Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

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Author: terribleminds (page 390 of 464)

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June 22, 2012 / 37 Comments

Flash Fiction Challenge: That’s My New Band Name

Last week’s challenge: “The Crooked Tree.” Go and see!

It’s been a very music-themed week for me. I’ve been listening and connecting to music in ways I haven’t in a while, in terms of narrative — which reminds me, go get the new Fiona Apple album. For reals.

Anyway.

What that means is, in this challenge, I want you to write a story about a band.

The name of that band?

Well, click here to choose one.

There you’ll get a buncha random band names.

Choose one.

That’s the band.

You’ve got up to 1000 words.

Post it on your blog. Link back here so we can read it.

You’ve got one week. Due by noon EST on Friday, June 29th.

Let’s see whatchoo got, band geeks.

June 21, 2012 / 16 Comments

Meg Gardiner: The Terribleminds Interview

I suspect you already know Meg Gardiner. Or, at least, have read her crimey thrillers starring her lead characters Evan Delaney or Jo Beckett. Hell, while you have a free moment, go read what Stephen King said about her at Entertainment Weekly (“The Secret Gardiner“). In fact, she’s got a new book out in a couple weeks — RANSOM RIVER — that’s a standalone, and it’ll grab you by the short-and-curlies and pull you along for the ride. I had the chance to lock Meg in a room for a few weeks while I subjected her to a battery of psychological tests in the form of “interview questions,” and below are the results of that experiment. Oh, you can find her at MegGardiner.com, or on the Twitters @MegGardiner1.

This is a blog about writing and storytelling. So, tell us a story. As short or long as you care to make it. As true or false as you see it.

We were stuck at a traffic light and the kids were squirming. They’d had a long day at school. If we didn’t get home soon, they’d lose it. We were counting down to Battle Royale II: Honda of Mayhem.

The two older kids each held half a book in their hands. That was the spring they discovered The Lord of the Rings, and they’d fought over who got first crack at The Two Towers until they settled it by ripping the book down the middle. The novel would hold them for a few minutes more, but only that.

Then my son, the ten-year-old, looked up and said, “I’ve figured out how I want to die.”

The light turned green but I just sat there. “Really. Okay. Tell me.”

He straightened and faced me with great solemnity. “Riding out to meet the Orcs in battle.”

His eyes were wide and grave. I felt deeply moved, and desperate not to laugh with relief. He meant it. If he had to die, let it be in heroic sacrifice.

And in the back seat, his twelve year old sister snirked. “How stupid would that be? You should die riding back from battle after you’ve killed the Orcs.”

Her duh could be heard in outer space. He spun and told her she was the stupid one and the Orcs would eat her oh yes they would so. And another car honked, and I pulled away from the light, and the argument intensified, Orcs and Mordor and “No, you’re stupider,” until they had to stop to catch their breath.

Which is when their little brother said, “What’s your favorite James Bond gun sound? Is it crishhh, or shuuuk?” We all turned to him. He said, “Mine is Doofkah. Doofkah.”

In my house, stories are a matter of life and death.

Why do you tell stories?

Because holding people’s suspended disbelief in my hands is a beautiful, powerful kick. And when those people gasp, or laugh, or throw my book across the room, I think, Yeah. Thank you. Now tell me a story that makes me feel the same way.

So: how do you suspend someone’s disbelief? Any tricks?

I stand before a mirror in a darkened room and chant, “Chuck Wendig, Chuck Wendig, Chuck Wendig.”

Also:

– Create characters who talk and laugh and ache like people we know in real life.

– Keep the pace up. Readers who are flipping pages to see what happens next do not pause to mull the metaphysical unreality of fiction.

– Don’t commit any howlers. “Queen Elizabeth leaned out the window of the taxi, hoisted the Uzi, and cleared London traffic in her usual way.” Oh, come on. The Queen would never take a taxi.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

Put your characters to the frickin’ test, and don’t let them get out of it by any means but their own grit and blood and pain.

What’s the worst piece of writing/storytelling advice you’ve ever received?

Kill the guy in the wheelchair.

Seriously – an agent who wanted to represent me offered that piece of advice about the heroine’s boyfriend in the Evan Delaney series. Jesse Blackburn is a world class athlete who gets run down and left for dead by a hit-and-run driver. The story is partly about how he and Evan rebuild their lives in the wake of that violent crime. The would-be agent told me: “Nobody wants to hear about people with disabilities, because nobody normal knows anybody with a disability. Kill him off.”

After I pulled my jaw from the floor, I ignored that advice. And the first novel in the series, China Lake, won an Edgar Award.

