Author: terribleminds (page 223 of 465)

Sometimes evil looks like a fuzzy teddy bear.

Still grieving the untimely death of his dad, ten-year-old Josh Leary is reluctant to accept a well-worn teddy bear from his new stepfather.

He soon learns he was right to be wary. Edgar is no ordinary toy, and he doesn’t like being rejected. When Josh banishes him to the closet, terrible things happen.

Desperate to be rid of the bear, Josh engages the help of a friend. As the boys’ efforts rebound on them with horrifying results, Josh is forced to accept the truth — Edgar will always get even.

* * *

Find Out What Publishers Want

It’s a lot easier to sell a story that publishers actually want (as long as you’re passionate about the genre or subject) than to write the novel you want and then try to find someone who’s looking for it. If you’re having difficulty getting published, give it a try.

In my case, Samhain Horror wanted stories about childhood fears for a new anthology series, and I knew that was something I could sink my teeth into, so to speak.

Tell Your Inner Critic to Suck It

I’ve written seven novels now, and none of them had outlines. Still, every time I’m about to settle in for a writing session, it happens…

What if you can’t figure out what happens next?

What if it’s not good enough?

What if no one wants to publish this, and it’s just a waste of time?

Most writers have an inner critic. If you listen to it, it’ll keep you from writing. Or it will make you rewrite your novel so many times you never finish it.

Don’t give it that power. Ignore it, keep writing, and eventually it will be drowned out by a torrent of words.

Don’t Fall In Love With Your Own Brilliance

Don D’Auria, my editor at Samhain, made very few changes to this book. But the one change he did want was BIG—he didn’t like my title.

One the other hand, I loved it. What better title for a story about a bear that keeps coming back than It Bears Repeating? I thought it was so clever.

“No one will know what the book’s about,” said Don.

So don’t fall in love with your own brilliance. Once it’s sold, anything can be changed. (And you may discover it wasn’t so brilliant after all.)

When Opportunity Knocks, Answer the Damn Door

I was busy writing a series when a friend told me about the Samhain call.

“Should I do it?” I asked. “I’ll lose momentum with my current book.”

Of course my smart friend told me to go for it, and thankfully I listened. The rest is history.

The timing is never perfect for anything, whether it’s answering a publisher’s call, writing a book, having kids, or going back to school. If you want something, go for it. You’ll only regret the stuff you haven’t done.

Keep Breaking the Rules

When it comes to writing, I break every rule in the book. I don’t outline. I don’t write at the same time every day. I don’t know the end of my novels before I start—and yet, they always work out the way they should. Whenever someone tells me I should change my way of doing things, I smile sweetly and keep on writing. (If I’m in a good mood—if I’m not, my response is a little on the blunt side.)

 

With The Bear Who Wouldn’t Leave, I broke another rule. Following Dean Wesley Smith’s advice, I didn’t give it to a million beta readers and critics. After writing the first draft, I polished it and gave it to just my copy editor before submitting. And it’s the first book I’ve gotten published. Go figure.

 

 

* * *

J.H. Moncrieff loves scaring the crap out of people with her books—when she’s not busy being a journalist, editor, book doctor, and publicist. In her “spare” time, J.H. loves to travel to exotic locales, advocate for animal rights, and muay thai kickbox.

 

J.H. Moncrieff: Website | Twitter | Facebook

The Bear Who Wouldn’t Leave: Amazon | Samhain | Kobo | B&N | Trailer

 

• A simple formula for writing: take the story from high intensity (action, argument, manifest tension, drama) to low intensity (dialogue, simmering tension, concerted character development). Nothing should be without tension, and conflict should carry throughout. A film like Die Hard does this well — period of calm, then period of action. Calm, action, calm, action. You can play with the timing and the length of these sections, too. Requiem for a Dream does slow, fast, slow, fast, too. But as it goes on, the slower periods begin to winnow. The sharp, fast, nasty patches get sharper, faster, nastier. The last ten minutes are a roller coaster ride through human depravity, addiction, and tragedy.

• Another simple formula: character wants something, something or someone stands in their way, character is tested on how far she’ll go (and what she’ll do) to accomplish her goals.

• Another simple formula: shit happens, shit gets worse, shit gets complicated, shit twists, and maybe just maybe the shit gets cleaned up.

• After today’s writing, ask: what was the conflict, what were the stakes?

• Create an outline as you go. As you finish a day’s worth of writing, open a new document, and write a short paragraph (50-100 words) of what transpired during the writing. Er, not what transpired in and around you personally (“I felt grave existential dread and suffered unruly crotchsweats”), but what happened in the story. Then, by the end of your effort, you will have a rough outline detailing the course of events in and around the story.

