to outguess your readers. They think you’re going somewhere with the story. Try to figure out what they would guess — or better yet, engineer it. Then? Go the other way.

80. Though sometimes you gotta go exactly the way they expect you to go. Some parts of a story are inevitable and that’s okay, too.

81. Facts don’t matter in fiction, but authenticity — meaning, the convincing appearance of truth — does. You can do or say whatever you want if you can convince me it’s true.

82. You can actually break any rule out there if you do it well.

83. Always wonder: why is this story happening now? Why is it urgent and necessary?

84. Are you having fun? Why aren’t you having fun? Find a way to have fun. I COMMAND YOU TO HAVE FUN. *points gun at you* *pulls trigger* *gun shoots fun particles into your mouth*

85. Shut up and get to the point. Stop dicking around.

86. Distrust plot formulas or preconceived story shapes. They’re useful when they’re useful. They’re dull, lifeless prisons when they’re not. Note I didn’t say not to use them. Simply distrust.

87. Actually, distrust most everything except yourself.

88. Active over passive. Character agency over character inertia.

89. All things beholden to rhythm. Music isn’t just a cacophony of notes garbled together to make a shrill, shrieking burst of endless static. Instruments meet together to form a symphony of sounds. Up and down. Fast and slow. Loud and quiet. Stories are this way, too. Listen to music. Emulate what you hear there. Across all things: character, tension, theme, mood, and so on.

90. Storytelling is an act of breaking the status quo. The story is itself a violation of the expected order. That is why This Story exists Right Now. Because the Way Of Things has been broken. If the status quo persists, then you have chosen the wrong part of the story to tell, or a story whose existence will never feel necessary.

91. All stories must feel necessary.

92. Leave things out of the story. The readers want to do work. Let them.

93. Don’t cheat. We’ll fucking know it, you Cheaty McCheaterperson.

94. Don’t be dishonest about yourself or about us or about the entire world as you personally perceive it. Come to the page with bold, bald honesty. About you. About everything. About what your ideas big and small. Authorial vision is a real thing. Don’t shy away from it.

95. Pat, tidy endings are the worst endings. Because we don’t believe them. Not even in fairy tales.

96. If you’re stuck, go do something else for a while. Get out of your own head. Have a different experience. Get the blood flowing. Eat some cake. I already told you that cake was awesome. Do not disbelieve me about cake. Fine, carrots are also pretty tasty. Especially in carrot cake.

97. You need to care about the story that you’re telling and if you don’t care, you need to figure out why. Tell the story that lives in your heart. It is a story that insists upon being told. It is the story that wants to jump out of your chest like a bloodslick xenomorph.

98. Storytelling is a series of promises, some broken, some fulfilled. Know which is which and know why each must be the way it must be. Fulfill more promises than you break.

99. The best stories make us feel giddy and afraid not only when we read them — but when we’re sitting there writing them, as well.

100. Stop fucking around and finish what you begin. Commit to that act: if you choose to begin, then know this means you have also promised to finish the story. Always go the distance.

* * *

The journey to become a successful writer is long, fraught with peril, and filled with difficult questions: How do I write dialogue? How do I build suspense? What should I know about query letters? How do I start? What the hell do I do?

The best way to answer these questions is to ditch your uncertainty and transform yourself into a Kick-Ass Writer. This new book from award-winning author Chuck Wendig combines the best of his eye-opening writing instruction — previously available in e-book form only — with all-new insights into writing and publishing. It’s an explosive broadside of gritty advice that will destroy your fears, clear the path, and help you find your voice, your story, and your audience.

Amazon

B&N

Indiebound

Writer’s Digest

*slowly lowers you into the NEWS HIVE*

*where dancing, stinging NEWS BEES consumes your flesh and leaves you as bones*

Ahem.

