Apple-Obsessed Author Fella

Author: terribleminds (page 423 of 449)

WORDMONKEY

What Ails You, Penmonkey?

First, as a head’s up: I triumphantly declared Thursdays to be reserved for guest posts and interviews, and you’ll realize that, erm, this isn’t that. I’ve got some good guest posts and have some incoming interviews (and have to send more out — be advised that this baby we have is some kind of goddamnable time vampire the way he eats hours of our lives), so those will come.

But — but! — for those weeks when I don’t have something in the pipeline, I figure I’ll bounce the ball into your court. Ask you a question. See what you got going on.

Today’s question is about: you and your writing.

In case you’ve been locked in a steamer trunk deep down in the darkest cavern, here at terribleminds I talk a lot about writing and writers, and I like to think I’m talking about stuff people find useful, but fact is, I never really know. This is one way for me to know. So, I ask you here: tell me about your current projects and, specifically, any problems you’re having as a writer. Anything at all. Babble away. Read other comments, too — maybe what one person considers a problem is something you’ve already figured out. Help each other. And this helps me, too — it lets me know how to gear future writing posts.

Sit on my lap. Tug on my wizened beard.

And tell Old Man Wendig your problems.

… okay, that sounds weird.

BUT I LIKE IT WEIRD.

Ahem. Anyway. You know the drill.

You. Comments. Go. Deposit your think juice in my blog box.

Search Term Bingo Stole My Dingo

Time again for SEARCH TERM BINGO, little babies. If you don’t know how this works, here it is: people discover this website via some of the strangest search terms one could imagine. I pluck these search terms out of obscurity and dissect them for gits and shiggles.

Let us begin.

ejaculation cordoruys

This is my favorite new Hipster Beard Ironic PBR Shop Teacher Eyeglasses band out of Portland.

dont do that, chuck

*pops thumb out of the lion’s butt*

*douses flaming hatchet in pail of angel spit*

*wheels the stripper cake back into the moving truck*

Fine. Fine. I won’t do that. Now you’ve ruined everything. I had something really great planned. Now nobody gets to see it. This is why we can’t have nice things.

ghost story amish melonhead

Oh! The tale of the spirit of the Amish Melonhead! Young Ezekiel Stolzfus, with his head the size of a rain-swelled cantaloupe, was out playing one day with an unadorned wooden block as his toy, a block he named “Old Esau Blockface,” and so rapt was he in his playing with his lump of wood that he failed to notice the horse and buggy rocketing toward him at a clip of five, maybe six miles-per-hour. The horse hooves clomped over Ezekial’s body and the buggy wheel ran over his face but still he did not die. Nay, what killed him was that his favorite toy, Old Esau Blockface, bounced away and fell into a rain gully and was swept away. Young Ezekiel then died of a broken heart, and now it’s said he haunts the old Creamery Road. You know his ghost is coming when you hear the sound of stomping horse feet.

Some folks say they see a glowing shape in the darkness. A shape holding an unadorned block of wood.

*crash of thunder*

how did ancient babies sleep

Ah. Yes. The ancient babies. The “olde babbies,” as it were. The ancient babies slept inside the coal-warmed corpses of white stags, sucking on river pebbles, their fists clenched around the puffy gloved fingers of the alien astronauts who founded the first civilization in Catal Hayuk. The ancient babies were protected by dire wolves. They dreamed of spearing pterodactyls. They slept well, the ancient babies. We’ve lost that, I think. We’ve really lost something special. I blame Phineas and Ferb. Whatever they are.

foreign fucking vowels!

Yeah! You damn foreign vowels! Stealing jobs from American vowels! With your goddamned Nazi umlauts! I saw a good old-fashioned American ‘u’ on the side of the highway the other day. Not just panhandling, ohhh no. Offering to suck dicks for money. I mean, he’s got the right shape for it, I’ll grant him this, but there’s no dignity in that. This is the end of the American Empire. Or should I say, ÃmërÎcæn Èmpírę?

i have lice

Well don’t bring that shit around here, pal. I got enough problems without inviting lice up in this place. I’m having a hard time getting rid of the bedbugs and the chlamydia. Now I gotta worry about lice?

many people die from frozen feces

Great, now you’ve given me something new to worry about. How many people? HOW MANY? I’m going to be walking around all day thinking my feces is going to freeze inside my body. Or that someone’s going to make a bullet out of frozen feces and shoot it into my tender doughy body! (If I don’t die from the trauma, I will die from some kind of out-of-control poop amoebas.) People everywhere! Dying from frozen feces!

