Category: The Ramble (page 179 of 463)

I am going to warn you up front that this post will offer little of value. You won’t find much focus here. I don’t have any great takeaways. I don’t have any solutions. I stand here between the polar forces of optimism and anger, trying to reach for one while shielding myself from the other. Part of me wants to retreat from the conversation entirely, to escape the culture and to settle down in a shack and sit and put on headphones and just wait it all out.

The culture I’m talking about is geek culture. Nerd culture. Pop culture.

Really, our entire culture, because our entire culture is pop culture these days. Geek culture is dominant. News is entertainment. Politics is run in part by a man right now who calls himself an entertainer and whose version of “telling it like it is” means telling us anything at all in order to provoke precious attention.

We have a problem. Really, it’s a man problem, and I don’t mean that it’s a problem that affects men but really, it’s a problem driven by and created by men — and yes, I know, it’s #NotAllMen and yes, I realize that men can be victims, too, especially LGBT men. Of course, most of the problems men suffer as victims are caused by the culture of men in the first damn place…

Let’s switch gears for a second, actually.

Right now, for whatever reason — let’s say El Nino when really we all know it’s climate change — the temperature is hella warm. It’s been 80 degrees here in Pennsylvania a few times already, and it’s only April. That means the ticks are out, and already in the last few days I’ve picked more ticks off me than I did all last year. I’ve seen more deer ticks, too, and deer ticks are more insidious. They bite fast and burrow quick, so by the time you’ve found them, they’re not just crawling up your skin, they’re already dug in. Their mouthparts are doing their hungry work. You gotta be real careful how you get the ticks out, because if you rip them out, they leave bits of themselves inside you, and then you get an infection — and that’s presuming you got them out quick enough, before they transmit Lyme Disease or whatever other parasite-in-a-parasite they aim to barf up into you.

I mention ticks because they’re tricky. You don’t see them. They serve mostly only themselves (though possums are good to have around because they eat hella hundreds, even thousands of ticks, a week). They’re parasites. Sucking blood and bloating like tumors — they’re an arachnid version of cancer. You have to remain vigilant. Nightly tick-checks on everybody, even the dogs, because otherwise, you’ll miss them.

That feels like what we have going here. We’ve got ticks in our culture. Latching on. Leeching blood. Staying hidden until they’re bloated up and by then, you’ve got a real problem.

The Hugo nominations came out yesterday, and in there are contained some genuinely talented and deserving candidates. (Please read Bo Bolander’s “And You Shall Know Her By The Trail Of Dead,” which is a story I love so hard I wish like sweet hot hell that I wrote it. Then go read Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti. And then check out Alyssa Wong’s “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers,” since you’re a smart person looking for great things to read.) Of course, the mangy curs and distempered doggies also got their grimy jaws around the throat of the thing. Inside those nominations you’ll find some, ahh, real eye-openers. I won’t go into specifics — you either know what I’m talking about or you don’t. And if you don’t, just trust me when I say, some of those categories are a real diaper fire. (Actually, if you do want a peek, Scalzi is over at the LA Times talking about it, so go point your eyeballs there.)

It’s not just in SFF.

In pen-and-paper gaming, harassment is endemic (read: “Tabletop Gaming has a White Male Terrorism Problem” — but be advised, big blinky trigger warning there).

Harassment has been a specter hovering over the comics community, too, and that pot is set to maybe boil over (read the latest CBR article on the subject).

Nintendo kowtows to Gamergate and fires Alison Rapp, which only empowers them more.

People get pissed when there’s a woman lead in gasp two Star Wars films in a row, missing the fact that if Hollywood were really aggressive about equality, they’d make sure the next 20-30 years of action films were 90% cast with women action stars, and men in those movies would be sexy lamps in need of saving — or fridging so that the heroine is properly motivated.

There’s a sickness here. We’re covered with ticks. We call them trolls, and they are, but that’s also a way to dismiss them — as if they’re just cantankerous outliers hiding under bridges. People say, “Don’t feed the trolls,” as if that’s ever worked. I remember in elementary school they told you to ignore bullies, too, and that never worked worth a good goddamn because they just came harder at you next time, pissed that you didn’t give them the time of day. You can’t ignore ticks, you can’t ignore tumors, and you can’t ignore trolls. Ignoring them means emboldening them.