I am back from the stinking heat pocket known as Indianapolis, fresh out of the whirlwind of games and writery stuff called the GenCon Writer’s Symposium. It was a wonderful time had by all (or at least me, for all I know the rest of them were miserable), whereupon I got to hang out on panels and bullshit about writing with other awesome writers. Many of whom are friends, too, and it’s great time and again to reconnect with other AUTHORIAL HUMANS to sort of share in troubles and triumphs and get your creative batteries recharged. These are Necessary Things.

Things I done did whilst there:

• Talked to writers of every level.

• Hung with writers I consider genuine pals — folks like Stephen Blackmoore, Delilah Dawson, Sam Sykes, Brian McClellan, Gwenda Bond, Kameron Hurley, JC Hutchins, Max Gladstone, Elizabeth Bear, and more — and got to meet writers I’d not yet met, too. Folks I admire, like Daryl Gregory. Or folks I’ve talked to for a long time but never actually encountered in the wild, like Elsa Henry. (And holy shit, Terry Brooks!) Or folks I just don’t see often enough like Scott Lynch, Jim Zub, John Hornor Jacobs, Maurice Broaddus. If talent were an obelisk, the size of said obelisk present at the Writer’s Symposium could’ve crushed a whole city had it toppled.

• Got to meet friends and fans I knew online but were not sure if they were just constructs of my imagination or not. Folks like Andrea Judy and Charlotte Moore!

• Three words: LIVE STORIUM GAME. Stephen Hood and Josh Whiting of Storium said to me, Dawson, Blackmoore, Sykes and McClellan, “Hey, you guys should play a live Storium game for the Worldbuilders Charity,” and we said, sure, sure, yeah, that totally won’t be a depraved drain-circle of sheer narrative perversity. We played a game that quickly descended into… something? Something that featured things like Assdazzler, Mooseknuckle, Brangelina, hammer dancing, Nickleback, ass bees, ecto-jizz, ecto-jazz, magical proctology, a vampire everybody ignored, Storg, Jamantha, Japertha, and so much more. We raised money. We ruined our careers. Glory be. Will that game ever be made public? Only the Storium gods truly know.

• Gwen Pearson of the Purdue Bug Barn said, “Hey, I’ll take anybody from GenCon who wants to go to hangout with me and a buncha bugs.” And so I said, “BUGGERY IT SHALL BE,” and then quickly revised that sentiment realizing what I’d just said. Me, Dawson, Blackmoore and Gladstone (the weirdest law firm ever) went and got a half-day lesson about ants, bees, beetles, spiders, caterpillars, millipedes, cloacal popping, phalloblasting, robots, dermestids, OBTs, ant-based thunderdomes, ants that smell like blue cheese, and more. I got to handle a tarantula named Rosie. It was actually awesome. She was gentle and slow and actually cute if you look at her up close. (Super derpy.) You may gaze upon my SPIDER DELIGHT here. Or you may take this present from Delilah, which is totally not a spider.

I probably did more shit, but there you go.

Thank you to Marc Tassin for putting it all together!

Zer0es Preorder Bonus

So, here’s a thing.

Let’s say you wanted to pre-order Zer0es, my “hackers go against a self-aware NSA surveillance program” novel which is hopefully a lot of scary, thrillery fun.

Let’s say you wanted to pre-order but then get SOMETHING EXTRA for your troubles.

Well, hey, here you go.

Pre-order either the hardcover or e-book edition from anywhere at all, and you can get the first two chapters of my next Harper sci-fi thriller, a novel I call Myrmidon, about an FBI futurist named Hannah Stander investigating a dead body in a cabin in upstate New York.

The link for the pre-order page (where you enter in your pre-order info!) is right here.

Pre-ordering is an awesome thing that tells booksellers how much to order and if the book has buzz. Plus, you buying a book like Zer0es lets me keep on writing other books and also running the blog. So if you’re one of those people who tells me you read this blog but have never read my books, now’s a good time to start, because hosting this sucker ain’t cheap. (/guiltprod)

You can preorder from:

Indie bookstores like:

Doylestown Bookshop, WORD, Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Murder by the Book.

(Or, of course, from Powells or a local bookseller found via Indiebound.)