Bonus round: the second worst piece of writing advice I’ve ever received! It came from a reader who complained: Stop using big words, showoff. She thought I was trying to belittle readers through my vocabulary, and advised: “Tame your writings to a more friendly word selection.” Unfortunately, (1) The novel was about forensic psychiatrist Jo Beckett, who performs psychological autopsies for the San Francisco Police Department. Medical, psychiatric and legal terminology is gonna be part of her job. (2) The reader wrote from her work email address. Which was with the federal government.

What goes into writing a strong character? Bonus round: give an example of a strong character.

A strong character needs a vivid personality, real presence on the page, and the determination to dig deep when it counts. He or she must find the resources and courage to rise to the challenge the story flings at them – in the face of ridicule, shame, exile, danger, or death.

A strong character: Atticus Finch. Bonus strong character: Ellen Ripley.

On writing a single character (Jo Beckett, Evan Delaney) over the course of many books: how do you sustain those characters and the audience’s interest in them? What is the difficulty — or, maybe, danger — of writing them again and again?

I give characters big personalities, distinctive voices, and families, friends, and lovers they care about. Then I put them in jeopardy and say, “You’re on your own, honey. Let’s see you get out of it this time.”

The risk is that you write series characters into a rut. A crazed killer traps the heroine in an alley yet again? Yawn. Keep it fresh. Mix it up. And have the characters grow from their experiences.

Cuts leave scars. Show them.

Characters should also face actual danger: the risk that their families, friends and lovers might suffer or even die. If you structure a thriller to keep your favorite characters safe, you hobble the story. So stop protecting them, and take the story as far as it should go.

Tell us a little about RANSOM RIVER. Where does it come from? How is it a story that only Meg Gardiner could tell?

Nobody looks forward to jury duty, not even lawyers. I know, because I used to be one. Jury duty makes us feel trapped. So in RANSOM RIVER I wrote about Rory Mackenzie, a juror who is literally trapped. The courtroom is attacked and she finds herself fighting for her life.

Maybe an attack on a courthouse is an attorney’s unconscious fear. It’s not off the radar – when I was a kid, gunmen stormed the Marin County courthouse and four people died in a shootout, including a judge. RANSOM RIVER let me unleash that dread as a story of suspense, and bring readers along for the ride.

In the novel, the courthouse attack is only the beginning of Rory’s nightmare. The police accuse her of working with the gunmen. She discovers that the attack is connected to an old case that was never solved. And getting to the bottom of it might destroy her.

RANSOM RIVER offers the audience a new protagonist: Rory Mackenzie. What does Rory bring to the table that your other characters don’t? For you as a writer and for the audience.

This story had to be told from the viewpoint of the woman at the center of the storm. It’s about her and her family. It’s about her childhood friend and ex-lover, the former cop who still loves her. And it’s about a sunny Southern California town with secrets just waiting to be dug out of the dark. It didn’t fit with either Jo Beckett or Evan Delaney. Rory had to bring an entire world to the table.

Creating it was a challenge. And I hope readers will feel that it’s real, and familiar, and scary – and that they’ll be in Rory’s corner. She has a pitch black sense of humor. She’s guarded but inherently trustworthy – stray dogs follow her home, knowing she’ll adopt them. She’s been knocked down, but she’s determined to get back up. She’s stronger than she knows.

Can we expect to see Rory again?

The novel is written as a stand alone, but Rory’s story could definitely continue.

Recommend a book, comic book, film, or game: something with great story. Go!

The Stand.

Here’s how a friend described it, back when I’d never heard of the young writer named Stephen King: A plague kills 99% of the people in the world… and then the really bad stuff start to happen. Oh, my, yes.

Favorite word? And then, the follow up: Favorite curse word?

Soar – it sounds smooth on the tongue, and if you’re going to fly, you might as well rocket above it all, whooping and performing barrel rolls. Favorite curse word: motherfucker. In a world where lesser curse words have become as ubiquitous as sprinkles on cupcakes and just as innocuous, this one still packs a punch. I take it out only on special occasions – I use it once in every novel, and only once.

Favorite alcoholic beverage? (If cocktail: provide recipe. If you don’t drink alcohol, fine, fine, a non-alcoholic beverage will do.)

Virgin margarita from Palo Alto Sol, a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Palo Alto, California. Recipe: I’m guessing margarita mix, ice, and salt on the rim. This drink is so potent that it doesn’t need alcohol. It has given me amazing visions, even without the tequila. And I don’t mean I saw the Virgin on a tortilla – I saw Mark Zuckerberg at the next table, noshing on a burrito. Dude.

However, I have just read that Palo Alto Sol catered Zuckerberg’s recent wedding. So I guess my vision wasn’t due to la margarita after all. Now for unexpected apparitions I rely on strong coffee. All day long. How else do you think I come up with the crazy stuff in my novels?

What skills do you bring to help the humans win the war against the robots?

I can short circuit anything without even trying. As proof, I refer you to the 2006 Laptop Logic Board Coffee Spill, and the 2010 Pepsi Keyboard Massacre. Bonus: Because I rely on coffee all day long, when the robots attack I will be primed for retaliation, perching on my desk with catlike readiness, mug in hand.

