Author: terribleminds (page 222 of 465)

Andrea Phillips is one of those writers I’ve known for a good while, now — we fought in the Transmedia Wars of 2018 together. We played live-action Ultima on the rings of Saturn. We ate fudge. Well, she made fudge? And I ate it? Because she really makes very good fudge. Whatever. Point is, I consider her a genuine friend. And now she has a book out — Revision, about a young woman who discovers that edits made to a Wikipedia-like site actually change reality — and it’s with Fireside, who I adore. Here, Andrea talks about working with Fireside and her experience with a small press. So listen up, word nerds. She has the floor.

* * *

Used to be, if you wanted to call yourself an author, the one true path was to persuade a publisher that your book was a great bet. Then the publisher would print up copies and persuade bookstores to stock them, who would in turn persuade readers to buy them. Nowadays, thanks to the same series of technological marvels that bring us never-ending fonts of porn and cat pictures, you have the option of going straight to persuading readers to buy your book your own bad self.

War has ensued. Pointless but amazingly heated war. Because if someone makes different decisions than you, they’re bad and stupid and wrong and deserve to be murdered by having their lungs filled with chicken feed, amirite?

Wiser heads know it doesn’t have to be like that. There are many paths, and it all comes down to what’s right for you. Me, I’ve been on both sides of the field. I’ve been published by one of the big New York operations. I’ve been an author-publisher, as our dear host Mr. Wendig likes to call it. I’ve crowdfunded, I’ve done work-for-hire, I’ve even put stuff out there on the internet for free-as-in-beer for exposure and funsies.

Reader, let me tell you about a middle way you may not have considered: working with a small press.

My upcoming novel REVISION is published by Fireside Fiction Company. They don’t have the staff of a Penguin or Hachette. They don’t have distribution at Barnes & Noble. They don’t have a PR machine, or deep pockets for advance money and a whopping print run. Hell, mine is the very first book they’ve ever published, so they don’t even have experience!

Sounds like a pretty bad bet, doesn’t it? Why in the WORLD would I sign up to work with a sketchy shop like that, when I could go straight to KDP and keep 70% of the cover price? Have I gone off my rocker? Do I hate money? Am I just prone to making gut-wrenchingly terrible life decisions? In the future, will others look at the burning husk of my life and point it out to their children as an object lesson?

Hey, maybe so, I’ll let you be the judge of that. But working with a small press isn’t one of those terrible life decisions. In fact, I think it’s one of the most fantastic decisions I’ve made in my career (and I think I’ve had a pretty great career so far, too.) Here’s why.

Not Just a Cog in the Machine

When you work with a big publishing company, it’s a lot like dating someone when you’re wayyyyy more into them than they are into you. They’ve got other booties to call. A full calendar of authors to edit, ship, and promote. Some of their books will be great and some of them won’t be, but eh, no big for them if some of those books they’re juggling fall down and roll under the sofa.

This sucks for you-the-author, because you’ve only got the one book, and writing the next one is the work of weeks, months, years. If this one book fails, you just might be screwed and unable to sell the next book.

But a small press will have fewer books to juggle, so the success of any one given book is proportionately wayyyyy more significant. Maybe even as important to them as it is to you. It’s great to feel like your publisher actually, you know, cares a lot if your book does well.

Awwww Yeah Creative Control!

That sense of being important to your publisher changes the whole power dynamic of the author/publisher relationship. They need you the same as you need them. And that makes a difference in how everything else plays out.

When I was published by McGraw-Hill, as lovely as all of my editors and publicists and so on were, I definitely didn’t feel like I could rock the boat. Since I was the little fish and they are the grandmomma shark, they could change my title, give me any old cover they liked, push off the release date, and all I’d be able to do is smile and nod and be glad they didn’t change their minds about publishing me at all.

I mean I could complain, I guess, but so what if I do complain? That doesn’t mean they have to change anything.

But working with a small press tends to be a lot more collaborative. Your voice can be a little louder, and your opinions as the author have more weight. You’re not underneath fifty other people on the totem pole.