• After today’s writing, ask: does my character have agency? Did she push on the story more than it pulled on her? Could she be replaced with a potato being passed around? Is she a little paper boat on the river, or is she the goddamn river? (Hint: she should be the river.)

• Chart your story. Use graphs. Give a number (1-100) to a particular aspect of the story (tension, drama, character development, pacing, physical/social/emotional, pornographic quotient, instances of the word ‘indubitably’). You can use use spreadsheets to create graphs.

• After today’s writing, ask: why do I care? What about this is engaging me? Why will it engage others? Explore the give-a-fuck factor. Challenge yourself.

• Don’t name your characters similar names. Even starting with the same initial can be confusing. I mean, you don’t want to assume your reader is so dumb that they cannot distinguish between “Davenport” and “Darren,” but if you have characters named Dan, Don, Dave, Dale, and Dom — then you’re going to confuse us. Though Wes Anderson could probably pull it off. He’s so quirky!

• After today’s writing, ask: what happens tomorrow when you write? Not to you — you cannot predict that my pet tiger, Lucius, will rend you from teeth to taint. (Well, I guess you can predict it now. Spoiler alert.) Figure out where the story will go tomorrow when you sit back down. Think about it. Maybe write a couple words to remind you.

• Got writer’s block? Skip the section you’re working on. Nobody said you had to work in order. Writer’s block might also mean something is wrong in the story. You might need to cut the last section you wrote because something in there is off-kilter and your writer’s soul can feel it. Maybe go back, stop writing prose and outline the thing. A hasty, chickenscratch, combat-landing outline — zero fuckery, just a quick scrawl of what the story should look like.

• After today’s writing, ask: what if? What if it doesn’t go the way you think? What if you do something different? It’s like the TV show, Survivor. Sometimes, you have to make big, unexpected moves inside the story. Sometimes it has to stop going the way it seems to be going and turn sharply in another direction. You sometimes have to fool yourself to fool your audience. Sometimes, some unwitting fucker gets voted off the island. Blindside the characters. Blindside yourself. Blindside the readers.

• Answer the question: “WHAT IS THIS STORY ABOUT?” Answer it in a big way but with a short sentence. One sentence only. What are you trying to say with this story? Not, “what’s the plot,” but the intense, gut-wrenching question of what is this story really motherfucking about? When you answer it, write it on a Post-It note. Stick that post it note from your monitor. Let it remind you as you write. Doodle a dong and/or boobies on another Post-It note. Because why not?

• After today’s writing, ask: why now? Why does this story happen right now? What events lead to it? What matters about this moment in time that the story has to exist, has to play out this way?

• Don’t just read your work aloud. If you hit an uncertain point, let someone else read it aloud. You’ll hear things in the way they say it. The story is written in your voice, yes, but it’s written for other people. What does it sound like coming from someone else’s mouth?

• After today’s writing ask: was I bored today by the work? If so: why? Fix that shit.

• Assure that you have STORY NOODLIN’ TIME. Every day. In the shower. On the lawnmower. While gutting your enemies and tanning their flesh for your leathery manskin bedsheets. Find time every day to just think about the story you’re telling.

• After today’s writing, ask: where are my pants?

• Before writing today, read the last page you wrote. Just one.

• After today’s writing, ask: who is my audience? Am I writing for them? (And also remember: your primary audience is you. Write first for yourself. Tell the story you want to tell.)

• Write for 45 minutes. Stop for 15. Repeat while able.

• After today’s writing, remember to save everything. Redundant backups. Extra saves.

• If you’re not sure about a word, sentence, or whole section, don’t fiddle with it right now. Writers start fiddling, they fiddle for hours while nothing else gets done. Highlight it in big bold yellow. Then move the fuck on until it’s time to edit.

• Cut the first chapter of your story. Cut the first paragraph of a chapter. Cut the first sentence of a paragraph. Be on a quest to tighten. Assume your job is to tell as little story as possible to get the point across. How little can you tell, how late can you enter, to still ensure that people a) understand what’s going on b) feel something about it c) think about it after they’re done?

• To understand story in a new way: study comedy. Study the shape of a simple joke — a joke is a story with a twist ending. Study magic tricks. Study how people tell stories. Study commercials. Study anything that has a narrative flow.

• Get some sleep. Sleep is brain food. You need your brain to write. Get some sleep.

Now go write.

