I mean, seriously, Spring, get it together. Yes, sure, you’re thinking, “But Chuck, that’s an image of some nice new growth, and a pretty pretty waterdrop,” and you’d be correct. But the only reason that droplet is so nicely formed is because only an hour before it was fucking frozen because Spring has been hanging out with Winter and learning all the wrong lessons. Now they’re dressing alike and listening to the same music and ugh.

WHATEVER, pssh.

So! What’s up?

I’ll tell you what’s up here — we had a great signing at the Doylestown Bookshop where Kevin launched Scourged and Fran Wilde and I were there as happy cheerleaders, shepherding his new book into the world. (Plus we signed some books too. And drank some whiskey? Shhh.)

Here’s how much I love you — have some photos.

That last picture, by the way, is what you see before you die.

It was a glorious event. There was booze and books and like, 150+ people, and then there were lampchop lollipops and also gin and — well, it was great, and if you weren’t there, then SHAME ON YOUR HOUSE.

So, umm, what else?

I have SECRET NEWS I can’t yet share — I’m told maybe later this month? It involves comics and other things that are awesome. I should also have a cover for WANDERERS here in the next month or two? And VULTURES, too. Otherwise, a reminder that next up I’m at Ravencon (Apr 20-22, my birthday weekend, woo), and then Phoenix Comic Fest at the end of May.

A casual reminder that you can find me on Instagram these days, too, and lately I’ve been posting photos over there FROM MY YOUTH, so if you want to see me as a beardless, cherub-cheeked life-n00b, you can go there and check it out.

That’s all, folks.

*fades to nothing, all that’s left is a robe*

*the robe blows away*

*the robe is blown into traffic where it obscures the windshield of a tractor trailer*

*36-car pileup ensues*

Here’s the challenge this week:

I want you to take the title of one of the following Stephen King books, and write a short story based on it. The trick is, your story should be entirely different — you’re divorcing the title from the novel from whence it came, and writing Your Own Damn Thing. (Bonus points if you assume an entirely different genre — not horror at all.)

Get it? Got it? Good.

Choose a title randomly (random.org) or just pick.

1. The Stand

2. Mr. Mercedes

3. Under the Dome

4. The Shining

5. The Colorado Kid

6. The Talisman

7. The Dead Zone

8. Desperation

9. Bag of Bones

10. The Dark Half

Length: ~1000 words

Due by: Friday, April 13th (oh shit!), noon EST

Write at your online space.

Give us a link below.

Go steal a title.

Last week I did a… let’s be charitable and call it “unhinged” fusillade of tweets about how you, Dear Person, should go forth and —

*clears throat*

*bangs the timpani*

*screams*

DO THE THING.

And I thought, I should really bring that over to the blog. And I should, in turn, answer some KEY CRITICAL QUESTIONS about DOING THE THING.

So, here it is, a Frequently Asked Questions about Doing The Thing. Did anyone actually ask these questions? No! Probably not! Whatever! Quiet, you!

Let us begin.

Q: When should I do the thing?

A: Now. Right now. You should do the thing now. Not tomorrow. Not ten minutes ago. Now.

Q: But I don’t have time right now.

A: Nobody has time. We do not collect time like coins or eggs. Time is water in the river, you gotta reach out and grab a cupful as it passes. Also that’s not a question.

Q: Okay, a question, then: how do I make time for the thing?

A: To once again devolve to semantics, nobody really makes time. You’re not a Time-Shitter, who just prances about, Pooping Temporal Waste everywhere. Time is not feces. It’s a precious resource. You mine it. You steal it. You carve it out of the schist and bedrock.

Q: You just said time was water, and now it’s rock?

A: I’m a writer and therefore I have poetic license. It is a real license for which I applied at a local DMP, aka, the Department of Metaphor and Poetry. The greater point, aside from my poetic deviation, is that time is a thing you must seize for yourself before you die. Because you’re going to die. I’m going to die. The entirety of the Earth is going to die.

Q: This is getting bleak.

A: That is not a question.

Q: Fine, sorry. Why is this getting so bleak?

