Author: terribleminds (page 68 of 457)

WORDMONKEY

November 19, 2019 / 30 Comments

Swimming Sideways: Navigating Grief As A Writer And An Artist

“Hi. I am a fellow writer and have enjoyed your blog over the years. I know you lost your mom recently and I wanted to share my condolences. I, also, lost mine over a year ago and it has completely paralyzed me — stopped me in my creative tracks. I read your blog regarding self-care: do you take time to lick your wounds or soldier on? Not to bring you down, but I’ve found that soldiering on, for me, is impossible — and the more I try, the worse I feel… like I’ve been abandoned on the lower end of a see-saw — my heels stuck in the dirt. I have started three separate books and have abandoned them all and am stymied: writing was how I got someone to jump on the other end of the see saw — but I’m still there, alone on the playground. “Just write” are the words I hear. Writing words are easy. Writing a cohesive story is not. No one understands, not my therapist, my agent, my loved ones, not even myself. I don’t know what I want you to say, if anything, I just wanted to write THESE words down to someone who I think understands.”

That came from an email I received, and I wanted to respond to it, but I didn’t know how. And I didn’t know that my answer would be fruitful, or useful, or even sensible, honestly. But just the same, I wanted to say something about this. Many somethings, as a matter of fact, and so here I am to do exactly that. I want to acknowledge this question and this email, even if I cannot answer it, not truly.

What I want to say is this:

Grief is water. Grief is wave, river, and lake, it is the sea, it is a current.

You do not control it; rather, you can only respond to it. It wants what it wants, and it is always moving, ready to fill the low spaces. Sometimes you’re in its shallows, sometimes you step wrong and you’re in its tireless, unrelenting depths looking for light, trying to find which way is up. But it’s always there. Sometimes wet on your feet. Other times a fog, a mist, a light rain.

There are rocks to crash against. Shoals to trap you. Probably some pinchy crabs, too.

When my father died, I wrote my way through it. I don’t know that I wrote my way out of it, though that’s what I told myself at the time. Simply, I had work, I had deadlines, and they were an anchor chain to hold onto down there in the dark. Was it healthy? I don’t know. Probably not. But I had bills to pay and at that point I wasn’t a proper novelist, but had freelance clients whose books would not wait for my words; I either wrote them and they’d be in there with some coin in my pocket, or I wouldn’t, and the books would go on without me. So I wrote anyway. Not because of. But rather, despite. Or even in spite, or to spite the grief — to spit in the unfair eye of an unfuckwithable universe, to assert my control over something I surely did not control.

This time, I didn’t. The grief is different somehow but so is the situation — a lot more chaos in my life, and also, fewer immediate deadlines. (I still have them, but they’re longer on the horizon.) Maybe too there’s a difference in losing a mother versus losing a father, I don’t know. I know that I’ve tried writing some fresh words and they were mostly just crumbs, and stale crumbs, at best, so I resorted instead to doing reading and research, which has been a good default. I’ll get there. I’m starting to feel like I want to get there. I can see how to swim up. But the water wants what it wants. It goes where it goes and I’ll have to respond to it.

And that’s all I know how to do. I can’t bail myself out of it with a bucket. I can’t fly above it. It’s water, as prevalent and present as it is all around us — it’s in the air, in our bodies, it’s our sweat and our tears. (And don’t forget: crying is just our eyes puking up sadness.) You can’t get away from it. You can’t dry it up, or out. You can only respond to it. Do you write through it? I don’t know. Maybe. Do you write garbage even knowing its garbage just to keep fresh? If you want. Do you write about it, as I’m doing here? If you’d like. Or do you rest for a while? Writing isn’t always writing. Sometimes writing is resting. (Though, writing is also knowing when not to rest, even when it feels easiest to do exactly that. Sometimes, hard as it is, you gotta wake up.) The river takes you where it takes you; it’s up to you whether you follow its path or reach for shore. Or maybe —

Maybe grief is undertow. You don’t swim away from it. You damn sure don’t swim into it. You swim sideways. You find a way left or right and you swim out of its current. That’s the only response, I think. What that looks like, in form, is up to you. But I want to say it’s okay to write, it’s okay not to write, it’s okay to write badly, it’s okay to write beautifully in a way that isn’t practical or useable, it’s okay to write about it or write to avoid it. Whatever it is you create, it’s a response to the grief or looking away from it. Toward it to see it and understand it, or from it to escape it.

It’s swimming sideways.

All I know is, keep on going. Keep swimming. Those we have lost would want us to, wouldn’t they? One suspects it might be their greatest wish, and so we honoring them by doing exactly that, in whatever we we can muster, in whatever direction we find best, with our strongest stroke.