What do you enjoy about writing thrillers? Will you ever try your hand at another genre?

Thrillers throw characters in the soup. They demand that characters dig deep and fight back – or die trying. I love writing stories in which people have to do that.

Other genres? Adventure, comedy, dystopian sagas set during the savage reign of the marmots. The possibilities are endless.

June 20, 2012 / 76 Comments

On The Subject Of Being Offensive

I’ve had this unformed post in my head for a while, and I’m tired of it racing around the ol’ skull-track like a squirrel with a lit firecracker up its ass. So, here’s the post in all its unformed, uncertain glory.

Last week, I wrote a thing about Tomb Raider and Lara Croft. And I saw some comments around the Internet — not so much in reference to anything I wrote, but rather to the overall negative reaction to Lara Croft being used, abused, and downgraded — that chalked up the outrage to “political correctness.”

In a totally different thing, sometimes people send me things — via email, tweet, Facebook, psychic transmission — written by other people, and they’ll say things like, “This sounds like Chuck Wendig wrote it!” And what they send often has a certain whiskey-and-rage-sodden vibe to it, but also often uses pejoratives like “retarded” or “gay” or “fag” in the process. Which, to my mind, doesn’t sound like me at all.

And again, you might be thinking, “Well, sure. Political correctness.”

Let me stop you. Hand planted on your chest, me clucking my tongue.

Political correctness is a desire to minimize or eradicate offense.

I care very little about minimizing or eradicating offense.

I’m okay with offending. I don’t find that traipsing too gingerly about a subject does that subject any good. I’d rather expose something for what I feel that it is rather than swaddle it in gauzy, soft-focus layers.

Clearly, this blog is part of that. I’m happy to use sexual imagery or profanity — not as a means to an end but because it’s just part of the way I like to say things.

And yet, I no longer use words like “retarded” or “gay” or “fag” in my posts or my daily parlance (though once upon a time I, quite lazily, did in fact use those terms as clumsy and inept shorthand).

The reason I don’t use those words, however, has nothing to do with political correctness. It has nothing to do with me hoping to not offend you. Strike that from your mind. I’m not trying to “not get caught” saying those words. Some parents teach their kids not to say those things because of what people will think when they hear them — as if, were it more politically acceptable, the kid could say “faggy” all he wanted.

Rather, what it has to do with is that I don’t want to hurt anybody. That’s the thing. Offending people? Happy to do it. With a shit-eating grin, as a matter of fact (and there is a turn of phrase that deserves reexamination — why am I smiling if I’m eating shit? What’s wrong with me? Is the shit mysteriously delicious?). But I don’t want to be mean. Or cruel. Or conjure up words that ding a person’s armor. I care little about minimizing offense, but I care quite a lot about minimizing people.

That’s why I don’t think the Tomb Raider thing is about political correctness — because I think it’s about minimizing women and, in a way, minimizing the men who play those games. That’s also why I don’t think that profane “in-your-face” blog posts that use words like the ones I noted are in what you might call “terribleminds-style” — sure, I’ll mock things within the industry or the bad habits of writers, but I won’t call those “retarded.” First, because it’s lazy. Second, because while that word may not seem to mean what it says, it still says what it means — and it’s short-code for being mentally handicapped no matter how you slice it. Third, and most importantly, because I don’t want to hurt people.

These words may still live in my fiction. Characters, after all, needn’t be so enlightened — my characters will say and do things I’d never do. They’re not models of civility. Nor would we want them to be.

But me, well, you’ll find I try to catch myself from falling into those patterns of ugly word-use.

You, of course, may do as you like.

I stop myself not because I don’t want to offend you.

Not because I care one rat pube about political correctness.

I stop myself because I don’t want to hurt anybody. Because it’s mean.

And because the world has enough of all that.

That’s what I’ll tell my son, too. Plenty of meanness out there without adding to it.

Just wanted to put that out there. Do with it as you will.

June 19, 2012 / 100 Comments

25 Things You Should Know About Writing Fantasy

I don’t write fantasy. Not really. I’ve written it from time to time (my short story collection, Irregular Creatures, has some). And Blackbirds apparently counts as “urban fantasy.”

Just the same, I am woefully underqualified to write this list. But by golly, that’s never stopped me before. So here I am, offering up my “list of 25” in the fantasy arena. Though I write with a certain authoritative sense of gavel-bangery, please understand that these are just my opinions–

— and shaky, unproven opinions, at that.

Accept. Discuss. Discard.

Do as thou wilt.

