Author: terribleminds (page 225 of 465)

Gunslinging, chain smoking, Stetson-wearing Taoist psychopomp, Elouise “Lou” Merriwether might not be a normal 19-year-old, but she’s too busy keeping San Francisco safe from ghosts, shades, and geung si to care much about that. It’s an important job, though most folks consider it downright spooky. Some have even accused Lou of being more comfortable with the dead than the living, and, well… they’re not wrong.

When Lou hears that a bunch of Chinatown boys have gone missing somewhere deep in the Colorado Rockies she decides to saddle up and head into the wilderness to investigate. Lou fears her particular talents make her better suited to help placate their spirits than ensure they get home alive, but it’s the right thing to do, and she’s the only one willing to do it.

On the road to a mysterious sanatorium known as Fountain of Youth, Lou will encounter bears, desperate men, a very undead villain, and even stranger challenges. Lou will need every one of her talents and a whole lot of luck to make it home alive…

* * *

Thinking Carefully about Representation—and Choosing to Write Inclusively—Doesn’t Make Books Less Fun

This is kind of a cheat. I knew this before drafting Vermilion. Most of my favorite novelists do this, after all. But, at the same time, I learned some valuable lessons related to the topic writing my own novel. And, in the wake of the consummately ridiculous Sad/Rabid Puppies claiming a “victory” re: this year’s eyebrow-raising Hugo slate, I feel inspired to discuss this issue.

One of the talking points beloved of the Sad Puppies is that their campaign was intended to put “fun” back in the spotlight. These Puppies claim that the Hugo is no longer the Academy Awards of good old-fashioned fun SFF, but rather a politically-motivated exercise in championing dreary, literary, “politically correct” works of speculative fiction. Where, they wail, has all the entertainment gone in SFF? Where’s the praise for novels about thewsy barbarians conflating rescue and consent? What’s up with how in all these award-nominated books about spaceships, said spaceships are full of career girls instead of cosmic bimbos? Why, they ask, must speculative fiction concern itself with homophobia, racism, transphobia, misogyny? The Sad Puppies have declared that it’s fine to have a little of that stuff, maybe sometimes, but spec fic at is core should be: worldbuilding, exposition, pew pew pew/chop chop chop, oh thank you for saving me, giggity giggity, the end—or is it?!

This argument is as disingenuous as it is fraught, and it is, to me, perhaps the saddest part about Sad Puppies. Thoughtful, inclusive writing just isn’t ever going to be “fun” to certain people. And that’s regrettable.

To bring this around to what I learned from writing Vermilion—eventually—I am a feminist who enjoys reading, watching, and experiencing art produced by and about women. And I’m pretty easy-going, in general. I certainly notice when a book or film or whatever passes the Bechdel test, but it doesn’t determine my enjoyment or approval.

But, in spite my love of and commitment to representation of women in fiction, at some point during the drafting of Vermilion, I realized that Lou, my protagonist — a woman — did not have or develop any truly meaningful, life-changing relationships with other women. This gave me pause. The novel passed the Bechdel test, multiple times over… but even so, it didn’t feel inclusive — didn’t feel complete, didn’t feel like it really represented the wealth of experiences a young woman might have on her first adventure. I did some serious soul-searching about this, including analyzing whether my impulse to rectify what I perceived as a lack was motivated by feminist impulses or writerly ones.

In the end, I realized it was both, and remedied the situation by extensively rewriting the last third of the novel to include and privilege a friendship Lou develops with a young woman named Coriander.

And you know what? The novel is way, way more fun now. Lou’s friendship with a Coriander ended up being an absolute gas to write, and then to read. I don’t usually laugh at my own writing, even when humor was my intent, but during edits I found myself snickering at their interactions. They play off one another in ways that made me excited about rewriting; they bring out one another’s characters that felt naturalistic and comfortable and vibrant. The adventure felt more adventurous, the thrills, more thrilling. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but to me at least, the end of the novel feels livelier and more satisfying for rewriting due to specifically considering issues of representation. If I hadn’t pushed myself to go further, do better, be more inclusive, I don’t think Vermilion would be as strong, as entertaining, and even—yes—as fun.

It Might Be Done, but It’ll Never Be Finished

Vermilion is now a real, actual book that people can hold in their hands, and choose or choose not to read. That’s an amazing feeling! But while I hope you read and enjoy Vermilion, the chance that I’ll sit down and read it cover to cover is slimmer than a shadow’s toot.

I find it impossible to read my writing without editing it. Heck, even after edits, copy edits, and page proofs, I really wanted to read Vermilion another time before returning the final version of the novel to my editor. Probably I would have refined it even further if I had. But I also knew I needed to be done.

There were several times during the drafting process that I knew I needed to be done, for whatever reason. It was difficult for me, acknowledging at those various points in the process that the book would never be perfect. But, in the end, the only reason it’s a real, actual book is because I forced myself to be done, even if I knew in my heart I’d never feel the novel was finished.

Cultivate Curiosity

I’m a huge fan of directed research, but today I’d like to talk about curiosity.

A few years ago I had an opportunity to tour the death facilities at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The what, you may ask? In short, DMNS has an agreement with several wildlife organizations, and whenever a creature dies, they get the corpse to play with. I mean, preserve. They strip the meat using carnivorous beetles, bleach the bones, preserve the skins or furs or feathers. It’s really cool. Cool… and pungent.

I went on this tour because when I was just starting to draft Vermilion, and in Vermilion, my main character deals quite a bit with death. She’s a psychopomp, a soul-guide, who helps unquiet ghosts and vampires and other undead find eternal rest. I figured the tour would be good research.

Well… I learned a lot on that tour, but not a single fact was relevant to my novel.

But! Afterwards, we were at our leisure to tour the Denver Museum of Science and Nature. So, I did. And what I found there actually make it into the novel.

Talking bears were always part of my vision for the weird western landscape of Vermilion. When I toured the DMNS, I learned that sea lions are related to bears, evolutionarily speaking. Well, Vermilion starts in San Francisco… and just like that, talking sea lions seemed like a really neat addition to the landscape of Lou’s hometown. They run the ferries, compete with human fisherfolk, and snooze in piles on beaches and piers when they’re not working.

I really can’t say enough good things about directed research, but in this case, stepping back and taking a little extra time to be merely curious helped me create a richer setting for my novel.