Stay afloat, fellow writer. Respond to the current. You are not its master, but nor is it yours.

November 14, 2019 / 25 Comments

On Writing What You Want, Without Permission

“OK Boomer” is a thing now, used (understandably) by younger generations to glibly flip off older ones — not, I feel, to dismiss legitimate concerns, but to dismiss prevalent baby boomer / baby doomer attitudes of blah blah blah bootstraps, something something climate denial, yadda yadda but what about both sides. Is it fair? I dunno. You tell me: the younger generations are inheriting a world that feels like it’s being rolled right up to the edge of a cliff, a boulder about to be pushed off the precipice. Sure, yeah, hashtag NotAllBoomers*, but generationally, they’re the ones who took the freedom of the 60s and let it calcify into the osseous capitalist culture cemetery of the 80s. Meanwhile the millennials (often viewed as Anybody Young, much as the boomers are Anybody Old) and the Gen-Zers wonder why college is so expensive and why student loans are terrible and house prices are interminable and they’re accused of “killing” every boomer tradition likely in part because they just can’t afford it — and yet they get yelled at for affording *checks notes* avocado toast. So, “ok boomer” evolves out of that — a casual, perfect dismissal of the Old Man Yelling At Clouds.

Related (I promise), here’s something too I noticed the other day — I noticed that older people tend to ask for what they want. I went into a restaurant populated by some older folks and they were very particular about what they wanted. No, I don’t want to sit here, I want to sit there. Substitute gruyere for cheddar. No, I don’t like those bootstraps, I like these bootstraps, you sassmouthed dillywhipper.

I don’t say that as a knock — knowing what you want, and asking for it, is huge. And it’s something that I don’t feel you figure out until you get older. As a kid, I didn’t know to ask for what I want. In part because you’re told to take what you get. That’s the attitude, right? YOU GET WHAT YOU GET AND YOU LIKE IT. And that made me think back to the “ok boomer” thing, and how it’s a little bit of fuck-you-flavored resistance, a thumb-your-nose-at-the-olds thing, a bit of reclaiming agency — instead of RESPECT YOUR ELDERS it’s lol shut up. It’s a revelation of, “Yeah, no, we’re gonna reclaim our agency and skip asking for a better world, and start demanding one.” It’s a big thing. A vital and necessary generational spark.

And that made me think about writing.

When I was younger — and I think this is maybe true of younger, untested writers overall — you really, really want to Do It Right. You want answers and rules and a map and you want to follow that map. You want to to write to the genre and hit the beats and follow story structure and all that. And that’s understandable, isn’t it? Both in publishing and in the world at large we’re told there are rules. Ways things get done. Do this, don’t do that, don’t doom your chances, stick to the path, and you’ll be fine. The process is the process, ass-in-chair, x-words per day, stay in your genre lane.

But then, ideally, as you get older and more experienced in writing you realize, fuck that.

You start to see through that illusion — some of the biggest, bravest stuff breaks rules. It doesn’t follow a path. Yeah, you still gotta do the work, you gotta commit to this thing, but what that looks like isn’t like putting together an Ikea bookshelf. It isn’t set to some prescribed, predefined blueprint or structure. The best stories are the ones that became themselves, that were an emblem of the author’s heart and mind in some way, that embraced the rare confluence of narrative atoms that make up Who You Are. And I wish I’d learned that earlier. Don’t get me wrong — maybe there’s value in trying to follow the rules for a long time, because maybe that’s how you get practice, and maybe that’s how you mount up enough frustration energy to kick through the wall and find your own way through. But maybe it can also end up a sunk-cost fallacy. Maybe you don’t need all that time to try to do it how everyone else tells you to do it. And maybe some authors have a hard time breaking out of that mindset — that if they just get in line and follow the rules, it’ll all work out.

But fiction isn’t like that.

Publishing is, somewhat. By which I mean, you do need to generally follow some rules there — agents, querying, etc. Self-publishing is a bit more lawless, but you still gotta embrace the business side of things. Rather, it’s creatively where rules need to be subject to obliteration — order built from your own personal chaos. Order you made for yourself and your work — architecture you invented, not stole from someone else.

