Category: The Ramble (page 160 of 462)

His mind can save the world, if she can save him from the human race… 

The Shield is Earth’s only defence. Rendering the planet invisible from space, it keeps humanity safe from alien invasion. The Actives maintain the shield – no one is sure how – but without them, the Shield cannot function.

When an Active called Tobe finds himself caught in a probability loop, the Shield is compromised. Soon, Tobe’s malady spreads among the Active. Earth becomes vulnerable.

Tobe’s assistant, Metoo, is only interested in his wellbeing. Earth security’s paramount concern is the preservation of the Shield. As Metoo strives to prevent Tobe’s masters from undermining his fragile equilibrium, the global danger escalates.

The Shield must be maintained at all costs…

* * *

Just how obsessive I can become.

I’ve never been a writer who writes every day. I know that’s what writers are supposed to do… I’ve seen the rules. I guess what I’m saying is, if you’re going to write, you might want to make your own rules.

I’ve always written in fits and starts, but when I get started I can’t stop. That might have been one of the things that prevented me from finishing longer pieces of fiction before I wrote ‘Savant’. I used to force myself to stop.

The writing starts slow, but, boy, when I hit my stride there’s no stopping me. Literally, nothing stops me writing. If I wake up clear-headed, I might even write all day without once thinking about getting out of my PJs. And when I say ‘all day’, I do mean sixteen or eighteen hours a day, sometimes for weeks. Towards the end of a book, I can write fifteen thousand words in a session. The hoovering doesn’t get done, and I forget to eat, but it turns out, that’s OK, because the faster I write, the faster it’s all over. I also discovered that I live with people who can fend for themselves, perfectly well.

What comes before informs what comes afterwards.

Not only do I not need a plot before I begin a novel, I don’t want one. When I began ‘Savant’, all I had in mind was a theme. I wanted to write about unconditional love. If I’d plotted that book, it would’ve been very different from the one I ended up with. Of course, having so little at the outset meant I had to be patient with the process. I spent a lot of time going back, changing things around, and rewriting the first third of the novel. But, during that period, the characters grew, the world emerged, and the theme took a new turn. The book evolved during the writing process, and that, for me, at least, feels like a good thing.

Not everybody will understand what you’re doing, but that’s OK.

I learned this over a long period of time, longer, probably, than it needed to be. The first few people who saw ‘Savant’, including a writer, a reader, a publisher and my first agent didn’t get it. I assumed that meant it wasn’t good. When the book fell, almost by accident, into Jonathan Oliver’s hands, he was the first person in six years to get excited about it.

That I had a novel in a folder on my desktop for six years was my own fault. I should have shown it to more people sooner. Have a little confidence. Trust what you’re doing. Knock on doors, and keep knocking.

Keyboard skills are important.

I learned to touch type when I was eight or nine (don’t ask). I can type a hundred words a minute, accurately, when I’m in full flow. I hadn’t realised what an asset that could be until I was churning out scads of words every day of the last week or two of writing this novel. It’s pretty tough to write fifteen thousand words a day. I couldn’t have done it if I wasn’t able to type. I guess It’s like driving a car; if you want to go faster or master tricky manoeuvres, it’s a good idea to be well practiced in handling those pedals and that gearstick.

There’s irony in the fact that we all use keyboards, all the time, but few of us take typing classes.

You can’t write for an audience.

Or, at least, you can, and I do, regularly. I’ve written tie-in fiction, but there’s a certain discipline in that: knowing the IP, plotting, re-plotting… It’s about giving the client what he wants.

Writing independent fiction isn’t like that at all. If I’d had an audience in mind while writing this book, I think I would’ve been missing the point. I wrote the book I wanted to write. I told the story that I wanted to tell. I did what mattered to me. I gave no thought to the audience… Any audience. I didn’t think about impressing an agent or a publisher, and I didn’t think about the reader.

In the movie, ‘Field of Dreams’, Kevin Costner’s character, Ray, hears a mysterious voice. It tells him, “If you build it he will come.” This is regularly misquoted as “If you build it they will come.” And, it’s misquoted for a reason.

No writer should be compromised, and neither should any artist. Feedback comes in so thick and fast in the internet age that it’s tough for a writer, for any artist, to ignore that stuff. A first time novelist doesn’t need to have that on his or her radar. No one is breathing down anyone’s neck. I know established writers and artists who are forever being told by their audiences what should come next.

The point of the writer must always be the reader. I get that. I say it all the time. Here’s the thing, though: No writer has more freedom than the first-time novelist. Nobody is trying to mould that story; nobody has a vested interest in it, yet. That isn’t true of second and subsequent novels.