Listen, But Also Don’t Listen

I wrote the first draft of Vermilion in 2010. Over the past five years I received a substantial amount of criticism and did quite a few revisions. I showed the first draft to a ton of people, and I listened to them all, even a beta reader who told me the novel would never be published in the form it was in. (To be fair, he was right!) Two agents gave me feedback. I had a huge notebook filled with ideas, suggestions, notes, rewrite ideas…

And at some point, I stopped listening, and just followed my own heart when it came to making Vermilion the book I wanted it to be. Only I knew the story I wanted to tell, and I had to trust I knew how to tell it. While the often extensive, and always thoughtful critiques people gave me were helpful in getting the novel to a certain place, I had to go alone into the final draft. At times, I had to go against the advice of people I respected to keep Vermilion the book I wanted it to be. And in the end, I’m glad I did.

Be Proud of What You Do (And Act Like It)

Talking about one’s own writing can be weird. There are times when it is more and less appropriate, and that can sometimes be difficult for an early-career writer to navigate. But, one of the times when it’s absolutely appropriate is when an editor asks you directly about what you’re working on. Then, go for it. Be excited, be proud. Speak confidently (and succinctly!), even if it feels completely terrifying.

I ended up seated next to Vermilion’s publisher, Ross Lockhart, at a big breakfast event at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival back in 2012. We were already friendly; he’d been excited to republish my necromancer picaresque “The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins” in his The Book of Cthulhu. During the breakfast he asked the dreaded question… What I was working on?

After years of conditioning to never babble about one’s in-process novels, even though he’d done the asking I struggled to confess that yes, I had a novel, and yes, it was about some stuff. It turned out that Ross is a fan of the subgenre of Hong Kong films that first inspired Vermilion, and he got super excited about the project right then and there. Lesson: learned. If I hadn’t pushed myself to speak proudly about my novel to an editor whom I knew I liked to work with, well… it might not be coming out this week, and through a publisher who really “gets” what I’m doing.

* * *

MOLLY TANZER is the Sydney J. Bounds and Wonderland Book Award-nominated author of A Pretty Mouth (Lazy Fascist, 2012), Rumbullion and Other Liminal Libations (Egaeus, 2013), Vermilion (Word Horde), and The Pleasure Merchant, forthcoming from Lazy Fascist in the fall of 2015. She lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband and a very bad cat. When not writing, she enjoys mixing cocktails, hiking in the Rocky Mountains, experimenting with Korean cooking, and (as of recently) training for triathlons.

Molly Tanzer: Website | Twitter

Vermilion: Amazon | B&N | Word Horde

*wheezes while stumbling down a mountain carrying ten stone tablets*

*dumps stone tablets on the ground and most of them break*

*coughs for like, 40 minutes*

OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE. WHY DO PEOPLE WRITE COMMANDMENTS ON STONE TABLETS. IF GOD’S SUPPOSED TO BE ALL POWERFUL WHY DIDN’T HE JUST HAND ME AN IPAD. DOES HE HAVE A THING AGAINST APPLE? GOD’S ONE OF THOSE STRIDENT ANTI-MAC PEOPLE ISN’T HE. SO HEAVY. IT HURTS. IT HURTS SO BAD.

Ahem. Okay. Yeah. Yes. Hi!

It is time to speak about the sticky subject of self-promotion. You’re a writer. You’ve written a book and somebody — you, a big publisher, a small publisher, some spider-eating alley hobo — has published it. And now you want to know how you promote the book so that the world can fling money at your face in order to greedily consume your unrefined genius. But it’s not easy. You don’t know what works. What makes sense. You don’t want to just stand on a street corner barking at passersby and hitting children with your book. But you also recognize that you’re just one little person, not some massive beast of marketing and advertising, hissing gouts of pixelated steam and vacuuming up potential buyers into the hypno-chamber that is your belly.

What do you do? How far can you go? What should you say?

Thus, I bring you these ten tablets.

Ten commandments about self-promotion for authors. In a later post I’ll get into the larger practicalities of self-promotion — what seems to work for me, what seems to do poop-squat for me — but for now, we’re going to cover the overall basics.

Let us begin.

Thou Shalt Throw Pebbles

The self-promotional reach of a single author is not very far.

Big publishers and companies have giant cannons.

You, however, have a satchel of pebbles.

A publisher will ideally dp outreach that puts your book in front of various folks within the distribution process — book buyers, librarians, the secret tastemaker cabal that operates out of a warehouse in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood. You, as lone author, do not have that effect.

The best you can do is pick up one of your pebbles and throw it.

And here you say, “But I really don’t want to throw rocks at my readers or potential readers,” and I agree (unless your readers are going through your trash cans again, at which point, let ’em fly). Instead, though, I’d ask you imagine throwing pebbles into a pond rather than at other people.

You throw your pebble into the water — with a tweet, a blog post, a conversation or interaction, a cover reveal, something, anything — and it does not make a huge splash but what it does make are ripples. The pebble’s point of impact is small, but ripples go farther. They reach unexpected parts of the pond. They reach that lilypad, that patch of cattails thrust up, that dead body over there, you know, the one the neighborhood kids are poking with a broom-handle?

Practically speaking — beyond metaphor — what this means is that your self-promotional effort will reach one, ten, maybe a hundred people, and turn some of them into readers. Mathematically, that’s not enough to sustain your career. But, consider the ripples. If your work is good and you aren’t a total fuckface, it’s a good bet that those ripples go further because the readers who read your work will now say to their readers: “Hey, this author’s book was the cat’s meow.” Then they’ll say that golden phrase: You should read it. Some of them will. And those folks may tell others and it’s like a giant Amway pyramid scheme of viral pop culture transmission.

Then, you go ahead and throw another pebble. And here’s an interesting result — some readers won’t immediately jump on a book based on a single recommendation. This is for a lot of reasons: lack of trust, limited funds, or they’re simply distracted by the bottomless (but oh so shiny) pit that is the Entire Goddamn Internet. Ah, but those same readers may take the jump when they see other mentions of your book. A second pebble creates new ripples that intersect with other ripples, and at those points of intersection you may find readers who say, “I keep hearing about this author and her books, and so I have to see what all the fuss is about.”