So, I’d advise authors — especially those in the midst of NaNoWriMo, and those writing fan-fic — to inject a little “lol ok boomer” into the work. To find a way to make your own demands in the work, of the narrative. To not ask for permission to write the book you want to write — and to write a different book than what the generations before already did write. Somebody will always be there to tell you why the story you want to tell isn’t right, or why you shouldn’t do that. But you know why you should. The story is in there. Your intestinal flora sing with the instincts necessary to do the work and tell the tale. Your heart knows what it wants; it knows the story it needs to tell. Don’t ask for permission to do that. Just write it. You are the only one for whom permission must be asked, and from whom it must be taken.

* just so we’re clear, I want to get ahead of anybody who’s going to still be like BUT THIS IS AGEISM #NOTALLBOOMERS. I hear you. I do. You, or a Boomer You Know, may be great. But do recognize that younger generations casting distrust toward older generations is a classic tune with a beat we can all dance to, and to quote Wikipedia, “Boomers are often associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, the civil rights movement, and the “second-wave” feminist cause of the 1970s. Conversely, many trended in moderate to conservative directions opposite to the counterculture, especially those making professional careers in the military (officer and enlisted), law enforcement, business, blue collar trades, and Republican Party politics. People often take it for granted that each succeeding generation will be “better off” than the one before it. When Generation X came along just after the boomers, they would be the first generation to enjoy a lesser quality of life than the generation preceding it.” So, just nod and smile and go with it. It’s not about you personally, okay? But if you’re that upset about it — it just might be.

** I also recognize that even by using it, my not-yet-old-but-certainly-not-young ass has only further reduced the potency of “ok boomer”

* * *

WANDERERS: A Novel, out now.

A decadent rock star. A deeply religious radio host. A disgraced scientist. And a teenage girl who may be the world’s last hope. An astonishing tapestry of humanity that Harlan Coben calls “a suspenseful, twisty, satisfying, surprising, thought-provoking epic.”

A sleepwalking phenomenon awakens terror and violence in America. The real danger may not be the epidemic, but the fear of it. With society collapsing—and an ultraviolent militia threatening to exterminate them—the fate of the sleepwalkers and the shepherds who guide them depends on unraveling the mystery behind the epidemic. The terrifying secret will either tear the nation apart—or bring the survivors together to remake a shattered world.

Audio: Audible | Libro.FM

November 12, 2019 / 3 Comments

Myke Cole: What I Tried To Do With The Killing Light

Myke Cole does not fucketh around. He’s written military fantasy, historical fantasy, and further, is now writing just straight up historical non-fiction in an accessible, engaging way. And soon he adds sci-fi to that list. Oh also, he’s on television? Jesus Christ, Myke, leave a little for the rest of us. ANYWAY. Today, though, he wants to talk about the last of his Sacred Throne trilogy — The Killing Light. *throws Myke the blog keys*

* * *

With The Killing Light, The Sacred Throne trilogy is complete. It’s been a hell of a ride for me (and hopefully for you too) featuring giant devils, a rebellion against an oppressive religious order, and a brave young woman who has been hard done by and climbs into a suit of power armor to balance the ledger, if only by a little. The trilogy featured narrow escapes, treachery from the closest quarters, and battle after bloody battle.

So, thinking back on all that, have you figured out what it’s about yet?

It is, of course, about love.

But let me be a little more specific. You all watched the absolutely brilliant first two seasons of the BBC comedy series Fleabag, right? If you didn’t, fix your shit. I won’t spoil anything, but I will say this – the triumph of that series is that it takes love head-on. It addresses the reality of what it is to love. It reminds us that love is a choice and a process and that most of all, love is about losing. “The pain now is part of the pleasure then, that’s the deal,” says Anthony Hopkins playing C.S. Lewis in The Shadowlands, and he’s absolutely right.

Dan Savage wisely tells us that every relationship we’re in will end, until the one we’re in when we die. It’s an idea that’s profound in its simplicity and it reminds me of a central axiom of my own:

That love is risk. If we want to win, we have to play.

And that’s the heart of The Killing Light.

Perhaps the most quoted line from the The Armored Saint (the first book in The Sacred Throne trilogy) is Clodio’s advice to Heloise – …love is worth it, the old man reminds her, It is worth any hardship, it is worth illness. It is worth injury. It is worth isolation. It is even worth death. For life without love is only a shadow of life.

An easy road is what we aim for in real life, but not in fiction. Stories without conflict are boring. In order to make the series sing, Heloise had to hurt, and badly. In order to make this critical point I have had to put her through the crucible that demonstrates it. Love is indeed a choice and choosing to love when doing so is hard, when it is costly, is where the rubber truly meets the road. Witnessing this was hard for me as the writer, but I didn’t want to shrink from her experience – most importantly this: That Heloise does not discard her loss, but cradles it, holds it as close as a lover and uses it to propel herself forward. Loss is the spinning wheel, the Kipti say. It crusheth us beneath, and raiseth us up again.