I was lucky to learn this while writing ‘Savant’, because I was already in the industry. I tried to take advantage, to write what I wanted to write, and not what others might want me to write, or what they might expect from an SF novel. I urge all first time writers to enjoy that freedom.

Nik Abnett: Website | Twitter

Savant: Amazon | B&N | Kobo

John Persons is a private investigator with a distasteful job from an unlikely client. He’s been hired by a ten-year-old to kill the kid’s stepdad, McKinsey. The man in question is abusive, abrasive, and abominable.

He’s also a monster, which makes Persons the perfect thing to hunt him. Over the course of his ancient, arcane existence, he’s hunted gods and demons, and broken them in his teeth.

As Persons investigates the horrible McKinsey, he realizes that he carries something far darker. He’s infected with an alien presence, and he’s spreading that monstrosity far and wide. Luckily Persons is no stranger to the occult, being an ancient and magical intelligence himself. The question is whether the private dick can take down the abusive stepdad without releasing the holds on his own horrifying potential.

Words are hard (but not impossible)

When I first started out, I wrote about 200 to 300 words of fiction every other day or so. It was a good day when I hit 500 words. Which is a paltry sum compared to the output of true professionals. According to what I’ve heard, 2000 words is basically the industry average.

And that knowledge is intimidating. Like, seriously so. I spent more time agonizing about my output than anything else, I think. Not craft, not quality of prose, not narrative structuring. Those are skills you can learn, can workshop, can develop. But the idea of coming up with so many words every single day was daunting.

Coming from a journalism background, I’m used to producing content on a tight schedule. In other words, there’s really not much time to weave through drafts so I edit as I write. Which is a terrible idea in fiction, as anyone can tell you. But Hammers on Bone managed to propel me to a 1000 words-a-day average. (I’m slogging towards 2000 words a day. It’s long, sad climb.)

The weird thing about that was this: all that advice about making space for these words? It’s true. I wrote most of Hammers of Bone across the course of January, between navigating the spectacle of Las Vegas. I was bored. I wanted it done. (And to be honest, I think I wanted to prove to C.C Finlay that I knew how to let a story breathe.)

So I gave myself two weeks to hit 15,000 words. I sectioned off my day to include fiction. I made it a point to sit down and write. After all, if Ken Liu can carve a handful of minutes each day from a lawyer-y schedule and Chuck Wendig can write 10,000 words in a day, I could do something, right? [I almost never write 10k a day! — cw]

And it worked.

I know it sounds obvious on paper. Self-discipline? Of course, that’s how you do it. But when you’re faced with a blank document, with the idea of writing for weeks, with the thought of committing yourself to thousands of words that may never see publication? Common sense gets squeezed out of the window and anxieties set in. What I learned writing Hammers on Bone, though, is this: you can totally be the boss of those fears.

You need to give a story room to breathe (but not too much)

A story is a puppy: it starts out small and cuddly, full of potential, practically quivering with a rambunctious desire to please. You and your puppy – you can be anything, anyone. You can go anywhere, have a variety of adventures. You will be best friends.

Of course, puppies grow up, shedding their wobbly-legged cuteness in favor of whatever they were meant to be. And like dog owners, writers are going to need to adapt to these circumstances. A Pomeranian is going to be perfectly happy in a one-room studio, but a German Shepherd will quickly tire of the limited space, simultaneously withering in its confinement and laying havoc on the room.

Er.

Complicated metaphor aside, the point that I’m trying to make here is that stories always start out the same way: with the sense that anything can happen. Then, it gets going and what’s interesting is that the story doesn’t always accommodate us. Sure, we might say that this was intended to be a piece of flash fiction. Sure, we expected a 10,000-word novelette. And sometimes, that’s true. (For plotters, in fact, that might always be true.)

But sometimes, it’s not.

Hammers on Bone was a 3,000 word story that I wrote up in two weeks and sent to F&SF, hoping that it might resonate with editor C.C. Finlay. To an extent, it did. He rejected it, of course. But not without first telling me that this was a story that had merit, but also a story that needed room to breathe.

So I gave it room to breathe. Slightly begrudgingly, of course. I was the dog owner who’d expected a lap-puppy, but ended up with three-times-a-day walkies. But I let Hammers on Bone breathe. I mapped out spaces for tension. I gave Persons and McKinsey room to be alpha dogs at each other. I sketched in the world that existed in my head.

And then I stopped. Because I’d said everything I wanted to say about the story. Things had happened, events had transpired. It was time to go. Sure, I could have given the tale another POV character, maybe write in more lore, but this was a story with a limited time frame. It had to go from point A to point B very quickly, and any detours would cause some grumpiness.

Was I right about that? Was Charlie right about his critique? Yes, I guess. It found a home with a wonderful publisher, in the end. Stories really need space. Sometimes, 14,000 words worth of space.