Not all small publishers will likely be quite as collaborative as Fireside — you guys, I got to weigh in on kerning for the print edition. You can be sure McGraw would’ve laughed in my face if I gave them my strong opinions on inside page design.

…TEMPERED Creative Control

But at the same time, the author isn’t always the best person to make great decisions about the book and how to sell it. Honestly it’s hard to know what your writing looks like from the outside, which makes it hard to choose the right approach for cover design, for marketing strategy, and on and on.

When you’re publishing your own work, you don’t have anyone to talk you down from your own bad creative decisions. Maybe that joke on page 233 comes off as a mean-spirited slur and not a cute play on words. Maybe your cover design idea is boring and makes it seem like you’re writing a nineteenth century French epistolary drama, not science fiction.

You can hire professionals, sure, but copy editors and cover artists are fundamentally there to do what you tell them to — and as professionals, they’ll do the best they can, but they don’t ultimately have a stake in your book’s sales, nor any leverage to save you from yourself. It’s all on you to direct their skills or professional feedback and wind up the best book possible. But a publisher has enough power to push back against your first instincts. And sometimes your first instincts are bad, you guys. So it helps a ton to get a reality check on your choices from another party who has just as much skin in the game as you do.

Less of That Pesky Admin Work

Now, I’m capable of self-pubbing. I’ve done it with ebooks and with print, I have the skills, I can do a pretty good job. But it kind of sucks?

The process of publishing a book involves a lot of busywork. Emailing, scheduling data entry, making spreadsheets. Not all of it is difficult (though some of it is!) but it sure is time-consuming. Formatting pages, entering copy edits, uploading files, going back and forth with printers or designers… gahhh, I’d rather be writing more work, you know?

So when you work with a small press, you have someone to offload all of that tedious scutwork to. Someone you can trust, because again, this is someone who cares about the success of the book just as much as you do. And meanwhile, you can keep on truckin’ with writing, the thing you’re in this game to do in the first place.

Capital Infusion

I’ve mentioned that my deal with Fireside is no-advance; that means I haven’t been paid a dime for REVISION yet. But I haven’t paid anything out of my pocket, either — as a self-pubber, by now I’d be out a good chunk of change for editing and cover design services, at the very least.

As the publisher, Fireside is handling all of that, and taking on all of the risk, too. So not only is it costing me less time to get the book out the door… it’s costing me less money, too.

Two Promoters Are Better Than One

So OK, a small press might not get you onto brick-and-mortar shelves, much less put you on endcaps and featured-author tables and all that other sweet, sweet in-store promotion. And yeah, that’s a disadvantage, I won’t lie. Point: traditional publishing.

But going with a small press instead of going it alone means I’m not relying on only my social network and resources to promote the book, either. It means I have an advocate who isn’t me going after guest posts and reviews. It means I’m not only selling to my friends and maybe their friends; it increases the scope of my potential audience.

There’s some overlap, of course, because SF/F publishing is a small community at the end of the day. But still — it never hurts to get your message out to a wider circle, right?

The L-Word

No, not THAT L-word, the other one: legitimacy.

The stigma of the author-publisher is fading. But it’s nonetheless true that a publisher, any publisher at all, opens doors that are otherwise padlocked tight. An example: my book got a glowing starred review in Publishers Weekly; but self-pub books go through a substantially different review process, and aren’t covered in Publishers Weekly at all. Other major reviewers have similar policies. When they review the works of author-publishers at all, it’s segregated, and sometimes breathtakingly expensive.

And that perception of legitimacy ripples out through the whole of the promotional process. I’m not acting as the primary contact for this book, which means the whole endeavor gets a credibility boost. There’s less chance of it being canned as spam, you know? Because some of us author-publishers sometimes go a little overboard on promotion, and it’s made the field a little twitchy on the rest of us.

More Money

In exchange for not getting an advance, I’m getting a whopping royalty — basically me and Fireside are splitting the revenue halfsies between us, after third-party distribution fees are said and done.

That means I’m getting half as much money as I’d get if I were to go to KDP myself, to be sure. But for that money, I’m getting all of the same services a major publisher offers — editing, design, production, distribution, marketing, publicity — and I’m getting two to three times as much money per every book sold than I would if the book had gone to one of the Big Four.