That is what all the battles and hard fights in what is admittedly a pretty blood-soaked trilogy are – engines of loss. Object lessons of how to navigate them. It’s why I love the grimdark subgenre so dearly. I never tire of examples of how humans can endure and emerge and find a way to triumph.

It is like this for all of us. We reel from the people we lose. The family members who pass away, the lovers who throw up their hands and walk, the friends who move and marry and lose touch. Sometimes we make mistakes that we recognize and own and remedy, but that we can’t erase or fully recover from. We lose people. Time helps. So does taking counsel from friends who help us to rally, but what nobody tells you is that it gets worse.

Because like the protagonist in Fleabag you get better at loving over time. With each new love we improve.

And that means that you will love harder the next time and the loss of that one will hurt all the more.

After one particularly rough ending, I sobbed on the phone to my friend on the other side of the country, belting out the cris de coeur that is so common to breakups that Hallmark may as well print it on cards, “Oh god, I feel like such a fool.”

“Yeah, well,” my friend said, “I guess if you’re going to be a fool, love’s a pretty good thing to be a fool for.”

We lose the people we love.

And it hurts. Sometimes it hurts so badly we tell ourselves it can’t possibly be worth it.

But it is.

It’s the only thing truly worth anything. It is worth it for Heloise, who is better than most, who has fought harder than most, who has lost more than most. It is worth it for me.

It’s worth it for you, too.

* * *

Myke Cole: Website | Twitter

The Killing Light: Print | eBook

November 12, 2019 / 12 Comments

Hey, You Did It!

Wanderers made the semifinal round of the Goodreads Choice Award as a write-in candidate, thanks to you! I mean, I tried to design a SINISTER ALGORITHM to BOT THE VOTE, but all it did was fall in love with a Smart Toaster in Cleveland and now they’re having digital babies, so that didn’t really work out so well for me. But thankfully, all y’all were there in a pinch, and helped get it to the next round. Can we get it into the Final Round? Well, assuming no help from my SINISTER ALGORITHM, I once more rely upon you, intrepid readers. There are also tons of wonderful books to vote for, and to read. It’s a veritable buffet of reading opportunities.

If you were so inclined to also leave a review of the book at Goodreads or Amazon, I’d be awfully chuffed. Is that a word? Chuffed? Is it British? Does it mean something good? It sounds vaguely like “chafed,” which is definitely not what I mean. Let’s assume it means BURNISHED TO A HAPPY SHINE and go with that. Chuffed.

In other Wanderers news:

It made Kirkus’ top sci-fi/fantasy of the year, alongside such estimable company as Cadwell Turnbull, Paul Krueger, Seanan McGuire.

And it also landed on Engadget’s list of books to give as gifts, which is pretty rad. Also present: the most excellent Mary Robinette Kowal, Martha Wells, Randall Munroe.

I continue to be in such admirable company I am faintly certain I have died and have gone to my reward. The only evidence against this is that I probably don’t deserve such reward? Whatever, I’m here, suckers. *barricades self in this place*

ANYWAY OKAY THANK YOU BYE

November 5, 2019 / 18 Comments

Wanderers And The Goodreads Choice Awards

Why, hello there — ’tis the time for the Annual Goodreads Choice Awards, and I feel like I should make special note that there are many excellent books on it. I also note, with a sad-face emoji, that Wanderers is not on that list, but I’ll also remind you that it could be, as a write-in in the science-fiction category. You just click that link and go down to the bottom and, zip zop zoom, write it in. (Also okay if you don’t, as there are many wonderful books on the list to choose from.) Why is Wanderers not there? I confess, I don’t know — in what is obviously my hubris, I kinda figured it would be? It did well in both sales and critical reception, and I humblebrag again that it made Publisher’s Weekly best SFFH of the year — but what do I know? Maybe it shouldn’t be. But if you think it should, I’d love for you to write it in.

(I’m sure there’s some question as to what category it belongs in — but I’d say it’s probably too long to be a proper thriller, and though I wrote it as a horror novel, its watermarks are ostensibly sci-fi.)

(Also! If you’re looking for a write in in the fantasy category, too, might I suggest Paul Krueger’s truly excellent Steel Crow Saga?)

Anyway, that’s it from me, thank you for your time and consideration and I definitely haven’t stolen a beloved pet or family heirloom from you to use as leverage in this negotiation, ha ha, who would ever do that, not me, definitely not me, says the guy who is holding your wonderful kitten, Mr. Boots, and your grandmother’s mysterious brooch. *sinister laugh*

Ahem.