Noir is very casually sexist

Classic film noir, along with the hardboiled fiction that inspired it, has always been exceedingly masculine in tone. The hero is inevitably an alpha male. He is ruthless, indomitable, alluring, immune to feminine wiles. He is the mercenary, the ronin, the man that will never be tied down, a creature of endless adventure, destined to just the right amount of hardship. In other words, he is a fantasy.

The problem with fantasies, though, is that they are intrinsically selfish. By and large, noir was disinterested in women, preferring to see them as either adversarial elements or objects of licentious desire. I like to imagine that this approach to female characters wasn’t always driven by ill intentions, that some of the authors were simply trying to stay true of the genre.

But regardless of how you cut in, the language of noir is very casually sexist. Women are never their names but instead a litany of diminutives: toots, babe, skirt, bird. You ‘shack up’ with a ‘roundheels,’ and ‘chew’ and ‘neck’ and ‘mash’ and ‘fumble’ your way into the boudoir of a saucy little ‘dish’ The sharp ones are always careful to be ‘sheiks,’ avoiding the trap of bar-haunting frills. Don’t be a ‘boob.’ You don’t want a ‘tramp’ to make you a ‘twist’, do you?

What’s also interesting is how easy it absorb all that by intellectual osmosis. While writing Hammers on Bone, I tried my best to keep the women in my book from suffering unnecessarily. After all, they were, by consequence of the plot, already going through horrific things. They didn’t need to be put down, objectified, reduced to a foil or a sex toy. But while the book was going through edits, I discovered something I hadn’t even really thought of. John Persons was still very flippantly chauvinistic. And it genuinely floored me as to how much.

Reading through the novella months later made me realize how much of that is true, and how much we glaze over things like that at first glance. I’ve thought about toning those elements of Persons down but for various reasons, I didn’t. Partly because it fit the plot, partly because it fit what I needed Persons to be, and partly because I wanted to remind myself of how easy it is for anyone to slip.

Shock factor is seductive

Hammers on Bone is a rough book. There is a lot of violence, both on-screen and off-screen. People get hurt in gruesome ways, and one of the climatic scenes in the end is straight out of my childhood nightmares of John Carpenter’s The Thing. (Thanks, mom. Thanks, dad. Having a 9-year old watch that movie was a great idea.)

That said, there are only three occasions where a woman is physically harmed in the novella. None of it is played for titillation. At least, I don’t think so. When I started writing, I made a promise with myself to not have the marginalized suffer gratuitously. If something happens to them, it won’t be in a space where it can be savoured, be reinterpreted into a cause for pleasure. (Thank you, college mates, for showing me that some people will publicly cheer at rape scenes. Ugh.)

Despite all those grandiose plans to do better, the temptation to play up certain scenes did manifest while I was writing Hammers on Bone. And it surprised me as to how easily that happened. Popular media had coded certain expectations into me: masculine character development is prefaced by a tormented woman.

Breaking it down, that trope makes a horrendous kind of sense. The desire to protect something weaker than yourself, to safeguard the vulnerable, to hold onto the people you love – these are the universal impulses that have fueled miracles. What better way to motivate someone than to tell them that everything that they love is at risk? What better way to prompt change than to take away everything that anchors a character to current reality?

Most importantly, it is an easy, reliable solution. In some ways, most of the work had been done already. Wasn’t I proof? For better or for worse, we all know that the pain of a woman kickstarts a revenge plot, or something subtler but no less potent.

So I wrote that.

I had wanted to create a tragic moment, something heart-wrenching. I wanted people to care. I wanted the characters to think about what they’d done, and who they were, and how all this affected their humanity. And then I looked down at what I’d written, retched a bit in my mouth, tore out the paragraphs, put them into a meat grinder, and sat in cold, clammy revulsion. Because I’d done that thing. I’d exploited one of my own characters. I had done it to shock, to appall, to move someone else’s character arc.

From a clinical perspective, it’s fascinating as to how that could even happen. As a queer Asian woman, you’d think I’d know better, especially since I had promised myself I wouldn’t do something like this. And I do.

But at the same time, decades of Hollywood and mainstream literature had apparently left an indelible impression. I had to catch myself. I guess my point here is that no matter where you’re coming from, there’s deprogramming to be done, there are biases and problematic thoughts to deconstruct. We’re all flawed people and no matter our good intentions, we will fuck up. So we better be watching for it, and we better be ready to fix it, and if it gets into the wild, we damn well better be ready to own up to it.

The world is full of monsters

Another no-brainer. At least, in theory. But we forget, sometimes. By and large, popular media defines our understanding of the world, flattens it to two-dimensionality. We buy into tropes, into the idea that our villains bristle with capes and menacing tattoos, that they announce their intentions in a dramatic manner, framed by the clamor of an unsuspecting city or a background of lightning.