Of course, we all know that trolls aren’t contained to pop culture. This problem goes well beyond our wells, well past the geek margins we believe contain us. Pop culture is a bellwether for things. It’s the canary in the coal mine. It presages the discrimination, the transgender bathroom bills, the Trumps and the Cruzes. And it’s a mirror, too. We see in it reflected the true face of the culture, sometimes. Other times, a distorted image, like you get from a circus mirror.

Here’s what I want to believe: I want to think this is normal, and it represents overall a good thing. I want to cleave to optimism. I want to think that all of this is like a bug zapper, summoning these human horseflies to the bright and angry light where their blind rage causes them to frizzle-fry while fixed fast in the fence of coruscating electricity. As social change starts to take hold, as attitudes shift toward including more people, as the cultural landscape rumbles and shifts in a bigger and broader way, well, that’s a milkshake that brings all the manboys to the yard. And they run to the yard, angry as hornet-stung bears, and they fall into the sinkholes and crevasses, and there they lay as the ground seals back up over their heads. Their mournful stung-bear howls trapped under the mantle of a changed world.

Like I’ve said in the past:

Dinosaurs squawking at meteors. Shaking tiny, impotent arms at the sky. The Empire, wondering where the hot hell all these goddamn X-Wings came from. Shitheel harasser assholes wondering when the world stopped listening to them and their diaperbaby bleats.

The other side of me thinks this is something deeper, darker, a vein of bad mojo thrust through the whole of the culture. Sepsis, toxic shock, an infection in the blood resistant to antibiotics.

But then I look and I think how thirty years ago I didn’t know what transgender meant. How three years ago I didn’t know what genderqueer was, and now it’s in the dictionary. I think about how we’re maybe on the cusp of having our first woman president. I think too about how social media has made the assholes louder — but it’s also amplified the voices of the non-assholes, and how conversations happen, tough as they are, across an Internet that moves fast and furious with both enlightenment and ignorance. I don’t know where we are or what’s going to happen next, and I know that I ping-pong between feeling optimistic about tectonic change and pessimistic about what that change has wrought.

I also know that no matter what we can’t just sit idly by. We push back. We vote no award when shitbirds nest in our award categories. We stand by those who are harassed by the worst of our culture. We stop sheltering the monsters and start protecting the victims. We amplify voices. We close our mouths and try to listen more. We master the one-two-punch of empathy and logic. We try to be better and do better and demand better even when we ourselves are woefully imperfect. I speak to geeks and I speak to men when I say: we need to get our house in order.

We have a problem.

But I hope we also have solutions.

At the very least, let this be a call that we need to do better by those who need us. Out with the bullies. Out with the terrorists. Gone with the ticks. We find those ticks and we pluck ’em out. Then we burn them, toss them in the toilet, rain our piss upon their parasitic heads, and say bye-bye as we flush and fill the bowl with clean water once more.

(Comments closed, because, c’mon.)

I have the pleasure to know the spectral presence known as “Leanna Renee Hieber,” who does not write books so much as she breathes them effortlessly into being with sheer pneuma. She’s awesome, and so you will sit very politely and listen to her tale of publishing woe — a tale with a much happier ending, a tale that tells the message of how the best thing you can do as a writer is hang the fuck in there. Because you’re only out when you bow out.

* * *

Peoples of the written word,

I’m very lucky to call Mr. Wendig here a friend, and I’m a huge fan of his talent, sense of humor and genuinely being a good guy. I also appreciate how open and unafraid he is to talk about the most brutal sides of the publishing industry, the equally intense difficulties and joys of being a writer. So with this in mind, I bring you my personal tale in hopes of helping someone else who has hit a wall and needs to commiserate as much as needs a sign of hope, to draw back a curtain on the vagaries of publishing and the difficulties of a writer’s emotional landscape when things go wrong and right.

I’ve maintained a writing habit since I could hold a pen. I don’t remember a time without writing. I went to school for Theatre performance, writing on the side, toured around the country doing Shakespeare, got my Actor’s Equity union card and moved to New York City to decide between a life on stage or in the page. I was at a Broadway callback and all I could think about was the book I’d started 6 years prior when I was an intern at the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival. Turns out I loved The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker far more than I loved Broadway (and that was A LOT). I thought to myself in that moment: if I do ONE thing before I die I HAVE to publish my wildly Gothic novel about Victorian Ghostbusters! I did that thing they tell you to do: I wrote the book of my heart and my heart was ready.