Here you might ask, “Well, why don’t I just fling all my pebbles into the water? I’ll load up this shotgun with all the pebbles and start firing wantonly across social media!”

First, assume the number of pebbles you have is limited. How few you have, you do not know — that is concealed from you. But assume your supply is mysteriously finite.

Second, assume that pebbles thrown and ripples made adds new pebbles to your satchel.

Third, recognize that too many ripples in the water becomes just chaos — it’s all noise and no signal. Any reflections you may have seen in the water or any elegance those ripples might have held is gone when you upend all your stones into the pond.

Thou Shalt Not Crush People With Boulders

Just as you shouldn’t explode people’s faces with your Pebble Shotgun, you also should not crush them with boulders. What I’m trying to say is, your goal in self-promotion is not to crush others beneath its weight. BUY MY BOOK BUY MY BOOK HEY YOU BUY MY BOOK DID YOU KNOW BOOK BOOK LOOK BOOK BUY IT REVIEW IT NEED IT I HAVE STOLEN YOUR PETS AND WILL NOT RETURN THEM UNTIL YOU BUUUUUY MYYYYYY BOOOOOOOK.

We’ve all seen those charming mutants who feel that the best way to let the world know about their new book is to fill up their entire Twitter feed with the same advertisement. Or they tweet it at people (likely those they perceive as tastemakers) — HEY STEPHEN KING I WROTE A BOOK HEY NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON I WROTE A BOOK HEY CVS PHARMACIES I WROTE A BOOK. Or they direct message everybody. Or they force you to join Facebook groups about their book release. Or slather you in tons of email spam from which you can never unsubscribe (it’s like herpes — once you catch it, it remains and flares up). Or they badger bookstores to carry their books and yell at them when they don’t. So many boulders. So many crushed heads.

If you do any of these things, I hate you. I hate you so bad. When you do these things, I imagine you being covered in ticks and bees and plague buboes and blinded with Axe body spray and then you’re thrown into the Sarlacc pit for good measure.

Self-promotion is a seduction, not a kick in the crotch.

Thou Shalt Always Demonstrate Your Talent

You are a writer. You tell stories.

If your self-promotion is not well-written, then you’ve really scroobled the poodle. If your self-promotion does not tell a story or use the talents you possess as a storyteller, then once again, you have supremely doinked the donkey.

You’re a writer. Your entire job is to — inside the pages of your book — get people interested so that they read past the first sentence, first paragraph, first page, first chapter. The sum total of your modus operandi is to keep their eyeballs entangled with the story you’re telling. Turn that same talent to self-promotion. Tell a story: your story, the book’s story inside or outside its pages, their story, somebody’s story. Hook them with mystery and interest. Be funny, or create tension, or make that strong and emotive plea that connects with them.

You wrote a book? Congratulations, but nobody gives a hot cup of shit. Everybody writes books now. Twitter is full of people who wrote books just as the shelves of the bookstore or the digital shelves of Amazon are chockablock with those books. You wanna stand out? So, stand out. Be you. You are your self-promo efforts. Bring your talents to bear. You’re a writer, so write.

Thou Shalt Perfect Your Pitch

Have an elevator pitch — a one-sentence fish-hook to catch in somebody’s cheek. You’ll use it online, at conventions, at bookstores, with your friendly neighborhood spider-hobo. (Time to cue up the theme song to that beloved 60s-era superhero cartoon: SPIDER HOBO SPIDER HOBO / GOES WHEREVER A HOBO GOES / EATS SOME BEANS AND SOME FLIES / HE’S A HOBO WHO HAS EIGHT EYES / OH FUCK! HERE COMES THE SPIDER HOBO).

Sorry.

You’ll get people who ask, “What did you write? What’s it about?” And your job is not to sit them down and lecture them about your book for four hours. Your job is to say, “IT’S ABOUT A KILLER ROBOT WHO LEARNS TO LOVE.” And that very short pitch will give off pheromones that crawl up inside the listener and tell them whether or not they might like your book. You’re giving them hints, transmitting signals, sending out feelers. Some will think, I like robots and I like love and so because I like those things, I am intrigued. Some will think, Not for me, and that’s okay, too.

Endeavor to perfect that single sniper bullet sales pitch. You can practice something slightly longer, too — a short paragraph rather than a single sentence — but for the most part, shorter is better. Don’t waste anybody’s time. Don’t waste your own time. If your book doesn’t sound interesting in 30 seconds, it won’t get better with 30 minutes.

Thou Shalt Be Aware Of Your Limits

You are a person with limits. You only have so much time. You have only so many talents. You can only be so comfortable. Stick to those things.

What I mean is: your job is to write books. If you don’t know how to do a book trailer or possess the time to learn or the money to pay someone, don’t do a book trailer. If you don’t have the time for a big-ass blog tour, don’t even try to do a big-ass blog tour. (Real talk: book trailers and blog tours can be effective when they’re done right and with a strategy in mind — but overall, not so much.) Know your limits. Work within them. It’s like social media — nobody wants you to operate inside social media channels you despise. If you hate Twitter, for the sake of sweet Saint Fuck, do not tweet. Don’t wanna blog? Don’t blog.

“To thine own self, be true.”

Someone very important said that. An important writer.

That’s right. Dan Brown said it. Dan Brown. I’m pretty sure.

Thou Shalt Not Treat It As Broadcast (But Rather, As Conversation)

“HOLD STILL WHILE I YELL THIS CANNED SELF-PROMOTIONAL ADVERTISEMENT AT YOU,” is not a very effective way to get new readers. For me, I’ve found readers climb on board the Wendig Train (sounds kinkier than I intend it) when I speak earnestly and honestly about my work. I talk about it and engage on the subject. It’s a conversation, not a broadcast. I share frustrations and triumphs. I get excited (because if I’m not excited, how can I expect you to be?). Social media is about engagement. It’s a conversation in a smoky bar, not a soapbox-and-a-bullhorn. Self-promotion is literally about promoting yourself and your work, but we’re in an age now where we’re no longer staring up at an artist on a stage. The artist is now part of the crowd. We’re all artists, now. It’s not just about talking, but about listening, and answering, and asking.