*writes my book’s name on a hundred hammers*

*hands out hammers*

*crowd runs around bashing people with hammers*

BUY MY BOOK

BUY MY BOOK

ONE OF US

ONE OF US

GOOBLE GOBBLE

GOOBLE GOBBLE

*clears throat*

Okay, yeah, don’t do that. Mindless head trauma is not an effective self-promotional delivery system, as exciting as it may seem. And just the other week I listed out for you what I consider to be the 10 Commandments of Authorial Self-Promotion. Ah, but you may be saying, “So, if my MURDER HAMMER promotional technique will fail me, gosh, what will work?” To which I respond with an eager and hearty shrug and then I flee back into the woods from whence I came. But that’s probably not a very good answer, is it? No matter how enthusiastic the shrug, the (not entirely inaccurate) answer of “Sorry, no idea!” is not helpful.

As such, I have written this post.

In this post, I will tackle (with regrettably short shrift) some of the varying THINGS YOU CAN DO AS AN AUTHOR in order to promote yourself and your work. Some of these I’ve used. Some of these I’ve seen only in implementation by other free-range penmonkeys. My thoughts will be imperfect and incomplete. This will not be an exhaustive list. Which is where you come in. Am I missing anything? Do you disagree with some of my shouty assertions? Then slingshot your derriere down into the comments section and say so.

Let us begin.

Endless Spambarfing

We’re going to get this one out of the way up front: there is literally no value in you frothily screaming the same ad copy / tagline / book cover across your social media channels again and again. You look at some author feeds and it’s just a parade of BUY MY BOOK tweets or updates, with nary a breath in the middle for the things that form the backbone of the Internet: food photos and cat videos. The worse version of this is not just endless shouting, but endless directed shouting — the author tags others across social media channels and just punches them again and again in the kidneys with their self-promotional effort.

This can take other forms, of course — unsolicited emails, unsolicited direct messages, forcing someone to join your BUY MY BOOK Facebook group, breaking into their house and clogging their toilets with leaflets for your latest epic fantasy.

Spamming will find new forms in the future, because it is a nasty little shapeshifter.

But it always feels the same, doesn’t it? So gross. Just so gross.

Self-promotion is a sniper’s bullet. Spamming is a machine gun spray.

Effectiveness: 0/10.

Thunderclap

This sounds like a particularly violent venereal disease.

It’s not. It’s a way to get a message out.

It seems clever, on the surface — as a service, it asks that a number of people sign up for a Thunderclap movement, and those people all agree to “get the word out” about your latest book / widget / protest / photoshoot / bowel movement, timed together so that it forms a singular “thunderclap” (get it?) of promotion.

It’s a shout, not a whisper. That’s right there in the name — it’s about volume from quantity.

You can use the Thunderclap service, or orchestrate one yourself.

This is not a thing I like. It is a thing that feels irritating, at least to me. It’s still spammy, but diffuse — it’s not the author shouting alone like a lunatic, but now the author and the author’s cult shouting like a gaggle of lunatics. It won’t burn the author so completely, because it’s a many-headed creature. But it can still come across as annoying. You’ve got 500 people shouting about a book (they likely haven’t yet read) — it’s noisy and insincere. Turning everybody into roaring, branded racecars for a short period of time doesn’t seem like an effective self-promotional strike, but your mileage may vary. Some people have expressed how well this works, so — try it if you like. (That said, it’s effectiveness won’t last. I’ve seen a sharp uptick of authors talking about this technique lately, which is a sure sign that its bubble will burst.)

Effectiveness: who cares, it’s annoying.

Guest Posting

Ahh, the venerable guest post. Where you pick a topic and go mouth off on somebody else’s space about it. And then in the process, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, buy my book.

This works if — and it’s a big if — if you’re good at blogging.

Kameron Hurley can do it well.

Delilah S. Dawson can do it well.

A lot of you cannot do it well.

“Blogging is not fiction writing!” Captain Obvious shouted obviously. So, just jumping on somebody’s website and stitching together some shoddy, meandering promo-waffle about this or that won’t really be that effective. But if it’s a good post? Now you have some juice. If it’s a good post that isn’t explicitly about buying your book (because, honestly, people don’t like to be sold things)? Double juicy. If it’s all that and it runs on a blog with some real reach? BOOM. TRIPLE JUICE. Which was also my nickname at Sex Camp back in the late 1990s. “TRIPLE JUICE,” the Sex Coach would say. “YOU KNOW YOUR WAY AROUND THAT FUCKTRON-909 ANDROID.” I’d give a pair of finger guns and boy howdy would my teeth gleam.

Anyway.

It’s effective if you do it right and find the right host.

(It becomes less effective the bigger you get as an author, mind you.)

Effectiveness: 5/10, but with +1 modifiers based on good / not exploitative / strong blog, and likely with negative modifiers the bigger an author you have become (at which point, you should probably have your own established blog or social media channels).

