Since Election Day 2016, there’s been a steady stream of comments and memes on social media comparing the United States to [fill in your favorite/popular/overhyped dystopian fiction]. From Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu to cracks about the Hunger Games, just when we thought dystopian fiction had worn out its welcome and it’s finally time for sexy yetis or magical narwhals or whatever to be the Next Big Thing, the world changed dramatically almost overnight, and now we cling to those dystopian books as more than escapist fantasies—they’re primers for dealing with daily life and planning the revolution.

2016: Trump won’t win.

2017: President Trump can’t do that, can he?

2018: You watching The Hunger Games tonight? I hope my District wins.

— Eric Smith (@ericsmithrocks) March 2, 2016

Or maybe people are just reaching for the easy jokes. But good comedy is usually based at least partly in truth, and humor is a longstanding coping strategy when things get completely awful. All kidding aside, for an increasing number of people living in America, things are getting pretty bad. The worst. People are literally dying as a result of the choices our current administration is making every day. If a self-interested, likely corrupt and compromised government hell-bent on disenfranchising, deporting, discrediting, dehumanizing, and outright killing its own citizens isn’t a dystopia, then I don’t know what is. So, perhaps we cling to dystopian stories now because as bad as things are, at least it isn’t quite that bad yet—or to help us prepare for what’s coming—just as children and teens read young adult fiction to get a preview of the embarrassment, relationships, and challenges that lie ahead for them.

These days, for many years now, dystopian fiction and YA go hand in hand. There are lots of reasons for that—high school is a kind of dystopia, adults are the establishment, and so on—and consequently in the early days of 2017, many people, including myself, made references to waiting for teenagers to save the world.

Contrary to some comments I’ve seen: I’m glad my friends and I have kids. We’re gonna need teen protagonists to fix this dystopia we built.

— E. C. Myers (@ecmyers) November 9, 2016

Again, going for the easy punchline, but with an underlying flavor of truth. It makes sense that young adults would gravitate towards stories where teens tackle gross social injustice and change the world for the better, while picking up a boyfriend or girlfriend or two along the way. But a tremendous number of not-so-young adults are also reading this stuff, and always have been. Depending on who you ask on a given day, upwards of fifty percent of YA sales are to grownups. What’s up with that? What could possibly be of interest in these books for people on the wrong side of high school graduation?

The heart of good YA fiction is a character learning about their world and figuring out how they fit into it, and that doesn’t stop once you become an adult with student loans and mortgages, jobs and children of your own—and a world filled with big, seemingly impossible problems to solve like climate change and expensive healthcare and rampant sexual harassment and too many subscription services for streaming video. Back in the golden, olden days, when the world lived on the brink of nuclear war, people tended to stay in the same job for their whole lives. But these days, it’s more common for people to change jobs every few years, maybe go back to school for a graduate degree, live on unemployment for a while, start their own business, and so on. We are all constantly reinventing ourselves as we find new places for ourselves in a changing world. Newsflash: adults don’t have their acts together any more than teens do, and we’re desperately searching for meaning and purpose in our lives. Yeah, we can still relate to YA fiction, and we need escapism more than ever.

But another key element of YA fiction, especially dystopian YA fiction, is that one person—or perhaps a band of preternaturally beautiful, scrappy, snarky teens—can make a difference, albeit often at great personal sacrifice. They can change the world. They can save the whole damn world. And that’s what all those jokes are about. We need that kind of optimism right now. Only just as your average YA protagonist can’t wait for adults to come along to make everything better, it turns out that we can’t wait for our kids to grow up and fix our mistakes.

Okay, so what does all this have to do with ReMade? Fortunately, the teens in our series were killed before the 2016 presidential election, though they awakened in a distant future that clearly has seen its share of dystopias and is deadly in its own right, what with the lack of food and a surplus of killer robots. They have literally been remade—faster, better, stronger—and now, with the entire future they had planned lost to them forever, along with their friends, family, iPhones, and Instagram, most of them seize the rare opportunity to change their identity. Realizing that no one is coming to save them and there’s no going back to the way things were, they rise to the challenge of surviving and saving the world.