We imagine child predators to be men in brown trenchcoats, balding and sweaty, possibly mustached, unmistakably creepy. We expect men with smiles like sharks. And it is always men because the sexual advances of a woman are never undesired, because men never say no to sex with a woman, and everyone knows that queerness is a joke to be played out on loop.

Popular media tells us we know who the bad guys are.

We don’t.

I’m writing a separate post somewhere else that digs into the statistics of domestic abuse, about how often the sexual assault of men and boys go unreported, and the culture that leads to this lack of visibility. As such, I’m not going to go into it too deeply here. But I wanted to touch on something related.

The story behind Hammers on Bone is real. There are two boys out there who were victimized for years, who went to school and met with their relatives, who had birthdays, who acted slightly-out-of-bounds but were largely treated as rambunctious kids, a little damaged from a difficult home situation but otherwise fine. There’s a woman who was afraid to leave, a woman who whispered about how her abusive partner got into her head, how he kept her pinned down with her own fears. There is a monster in London who is living quietly, awaiting proper conviction, gleefully unrepentant.

But you wouldn’t know he was a monster from looking at him. You wouldn’t have known that there were problems in that household. You would only have seen the family, only seen their outings together, only seen their laughter and all those things they wanted you to see. Because people are good at keeping their darker impulses under control. Tigers have their stripes. Humanity has a different kind of camouflage.

Predators need an edge, you see?

***

Cassandra Khaw is the business developer for Singaporean micropublisher Ysbryd Games. When not otherwise writing press releases, she writes fiction of grotesque dimensions. Her short stories can be found in places like Uncanny, Clarkesworld, and Fireside. HAMMERS ON BONE is her first novella with Tor.com

Cassandra Khaw: Website | Twitter | Facebook

Hammers on Bone: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Goodreads

Donald Trump, the oleaginous pre-ejaculate that somehow gained sentience and is now running for president, is a bad dude who says horrible things. These things are not merely “lewd comments,” nor is it “potty-talk.” His comments form an implicit admission and explicit endorsement of sexual assault, which to most folks who have studied Trump for more than fifteen seconds, does not come as a particular surprise. And watching him in the debate stalk Clinton across the stage like the monster from It Follows (and then inexplicably dry-humping a chair, quite unlike the creature from It Follows) only enriches our picture of what a brutish, loutish abuser he is.

Here’s though, where it gets a little weird, at least for me.

Normally, the #NotAllMen crowd comes from the alt-right side of things, like, “Hey, don’t you dare talk about rape culture, because NOT ALL MEN blah blah blah,” and then the progressive side steps up to say, no, not all men, but yes all women, and yes some men. Clearly, certainly, surely some men, and clearly, certainly we need to talk about them.

Given that this entire election has been delivered to us through a portal leading straight to BIZARROLAND, that narrative has shifted somewhat, and it’s honestly a little uncomfortable for me. Now we have the alt-right and GOP side of things saying, “Well, pfft, pssh, this is locker room talk and all men do it,” thus effectively taking on the role of YES ALL MEN, while on the other side, the progressive side, you have a lot of dudes who are saying, NOT IN ANY LOCKER ROOM I’VE EVER BEEN IN, which is to say, they are taking over the position of NOT ALL MEN. Some of the vigorous advocacy of men in this regard has been almost flailingly defensive — things said like, real men aren’t like this, or I’ve never heard this kind of talk, ever.

Hm. Really? Really?

I’d encourage you to read into Kelly Oxford’s hashtag, #NotOkay — here’s an article about it, and note, it’s triggering. (Troublingly, this entire election is triggery.) She asked for women to tweet at her, effectively cataloguing their sexual assaults.

Millions responded.

Millions.

Now, unless we are to assume that these millions of women have been assaulted only by Trump and his cronies, I think it’s woefully fair to expect that these women are telling the truth and have been assaulted by everything from ex-boyfriends to husbands to family members to random men on public transportation. Which is to say, Trump is not a singular creature. He was not created in a vacuum. If there are millions of women assaulted, then there are millions of men doing the assaulting. We need to believe what these women are telling us.

I don’t know that in my life I’ve ever heard commentary like what Trump uttered at quite the level of pure, unmitigated rape culture he’s spouting — his words were, like I said, an admission and an endorsement of that kind of culture. It offered a clear picture of terrible men holding power and expressing that power not on behalf of women but rather, against them. Power serving as a weapon of desire and control.

But just the same, I’ve heard some nasty shit.