It’s not worth going outside the house anymore.

things to know as a writter

The first thing would be how to spell “writer.”

a big dick should suck itself

I’ve said this many a time. A guy’s gonna have a big bullhorn, a super schwanz, a mega-magic-wand, a muscled baby’s arm, then that thing should be like a snake biting its own tail — it should jolly well suck itself. Get that on some t-shirts. On bumper stickers. On dasher, on dancer, on thrasher and prancer! … no, I don’t know what I’m talking about. Just go along with it. Don’t ask questions. Shut it.

cant get my dick inside a pussy so is castration a good idea?

Yes. If you can’t get your manhood inside a lady’s baby-maker, then your only recourse is to pop that bad-boy onto the tree stump and take a camping hatchet to it. Or you could go the chemical castration route. Don’t pay an expert, by the way. Chemical castration is like social media — any self-proclaimed “experts” are just Snake Oil salesmen. You want to chemically castrate youself? A can of Raid wasp-killer spray. Hose your big dog down with that for about, ohhh, seven cans or so. Done. Boom. No more swimmers. Your balls as dry and inert as the Salton Sea.

crowdsourced diapers

Crowdsourcing is plainly the future. It takes a village, and all that.

Here’s what I propose: a bunch of you people come over — say, a dozen of you — and each of you will form your hands into a giant bowl, and you shall then place this hand-woven bowl beneath my child’s pooper, and so when he makes yellow rain or squeezes out some newborn “caramel sauce,” you all catch it in your hands. Boom. Crowdsourced diapers. The future is here. High-five, Internet!

harmless animals that can crawl into your genitals

Any animal that crawls into my genitals is not harmless. Let’s get that straight right now. An animal that crawls around my genitals — like, say, a fuzzy koala, a sloth baby, or a slow loris — is a whole other story.

how long will my new beard hurt?

UNTIL YOU STOP RESISTING IT.

i am seeing dead birds

Then you should take them off your desk. They’ve been there for, what, a week now?

i have made an alien what could i make for a body (creativly)

Wh… uhhh. Eh? I don’t… ennh?

Seriously, no idea what you’re asking. Just make the whole thing out of mashed potatoes.

what is i love you in baby language?

The baby says GOO-ga, then pees in your eye. That’s “I love you.” Note, however, if the eye-pee is accompanied by goo-GA, instead — that means, “I will destroy you, giant human.” With babies, it’s all about intonation. And the target of their spraying urine stream. You might need to find a baby whisperer to help you. You can hire one on CraigsList. Or so I’ve heard.

i really wanna be with you, love ponies

This is my favorite Judy Blume book.

ima forage for an orange while i look at the corpse of a whore

This is my favorite e.e. cummings poem.

it only hurts when i laugh fire gas

HAHAHAHA *blorch*

*fire jets from mouth*

OW GODDAMNIT OW

Yes, one imagines it would hurt when you laugh “fire gas.”

knife-wielding baboons

How’d you know what my next novel is going to be about? GET OUT OF MY MIND, INTERNET.

kodiak bear reading poems

This would be the best single-serving Tumblr site ever. Someone get on this. The Kodiak bear should begin by reading, “To An Athlete Dying Young,” by A.E. Housman. Then, he should follow-up with e.e. cumming’s “forage for an orange.” Poetry is so beautiful, especially when read by a man-eating bear.

monkey DNA flowers

Ahh, the sophomore album by the Ejaculation Corduroys. If I’m being honest: disappointing.

tits on a lawn mower

Once again the Internet turns me on to the hot new lingo paraded about by youths in America. “Tits on a lawn mower, dude! I just did a gnarly 360-degree wallaby pube-laser on my hover-board!”

