Apple-Obsessed Author Fella
Yammerings and Babblings
Last week, we crowdsourced your essential epic fantasy reads.
This week? It’s noir.
Why? I dunno. BECAUSE THE BLACKNESS OF MY HEART DEMANDS IT.
What is noir? That’s for you to tell me. Discuss it amongst yourselves.
Here’s the trick: in the comments, you drop your three most essential noir reads. They don’t need to be “classics,” but they should ostensibly get across the message — from you! — that says, “This is what I think noir is.” That’s your job. See you in the comments section.
Last week’s challenge: Spin the Wheel of Conflict.
I’m writing a serial right now, a story called “The Forever Endeavor” (read the first part for free at Tor.com), and one of the tricks with writing a serial is getting people invested enough to read the second part. And thus one might embrace the art of the cliffhanger — in pulp terms, the protagonist or another character is dangling over the edge of the cliff. Their fate, certified by doom. And then the next chapter reveals how they got out of such a sticky wicket.
You dangle them from the cliff. You save them from the cliff.
Doom? Salvation.
Question? Answer.
That’s the barebones idea, of course — cliffhangers can have way more nuance, and can be more emotional than physical, too. The end of a marriage! The pull of a trigger! The press of a forbidden button! The goal of the cliffhanger is to walk the audience right up to the edge of uncertainty and then leave them there, jaw dropped, unsure what could come next. It’s a sharp shock — and the only medicine is to read to the next chapter.
I wanna play with that idea, here.
Here’s what you’re going to do:
You’re going to write an unfinished story.
Around 1000 words that leads to a cliffhanger of some kind.
Then, next week, we’ll pick up in part two —
Where someone else may write the end of your story.
You’re writing, in a sense, to entice another writer to want to complete the second half of your tale. To answer the cliffhanger, to be the one who saves the day, solves the mystery.
Like I said: ~1000 words.
Post at your online space. Link back here so we can read it.
Due by next Friday, 9/27, by noon EST.
They were like “HEY DO YOU WANT TO INTERVIEW ANSON TROUT” and I was like, “The guy from Happy Days?” and they were like “NO THE GUY WHO WROTE THOSE COOL URBAN FANTASY BOOKS” and I was like, “You mean Anton Strout,” and they were like “THAT’S WHAT WE SAID, STUPID.” Needless to say, it’s a no-brainer to have the lovely Mister Strout here. Please to enjoy as he answers questions about Stonecast:
I have been told by some I am the anti-Wendig, by those who know us both. Which sucks because you keep posting really profound things about writing that I can never quite articulate myself, but they are so on the money! So if I’m the anti-you… then I guess I post profound pity things about writing!
When not overthinking this comparison I somehow manage to write me some quirky urban fantasy because the pain of missing Buffy & Angel runs too deep still. I’ve discovered the soothing balm of Supernatural, which is helping…
Damn you. Hmm…
A female Spellmason, D&D nerd, & a glaive guisarme wielding dancer struggle to find the whereabouts of a gargoyle once sworn to protect them
There is a store about three blocks from my office at Penguin… I found it under Gargoyles Cartoon Fan Fiction.
Actually, the whole Spellmason Chronicles stemmed from a one shot short story I did for an urban fantasy. As with most shorts, you’re really capturing a moment in time. There’s usually a before and after that the author must know to color the tale, but it doesn’t get written. In creating the short Stanis, I discovered when I was finished that there was more I wanted to tell about the world I had created. I ran it up the flagpole at Ace, and they went for it… the fools!
Well, first of all, Joss Whedon keeps refusing to take my calls to collaborate! I find this an unsettling trend. The whole reason I got into writing was because I found no one was telling exactly the type of stories I wanted to be reading. Yes, there’s a lot of books out there that I love, but I felt that there was a vacuum, and I was the suck to fill that vacuum! Or something like that…
For a long time I called my Simon Canderous series a sort of Diet Dresden Files, but now that I’m working on book three of my second series, I find I can’t quite compare myself to other books. Not that I’m incomparable. I just think I’m… me. I write stories mostly set in the modern world where the only reaction to the shambling horrors out there is to either scream or meta-deconstruct them with a reference about Hogwarts or the Beholder from Dungeons & Dragons.