I’ve heard men talk about women as if they’re objects. Not people, but just disconnected body parts suitable only for lust. I’ve heard men take away a woman’s identity as a person and turn her into a receptacle for their urges. That’s not to say an admission of desire or an expression of proper human sexuality is bad — but when it comes at the cost of un-personing a woman? When it fails to form the recognition that the woman is a human being with autonomy over herself and her body? Nnnyeah, now we’re starting to get close to Trumptown. I never heard talk like this from close friends, no, but I’ve heard it from some family members, I heard it in high school, and in college, and at jobs. Early on in life I was not good enough to push back against it because that can be tough, and it requires courage that I didn’t then possess. But it’s there now, and I think it’s vital that men summon that courage when they can — and even when they can’t, to understand the danger in themselves and to raise their children (sons in particular) with the understanding of what this is, what it means, and how our sons can grow up to be better men to women and to one another. Because seriously, this shit is real. Toxic masculinity and rape culture are not separate from one another. Those two demons have their tails neatly entwined.

I’ll give you a good example — you ever heard any men give the friend zone talk? You know the drill: oh, I’ve been such a good friend to her, but she won’t date me, won’t sleep with me, oh woe is me, I am relegated to the friend zone. It’s shitty. It’s shitty because it assumes:

a) friendship is just a key to unlock a woman’s panties

and

b) that decency on behalf of the man means the woman owes him something for his efforts

It is on the same spectrum of what Trump said, just at the other end of it. Trump is speaking from a place of power — he’s rich, he has celebrity, he has unlocked that door and can walk through any time he likes, thank you very much. Friend-zoners are speaking from a place of perceived non-power — oh, I have no power, I’m a nice guy, I should be owed what a guy like Trump can take. It’s the same coin, it’s just the other side of it.

Nigel Farage, that blunt and clumsy thumb, says that this is just how men talk. All of Trump’s supporters are saying that, right? Oh, this is just how men talk, it’s just boasting, it’s just locker room talk. When they bring this up, our defense cannot and shouldn’t be:

“No, men do not speak like this.”

Because men do talk like this sometimes.

And some follow it up with actions, too. Or other men become emboldened by this kind of talk, and then choose to act accordingly. It normalizes all of it.

The trick is, that doesn’t make it okay.

It doesn’t absolve the sin. It does not change the problem. It doesn’t stop the fact that these “just words” are the backbone to actual actions, to a culture both personal and institutional that treats women like toys, like pets, like something you own rather than a person with whom you are equal. But they are real. This happens. One’s vigorous defense of NOT ALL MEN is not appropriate here. What’s appropriate is acknowledging the reality of this by listening to the women at the #NotOkay tag, and saying, okay, this is endemic. These are millions of women with millions of stories. Trump was not made in a vacuum. He was not born from some other place, some heinous clown-stuffed hell-realm. He isn’t a monster out there on his own — he’s a monster we know. And he’s damn sure a monster women know, and watching this election is reminding far too many women that they know guys like him. They’ve been stalked. They’ve been dismissed. They’ve been grabbed. And as men, I think it’s on us to not simply dismiss Trump’s comments simply because we want the purity of the political win. We want to believe that OUR SIDE isn’t like that, like no men we know could ever do such a thing, but statistically, we absolutely do know men like that, even if they’re not saying this stuff out loud.

This is real.

No, it’s not all men.

No, it’s not all “locker rooms.”

But it’s some of them. It’s more than we’d like.

Just ask women. And when you ask them? Listen to their answers.

So, here how this is going to work.

You are going to write the first part of a SCARY STORY.

You will write 1000 words.

You will not finish this story.

Consider it the first act of a three-act tale.

You will post this at your blog. You will expect quite fully that next week, someone else will pick up your tale and add another 1000 words to it. This is an experiment in collaborative storytelling, of passing the story from one another to the next and to the next, until we have a completed spoooooooky story.

Due by: THE DREADED FRIDAY THE 14th, noon EST.

Word limit: ~1000 words.

Post at your online space.

(Do not finish the story!)

Give us a link.

Go be scary.

I’m off to THE YORK THAT IS NEW today for the big, bad NYCC (my sked is here), so this is a quick post, but I wanted to give you ten quick story tips to help you hard-charge your way through whatever the hell it is that you’re writing. Dig? Dug? Let’s do it.

1. Story is, as I am wont to remind, the destruction of the status quo. A story begins when the expected course of events deviates — it’s like a bone breaking. Compound fracture, crack. The inciting incident is that break. High school is high school until a new teacher shows up and changes everything. The magical fantasy kingdom is doing its thing until the king is murdered by a murderous murdercorn (aka a once-innocent unicorn that turned super shitty). This isn’t hard to see in stories that exist: the original Star Wars trilogy has the Empire serving as the status quo, and then Luke, Leia and the gang provide the match-tip to the Rebellion powderkeg and boom, status quo shattered. This is true for the inciting incident and also true as the story progresses — any time the story threatens to return to a “new normal” or some kind of status quo, it is your job to once again break that bone just as it heals. Plot is born of this.

2. Plot is also born of agitation. Agitation is best served as conflict between characters — aka, drama. The drama llama is a storyteller’s best friend. Love the drama llama. Ride the drama llama. Make love to the — wait, no. Sorry! *sprays bleach on your brain* Characters with competing agendas, desires, and emotions agitate one another simply by dint of pursuing (or denying) these agendas, desires and emotions. It’s like putting a bunch of spiders and centipedes and beetles in a jar and shaking it up — they fight and crawl and try to escape or eat each other. Story basically starts to write itself once you’ve got these fundamental elements, because the characters will forever push the narrative forward. This isn’t magical, though, and you’ll still need to control the characters. Otherwise they will be literally born and you will wake up surrounded by them. They will have knives. Okay, maybe it is magic. Whatever.

3. Secrets and lies power narrative. But don’t overdo it. We expect characters to keep secrets and to tell lies, but if it goes too far, it strains credibility. (Example of this is Lost, where as the seasons went on, it became totally unbelievable that they refused to share any piece of information with one another for dubious reasons.)

4. Transitions are one of the hardest parts of writing a story. Getting characters from Point A to Point B is mundane, boring stuff. You have two ways to deal with transitions: one, make them interesting, which is to say, make even transitional scenes heavy with consequence. Or two, just fucking skip ’em. If it’s something you can sum up later in a sentence or three, uh, yeah, do that. Don’t waste our time. Leapfrogging the story along is a vital skill — we sometimes expect it’s like a gameboard where we have to literally move the piece from section to section but sometimes you just pick up the piece and move it to somewhere cooler because that’s more interesting. It’s all about value in narrative. Bits of your story that don’t do double-duty, meaning, they fail to serve more than one narrative purpose, nnnnyeaaaah, no, they gotta go. Some folks say to kill your darlings, and that’s sometimes true. But also kill your unitaskers. Transitional scenes are often unitaskers, and are best served left in a bag, in a ditch, covered in ants.

5. Give the story a sense of movement both physically and temporarily. Creating a vibrant setting and moving the characters through it — whether that means NEW YORK TO MUMBAI or it means THE KITCHEN TO THE CREEPY BASEMENT — gives a sense of dynamism and action. Time matters too, though. Don’t cram. Let the story play out. Feel free to insert days, weeks, months into the periods of transition. (I love The Force Awakens, but it and a lot of blockbusters suffer from a lack of temporal movement. Everything in that movie feels like the story takes place over its literal two-hour running time.) These elements of movement are fine left as gaps — readers don’t mind the gap. (Insert London Underground reference.) We fill in the gaps. It makes a story feel fuller, richer, longer. It is narrative umami.

6. A story isn’t just about setting up stakes, but also about reminding us of them throughout. Stakes are what can be won, lost or gambled in terms of the characters and the world. (Note: character stakes are nearly always more interesting than world stakes.) You set them up, but always come back to them. Remind us. Revisit them. And then at appropriate intervals, dial them up. Turn up the volume. Raise the stakes or complicate them. As I have noted before, the shift from A New Hope to Empire Strikes Back shows us stakes not raised but rather, complicated. The stakes aren’t raised because we enter the film with the Rebellion at an advantage — an advantage that can be lost, and we see it starting to winnow when the Empire attacks Hoth. But the real complication comes in when Luke’s relationship to the Empire — through Vader — changes dramatically. He thinks Vader is his foe, an adversary. But really, Vader is (gasp) his accountant uncle, Hank Skywalker. Or something? Been a while since I’ve seen that movie. Point is, the stakes are complicated by Luke learning that his greatest enemy is actually family.

7. Give all the big moments their due. Sometimes we just want to rush from one thing to another in a story — and above, I even encourage that a little by telling you to skip boring transitions. But also know that when big events occur, you need to lead into them slow. I loved the new Ghostbusters, but where it fell down for me was when it tried to ape the bigger plot beats of the original film, and in doing so, kind of hastily moved toward them and then past them almost on the assumption that, “Well, you’ve seen this before, you know there’s an old creepy place and a ghost lady and — look, let’s just get to the cool part.” COOL PARTS are made cooler by slowing our entry to them. Build in tension. Build in antici —

— pation. Study horror films for how this works best — even if you’re not writing a horror story, that same modeling works.

8. TANTRIC STORYTELLING. Nnngh. Yeah. NNNNNN. Okay, sorry. The admittedly-shortsighted view of Tantric Sex is about denial of orgasm, about maintaining the ZEXUAL VIBRASHUNS as long as possible while staving off the, um, the cookie-pop moment. Right? Stories can work this way, too. If you’re about to give a character (and by proxy the audience) what they want, take a look at if there is a way you can deny that moment. Restrict the bloodflow. Abstain from narrative storygasm. Though, sometimes the opposite is true — sometimes it’s about getting to the storygasm, and then making the characters realize that what they really wanted is way more complicated, or that what they actually got has unforeseen consequences. Like a baby. A sweet, squalling story baby. I think this metaphor has gone weird so I’m ejecting. Not ejaculating. EJECTING. God, you’re so gross.

9. Maximize complication. Make choices that lead to interesting consequences. Killing characters is easy and often leads to fewer consequences than if you kept them around and changed their situation — forcing them to remain as an agitating element. Though, killing off characters is fine, too. DREAD LORD CTHULHU KNOWS I’ve done my share of it, and will continue offing motherfuckers with zero mercy. Best reason to kill off a character (besides simplifying a busy cast) is when the death of that character creates powerful, tectonic ripples through the earthen mantle of the story you’re telling. You want to create earthquakes. That’s a good thing.

10. Storytelling is a game of imagining what your audience believes you’ll do next. And at least half the time, you’ve gotta do differently. You fake them out — you set up events to make it look like you’re going to jump left, and then you duck right. But the other half the time is giving them the satisfaction of being right. They think you’re going to kill Very Important Character, and then you make it seem like maybe you’re not going to but ha ha ha no, yeah, you are. VIC is dead, now. The audience was right, high-five to them. They didn’t want to be right, but they were, and they feel both satisfied about the result and tense about the build-up to that moment. Storytelling is a weird act of mitigating expectations — sometimes you lean away from them, sometimes you lean into them. You do both in a balance to make the tale satisfying.

* * *

The journey to become a successful writer is long, fraught with peril, and filled with difficult questions: How do I write dialogue? How do I build suspense? What should I know about query letters? How do I start? What the hell do I do?

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Amazon

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Writer’s Digest

Just around seven years ago, November 2009, I submitted a query to an agent named Stacia Decker for a book called Blackbirds. By December of that year, 2o09, she was my agent. (I’m sure she’s still kicking herself, if only because she has to field my daily emails.)

A year later, Blackbirds was on submission. This book, which had already taken me five years to figure out how to write, had been on submission since the start of 2010. And it just kept sitting there. It would go out, round after round. It would return from the wild with brand new rejections stapled to it, all of them kind, many of them glowing. Which is a strange thing, of course, to receive rejection messages that ostensibly read like acceptances. “WE LOVE THE BOOK IT’S THE BEST GOOD JOB oh hey by the way we can’t sell it.”

It became very frustrating.

Inevitably, like the scouring natural force of erosion, Stacia’s tireless efforts on behalf of the book somehow wore the padlock off the GOLDEN GATES OF PUBLISHING, and the door swung open half-an-inch, and not one to miss an opportunity, I shoved my way into the gap and slithered through, all snakey-like. Blackbirds was published in April of 2012, about two years after it went out into the world. And since then, things have been, well, pretty rad. The fourth Miriam Black book, Thunderbird, comes out in February. I’ve had the good fortune in just a handful of years to have published 18 (!) novels, with another batch of five or so on the way in the coming few years. It’s been a good run, and no, this is not me bowing out — barring any unforeseen circumstances (aneurysm, meteor, robot attack, the dystopia that arises post-Trumpocalypse), I’m just getting started over here. But I’m a fan of looking back as a way to look forward, to say, okay, how did I get here? And what lessons have I learned to carry me forward?

To sidetrack a little bit, a thing you should know about me is that I am something of a control freak. This is not necessarily a healthy way to be, mind you, and it can occasionally be stressful to be constantly reminded how little control I have over things. Especially with a five-year-old. Having a child is like spilling a bucket of tarantulas on the kitchen floor. You can’t control that. That swiftly changes from A THING I CAN CONTROL to A THING THAT JUST FUCKING HAPPENED OH WELL. The spiders are everywhere. They’re just a part of your house now. A kid is like that — the child will enter into your life and the first thing that happens is Ian Malcolm appears behind you and whispers chaos theory chaos theory in your ear. As I am fond of saying, every day with a child is like that scene in Jurassic Park where the velociraptors learn to open doors. Having children is a good way to remind you how woefully outmatched you are in all things.

More importantly, it reminds you how little control you have.

Lots of influence! Little control.

It’s a horrifying reminder, but it’s also a good — and necessary! — one.