Of course, it also reminds me that the world would be a better place if lawn-mowers did have big, luscious breasts dangling there. Men would never not mow the lawn. They’d be out there all day, just mowing and mowing. “Nancy, what’s Dave doing out there?” “He said he thinks he ‘missed a spot,’ but you ask me, he’s just out there fondling the tittles on that there Husqvarna.”

we’re gonna smoke that motherfuckin christmas tree

Every year in this country, more and more kids get hooked on smoking these motherfucking Christmas trees. Huffing pine-tar. Crumbling up delicate ornaments into their candy cane pipes and cooking it down with a candle that smells like egg-nog or mulled cider. “Chasing the Reindeer,” they call it. That first high, you catch the reindeer and just bang the jingle right out of that reindeer’s bells — but after that, the reindeer is ever elusive, running faster and further with every high. That’s not a metaphor, either. Every time you smoke a motherfucking Christmas tree, you get to pork one of Santa’s reindeers. True story.

what celebrities say about emu meat

Brad Pitt says, “It’s emu-licious!”

Meg Ryan says, “Emu meat destroyed my lips but I don’t care because I will shank a motherfucker for some emu meat!”

Jim Varney says nothing. BECAUSE JIM VARNEY IS DEAD.

Let’s all have a moment of silence.

Of course, I joke, but soon I’ll find out that a rash of American celebrities are doing Japenese “emu meat” commercials or something. Goddamn celebrities. Goddamn Japan. Ruining the fun.

what to do when your body produces too much turmeric or cumin

I harvest the turmeric from my nipples and scrape the cumin as it accumulates like pollen on my thighs. Then I make some kick-ass emu-meat tacos. Why? What the hell do you do with all those bodily spices?

what do a witch’s tittys look like?

Termite mounds.

why do murder mysteries cause women to masturbate?

You find out, you let me know. Every time I’m at the airport, though, whoo-dang. Ladies sitting at the gates reading some sweet-ass murder mysteries, sitting there and doing the old “murdering the little man in the canoe,” if you know what I mean. Something about the delicate combination of death and mystery just gets the women-folk all juicy-goosey.

In other news: what the fuck are you talking about?

my wife will not listen to my advice about the baby

That’s because your advice is terrible. C’mon, seriously? “Swaddle him with bungee cord. Let him nurse on the nose of this dead possum I found — he needs the bacteria to strengthen his physio… bio… babylogical system. If he gets cold at night we’ll just kill a pony and let him sleep inside the animal’s warm guts. What? Han Solo did it with a Taun-Taun. It’s how the ancient babies slept. That shit works, hombre!” And also, why are you calling your wife ‘hombre?’ You might want to think long and hard about that.

sometimes you just have to fuck the demons out

Please don’t touch me.

Chick-Fil-A Versus The Homosexuals

I don’t eat a lot of fast food.

Mostly because, well, it’s shit. Delicious shit, in many cases, but last time I checked, pets think antifreeze is delicious: doesn’t mean I’d recommend it as a fucking snack.

I’ll eat fast food (Wendy’s, McDonald’s, what-have-you) if I’m on the road for something because it’s often difficult to do otherwise. This is fairly rare.

I’ll eat “higher-end” fast food if it’s the only choice — Five Guys, Panera, Chipotle — but again, we’re talking a fairly rare event, here. (Actually, I take an annual pilgrimage to Five Guys. Because, c’mon.)

And, finally, I’ll eat Chick-Fil-A.

Why not? Tasty food. Always gets high marks in terms of quality ingredients and relative healthfulness. We’ve one close by, and the people there are incredibly friendly. Beaming smiles and bright eyes and the epitome of politeness. Plus they have a giant cow tottering to and fro, and sometimes that big fuzzy motherfucker will come right up to your table and clear it for you. They have family nights. Kids get their faces painted. A sense of community lingers.

Of course, while their food is delicious, it turns out, their politics are not.

They have a raging hate-boner for same-sex couples.

Well, goddamnit.

Way to go, Chick-Fil-A. Way to be a dick. (I’m sure given their almost sexual fascination with chickens there’s a “cock” joke in there somewhere. I’ll leave it for you, my intrepid readers, to discover.)