A: It’s not meant to be bleak, it’s just meant to be a reminder that our lives are a limited resource. We each have an end, and we do not know when that end will be, and so it behooves us to Do The Thing now, not tomorrow, or next week, or next year. Because you may not get tomorrow, or next week, or next year. This may sound bleak, but with a bit of a twist on your perspective, it actually becomes quite empowering. It’s like how a TV show does better when it has a finite number of seasons — Lost versus, say, Breaking Bad. The former had to go on and on as long as ABC kept renewing it, thus forcing the show to streeeeetch its story and parcel out its actual narrative. Breaking Bad was five seasons strong, and that’s because it was able to have a start and an end and know that its narrative had limits. When we recognize that we are expecting an end, we can start to actually make decisions and take actions, which is empowering and freeing rather than floating in some kind of wishy-washy middle limbo.

Q: What is the Thing I should be Doing? Is it writing?

A: It can be. I don’t know, I’m not you. Sure, I sometimes knock you out with ether and dress like you and try to sample your life in fits and starts, but that still doesn’t make me you. Maybe your thing is to write the book, maybe it’s to make a movie, or to tell someone you love them, or to clean your desk or hide a body. I don’t know. Every day we have a whole Menu of Things we can do, and you should do at least one of them, I think, in order of some importance.

Q: Can we go back to the part where you said you ether me and dress like me in order to experience what it is to be me?

A: No, we’re moving on.

Q: Ugh, fine. What if Doing The Thing is hard?

A: Then that’s good.

Q: Why is that good?

A: Because the most difficult things are often the most important. As I’ve said before in this post about Having A Bad Writing Day, it’s supposed to be hard. The most worthwhile things are also, inconveniently, the most challenging things.

Q: What if I’m not ready to Do The Thing?

A: That’s legitimate. Maybe you’re not. I have a book to write and I’m not yet ready to Do The Thing. The last book I had kicking around my head for five years, and I wasn’t ready to write it until I was. But that also doesn’t mean I just sat on my hands and stared at the wall. I found Other Things and Fucking Did Those.

Q: Like what?

A: Well, sometimes it meant writing the book I was ready to write. It also meant devoting supplemental energy to the book in ways — Writing The Book, in my case, is not the sum total of Doing The Thing. The actual authoring of said book is just the visible peak of that iceberg, but a lot of stuff goes into the book. Thinking. Outlining. Researching. More thinking. Stroking my beard. Making hmm sounds, and ahhh and even no, that’s not right. Going to a coffee house and pretending to be an author. You know, shit like that. It’s true of all the Things you must Do that a lot goes into Doing the Thing that isn’t the culmination of the Thing. The trick is not to fall into an oubliette of excuses.

Q: What the hell is an oubliette?

A: Haven’t you ever watched Labyrinth?

Q: I did, but was held rapt by David Bowie’s magic yambag.

A: That’s fair. It was hypnotizing. I wonder if that’s where he gets his crystal balls. Anyway. To answer the question, an oubliette is a pit, a prison, a trap.

Q: What excuses are you talking about, then? 

A: This is one of those really tricky things where a person has to be fairly, authentically honest with themselves. There is a very thin line between giving yourself a undeserved pass (aka, an excuse) and recognizing when you have a real reason to not yet Do The Thing. It’s also the same kind of hazy interstitial terrain between being hard on yourself and going too easy on yourself. I can’t tell you where that line is, or how to navigate that terrain — you just have to, over time, be self-aware and actualized enough to say, “Hey, I need to practice self-care,” versus, “Wow, I’ve been spending a whole lot of time on self-care and not a lot of time on Doing The Thing.” Sometimes, self-care is Doing The Thing, and sometimes it’s just you avoiding Doing The Thing. That calculus is different for all of us.

Q: Wait, I have to learn fucking calculus?

A: Emotional calculus, yes. Not fucking calculus. Fucking calculus is about angles of entry on a fuck chair and the various calculations behind lube.

Q: This is getting weird.

A: It was weird to begin with, you just didn’t realize it. Also, not a question.

Q: What if I don’t know how to Do The Thing?

A: Then you’re in good company. Nobody really knows how to Do The Thing. We’re all just guessing with varying degrees of instinct, luck, and success. I possibly know less how to Do The Thing than when I started.

Q: Isn’t that counterintuitive? Aren’t you going backwards?

A: Nope. Knowing that I know less frees me up to try more things. Believing you know how to exactly Do The Thing puts a lot of pressure on you when actually Doing The Thing. Being free of that knowledge is liberating. It lets you experiment.