To go back to the publishing thing, while Blackbirds was out in the wild collecting rejections the way a deer’s ass collects burrs, that was stressful. Because I did not control it. I didn’t have my hand on any of the levers, wheels or buttons. I wrote the book. The book left my hands and it went into the world. It wasn’t even in my agent’s control. It was, in a way, loose in the wind like a fucking kite — nobody controlled it but the weather. And even once the book was published, I still didn’t control it. I didn’t control people’s response. I didn’t control sales. I didn’t control reprintings or reviews or pretty much anything at all.

Again, that’s very frustrating. We work very hard in life to create for ourselves environments we control. We put this widget here, we put this duck over there, we hook that button up to that dongle and we endeavor to keep control of every aspect. When chaos creeps in like a clambering cockroach, we swat it and return order to disorder and get back to life. Publishing is like this. We want control over the whole process, from nosehole to butthole, snout to tail.

But all that’s a lie. This shit’s just a sandcastle. Sure, it’ll stay standing for a while, but eventually, man — *whistles* — eventually the ocean or the wind or some stompy little kid is gonna wreck your business. That sand castle is not long for the world. Your control is temporary, and all too often, a total illusion.

And that’s really hard, especially for someone like me. But I came to terms with one piece of advice that has helped me significantly in my writing career and that is:

Know the difference between influence and control.

Then, influence what you can influence.

And control what you can control.

The end. Game over. That’s it.

Influence is light, imperfect, improbable. Some aspects of my career I influence — again I go to the kite metaphor, because when you’re flying a kite, you don’t control a fucking thing, and yet, the illusion is that you remain in control, right? You’re the KITEMASTER with the spool and the string and you feel like that gives you an element of control, but it doesn’t. You don’t control the wind. You don’t control the kite once it’s up there. The best you have is influence — and that influence exists only over the kite via the string-and-spool. That’s it. The kite isn’t a drone. It doesn’t do what you want. It does what the wind wants.

The only thing you really control in that situation is you.

And so in writing, that means recognizing the limits of my control as well as the opportunities for influence. Influence means I can, I dunno, be a friendly person to other creative and publishing industry humans. Influence means I can do a book signing and meet the bookstore staff. Influence means I can (gasp) WEAR PANTS at a PROFESSIONAL EVENT —

Ha ha ha I’m just kidding I wouldn’t do that.

*burns pants in the fires of solidarity*

PANTS ARE THE OPIATE OF THE MASSES

PANTS ARE A TOOL OF THE OPPRESSOR

DOWN WITH THE MAN

DOWN WITH PANTS

DOWN WITH THE MANPANTS AND THE PANTSMAN

*deep cleansing breath*

Okay I’m feeling much better now. Sorry. Onward.

So, that’s my influence. I can urge the publishing kite to move a little bit, but I don’t control the winds. But the one thing I do control is: I can build the kite. I can fix a hole in a ripped kite. I can improve on my kite’s design and I can buy better string and —

You get that the kite is my book in this metaphor, right? I control the book. I don’t control much else, but that’s one area that’s mine. (And editors, if ever I or any other writer push back, understand that this is what we’re dealing with — our control is very limited, so we want to exercise it as much as we can.) I can control my time, the words, the work. And beyond that, I control me. I control my response to edits, to critics, to reviews. I control my reactions to the twists and turns of the industry. I control everything to the end of my own personal margins — and that’s pretty much it. Everything else beyond those margins is one big vigorous shrug emoji.

That helped me immensely. You’d think it might make me feel helpless, but it was to the contrary — it helped me bear down and focus on the aspects of the job I do control. In essence, it encourages me to do my part. I control what I control. I influence what I influence. And the rest of it is left to the GNOMES OF FATE.

I’ve recently begun to take this advice to life, too. Because in all things, I control alarmingly little. So much of what comes at us in a day is external. We can’t control it. We might have some influence over events, but not always. We can, at best, control how we react.

We control simple things. Like breathing. I can control my breath. Sounds small, but it feels so huge. It’s also obvious on the face of it, but not always so easy to see — when the shit hits the fan, it’s incredibly clarifying to realize that I control that one vital thing. To realize that I control me, and not much beyond that. (And even then, I don’t always control me as well as I like — though, the potential is always there, and it’s useful to know that in times when I feel out of control, I know that the control is theoretically potentially there.) It’s become something of a mantra — control what you can control — and that’s helped me deal with daily stresses and anxieties as they hit. Control what you can control. Influence what you can influence.

The rest can fuck off and go.

Helpful to you? I have no idea. But I thought I’d share it.

Go forth and be awesome. Do what you can do, because that’s all that you can do.

* * *

INVASIVE:

“Think Thomas Harris’ Will Graham and Clarice Starling rolled into one and pitched on the knife’s edge of a scenario that makes Jurassic Park look like a carnival ride. Another rip-roaring, deeply paranoid thriller about the reasons to fear the future.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Out now where books are sold.

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