It’s one thing to know that, say, a CEO is a dick. That’s no good, but you could maybe justify not caring so much — after all, I haven’t vetted every employee of every corporation that produces every product I consume. I don’t know that Steve Jobs isn’t a fetus-munching Scientologist or the guy who made my frozen burrito isn’t some kind of violent Eskimo-hater. Further, I’ve heard some folks say, “Well, they are Christian,” as if every Christian human has a secret agenda against the LGBT community. But here, the real rub is that Chick-Fil-A is actively opposed to gay marriage and LGBT rights, which is another way of saying they oppose human love, rationality, and human rights.

Which means I have to oppose their delicious chicken sandwiches.

It’s stupid, but my initial thought was, “Well, I can sometimes still eat the sandwiches, right?” Having a new kid, I have no intention of plugging his growing body up with fast food but I thought, “Well, we can take him to Chick-Fil-A. He can see the big cow. He can get his face painted on Tuesdays. Delicious milkshakes!” Except, fuck, fuck, every dollar I spend there means it’s a dollar that can go toward them being dicks.

“Here,” I say. “Here’s five dollars for this delicious meal.”

“Thanks!” chirps the Chick-Fil-A smiley-bot girl. “We’re going to donate twenty-five cents of your order toward making sure gays remain at sub-human legal levels! Would you like waffle fries with that?”

Actually, their chirpy, uber-polite veneer now takes on a Village of the Damned-esque quality, doesn’t it? Like, out back behind the franchise you’ll find a bunch of smiley blonde white girls with promise rings whanging homosexuals in the head with shovels and throwing their bodies into barrel fires. “God loves you!” they cry. “It’s a nice day at Chick-Fil-A!” The big fuzzy cow will totter up and laugh — hurr hurr hurr hurr — before taking a big ol’ cowflop on the bill of rights.

Point being, of course I can’t eat the fucking sandwiches. Not if I want to ever pretend my convictions have substance greater than that of cotton candy in a warm mouth. Is that what I’m going to teach my son someday? “Son, you have to standup and do what’s right. Taking the righteous path isn’t about taking the easy path. Stand by your convictions. Unless, of course, the enemy of those convictions is selling you a delectable chicken sandwich. Because then? Yeah, fuck that noise. You compromise your ideals for a sandwich like that. I’d shoot an Eskimo right in his cold heart just to eat a trio of waffle fries, my boy.”

I mean, shit, if Hitler’s Third Reich had the Chicken Deluxe Sandwich, are we to believe everyone might’ve just looked the other way when it came to the concentration camps?

(“That Hitler sure knows his breaded chicken!”)

I dunno. Point being, if you believe in something, then you have to at least be willing to commit the bare minimum toward that conviction, and here the bare minimum is “not eating their food.” I ate there just a week or two ago, and to my regret, that will have to stop. At least until they learn to play nice with the human race. You chicken-fucking bastards. (That’s why they’re all smiling. They’re banging chickens by the box-load. Don’t buy their bullshit. They love cock.)

25 Things You Should Know About Writing A Novel

I figured, okay, I just finished the first draft of a new novel. Just got a book deal for another one. Got DOUBLE DEAD coming out in November. Maybe a list of “25 Things” to do with writing a novel. Specifically. The other lists apply, of course — plot, character, storytelling — but this one about the mechanical act of smacking your face again and again into the meaty thighs of a novel. Only problem: I had a list that went well-beyond 25 things. So, I had to trim and trim and trim, and this is the list I came up with. It’s incomplete, of course. They all are. So, if you’re so inclined: get into the comments, add your own.

Previous iterations of the “25 Things” series:

25 Things Every Writer Should Know

25 Things You Should Know About Storytelling

25 Things You Should Know About Character

25 Things You Should Know About Plot

1. Your First And Most Important Goal Is To Finish The Shit That You Started

Let’s get this out of the way right now: if you start a fucking novel, then plan to fucking finish that fucking novel. Your hard drive is not a novel burial ground. It’s like building your own Frankenstein monster — robbing a grave, stealing a brain, chopping up the body — and then giving up before you let lightning tickle that sonofabitch to life. The true author finishes what he begins. That’s what separates you from the dead-beats, from the talkers, from the dilettantes. Don’t let dead metaphysical weight slow you down.