And I’m seeing that happening now in America. A year after the election, people have stepped up in surprising, inspiring ways. Many who hate talking on the phone and to strangers have called their representatives, sent e-mails and letters, marched around the country for what they believe in. People who never had any interest in politics are running for office—and winning! People are subscribing to and reading freaking newspapers again, which has to be a sign of the apocalypse. People are speaking up and speaking out against institutional racism and harassment, raising funds for human rights organizations and disaster relief. People are voting, even for local elections. If the America we know died on the night of January 20, 2017, then we have the opportunity to remake it, and ourselves and decide what kind of a nation we want to be.

So imagine this farfetched scenario. Your parents are absent or dead. You’ve just realized or accepted that the world is an ugly place and you can’t trust your own leaders. You’re under constant surveillance, manipulated by social media, and more people are suffering and dying every day. The polar ice caps are melting. What are you going to do?

We are each the protagonist of this dystopian nonfiction. Forget about making America great again, whatever that means. It’s always had room for improvement. Let’s work together to remake it better than ever. No one is coming to save us, and it’s up to us the save the damn world.

* * *

E.C. Myers: assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts and raised by a single mother and the public library in Yonkers, New York. He has published numerous short stories and four young adult books: the Andre Norton Award–winning Fair Coin, Quantum Coin, The Silence of Six, and Against All Silence.

His most recent work includes contributions to anthologies Feral Youth, Behind the Song, Where the Stars Rise, and A Thousand Beginnings and Endings(forthcoming). He is also co-writing the YA science fiction serial ReMade for Serial Box Publishing, which begins its second season on 11/15/17. You can find traces of him all over the internet, but especially at http://ecmyers.net and on Twitter: @ecmyers.

E.C. Myers: Website | Twitter

ReMade: Read @ Serial Box

I was a teenager in New York City in the 1980s. My parents were artists, and I was queer. Which meant that, by the time I was 15 years old, almost everything in my world – from school reading assignments to dinner conversations — was about AIDS. AIDS and my bisexuality didn’t feel separable any more than AIDS and art did. I spent a lot of those years, and the ones that followed in university, lying to my parents and fighting our government. And in all the books I read, everyone always died.

When I first encountered Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint in the 1990s, it was lent to me by a suitor with little explanation. I read it, somewhat dutifully (I love when people recommend books to me, I less enjoy the time pressure of having them lent to me), with a constant startlement.  Wait, I’d ask, are those guys dating?!? I had to keep flipping backwards and starting scenes over to be sure I was reading what I thought I was reading.

Some of that disbelief in my own comprehension was a product of the time; I was not familiar with queer narratives that weren’t about AIDS. I hadn’t read any, I hadn’t seen any, and, to a large extent, I hadn’t experienced any either. But Swordspoint, of course, isn’t set in our world. And Ellen’s deftness as a writer means that the world she created was saturated with a constant overt queerness that was always never announced. In the neighborhoods of her unnamed city in an unnamed land, same-sex attraction is so normalized and bisexuality is so ubiquitous, terms for them don’t even seem to exist.

But this queerness has not been, in many ways, what makes the world of Riverside (the city may not get a name, but its most infamous neighborhood certainly does), so remarkable. More, for me, it is the amalgam of time periods and class-related dilemmas that so reflect the New York I grew up in. In the world of Riverside everyone is brash, everyone is proud, and everyone is just trying to survive their particular and peculiar dilemmas.

These days, Swordspoint is anything but a historical artifact of when I first saw queerness without loss in fiction. Tremontaine, Serial Box Publishing’s serialized prequel to the World of Riverside books is now in its third season. Created and led by Ellen Kushner and with a team of writers, Tremontaine explores the City fifteen years before readers first found it.

While all of us are working within a set of existing rules created by the Riverside books and stories – Tremontaine represents a number of peculiar freedoms for each of us on the team. The collaborative nature of the process, based on a TV writers room, means we never have to suffer in solitude with challenging first draft, an abrupt case of writer’s block, or a sudden inability to find just the right word. But because of the source material — and Serial Box’s commitment to underserved voices — Tremontaine also means we never, ever have to worry about having too many queer characters.