Probably handling the two first person narrators to the tale. One is a gargoyle that’s been around since the 1800s, and the other is a twentysomething artist caught up in her family’s true legacy. Keeping the voices of the two unique and separate was a challenge. The gargoyle, Stanis, doesn’t get modern or idiomatic language, doesn’t contract his words. There’s a sad, quiet stoicism to him that I’ve come to enjoy writing from his perspective. Alexandra Belarus, our heroine, is a child of our times… her language has a different almost cinematic flow to it. And somehow I have to make these two perspectives thread each other to create one cohesive narrative… it’s certainly one of the most daunting tasks I’ve put upon myself.
How to cry a lot…? The lessons I learn along the way are rarely obvious to me. Occassionally in retrospect I can see it, but not always. In the case of Stonecast I think I learned subtlety. I have had a tendency in my fiction to overstate things for fear the audience would miss it if I didn’t put a spotlight on it. And then a second and third spotlight. My editor has been beating that out of me for years. With writing the dual first person narratives I’ve had to work at the craft of implying things so that narrative 1+narrative 2= narrative 3, where narrative 3 is something I never actually wrote on the page.
What’s not to love?! It has all sorts of things that I am thrilled to have in one book. I got to include alchemy and witchcraft and Dungeons and Dragons references… I even have a tiny brick golem named Bricksley who waddles around doing chores. Oh, and tons of gargoyle-y action.
I’ve had time management issues on my last two books. It’s led to a lot of panic writing, which causes burst of inspiration all its own. I need to get myself back onto a more regular schedule. Having twins in May is REALLY helping with that. *cries* Actually, what helps is reading a lot of what you post online about write. It makes me feel less crazy, or at least there are other people banging their heads on the padded walls just like me. Comparatively, I feel like a whiny bitch… which is usually when I get motivated again.
“Hey,” she said, raking her blade in sparks against the brick golem. “We used to wish there to be magic in the world, and we got it.”
“I’m not asking for much,” I said. “Just some real instruction. A Dumbledore, a Snape . . . hell, I’d even take a Trelawney right about now.”
I’m under deadline through the end of the year on The Spellmason Chronicles 3, but I’d really like to fit in more work on a half finished young adult book I call my Dickensian Steampunk Voltron Iron Man novel. And there’s a gnawing idea for a graphic novel burrowing into my head… I need to teach my newborn twins to pick up some of the slack, dammit!
I get a lot of books to potentially blurb these days, and I’d love to hug and squeeze each book to my bosom and blurb them unabashedly, but I’m a slow-ass reader. And already writing four books in the next 12 months. So, when Tor said, “Hey, maybe you blurb this book?” and they waved Victoria Schwab’s book Vicious at me, I told them the same thing I tell everyone else: if I have time, and if I really love it. And I expected neither of those things would come true. I was wrong. So wrong. It was one of those books I opened, and it was like a hand around my neck that yanked me into the story. (My blurb, by the way: “An epic collision of super-powered nemeses. The writing and storycraft is Schwab’s own superpower as this tale leaps off the page in all its dark, four-color comic-book glory.”) Vicious comes out next week. You want to read this.
I have no idea. It’s always the first question asked and it usually leads to “Oh god, who AM I?” and that leads to drinking…tea, of course. But existential crises aside, I’m the product of a British mother, a Beverly Hills father, and a southern upbringing. I’m a 26-year-old superwholockian who likes to write about dark things. I have two YA books on shelves right now (THE NEAR WITCH, about a village where children start to disappear, and THE ARCHIVED, about a library of the dead) and my first adult novel, a supervillain origin story called VICIOUS, hits shelves this week!
Two pre-med students discover the key to superpowers—near-death experiences—and set out to create their own abilities. It doesn’t end well.
I’ve always wanted to write about superpowers, but VICIOUS actually started out as someone else’s story. Originally, this guy with superpowers came to this city called Merit and was recruited by two rival groups, one that called themselves heroes, and the other that called themselves villains simply because they were on the other side. In writing about those two groups, I became fascinated by two things: 1) the leaders of the respective groups, Victor and Eli, and why they hated each other, and 2) the idea that the labels hero and villain had nothing to do with whether these people were good or bad. They were just opposed.
Everything else got trashed and I started again, this time looking at Victor and Eli and how they got to be arch-nemeses, how Eli came to be thought of as a hero, making Victor automatically the villain. I wanted to explore what happens when you take the meaning out of those words. Who do you root for?