2. That Means Momentum Is Key

Say it five times fast: momentum-momentum-momentum-momentum-momentum. Actually, don’t say it five times fast. I just tried and burst a blood vessel on the inside of my sinuses. The point remains: writing a novel is about gaining steam, about acceleration, about momentum. You lose it every time you stop to revise a scene in the middle, to look up a word, to ponder or change the plot. It’s like a long road-trip: don’t stop for hitchhikers, don’t stop to piss, don’t stop for a Arby’s Big Beef and Cheddar. Just drive. Leave notes in your draft. Highlight empty spaces. Fill text with XXX and know you’ll come back later.

3. The First Draft Is The Beach-Storming Draft

It’s you and hundreds of other soldier-penmonkeys clawing their way up the enemy beach of the People’s Republic Of Novelsvainya. Most of those other poor sots are going to take a stitching of bullets to the chest and neck and drop dead in the sand, flopping around like a fish, their bowels evacuating. Your only goal is to get up that beach. Crawl through mud, blood, sand, shit, corpses. It doesn’t matter if you get up that beach all pretty-like. Or in record time. Nobody cares how your hair looks. Your first draft can and should look like a fucking warzone. That’s okay. Don’t sweat it, because you survived. Put differently, that first draft of yours has permission to suck. Go forth and care not.

4. Be Like The Dog Who Cloaks Himself In Stink

Find joy and liberation in writing a first draft without caring, without giving one whittled whit. It’s like pouring paint on the floor or taking a sledgehammer to some kitchen counters. Get messy. Let it all hang out. Suck wantonly and without regard to others. Let that free you. Have fun. Don’t give a rat’s roasted rectum. You’ll think that all you’re doing is upending a garbage can on the page, but later, trust in the fact you’ll find pearls secreted away in the heaps of trash and piles of junk.

5. The First Draft Is Born In The Laboratory

Take risks on that first draft. Veer left. Drive the story over a cliff. Try new things. Play with language. Kill an important character. Now’s the time to experiment, to go moonbat apeshit all over this story. You’ll pull back on it in subsequent drafts. You’ll have to clean up your mess: all the beer bottles, bong water, blood and broken glass. But some of it will stay. And the stuff that does will feel priceless.

6. Writing Is Rewriting Is Rewriting Is Rewriting Is

Said before but bears repeating: writing is when you make the words, editing is when you make them not shitty. The novel is born on that first go-around but you gotta let that little bastard grow up. Do this through rewriting. And rewriting. And rewriting. As many times as it takes till it stands up and dances on its own.

7. You Have As Many Chances At-Bat As You So Choose —

A Marine sniper doesn’t get infinite shots at his target. A batter only gets three strikes. A knife-thrower only has to fuck up once before he’s got a body to hide. The novelist has it easy. You can keep rewriting. Adding. Fixing. Changing. Endlessly anon until you’re satisfied.

8. — But You Also Have To Know When To Leave Well Enough Alone

Seriously, you have to stop sometime. You whip mashed potatoes too long they get gluey. Comes a time when you need to stop fucking with a novel the same way you stop tonguing a chipped tooth. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Write till it’s good, not till it’s perfect. Because you don’t know shit about perfect. Aim squarely for a B+, and then it’s time to let others have a shot in getting the novel to that A/A+ range.

9. Know When To Bring In The Motherfucking A-Team

You’re not Lone Wolf. You are not Ronin-Ninja-Without-Clan. A novel is a team effort. You need readers. One or several editors. Potentially an agent. True story: writers are often the worst judges of their own work. You spend so long in the trenches, it’s all a hazy, gauzy blur: a swarm of flies. It’s like being on acid. Sometimes you need a trip buddy. Someone to tell you, this is real, this is illusion. “The pink unicorn is just a hallucination. But the dead body in the middle of the floor, dude, that’s real, WE GOTTA FUCKING GO.”

10. Escape The Gravity Of The Hate Spiral

Every 10,000 words is a new peak or valley on this crazy-ass roller coaster ride. You loved the novel last week. This week you want to punch its teeth down its throat. That’s normal. Write through it. The hate spiral will kill you in if you let it. It’s one of the reasons we abandon novels. It’s also nonsense. Sometimes your best work is your worst, your worst is your best. Everything is ass-end up. Fuck worry. Just write.