So I stopped auditioning cold, joined writers’ groups, networked, took classes, revised my book countless times after getting any valuable feedback from the few rejection letters that weren’t form- I was earning a huge stack of rejections after going through THE ENTIRE Writer’s Market and querying anyone and everything that might accept Historical Fantasy with Romantic, Suspense, Mystery and Horror elements. (I’m the epitome of cross-genre.) And then finally, after a revise and resubmit, I landed an agent. Thanks to published writer friends pointing me to a specific editor, after another revise and resubmit, my baby sold to a New York house! The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker came out in the fall of 2009, nine years after I’d begun the draft. It was a good first experience, with a great editor and team, a healthy mass-market print run that soon became 4 print runs and a Barnes & Noble bestseller. The book garnered genre awards, critical acclaim, drew some fire because my heroine is the sweetest, dearest creature in the world and some people just didn’t care for that, but the sequel came the next year, and the prequel the following.

Then the bottom dropped out. The publisher, Dorchester, went bankrupt and closed its Madison Avenue doors. Three books into a bright start, right after winning an award for the third book, I was in free-fall. I held out after the very first signs of trouble in hopes the company could turn it around, while other authors yanked their rights, I stayed on that sinking ship until there were no more lifeboats. Let me be clear that none of this was the fault of my editor or the immediate staff around me. The meltdown came from high-ups I’d never met. Authors are the lowest on the totem-pole and we were all out of luck, out lots of money, out of rights and out of print.

I tied up far more of my self-worth and emotional life into these books of my heart than I’d advise another writer to do, simply for sanity and health. It felt like my children were taken away as wards of the state. And the $20k I had put on credit cards to invest in my career, in ads, travel, conferences, author swag, etc, confident at the time that the books were doing well and I’d get that back in royalties, was $20k I was entirely on the hook for. Yes, my agent helped, but there was only so much anyone could do. There was a fight to get paperwork, a struggle to know what to do when, a mess to untangle and when Amazon bought all of Dorchester’s rights, I was in a fog. I didn’t want to be published by Amazon, that much I knew, and I didn’t want to have to self-publish. I wandered lost in the thick of a brutal depression for a long while. I somehow managed to crank out another book to get my mind off of the pain and in a desperate attempt to still stay relevant in the industry.

But there was dark stuff going on within me. Everything in the industry felt like it was on the rocks. Once rights were wrested away from Amazon’s clutches, I knew that I should do what others were doing and self-publish, but I hadn’t enjoyed what little self-publishing I had done and I didn’t have the finances to do it right in terms of hiring formatters, editors and art staff. I didn’t have energy for the marketing. I was exhausted, having a hard time making a go of it as a New York City artistic freelancer, and I was just really, really damn sad.

I was overwhelmed by massive, complicated feelings of betrayal, of incapacitating rage at being robbed of thousands upon thousands of dollars of lost payments and royalties, of no small amount of unhelpful self-pity. I was in the throes of vocational materialism; I wanted external achievements like someone else might want a Porsche. Feelings of failure were incapacitating. I didn’t know what to do artistically for comfort. I knew I couldn’t let what happened to me kill my ability to write, writing is like breathing, but my muses were in limbo.

The characters in the Strangely Beautiful saga had been my bedtime story to myself for nearly a decade. I’d envision entering the quaint little London pub where my characters all hang out together and we’d sit, chat, drink and tease Alexi, my Gothic hero until I drifted off. These particular characters are my beloved friends, a priceless flock of treasured souls. But after this happened I couldn’t even think of them anymore. They were covered by a death shroud I couldn’t seem to peel off, buried in my own complicated emotional earth. I was numb, disconnected and fragile. While I hated the prospect of self-publishing and all the logistics it entails, I couldn’t let them languish. And even though I started the process, I wanted there to be another way. Miss Percy Parker has a certain magic about her and I prayed that something out there might see her and me through.

Thankfully, enough of my self-preservation auto-pilot was on to know to say yes to opportunities, so when I was asked to attend conventions, I did, again, to stay relevant in the industry, and to be ‘seen’ even if the books I was most known for couldn’t be accessed. A performer by nature, I took to the stage of public appearances in hopes of figuring out what was next. A Paranormal Romance convention in New Orleans is where I met the knight in shining armor who rescued my children. It was a ‘right place at right time’ for me and Melissa Singer at Tor, and thankfully she was already familiar with Strangely Beautiful and wanted to do something about it. Tor had been my dream house, but I hadn’t been able to get past the front door. Now Melissa wanted to work on a new series (THE ETERNA FILES) as well as publish the STRANGELY BEAUTIFUL backlist, including the never before published finale.