Plus: Amazon, B&N, iBooks, Google Play, Books-a-Million.

Amazon listed the book as one of the best books of August!

Typhon emerges — uh, I mean, Zer0es releases — 8/18. For related events, see Appearances.

Zer0es: First Four Chapters!

Let’s also say you’re all like, “MAN, I really wish I had some of that book to read right now.”

That, too, shall be done.

In fact, you can read the first four chapters right now.

And, if enough folks click that link and spread it around, a fifth chapter will be revealed.

IT WILL BE UPLOADED STRAIGHT TO YOUR BRAIN VIA A LOUD, SHRILL MONOTONE —

Okay, actually, it might just be like, a PDF or something, I dunno.

Cornell Collective!

I was very fortunate to be invited onto Paul Cornell’s newest podcast endeavor, The Cornell Collective! A delightful time was had as I joined Leah Moore and Christel Dee. Go listen!

Mockingbird On Sale

The second Miriam Black book, Mockingbird, is now only $1.99 for the month of August.

So, you know what to do.

KILL IN MY NAME.

*checks notes*

Uhh. I mean, “Go buy the book?”

*sheepish grin*

Blog Snafu

Some folks correctly noticed that I wasn’t approving unmoderated comments at the blog over the weekend while I was at GenCon. I had minimal access to Internet and for some reason my phone doesn’t always like me to administrate big chunks of bloggage on the fly. The iPad is better but I couldn’t get it to any meaningful wi-fi for that purpose. Apologies!

Comments released from their cages, now.

Today, I am off to the GAME-SLICK WILDS of GENCON, where I will talk a lot about writing and hopefully maybe sneak in a game or two and also did I mention the bad-ass Storium charity game that you should totally go to BECAUSE CHARITY?

Anyway, so to go onto the game theme, I figured I’d pose a pair of questions:

a) Favorite tabletop non-RPG game?

b) Favorite tabletop pen-and-paper RPG game?

Use the comments.

Get to answering.

GO.

And if you’re gonna be at Gencon — swing by, say hi!

[disclaimer: I am not a MINDOLOGIST or a PSYCHOHOLIC or in any way an expert on subjects relating to emotion or the human brain, so take all this with a entire salt lick]

I just read an article that literally had the headline:

THIS EL NINO PHOTO SHOULD SCARE THE SHIT OUT OF THE WEST COAST.

(I’m not going to link to it, because fuck that article right in its bloviating trash-hole.)

El Nino is so bad, the article posits, that the entire populace of the West Coast of America should — right now — stand up and just defecate themselves while screaming in terror.

It’s the kind of article whose headline should be read by a wildly gesticulating Muppet whose felt is on fire. Whose plastic googly eyes are literally melting out of his hand-ensconced face.

And this isn’t new. This is pretty much every article on the Internet — everything is either OBLIVIOUS OPTIMISM or PANTS-SHITTING FEARGASM. Your hometown is going to be destroyed by an earthquake probably tomorrow maybe! Something-something super-volcano! Global warming is going to destroy New York City! Something-something crime! Something-something serial killers! Hackers just hacked your wife! Bats fucked pigs and mice in a batpigmice fuckorgy and now there’s a batpigmouse flu and it’s probably one day going to make you sneeze your brain out of your head! Be afraid! Be fucking scared! FIERY DOOM IS ABOUT TO RAIN DOWN UPON YOU WHY ARE YOU NOT PROPERLY WORSHIPFUL OF THE FEAR YOU MUST BE FEELING RIGHT NOW AT PRESENT IN YOUR HEART ALWAYS. Now look at these funny kittens with lightsabers.

I mean, holy shit, have you ever turned on the local news? The national news? It’s just a scare parade, man. Everything sucks. Your town is dangerous. The country is dangerous. Those people who aren’t you are dangerous. It’s like watching a horror movie for the jump scares except the jump scares are things that are actually happening right now apparently right outside your door.