In fact, queerness is so the overwhelming default in Tremontaine that the writing team (which is also significantly skewed towards queerness) occasionally has to be reminded to let a character or two be straight.

Freed from the constraints of our world, we don’t have to note that a character enjoys relationships with multiple genders before portraying those relationships. No one ever has to write a coming out scene. Our villains can be queer because our heroes can be queer. And, perhaps most importantly for our proclivities as writers, we can be as tragic and murderous as we want, because none of our characters ever die for being queer. In the world of Riverside, that’s just not possible.

Growing up as I did, the legacy of the AIDS era as reflected both implicitly and explicitly in queer creative work is incredibly important to me. I often argue with younger people about the need for both a freedom from our tragic stories as well as an ongoing acceptance of their necessary reality. It is 100% true that people – of all identities – need to see queer heroes and queer victories. It is also 100% true that the history of villains and tragedy in queer art created by queer people is not one that should be excised from the cultural narrative.

People who have lived those losses, and those fears, remain right here among us. I’m even one of them. Several people on the Tremontaine team are. While those stories are largely long ago and far away both personally and from the world of Tremontaine, they are not absent.

When I first read Swordspoint in my early-20s, it was revolutionary for me. While queer characters now abound in the books I read and the books I write, the world of Riverside as it has been expanded through Tremontaine remains special. For we have always been there just as we have always been here.

But in there, in that unnamed City, in our queernesses we are also always safe and never sick. We hope you’ll join us there in ambition and adventure.

* * *

Racheline Maltese can fly a plane, sail a boat, and ride a horse, but has no idea how to drive a car. With Erin McRae she writes romance about fame and public life. She is also a producer and writer on Tremontaine, Serial Box Publishing’s adventure of manners, swordplay, and chocolate that’s a prequel to Ellen Kushner’s gay lit classic, Swordspoint. 

Racheline Maltese: Website | Twitter

Tremontaine: Read @ Serial Box

Yesterday, a literary agent on Twitter stepped into a big pile of Twitter poop. One assumes this agent meant well. He, the agent who shall remain nameless as he has since deleted his tweet, popped on with a bit of intense, over-the-top writing wisdom (“wisdom”) that said, paraphrased, cut out all of the adverbs and adjectives from your book. All of them. Every last one of those little motherfuckers — axe ’em. They are ill beasts to be put down.

My response, was of course, to go even bigger:

DELETE ALL REFERENCES TO PLACE AND TIME IN YOUR BOOK. ALL OF THEM. GET RID. YOUR BOOK SHOULD FEEL TIMELESS AND AS IF IT IS FLOATING IN THE NETHERVOID.

DELETE ALL NAMES IN YOUR BOOK. EVERY LAST ONE. PURGE THEM. NAMES MARK US AS INDIVIDUAL BEINGS AND TRUE STORYTELLERS KNOW THAT WE ARE ALL ONE TERRIBLE, NAMELESS ENTITY.

PUNCTUATION IS A CRUEL VIOLATION OF THE SACRED WHITE SPACE OF THE PAGE, AND TO SUMMON READERS YOU MUST ELIMINATE ALL PUNCTUATION. BE SHUT OF THESE HUMAN, FLESHBAG NEEDS. YOUR READERS WILL THANK YOU IN DREAD ULULATIONS

SOON YOUR WORK WILL BECOME TRULY SUBLIME. YOU WILL HAVE CUT OUT THE FAT. AND THE TENDON. YOU WILL HAVE BECOME RID OF THE RUINED MEAT OF EXISTENCE. THE BOOK MUST BECOME ONLY BONE. SHARP, HEART-KILLING BONE.

REMOVE ALL WORDS FROM YOUR BOOK. GET. RID. OF. WORDS. THE BOOK MUST BECOME A SERIES OF GRUNTS AND ANGRY GAZES. THAT IS HOW YOU WRITE A BESTSELLER. YOUR BOOK IS A DEFIANT, WORLD-CLEANSING WIND. IT IS THE GASP OF A DYING GOD. THE FLASH OF A STAR IMPLODING.