1. Nobody Knows What The Fuck Fantasy Is

Fantasy is a bullseye painted on a horse’s rump just before someone fired a magical spell up under the nag’s tail and set her to stampeding. We can all agree that something that has dragons in it and castles and a great deal of faux Medieval frippery is likely to be considered “fantasy,” but beyond that, it’s hard to say. It probably has magic or deals with the supernatural. It likely avoids science. It might be scary, but not so scary that it be labeled “horror” instead. It’s a fuzzy, muzzy, gauzy, hazy fog-clogged hollow, this genre. As it should be. Genre does best when its definition is decidedly low-fi rather than high-def.

2. Fantastical Fiefdoms

Fantasy is vivisected into various gobbets, limbs and organs — sword-and-sorcery does battle with epic or high fantasy, horror-tinged fantasy used to be “dark fantasy” but now it’s “urban fantasy” or maybe “paranormal fantasy” or maybe “fantasy with vampires and werewolves looking sexy while clad in genital-crushing leathers.” There’s fantasy of myth and fantasy that’s funny and fantasy that’s laced with a thread of science-fiction. You have magic realism and one day we’ll probably have real magicalism and I’m sure there’s a genre of fantasy where lots of fantasy creatures bang the whimsy right out of one another (hot centaur-on-goblin action, yow). Sub-genres have value as marketing tools and as a way to give you some direction and fencing as you write. Otherwise: ignore as you see fit. Or create your own!

3. Rooted In The Real

Reality is fantasy’s best friend. We, the audience, and you, the writer, all live in reality. The problems we understand are real problems. Genuine conflicts. True drama. The drama of families, of lost loves, of financial woes. Cruel neighbors and callow bullies and loved ones dead. This is the nature of write what you know, and the fantasy writer’s version of that is, write what’s real. Which sounds like very bad advice, because last time I checked, none of us were plagued by dragons or sentient fungal cities or old gods come back to haunt us. But that’s not the point — the point is, you use the fantasy to highlight the reality. The dragon is the callow bully. The lease on your fungal apartment is up and your financial woes puts you in tithe to the old gods who in turn make for very bad neighbors. You grab the core essence of a true problem and swaddle it in the mad glittery ribbons of fantasy — and therein you find glorious new permutations of conflict. Reality expressed in mind-boggling ways. Reach for fantasy. Find the reality.

4. Break Reality With Your Magic Hammer, Rearrange The Resultant Shards

Reality also offers up awesomeness in the form of data. You may think, “Well, I can’t research a fantasy world because it doesn’t exist, dummy” but again — root fantasy in the real. Look to actual events. Look to history. Look to culture and religion. Mine truth for fiction. Some cultures (Asian in particular) have a practice where friends and family and villagers help pay for each other’s funerals. Right there, you can take that, tweak it, use it. Drama lives there. What if the village won’t pay for someone’s funeral? Why? What’s the stigma? Why the exile? Adherence to dark magic? Broken oath? Cranky centaur bastard child?

5. Woebetide The Faux Medieval Frippery

Kings and knights and dragons and oaths and tithes and princesses and plumbers rescuing those princesses from giant rage-apes and — okay, wait, maybe not that last part. What I’m saying is, European Medievality (not a word) is the meat-and-potatoes of the fantasy genre. And I think we can do better than meat-and-potatoes. Look beyond that single slice of time and space for your inspiration. What about the 18th century bloody rivalry between chiefs and kings in Hawaii? Or the French Resistance in WWII? Or Masada? Or that time the Ewoks repelled the Empire and blew up the Death Star in their space gliders?

6. Go Weird Or Go Home

The power of fantasy is that you can do anything. Anything at all. You start with that core of reality and from there you’re allowed to grow anything from that fertile seed-bed. And yet, so much fantasy looks like so much other fantasy. Stop that. Embrace the wide open openness of the genre. The power of magic is that it’s motherfucking magic. You are beholden only to that which you yourself create. Go big. Dream weird. Be original. Why do what everyone else has already done?

7. Opinion: The Bravest Fantasy Right Now Is In The Young Adult Space

I’m just putting that out there. Discuss amongst yourselves.

8. People, Man, People

It’s easy to get lost in the shiny crazy bits — dragon undertakers and goblin butlers and the culinary traditions of the Autochthonic Worm Lords. It’s easy to be dizzily dazzled by the sheer overwhelming potential fantasy affords. But at the end of the day, fantasy has to be about characters above ideas, above culture, above all the fiddly fantasy bits. Great characters are our vehicle through the fantasy.

9. The Heart’s Bane

Fantasy fiction often seems to be about external conflict — sieges and escaped gods and blasphemous magic and, I dunno, unicorn orgies. But what we connect to in storytelling is the internal conflict. What lies in the heart of a character is what we understand — and, in fact, relate to — most. Yes, the battlefield is a muddy bloody hell-ground of decapitations and magic missiles, but those two forces are clashing based on the motives of characters — characters who feel betrayed or vengeful, who send nations to die to rescue one lost love, who risk it all because of some real or imagined slight decades before. The human heart — even when encased in an ogre king’s chest — drives fantasy fiction.