Should this book go Hugh Howey big, it might look like a bad bargain on the surface; are those services worth hundreds of thousands, even BAZILLIONS of dollars? My answer to that is: fuck yeah, because without them, the book would never have reached as many people in the first place, it wouldn’t have been as well designed, it wouldn’t have been as widely available, it wouldn’t have been as good.

Working with Fireside has made my book a better product, cover to cover. It’s been a tremendous and positive experience, and I have no regrets about the choices we’ve made together — even if it only sells a hundred copies. And even if it sells a hundred million.

* * *

Andrea Phillips: Website | Twitter

Revision: Amazon | B&N

This past weekend, I bopped by San Antonio, Texas to punch a couple bulls, hide a bicycle in the basement of the Alamo, eat buckets of tacos, and also work as faculty for this year’s Paradise Lost writing program. I got to hang out with some fellow pro-grade writers (Delilah S. Dawson, Robert J. Bennett, Marko Kloos) and work with some semi-pro up-and-comers, all under the vigilant stare of the madman known as Sean Patrick Kelley. The program had both a retreat track and a critique track, and I did a couple sessions of critiques with a handful of writers each time.

Now, whenever I do these things, I like to come back and noodle on some of the issues that pop up from time to time — stuff that isn’t just held fast to one story but persistent issues I’ve seen in the stories of some of these writers and, frankly, in the early drafts from a lot of penmonkeys (including yours truly). That’s not to say the stories are bad. Many were quite good, and have a great deal of potential — but every story could use some improvement.

As such, I figure I’d unpack some of the critiques I had, because honestly? They probably apply to your stories, too. These are common potholes on the road to story excellence — even though I haven’t actually read your story, hey, just pretend I have. Pretend I’m sitting there with you now. Staring at you. Quietly massaging your manuscript. With a knife. I have a creepy grin, like maybe I just ate the neighbor’s cat? And I’m touching my nipple. Whatever. Point is: check your story for these problems. See if they apply to you. And if they do? Get to fixing.

Let us begin.

Lack of Urgency, Tension, Conflict

The standard shape of a story isn’t a straight line. It isn’t a straight flat line, it isn’t a straight inclined line. Stories have swoops and jiggles and jaggles — it is a craggy and dangerous mountain, not a safe and code-standard wheelchair ramp.

But here’s what happens: your story has too straight a line. You have robbed your tale of tension. You have undercut the conflict. You have urinated in the mouth of urgency. And what results is this kind of gutless, gormless narrative. It’s a pair of underwear with the elastic blown out. It’s just laying there on the highway shoulder. Slack and sad. It’s covered in ants. Nobody wants to pick it up because nobody feels compelled to pick it up.

I want to feel that when I read your story, shit’s serious. I want to feel that the characters are being urged to action. I want to feel driven to the precipice of a cliff, whipped by the lash of the story — I don’t want to feel casually perambulated to the precipice of a curb where I will then get over the curb so I can have ice cream at this lovely ice cream stand there. I want danger! Risk! Fear! I want emotion and consequence. I want stakes on the table — something to be won, something to be lost, something to matter. I want to know that somebody wants something and that the world stands against them getting it. Life! Death! Love! Hate! Things exploding! Lemurs on fire! AHHHH.

Here’s the trick, right? In life, we avoid conflict, but in fiction, we seek it. Or, rather, we should — but what happens is, authors model story after life. They want the story to work. They want the characters to do well. They want the characters to win, yay, woo, huzzah. They’re afraid to punish. They worry that the stakes are too high. (Spoiler: they probably aren’t.) And so they race to the end of the story and they establish three boring beats that go like this:

1. HEY LOOK A PROBLEM

2. HEY LOOK A SOLUTION

3. THE END YAY

That is not nearly enough story.