Thou Shalt Promote The Unholy Fuck Out Of Other Books And Authors

Fact: if I promote my books and I promote someone else’s book, the link to someone else’s book usually gets about three times the clicks. It’s for a lot of reasons, I guess — some of you are already on-board the aforementioned Wendig Train, and so you don’t always need to check out my work. But also, we tend to trust recommendations more than sales pitches. And shit, why wouldn’t we? BUY MY STORY WIDGET is so less endearing and honest than HOLY SHIT I JUST READ THIS AMAZING BOOK. I get that you want to sell your book, because you want to eat and pay rent. But when you sell someone else’s book? I assume you’re taking the time and effort because it really struck you. We have a bigger circle of trust online, and “word of mouth” means something more than just our close friends. You tell your social media network about a book that really got you, that matters. We’re listening. And we’re ready to click.

Promote other authors. And not just in a quid pro quo way — this isn’t about favors for favors. It’s about Book Love, baby. It’s not just about promoting yourself. It’s also about promoting what you love. That creates community. That creates connection. You can make fans for other authors and, in a roundabout way, fans for you and your work, too.

Thou Shalt Spend Money To Make Money

Crass, callous fact: you want to do self-promo beyond just bleating into the starless void, you’re going to have to put up some coin. Buy advertising. Pay a publicist. Rent a llama and spraypaint your book name on its side and let it loose in a shopping mall. Shit, I dunno. Big publishers will spend money, ideally, on promoting their authors and if you do not have that luxury and you wanna do more than just throw pebbles —

Open thine wallet.

Which may not be an option. And that’s okay. Further, not every expenditure of cash is meaningful — I don’t really know how well “promoted social media posts” really do, but I do know that doing them on a site like Facebook can have longer-term negative ramifications. Plus, not every publicist is amazing, and not every advertisement will land the way you want it to.

But real reach costs money. Cold truth.

Thou Shalt Not Feel Bad About It

As a writer, I expect that some of the people who follow me do so because they like my writing. Maybe they like my blog, or my Twitter, but hopefully, some of them also like the books I scribble and punt into the world. I follow writers and I expect — nay, demand — that they tell me about their new books. Because that’s how we find stuff out, now. If an author has news, I wanna know about it. If they have a new book out, damnit, I hope to hell they tell me otherwise that news will slip past me like a sneaky little ninja. Sometimes? I just need a reminder.

That’s why you shouldn’t feel bad. We expect and even require a little promotion from authors. The worst thing in the world (okay, just behind genocide) is when a beloved author has a new book out and it was like, six months ago but you never found out. You ever have that happen? “Holy shit, Dan Brown’s newest, The Macchiato Conundrum, came out in 2013 and I never knew? Why, Dan Brown, why?” *shakes fist at the heavens*

Thou Shalt Write And Finish New Stuff

Self-promotion is part of your work.

It is also not the point of your work.

You’re a writer. Your job is to write.

So: write more stuff.

The best sales pitch for pre-existing work is new work. All your efforts build upon prior efforts. Someone reads one of my books, they sometimes follow that trail back to the books that came before it. (I can’t speak for all of us, but I bet a whole bunch of us here will, upon discovering a new author that we like, read deep into that author’s slate of books.) That’s not to say you should just defecate your words into a bucket until it overflows — I know a certain nasty strategy of some self-published authors is to churn out books of marginally low quality built on the dubious supposition that MORE IS ALWAYS BETTER, but the core of that strategy is not entirely terrible:

Go write! One book isn’t working? Write another book.

Because here’s the real secret: nobody knows what works. There is no single magical self-promo bullet that will make your book a bestseller. There is no social media service that will guarantee sales. There exists no switch to flip or palms to grease or wizard to battle. Some books land, and some don’t. Yes, you probably increase the chances of your book doing well if you actually talk about it (meaning: fling those pebbles!), but talking about it isn’t guaranteed to do shit for you, either. No author really knows what works and what doesn’t and what does work for one won’t necessarily work for another. We’d love for this to be like math, but really, it feels more like alchemy. Sometimes lead becomes gold and we often don’t know why.

So, you do what you do. And you cleave to that one thing you can control: the writing.

(Now? Go read: “PLEASE SHUT UP: WHY SELF-PROMOTION AS AN AUTHOR DOESN’T WORK.” By the inimitable Delilah S. Dawson.)

* * *

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 into crap bucket*)

Delilah is one of those people to whom I will toss the keys to this blog, no matter the purpose. I do worry that one day I’ll come home to find that every blog page is just ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES DELILAH A BITEY WOMBAT but so far that hasn’t happened. So, once again, I hand over the keys. A round of roaring applause (which autocorrected to ‘applesauce’ for some reason, so I guess give her that, too) for Delilah S. Dawson, please and thank you.

* * *

I’ve been in hundreds of fights, all of them in my head. From the old man on the elevator who insulted my dog’s manners to my 8^th grade French teacher, I have imagined the crunch of knuckles in cheekmeat and the crisp smack of an elbow against some deservingly dickish teeth. But writing those fights so that they’re realistic, accurate, and exciting? Takes a lot of work. Almost as much work as writing sex scenes.

Now that I’ve got nearly a dozen traditionally published works under my belt, the latest one — HIT — with a rather high body count, I’d like to give you some tips on writing violence.

Mmm. Delicious violence.

1. You’re not writing a manual.

A great fight scene moves quickly, providing exactly enough detail to help the reader picture what’s occurring. The worst fight scenes read like college textbooks, listing action after action in hideously descriptive detail without any emotion, reaction, or, as they say, punch. The characters are not putting together an Ikea bookshelf; they’re dancing with blood.

2. You’re not writing a memoir.

The other side of that coin is that a fight can’t be all memories and feelings and grand similes for pain. When you get throatpunched, you don’t wax philosophical about that time as a child when you saw a sparrow fall from the sky. The reader needs to know the emotional and physical impact of the fight but not the minutiae of every loose tooth.

3. You’re not writing a sex scene.

There is no ever-spiraling tornado of tension. If you look an angry man (or bear!) in the eye too long, he’s going to hit you. Fights happen fast, and you don’t have time to close your eyes and savor every busted knuckle. It’s not wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am. It’s wham-bam-slam-ow-ow-ow. And the climax involves going to the hospital for stitches.

4. Except– WAIT. It’s almost like writing a sex scene.

Because we are talking about flesh pounding against flesh, growing hot and slippery. With blood. But there’s a dance to it, the partners taking turns, hunting for openings, and slamming into each other again and again. And, just like with sex scenes, you have to respect that a fight changes things, moves the plot and characters forward, and leaves everyone exhausted and panting. Gratuitous violence is as useless as gratuitous sex.