Book Blog Tours

This is the weaponization of guest posts. You don’t just write one. You write five. Or ten. Or twenty. For blogs big and small. It’s you running laps around the Internet like some kind of Johnny Contentseed,  pollinating blogs and their reader-bees with your precious book dust.

I think this is less effective than doing a few strong guest posts, and here’s why:

You start showing up at a buncha blogs all at the same time, everybody knows what’s up. HEY SOMEBODY’S GOT A BOOK TO SELL, they all groan collectively, and then go back to doing whatever it is they were doing before: eating Pop-Tarts and masturbating probably? It isn’t spammy, but it can start to feel that way. You’ll reduce that feeling if every guest blog you release in this fusillade is top shelf content, mind you — but that’s also tricky. Because now you don’t have to write just one crackin’ guest post, but like, thirty-seven of them.

And really, shouldn’t you be writing books?

(Note: if you can monetize this, then that rocks. Kameron Hurley, as I understand, does these blog tours but then aggregates her posts to sell them. Which is smart authorin’, if you ask me.)

Effectiveness: 4/10, but with +1 modifiers based on good / not exploitative / strong blog.

Bookstore Tours

The mainstay of authorial self-promotion:

Leapfrog across the country from bookstore to bookstore, signing books and talking to readers and shaking babies and kissing hands. (The young adult version of this is visiting schools and libraries. If you write board books, maybe you tour a bunch of daycares? I dunno.)

And with every book tour arrives the inevitable stories of spectacularly failed events. “I travelled 400 miles to promote my new book. I showed up at the store with party hats and a trained chimpanzee accordion band. But nobody else showed up. The bookstore people were mean to me and hit me with dictionaries. I read my book aloud to four cockroaches that wandered inside. I ate the chimpanzee band. My life is a dismal, existential pit.”

Bookstore events are tricky. I’ve had good luck with them — and no horror stories, as yet, though I know they will come — but I also don’t do a ton of them, either. Further, publishers don’t often pay for these until you’re at a certain point. Self-publishers will have a hard time because bookstores are notably and understandably hesitant about dealing with self-published authors.

Seems that a bookstore tour is not unlike a Kickstarter campaign — they’re effective if you have an audience there to support you already. Otherwise? Not so much. Big authors can get a lot of mileage out of tours or even single bookstore visits. Smaller authors have a harder shot of bringing people in the door (which is why some events put a few authors together for such an event).

Effectiveness: 7/10 if you’re established, 3/10 if not.

Conventions and Conferences

You go to a con, you sit on panels, you sign some books, you press the flesh and try out your elevator pitch. It works in part because the crowd is already there — and while they’re not there to see you, they are there to roll around in the sweet grease of pop culture goodness. AND YOU EXUDE JUST SUCH SWEET GREASE.

It works, I think. I’ve met a lot of great people this way. Met a lot of great authors, too.

Consider me a fan.

Effectiveness: 7/10, add negative modifiers if you’re an asshole.

Newsletter / Email List

I don’t have a “proper” email list — though I do have over 7,000 subscribers to the blog, which means they all get these posts in their inboxes (full text, no links) whenever I post ’em.

It’s pretty effective for me, and I’ve heard that authors with newsletters and email lists find it effective, too. Some services like MailChimp give you good analytics that tell you how many folks opened the email or clicked the links or printed out the email to use angrily as toilet paper.

It’s a good way to speak to people who are your audience or who want to be.

It’s a good way to also not be spammy, because they consented to be on the list.

Effectiveness: 8/10

Swag

Bookmarks! Stickers! Mugs! T-shirts! Temporary tattoos! Ball-gags! Hand grenades! Live tigers! All emblazoned with your book and tagline and cover and web address! IT’S SWAG, BABY.

Swag: free promotional shit you give away.

Does it work?

You know, I dunno. Some people are swaghounds. They sniff out free swag. You ever go to BEA or Gen Con or anywhere like that, there are whole roving packs of people who vacuum up every free piece of garbage hanging out on every table. They will, and this is no exaggeration, pick up everything at the table and ask if they can have it. “This pen? This book? This laptop? This child? Is it free?” And then sometimes before receiving an answer they will pitch the thing into the bag and merge back into crowded superorganism from whence they spawned.

I wish I were kidding. I’ve seen people walk away with books. With signage. It’s absurd.

Anyway.

Here’s the thing about swag:

If it’s cool, people will want it and they’ll remember it.

If it’s ennnh, people will want it but probably trash it soon after.