November 1, 2019 / 22 Comments

For National Novel Writing Month, Two Vital Reminders

I’ve certainly said a lot over the last many moons about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and I’m not really sure I have a whole lot to add, but I do want to remind:

Writing a novel is hard, because it’s supposed to be hard.

And writing a novel is hard, because it has to be done your way.

And your way only.

Let’s unpack that a little bit.

If writing a novel were easy, everyone would do it. Everyone says they’re gonna do it, after all — you tell someone you write books and they tell you they have a book in them (presumably nestled somewhere near the pancreas, or tucked up in an orifice as part of an embarrassing sex maneuver), or they say they have an idea and they’ll give it to you and all you have to do is write it because ha ha that’s obviously the easy part, you shitty ink-fingered monkey. But it’s not the easy part. It’s the hard part. The writing of the thing is the hard part. Ideas are easy-fucking-breezy. Maybe they don’t always arrive so easy, but an idea is a seed, a capsule, a stray thought. An idea is a dog you don’t own — you walk up to the pupper, give it some ear-scritches and some butt-scratches, and then that dog is on its way and you owe it no responsibility. But a novel is a dog you own. Sure, that means getting all the joy of the snoogles and snuggles and the playtime, but it also means getting up at 3AM because the dog needs to go out, and it means cleaning up after the dog yaks up a dubious slurry on the kitchen floor, and it means walking the dog even when it’s raining. Sometimes, you get dog cuddles. Sometimes, you get dog farts. Because it’s your dog. It’s a commitment.

A novel is hard because it needs to be hard, and the novel is hard because it’s yours.

It needs to be hard because it’s not just an idea. It’s the execution of an idea. It’s not just imagining a house — it’s building it. Foundation to roof, basement to attic, brick by bloody brick. It’s you mentally orchestrating entire worlds, people, concepts, conversations, and then doing it all in a way where it clicks together and makes sense and forms not just a hot Ambrosia Salad mess of goop and fuckshittery, but rather: structure and form, story and plot, thought and feeling and meaning. It’s not a grade-school crush. It’s marriage. You gotta put a ring on it.

It’s yours because there’s no other reason to write a book if it isn’t going to be yours. It’s not the money, because the money is… well, it’s often moist, open ass. (I recognize that I do pretty well at it, and the money for me is pretty good, but let’s be clear, I’m a privileged outlier who has also been working as a novelist for a number of years now and who had a long, long freelance career before that.) It’s not the fame, because ha ha ha what. It’s not the immediate gratification, because writing a novel and editing it and shopping it around to agent and editor and editing it again and copy-editing it takes approximately *checks notes* 47 years, and of course the first novel you write probably isn’t even The Novel anyway, you’re gonna write two, or maybe five, or fifty, before you actually figure out what you’re doing. And, by “figure out what you’re doing,” I mean, “figure out you don’t know what you’re doing but realize that this is a feature and not a bug.”

If you’re gonna write a book it’s because you love books and because you want to put some part of yourself out there. An idea, an argument, a fear, a dream, a parade of anxieties. If you’re gonna take the time and the intellectual-slash-emotional effort to carve that narrative bedrock, you do it because it’s who you are, and it’s what you want to do. The novel is yours because if it’s not yours, what’s the point? If it’s someone else’s, who cares? Let them write it. It’s yours. It’s yours, and beyond that, it’s also you. The novel is you. A part of who you are, anyway. A slice of it, like a bisected chunk of heart — a Heart Piece from Legend of Zelda. What the book is — and furthermore, how you get there, in the process, is yours and yours alone and nobody else can tell you precisely how to get there. They can give you advice. They can offer notions. But that map is theirs. The design is for them. You have to do your own thing. You can’t raise their kids, can’t have their dog, can’t build their house. You gotta do your own thing. And maybe that means writing X number of words per day, or per week, maybe it means writing relentlessly for one day, or a little bit every day, or morning, or night, or a long book, or a short book, or an outline, or just a wild feral dash through Word Country. Who the fuck knows? Nobody the fuck knows. You. Just you. That’s it.

The book is the book.

It takes the time that it takes.

Every writer of every book is different.

Every book is different.

Even you, the author of the last book, will be a different author when you write the next book.

So, whether you’re doing NaNoWriMo or you’re just thinking about writing a book, remember these things. It’s going to be hard because it needs to be hard. And it needs to be hard because it’s yours.

Happy writing. Good luck with the book, whoever you may be.

Oh and remember: