Category: The Ramble (page 168 of 475)

Dearest Electors, And Also My Fellow Americans:

I don’t know if you’ve noticed lately, but things have gone slippery here in the ol’ States-That-Are-United. I feel like I’m watching one of those videos where a car hits a patch of ice in slow-motion and then drifts ineluctably down a hill toward an intersection, and we see it’s happening but we can’t do shit about it, just as the driver of that car couldn’t really do shit about it. Except this video is worse than any video I’ve seen, because the car is now sliding toward a school bus, and a church, and a zoo full of adorable animals, also a hospital, and at the end of it all is a nuclear munitions factory sitting on a fault line.

The news from President-Elect Trump’s side of the chasm comes fast and furious every day, and it’s never really good news. It veers somewhere between head-scratchingly odd and gut-churningly apocalyptic. It’s like watching TV in Bizarro-World. If I wrote this stuff in a novel, people would tell me it was too far-fetched for fiction. If I wrote it as satire, it’d be too on-the-nose, too crass, too clumsy. It’s all very confusing. We’re all very confused. We have a phrase amongst me and my fellow bewilderbeasts: this is not normal. But lately, that phrase has almost started to feel a bit toothless to me. We’ve set a benchmark for normal that includes George W. Bush’s run, because at this point I think we’d all gladly agree to another four years of him, instead. But normal is so small a signpost, and so far in our rearview. Abnormal isn’t even visible anymore from where we are. We’re in Fucking Cuckootown, Population All Of Us. We all live here now, it seems. The news is like being covered in fire ants. Each headline seems weirder and worse than the last. TRUMP ANNOUNCES MUMM-RA THE EVER-LIVING AS PICK TO HEAD SECRETARY OF STATE. MUMM-RA SAYS, “I’LL GET THOSE THUNDERCATS. ALSO I PLAN ON DISMANTLING CLIMATE CHANGE LAWS, WORKER PROTECTIONS, CIVIL RIGHTS, AND EACH YEAR INSTEAD OF PARDONING A TURKEY FOR THANKSGIVING WE WILL CATAPULT A BAG OF KITTENS INTO THE SUN. MOSTLY, THOUGH, IT’S THE THUNDERCATS THING. ANCIENT SPIRITS OF EVIL, TRANSFORM THIS DECAYING FORM!”

One of the aspects that is so far beyond normal to me is the fact that conservatives are… somehow on board with all of this. Listen, I get it, Trump ran on a platform of draining the swamp, and Crooked Hillary with her Evil Emails and also her Goldman-Sachs ties, and he was a Man for the People. But that hasn’t worked out. We aren’t even remotely heading in that direction. Trump is surrounding himself with the richest pay-for-play donors. (He’s also got a few generals up there in civilian roles, which is sounds a lot like a junta.) Trump is kissing-friends with Goldman-Sachs. Trump is bringing in people who have done a lot worse than Hillary in the email department. He’s not only failing to protect the American workers, but he’s glad to individually call them out on his Twitter feed like a vengeful god who is also somehow a poop-shellacked diaper-baby. And yet gods, that’s just the beginning of it.

He refuses to take intelligence briefings.

He’s surrounded himself with Nazi-Adjacents.

Kellyanne Conaway said he’ll stay on as a producer for The Apprentice, but then he gets on Twitter and rants about how CNN is “fake news” because that’s totally untrue, despite his own spokesperson saying it. (This is gaslighting, and please read Teen Vogue’s take on that.)

He provoked diplomatic conflict with China and India before he’s even in office.

He defended Duterte, who has idly suggested, oh, he wouldn’t mind slaughtering 3 million drug-users in his country because sure, that’s a thing you can do, and also, Duterte is a fan of Hitler ha ha ha oh shit.

Some of his people have signal boosted completely deluded ding-dong conspiracy theories about Democrat kid-toucher cabals operating out of secret Satanic pizza shops.

Pretty much every appointment he’s making are either people whose ethics place them as haters of the department they’re about to lead, or they’re just woeful incompetents who have no right to head their given department. I’m pretty sure for the EPA, Trump is going to appoint a guy spraying CFC hairspray into the air while dancing on a cairn of burning tires.

Like I said: Fucking Cuckootown.

Except — except! — somehow, we were not content with merely remaining in Fucking Cuckootown, oh no. No, no, no, no. We packed our bags and said, “I bet there’s something even wackier going on down the road,” and we all got in our cars and we headed on down to BATFUCK CITY, POPULATION EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE AND THIS IS FINE. Because now we are starting to see evidence that the state of our democracy is that it’s a finger puppet with a Russian middle finger up its ass. The wind has been whispering it for a while, and now we have intelligence agencies confirming it — not just that they intervened, but that they intervened on behalf of the candidate who won. (A candidate who “won,” by the way, by losing the popular vote and whose margin in battleground states was so thin you could slip it under a door.)