Bookmarks are… fine, but maybe only so functional. It feels a little like giving out buggy whips — so many folks read on e-books that you gotta wonder what the value is of a bookmark. And not all physical readers use bookmarks. Whatever it is you give, too, it has to be a thing not only of some utility or interest but also has to effectively sell a book. It’s gotta feature a hook or a great cover or something that creates that vital bridge between “I am holding this FREE THING” and “I will now go and purchase that person’s book.”

And then the other side of it is:

Swag is free for them, but can be expensive for you.

Sometimes it’s a nice reward for established readers, though.

Effectiveness: 5/10, but with negative modifiers based on cost

Free Copies

Word of mouth is the finest, sharpest, most functional form of promotion there is. Because, ha ha, it’s not self-promotion. It’s somebody else legitimately, earnestly promoting you or your book. “I love this, so you will love it too,” someone says. We believe that kind of outreach. It feels sincere. And so, we listen. Buzz about a book is hard to orchestrate — you can feel when it’s artificial. But real-deal buzz? When people are just… talking about a book? That’s something special.

And you cannot engineer it anymore than you can piss lightning.

But, you can maximize it a little bit — er, the word-of-mouth, not the lightning-urine.

If you want people to talk about your book, you need them to read your book.

And if you want them to read your book, sometimes you gotta give it to them.

For free.

Now, free is a word that rightfully makes a lot of authors clench their sphincters up so hard they risk causing a full body implosion. (“Floomp!”) They start freaking out about piracy or not getting paid or dogs and cats getting married and suddenly it’s the apocalypse.

But free books in a targeted way is a good path to getting the word out.

Publishers do it. They send free copies all over the damn place.

You can do it, too.

At cons. In giveaways. To reviewers.

It should be a targeted effort, of course. Some people just like free things and yet, do not respect free things. They get it because of the dopamine rush, but then view it as being worth what they paid to get it — which is to say, nichts, nada, bupkiss, bullshit. “YAY, FREE STUFF,” turns swiftly into, “WELL IT’S PROBABLY NOT THAT GOOD.”

So, targeted free things has value.

Get the books into not just any hand but the right hand.

Effectiveness: 8/10

Buying Ads

Yep. You can buy ads. At Goodreads. Across Twitter or Facebook. On some blogs.

Worth it?

I’ve never done it personally, so I have no guarantee of its effectiveness. I know this: when I see an ad on Goodreads, if it looks interesting, I might click. Or, if it’s reminding me of a book I wanted but didn’t realize it’s out, I’ll click. Same goes with social media ads to a point. I’ve seen a book advertised on Facebook or Twitter and the first time I see it, I think, “Okay, sure.” And then I see it again and again and again and then I get irrationally irritated at the book and the author (even if the publisher paid for the ad). Again, there’s the rub: in our social media channels we bristle against too much promotion, don’t we? We expect ads in certain places, and the interiors of our social media feeds just isn’t one of those places.

Ads do work somewhat, though I can’t speak to how valuable it is against cost. When the publisher pays for it — well, hell yeah. I had some Kindle screensaver advertising that was epic in terms of how many books it sold. Goodreads ads were far less effective, but still effective.

Effectiveness: 5/10, unless somebody else is paying for it, then whee

Earnest, Sustained Outreach

Biggest and best self-promotion:

Be the best version of yourself online.

Just be you. And sometimes that means occasionally talking about your books.

This won’t be a magical solution. It will not turn you into a bestseller overnight, if at all. It will not move heaps and mounds of books off of shelves and into hands. But it does slowly-and-surely gain you audience. It interjects you and your stories into other people’s ecosystems. Suddenly, you’re just there. Like a cat they didn’t mean to adopt. Like a smell — and hopefully a nice smell, like baking cookies or the fear-sweat of your enemies.

It’s not at all effective in the short term.

But I think it’s very effective in the long term.

I’d argue that self-promotion isn’t about selling yourself but rather about being yourself.

Do that, and people will watch, and talk, and laugh. They’ll come to hang out with you.

And one day they’ll click buy.

Effectiveness: 1/10 short term, 9/10 long term

Write The Best Book You Can

Well, that one’s just obvious, I hope.

There is no better promotion for one good book than another good book.

Write more books, bookmonkey.

Effectiveness: 10/10

What About You?

What worked? What didn’t? What forms of self-promo don’t you care for? What am I missing?

* * *

The Gonzo Big Writing Book Bundle.

Eight books: those pictured, plus 30 Days in the Word Mines.

(Just $20.00!)

(See? Self-promotion!)

(Did you click?)

(Why didn’t you click?)

(*cries onto pile of self-promotional sex toys*)

I did this challenge back at the start of the year and kinda adored it.