Strangely Beautiful being first published when it was, despite all the things that happened to it and to me, still put me on the radar enough for this second chance. Maybe that whole idea of ‘things happen for a reason’, or even that bit about lemons and lemonade is true and wise. I learned (and am still learning) so much from that initial disaster. I’m much more cautious about how I manage investments in my career versus money coming in the door, (ProTip, by all means make time for writing and make certain reasonable investments in your work but don’t go all free-fall without a safety net). I’m aware that I have publishing PTSD so I try not to let paranoia and anger about the industry color my every thought or displace worry onto the next series. I’ve learned to examine my emotional state and artistic process as separate engines to calibrate, and give both breadth and gentleness. I must keep worry/anxiety about the industry far, far away from my writing, like going into a room where the noisy zoo of the industry isn’t allowed in. I am trying to learn that my self-worth is not defined by my books. That’s a hard one, because I feel that I was put on this earth to be a writer. But I’m better emotionally balanced when I can make that distinction. One cannot take the industry personally. You just cannot.

I’ve learned there will always be another chance, opportunity, way forward, but only if you show up. Even during this fog and tribulation, I did manage to write a YA series, the MAGIC MOST FOUL saga. All the while worried and fretting about my original babies, my favorites. I still had to do something. That writing compulsion thing came in handy. Staying busy isn’t a bad idea, treading water is better than drowning.

But my babies are back today. Today is release day for the STRANGELY BEAUTIFUL omnibus. Tor put the first books in the series together into one volume, Melissa helped me re-edit and polish both, with new scenes and content. It’s a dream come true made all the sweeter for the difficulties. Not to mention the most gorgeous cover! When I first saw the cover I wept. I can envision my precious flock again and can visit their pub in my dreams again, their death-shroud lifted like Lazarus.

I’ve shared all of this because I appreciate when other artists talk about their ups and downs, it helps with perspective. If my worst artistic nightmare can happen and those books can resurrect like the mythical Phoenix I use as a character in this series, let it be a sign of hope for all who struggle with the work that they are most passionate about, through thick and thin.

Your desire for your art and talents to go out in the world has to outweigh the fear of what will happen to it out there, because anything could. There is no more safety for your art than for any of us on any given day. Things happen. Keep writing. Keep being ‘present’. Say yes to opportunities even when everything in you wants to curl up and cry. Network, work hard and consistently. Be nice to people in the industry because you never know who might be your knight in shining armor when you most need help. Learn about the craft and yourself in equal measure. Face your fears and do it all again the next day. Because none of this ever stops or gets any easier. If it was easy, no one would write any books, because easy is boring to read.

Now this story of renewal can really grow. It is release day, so your support, purchase and interest in this series is at critical peak, and I appreciate your participation in this second chance. STRANGELY BEAUTIFUL is a Gothic styled Historical Fantasy saga (two books in one edition!) about Victorian ghostbusters saving the world, featuring quirky and lovable characters, Greek Mythology, Jack the Ripper, and love conquering evil and death. PG-13 content, good for a wide range of ages and interests. It will certainly scratch your every Gothic and Victorian itch. (Please help me make some money on these damn ghosts for once…)

Thank you and happy haunting…

* * *

LEANNA RENEE HIEBER’s first novel, The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker, won two Prism Awards from RWA’s Fantasy, Futuristic & Paranormal Chapter: Best Fantasy Romance and Best First Novel and is currently in development as a Broadway musical, with Hieber writing the script. Her YA novel, Darker Still, was a Scholastic Highly Recommended Title, an INDIE NEXT selection, and a finalist for the Daphne du Maurier Award.

Leanna Renee Hieber: Website | Twitter

Strangely Beautiful: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Two years ago, I wrote ten things that I’d like to say to young writers, and I find that a lot of young writers — WEE TINY BABIES WITH HOPE GLINTING IN THEIR DEWDROP EYES — email me. They want to be writers but they don’t know if they can or if they should. And as I recently turned 40, that means I received from the doctor a booster shot of the Wisdom Vaccine, so right now I’m shedding wisdom like the flu virus and so you should all expect to get a little on you.

Vitamin C won’t help you.

Here are some more things I’d like to say to the YOUNGER WRITERS amongst you — though certainly a goodly portion of this might apply to those of any age and experience level.

Now please watch as I run circles in a meadow and yell wisdom at clouds.