I just want you to take a moment with that.

Swish it around in your mouth.

Savor that for a while.

Surely some of you are fans of cinema. Maybe you like, oh, I dunno, The Hunt for Red October. Or you enjoy an Indiana Jones movie once in a while. Could be instead that you’re a student of history, or at least a fan of The History Channel, back before their version of ‘history’ was about UFO Sasquatches. And if you watched The History Channel, you probably remember, oh, mmm, I dunno, the Russians and the Germans were not positive role models on the world stage. Do we remember the Cold War? No, I know it wasn’t fun, but it was better than just handing over the keys to the American Experiment, wasn’t it?

Let’s enjoy a brief timeline:

Trump asks, back in July, in a press conference, if Russian hackers will find Hillary’s emails. (We remember Hillary’s emails, right? The ones we printed out and braided into a noose to hang her with?)

WikiLeaks hits Hillary, and only Hillary.

Hillary warns us in a debate that Trump is Putin’s “puppet.”

Comey gets one last dig in just before the election. THE EMAILS THE EMAILS OMG wait j/k.

This also times out with PizzaGate, which is created almost literally out of thin air.

Trump is elected.

After he’s elected, we learn that Trump’s team had contact with Russia.

We also learn that Giuliani was in contact with Comey.

And now, 17 intelligence agencies, led by the CIA, confirm that there was election meddling with the explicit goal to elect Trump — and it was Russia, or one-step removed from Russia. And funnily enough (ha ha ha *sob*), Trump on the same day announces that his potential secretary of state is Rex Tillerson, Exxon CEO who is also (ha ha ha *weep*) pals with Putin. For extra-credit, Trump sided with Russia and against the CIA in this report. I want you to crystallize that in your mind: a Republican president-elect just doubted the intelligence from the CIA to prop up Russia. This is a man who has no experience as a politician or a leader who routinely rejects intelligence briefings in order to say, nah, I don’t buy it, thanks.

This is not sensational. This is not fake news.

This is really happening. (Or, worse, has already happened.)

This deserves investigation, for one. I don’t care if it was the Girl Scouts who did it, it still demands a deeper look — especially because this is a foreign power who would benefit from us losing our power on the world stage. Consider the book, The Foundations of Geopolitics, by Alexander Dugin. Dugin, a Russian political scientist who is chummy with Putin and who influences policy at a high level, wrote about a return to Russian power. In regards to the US:

‘Russia should use its special forces within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism. For instance, provoke “Afro-American racists”. Russia should “introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics.’

(For extra-chilling reading, check out what happens to Russian foes. Hint: it involves being discredited with planted child pornography. Whispers of PizzaGate, or worse. Is this what will happen to Trump’s foes?)

(And hey, what did Dugin say after Trump was elected? Oh, here it is: “Washington is ours.”)

That’s not —

Whh.

Fhhh.

Guh.

I mean, shit. Fuck. Shitfuck.

That’s not good, people.

You get the sense that, if we’re not careful, we’re all going to end up as butt-puppets.

Now, let’s ask:

What can we all do?

Well, for those of us who are not electors, we can write to our representatives. Our local representatives are best, as Emily Ellsworth has noted on Twitter. I would argue we should ask they continue to investigate Russia’s presence in our election, and further, demand an audit of the election. We should know what has transpired.

If you’re an elector —

It’s time for a hard discussion.

You have a job and arguably that job is to vote for the person who won the election.

Now, of course, that’s a bit wibbly-wobbly, isn’t it? Because one candidate gained nearly three million votes more than the guy we’re about to put into the Oval Office. But even there, I understand your job as the electoral college is separate from the popular vote. I also understand that maybe, once upon a time, you thought Trump was the Right Guy. He made promises. Drain the swamp. Get rid of crooked crony government. Big talk. None of it looks true, though, does it? He’s betrayed the promises. He’s not even in the chair and he’s failed us in innumerable ways.

And then there’s the Russia thing.

Listen, there’s maybe a part of you that says, hey, I don’t want another Cold War. And maybe these Russian hackers, maybe they exposed some truth on our behalf and we should just shrug and look the other way.

A few problems with that though, my dear elector.

First, if it can happen to them, it can happen to you. Meaning, if External Forces decide in a future election that your party is the problematic one, they’ll hack it the other way. The GOP has traditionally been hard-lined toward Russia — it is not outside the realm of possibility that they will sow discord in the other direction.