Therein I described it as follows:

I love that some writers describe their stories — usually in an elevator pitch or to sell the story to an agent, editor or reader — as “THIS STORY meets THAT STORY.” Right? “Oh,” the writer says, “It’s like CATCHER IN THE RYE meets SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS.” And you’re like, whoa, what the fuck does that even mean.

Today, we are going to find out.

Below, you’ll find two columns, each of 20 different fairly well-known properties.

You will randomly choose one from each column either by d20 or random number generator.

Then you will literally fill in the variables of the equation:

IT’S LIKE X MEETS Y.

And you will write the resultant story.

Note: your goal is not to literally mash these up in fan-fiction (though I suppose if that’s where your head goes, hey, I can’t stop you) — the goal is to take the idea, the spirit of the combination and make them into a story all your own. What is the theoretical mash-up look like and feel like? Diggit? So, what’s the story like if you get: “It’s like HARRY POTTER meets INDIANA JONES?” Or, “It’s like GAME OF THRONES meets SCOOBY DOO.”

So, get your random number generator or d20.

Pick one from each column.

Mash them together. See what kind of story squishes out.

You’ve got 2000 words.

Due by next Friday (5/1) at noon EST.

Post at your online space. Link to it here in the comments.

Ready? Steady? Go.

Column X

1. Paranormal Activity
2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
3. Terminator
4. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
5. War Games
6. Hunger Games
7. Batman
8. Goodfellas
9. Pokemon
10. The Wheel of Time
11. Robocop
12. Dracula
13. The Princess Bride
14. Dirty Harry
15. The Great Gatsby
16. Josie and the Pussycats
17. Ender’s Game
18. Guardians in the Galaxy
19. Twin Peaks
20. Dungeons & Dragons

Column Y

1. Pulp Fiction
2. The Silence of the Lambs
3. Toy Story
4. Die Hard
5. Pacific Rim
6. Back to the Future
7. To Kill A Mockingbird
8. Ghost In The Shell
9. Se7en
10. The Wire
11. Sherlock Holmes
12. True Detective
13. Monsters, Inc.
14. Doctor Who
15. The Matrix
16. Groundhog Day
17. The Lord of the Flies
18. The Stand
19. Mad Max
20. Minecraft

 

 

 

 

I’ll say up front I am genuinely happy that DC is going to put forward their girl superheroes for kids. If the writing is great, this’ll be good stuff. Kudos. Huzzah. Hurrah. A PARADE OF PONIES AND GLEE. *flings ponies into air with catapult* *explodes ponies with cannons* *glitter everywhere* *also sequins* *also ice cream sprinkles because why the fuck not*

I’m happy anytime any publisher, creator or company thinks: “Hey, weird, maybe we should be talking to everybody, not just this one group who has dominated the conversation for a good long time.” That’s a good thing. The world is full of folks who have been grossly undernourished by pop culture because of exclusion. And this is true up and down the chain — from those who run the companies to those who create the content to those characters within the content. This is a top-to-bottom, nose-to-toes problem.

And that problem trickles down to the readers, too.

I’ve talked about this before — “Boy Toys, Girl Toys, And Other Cuckoopants Gender Assumptions” — and once again, the specter of this problem rears its exclusionary little head.

I want you to take a look at the DC Comics press release.

More to the point, I want you to gaze at some of the language therein:

“…an exciting new universe of Super Heroic storytelling that helps build character and confidence, and empowers girls to discover their true potential.”

“Developed for girls aged 6-12, DC Super Hero Girls centers on the female Super Heroes and Super-Villains of the DC Comics universe during their formative years…”

“I am so pleased that we are able to offer relatable and strong role models in a unique way, just for girls.”

The underlined emphasis is mine.

I’m of a conflicted mind, here.

See, I want this comic to be about the girls. Not about boys. I want it to empower girls and maintain whatever aesthetic it must to appeal to an audience of girls. I hope it’s written by amazing women authors and put on the page by incredible women artists. Like I said, this is a nose-to-toes problem. It needs to be on the page but also beyond the page, too.

But here’s my conflict:

I want my son to read this.

And the response would be: “Well, he can, duh.”

To that, I agree! He can. And will, one day, I hope.

My problem is the signal that gets sent by identifying again and again that this is “just for girls.” That’s marketing speak, I know, but it’s also something that reaches the audience. It reaches the parents who buy this stuff and that means it reaches the kids who will read these books. This attitude trickles down and it bolsters poisonous gender typing. It says, “GIRLS LIKE GIRLY THINGS, BOYS LIKE BOYLY THINGS, AND NEVER THE TWO SHALL MEET.”

The problem isn’t that things are pink.

The problem is that pink is “just for girls.”

Girls need to be reading comics about girls and by women. Honestly, they’ve had to endure comics that have been about boys and by men for a very long time, and that needs to change.