5. You can learn a lot from reading great violence.

Have you read HEROES DIE by Matthew Stover? If not, go get it. Read it. Love it. I’ll wait.

Point being, the best way to learn how to write great violence is to read great violence. Study the rhythm, the vocabulary, the timing. Study the greats. Watch that scene in the new Sherlock Holmes where Robert Downey Jr. describes the fight in slow-mo. But…

6. You can also learn from horribly done violence.

Reading a bad fight scene is just painful. You wince. You have no idea what’s going on. You just hope that a velociraptor will run in and kill everyone so it’ll be over. You want to punch the author in the giblets.

7. If you’ve never been in a fight before, GO GET IN A FIGHT.

Note: I am not suggesting that you go to the local dive bar, find a guy with prison tatts, and say something about his mother and army boots. Don’t do that. I don’t want to be responsible for your hepatitis. But there’s probably a local martial arts or boxing academy where you could take some classes. Because the thing is: You need to know what it feels like to be hit. There’s no substitute for the jarring surprise of getting clocked, for the animal success of landing a punch, for knowing exactly how long a black eye lasts and the various Crayola colors it will turn on the way back to normal.

If you can actually spar, all the better. I remember how mind-shattering it was the first time I got hit, because no one had ever tried to punch me before. And I was surprised at my own instinctual aggression, too. Your brain sometimes doesn’t know the difference between “I could die in this street fight” or “This instructor is going gently on me while I wear my cushy, sexy, pink headgear and mouthguard.” So give your brain a (safe, controlled) chance to feel that, if you can.

8. Unless you’re writing Superman, everyone has a weakness.

Sorry not sorry, but no one is invulnerable. Even if you’ve got The Rock battling Thor, someone is going to get destroyed, or at least have their armor crushed a little. I’ve read fight scenes where someone gets hit by a car, then takes six bullets and keeps fighting, and… well, it can fly in Justified, but not so much in real life. Go bang your funny bone on a table and try to do anything but caterwaul in a corner for ten minutes. Invulnerability is boring and unrealistic, and your reader will start to mutter under their breath if you stretch believability too far regarding how long a character can fight with both arms cut off.

9. Blood is constrained by physics.

The human body contains about 1.5 gallons of blood. Lose 2-3 pints, and you’re going to pass out. Lose 4-5 pints, and you die. At least, that’s what Yahoo Answers says. Point being, whatever damage is done in your fight is going to affect the fighters. Even if you’re tough, having an open wound bleeding into your eye is going to make it troublesome. Broken ribs, sprains, kidney punches—they’re going to take their toll. Unless you’re Tarantino, you can only paint the room with so much blood before you have two empty, floppy meatsacks. Hyperviolence works better in movies, where we’re distracted by abs and sweat and painterly blood spatters. No, Tina Belcher, that’s not what actually happened in Sparta.

10. Adrenaline is great, but it will only get you so far.

They tell us that adrenaline can give you the strength to lift a car off your child, but… uh… are we talking a Yaris or a 1972 Oldsmobile? And what if you have five kids and you’re on the third car? Point being, even the most superhuman squirt of adrenaline is going to wear off, leaving your protagonist weak-kneed, dizzy, and drained. If you’re going to push her through an insane fight, you’re going to have to show her crawling into bed to sleep for seventeen hours. We in the SFF world are known for saying, “Magic has a price,” and the price of a berserker fight is exhaustion and hunger.

11. Healing takes time.

Back when I was on my husband’s work softball team, I slid into third and gave myself the most spectacular injury. It was a crusty, bleeding abrasion on top of an epic rug burn on top of a two-foot-long 3D bruise that took a month to stop swelling and changing color. I had to spend two days in bed slathering myself with arnica and trading out ice poultices, and then I couldn’t wear skirts for a season or people thought I was a zombie. Point being, I wasn’t fighting a den of vampires and werewolves with vibroswords—all I did was slide into third base wearing pants.

Cuts must be tended. Bruises will go through many stages from purple goose egg to yellow blob. Split lips will open and crust over. Black eyes take a while to open and de-puff. Unless your character has a superpower that heals him instantly, you’re going to have to honor his suffering and the weird looks people give him when he shows up to work at the daycare covered in scabs.

12. Like, a lot of time.

If you’ve ever opened a stitch when you thought a wound was sealed, you know this all too well. Healing takes longer than the character wants it to—and much longer than the author would like. That’s why so many authors build in methods to speed healing and move the story along—like ingesting vampire blood in the Sookie Stackhouse world or drawing a healing rune in The Mortal Instruments. If you have a Fantasy world and a character who gets in a lot of fights, build in a way to get them back into fighting shape, fast—an elvish salve, a magic spell. If you’re in our world, prepare to google things like, “How long does it take stitches to dissolve?” and “Can you fight with a dislocated, relocated shoulder?” When we, as writers, build a massive fight scene, there must be an equal and opposite healing span, or the reader loses faith.

This brought to you by the girl who broke open her c-section scar carrying a baby to the mailbox.

13. There is lasting emotional aftermath. Trauma is traumatic.

I learned this one the hard way when I broke my back and started having nightly panic attacks. Your mouth says, “That was no big deal,” and your brain says, “OMIGOD WHAT WAS THAT I ALMOST DIED THAT WAS TOTALLY A BIG DEAL,” and then they fight over it. Whether your character has PTSD or night sweats or a daily crisis of faith, you have to connect violence and its aftermath to their psyche. Healing takes time, but there may always be triggers that bring those memories to the forefront of a character’s mind. Not to mention that some wounds cause emotional damage and can make a character doubt themselves, become depressed, or work out harder to overcompensate. It can be all too easy for an author to ignore this aspect of a character’s development, but damage is damaging, trauma is traumatic, and violence sometimes leaves us with permanent disabilities and scars.

In my latest book, HIT, the main character is forced to become a bounty hunter, and she struggles with how to protect who she is while doing very bad things. As the story progresses and the bodies pile up, the effects on her psyche become harder to repress, and she starts having the symptoms of PTSD. Committing violence changes people irrevocably, as does being the victim of violence.