Second, considering everything I said earlier, it might be worth realizing that Russia is not a benevolent player. Sure, we don’t want another Cold War. Nobody wants a war of any kind. But if that war is coming to our doorstep, then it behooves us to not… just open the door, right? If a guy with a gun is at our door, we don’t let him in because we don’t want damage done to the door.

Third, if we allow this to stand, then the American Experiment as we know it is over, at least for a while. We will have ceded our power on the global stage. We will be a puppy showing its belly to the wolf standing above us.

(If you need an example of a principled conservative standing up against this on the daily, look no further than the Twitter feed of Evan McMullin.)

Put succinctly, we are in trouble.

Which is where you come in.

Let’s re-frame these political shitnanigans as what they’ve become:

A reality show.

Our PEOTUS is a reality show host.

It has routinely attracted our eyes in a lurid, reality-show way.

Trump used to host The Apprentice, created in part with Mark Burnett, but let’s instead look to another of Burnett’s shows: let’s look at Survivor.

I watch Survivor, and the big thing of the show these days is when all the survivors go to tribal council, and they vote out someone who wasn’t expecting it. The show puts up a hashtag: #blindside. Because that’s what it is. Some survivor who felt supremely comfortable in how they were controlling the game is suddenly sent packing when the rest of the tribe revolts privately against them. This happened, arguably, to Clinton — and some part of the electorate cheered. But now, we’ve gone the other way. The swamp was only drained so we could harvest the swamp monsters that had been slumbering in the bottom muck. So let’s do it again. Let’s blindside. It’s entertaining! It’s fun! And you can do it, electors. It’s on you. You can make the vote. You can change history. You can deliver the greatest blindside that the American Reality Show will have ever seen. Vote Trump off the island. If you can, some of you also need to vote for Clinton (I know, I know, her emails!) to get her to 270 electoral college votes.

This is, I get it, the Hail Maryest of the Hail Marys.

It’s unlikely.

And I don’t know what happens if it happens.

But we’ve already got one.

And maybe more of you are waiting in the wings.

Let’s not give up the American Experiment just yet.

Let’s embrace the democracy you still have as electors.

Let’s blindside the hell out of our Comrade-in-Chief.

“You ask for miracles? I give you, the electoral college.“

Mabily “Mab” Jones’ life has returned to normal. Or as normal as life can be for a changeling, who also happens to be a private detective working her first independent case, and dating a half-fey.

But then a summons to return to the fairy world arrives in the form of a knife on her pillow. And in the process of investigating her case, Mab discovers the fairies are stealing joy-producing chemicals directly from the minds of humans in order to manufacture their magic Elixir, the dwindling source of their powers. Worst of all, Mab’s boyfriend Obadiah vows to abstain from Elixir, believing the benefits are not worth the cost in human suffering—even though he knows fairies can’t long survive without their magic.

Mab soon realizes she has no choice but to answer the summons and return to the Vale. But the deeper she is drawn into the machinations of the realm, the more she becomes ensnared by promises she made in the past. And in trying to do the right thing, Mab will face her most devastating betrayal yet, one that threatens everything and everyone she holds most dear.

SEQUELS DON’T HAVE TO SUCK

It is a truth universally acknowledged that movie sequels are (almost) always dreadful, yet that isn’t necessarily true of second books in a series. Perhaps what dooms most film follow-ups is that they try to stay within the well-worn tracks of the beloved original; when they succeed, it’s often because they go darker. The same is true for book sequels.

If the first book is too gratuitously grim however, it leaves the series nowhere to go, no way to up the emotional ante. Luckily, ELIXIR, the first book in my CHANGELING P.I. series, is notably less dark than what’s fashionable for urban fantasy. While it deals with serious and disturbing subject matter there’s an underlying optimism; it’s a “cozy urban fantasy” as one reviewer put it. Thus, the second book, UNVEILED, gave me a lot of room to go psychologically darker, while still maintaining that sense of hope. So much of a first book is taken up in world-building, introducing characters, and laying a strong foundation for the series that follows. With some of that heavy-lifting already done, I was now free to really focus on the internal development of my characters, forcing them to grow as people. I’d always heard that writing a sequel was hard, so much harder than writing a first book, and I had braced myself for the difficulty of this task. What no one told me is that writing a sequel can also be really fun. Maybe I’m a sadist, but I relished the freedom a second book gave me to really push my characters to the point of breaking them, to find out who they become when they experience more than they think they can bear.