But my son — now almost four, holy crap — and other boys have had to endure the same thing. That sounds strange, like it’s some kind of punishment — but boys also need to read about girls. Girls are always expected to understand boys (“Boys will be boys”) but boys are never expected to understand girls (“THEY ARE LIKE ALIEN ARTIFACTS AND IF YOU TRY TO UNDERSTAND THEM YOU WILL FRY YOUR BRAIN TO A CRISP CINDER now go play sports or punch somebody”). And this becomes the way men and women are to one another, too. Cosmo teaches women all the sexy sex tricks (“Try oral sex at a small town carnival with a mouth full of hot, deep-fried Snickers bar!”) and teaches men to, y’know, just be dudes, dude. Just bro it up. Be a bro. The ladies will come to you and then you might get to do that thing at the carnival I was telling you about. 

Society will get better when boys have to learn about girls the same way girls learn about boys.

Boys need to think about girls in ways that go beyond objectification or alienation.

Boys need to know who girls are and what they will go through.

All the toxicity between the gender divide? It starts here. It starts when they’re kids. It begins when you say, “LOOK, THERE’S THE GIRL STUFF FOR THE GIRLS OVER THERE, AND THE BOY STUFF FOR THE BOYS OVER HERE.” And then you hand them their pink hairbrushes and blue guns and you tell your sons, “You can’t play with the pink hairbrush because GIRL GERMS yucky ew you’re not weird are you, those germs might make you a girl,” and then when the boy wants to play with the hairbrush anyway, he does and gets his ass kicked on the bus and gets called names like sissy or pussy or some homophobic epithet because parents told their kids that girl stuff is for girls only, which basically makes the boy a girl. And the parents got that lesson from the companies that made the hairbrush because nowhere on the packaging would it ever show a boy brushing hair or a girl brushing a boy’s hair. And on the packaging of that blue gun is boys, boys, boys, grr, men, war, no way would girls touch this stuff. Duh! Girls aren’t boys! No guns for you.

My son plays the LEGO superhero games of both DC and Marvel (the Marvel one is better, let’s be honest) — and he plays the women superheroes as often as he does the men ones. He loves Wasp and Pepper Potts (particularly when she’s in the Iron Rescue suit). He got so excited to unlock Batgirl. He doesn’t even know who the fuck Batgirl is, he just thinks she’s rad.

One of my favoritest shows of all time is Gilmore Girls. And I still get people who give me this look (nearly always from dudes) as if to say, “Do you have a penis? Are you sure? Do you need to turn it in — like, are you done with it?” And I’m all, oh, what, it’s cool to like quick-talking Buffy because she stabs things with wooden stakes but not like this other show which oh yeah is basically Buffy just without the vampire fights? “Well, Gilmore Girls is a girl show. It’s right there in the name.” Whatever. Who gives a shit. It’s also an incredibly funny, sarcastic, sweet, sad, quirky show. (Run by a woman showrunner — at least up until it started to suck a little bit.)

Now, this runs the risk of sounding like the plaintive wails of a MAN SPURNED, wherein I weep into the open air, “WHAT ABOUT ME, WHAT ABOUT US POOR MENS,” and that’s not my point, I swear. I don’t want DC or the toy companies to cater to my boy. I just don’t want him excluded from learning about and dealing with girls. I want society to expect him to actually learn about girls and be allowed to like them — not as romantic targets later in life, but as like, awesome ass-kicking complicated equals. As real people who are among him rather than separate from him.

DC Comics making comics about girls isn’t the problem.

DC Comics telling us those comics are “just for girls” is.

Listen, if these comics are half-good, I’m giving them to him regardless. And this one particular instance isn’t going to ruin anything or change much at all — I think it’s a great initiative. I’m excited. But I do think it’s indicative of that larger patten. That larger division in gender. You don’t have to submit to a chromosomal test to read certain books or play with certain toys. Gender is a spectrum, not two poles at opposite ends of the globe. And the characteristics we associate with gender are constantly floating, shifting, changing. We need to embrace that, not the US VERSUS THEM attitude. Not the THESE PRODUCTS ARE FOR YOU, THESE PRODUCTS ARE FOR THEM declaration. Men can read books by women, about women. A boy can play with an EZ Bake oven because what the fuck? Why not? Why can’t a boy learn how to cook? Why can’t a girl learn how to use a screwdriver? Men can’t try to learn what women actually have to go through? C’mon.

I’ll be teaching my son all this stuff. I hope others will teach their kids the same, too. And I hope companies and publishers wisen up, as well — we need to stop that idea of gender roles trickling down from company to creator to parent to kids. Because this is where it all starts. This is when we have to catch it. It’s on us to fix it.