A story should look more like:

1. HEY LOOK A PROBLEM

2. I’M GONNA JUST GO AHEAD AND FIX THAT PROBLEM AND —

3. OH GOD I MADE IT WORSE

4. OH FUCK SOMEBODY ELSE IS MAKING IT WORSE TOO

5. WAIT I THINK I GOT THIS —

6A. SHIT SHIT SHIT

6B. FUCK FUCK FUCK

7. IT’S NOT JUST WORSE NOW BUT DIFFERENT

8. EVERYTHING IS COMPLICATED 

9. ALL IS LOST

10. WAIT, IS THAT A LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL?

11. IT IS BUT IT’S A VELOCIRAPTOR WITH A FLASHLIGHT IN ITS MOUTH

12. WAIT AN IDEA

13. I HAVE BEATEN THE VELOCIRAPTOR AND NOW I HAVE A FLASHLIGHT AND MY PROBLEMS ARE SOLVED IN PART BUT NOT TOO NEATLY BECAUSE TIDY, PAT ENDINGS MAKE STORY JESUS ANGRY, SO ANGRY THAT STORY JESUS GIVES EVERYONE MOUTH HERPES

A lot of the complexities and consequences that should be found are often skipped or zipped past — but all of that (which you could roughly lump under the single term UH-OH) should not be avoided. You should instead be hovering over that turmoil. In a flight, we want to get past the turbulence as fast as we can. But in fiction, we thrive on turbulence.

Do not hurry past it.

Your tale — and the reader’s investment in it — is fueled by tension, conflict, urgency. The feeling that all this has to happen. That things matter. That this is of significant consequence.

Begins At The Wrong Moment

You are beginning your story at the wrong moment.

And now it’s super-boring.

Listen, storytelling is an act of breaking the status quo. It is a straight line interrupted — and it’s that interruption, that fracture, that chasm, that makes the story interesting. It’s why the story matters. It’s why the story must be told right now.

But you have chosen to begin it at a time of no consequence. And so the first three pages are about as interesting as watching two garden slugs make love to a tube of Chapstick.

I understand the inclination, here. You think: But to get people to care, I need to give them context, and to give them context we have to settle into the bones of this thing and see the characters just living their lives and once we’ve met the characters and set the stage, only then will people care when I set fire to the curtains.

Problem is, that opening section is taking up my time. If after the first page I have no sense of where the thing is going, I’m going to put it down and go eat a taco or something. I have better things to do than read stories that refuse to commit, that won’t make a promise to me, that make no effort to hook my interest at the starting line. We don’t watch baseball expecting that the first hour will be batting practice. We don’t expect the pilot episode of a TV program to give us an hour of character introductions only. We don’t go out on a date only to meet our date’s parents first and look through hour after hour of photo albums and yearbooks and baby booties.

Get to the part where shit happens. Get to the gunfire! The robot! The drama! The fucking!

The saying goes, “Start the story as late as you can.” Which means: push, delay, wait until the story not only begins but has already begun. Throw us into event, action, reaction — a murder, a chase, a betrayal, a scene of struggle, a moment of mystery.

Ask Yourself The Question: “Why Now?”

All this leads into: you don’t know why this story is happening right here, right now. But you need to know that and you need to tell it to me, your faithful reader. You need to make it clear that this story has to happen in the here and now. It’s why I’m reading. I assume you’ve chosen this point in the story’s timeline and marked out this plot of narrative real estate for a reason. It’s not random. It’s because the character’s lover is about to leave (or has already left). It’s because the enemy has seized all the other homes but this one and this is the last stand. It’s because the disease has killed 90% of the world and if they’re going to save the last 10% with the new information they just discovered it’s gotta be right fucking now.

Load the moment with meaning.

Too Easy With Answers

You introduced a mystery. That’s good! As I am wont to say: question marks are shaped like a hook for a reason. They embed in our brain meats and drag us through the story.

But just as you should not immediately solve a conflict upon creating it, you should not solve a mystery upon introducing it. You must let it sit. You must let us pickle. You must be cruel.

The best storytellers are cruel storytellers. They are slave-drivers and tormenters. They are monsters and sociopaths. Your inclination to be nice is itself nice. It is also way wrong-o.

Hold off answering questions. Embrace Tantric storytelling. Delay satisfaction.

Hold off as long as you can while still maintaining structural narrative integrity.

And when you answer one question:

Introduce another — or three! — as a result.

Fails To Fulfill The Promise Of The Premise

Your story is sending off signals. Chemical markers. Pheromones.

And it’s telling us something. It’s telegraphing for us what kind of story it intends to be. Sometimes these are subtextual signals and sometimes they’re more overt, but no matter what, your story is making a promise to us.

You have to fulfill it.

Chekhov’s Gun is not about a gun. Chekhov’s gun is about the promise of the premise — it’s about laying something out on the table and having it mean something, having it be a thing that matters to the story. It’s a treasure map with burned corners, an instruction manual with pages missing, a corpse with its fingerprints burned off. You have to make good on what you’re telling us. You can hand me a cup and tell me only that it’s an alcoholic beverage — and I’ll be interested to find out what kind of alcoholic beverage. But when I drink it and get a mouthful of ants, I’m going to be pissed off.

You can’t show me that it’s a fantasy novel and then tell me it’s sci-fi.

You can’t introduce a whodunit without telling me whodunit.

(Originally mistyped as “WHODONUT,” which is a story I would like to read. And then eat.)

Point is:

You cannot break your promise.

That’s not to say you can’t do something unexpected. But that unexpected thing has to make us go, “OH COOL,” and “HOLY SHIT THE HINTS WERE THERE ALL ALONG,” and not make us go “WHAT MANNER OF FUCKERY IS THIS.” You can’t write a whodunit where some unseen rando was the murderer — that works in noir, but not in a real-deal murder mystery. “Oh, it was the car wash guy you never met ha ha ha suckers.” You can’t switch gears and make the story become something different — you have to warn us. You have to promise.

And then you gotta pay your narrative debts, motherfucker.

The Protagonist Is Wallpaper

You’ve created a fascinating story full of great characters and nifty notions and then you stuck in there a protagonist whose entire job is to be the wallpaper that witnesses the whole thing.

Do not do this. Stop right there.

The protagonist is the agent of change. The protagonist gets shit done. She has agency. She has meaning. And she has to be interesting. A fully-fledged character with wants and needs and fears and stuff to say and things to do. The protagonist is not a tour guide. She is not an exposition machine. She is not a pair of animated binoculars. Delilah and Robert had a conversation about this at the event, where they referred to this as sticking a GoPro camera onto a remote control car and just wheeling that little fucker through the story.

No, no, no.

The protagonist isn’t a passive participant.

She is the active agent of effort, conflict and change.

She is front and center, not hiding in the back row.

Nothing Going On Beneath The Surface

A first draft of a story is often: “This happens, that happens, she says this, he says that.” It’s a sequence of events. Maybe one clumsily laid out, maybe one artfully arranged. But ultimately?

Superficial.

Your goal is to lift that piece of plywood and see what squirms in the dirt and grass underneath. Go deeper. Sink your fingers into the rich and heady earth. Tell us the theme. Figure out for us what you’re trying to say. What’s really going on? What’s the argument the story is trying to make? Why does this matter beyond mere event and action? The story isn’t just a robot. It’s got a soul.

You need to find that soul and remind us of it.

We need glimpses of skin. Salacious looks at something secret. Something special.

Go deeper.

You Never Figured Out The Rules

Every story has rules.

Those rules are not written on the wall, usually — and if they are, someone (the author) paints over them so that they cannot be seen, so that the suspense about what’s really going on remains.

But the author still has to know the rules.

And many don’t. You start the tale and there’s magic or a murder or a conspiracy or a spaceship (OR A MAGICAL MURDERSHIP CONSPIRACY IN SPACE), but you don’t know all the details. You don’t know the rules. You’re just making it up as you go. Which is fine! We all do that. But by the end? It all has to hang together. This thing you wrote — it must, must, must have rules. And it cannot betray them or break them (unless you organically establish a way to break them, but even there, that’s actually just another unwritten rule, isn’t it?).

You have work to do. This thing has to make sense. The plot isn’t just a sequence of events — all the pieces of the plot snap together and interlock. They’re LEGO bricks, and they’re building something. You have to know what, and why, and how. Order is revealed in the chaos. The reader will know if you haven’t figured it out. Because the reader is like a bloodhound. The reader can smell your bewilderment because it’s coming off you like rank halitosis.