TASKS EXPAND OR CONTRACT TO FIT THE TIME AVAILABLE

Because ELIXIR was my first book, I didn’t write it under a deadline. I could take my sweet time to work on the story, waste hundreds of pages on tangent plot lines that went nowhere, stop and start as inspiration ebbed and flowed, and revise indefinitely. All told, I spent almost seven years on that first book. And then the publishing gods smiled on me and I found myself with a two-book contract which allowed me a little over seven months to write the follow-up, UNVEILED. Given my writing history, this task sounded almost impossibly daunting. What I realized, however, as I successfully completed the manuscript well within the deadline, is that tasks expand or contract to fill the time available. I took seven years to write ELIXIR because I could. I wrote UNVEILED in seven months because I had to. More time does not necessarily make for a better book, either. When there was all the time in the world, that time was most often unproductively frittered, whereas the deadline had a way of sharpening my focus, making me more attentive. And attention begets inspiration.

THE OUTLINE CAN MAKE YOU FREE

In order to meet my first deadline, I had to break down the mammoth task of producing a manuscript into small, manageable chunks. This meant learning to outline. Not because I thought outlined stories were inherently better, but because outlines are a time-management tool, and adulthood no longer gave me the luxury of last-minute all-nighters. Yet at the same time as I saw the need for an outline, I was afraid of it. I had “pantsed” my first manuscript, and even when I became more of a plotter, it was an amorphous, at-least-I-know-the-ending sort of plotting, not a minute chapter by chapter plan.

I thought outlining would crimp my creativity. Instead, it saved my sanity. Nothing can cause writer’s block like the panic of not knowing where your story is going, or realizing you’ve pantsed your way into an enormous plot hole. My detailed outline gave me a time, a place, and a cast of characters for each scene – but beyond that point I was free. It enabled me to focus in on the moment, explore the nuances of the setting, and– because I wasn’t worried about what was going to happen— really let each conversation shine. It turns out my muses work best when given a bit of a structure.

THE EDITOR IS ALWAYS RIGHT

The first professional writer I ever got to know personally was a 60-something, veteran journalist, a larger than life character to whom the phrase “tough old broad” seemed both complementary and apt. I was a wide-eyed recent college grad who’d been lucky enough to get to house-sit the apartment next to hers in a renovated tenement on New York’s Lower East Side. At that time, it never occurred to me to even dream of writing novels. I had set my heart on freelance journalism, and it was through my neighbor’s generous networking that I had my first article published. I also got my first experience of being professionally edited, and it was not pleasant to watch my most beloved paragraphs be summarily plucked from the piece. There was one change I was particularly unhappy about. I asked my neighbor if I had the right to refuse the editor’s request? I’ll never forget what she said to me, in her gravelly Long Island accent: “I’m going to give you the best advice you’ll ever get in your career as a writer.” “What?” I asked, rapt and eager to hear this wisdom. She leaned in, as if whispering a secret: “the editor is always right.”

I was disappointed to hear this, but I followed her advice. I saved my original draft, and kept it alongside the clipping of the piece when it was printed in the newspaper. When I read them both ten years later, I could only smile to myself and shake my head. That paragraph that I’d thought was so eloquent at the time? Turns out it was merely over-wrought. The editor’s changes had simplified it, made the story shine through without being bogged down by bombastic prose. In short, the editor had been *ahem* right.

I recalled this memory as I did revisions for UNVEILED with my wonderful editor at the time, Rebecca Lucash, who proposed a few changes that pained me to accept. I must confess I doubted her judgement at times, and clung tenaciously to my creation as it was, but in the end I realized that this person was a brilliant professional whose instincts I should trust. I can’t tell you what the change was without revealing a huge spoiler, but when I look back on UNVEILED now with the perspective of time, I must admit the advice of my old journalist friend still holds true. We as authors are often very poor evaluators of what’s working or not working in our own books; we’re just too close to it. I’m sure there are exceptions to the editor being right…but I haven’t found one yet.

YOU GET TO BE A LOCAL INSTEAD OF A TOURIST IN YOUR “WORLD”

One of my favorite parts of writing the CHANGELING P.I. series has been getting to make New York City into a magical place – because, in my experience of my adopted hometown, the real city is stranger than any fictional version. New York is its own character in this series, with all the quirks and flaws of any of the other characters. Since the first book was an introduction to this world, I had to take a tourist’s eye-view, as if I was introducing readers to the real city as well as my take on it. ELIXIR gleefully riffs on classic New York landmarks – for example making the Times Square New Year’s Eve ball drop into a portal to fairyland, with the focused attention of millions of people unwittingly powering the spell. But with most of the quintessentially New York places already touched upon in the first book, UNVEILED allowed me take the reader farther afield, beyond the boroughs and into both the glamorous and the gritty Tri-State commuter towns, the areas that tourists never see, the areas that frankly seem the least enchanted. But I set out to change that (perhaps because I’d moved out of the city and into the suburbia over the course of writing this series, and I was determined to find the magic here.) And plenty of weird, unexpected, magical things exist in the New York suburbs amidst the split levels and the strip malls, but you have to look harder to find them. The more mundane my settings, the harder I had to work as a writer to make them feel magical, and I think that challenge made me a better writer. Because a too-magical world is like a too-powerful character – boring. And while I admire the epic fantasy writer’s craft of made-from-scratch universes, personally, I’d rather believe that fairyland is no farther away than my own backyard.