You Can Do It

Writing is a hard gig, but it’s not like, botany? A lot of things in life are hard and require years of training and schooling. Writing isn’t that. Writing doesn’t require you know how the covalent bonds hold sentences together or the anatomical atomic rules of thematic narrative application. Writing obviously has rules, and you should know them. But those rules duck and feint, shift and change, and they’re just rules that someone made up. Writing is less an act of rigorous academic study and more a childhood act of riding your wagon down a steep hill and off a ramp and over a stream. Most times you’re going to fuck it up and break a limb, but at least you’ll have a good story to tell after. And once in a while you’ll get perfect air and score a gorgeous landing.

Point is, you can do it because others have done it. It isn’t an impossible thing. Especially at this stage, when you can separate career out of the equation. Right now, you can just concentrate simply on reiterating. Speaking of that —

Doing It Means Doing A Lot Of It

You write one story, you’re a writer. Hell, you write one page, you’re a writer.

You’re probably not a very good one, though.

Writing is this:

write write write write write write

write today

write tomorrow

stop writing for weeks

months, maybe — a year?

get back to writing, feels good, feels good

write a short story

write half a book

write ten halves of books, none of which match, all of which aren’t finished

write one book holy shit it’s finished

write bad stuff

write really bad stuff

course correct and write better stuff that’s still mostly bad but not like kill-your-momma bad

learn that oh shit you have to rewrite

rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and then you edit and you edit

feel bad because it just isn’t working and you repeat this cycle for one year, five years, ten years, and then, only then, do things start to click into place.

Admittedly, some of you are probably maestros of language and story the moment you begin — but even you, you precious moonstones, have to do the work lest your talent go fallow.

Enjoy Your Muddling Fuckery

Something I wish I would’ve realized earlier? You can enjoy the part where you don’t know what you’re doing. I think in a work-and-career-focused society, and one where choosing to write means becoming A PROPER PROFESSIONAL WRITER, you can early on lose the part where you have fun with what you’re doing. More to the point, it’s not that I don’t have fun now — but coming up as a newbie neophyte novitiate in the Ancient Order Of Ink-Fingered Penmonkeys (the AOOIFP, pronounced the AH-OOOOO-EE-FFFPPP), I was often frustrated and wanted my work to be MORE BETTER FASTER. And I forgot the part where I was doing this for kicks.

Moreover, you don’t only have the opportunity to enjoy what you’re doing, but you also have the chance to operate at a level where really, nobody is paying attention. You can do whatever you want. The page is your hallucinogenic wonderland. You own it. Nobody’s looking. It is an isolated bubble realm separate from all others, and in that, you have the freedom to take storytelling risks, to be super-weird, to experiment with language and character and motifs, to fuck around with the big questions that bother you, to mess with form, to explore straight up silly shit. This is a glorious time for fan-fiction. This is a wonderful time for breaking all the rules with nary a fuck left in the bottom of your gorgeously thatched fuckbasket. You do not have to care right now. You merely have to write.

So, do. And do so with great joy. Sing in the shower because nobody is listening. This is like a virtual simulation. You have minimal consequence and maximum freedom. As Beck once said: GET CRAZY WITH THE CHEESE WHIZ. … though I never really knew what that meant. Is cheese whiz a drug? Is he fucking the cheese whiz? It better not be hot whiz if he is, because ow, goddamn. Maybe he’s just slathering himself in Cheeze Whiz and running through a shopping mall. That could be fun. What were we talking about again?

Read Widely And Read Voraciously

The world is full of books. It is full of books good and bad. It contains books about dragons, birds, bees, sex, love, hate, government, parasites, parasols, alternate dimensions, alternate lifestyles, food, drugs, bugs, spaceships — I mean, really anything at all. It’s all out there, slathered into these glorious KNOWLEDGE SANDWICHES called books. Read fiction. Read non-fiction. Read things that the writer thinks is non-fiction but probably isn’t. Read things that are fiction but that speak to truth. Do not read in one genre. Do not read in only the genre you want to write. Paint with shotguns. Look beyond your comfort zones. Other readers can read for comfort.

You are not other readers. You want to be a writer.

And writing is very much about discomfort.

Read to enjoy. Read to get angry. Read to be challenged.

Read Lots Of Writing Advice, And Question It All, Then Question Yourself

This is the internet, and it contains mostly writers. I don’t say that glibly, I mean, a great deal of what exists on THESE HERE WEBS AND TWEETS has been fucking written down by people going tippy-tappy-typey with their keyboards. The internet is made of words. People — plus a few cats and robots — wrote those words down. Further, a great portion of the internet — at last count it was 22% — comprises writing advice. I should know, I’ve contributed at least one percent of it.