* * *

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

 

The time has come, folks.

Everyone’s favorite psycho psychic is back —

The Miriam Black e-books have returned to sale!

In Blackbirds, she has to undo a murder that she causes; in Mockingbird, she must hunt the serial killer stalking the students at a girls’ private school; in The Cormorant, she falls into a trap set for her — one that puts her mother’s life in mortal danger.

(Print copies will stagger their releases over the next several months — Blackbirds will come out 8/25, Mockingbird 10/20, Cormorant 2/23, Thunderbird on 4/5.)

And not only have those books returned for sale, but also out now is the collection Three Slices, which is an anthology of novellas by Kevin Hearne (an Iron Druid story), Delilah S. Dawson (a Blud story), and me — it features a Miriam Black story called Interlude: Swallow, set between Cormorant and the upcoming fourth book, Thunderbird. In it, Miriam goes on a quest to undo her curse, but begins to see signs that an old adversary is not as dead as she thinks…

Blackbirds: Kindle | B&N | iBooks | Audible

Mockingbird: Kindle | B&N | iBooks | Audible

The Cormorant: Kindle | B&N | iBooks | Audible

Three Slices: Kindle | B&N | iBooks | Audible

Miriam Black Book Trailer

(Saga covers by Adam Doyle; Three Slices art by Galen Dara)

FOURTH THE MAY BE WITH YOU. — Yoda.

Ahem.

So! Hey. Star Wars.

Of all the films, shows, books, and so forth, I gotta know —

Who is your favorite obscure Star Wars character?

(They don’t need to be all that “obscure” — just not one of the “main cast.” No Luke, Leia, etc.)

Me, from the original trilogy, I love me some Nien Nunb.

I don’t know why.

I like that the joy he expresses when they win.

I like his workman’s attitude. He seems like the kinda Sullustan you’d want on your side. Or at your barbecue. He just looks like a good dude. I mean, sure, his face is super gross? It’s like, a bunch of moist folds stacked on top of each other. He’s like several layers of animated mortadella bologna just flapping wetly at you, but hey, whatever. You can’t judge him on that.

If I had to go deeper —

The bounty hunter Sugi, from The Clone Wars.

It’s easy to love the bounty hunters, but she’s even easier because she seems noble, somehow — not just your standard mercenary scum, but Scum With Honor. She’s pretty obscure — I think she only shows up in two episodes? But I like that there’s more going on there than what you see. You get the sense of larger story, somehow.

So, your turn.

Fave third-tier, obscure character? GO.

I saw a great tweet this week.

Search History:

Cat armor

Buy armor for cats

Cat jousting tournaments

How to stop armored cats

Cat army how to stop

national guard phone #

— Alone Shark (@AbrasiveGhost) April 26, 2015

Search terms tell a story. We’ve seen it used in advertisements. It sometimes plays as a joke on Twitter.

This is your challenge.

I want you to take six to ten search terms.

And I want you to tell a story with them. A narrative progression.

That’s it.

Short, simple, easy.

It can be funny, scary, tragic, whatever.

This time, there are stakes.

Prizes.

I’ll give away three physical copies of my upcoming Z-List Hackers Vs. Evil Government Surveillance Program novel, Zer0es. (This means you’ll need to be in the US to receive those copies unless you want to pay the shipping costs to receive the book elsewhere.)

I’ll pick my two favorites and choose one random winner, too.

You’ve got one entry.

One week to do it — due by next Friday (5/8), noon EST.

Put your story directly in the comments below.

Go forth and rock.

EDIT: Time to announce some winners!

Okay, these were hard because oh so many good ones.

Some were a little samey-samey — like, okay, sure, zombies and suicide and the standard progression. And a few were good but actually went past the rules — either entered more than once or went over 10 search terms. So: some disqualified themselves.

My favorites included but were not limited to:

Douglas Riggs, Elizabeth Mallory, Matt Perkins, Valerie Valdes, ABillyHiggins, Alissa Hodges, Thirstyfish, Tony J, Mrnswen. But, I have to pick two winners out of there.