It’s not that we don’t have problems. We do. And will. This is a planet of seven billion people. Shit is going to get fucky with seven billion people bumping into each other and into animals and glaciers and robots and whatever else we have wandering around out there. Global warming is probably the most serious challenge in my lifetime. Right now the abuse at the hands of government surveillance and police is unparalleled. Pretty much any hobo in clown makeup and Nazi regalia can go and buy an arsenal of guns from your local flea market.

This is a time of epic challenges. This is a time of necessary change and, perhaps, even upheaval.

So, being scared is understandable.

But we also have to understand that we’re being manipulated into fear. By the media. By the Internet. By our chosen social groups and echo chambers.

Listen, here’s the thing: fear is not that productive.

It’s productive in the short term, in fear-based situations.

Like, let’s say you’re at the park. And you’re walking along, humming a jaunty tune. Next thing you know: the bushes shake, and out comes a motherfucking tiger. Big. Rangy. Mangy. Starving. You’re it. You’re dinner. And the tiger is joined by a prehistoric claw-bear, and maybe they’re working in concert, or maybe they’re competing to see which one can eat your entire head first.

Fear at that moment is entirely perfect.

It is a necessary response.

Because fear engenders in us two potential responses: fight or flight. Punch or flee. Fuck or run.

You can either stand your ground and try to go toe-to-toe with the tiger-bear combo, or you can haul ass out of that park and never go there again because who the hell let tigers and bears into the park? I don’t want to put up a fence to stop immigrants, but tigers and bears, sure okay.

Fear as a momentary response has value.

Fear as a long-term emotional strategy destroys you.

You look at global warming, and it’s becoming clear that fear-based tactics only engender (according to this article) “denial, fatalism, and polarization.” You either get so anxious about it that you’re like, “Well, fuck it, we’re all going to boil so I might as well just set fire to this mountain of tires,” or you become so angrily optimistic that you grab for any lifeline you read about global warming being a sham or about some new mini-ice age we’re about to get (which is bullshit, by the way). Driving people to a fear-based life — especially when things seem relatively okay outside your window at any given moment — is a great way to inspire a symphony of anxiety inside your head. We’re urged to PANIC PANIC PANIC but the birds are chirping and the sun is up and suddenly we’re feeling OH GOD SWEET FUCKING HELLMONKEYS I HAVE TO FIGHT OR FLIGHT BUT I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO FIGHT AND I DON’T KNOW WHERE TO FLEE and so you just stand there, paralyzed by uncertainty and fear. The fear stops being a momentary response and becomes a long-term strategy — and fear as a long-term strategy is not a healthy way to be.

I remember that one of the takeaways of Bowling for Columbine (regardless of what you feel about Michael Moore) wasn’t that guns are our problem, but fear was the real problem. Fear was the Emperor Palpatine manipulating us. (And others are in turn manipulating us through fear.) The events of 9/11 were a thing that inspired us to fear-based action — our leaders used that fear to manipulate us. One thing the Star Wars prequels actually got kinda right is how easy it is to puppet a frightening population. Guns are the tools of fear, too. You don’t build up an arsenal for the art of it. You build up the arsenal for the doomsday. For the time when the people who aren’t you come to hurt you, or take something from you, or [insert made-up thing]. You can sell a person a gun by reminding them of all the things they should fear out there in the world. And then you can sell someone else a gun because that person should be afraid of the last person to whom you sold guns. “That guy’s got guns,” you whisper. “And he looks pretty sketchy. Shouldn’t you have one, too? Jeez. What if he decides to shoot up a grocery store when you’re in it? That’d be a tragedy if you weren’t PREPARED. Am I right?”

Fear is like one of those zombie parasites that controls its host.

