Apple-Obsessed Author Fella
Yammerings and Babblings
Why yes, I am doing a Reddit AMA today.
And why yes, you can go over there and ask me whatever your surly little heart desires.
Or not. You can also just go and gawk and gape.
Or you can not click the link and fail to behold whatever WISDOM* and GENIUS** I impart.
* not very wise
** definitely not a genius among humans, maybe among dogs
No, that’s not a macro photo.
But it’s a fox, and to hell with you if you cannot appreciate a fox.
I have a fox that lives behind my writerly BattleShed, and the fox comes out almost daily, now. She (?) crosses the lawn, goes up the driveway, and disappears into the woods for anywhere from ten minutes to an hour or more. Then she trots back, and returns to the den. One suspects there might be kits now or soon? I hope so, because I kinda relish the idea of having a bunch of TINY FLOOFY FOX BABIES playing just behind the shed, but hey, who knows.
Here’s a couple more shots:
Huzzah, fox.
Lessee. What else?
Here’s an updated 2017 schedule:
March 31st – April 2nd, Wondercon in Anaheim, CA [full schedule here!]
April 13th – 16h, Star Wars Celebration, Orlando, FL
April 22nd-23rd, Los Angeles Festival of Books, USC campus [schedule here]
April 27th – 30th, StokerCon, Long Beach, CA
May 5th – 6th, Northern Colorado Writers Conference, Fort Collins, CO
June 3rd – 4th, Bay Area Book Fest, Berkeley, CA
July 14th, Philadelphia Free Library event with Kevin Hearne and Fran Wilde
Aug 18th – 20th, Writers Digest Conference, NYC
Oct 2nd – 8th, Pelee Island Writer’s Retreat, Pelee Island, Canada
So, added to the list is WDC, and Pelee Island, plus my Wondercon schedule and LA Times Book Fest schedule are both now in play. (Note that the LA book fest schedule may have additional signings added to it. Watch this space.) I should have SW Celebration and StokerCon schedules soon, I expect. Also hopefully when I go to Canada they’ll let me back in the US ha ha *sob*
Hope to see you somewhere, at some point.
Our poor pooch, Loa, had to go into the emergency vet this weekend. She’d had a bladder infection for a while that wasn’t clearing up (or, at least, continued to be re-enflamed), but she’d been acting fine the whole time — running, eating, playing, sleeping. Friday night, that changed. She was acting goofy, straining to pee again and again, throwing up, not eating. We took her to the vet and turns out, a crystal had fully blocked her urethra and her bladder was filling up. Good we caught it early, because that sort of thing left untreated for a couple-few days can lead to permanent kidney damage or even death. Good news is, it’s taken care of. Bad news is, she had to have emergency surgery, whiiiiiiich isn’t as cheap as you’d like it to be. (Ahem, $2k.) Worth it, of course, given that we have our PRECIOUS GOOBER back and in good health, but still: $$$.
As such, I’m tossing it out there that hey, now is a good time to buy my books if you were thinking of diving in but have not yet done so. I don’t do tip jars or anything — so far, my career sustains me in the purest way, which is you buy the books and I don’t die (and by proxy, my pets and child also remain fed and without, yanno, bladder crystals). We can continue that relationship, I hope — if you dig the bloggery here, check out my books, please and thank you.
Further, I’ve taken my GONZO BOOK BUNDLE and upgraded it to the MEGA ULTRA BOOK BUNDLE by adding in two novels: Blue Blazes and The Hellsblood Bride. Still only $20.
Please to enjoy.
The answer to last week’s Macro Mysteries are, in order:
1: bubbles of coffee brewing in a Chemex
2: a droplet of water on a kale leaf
3: bell pepper seeds in a red bell pepper
TA-DA.
I have begun accumulating a dozen or so additional mystery macros, and one day soon I’m going to run a contest, because it’s fun. So, keep your grapes peeled for that.
Otherwise, HAVE A VERY FINE MONDAY, YOU MONSTERS.
*becomes five foxes who conspire to steal your breakfast*
If you want to be a real writer, like, a really real writer, a writer who does it right, a writer who is officially official and who will earn the respect of the rest of the tribe —
You have to write longhand. Forget your phone. Put your phone away. Your phone is just beaming nonsense into your head — telecommunications chemtrails. Real writers write longhand, on notes stuffed into secret underwear pockets. If you don’t have secret underwear pockets, then you are not a Real Writer. That’s just fact. That’s just science. You write your first draft on notes stuffed into underwear pockets, then you write your second draft carved into a fundamental surface: driveway asphalt, a granite countertop, the stump of an ancient and magical tree. (Hemingway once famously carved THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA into the back of an impudent busboy.) When that’s done, eat some bees. Because writers, Real Writers, definitely eat bees. Writers also all have English degrees, or they all die. It’s like water to fish. We need it to swim.