You need to read it. Not just what I say, but what Stephen King says, and Anne Lamott, and Delilah Dawson and Margaret Atwood and Neil Gaiman and — well, the list goes on and on. Any writer that exists has opinions on how to write. And they will probably write those opinions down, because, well, writers.

Read it all. Shove it greedily into your THOUGHT CAVE where it will be slowly digested by the shadow beings that dwell there. Consume. Absorb. And then —

Question every last bit of it. Writers have all these opinions and on writing and they don’t agree with one another. I frequently don’t even agree with myself on how to write. (Spoiler: most of it is bullshit. But bullshit still fertilizes.) My own advice is an impatient chameleon forever changing the color of its skin — and it’s not because I’m confused or seek to be confusing, it’s just, this isn’t math. This isn’t codified truth. This is drawing pictures in the dark. The day changes and so do the rules. Question what you read.

And then question your own questioning of it. The young are bullish with ego, which is good — you think you know everything, and you can seize that gallumphing confidence to get a lot of shit done. But at the same time, the wisdom of those who came before you is at least worth considering and not immediately dismissing out of hand. Question them. Then question yourself. Then question reality because none of this is real, and we’re all just holograms designed by a giant cat named Mister Tinkles who lives in the center of the moon.

Sorry, just seeing if you’re still paying attention.

Focus On Storytelling

How language works matters. Language is the lens through which we study and project story. You need to know how language works in order to be clear and concise and in order to sometimes go the other way — to fortify ambiguity and to fill the tale with oxygen and uncertainty.

But, but, but — language is just the mechanism. It is a middleman — a transformative middleman, but just the same, it’s the thing standing between THE READER’S BRAIN and THAT DELICIOUS STORY. We can’t eat story, we can’t drink it, we can’t insert it rectally in a story suppository (but one day the power will be mine). But story is why we’re here. It’s what we want. And so, story is what matters most. It is the reason we read and the reason we write. We don’t write just to hear language. We write to say something.

Focus now on what story is. Look at how story works. The stories you love unabashedly and without examination? Keep loving them, but start examining them. What moments excite you? What moments scare you? How, do you think, the storyteller articulates those emotions? How does one manipulate the audience so that they do not feel manipulated? Don’t just read stories. Listen to stories. Let your KOOKY OL’ GRANDPA JOE tell you about that time he fought the LIZARD PEOPLE on the RINGS OF KRANG. Listen to podcasts. Listen to drunk people tell stories. Listen to stand-up comedians. Don’t just passively sit. Actively take in what they’re saying and dissect it. Try to find the secret of the magic trick.

How are stories told? What makes them work? What makes them fail?

Find Your Process

Nobody writes the same way. It’s why writing advice is a dubious proposition to begin with — I can only tell you about how I do things, or how I’ve seen things done. I don’t know what you do. I’m not your Dad. NOT YET, BUT ONE DAY I WILL MARRY YOUR MOTHER AND THEN WE’LL SEE WHO HAS TO CLEAN UP HIS ROOM. … uhh, sorry, what I mean is, you gotta do you.

Thing is, how you do you isn’t set in stone. Further, it isn’t a known quantity. You’re not a computer with a program, you’re a human being with lots of human foibles and peccadilloes, some known, some not. Your process is mysterious to you. It is a giant neon question mark hanging over your head. I don’t know how you do things. And neither do you.

A lot of being a writer is becoming a writer: a journey never completed.

Go on that journey. A writing life is the archaeology of uncovering your own writing process. Some people write a fair amount every day. Some people write a little. Or write a lot only one day a week. I write in the mornings. You might write in the evenings. I like to write while sometimes bathed in the heinous heart-choking gas that comes out of my dog’s butt. You might like to write with a cat on your head. I write drinking coffee. You write while guzzling antifreeze because you’re secretly an Alien Person from Krang-Ring V. I outline. You don’t. It’s all good. But you gotta try a lot of things to find out how you write, what you sound like, who you are on the page.

Then Forget Your Process

Find your process, then promptly fucking forget it. Or, more to the point, become very flexible about it. My process is ever-evolving. It evolves with circumstance (I have a soon-to-be-five-year-old, I have a writing shed, I have dogs that demand attention). It evolves with life and age and experience. It evolves with every book — I write outlines for every book I write, and I don’t think I’ve written those outlines the same at any point. Just as every book demands its own way of being told (POV, tense, chapters/no chapters, one protag or many, etc), your own writing life demands many processes. Finish your shit, but be flexible in how you do that. Discipline is good, until discipline becomes a prison from which you can’t escape.