(Here we hear the echo of FDR: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” And then we hear the modern addenda: “And also killer bees and brain amoebas and global warming and killer cops and terrorists and hackers and too many guns or not enough guns and Other People and ebola and volcanoes and earthquakes and tsunamis and did I mention killer bees already okay you know what just be afraid of your entire present and future. So, be afraid of fear, but then also be afraid of all this other stuff. HAVE YOU SHAT THINESELF YET?” FDR asks you with bulging eyes and spit-froth lips. Then he goes back to watching the news, digesting all the horror punctuated by advertising designed to get him to buy things in his fear-blind panic state.)

And the fear doesn’t even have to be real. Fear of science seems to be at an all-time-high. Fear of GMOs and vaccinations. Fear of things we need to actually help us. Sometimes social media helps clear the fog — but it can just as easily spread lies and misinformation, quick as lightning.

It’s across the board, this fear.

Listen, I talk to a lot of newbie writers, and one of the things that always seem to hold them back is — you guessed it! Fear. They’re just nebulously afraid of… things. They’re afraid of agents and editors. They’re afraid of failure. They’re afraid of success. They’re afraid of the horror stories they’ve heard. They’re afraid of getting published but then not selling, or getting published and selling but then selling a second book and oh shit what if that one doesn’t do well and next thing you know, they’re hemorrhaging blood out of their various face-holes. It’s a random rag-tag assortment of fear. And again: it’s utterly paralyzing. Total creative vapor lock, man.

It isn’t healthy.

It damn sure isn’t productive.

I don’t have any answer to this, by the way. This rant is itself unproductive. I don’t know how we get out of the cycle of fear. And I don’t mean to diminish the very real challenges we face — but the challenges we face are presented so often with just klaxons of terror and anxiety instead of solution-based direction. (This is one of the reasons I do like Obama. He presents challenges in a calm, almost comforting way. He doesn’t kick over his podium and barf into his own hands, screaming about how we better do what he says or we’re all gonna die from super-volcanoes.) (Though now that I think about it, this might be how I attempt to get things done in the future: threatening people with super-volcanoes. I mean, no, I can’t make super-volcanoes, but who wants to take the chance? Maybe I secretly do. I mean, what if, right? Maybe you should just give me that hamburger for free because FEAR FEAR FEAR and also super-volcanoes.)

We have to give up the fear.

We’re addicted to it.

We click it. We watch it. We embrace it.

And then we sit, paralyzed. Or we deny.

The change that results from fear is rarely the right kind of change. We need some way forward that doesn’t constantly try to shock our systems with panic and doom. I don’t know what the way forward is, except that individually we have to try to be conscious of when we’re being manipulated into fear and then finding the way around it — like fear is just a traffic snarl on our emotional or intellectual highway, an obstacle to overcome rather than a tool to wield.

And that is its cover.

All hail the work of Adam Doyle!

In the book, Miriam heads cross-country to look for a psychic who can help her understand — and potentially be rid of — her gift of being able to see how people are going to die when she touches them. But her search is fraught with danger, and her path intersects with that of a dangerous cult of domestic terrorists who want to use Miriam to aid in their mad crusade.

You can pre-order the book now — it comes out April 5th, 2016. Hardcover!

The first book, Blackbirds, is presently $1.99 at Amazon until Friday. That’s e-book — the print edition will release in September, and I can say, it’s very, very pretty.

And you can also check out Mockingbird (Book 2) and The Cormorant (Book 3).

(Print to follow, too.)

Further, if you’re so inclined —

“Interlude: Swallow” is a bridging novelette that connects The Cormorant to Thunderbird. You can find it in the collection Three Slices, which also features an Iron Druid story by Kevin Hearne, and a Blud story by Delilah S. Dawson.

There’s this thing that happens sometimes where someone asks about book recommendations from an author and that author — probably a white guy, like me — rattles off some names of other authors who are also probably white guys like me. I don’t believe this to be an actively racist kind of thing, but more a product of an industry that doesn’t publish as many writers of color. And when they do publish them, they tend to remain marginalized because of various institutional reasons. Plus, then you get that excuse that’s meant to be a positive — “I don’t see color!” — which is a noble thought that ultimately fails, because while you mean I don’t give into preconceived divisions between race, what often results is, I don’t see color because mostly I see only white and if I don’t see color then I don’t have to acknowledge people of color.