10. Dolls Nesting In Dolls

Put differently: find the little story in the big story because the little story needs to actually be the big story. Did you follow that? Let me explain: fantasy is often about epic motherfucking stuff. Quest for the magic boomerang! Dragon Parliament is going to war with the Unicorn Tribe of the Northern Blood Red Shadow Death Crescent-Steppe! Evil has awakened from its thousand year nap and now stumbles drunkenly toward our villages — oh by the gods he’s stubbed his toe and now Evil is very very angry. Those are big stories. And they don’t matter. Not without a compelling little story. The story of a boy in love. The story of a fractured family pulling itself together (or further apart). A coming-of-age tale! The tale of redemption and regret! The big stuff is just a trapping — epic shadows cast on the wall, thrown there by firelight.

11. Building A World Where Nobody Lives

Though the stage is essential, theater is not about the stage. All the pieces on it contribute to the action, the blocking. But theater is not about the stage. Theater is about the stories of people, and so too is fantasy. Fantasy is not about the worldbuilding, though it’s tempting to make it so. It’s a tantalizing proposition, to slide down that muddy chute (get your head out of the gutters, and also, out of other people’s mud-chutes, I mean, unless they invited you) and to keep on going — designing forest ecologies and ossuary cities (bone-o-polis!) and the mating dances of the randy tumescent Ettins. And weeks later you’ve forgotten the story. You’ve lost the characters (if you ever had them). Worldbuilding supports story, but is not itself the story. Worldbuilding is just the stage. It demands attention. But not all of it.

12. The Seduction Of Detail

Fantasy gives itself over to detail very easily. Exposition. Explanation. It feels like, “Well, the readers have never experienced this world before and so I must paint for them every inch.” You can spend a whole page on describing the pommel of a knight’s mighty sword or the density and temperature of pegasus cloaca, and I’ll admit that there exists an audience for that sort of thing — readers who want to be immersed so fully in a world’s minutiae that it bubbles up into their nose. For my money, if the fantasy is more about those details than it is about the story or the characters within it, I’m done. I’m Audi 5000, son.

13. Free Range Cage-Free Fantasy

Grow your world and its many details organically. Meaning, describe it when you need it. The test is easy: can the audience continue without this information? If the answer is no, describe as simply and clearly as you can manage. If the answer is yes, the move on to the stuff we care about.

14. Reality Versus Authenticity

Fantasy would seem the opposite of reality as in, “My reality does not feature merfolk flea markets or werewolves having sex-wars with vampires, and this book has those things aplenty.” And yet, each tale of fantasy must have its own reality and the way you accomplish this is by embracing authenticity. Authenticity makes everything feel real, even when it most certainly is not. Authenticity comes from consistency and confidence in your writing. (Logic and common sense don’t hurt, either.) Authenticity is a nice glass of warm milk that puts any reader’s disbelief down for a long, comfortable nap.

15. This Thing’s Got Rules, You See

Part of that consistency I’m talking about is maintaining a level of consistency in the rules of your fantasy worlds. Your sex-dragons and sentient blimp-creatures don’t need to act like my sex-dragons and sentient blimp-creatures, but they do need to act in a way we find consistent and believable. Discover the rules of your magic systems. Find out what the zombie magus can and cannot do. What happens if a werewolf tries to make a baby with a mummy? Hell, that’s a good question for all of us to answer whether we’re writing fantasy or not. I don’t want to be sandbagged by some squalling wolf-mummy. Fuck that, man.

16. The School Of Cool Has Been Shut Down For Serving Re-Heated Poop Mash To Students And Is Pending Investigation Thanks For Your Patience

Don’t put something in your story just because it’s cool. Won’t work. It’ll feel like a third nipple just sitting there, squirting scalding hell-milk in your eye. Elements of fantasy should be cool and work in the greater context of character, setting, theme, whatever. “DUDE SO AWESOME” is not a justification for inclusion.

17. Gone Off The Reservation

Yes, I’m exhorting you to go big, go weird, or go home. But you can go too weird. You can conjure an insurmountable distance between your world and the audience by being too abstract, for embracing weird just for the sake of it. Byzantine abstractions are fascinating, but they don’t do well in protracted storytelling unless you can somehow help the audience relate to it. We need to find our story in your story. If we can find no recognizable landmarks, if we can find no familiar paths — even murky ones — we won’t connect with your story. The weirder you go the harder you must strive to connect with us.