Q: Experimenting? Is this a sex thing again?

A: Not unless you want it to be, I guess.

Q: Okay. So. What if I fail to Do The Thing?

A: The only damaging and dangerous failure is quitting before you Do The Thing. Pre-rejecting yourself and prematurely quitting because you suspect you won’t do the thing well is the worst. Otherwise, failure is the greatest teacher and serves as powerful medicine. It isn’t medicine that tastes good, necessarily, but it can become an acquired taste. The other thing is setting reasonable results for yourself. Let the Thing-Doing be the result. Don’t let the reaction to the Thing-Doing be the result. You can control the former. You ain’t got shit to do with the latter. You just Do The Thing as Best As You God Dang Can.

Q: Real-talk, though, the world is very stupid right now. It’s hard to Do The Thing. How do I Do The Thing in the face of such wanton fuckery?

A: It’s an understandable problem. We are at Stupidity Level 99, and turns out, it doesn’t end at Level 99. Here’s the thing, though: Doing The Thing won’t make the world any worse. And it may actually make it a little bit better, be it for you or for an audience or for someone who needs the Thing you Just Did, whether that thing is a book or a webcomic or a declaration of love or a body you need buried. The fuckery is the fuckery. There is persistent fuckery at varying levels of intensity. But the world is still turning. You’re still you. We still need art and love, we still need to work and create and tell truths. The Thing still needs Doing.

Q: So you’re saying I should Do The Thing?

A: You should, indeed, Do The Thing. Because the Thing Needs Doing.

* * *

THE RAPTOR & THE WREN: Miriam Black, Book Five

Miriam Black, in lockstep with death, continues on her quest to control her own fate!

Having been desperate to rid herself of her psychic powers, Miriam now finds herself armed with the solution — a seemingly impossible one. But Miriam’s past is catching up to her, just as she’s trying to leave it behind. A copy-cat killer has caught the public’s attention. An old nemesis is back from the dead. And Louis, the ex she still loves, will commit an unforgivable act if she doesn’t change the future. 

Miriam knows that only a great sacrifice is enough to counter fate. Can she save Louis, stop the killer, and survive? 

Hunted and haunted, Miriam is coming to a crossroads, and nothing is going to stand in her way, not even the Trespasser.

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Kinda love this photo. It is very clearly a toothbrush with intense anxiety. What gives a toothbrush anxiety? It sounds like a joke, but I really don’t know. Plaque? Whatever. (FYI: “Anxiety Toothbrush” is the name of my Jaeger robot in PACIFIC RIM 3.) Point is, I like this photo, and it’s a new macro, so please enjoy it. Or don’t. You’re not my puppet.

OR ARE YOU.

Anyway.

The other day, I took this photo:

And today, I took this photo:

So obviously, spring has been radicalized by winter. Visiting weird Winter Forums and hanging out on Winterstagram. Learning its ways.

Stupid weather.

Also, this photo:

Which, obviously, is a very colorful egg from a very colorful bird.

And now it’s hatching.

OR MAYBE IT IS AN EGG THAT I DYED and uhh, dropped?

Shut up.

So! What’s going on? How’s everybody doing?

Here’s what’s new in Wendigville:

Both Atlanta Burns and its sequel, The Hunt, are on sale in e-book right now at Amazon for $0.99 — which puts the first book as the, erm, #1 seller in Amazon’s Teen & Young Adult Physical & Emotional Abuse Fiction category. Which is a thing that exists, I guess. And is a thing that roughly tells you the tenor of these books, so please: assume a trigger warning for, like, *gestures widely* all the things.

And also reminder that I’ll be joining the mighty Kevin Hearne and freshly-Hugo-nominated Fran Wilde at the Doylestown Bookshop this coming Saturday (Doylestown, PA) at 7PM. Kevin is releasing the newest — and final! — Iron Druid book, so Fran and I are happy to help him celebrate this release. Be there or be frowned upon from a great distance.

I also pitched a new book to my editor at Del Rey, and she seemed to dig it, so I’m off to the races on that one — time to start doing research and plotting a rough outline and imbibing various hallucinogenic draughts. I mean, ha ha, what.

And that’s it for me, folks.

Have an excellent week, and remember:

DO THE THING.

Two words:

“New life.”

Lot of power in those two words, and a lot of ways to interpret them.