I made an effort a couple years back to include a far deeper bullpen of women writers on my shelves, and I’d say at this point about half of my SFF reading is of women authors. This isn’t because of some kind of diversity bingo — I’m not reading books that are bad just to read them because they were written by a woman. I’m reading awesome books by awesome authors. The single result of expanding my reading has been that I am reading more amazing books.

I’ve been making the same effort to include more writers of color — and so it seems like this is a good time to open the comments up to recommendations of writers of color in the SFF space (or, more broadly, feel free to wander into horror and YA if you need to). I recognize there’s some danger in making this a Very Special Post like it’s an Afterschool Special or That One Panel At A Con About Women Authors Where All The Other Panels Are Assumed Then To Be About Men By Default. The ideal goal is, when we recommend books, to have a more diverse slate of books to recommend and not sequester them in their very own marginal post — at the same time, my hope is this post serves as a seeding ground for myself and for others where we learn about awesome books we’re not yet reading. And then we read them and we include them going forward in the books about which we proselytize.

HEY LOOK, MORE AWESOME BOOKS FUCKING YAY.

Right? Right.

Here’s a dollop of reading suggestions on my part, but for your part — get into the comments, recommend some writers of color and what they’ve written. Short stories and novellas are totally on the table, though I’ll recommend only novels right now as my reading of short fiction lately has been woefully shallow. If any work is free to read on the web, feel free to drop links.

(I do recognize that not all writers of color are self-identified, and the same goes for some women and QUILTBAG authors — but, many are, so the effort must be made.)

(Also, this really isn’t meant to be a proving ground for arguments about whether or not we should read more diversely or whatever your stance happens to be — please use the comments as a recommendation engine only. In this instance, be a fountain, not a drain. Thanks.)

The Recs

Nnedi Okorafor: Lagoon. I just started reading this a few days ago and my mouth cannot make the proper pleasing sounds. This woman’s prose is fucking astounding. Cinematic, yet also occasionally dreamlike — science-fiction, but also occasional fantastical? It’s a weird, wonderful book so far. The plot is fine and all, but her prose is a place I wanna live.

Daniel Jose Older: Half-Resurrection Blues. This is how I like my urban fantasy. Real, monstrous, street-level stuff. (I have an unattainable dream of mashing up this series with my own The Blue Blazes given how both are set in and around Brooklyn and Manhattan.) It’s funny, too, and grim, and all the things I want. I have Shadowshaper, his newest YA, but haven’t cracked the cover yet as my tbr pile threatens to crush me beneath its weight.

Maurice Broaddus: King Maker. The Arthurian myth recast in modern-day inner-city Indianapolis. Good stuff — neat analogs to the mythology here (Excalibur becomes a gun, the Caliburn, f’rex). It’s a fantasy novel but occasionally pretty brutal about the lives of these characters. It’s harder stuff than you realize — not fluffy fantasy.

Aliette de Bodard: Obsidian & Blood. This is three books in one, and it was a jaw-dropper for me in what it does with your expectations of genre — what I mean is, this is essentially a detective novel set in the Aztec Empire, and is chockablock with blood magic and necromancy and the drama of the gods and goddesses. An ARC of her newest, House of Shattered Wings, just landed across my doorstep, and I’m excited to read it.

Greg Van Eekhout: California Bones. I dunno why this book is $2.99 right now, but do yourself a favor and fling yourself upon it. It’s this cool LA urban fantasy about unearthing ancient things — but just as it’s sometimes about digging up real bones of old creatures, it’s also about digging up the bones of the past.

SL Huang: Zero Sum Game. Listen, I don’t like math, so when you tell me this is a book about a person whose superpower is math, I’m not interested. More the stupid on my part, because this first book is a blast from start to finish. Huang writes with hella energy — whatever mad calculus she’s doing, she’s doing it right. Curse her for making me care about math.

Now?

Your turn.