* * *

Ruth Vincent spent a nomadic childhood moving across the USA, culminating in a hop across the pond to attend Oxford. But wherever she wanders, she remains ensconced within the fairy ring of her imagination. Ruth recently traded the gritty urban fantasy of NYC for the pastoral suburbs of Long Island, where she resides with her roguishly clever husband and a cockatoo who thinks she’s a dog. Ruth Vincent is the author of the CHANGELING P.I series with Harper Voyager Impulse, beginning with her debut novel, ELIXIR. Ruth loves to hear from readers.

Ruth Vincent: Website | Twitter

Unveiled: Amazon | B&N | Google Play | iBooks

Last night, B-Dub came into the living room where we are ensconced, and he said, somewhat poutily, “I want a new stuffed animal.”

Our response, practically canned at this point, was: “Christmas is coming up soon, and also, you just got like, 300 stuffed animals in Hawaii. And, you have so many stuffed animals at this point that we took away your bed so we could and we replace it with a giant sack stuffed with stuffed animals. You’re good. Relax.”

He became more indignant, then. Generally, he’s tantrum-averse these days, but he still gets grumpy, as any five-year-old is wont to do. And he asserted, with a stomp of his foot, “I want a new stuffed animal.”

So began the classic parental speech of, blah blah blah, if you can’t appreciate the things you have, why would we get you new things and also perhaps you don’t want the things you already have, blah blah blah.

Panicked, he said, “So, I’m not getting any stuffed animals for Christmas?!”

“We don’t know,” we said, shrugging. “We’ll see.”

(Another popular parental phrase: We’ll see. It’s the two-word equivalent of kicking the can down the road so you don’t have to deal with the can right now.)

His little face screwed up tight, not with grief but with a special kind of mischievous anger, and he said, quite confidently: “If you take my Christmas presents away, I’m taking your Christmas presents away.” (Here, echoes of my own father on the phone with the power company. They had him overdue on a bill, which was not his way. He said he paid it. They said he didn’t. The power company told him they’d turn his power off, and his response was: “If you turn my power off, I’ll turn your power off.” A nearly impossible threat, and probably unwise. But it worked.)

Anyway, we laughed. He wondered why we were laughing, and we said:

“We already had our Christmas presents. Our trip to Hawaii was our present to us.”

This boggled him for about three seconds, obviously stymying his plans.

But then, a new plan stirred.

“I will take Hawaii out of your head,” he said.

“What?” we asked, uncertain what we just heard.

“I will take the memories of Hawaii away from you.”

Wh

uh

ah

Holy shit, what the actual fuck? That was an astonishing threat. That he actually said. We kind of warily acquiesced, ha ha, okay, and then he promptly went to his drawing table (where he draws pictures nigh-endlessly), and he began to draw for about fifteen minutes.

After those minutes had passed, he delicately tore something out of a piece of paper with pinching fingers, then signaled for our attention. We looked over, and he stood there with a piece of paper hanging above his head. On this piece of paper was a ghost. (More a Pac-Man style ghost in design, if you need the visual.) B-Dub held it above him, then he dramatically fake died and fell to the ground. With fluttering hand, he helped the the paper ghost arise from his supine body.

B-Dub said, the paper fluttering, “I AM NOW GHOST ME.”

And “ghost him” proceeded to go grab a couple more pieces of paper. The cut-out-ghost brought us these pieces of paper, which were drawings that clearly illustrated the ghost hovering over two people (the words Mommy and Daddy written over these two people), and around ‘Mommy’ and ‘Daddy’ were images of palm trees and the ocean and other Hawaiian icons. Those icons were all pointing, via arrow, toward the ghost. Then — then! — in the next image, the ghost exploded those things with fireballs. “GHOST ME IS IN YOUR HEAD, STEALING YOUR MEMORIES,” B-dub explained. “THEN I EXPLODE THEM WITH FIRE.”

I was impressed, and said so. He was having fun drawing it. He was channeling his art into this… well, this terrifying act of him somehow turning into a ghost that is able to get into our heads and steal our memories in order to burn them up, but I mean, what can I say? I loved it. He seemed happy and content, and was no longer angry, and now Mommy and Daddy have precious art we can hang on our fridge of our memories being stolen and burned by an angry ghost child.

Kids are fucking weird.

And I love it.

Look at that little lizard dude-slash-dudette.