14. When in doubt, do your research to avoid looking like a moron.

Nothing makes my husband more angry at a movie than a slow-mo gun shot that shows a bullet flying out of the barrel… with its casing intact. Except maybe a poorly done jiu-jitsu hold. If you’re going to write a specific sort of violence, chances are some of your audience is going to know more than you do about it, and if you botch it up, they’re going to let you (and all of Amazon and Goodreads) know. When in doubt, ask an expert, take a police procedural class, visit Wikipedia, crowdsource, read a book, or—my favorite—try out whatever it is you’re using. Because…

15. There is no substitute for (controlled!) experience.

You don’t know what recoil feels like until you’ve shot several guns. You don’t know how much pressure it takes to load a crossbow or shoot a compound bow until you’ve held one in your hands. If you’ve never used a knife outside of a steakhouse, you don’t know how to grip it. So go find out. After all, if you’re a writer, it’s tax deductible! And there are usually plenty of places, people, and classes to help you learn.

I say this when I’m speaking on writing sex scenes, too. Before writing a scene about scrumping in the hayloft, you need to go sit your bare butt on a hay bale and tell me how sexy it feels. Because your job as a writer is to keep the reader in the story and compelled to keep going, and once a reader begins to doubt you, they’re not in the book anymore. That’s why I took several trapeze classes before writing a sex scene set in a circus. The details will be more real if you’ve lived it.

16. Plant your Chekhov’s guns and tend the soil. With manure and blood.

If your character is going to do wing chun in chapter 7, you need to frontload his time in the dojo. If she’s going to make her own arrows in the last chapter, we need something early on about her uncle, the fletcher. Fighting prowess is not accidental, and if your character pulls an entire martial arts discipline out of their ass in the middle of a fight, we’re going to groan. Same goes for flawless aim or the ability to give neat stitches, survive in the forest, or do a chokehold on an assailant.

Don’t believe me? Tell me how you felt when Mal got stabbed in Serenity and then hopped up to fight, and he later mentioned destroying a nerve cluster in the war. You can watch all of Firefly and Serenity, and that injury was never mentioned, which makes it a cheap writer trick, in my book. My writer brain says, “Oh, you JUST SO HAPPENED to get stabbed in THAT EXACT ONE-SQUARE-INCH AREA, HUH? CHEAP.” And then I finish my eleventy-hundredth series rewatch as revenge.

17. Plenty of violence is accidental, and that’s okay.

Ah, the elegant beauty of a professionally choreographed fight scene with wires and eight hours of training a day by the world’s most renowned experts. Unforch, real life is not Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and none of us can dodge a bullet like Neo. Fights are most often dirty, rough, quick, and full of accidental elbows and broken chairs. Your character will stumble into walls or get her fingers snagged in the attacker’s hair. I can’t even walk through my own house without hitting my hip on a doorknob, so chances are that when a character’s life is on the line, they’re not going to do a perfectly executed armless cartwheel off a pristine dumpster. Let it get messy. Throw in accidents that hurt and accidents that damn. Let them stumble, let them fall. Blood is very slippery, after all.

18. 90% of fights are over in the first 30 seconds.

That’s what they told us at the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu academy where I studied muay thai and BJJ. Most fights go to the ground and are over crazy fast. And that means that if your fight goes on for an hour and gets very balletic, the characters remaining on their feet, thinking clearly, and shiny clean, we’re going to doubt you. If Chuck points a gun at Sam and talks for twenty minutes, Sam is either going to attack or a corgi is going to start barking or someone is going to stop and ask them why they have a gun out at the toy store. If Robin Hood has his arrow nocked, he most likely won’t be able to give a three-minute long speech on how he always knew it was Mean Old Mr. Mulligan in a monster mask—at least not without his arm trembling or the arrow accidentally flinging off into the sky. Yes, violence in books takes longer to describe and often goes on a bit, but… a ten-page fight is going to not only be realistic, but also boring. Do what you need to do and move on.

19. Most fights get dirty. Really dirty.

Look, I know we grew up with the Dread Pirate Roberts fighting Inigo Montoya, but that is not how real fights go, much less acts of violence. It’s not even River-in-Serenity-balletic or Crazy-88-beautiful. Hair is pulled, eyes are clawed, junk is kneed, telephones are used as bludgeons. The bad guy does not always pause meaningfully to explain his reasoning, giving the good guy time to go from on his knees in handcuffs to suddenly swinging a lacrosse stick around with startlingly good aim.

Let me put it this way: the first real fight I saw involved skinheads curb-stomping a guy outside of a club at college, and I’ve never forgotten that sound. They did not stop to explain anything, either– just stomped the dude and ran before I could pull out my briefcase-sized phone.

20. If your character isn’t accustomed to fighting, they’re going to freak out.

Most of us have two responses to unexpected violence: flail or freeze. It’s kind of like fight or flight but not nearly as useful. Sometimes it also involves the ol’ piss and shit or puke and shake. Really, your body has a very good chance of falling apart on you if you’ve never faced real violence before. Unless you’ve pre-loaded a character with superpowers or Joss Whedon brain-whammying, your mild-mannered librarian isn’t going to go into ninja mode and do a triple flip over a werewolf before breaking its skull with her first punch. Even people who have extensive training in martial arts or on the shooting range might freak out the first time they must apply their knowledge to a real-life situation.

Thing is, your brain doesn’t want you to stick around and get hurt. Your heart doesn’t want to pull the trigger, whether you’re staring down a doe in a field or a burglar in your kitchen. So it’s perfectly natural for a wide variety of characters to do the opposite of what is helpful in any given violent situation. Let them. Their reaction should be unique to them, their situation, their backstory, their physical state, and every feature you’ve loaded them with, and that makes them real and relatable.

21. Mistakes will be made.

Once you take into account the previous 20 points, you can see that… people mess up. Whether they don’t pull the trigger when they should, they let the bad guy on the elevator, or they punch the wrong person, you have to let your characters mess up. No fight is perfect, and no character is perfect. Let them storm off or apologize or break into tears. Let them watch someone die because they screwed up. Mistakes show us who characters truly are, and how they learn and fix their mistakes shows us who they will become.