I want you to take those two words, and use them as the basis for this week’s challenge — write a story using those two words as a springboard. Again, feel free to get creative — you don’t need to interpret these words in any one way, but however you choose, using whatever genre you like.

Length: ~1000 words

Due by: Friday, April 6th, noon EST

Post at your online space.

Link back here.

See you on the other side.

Captain Talis just wants to keep her airship crew from starving, and maybe scrape up enough cash for some badly needed repairs. When an anonymous client offers a small fortune to root through a pile of atmospheric wreckage, it seems like an easy payday. The job yields an ancient ring, a forbidden secret, and a host of deadly enemies.

Now on the run from cultists with powerful allies, Talis needs to unload the ring as quickly as possible. Her desperate search for a buyer and the fallout from her discovery leads to a planetary battle between a secret society, alien forces, and even the gods themselves.

The Book Won’t Happen Without You

I spent years waiting for a toga-draped muse and Time incarnate to come together in a Wonder Twin powers, Activate! moment. Waited for the clouds to part and light to shine upon my keyboard like it did for King Arthur’s sword. Oddly enough, this never happened.

I waited for vacations and wrote only when I had three or more hours to rub together. I picked and pecked, lost my grip on the plot, and started over multiple times, re-writing new threads of ideas when I began to doubt in what I’d written.

When I engaged a developmental editor and we agreed my malignant tumor of words needed to be put aside to write a new, clean draft, I braced myself for another twelve years of putting this story together. I begged life for more long stretches of Saturday afternoons when I could write and still no such time materialized.

Then I had an odd thought: What if I write every day? What if I get up a bit earlier in the morning, write for an hour before work, and see what happens?

A month later I had a new draft. Four months later I had a revised draft.

I wasn’t writing faster. I was writing consistently for the first time. 1,500- and 2,000-word sessions added up fast. I recorded my writing practice in a YouTube series I call Asimov Hour, which stands as proof that not only was I able to scrape up an hour to write, I also scraped enough minutes together to edit a new video series.

The time didn’t appear to me. I seized it, wrestled it, and pinioned its limbs. I set my alarm earlier, put my ass in the chair, and made lots of tappity on the keyboard.

I’m not saying that everyone needs to write Every. Damned. Day. But for me, consistent effort kept my plot lines moving on a single plane. Claiming time and space to do the work built a habit that became my new normal (two years later, I still put my ass in the chair every morning). Through daily practice, I found that, for me, writer’s block was temporary and writing is less a cosmic orgasm of creative inspiration and more a matter of showing up and doing the work.

Please Stop Revising (Never!)

During those years of inconsistent effort, I believed there was no point engaging the services of a professional editor until I had a mostly perfect, final draft. I wrote and re-wrote, tacking on new ideas, putting friends through the misery of reading multiple versions of the same shipwreck of a story. New threads and new twists would fix existing problems, and I could patch any hole with more plot and more exposition. And I always kept my mind open to changing a major detail, even if it led to me writing everything over. And over. And over.

You might expect that I was heartbroken when the editor I finally hired told me it was time to strip out all that stuff (pretty sure he used a stronger word) and write a clean draft. Twelve years, wasted! I might have moaned, back of hand to my forehead, draped across a settee of emotion.

But instead I felt freed, untethered, given a new chance. It was like a hot shower at the end of a long day of yard work. I could be proud of what I did, only clean and not stinky.

Suddenly I had energy for the novel again. I had guidance, a path laid out for me, an outline free of plot holes, and new purpose.

I don’t think, given a hypothetical time machine, I’d go back and stop myself from writing and re-writing all those drafts. Those were words I had to invest into my craft in order to get better and mistakes I had to make to know what better felt like. But I will say, with one-hundred percent certainty, that getting serious, putting aside my fear, and reaching out for help propelled both my novel and me ahead at full speed.

Still, You Can Revise It If You Need To

While over-revising was definitely my favorite crutch, it also gave me a sense of freedom to write the story without fear of it being too strange or too out-there. My setting is strange. My combination of story elements is improbable. As my publisher has said, publicly, “Nothing in this book should work…” It wasn’t written to market. It wasn’t written to trends. It cracks a whip over the reader’s head right off the start, shattering preconceived expectations, and it never apologizes.