Also, kill a goat. TRUE writers kill goats. But you gotta kill the goat in a real specific way. You have to get a goat, then yell into the goat’s ear the full text of your first rejection letter. You scream it into the goat’s ear at top volume, then as the goat is reeling from the disappointment borne of such rejection, you seize the moment and snap its neck. (Though Edith Wharton famously dispatched her goats with a blunderbuss full of dynamite.)
Of course, none of this is true.
Because all writing advice is bullshit (though bullshit fertilizes). I’m writing this thing because once in a while we are treated to missives from well-meaning expert writers who have come to believe that The Way They Write is the Only Way To Write, because their process has been tainted by the strong smell of Survivorship Bias. “I survived this way, and so you must, too.”
There exists no one way to write any one thing, and as long as your writing has a starting point and an ending point, I think whatever shenanigans go on in the middle serve you fine as a process as long as it gets you a finished book heavy with at least some small sense of satisfaction. If you’re not finishing your books, you need to re-examine your process. If you’re not at all satisfied with your work, then again: re-examine that process.
And that’s it.
Everything else is just picking out drapes.
If you need a handy flowchart reminder, here’s my ARE YOU A REAL WRITER chart, written by me and designed by Rebekah Turner. Feel free to share!
This week’s challenge:
Gods and goddesses.
Genre doesn’t matter, but I want you to write a story dealing with the divine. A deity! A demi-god! Whatever. Made-up or real, doesn’t matter. From the POV of the deity or from someone having to deal with said deity. Or maybe you wanna talk about a whole damn pantheon.
Entirely up to you.
Length: ~2000 words
Due Date: 3/24/17, that Friday, noon EST.
Write at your online space.
Link back here.
Go forth and confront the divine.
THINGS AND STUFF AND THINGS:
Only a handful of hours left in the expertly-crafted cage-match of Miriam Black versus Suri over at Unbound Worlds. Go vote! And vote for Miriam or she’ll send birds to peck out your kidneys! Props to Michael Sullivan, who wrote Miriam’s final moments with glorious bad-assery.
You wanna read a killer Thunderbird review from Adventures in Poor Taste? Excerpt:
As always, Miriam Black is a dark delight to read; a bizarrely perfect blend of nobility and nihilism, struggling with her own demons as hard as she fights those who would do harm to an innocent person or someone she’s pretending she doesn’t care about.
And similarly, a kick-ass review of Empire’s End from Starburst Magazine, excerpted:
The result is a high octane and swiftly paced affair. It isn’t tight; this is an explosion of events as the key characters find themselves fated to visit Jakku, and the challenges that await them there. Though every character gets their arc, and we get some nice scum and villainy action with the addition of another Hutt to the mix, this is really a battle between two complex and interesting women, one Rebel, one Imperial, both desperate to enforce their will on an ever changing galaxy. Strong stuff. Highly skilled geek and very experienced writer Chuck Wendig has weathered heavy criticism to produce the Aftermath Trilogy. The old Star Wars tie-in books had their own cult following and some heavy investment from the fans. Add to this Wendig’s inclusive and sensible approach to world building, and the series got much more than its fair share of flack.
See? I am a highly skilled geek. I bought five dots in the Geek Skill.
Bonus: I list five rad books at Tor.com with birds in their titles. Go check out my list, feel free to use the comments there (or here) to add your own favorite bird-titled books.
Finally, the image at the top of the post is from a fan — fella named Zach Miller decided to go ahead and conjure up his own idea of what the Moth freighter looks like in the Aftermath trilogy with LEGO bricks. He cannibalized a Falcon build to do so and the result is freaking awesome:
Ooh ooh one more thing —
I’m noodling on starting a newsletter type of thing. TinyLetter or what-not. Ping me below in the comments if you think such a thing would be a) interesting to you or b) why the fuck bother because hey look here at this blog or c) some other random thought or idea that will force its way out of your brainpan and into the comments
OKAY BYE
We are in the path of a bulldozer of a storm, apparently — it’s going to snow Yetis, as I’m told — and so I figure that leaves today as a very good day for you to come over here and drop into the comments. Your purpose? To recommend a book you’ve read recently that you liked. Tell us the name, who wrote it, and why you dug it.
Feel free to throw in comics you’re digging, too, because comics are rad.
DO THIS NOW FOR GOOD BOOK KARMA.
For the rest of you in the path of the snowstorm, good luck, may your power remain forever on, and don’t eat each other like the guys on that soccer team who crashed in the mountains. Also, beware your microwave, because I hear that motherfucker can spy on you, now. Goddamn microwave, WE ARE WATCHING YOU WATCH US.
*microwaves a bunch of forks to punish it*