11. QFT

The other day on Twitter, the author J. Robert King said something that rang true: “No balanced person writes a novel.” You sit down at the desk, shackle your mind to the project, wade into an imaginary swamp with made-up people. For days. Weeks. Sometimes even years. That’s fucking batty.

12. Gotta Abandon Your Baby? Butcher Him For Spare Parts

Don’t abandon your novel. Don’t do it. Don’t make me kick you in the nuts. There. I did it. I kicked your nuts. Taste that? In your mouth? Them’s your nuts. Still. Sometimes it’s going to happen. Hopefully not often, but it does: a novel just isn’t working. Fine. Fine. But don’t let it go without a fight. Chop it apart. Break it into its constituent parts. You put work into that. Take what works and apply it elsewhere. Build another robot using parts you stole from yourself. Eat your body to sustain your body.

13. You Can Write A Novel Pretty Fucking Fast

It’s hard but not impossible to write, say, 5,000 words a day. A novel is roughly 80k. At 5k/day, you can finish a novel in about 16 days. Just know that it won’t be good. Not yet. Can’t write and rewrite that fast.

14. For Fuck’s Sake, Say Something

A reader is going to spend those 80,000 words with you. Hours of his life, given to you. Make them count. Say something about anything. Have your novel mean something to you so it can mean something to them. Bring your guts and brains and passion and heart and for the sake of sweet Sid and Marty Krofft, a message to the table. Don’t just write. Write about something. Do more than entertain. You’re not a dancing monkey. You’re a storyteller, motherfucker. Embrace that responsibility.

15. The Shape Of The Page Matters

A novel page shouldn’t look like a giant wall of text. Nor should it look like an e.e. cummings poem. The shape of the page matters. Balance. Equal parts emptiness and text. Void meets substance.

16. A Novel By The Numbers

The ideal novel is 48% action, 48% dialogue, and 4% exposition and description. I just made that up. Probably totally inaccurate. Possibly I might could maybe sorta be drunk right now. Drunk on words, or on Tito’s Vodka? You decide. Point is, a novel gets bogged by boggy bullshit like heavy description and blathering exposition. A novel is best when it lives in the moment, when its primary mode of communication is action and dialogue linking arms and dancing all over the reader’s face.

17. I Just Lied To You Back There, And For That, I’m Sorry

Dialogue is action. It’s not separate from it. It is it. Action is doing something. Dialogue is talking, and talking is doing something. Even better when dialogue manifests while characters do shit: drive a car, execute some baddies, make an omelette, build a sinister dancing robot whose mad mechanical choromania will reduce the world to cinders. Characters don’t just stand in one place in space and talk. They’re not puppets in community theater. Find language with movement and motion.

18. Description Is About Signal To Noise

Description is best when subtle. Too much description is static. Paint in short strokes. A pinch of spice here. A delicate garnish there. Description is not a hammer with which to bludgeon the mooing herd. Pick one, two, or three details and stop there. I’ve heard this said about large breasts and we’ll reiterate it here for description: anything more than a mouthful is a waste.

19. The Reader Is Your Mule

Up to you whether the reader is a mule carrying your prospector gear up a canyon path or a mule carrying doody-balloons of hard drugs in his butt-pocket; the point remains the same. The reader wants to work. The reader doesn’t know this, of course, so don’t tell him. SHHH. But the reader wants to fill in the details. He wants to be invested in the novel and to make his own decisions and reach his own conclusions. You don’t need to write everything. You can leave pieces (of plot, description, dialogue) out. The reader will get in the game. His imagination matters as much as yours. Make that fucker dance for his dinner.

20. Too Many Dicks On The Dance Floor

A novel can have too many characters. It’s not a set number or anything. The number of characters you can have is limited by your ability to make them fully-realized, wholly-inhabited people. If you don’t have the time or the room to give them a soul, to lend them wants and needs and fears and foibles, then fuck it, chop their heads off and wipe their blood from the page.