And the only way I could write such a story – to have the grit coarse enough to put this book out there – was to promise myself I could always change it later if I needed to. Could always rein it in if it got too strange. Luckily, the resulting strangeness is the very thing that draws readers to the story.

Lots of details did change. Some elements were revised when they needed to be, pumped up or deflated to better fulfill a few bonus genre expectations. Other things were revised to increase tension or improve world-building. More subtle but no less important changes were made, as well, no matter at what stage in the production we were (and I cannot thank Parvus Press enough for being willing to do right by the story even when it would have been way more convenient to let certain things go). Every change made the story better.

That’s all awesome. All good reasons to revise. Way better than combing back over it one more time just so I didn’t have to do something scary like actually publish the thing. Revisions aren’t a thing I fear. Revisions, admittedly, are a shield I use to defend myself against the things I fear. They’re also the safety harness that made me brave enough to let loose and write an impossible, improbable story, wild, free, and head-strong. And why the entire quote from my publisher is, “Nothing in this book should work and it does and it’s amazing and I love it.”

Characters are People First

One of things I knew, in an unexpressed and intangible way, was that I loved well-rounded characters. I enjoyed villains who thought they were the only one doing the right thing. I loved that their goals were often the same goals the “good guys” had, but that they were willing to do drastically different things to get there. I loved that they needed the exact same building blocks of character that my protag needed.

I love characters that might be real people. Sure, I love a good Skyscraper Action Movie with memorable one-liners, but I love getting to sympathize with their broken marriage and not just the broken glass in their bare feet. Their skill set helps them defeat the antagonist, yes, but their motivations and emotions connect me to their story and make me care whether they win or die trying.

When I wrote intuitively these kinds of characters appeared on the page without much extra effort. But when I followed the outline too closely, worried too much over my world-building, or whether this-or-that steampunk device might work the way I described it, or focused on turns of phrase, I sometimes glossed over who these characters were, what they wanted, and what they were willing to do to get there.

But in my final draft, I allowed my characters’ personalities and motivations to drive the plot instead of my delusions of writerly cleverness. Given agency, my characters made the magic happen on their own, without meddling on my part and the story came together in a gripping, cohesive whole.

Don’t Wait to Behave Like the Writer You Want to Be

It wasn’t patience that allowed me to write for twelve years and still be willing to start over. It was fear. Deep, vagus nerve-level fear, as one might feel for spiders. Out of proportion with the things I was actually afraid of, it elevated my emotional reaction from a shrug to a scream. Fear of the simple unknown became terror that I’d release the book, be found out as a fraud, and be laughed all the way back into obscurity where I belonged. It kept me hemming and hawing over the plot, the characters, the world, the production plans. Kept me from moving forward until everything the was perfect: the words, the cover, the weather, my health, the economy, the computer I wrote on. These details were an excellent shelter for my fears. They piled up to hide me and kept me safe.

Except in being safe, I was unpublished. My ultimate, primary goal – to get my story out there and find readers who get as excited about it as I do – could not happen as long as I remained safely swaddled in the self-protective behavior those fears inspired in me. I had to take the risk, jump, go, go, go. Put my arms up and run through the cobwebs no matter how horrifying the thought of spiders in my hair or how awful the feeling of their sticky silk clinging to my face and arms.

Now? I’m still me. I still worry about my mask being pulled off by meddling kids. But I don’t let it stop me. Not because I’m suddenly brave, but because I discovered what can happen when I choose to live as the version of me that I want to be true. The version of me who has Wendig-quantities of books to her name. The version who makes a living off her writing. The version with passionate readers who get excited over her new releases.

Only premonitions of these things are true today, but if I want them to be my reality, I can’t let fear convince me that they never will be. I’m a writer, so I write. I’m a published author, so I finish the books and release them into the wild.

* * *

R J THEODORE is hellbent on keeping herself busy. Seriously folks, if she has two spare minutes to rub together at the end of the day, she invents a new project with which to occupy them.

She lives in New England with her family, enjoys design, illustration, podcasting, binging on many forms of visual and written media, napping with her cats, and cooking. She is passionate about art and coffee.

Book One of the Peridot Shift series (Parvus Press), FLOTSAM is Theodore’s debut science fiction novel, available now in print, digital, and audio.

R J Theodore: Website | Twitter | Facebook

FLOTSAM: Excerpt | Amazon | B&N | Kobo | iBooks | IndieBound