18. The Chosen One Is Done, Son, Unless He Got Buns, Hon

Personal opinion: the chosen one is over. Kaput. *poop noise* Jesus, King Arthur, Paul Atreides, Rand al’Thor, Spongebob Squarepants, whatever. Fuck the prophecy. It’s over! It’s a puerile convention in a genre that’s matured well beyond the need for such over-common trappings. Anytime I read, “He’s the one person who can save the kingdom / defeat the monstrous monster-thing / wield the magic sword known as Lion-Tickler,” I just roll my eyes and gently close the book. I no longer buy it. It’s lazy. Do better. (Oh, unless you’re subverting that meme. Then you get a fist bump. And a genital bump, if you’re into it. *eyebrow waggle* Oh, hey okay, since you’re getting out the Taser, maybe not.)

19. If Your Character’s Name Has More Than Six Apostrophes I Will Choke You

If your character’s name has a bunch of consonants jammed together, I will slap your face. If I need a ten-page pronunciation guide to sound out your hero’s name, I will kung-fu your soul. If you’re desperate to make your character names sound “exotic” and “weird” without any cultural underpinnings or consistency, I will clone you and make you fight yourself in a McDonald’s ball pit. If all your fantasy names sound the same (Galen Galorn Galendal Galendel Galendole Gaileen Crystal Gayle GALEYGALEGOOBYGALE) I will pull out your heart, stuff it with acorns, and leave it for the squirrels.

20. This Way To The Great Egress Ha Ha It’s Actually An Owlbear Lair You Fool

One of the things I really like about fantasy is that it pretends to be escapism. Even the word fantasy suggests an imagined escape. But fantasy can — and perhaps should — be used to explore some really deep, really profound stuff. By stripping away the faculties of real life you crack open bone and open up the marrow. No topic is too weighty for fantasy — life, love, death, marriage, social norms, violence, politics, government, commerce, sex — and yet fantasy is a honeypot, luring you in with promises of a trouble-free escape. That is, in the truest sense of the word, fantastic. (See what I did there?)

21. Maybe You Don’t Need To Write A Ten-Book Epic Cycle

You will not get your giant epic fantasy series (with accompanying 1000-page mythic dictionary) published if you’re a new writer. Some authors can get away with this. Most can’t. Before I tackle any big fantasy series, I wait until it’s all finished. Because suddenly the author starts taking five year breaks between books and then gets hit by a bus before Book Eight and suddenly I’m up poop river without hip-waders.”But now I’ll never find out what becomes of Lady Braidly Manabozho of the Shadowdark Hegemony! Will she be forced to marry Lord Krommng’kar? Will she accept her destiny as one of the Sandmurai and join the Magenta Falconer’s Guild?” Maybe calm down. Start smaller.

22. Read Broadly Lest Ye Regurgitate A Thin Slurry

Don’t read only fantasy. Read histories and mysteries. Read biographies and mythologies, thrillers and chillers. Reading only in your genre ensures you regurgitate your genre.

23. Fuck Tolkien

Tolkien deserves kudos. High-five to him. And now we’re done. Stop emulating him. No more elves and orcs and dwarves. No more slavish D&D devotion. Fantasy isn’t beholden to this dude. Nobody’s forcing you to trample the same grass over and over again. He is not the only example (and fantasy needs few examples, anyway). As a sidenote, “fuck Tolkien” sounds like “fuck token,” which I think is how one properly accesses an orgy. “Ahm, yes, I’m here for the unicorn orgy.” “Do you have your fuck token?” “I seem to have… lost it.” “Then get lost, pervo.” “But I have this copy of the Silmarillion.” “I said get lost.”

24. Also: No More Hot-Pants Vampires

I like vampires. I do. And I like tight leather pants. Hell, you put a vampire into some tight leather pants and give her a katana, I’m good to go. But, urban fantasy — it’s time. It’s time to back away from the beleathered bloodsuckers and sexy vampire hunters and their hirsute lycanthrope lovers. All the romance and the vampire clans and swords and the two pistols and the sexy tattoos and — I mean, we’re done here, right? Is there nowhere else to go? Can’t you at least file off some serial numbers?

25. Write Down Your Dreams

We dream at night unfettered. Our minds unmoored from the known, lifting and drifting into the unknown. Anything is possible in our dreams. That’s why our dreams are so powerful — we feel something strong upon waking even as the dream breaks apart in our hands like a crust of beach sand. It’s why I encourage writers to write down their dreams if they found them so affecting, and it’s now why I think our dreams serve as an excellent model for fantasy fiction. The same feel I get when dreaming is the same feel I hope to reach when reading fantasy fiction — the sense of being out of my head, of entering territory that is unknown and so becomes both beautiful and frightening in equal measure. I want to believe that the author is not fixed by the rigors of reality or the reagents of the genre and that here, All Things Are Possible. The power of the fantasy is in its limitlessness to explore human imagination. Stop walking the same paths. Stop feeling trapped. Find the dream. Write what you want to write and let that free your fiction.

Fantasy or otherwise.


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June 18, 2012 / 80 Comments

Ode To The Editor

The editor walks the craggy wasteland.