And of course, that’s all very bad advice.

It’s very bad advice because there exists this occasional movement toward severe austerity cuts inside fiction, as if every bit of prose should be cut down to the bone, and then the bone whittled to a spear that can be thrust cleanly through the reader’s heart. There’s nothing wrong with austerity in prose, if it’s what you seek and if it’s what the story demands. There’s also nothing wrong with adding fat to the prose in the form of descriptive language. One’s voice as an author and in terms of the book you’re writing is useful, even vital, to preserve; I often note that originality in fiction is utter bullshit, except in the area where it really matters, which is to say, YOU. You, the author, are the one original component that can be brought to a story. Your ideas. Your fears. Your preferred arrangement of elements. And, obviously, your voice.

Now, that’s not to say that BUT IT’S MAH VOICE is a good reason to keep bad writing. Bad writing is bad. But bad writing does not mean, “writing that includes adverbs and adjectives.”

Adjectives and adverbs should be kept when they are impactful and provide clarity to the narrative. Use them with intentionality. Use them because without them, the work cannot be properly conveyed. Removing adjectives will force us not to describe things, and while over-describing things is bad, describing essential parts of the story is just fine. We want the reader to know what they’re seeing. And never mind the fact that the constant tolling of the anti-adverb bell always seems to misunderstand that adverbs don’t just mean SHE RAN OVERLY SORROWFULLY THROUGH THE GARDEN, it also means words like “later,” or “everywhere,” or “never” or “alone.” And so the advice really should be, don’t use adverbs or adjectives when they sound awkward, or when they fail to tell us something that we need to know.

All this goes toward the old chestnut of SHOW, DON’T TELL in fiction. But even that is an oft-misunderstood chestnut, innit?  SHOW DON’T TELL is half-nonsense because, spoiler warning, you’re always telling a story. It’s why it’s called storytelling. It’s why your book isn’t a fucking movie. You must use words to — oh no — tell it. SHOW DON’T TELL isn’t a rule; it’s a trick. You’re trying to trick the reader into feeling like they’re being shown a thing rather than told a thing. Which is fine and admirable to attempt.

Whatever.

All this, really, is beside the point.

The point today is that you should beware writing advice from people with power inside the publishing industry — which, I know, sounds terribly counterintuitive. But please, follow the bouncing ball of my logic:

Writing advice, as I am wont to note, is bullshit.

And yet, I give it. I give it because I like to think about this stuff and talk about this stuff and often talking about writing helps me unpack the problems I’m having with writing. So, yes, writing advice is bullshit. Bullshit can fertilize; it has value. But you still gotta know that it’s bullshit. I also increasingly like to make clear that writing advice is nothing more than giving an opinion, and it is similar to the opinion as to how one should wear their hair or parent their child: while there are a few cardinal rules, for the most part, it’s DO WHATEVER THE HELL YOU LIKE, BECAUSE WHATEVER WORKS IS WHATEVER WORKS.

Nearly every piece of writing advice can be taken, tested, and found wrong. Because inevitably there exists a novel — a popular novel, either bestseller or an award-winner or both — that does exactly the thing you’re Not Supposed To Do. Or it doesn’t do the thing that Everyone Is Supposed To Do. Novels break the rules all the time because ultimately, no rules exist. (The one rule that does exist is that you must finish your shit. A book can never exist until you finish it, and so all books pass that indestructible law.)

The problem is when people inside the industry — writers, yes, but more notably editors and agents and other publishing folk — make declarative statements about writing and style and story without first letting people know, “This is my preference, not an ironclad rule.” Newer writers, aka LI’L BABY PENMONKEYS WANDERING THE DARK WOODS OUTSIDE WRITERTOWN, take this shit as Golden Law. They accept it to have been given from On High, and so now it is Sacred, even though it’s no more sacred than the steaming load that falls out of a bull’s ass.