22. No matter how ugly the fight is, your language should be beautiful.

Myke hit Django, and then Jason hit Myke. Jason’s hand hurt, so he fell to the ground. Django roared and jumped on Myke’s back, and they knocked Ty into a giraffe. Chuck screamed at Diana, and she kicked him in the nads. UGH, NO. A fight needs the same mix of names, pronouns, nouns, verbs, prepositional phrases, and linguistic tingles as any other scene. It’s not a laundry list of actions, nor a roll-call. We need actions, feelings, dialog, descriptions, and the occasional well-placed simile. Short sentences have more oomph, so it’s probably not the best time to go all Faulkner. The rhythm of your sentences should suit and mirror the fight and give the reader occasional breathing room. Your voice should be there, even during a fight.

23. Readers crave revenge and justice.

There’s a reason I name all the bad guys in my books David, Chad, and Jimbo: those are the names of the guys who bullied and abused me when I was a teen. I didn’t get justice then, so this is my revenge—those names, again and again, getting shot and neutered and destroyed in my books. That’s because normal people want to read about the revenge they can’t have in real life—like the printer assassination in Office Space. If you start off with an injustice against your main character, your reader is waiting to see that character face the villain and take them down. And that means that if you set us up to hate a character, to want to see a character punished, it’s your job to make sure that justice is served, often in the form of a knuckle sandwich and grisly death. Don’t let bad guys off the hook or end their showdowns anticlimactically. Let us feel the heartpunch of beautiful, delicious revenge.

24. If you’ve written it well, the reader might not notice.

The thing about great violence—and great writing in general—is that the reader doesn’t notice it. The story pulls them through, and they forget to eat, and they skip bedtime, and they can’t think of anything else as they gallop toward the conclusion. That’s what you’re going for—an effortless experience. You never want the reader to surface, to pause, to put the book down. And that means that your violence should fit in with the plot, with the character arcs, with the reality of your worldbuilding. The fight should make sense, be easy to follow, have tension, and be satisfying, or at least set the characters up for another important moment down the line. Every scene and every word should serve a purpose. The highest praise I can give a fight scene is a fist pump or tears. Or both.

25. For the love of all that’s holy, do not kill the dog.

Or, in Chuck’s case, THE GRACKLE, YOU MONSTER. [ahem, I don’t know what she’s talking about — c.] There’s just something about the human heart that will allow us to watch eighty-eight people in tuxedos die horrifically without a single thought about the broken-hearted parents and lonely lovers and orphaned children they leave behind, but if someone flicks a kitten in the face, we rise up like Poseidon to drown the world with hot, foaming saltwater tears of piss and rage. Do not kill the pets. Ever. Trust me on this one. Or at least trust my agent, who has softened my heart over the course of five years so that I no longer put puppies in peril. Much. Except for that dog I shoot in HIT. Maybe.

* * *

My hardcover YA, HIT, is about what would happen if banks took over America, made debt a crime, and forced teens into becoming bounty hunters. As you can imagine, there’s lots of violence. Up until a suit from Valor Savings Bank shows up at her front door with a 9mm, the most rebellion Patsy has ever attempted was yarn bombing, but suddenly, she’s got no choice. Kill or be killed. You can read the first chapter and order it at www.hitbookseries.com.

One of the perks of being a writer is being friends with other writers.

I don’t say that sarcastically. Sure, some writers are a squirmy sack of ass-hats, but for the most part? Writers are actually really, really cool people. We’re a theoretically solitary bunch — I for one am an introvert playing the role of extrovert — but that means when we get together we often grok each other, too. And so, I’m lucky to get to hang out with other writers and actually have writers who are genuine, bona fide, motherfucking legit friends. It means I get to write a comic with a groovy dude like Adam Christopher. It means I get to share a series with a bad-ass like Stephen Blackmoore.

And it means I get to join a short collection of tales also featuring Kevin Hearne and Delilah Dawson (who you will see here tomorrow with a guest post about writing violence).

It went like this:

The three of us were in the desert last year, tripping balls on mescaline tabs that we dissolved in cheap tequila, and we had just fought the Coyote King — not the Bolivian drug-runner but rather, the actual mythological King of All Coyotes — and then the Cactus Angels rose up out of the dry and dusty earth and roared in their collective, crackling voice —

You know what? That’s a story for another time.

Suffice to say, when we woke up in the morning covered in blood and coyote hair, Hearne said: “I am really hankering for a hunk of cheese.” And Delilah mumbled, “We should do a short fiction anthology loosely themed around cheese.” And I was all like, “Wuzza booza muzza wuh.” And then we all had a good laugh before going out to eat tacos.

The result of that wild vision quest will soon be before you.

I give you:

Three Slices.

Three novellas/novelettes/novellinis or whatever the hell they are.

One Iron Druid story from Kevin Hearne: “A Prelude to War.”

One Blud story from Delilah: “Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys.”

And one new Miriam Black story from me: “Interlude: Swallow.”

The official description is:

A Prelude to War by Kevin Hearne 
After an old friend is murdered in retaliation for his mercenary strikes against the oldest vampires in the world, Atticus O’Sullivan must solicit the aid of another old friend in Ethiopia if he’s going to have a chance of finishing a war he never wanted. Meanwhile, Granuaile MacTiernan starts a private war of her own against Loki, the lord of lies, and if it brings Ragnarok early—so be it.

Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys by Delilah S. Dawson 
The number one rule of the circus? Don’t kill your volunteers, even accidentally. That’s how young magician Criminy Stain ends up on the run in a forest, where he meets a beautiful woman holding a bucket of blood. But is Merissa the answer to his prayers — or the orchestrator of his ruin?

Interlude: Swallow by Chuck Wendig 
Miriam Black is back. Miriam is tired of her curse and finally believes she knows how to be rid of her ability to see when and how other people die. She follows a lead to the mountains of Colorado, where she sees signs of a serial killer she thought she had already killed. (Set between THE CORMORANT and THUNDERBIRD.)

Not only did we write these stories, but we also got a cover and interior illustrations by the ever-mighty and wonderpants artist, Galen Dara (who also did work on my earlier novella, The Forever Endeavor — which, by the way, is free to read.)

Also, since I like you guys a whole lot, I’m going to show you Galen Dara’s Miriam Black art:

Holy shit, I know, right?

Also: Galen has made prints available of the collection’s illustrations at her Etsy store.

The collection lands on May 5th.