(An anole, I believe.)

Very surprised this critter let me get that close. But, it did, and I am enamored of the texture captured over that eyeball. It feels real enough to touch. I had another cool anole shot — one who again was willing to pose for me — or, rather, I wish I got the shot that I wanted. This next lizard was covered in water droplets, and I never really got any shots that captured what I wanted. They either captured the droplets but not the lizard, or like this one below, it captured the lizard but not really the droplets. (DOF was too narrow, should’ve opened it up some.)

Alas.

I’ll post some more Maui shots at the bottom of the post, or you can check out the (still-growing) set of them that I’ve posted in an album over yonder at Flickr. But first, some news —

First: INVASIVE is $2.99. Why is it on sale in e-book? I have no idea! Let’s just go with HEY, IT’S A CHRISTMAS PRESENT or something. If you’ve been wanting to take a chance on it, please nab it up. And spread the word, if you so care. And, if you’re willing to leave a kind review, I’d appreciate that. Or, if you have a surly review, please scream it into a hollow stump somewhere. Anyway, go and getchoo some antpocalypse.

Second: My agency sold rights to my writing book, 250 Things You Should Know About Writing, to the Russian publishing house, Alpina! And then —

Third: We also sold the next three Miriam Black books to Beijing White Horse Time, who hold the rights to the first three. If you haven’t seen the very cool Chinese cover for Blackbirds, well —

Love that cover.

Don’t forget about the AWKWARD AUTHOR PHOTO CONTEST, still ongoing.

Also check out my Gifts For Writers 2016 post yesterday.

I think that’s it for news. I’ve got a couple other pieces I’m sitting on, but can’t really talk about yet, so — *stitches mouth shut, screams from behind flesh gag* — onward to a few more Maui pics. Please to enjoy.

This sunset pic is from 10,000 feet. At the top of a volcano, you can see the coast and ocean:

Here’s another sunset pic from Haleakala:

Looks like Mars up there —

I’m quite partial to this photo. Someone is hiding in this pic, though…

HERE IS A SASSY GOAT.

Hey! Beach! Sunset! Pretty!

Last one for the day — LOOK AT THESE STUPID ROCKS.

(Gifts for Writers 2014 here.)

(Gifts for Writers 2015 here.)

(Please check those out, too, for cool ideas.)

1. A Good-Ass Carafe

(Vital to note hyphen placement. Please do not buy a “good ass-carafe”) Here’s how my writing day goes — I stumble out of bed, I water the dogs, I kill whatever giant spiders have nestled in the eaves of my cathedral, I make eggs, I give my child his magical growth serum, then I brew coffee. I brew about twenty ounces of coffee, I stick it in a thermal carafe, and then I’m off to my day, and I bring a proper mug, and pour when I need it. That coffee is kept warm all damn day. So go buy this thermal carafe for your writer pal, and make them happy.

2. Customizable Notebook

Check out Wrights Notes notebooks. You tell them what you want your notebook to look like, and boo-bam, you get two of them off the bat. They are not the only game in town, mind you — Google “customizable notebooks” and you’ll get a veritable plethora.

3. Litreactor Courses

ALL Y’ALL’S WRITER PALS NEED SCHOOLING ON HOW TO DO THIS WRITEY-FLAVORED THANG. EVEN ME, BECAUSE I SAY THINGS LIKE ‘WRITEY-FLAVORED THANG,’ WHICH IS NOT HOW ANYONE SHOULD REFER TO ANYTHING, AND THEY SHOULD NOT DO IT IN ALL CAPS, YET HERE I AM, BLITHERBLATHERING IN ALL CAPS. But seriously, hey look, these LitReactor courses are cool as hell. And I know a lot of the people giving them (Delilah Dawson! Melissa Olson! Ania Ahlborn! Weston Ochse! Brad Beaulieu!), which is nice because it’s clear these people and these courses are legit. Lots coming in the new year. The writer pal in your life will appreciate it.

4. Comixology Unlimited

I read differently now that I’m a writer — and I also try to read more diversely and outside of my own format. Bonus: I write comics now, sometimes, when I am able to steal the key and escape my cage. Sometimes writers only have a few moments here and there, and comics make for snappy, zippy reading on any mobile device. Get them a Comixology gift card which can be applied to their new Netflixian service, Comixology Unlimited.

5. Audible Subscription

Related: get them an Audible Subscription for maximum audiobook goodness.

6. Tequila Mockingbird

This is a book about literary-themed cocktails. And given the ever-burning septic system fire that was 2016 — and given what’s likely to come in the smoldering fuckstack that will be 2017! — I expect we’re all gonna be doing some drinking. So, for your writer pal: Tequila Mockingbird. Or just buy them booze, I guess. I’ll take a VW bug full of gin, please and thank you.