It’s pretty sick and twisted, that dark funny where you feel like maybe you shouldn’t be laughing, and I think that’s very much my own personality coming through. Also I studied hero/villain archetypes in college, and have always been fascinated with the gray between, the Anti. And my editor and I joke that Victor is my sociopathic supervillain alter ego, so this book is pretty much made up of me. But most of all, at its heart, this book is me because it’s mine. I wrote it over the course of two years, in between other deadlines, and I did it entirely for me. It was everything I wanted as a reader and as a writer, and while I’m so very excited to now be sharing it with others, it is more mine than anything else I’ve ever written.
Coming off of THE ARCHIVED, which is an intensely emotional book, I’m used to giving emotional answers, about having to live out my characters’ grief, etc. But VICIOUS is in many ways a purposefully unemotional book. Our main character, Victor, is a sociopath. There is a level of remove (it’s not the kind, hopefully, that makes you as a reader care less, everything just has a careful distance), and so the hardest part of writing a book was, for once, not the emotional component.
The hardest thing about VICIOUS was making the craft element feel invisible, effortless. From a construction standpoint, the book is a puzzle. It’s a braided narrative, five POVs—two main, two secondary, and one tertiary—twisting across a decade-long window. Making it move the way it needs to was no small feat. And then there was the actual logic between the superpowers. No radioactive goo for me. I wanted a medical foundation that was intuitive and compelling, something the reader could see actually happening. Those two components (I know, I cheated and said two, but we can put them under the craft blanket) were the hardest.
That the trick is not in finding ways to kill characters, but in finding ways to bring them back in one piece.
I love that even though there are no heroes, you will root for someone. I love that even though it’s emotionally detached, you will care about the characters. I love that after almost three years with these characters, I still love them. It is the only thing I’ve EVER written that I re-read for fun, and because I miss them.
Nothing. Honestly.
“The moments that define lives aren’t always obvious. They don’t scream LEDGE, and nine times out of ten there’s no rope to duck under, no line to cross, no blood pact, no official letter on fancy paper. They aren’t always protracted, heavy with meaning. Between one sip and the next, Victor made the biggest mistake of his life, and it was made of nothing more than one line. Three small words. “I’ll go first.”
The second book in my ARCHIVED series, THE UNBOUND, comes out in January, I have a Middle Grade series about a Doctor Who/Peter Pan-esque guardian angel—EVERYDAY ANGEL—kicking off with Scholastic next summer, and a brand new adult book full of magic and Londons (yes, plural) and cross-dressing pirates hitting shelves next fall. If I finish writing it in time. I guess I should get back to work!
V.E. Schwab: Website / Twitter
Vicious (9/24/13): Amazon / B&N / Indiebound
Ahem.
I will be at the Free Library of Philadelphia (Joseph E. Coleman Northwest Regional) on Saturday! You’ll be there. Don’t disappoint me. OR WE’LL DISCUSS YOU IN YOUR ABSENCE.
Details:
Wendig has been nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer of science fiction or fantasy for his first Miriam Black novel, Blackbirds, described in The Financial Times as “… a splendidly profane slice of urban fantasy – hard, dark and fast… a black comedy that even the Grim Reaper could smile at.” Other well-received recent books are Mockingbirds and Blue Blazes.
Wendig will talk about his books, especially about the origins of his recently published young adult science fiction novel, Under the Empyrean Sky, the first book in the Heartland trilogy, which Kirkus Reviews called “A chilling post-apocalyptic adventure set on an Earth devastated by poor agricultural practices…A thoroughly imagined environmental nightmare with taut pacing and compelling characters that will leave readers eager for more.”
He will also talk about writing, as he is well-known for his witty, profane, and very practical advice to writers, which he dispenses at his blog, terribleminds.com, and through several popular e-books. A collection of this advice will be published as a paperback in November 2013: The Kick-Ass Writer: 1001 Ways to Write Great Fiction, Get Published, and Earn Your Audience.
Bring your copy of Chuck’s books and he will sign it for you after his talk!
So, as you may recall, I am writing a serialized story for Fireside Fiction Company.
That story is “The Forever Endeavor.” It’s about, as I put it before, a man who finds a very special box with a very special button that does a—well, obviously, a very special thing.
To get full access to all the serial chapters, you need to subscribe to Fireside.
However, were you wanting to read the first installment, well — Tor.com has you covered.
Please also note that the stories are illustrated by none other than (ahem) HUGO-AWARD-WINNING ARTIST, GALEN DARA. *puffs out chest proudly*
Written by Campbell-nominated me. Illustrated by Hugo-winning Galen Dara.
First installment: free.
Rest: awaiting your clickies.
*stares*