But you can preorder it now in e-book and audio:

Kindle | iBooks | Audible

Please to enjoy, folks.

That classic challenge is back:

Do not write a story.

Nope. Mm-mm, don’t do it.

Instead:

Write only an opening sentence.

Not two sentences. Not three. One. Good. Sentence.

Drop the opening sentence in the comments below, and then next week we will make use of some of those sentences for the next challenge. You’ve got one week — due by next Friday, the 17th, noon EST. Get cracking, word-herders.

Draken vae Khellian, bastard cousin of the Monoean King, had risen far from his ignominious origins, becoming both a Bowrank Commander and a member of the Crown’s Black Guard. But when cursed black magic took his wife and his honor away, he fought past his own despair and grief, and carved out a new life in Akrasia. His bloody, unlikely path, chronicled in Exile: The First Book of the Seven Eyes, led him to a new love, and a throne.

Draken has seen too much blood . . . the blood of friends and of enemies alike. Peace is what he wants. Now he must leave his wife and newborn child in an attempt to forge an uneasy peace between the Monoean King and the kingdom of Akrasia. The long bloody shadow of Akrasia’s violent past hangs over his efforts like a shroud. But there are other forces at work. Peace is not something everybody wants . . . not even in the seemingly straightforward kingdom of Draken’s birth.

Factions both known and unknown to Draken vie to undermine his efforts and throw the kingdom into civil war. Forces from his days in the Black Guard prove to be the most enigmatic, and a bloody tide threatens to engulf Draken’s every step.

* * *

Shh, this one is secret.

The contract for Exile, the book previous to Emissary, had a second, unnamed book in it. I decided to write a sequel because (shh, here’s the super seekrit part) a few years back I had done this really freaky-weird thing that writers aren’t supposed to ever want to do, certainly not without a gun to our heads: I’d written a synopsis.

The book was called Emissary, a story about Draken returning home to the country that exiled him.

I didn’t worry about this aberration too much at the time, and I sure as hell didn’t tell anyone. This was B.C. (before contract) so I was pretty sure the book would never get written. I wouldn’t have to face the shame that I’d actually enjoyed writing the synopsis, that something so wrong could feel so right.

But when it came time to write Emissary I got out the Synopsis-of-Shame and OMG YOU GUYS!! It’s so much easier to write a book when you know what it’s about before you start writing! Who knew?

The slow, good words

Not that the SoS solved all my problems.

The second book I ever wrote, a long time before Emissary, I set a goal of 5-10K words a day. I typed my way into carpel tunnel and a sore back, but my fingers hobbled over “the end” inside of two months.

I spent the following year and change cleaning up the mess I’d made.

And the damn book still never sold.

What I learned, not from that book, not from Exile, or any of my other books and novellas, not until Emissary, that even with a synopsis, I write best when I draft slow, good words, usually inside of a thousand a day. I like to write pretty clean. This isn’t to say I don’t need to revise. And hells yeah I’m jealous when people talk about writing 5K or 10K in a day. But my pace and style are just that: mine. They seem to make me relatively happy with what I write.

Will I change my style eventually? Maybe, when I don’t have two beautiful, brilliant, time-sucking, drama-riddled teenagers at home. Plus, I think process is a dynamic thing. Every book is different.

But I had to embrace a glacial pace while working on Emissary. Which meant I had to learn…

When to Say When

Among Chuck’s readers, it’s likely enough to say I’m a Night Shade Author, but in case it isn’t: two months after Exile came out and eight months after I started writing Emissary, Night Shade, a delicious boutique publisher who made beautiful books, shuttered. When the news hit, my agent and I figured chances were good Exile and Emissary would be tied up in bankruptcy court, like, forever.

Not writing a contracted book that will never see the inside of a bookstore is smart business, and I couldn’t concentrate for shit anyway. Fast-forward a few panicked, social-media-buzzed months, and Skyhorse Publishing and Start Media joined forces to buy NSB. When the dust settled in July, I realized I had a late August deadline for a half-finished book, plus three cons and a vacation scheduled. I hated doing it, but I asked my agent to tell Skyhorse, my new publishing house, for a couple more months. She recommended six. (That was wise. Agents Know Things.)

I got a February date and used every scrap of it on the book. (see #2)

Writing is a Peepshow

And whoa. Was that ever a stressful six months. I’d never written a book with an agent before. Or, you know, editors who plan to give you actual money for your words. And then there are the readers who love your stuff and chat you up at cons and you go home, pretty sure what you’re writing is utter crap and gahhh this sucks, I’m a hack!

Yeah. It’s all about the positive self-talk.

Every time I wrote I imagined my two editors and my agent watching over my shoulder, snickering every so often over particularly bad lines and typos. Sometimes they’d invite reviewers and readers to the party. There were cocktails, black ties, and fancy dresses. Awkward small-talk and jokes at my expense. And I sat there in my pjs, day after day, writing these slow, shitty words with the whole publishing industry jostling me from behind.

Until one day I didn’t.

One day I said fuck it, turned up the lights, blared Closing Time on the hi-fi, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGytDsqkQ   and told them in no uncertain terms to GTFO but leave the whiskey.

Write Big

Once I got rid of the party in my head, I realized I wasn’t actually scared of my editors and agent or readers (much). Mostly, I was scared of the damn story. And that’s the thing that should scare writers. Our own stories should dig their claws in and terrify us witless. They should also thrill us and please us and piss us off and we should get to sigh every so often and think, Damn. That’s a good scene.

Emissary is a big book. It’s a journey story, not only in distance but a journey of memory and emotion, too. It’s got fights, love, honor, and truth. Immense gains and losses. I needed to write some fearless drama. I had to write big.

Thanks to all the other stuff I learned, I did.

I think.

I hope.

At this point it’s not on me to say, because it’s not just my book anymore; it belongs to the world now. So let’s party it up—until it’s time to write the next synopsis.

Thanks, Chuck, for hosting me today, and to Chuck’s readers, for always having such interesting things to add to the conversations here.

* * *

Betsy Dornbusch is a writer and editor. Her short fiction has appeared in print and online venues such as Sinister Tales, Big Pulp, Story Portal, and Spinetingler, as well as the anthologies Tasty Little Tales and Deadly by the Dozen.

Betsy Dornbusch: Website | Twitter

Emissary: Amazon | B&N | Powells | Tattered Cover