7. Spa Day, Motherfucker

Being a writer means crumpling up your body like a dented soda can and hunching over your creative brilliance until your spine bows and your shoulders melt into a crooked pile and all your bones are like twisted vines. It’s great. But sometimes that means you need some help just… y’know, working that out. Throw in stress from our various creative industries compressing our body and mind and I dunno about you, but I could use someone to massage all that out of me. I could use a manicure, a pedicure, one of them fancy face-wraps, a foot massage, a nipple shellacking, a tummy tickle, a chin scrub, a butthole buffing, everything. I’d love a spa day. But if you won’t buy me one, maybe buy one for the writer pal in your life.

8. I’m Just Saying, Jeni’s Now Has Flat-Rate Shipping

Listen, in my earlier GIFTS FOR WRITERS posts, I advocate the gift of ice cream, and that’s because ice cream is amazing. And Jeni’s ice cream is the best of them all. Thing is, Jeni’s used to be hella ‘spensive to ship to most of the country. Ah! Not so anymore, my dubious friends. Now, flat-rate shipping to the states (well, 48 of them). Just $13. So go get some ice cream for your writer pal. I can make recommendations if you need it.

9. Dark Chocolate Subscription

Dark chocolate is magical and mysterious. I’m sure it’s not actually healthy, but we can pretend it is, can’t we? Look, I’ll even spin it and say that “dark chocolate is brain food.” Is it? Who fucking cares? We live in a post-truth age, dontchaknow? Ha ha ha! Behold the Cocoa Runners giftbox. Give your writer pal some, ahem, cough cough, brain food.

10. A Manuscript Consult

A writer of a novel is writing blind, and may need some guidance or editing from another capable writer. Kat Howard, for instance, will do a developmental edit of a novel. As does Laura Anne Gilman! (Actually, I asked about this on Facebook, and you’d be surprised how many of your favorite authors may offer editing. Feel free to drop into comments and note yourself if you are one such author who offers consults and edits!) Here’s a pretty good list via Eric Smith.

11. Superfight!

I like games that work your creative muscles (not a genital euphemism, you pervhead) and that tease out stories. RPGs are good for this, obviously, and you know, if you ever wanted to do something cool for me, just run a session of D&D for me because it’s been too fucking long. But! Also consider for your writer pals: Superfight! Rad card game. Not so, erm, controversial as CAH. If you want something more officially RPG-ey, then Fiasco will be your jam. Bonus: short play sessions make this easy to hop in, tell a story, and then go do something else. Like watch porn. Or rob a bank. Or masturbate while watching a bank being robbed. Weirdo.

12. Haikubes

Kinda like magnetic poetry except, uhh, cubes? Yeah. Poke your poetry buttons with Haikubes.

13. Mix-And-Match Profanity Generator

I feel like the title says it all.

14. Profanity Dictionary

Don’t want to make up your own profanity? Well, here’s a book: Jibber Jabber and Giffle Gaffle. It goes through a history of so-called ‘salacious slang’ through the ages.

15. An Experience

Story is an engine. We must feed it with information, ideas, and experiences. Give your writer pal an experience. I don’t mean to put winky air-quotes around that (“Give your writer pal an ‘experience,’ by which I mean, a prostate massage with a bumpy cucumber! Merry Peggingsday!”) — I mean, y’know, give them a trip. Or hiking shoes. Or SCUBA lessons. Whatever you put into that engine will make the story go. Help them make the story go.

16. Couple of Handweights

Writing is not the healthiest job. Our bodies atrophy under the onslaught of words — our fingers are muscley from typing, but the rest of us is sludgey like dashi-plumped udon noodles. Get your writer pal a set of small handweights. It helps, I promise.

17. Under Desk Foot Massager

Do not stick this thing up your ass. (Or you’ll end up on one of those websites of embarrassing X-Rays.) Sitting at a desk is not ideal for your posture, and foot cramps and plantar fasciitis is not uncommon. So, go get the thing that is definitely not a hedghoggy butt plug (no flared base!) and bring your under-desk feet some sweet, sweet relief.

18. A Brother Laser Printer

Why am I recommending a laser printer? And a Brother, no less? I have a Brother H-2070N and it is a workhorse of a printer. And InkJets are total scams. Every page takes a thimble of ink, and then you have to buy another $700 cartridge (which explains why the printer came free in a fucking cereal box). But my laser prints endlessly. I’ve had it for just shy of ten years now and I’ve replaced the toner cartridge once. And I’ve printed out endless contracts and manuscripts — as your writer pal is also likely to do. This model is old, but newer ones exist (like the HL-2300D), and everybody I know tells the same workhorse story for their Brother printers. (Just avoid the all-in-ones, as more will break. Plus with cell phones, you don’t need scanners much anymore. I also skip color as I find it an unnecessary frill.)