So I’m going to do that with great pain and reluctance because so, so good.

First up:

ABILLYHIGGINS:

domination

define dominatrix

non-sexual domination

world domination

simple plan for world domination

simpler plan for world domination

is beyonce world leader

alternative to world domination

how to become accountnt

what to do with broken dreams

And my second choice?

ELIZABETH MALLORY:

Best sex positions to satisfy men

Female why can’t I orgasm

What are Kegels

Meditation practices to open sacral chakra

How to know if you’re in love

Best way to break up with someone

Good bars near me

Date night ideas

Best sex positions to satisfy women

Engagement ring sizing chart

States where gay marriage is legal

And then, on a lark, I’m going to throw in two more winners, because so good:

MRNSWEN:

Symptoms of toxic waste poisoning

Strongest weight lifted by a human

How to tell if something is bullet proof

Average amount of money in a bank vault

Average police response time

Private jet charters in my area

Best country to live in

Best country to live in with no extradition

How to defeat a superhero

and

VALERIE VALDES:

how to tell if your spouse is cheating

can people change

can people change into bears

next full moon

how to build a safe room

what do bears eat

can a bear get a human pregnant

can a werebear get a human pregnant

bear gestation period

small bear cages

Then, we have one random winner:

WTF PANCAKES:

Summer family party ideas

Seasonal produce

Citrus recipes

Lemon party

How to clear browser history permanently

Therapists on my insurance plan

All of you need to email me:

terribleminds at gmail dot com.

I’ll need a shipping address in the US where I can get you a copy of ZEROES!

THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS. 

On a warm summer night at Yankee Stadium, a monstrous plot to eradicate the human race is set into motion. 

Within days, the deadly Medusa virus is racing across the globe like a wildfire, leaving behind a handful of terrified survivors in a world unlike any they have ever known. 

One of those immune – Dr. Adam Fisher – discovers that his college-aged daughter in California may share his rare resistance to the virus. With a raggedy band of other survivors, he treks across a ruined American landscape to find her, discovering along the way a dangerous new enemy that threatens their fragile existence and learning that his daughter may have become their latest victim.

 * * *

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

You really need to trust your gut.

 

I fell in love with post-apocalyptic fiction after reading The Stand in 1993. Since then, I’ve read and watched countless books and movies in the genre. I’ve always been attracted to these kinds of stories – ordinary people living in a very recognizable world with suburbs and Twitter and Taco Bells suddenly thrust into a new world emptied by plague, ravaged by zombies, irradiated by nukes, whatever.  For years, I’d longed to write a post-apocalyptic tale – but I never did it. I wrote other books instead.

 

Finally, in 2011, I sat down and started writing The Immune. I banged out about 40,000 words in two months. I loved writing it. And then I stopped, probably the most damn-fool decision of my writing life, having been advised that there was no market for such a book. Despite every fiber of my being screaming not to give up on The Immune, I wrote yet another book. That book wasn’t very good (and it remains locked in solitary confinement on my hard drive). I floundered for months trying to come up with something else marketable and didn’t write a thing. And then I decided I was either going to finish The Immune or I was going to stop writing entirely.

 

So on November 12, 2012, I went to a coffee shop and pounded out 4,000 words. None of those words made it into the final draft, but I was off and running. I didn’t care about the industry or the market. I never looked back. I wrote the book that deep down I wanted to write, the one my gut had been telling me to write for years.

 

There’s a reason people tell you to write what you love. When you do it, two things happen – the work gets done, and you’re driven to do your best work.

“Your friend is quite the mercenary. I wonder if he cares about anything.”

Look, no one cares if you ever write a book.

 

Nothing puts up a bigger headwind than the pursuit of the arts. I think this fact kills more writing dreams than anything else. Once you announce that you’re going to write a book, you’ll get an “Awesome, can’t wait to read it!” and 38 Facebook Likes. And then everyone will promptly forget about your silly book writing and you will be all alone.

 

Even worse? No one will be tapping his/her watch and saying, “honey, don’t you have a thousand words you need to bang out here?”