Have Adventures

We are what we write and we write what we are, and your life is the fuel that drives your creative engine. Use it. And you’re young, so that means to go out and have adventures. That can mean whatever it can mean — a hike can be an adventure. So can a party. Traveling for me is always an adventure. Also an adventure: waking up in a casket in the Sonoran desert, wearing only rattlesnakes as a thong and a mezcal hangover as a hat.

Go, fill your sails with the wind of life. Which sounds like an overly gassy metaphor, so instead let’s maybe go with: we don’t write only what we know, but we definitely can and should write what we know. It is an opportunity, not a prohibition, and part of that opportunity is going out and EXPERIENCING EXPERIENCES. Whenever anyone questions your judgment or scrutinizes your choices, just say: “It’s for a book.” Then leap into the chasm, cackling.

Hang In There, Goddamnit

A creative life is a bucking horse.  The best thing you can do is commit to hanging on. It throws most people off, and right now, it seems to you like everybody and their mother wants to do what you do. But time will see them fall. The horse will buck and kick them into the fencerow while you still cling to the beast’s froth-slick mane. In writing, stubbornness is a virtue. The first and most important thing is that: just staying with it. Most won’t. So you must.

* * *

Miriam Black Is Back (In Print)

Miriam Black knows how you’re going to die. This makes her daily life a living hell, especially when you can’t do anything about it, or stop trying to. She’s foreseen hundreds of car crashes, heart attacks, strokes, and suicides. She merely needs to touch you—skin to skin contact—and she knows how and when your final moments will occur. Miriam has given up trying to save people; that only makes their deaths happen. But then she hitches a ride with Louis Darling and shakes his hand, and she sees in thirty days that Louis will be murdered while he calls her name. Louis will die because he met her, and Miriam will be the next victim. No matter what she does she can’t save Louis. But if she wants to stay alive, she’ll have to try.

“Fast, ferocious, sharp as a switchblade and fucking fantastic.” — Lauren Beukes

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

ICYMI, I manifested the true power of the Internet and wrote an “open letter” to the intrepid reality stars of Tiny House Hunters, and I have only fallen deeper down the rabbit hole on this show since. I just can’t quit this shit, especially now that I found past episodes on Netflix.

And I thought, hey, if you really wanted to get just tore up, if you wanted to lubricate your soul with flagons of liquor, then you should turn Tiny House Hunters into a drinking game.

(There’s already one for regular ol’ House Hunters, by the by.)

First up, though, you’re gonna need some dranks.

I recommend the Tiny House Iced Tea, which is:

– 1 oz white rum

– 1 oz dark rum

– 1 oz vodka

– 1 oz ginger beer

– 1 oz triple-sec

– 3 oz Coca-Cola

Then pour it all into a 1.5 oz shot glass.

Most of it won’t fit, so you’ll have to slurp the rest off the table and floor with a straw.

Then when you’re proper crunk, barf it up into a composting toilet, and let one of the three dogs you keep in your tiny house drink from the dung bucket in sloppy, claustrophobic misery.

Or, you know, you could just drink hella wine. You do you.

And now, onto the drinking game.

The Rules

When you witness any of these shenanigans on the show, take a drink.

– Whenever someone says, as if totally fucking shocked they’re in a tiny house, “It’s really small.” Variations include: “It’s cramped,” or ironically, “It’s really tiny?”

– Someone bonks their dumb head

– They say they wanna: “simplify,” “downsize,” “save the environment,” or “travel”

– When they end up parking their tiny house on the lawn of some incredulous family member

– “It’s a great starter home,” they say, as if not realizing it’s not so much a home as it is a car, and unlike a house, that motherfucker is going to sink in value like a brick in a lake soon as the tiny house trend-bubble goes ‘pop’

– There is a toilet inside the shower

– The toilet is a composting toilet

– Take two drinks if there’s just a fucking spooky old outhouse

– No sink in the bathroom

– “Where’s the closet?” (answer: this house is a closet)

– Someone wonders where all the appliances are, or asks for a specific appliance (“I need a full-size fridge, a washer and dryer, and a walk-in freezer to store my racks of bison meat.”)

– They see a dorm fridge and stare at it like it’s a cancerous sore

– They ask for something entirely unreasonable for a tiny house, as if this is an episode of MTV’s Cribs and not jerks taking a tour of a 150 square-foot lawnmower shed (“I need an office,” or, “Where is the four-car garage?” or “Where will I keep and train my two Bengal tigers?”)