19. QwerkyWriter!

Okay, I kinda love this keyboard for your iPad. Actually, I do a lot more writing on my iPad than I used to, thanks to it now having a fully-functional MS WORD suite — super-stable, totally accessible app. A cool mechanical keyboard like this would be a nice complement.

20. Great Headphones

I have Sennheiser Momentum headphones. I’m sure there are ones you like better — point isn’t to get mine (though they’re comfy and lovely!), point is that sometimes, a writer needs to drown out the world and a pair of quality headphones can help them do exactly that.

Self-Aggrandizing Promo 1: Terribleminds Merch

Mugs: Certified Penmonkey, Art Harder (NSFW), Art Harder (SFW), The Secret of Writing (NSFW), Writer Juice, and the newest addition: CAFFEINE, MOTHERFUCKER. DO YOU SPEAK IT? Er that one is pretty obviously NSFW.

T-Shirts: Certified Penmonkey, Art Harder (NSFW).

Self-Aggrandizing Promo 2: Writer Books By Yours Truly

Like howzabout The Kick-Ass Writer, or the Writing E-Book Bundle?

If you got cool writer gift ideas, drop ’em in the comments.

Merry Peggingsday, one and all.

One more post before I fuck right off to a warm and distant island —

Hey! YOU.

I have a stack of the new Miriam Black novel, Thunderbird, that I’d like to give away. The book doesn’t come out until February, but damnit, I have ARCs, and I’d love for you to have one.

And! Since it’s National Novel Writing Month, I figure this is a good time to engage in a much-needed and momentary distraction in order to playfully envision yourself as the AUTHORIAL PRESENCE you hope to be — which is to say, it’s time to depict yourself in an awkward author photo in the hope of winning BIG FANCY PRIZES (cough cough that are actually mostly just books cough cough but hey shut up books are awesome).

You can see the entrants into the first contest here. Or, examples:

What exactly goes into an awkward author photo, you ask? Well, I don’t know! The goal is not to make a real, official back-of-the-book-jacket photo, but instead to make something weird, funny, goofy, uncomfortable, or awkward. Something to make people laugh or, I dunno, stare worriedly at your deranged visage. If you want to make it Miriam Black-themed and throw in a couple birds, sure. If you want it to be Christmas-themed, or Star Wars-ian, or Fuck-2016-themed, since all are relevant: hey, you do you. Have fun with it. No requirements other than:

It needs to be a photo of you. An author photo, like you’d find on the back of the book jacket.

Photoshop is fine, provided you’re ‘shopping a real photo.

The rules are:

The contest runs from today till December 14th, 2016, noon, EST.

You get one entry. Just one. Multiple entries disqualifies you.

Email that entry — a photo of medium size, at least 700px wide — to me at terribleminds at gmail dot com, and when you do…

Use the subject (and this is a must): AWKWARD AUTHOR PHOTO CONTEST SUBMISSION 2016.

I will search for that subject, and if it ain’t exact, I might miss your entry.

Your photo will be uploaded to a public Flickr page so that it can be seen and judged, and it may also end up here on the blog or other social media if it’s one of the winners. I don’t own the photo, though, and I claim no rights to it. If you want to share credit for who took the photo, please do! I’ll include any credit I get with the photo page.

Open to international (non-US) participants, but international winners pay their own shipping.

I will get the photos up and judged in the week following the contest deadline, which means the books will likely be out to you around or just after Christmas, but before New Years.

The prizes:

I’ll pick one BIG-ASS WINNER, and said Big-Ass Winner will receive: a copy of Thunderbird, and, I’ll throw in some of my other books, too, all signed. Plus: hey, I’ll pitch in a $50 giftcard to the indie bookstore of your choice — even if you don’t have one near you, a number of the best ones ship. (Note: this will require that I actually be able to buy a gift cert for that bookstore. If you name a bookstore that won’t let me buy one for you, I’ll have to default to, say, Mysterious Galaxy or WORD or some such, be advised.)

Then, you, the audience will pick your favorites.

The top four will each get a physical copy of Thunderbird and I’ll also throw in one of my self-pubbed writing e-books, your choice. (Excludes Kick-Ass Writer.)

The rest of you will all get a participation trophy. Which is an imaginary high-five from me, because you’re awesome, and I love you. I mean, I don’t love you in a creepy way. I’m not going to show up at your house with a boombox and a clownsuit.

Just the clownsuit, probably. No boombox for you.

ANYWAY, so them’s the rules.

It begins now.

Have fun.