21. Genre Matters, Except When It Doesn’t

A good story is a good story, and that translates to novels: a good book is a good book. You write the novel you gotta write regardless of genre. But eventually you have to think about it. Agents, publishers, bookstores, Amazon — they care about genre. Your book has to fit somewhere. The secret is, it doesn’t have to be a perfect fit. Close enough for horseshoes, hand grenades and hobo handjobs. Maybe not that last one.

22. Beware The Saggy Mushy Middle

The beginning’s easy because it’s like — BOOM, some shit just happened. The ending’s easy because — POW, all the shit that happened just lead to this. The middle is where it gets all gooshy, like wet bread or a sloppy pile of viscera. Combat this in a few ways. First, new beginnings and early endings — the peaks and valleys of narrative. Second, keep the pressure on the story and, by proxy, yourself. Third, treat the second act like it’s two or three acts in and of itsownself.

23. Like I Said: Imagine A Long-Ass Road Trip

Variation. In scene. In character. In mood. In setting. In everything. A novel can’t just be one thing. Mix it up. It’s like a long car ride. Take an eight-hour trip down a bland mega-highway and you pretty much want to suck on the tailpipe. Take an eight-hour trip through scenic mountains and pretty burgs and ghost towns, you no longer want to eat gravel and die. Put differently: don’t be boring. If the story buys a house and gets a job in Dullsville, you need to burn Dullsville to the ground and push the story down the road a ways.

24. No One Way Through The Labyrinthine Mire

Plotter. Pantser. Five-k a day. Two-k a day. In sequence or out. Nobody writes a novel the same way, all the way down to which font folks like. Individual novels have their own unique demands. You write it however it needs to be written. Nobody can tell you how. Only that it needs to get done. We each cut our own way through the dark forest. In the deepest shadows, look for your voice. Your voice is what will get you through.

25. Writing A Novel Is Easy, But Writing A Publishable Novel Is Hard

Writing a novel isn’t hard. You throw words on a page, one atop another, until you’ve got a teetering Jenga tower of around 80,000 of the damn things. Same way that building a chair isn’t hard: I can duct tape a bunch of beer cans and chopsticks together and make a chair. It won’t look pretty. And it’s an insurance liability. (“I’m suing you because I smell like beer, I have cuts on my legs and I’ve got two chopsticks up my ass, perforating my colonic wall.”) But writing a good novel, an original novel that’s all your own and nobody else’s, well, there’s the rub, innit? The way you do it is you tell the story like you want to tell it. You learn to write well and write clearly and put a pint of blood on every page until you’ve got nothing left but spit and eye boogers. Learn your craft. Learn your voice. Write it until it’s done, then write it again.

* * *

If you dig on the apeshit crazy-face no-holds-barred profanity-soaked writing advice found here at terribleminds, then you may want to take a wee bitty gander-peek at: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY, which is available now! Buy for Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), Nook, or PDF.

Wait, What? Who Let Me Be A Father?

And like that — poof — I’m a father.

Didn’t have to fill out a form. Didn’t have to get a license. Didn’t have to kill a wild boar with my spear and eat its still-beating heart. No test. No spirit quest. No nothing.

Just a paroxysm of delight — a darling dalliance with my beautiful wife — and now we’ve a little drunken homeless man in our life that we call “Baby Ben.”

Holy shit.

In italics, this time: holy shit.

The strange thing is, for the last several years now, Father’s Day has been something of a maudlin day for me. My father passed a few years ago, as you may know, and so when this day rolls around it’s about a day of conspicuous absence, a day where the void of exclusion is felt most keenly. Hey! Not going to send him a card. Not going to call him. Not going out to dinner with him. Not sharing a glass of blackberry brandy.

In that canyon, a swirling stinging sirocco of never-gonna-happen-agains.

Ah, but.