Maybe she’s a freelance pen-for-hire. Maybe her red ink dances for one of the corporations.

Doesn’t much matter. She is what she is.

Then —

In the distance, across a valley of charred manuscripts and killed-off characters she hears the plaintive cry of a writer lost in the woods, a writer with a soggy, boggy book falling apart in his hands.

And the editor rides.

Hoofbeats on broken earth. Her heart driven by the thunderous stampede — a heart hungry for the story, voracious for the words, desperate to find all the fiddly bits, all the commas and semi-colons and character arcs and thematic throughlines and save them from the hands of an author strangled by his own creation.

An author mad by his own whims.

And that is what she finds over the next ridge.

The author, kneeling over his manuscript. Punching it with raw-knuckled hands. Grabbing fistfuls of paper and shoving it into his mouth and moaning around the wads of crumpled story.

“I’ll make the protagonist a camel!” the author cries around dry, labored gulps. “I’ll write three prologues. Each weirder than the last. I’ll remove all the punctuation and make it one big run-on sentence and all the characters will fall prey to my plot and my plot will fall prey to my themes and my themes will fall prey to a half-dozen strongly-concocted gin-and-tonics and–” Here he eats another wad of his own manuscript. “GRASHAGRABLECHRAGGTERFUGGMBTZZ.” He falls to the earth, forehead against it, blubbering.

The editor kicks him off the manuscript. The author tumbles into the dust. Tears streaking dirty cheeks.

“You,” the author says.

The editor nods. Pops a white Chiclet. Crunch.

“But…” the author begins.

The editor just shakes her head.

Finger to lips. Shhhh.

She pats his head. Whispers something in his ear. It’ll be all right. That’s what she tells him.

Then she gathers up the crumpled story-boulders and pages caught on cactus spines and she again mounts her steed and rides to the next ridge. There she sits, alone. For hours. Maybe days. Pulling pages apart. Seeing what she has. Shining a light into dark corners. Finding sense. Fixing errors. Bringing sanity back to madness, chaos back to order, context back to content. Her red pen dances bloodily upon the page.

And when the time is right, she rides again.

Finds the author now sitting alone, perfectly still as if he had taken Herculean amounts of LSD and was afraid that he’d become a little teapot and any movement could cause his tea to spill.

She goes to him.

She shows him what she’s done.

He hates her — at first.

He froths and kicks and spits, a beast poorly corralled, distraught at what he sees — the ruination of my art, the muddying of my vision, poopy handprints on what was once a clean white wall.

But soon he sees.

He sees how things make sense.

How the periods and commas all line up proper-like. All reporting for duty.

His crutch words are gone. His plot has been untangled. The characters are no longer just cardboard cut-outs slotted into gaps but rather living, breathing entities, emotionally resonant and utterly believable.

His pile of word-slurry has been concretized. Into a marble bust. An aegis of the gods.

And when he looks up, the editor is gone. His satchel, too.

She’s riding off. A wasteland MacGuyver. An apocalyptic A-Team.

What she brings to the story is hidden behind every page. Lost in the space between sentences. Her repairs are invisible — the mechanisms of her craft hidden behind authorial drywall. Ever unknown to readers.

“But I don’t even know your name,” the author whispers — a whisper lost on the wind.

She’s gone. Onto the next writer sitting in his own waste. To clean up him. To fix his story.

To do what must be done.

* * *

All this is a roundabout way of saying Yay, Editors!

Not all editors are good, or great, and some are quite bad.

And no editor can take a bad story and make it good — dross does not polish into gold.

Oh ho! But an editor can however take a good story and make it great, harnessing the potential that lives in a pile of unforged story. Dross will not become gold, but iron can become steel.

What I’m trying to say is, I have recently been getting this question:

“Do you know any good editors?”

Folks email me and want to know if I’ll look at their work (I won’t), or if I know any good editors (I do, but not in a helpful way). And so I come to you, my bubbly lovely jubblies. Let us speak of editors.

If you’re an author who has a favorite freelance editor or who merely cares to sing the praises of an editor you’ve worked with at a publisher or elsewhere, please do! Sing, sing those praises!

If you’re an editor who is available…

Well. Please, let us know that. You may find clients here.

And let us all sing the ballad of the editor and tell their mighty stories. For it is the editor that lifts the story up so that it may catch the sun. And yet it is the author who swallows the syrup of glory.

All hail the editor.

June 17, 2012 / 17 Comments

My Father Ate Really Weird Things

My father was a farmer, not a foodie.

He ate and drank normal things most of the time, of course — steak a favorite, maybe a Beck’s beer. Or at night, a blackberry brandy. Or a blended Scotch like Dewar’s.

But between the margins lived very curious choices of food.