The Vagrant is his name. He has no other. Years have passed since humanity’s destruction emerged from the Breach. Friendless and alone he walks across a desolate, war-torn landscape. As each day passes the world tumbles further into depravity, bent and twisted by the new order, corrupted by the Usurper, the enemy, and his infernal horde. His purpose is to reach the Shining City, last bastion of the human race, and deliver the only weapon that may make a difference in the ongoing war. What little hope remains is dying. Abandoned by its leader, The Seven, and its heroes, The Seraph Knights, the last defences of a once great civilisation are crumbling into dust. But the Shining City is far away and the world is a very dangerous place.

* * *

1. Some things take time

It can be tough when you’re struggling to get the words on the page and people all around are talking about word sprints of a thousand words an hour, or daily totals of two, three, five or even ten(!) thousand words a day. But with The Vagrant I learned that sometimes you have to write slowly. As I figured out my process with the book, I limited myself to a thousand words a day. If I wrote more than that, the quality of the writing began to suffer. And more often than not, that thousand words would not just pour onto the page so I could run free for the rest of the day. They had to be chipped out of the edifice of my unconscious, letter by letter. But here’s the thing. Some projects are fast to write, and something of that frenetic energy gets translated onto the page and that’s great. But sometimes, the work demands to be taken slowly, and that can be great too.

2. It’s amazing how much space dialogue can take in a book

In The Vagrant, the protagonist is silent. His primary companions are a baby and a goat so for large sections of the book there isn’t much chatter. It made me realise how much of books is often the principal characters talking to each other and, from a writing perspective, how useful it is to have the principal characters talking to each other. On the plus side, it forced me to find other ways to tell the story and work hard on other elements of the narrative.

2.5. It’s amazing how much space the character’s inner worlds can take in a book

In The Vagrant, we don’t get access to the inner thoughts of the protagonist. I decided that it would be more interesting if the reader had to come to their own conclusions about him, based purely on what he did. You get to see into the heads of some of the other characters, especially the infernal ones but not the Vagrant himself. Again though, this means that a lot of what usually makes up a book in terms of speech and thoughts aren’t there, putting the focus very much on action and reaction.

3. Gender stereotyping is tricky and insidious

Some of the characters changed gender between first and final drafts. This is partly because of feedback that I got and partly because over the course of writing and rewriting, I came across a number of very cool folks posting about the representation of women in fantasy that forced me to look hard at what I was doing. I think it’s all too easy to assign gender to a character without questioning or thinking through the decision, considering why that choice has been made and what message that might be sending out.

I also tried to make sure that there was a balance of male and female characters across a variety of roles, both in the foreground and background. To a degree I did this naturally but not enough. I’m fairly happy with the balance I’ve achieved in the book, and even happier with the sequel.

4. Things that look cool in my head can be hard to put on the page

There was this one fight scene that I had to keep rewriting. It was a cool scene: Three different factions and multiple combatants going back and forth, twisting and turning, different sections of the fight playing out in multiple levels of a complex. High stakes, high drama-

It was complicated and hard to follow.

On a screen, it would have been easy. In a graphic novel, perfect (if anyone wants to turn The Vagrant into a graphic novel by the way, I’m all ears) but in text form, it was problematic. I mean, I could understand what was going on in the scene just fine but apparently that isn’t good enough so I went back and reworked it.

And reworked it.

And reworked it.

And… actually, by then it was pretty good. J

5. Standalone? Duology? Trilogy? Neverending Story?

I originally started writing The Vagrant as a standalone. It was only when I was coming towards the end that I found narrative doors were opening as much closing. When the book was submitted, and I was asked to pitch for a sequel, I found the ideas already there, almost as if I’d planned it that way.

Recently, I was asked: why did you plan to write a duology? The truth is that I didn’t plan a duology. In fact the sequel is with my publisher at the moment and having written a draft of it, I find that there is a third book knocking on the inside of my skull, asking if it can join the first two. So if I’m lucky, one day the duology will become a trilogy, or a wheeloftimelogy. But who knows? Not me. And I think that while sometimes you need a concrete arc that fits into a set number of books, sometimes it’s okay to be taken along for the ride.

* * *

Peter Newman lives in Somerset with his wife and son. Growing up in and around London, Peter studied Drama and Education at the Central School of Speech and Drama, going on to work as a secondary school drama teacher. He now works as a trainer and Firewalking Instructor. He sometimes pretends to be a butler for the Tea and Jeopardy podcast, which he co-writes, and which has been shortlisted for a Hugo Award.

Peter Newman: Website | Twitter

The Vagrant: Amazon | B&N