So, I just want to note that you should be wary of writing advice from people inside publishing — not that you should dismiss it or disregard it. To the contrary, you should try using the bullshit to fertilize your own narrative fields, and see if anything grows there. But take nothing as chiseled into stone. Make no assumptions about the indefatigability and righteousness of their advice. It’s just advice. They’re just telling you how they prefer you wear your hair. But they also don’t know. For every bit of writing wisdom they believe that they believe, they will probably have that faith tested — and defeated — again and again, because what works works, and what doesn’t, doesn’t.

If you’re a person inside publishing giving out writing advice, try to be cautious how you frame it. I’ve grown increasingly aware that the impact of my assertions can be dangerous; indeed, what works for you, what you like, may help someone. But it may set others off the path, and the best thing you can do is to frame your advice with a lot of flex in the joints, ensuring that people know full-well that what you’re offering is only your opinion, and nothing more.

NOW PLEASE GO AND READ MY BOOK ABOUT STORYTELLING

see, that’s how you pivot to sweet, sweet marketing, everyone

*beams*

* * *

DAMN FINE STORY: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

What do Luke Skywalker, John McClane, and a lonely dog on Ho’okipa Beach have in common? Simply put, we care about them.

Great storytelling is making readers care about your characters, the choices they make, and what happens to them. It’s making your audience feel the tension and emotion of a situation right alongside your protagonist. And to tell a damn fine story, you need to understand why and how that caring happens.

Whether you’re writing a novel, screenplay, video game, or comic, this funny and informative guide is chock-full of examples about the art and craft of storytelling–and how to write a damn fine story of your own.

Out now!

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

As you may well know, I sell an ART HARDER, MOTHERFUCKER mug through the Zazzle store, and today, for some reason, the mug is on sale for like, 60% off. You get that discount, you simply click here and then use the coupon code ZHOLIDAYSAVE.

That coupon code also works on the clean version of the mug, though why you would ever want a coffee mug that doesn’t curse at you is beyond me.

And there are other mugs, too:

Certified Penmonkey

Caffeine, Motherfucker, Do You Speak It?

Writer Juice

And finally, the Secret to Writing mug.

All open to that 60% off with ZHOLIDAYSAVE.

Just putting that out there if you require gift ideas for the Penmonkey in your life.

Whilst in Florida, we went to the J.N. Ding Darling Wildlife Preserve on Sanibel Island, and I saw a bird — a white ibis, I believe — fishing at low tide. The bird stabbed into the water and withdrew what looked to be a fish, though upon closer examination, that’s a weird fish. I’m sure it is a fish, and I’m sure it’s not a cryptozoological find, but — well, take a look and tell me what you see.

(Note: click the pic to embiggen it.)

Here’s another bird — a snowy egret:

Let’s see, what else is going on?

WELL, tomorrow Alabama tries to elect a credibly-alleged child molester, so that’s fun. And the FCC is voting to dismantle Net Neutrality, which may one day mean you won’t be able to reach this website unless you pay more or I sign up with some special host or — well, the possibilities there are endless, but do understand that Net Neutrality going away means your Internet experience will suddenly be a lot more like your Cable TV experience. As with all things, call your reps, make noise, use 5calls.org, use Resistbot, whatever you gotta do.

Couple of my books this week are getting the EL CHEAPO e-book treatment

Atlanta Burns

Atlanta Burns: The Hunt

Each is $0.99.

Note, these are trigger warning-laden. Assume there’s a lotta dark-bad stuff going on in these books. But, as a bonus, there’s also a lot of punching and shooting small-town Nazis, so?

Also, if you’ve read any of my books, leaving a review of said books is a super helpful thing you can do. Especially with a book like Damn Fine Story, whose sales are strong, but who could use more reviews on a site like Amazon.

Is there more going on?

I DUNNO, PROBABLY.

At the end of the week is The Last Jedi, which I’m deeply geeked for, and contrary to people’s beliefs, I know literally nothing about the movie. I mean, no more than the average individual; I am no longer privy to Special Secret Star Wars Stuff. (Well, at least, nothing related to this movie.) I’m just a regular Citizen of the GFFA, folks.

Also, if you spoil the movie for anybody, you will be thrown into the Mighty Sarlacc, where you will be digested blah blah blah thousand years blah blah blah angry desert tentacle butthole.

Have a nice Monday!