He’d eat whole cloves of garlic, raw. Munch, munch, munch. The resultant breath potent enough to punch a hole through a vampire’s breastbone and turn his heart to strongly-scented ash.

Horseradish could be grated onto anything. He’d also eat that raw, right out of the garden.

Hell, the raw garden was a good place to find him. Grazing like some kind of horse or antelope. Picking up green peppers, parsley, tomatoes, beans. Crunch crunch crunch.

If my mother made asparagus in boiling water, Dad would drink the asparagus water. A hot, tall, frothy glass of mm-mmm asparagus water. It looked like a big cup of pee. Which is, perhaps, appropriate.

You know Clamato juice? Clam Tomato juice? He’d drink that, too. Most people make dips from it, or use it in recipes. He’d drink a glass of it. Warm, cold, didn’t matter. Glug, glug, glug.

Hot peppers were always on the menu. Never seemed to bother him, either. He grew a wide variety in the garden and would occasionally go out and sample the wares by just popping them in his mouth like they were fucking Triscuits. Didn’t seem to faze him. He’d occasionally say something like, “Hot,” or, “This has good heat,” and then he’d see if I wanted a bite. And it was a trap. Always a trap. Because he’d goad you, tell you it wasn’t that bad, or maybe he’d say from the beginning that it “wasn’t hot at all,” then you’d eat it and from the first moment your tongue touched the thing it felt like someone had jabbed a sparking Stun Gun into your mouth. Alarm bells and synapses firing. And he’d laugh.

He grew these little tiny peppers — “Thai hots,” he called them. Bright red. Each no bigger than the tip of your pinky finger. He’d take two of those, break the skin with a knife (not even chopping them), then toss those two into a pot of elk chili that simmered for the rest of the day. That chili was the deadliest chili around. A turbid, blood-red brew. Delicious, admittedly — but it even got to him. Dad would sweat and snorfle and cough. And keep on eating. It was like a Szechuan hot pot had made sweet spicy love to a bowl of Tex-Mex chili. You could probably boil an elk alive in that pot.

He ate organ meat without batting an eye. Something I’ve only recently come to, myself. His favorite part of the chicken was the “gizzards,” which meant not just the gizzards but all the bird’s inner workings. Heart, liver, etc. All the little inner bits fried up in a pan with some onions and butter, maybe some old-school lard.

We’d go fishing sometimes and catch these gutter eels and one time he was like, “Hell with it,” and we put ’em in the cooler and took them home. He went at them with a cleaver and cut them up into something resembling hunks of garden hose, or maybe something out of an H.R. Giger artwork. Then cooked them and ate them. I guess they weren’t great but they did the trick. I wouldn’t go near ’em.

He ate a lot of fish that we caught. We had catfish at our pond that were big sonofabitches. Long as my arm, thick as my thigh. You’d throw bread into the water and there they’d come, slow like whales, mouths open wide, bread and water disappearing into that fleshy aperture. We didn’t kill or eat those fish, though. Hell, one time a great blue heron — beautiful birds, by the way — started paying visits to our pond and finding it a rather epic buffet. Spearing sunnies and bass and maybe trying for the catfish. So Dad shot it. Which was illegal at the time and, I suspect, still is. His reasoning was, “Bird was eating my fish,” and that was that.

We used to go and shoot birds sometimes — pheasants, geese, chukars — and then have to eat gingerly so you didn’t crack a tooth on the shot. That’s not weird so much, but it comes to mind so there it is.

Weird was pickled pig’s feet. He loved those. Mason jar of those looked like something out of a mad doctor’s laboratory. Fibrous hooves calling to mind a forensics scene where they discover a body in a swamp.

Food was a thing for us. We were a farming family — though by the time I was old enough to have a clue, we raised whitetail deer and that was it (and we generally didn’t eat those deer but one time we ate one and that, well, let’s just say that did not go over well). Later, elk. But farming life is hard and even though the sting of that hard life was gone from ours it still remained and so with it came that utilitarian “You eat everything,” and that meant whatever was on your plate and in your glass even if you didn’t like it. (Though that ended one day when I was forced to eat eggplant and I threw up at the table.)

Really though this isn’t about food. It’s about memory. What we take with us, what we forget. Who we become because of those things. Father’s Day will always be a reflection — like his birthday, like my son’s birthday, like Christmas, like all those days that ping the emotional radar — and it’s always interesting to see what memories float up out of that turbid blood-red brew. One memory leads to the next and the next and the next after that, feeling your way around the dark with open hands to see what you find. It’s good. Strange, but good. Someday, when I’m dead, my son will do the same thing, I hope. Piecing together those memories. Finding a thread and pulling on it until he gets to something he didn’t expect to remember. I guess that’s how we are, fathers and sons. And mothers and daughters and all of us with whatever memories we carry. Memories and stories and lost images found anew.

Happy Father’s Day, you motherfuckers.

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