– For every child, take one drink

– For every pet, take one drink

– If the children or pets look extra-horrified, like they’re imagining being forced to live in an airless and oppressive cubby-hole like a bunch of trapped miners, take an extra drink

– One of the tiny house hunters cannot get down the ladder leading to and from their spacious funerary box SORRY I MEAN “bedroom loft”

– When they figure out that they’re going to have to use that library ladder whenever they get up at night to pee, and that they’re probably just going to pee the bed or try to stunt-piss and aim for the sink — which is doable, because really, it’s right down there

– When someone realizes that the loft bed is basically a chest-crushing, sarcophagal sex-free frottage zone and as soon as you put anything beefier than a ratty blanket up there you’re going to break your nose on the ceiling and then smother to death

– “I was hoping for steps,” because sure, that’s reasonable, why not also wish for a talking pony

– When one of the tiny house hunters is a really tall or wide person and they look like a giant stomping through a child’s playhouse and yet, they still wanna live here I guess

– The real estate agent looks at the camera as if she’s Jim from The Office

– Curtains instead of doors

– Someone says, “There’s no privacy in here,” as if they expect this birdhouse to have a quiet Zen garden or a personal sensory deprivation chamber

– Someone contorts themselves into an improbable and painful human knot trying to prove to everyone that sure, yeah, no, we can totally use this space as a living room or an office or whatever and no ha ha ha I don’t have a leg cramp right now

– HIPSTERS SPOTTED

– When one member of a couple looks like a hostage (“I don’t want to live here, Maureen” “OH WE’RE FUCKING LIVING IN THIS SHIPPING CRATE, BILL, YOU CAN BE SURE OF THAT”)

– Someone says the word “cottage”

– We all collectively realize the house is smaller than the pit Buffalo Bill used for his victims (“IT PUTS THE LOTION IN THE BASKET oh wait we don’t have room for lotions or baskets”)

– You realize you hate these people

– Finish the bottle when you wonder why you’re even watching this show

– Grab another because you just can’t quit AND LOOK AT YOUR CHOICES LOOK AT YOUR LIFE

What I like about macro photography is the ability not only to get close and see the microscopic rendered macroscopic, but also the ability to get so close that what you’re looking at becomes obscured, obfuscated by proximity, and what you get is instead something otherworldly. That is transformative and fascinating to me. And so, I thought, I’ll toss off a few shots at macros that look like they don’t belong on this planet.

BUT FIRST, some quickie-poo updates.

Today is the last day I’m running a sale on some of my e-books. The Gonzo Bundle, featuring eight of my writing books, remains $10 till the end of today. And both Blue Blazes and Hellsblood Bride are both $2.99.

Also, if you haven’t picked up Hyperion #2, well, dangit, it’s out. It features disgusting worms! And an adorable dog! And sinister body horror! And fun banter! And also the page of which I am the most proudest as a writer in comics yet, and really that’s only because Nik Virella did it so awesomely. Nik has done such an epic job on that book. Much love.

I feel like I haven’t mentioned here that Star Wars: Life Debt — the second book in the Aftermath trilogy — has gotten the special excerpt treatment at Entertainment Weekly. For bonus fun, read the comments! (Spoiler warning: don’t read the comments. It’s like looking into the sewer. Nearly all internet comments sections are perfectly represented in this single image.) Anyway! The excerpt has a SPECIAL GUEST, so go clicky clicky.

What else? I’m doing a Star Warsy-themed event in Cherry Hill, NJ on MAY THE 4th (get it?), and it’s a ticketed event, so peep it now while SEXY TIMES WITH ME ARE STILL AVAILABLE wait no not that kind of sexytimes ha ha ha what. But there are VIP tickets, so, you know, wink wink. You get to spend SPECIAL TIME with YOURS TRULY for MAGIC SEXYT… uhh, I mean, a “private catered reception.” Elbow elbow. Saucy pout.

And I think that’s all she wrote.

Time to take a trip to another world.

It’s macro time.

Your task this week is woefully simple. Go to the comments, and deposit into these comments a title for a short story — not the story itself, and nothing in fact beyond the title.

Then, next week, I’ll pick a handful of the best, and we’ll use those as springboards for the next round of stories. Dig it? Good.

You.

Comments section.

A title.

GO.

Due by next Friday, April 29th, noon EST.

[EDIT: Only ONE title per person, please.]