Here, I am, in a different role. Now I’ve got a child — even moreso, a son — of my own. On the one hand, therein lies further cause for sadness here today: Ben has one grandfather now, an awesome guy, a guy who will handily own the job and embrace it the way a bear embraces a falling tree full of honey, but he’s down one grandfather. He’ll never meet my Dad. And damn, my Dad would’ve been a bitchin’ grandfather. He was a good father, but we didn’t always have the best relationship — but he’d have been a great grand-dad (or Pop-Pop or Grampa or whatever the hell he would’ve been called). That’s even sadder, right? Here’s my son and he’ll never have my Dad to show him how to fish or shoot cans off a fence-rail or look for deer or find weird rusted treasures at creepy flea markets nationwide. In that way, the void just yawned wider: the canyon walls crumbling and stretching to accommodate a deeper oblivion.

But then, on the other side, there I am. The kid has a father. (Uh, me, in case you haven’t been paying attention. Or the mailman, if I haven’t been paying attention.) And my Dad’s not here to show him how to fish or shoot cans or any of that, but I am. And through me, those things flip and switch from never-gonna-happen-again to gonna-happen-again-someday. My father’s ghost, his callused hands (and missing pinky finger), maybe getting a second life through me. It won’t be the same, of course — like I’ve said before, we’re all just blurry, blotchy fascimiles of those who came before us, each generation thinner and cut with more water than the last — but it’s something. And I’ll bring new things to the table, too, and in that the weird goofy DNA of fatherhood keeps on going.

Point is, I miss my Dad, but I’ll bring him back through the stories I can tell to my son and through the things I can teach and the adventures we can have.

It’s not everything, but it’s something, and something is better than nothing.

Miss you, Dad. Love you, Dad. Hope you can pause in your wild romp across the Happy Hunting Grounds and look down upon your grand-son and maybe give him a wink and a waggle of your ruined pinky.

Happy Father’s Day, everybody else.

(Sidenote: that photo above is from an early pheasant hunting trip when I was a kid. That’s my gawky, beardless self there second in from the left, and my father the one with the NRA hat. I may be a bespectacled intellectual moderate, but you can be damn sure my son’s going to have a fishing rod, a knife, and a rifle if he wants it. And he’ll learn to use and respect each of those in kind, just as I had done. I won’t make him hunt, but if he wants to, we can do that. Hell, you’ll note that I went just last year to bag more pheasants in honor of the old man. Though, I just can’t hunt deer.)

(Second sidenote: some folks think that B-Dub looks like me, and that might be true. Heck, he even does my one cocked eyebrow look — a dubious, incredulous face. But a lot of the time I see my father’s face in there, too. Which is at times spooky, but at all times, heartening.)

Flash Fiction Challenge: Must Love Robots

Last week’s challenge — “Dirty-Ass Sex Moves” — is live, live, live.

Given yesterday’s big news regarding BLACKBIRDS, I figured that doing a flash fiction challenge slightly in-theme wasn’t such a bad idea.

With that in mind, and given that the news is about Angry Robot Books, I figure:

Hey, let’s see some flash fiction featuring one or several robots.

In any capacity. In any genre. Get creative.

Here’s the tweak, though: I’m again going to give away copies of CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY and IRREGULAR CREATURES. This time, however, I’m not giving them to my favorites but rather, those who get here and write their fiction first. The first ten (EDIT:) fifteen entrants in the flash fiction challenge (as posted chronologically in the comments below after all comments are approved) can have their choice of either e-book in whatever format they so choose (PDF, Kindle, Nook). If you already possess both e-books, you can either let the next person down the list have your copy or pass it along instead to someone you know will want a copy.

You once again have 1000 words.

You have until next Friday (June 24th) at noon EST, but again, to qualify for the e-book, you gotta get into this challenge early and write some flash fiction featuring a robot in some capacity.

That’s it. That’s the deal.

Robots: it’s what’s for dinner.

Go forth and write, ink-slingers.

EDIT:

Here are the folks who get themselves an e-book:

1. Oldestgenxer

2. Sparky

3. Lesann

4. Alan

5. CY Reid

6. Lindsay Mawson

7. Tribid

8. Tara Tyler

9. Karen Taveres

10. Eric Archibald

11. Amber J. Gardner

12. David Earle

13. Puddin

14. Travis Cole

15. Darlene Underdahl

Folks: hit me up either via the contact form or at chuckwendig [at] terribleminds [dot] com to collect. Be sure to let me know what you want: PDF, Kindle, or Nook format!