 

The world would keep on spinning just fine if I stopped writing, if you stopped writing, even if Chuck stopped… (*Writing Shed starts to rattle*). Well, Chuck is different.  SORRY SHED.

 

Repeat after me. No one cares. Your mom or dad or spouse or kid or best friend will love you just the same if you walk away from that book forever.

 

But it’s so freeing. No one else needs to care, not right now. I wrote the very best story I was capable of writing, free of the shackles of worrying what others might think about it.

“No! Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.”

You’ve got more time to write than you think.

 

The first draft of The Immune weighed in at about 180,000 words. After my coffee shop get-r-done! epiphany, I wrote about 140,000 of those words in five months.

 

When you decide to seriously pursue writing fiction, you will probably be doing it at a time that you have about forty other VERY GROWN UP obligations and then fuck, can’t I just sit and watch this Big Bang Theory marathon while eating this here Chinese food because I’ve had the longest goddamn day?

 

I lead about the most suburban life you can imagine – I’m married with two kids and a job and a dog and I do most of the cooking and yard work. We have soccer games and practices, Girl Scout meetings, PTA meetings, I’m even on the board of the homeowners association.

 

But I always make time to write. It may not be the same place every day, It may not be the same time every day, it may not even BE every day. It could be fifteen minutes here, an hour there. At soccer practice. Waiting for the pasta water to boil. A couple hundred words at lunch. But it gets done. Because I want it to be done.

“Many Bothans died … to bring us this information.”

To a writer, a novel is a bit like the Death Star. It’s big, constantly under construction, and it looms over everything in your life. And to attack it, you need a blueprint.

 

There are more novel-writing strategies out there than there are naughty words in a Chuck Wending blog post so you know that’s a big number. In the end, they probably all work to some degree in that they force you to give some serious thought about where you’re ultimately headed with this hostage crisis I mean story. This is incredibly important because if you’re going to write a book in 15 or 60-minute slivers (and the truth is, you’re almost certainly going to have to if you’re just starting out), you want that time to be productive. A blueprint is incredibly comforting in the lonely weeks and months when you’re in the no-one-cares stage, when it’s just you and your keyboard and your tequila-Cherry-coke slammers.

 

Chuck has a great post called 25 Ways to Plot, Plan & Prep Your Story. Read it, arm yourself with the weapons you like, and launch your assault on your personal Death Star.

“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”

When things go off the rails, and they certainly will, your characters will tell you what needs to happen.

 

HAHAHA no, I don’t really mean that they actually tell you I’m not a psycho. At some point, things will go off the rails. You’ll cry, scream, beg, drink, eat Cheetos and you will want to give up and try that shiny new idea tickling you in your writerly parts.

 

You have to get past that. And this is how you do it.

 

Think about what your characters want. Everyone wants something – it could be an internal thing (be a better parent) or external thing (get tickets to sold-out Meghan Trainor concert). It could be both. Achieving one goal could get your character the other. Failing at one could mean success at the other.

 

On the surface, Breaking Bad was a show about a mild-mannered teacher who wanted to provide for his family in the face of his impending death from lung cancer. He used who he was (a brilliant chemist) to make that a reality via a very pure and very lucrative formula for crystal meth. But it went deeper than that – the man he’d been before the events of Breaking Bad played a significant role in driving the lengths that he would go to in order to achieve that surface goal. And as the story unfolded, we learned that Walter’s true goal was something much darker and more terrifying.

 

If you know your characters well, you’ll know what they want beyond the surface goal (and I don’t mean to discount the surface goal’s importance, because the surface goal is often the thing that brings the deeper goal to light), much like Vince Gilligan clearly knew what Walter White’s true goal was.

 

And those goals, filtered through the prism of whom your characters had been before the story began, will often light your way through the narrative and deliver a richer story.

* * *

 

David lives in Virginia with his family. His first novel, The Jackpot, was a No. 1 Legal Thriller on Amazon and will be published in Bulgaria later this year. He’s also the creator of a series of short animated films, including So You Want to Write a Novel, which have been viewed nearly 3 million times on YouTube and were featured in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Huffington Post.

 

Links:

David Kazzie: Blog | Twitter

The Immune: Amazon