WELL, SOMEBODY WAS HUNGRY.

I encourage you to read the sordid tale of The Mantis And Two Ants, which begins with this tweet right here on my tweetypants timeline.

I also really like this photo:

I took off my shoe the other day and found a teeny little snail shell in it. So I put the snail shell on the edge of my sink and said, “I should take a photo of that shell because, hey, snail shells are cool.” When I returned, I saw that the shell was still a home for this little goober.

Then I ate him.

*crunch crunch crunch*

OKAY NO FINE I put him outside, sheesh.

Let’s see, what else is going on?

I’m sick, so that’s fun. CHILDREN ARE NEVER-ENDING PLAGUE FACTORIES, JUST SPEWING BACTERIA AND VIRUSES AND FUNGAL PATHOGENS INTO THE AIR, A CONSTANT MIASMA OF ILLNESS. My son’s been back at school one week and we’ve all got Ebola.

Invasive is still $3.99 for your digital devices.

I’ll be hanging out at B&N Bethlehem on 9/23 for their B-Fest book fest thing, which is kinda teen-oriented but not explicitly teen-oriented? I’ll be signing there at 4pm and then at 5pm will be doing a short writing workshop for teens.

Then, I’ll be hanging out at B&N Rittenhouse with the ever-charming and talented Fran Wilde for our annual FRANK AND CHANK SHOW, where she reads her beautiful prose and I read something about vulture barf and then she tells a knock-knock joke and we all eat cupcakes with my face on them. It’s weird but awesome. Also probably a Satanic ritual of some kind. Whatever, you need to go. That’s Fran’s Horizon Launch Party, on September 26th at 7pm. BE THERE OR BE FED TO THE BLOOD ENGINE.

And I think that’s it.

BYE.

*dissolves into a pile of fizzing bacteria*

Given my choice of mid-day horror film (IT, which was great), I ask that today’s flash fiction challenge be a simple one:

You have 1000 words to write a story about good versus evil. In whatever context you choose, in whatever genre you choose.

Do that, and do it well.

Post at your online space.

Due here by September 15th (Fri), noon EST.

Here, Mighty Michael Martinez talks about something I know that plagues all of us writers — at least all of us with brains in our heads, hearts in our chests, and eyes to see — which is, how the hell do we do it now? The world seems so desperately dipshitty, how do we manage? Here is his take on that very question:

* * *

Like pretty much every writer I know, 2017 has been exceptionally unkind to my focus and productivity. I’ll settle in for a good bout of word-slinging and, oh, I’ll just check Twitter for a second and – OH GOD WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING NOW.

*four hours of news roundups, angry tweets and nausea go by, followed by Firefly marathons and junk food*

I mean, I’ve even watched Phantom Menace again to distract me from it all.

And yet, deadlines beckon. The second book in my MAJESTIC-12 series, MJ-12: Shadows, is out there now, and book three ain’t gonna crawl out of my brainpan unaided. And I have a day job and a family that, by all reports, continues to enjoy my presence. Rage and sorrow is a massive time sink. Cold, man, but true.

So what to do?

Initially, just after the election, I figured I’d do the one thing I do tolerably well – write. I had this idea spring into my mind that was pretty much fully-formed and ready to go onto the page, a dystopic vision of a future with a foundation of the sort of crap we’re seeing in the headlines now, augmented with technology and capitalism run amok and…

I couldn’t write it. I started to, but I was so freakin’ angry and scared for my future and for my daughter’s future, I was paralyzed. Somewhere on my hard drive is about 10,000 words of background and draft that are gathering electron-dust.  I don’t know if I’ll ever go back to it, because I really would hate to be one of those writers who, decades later, folks go, “Man, was he ever prophetic.” I don’t want that world, not even as a warning or a cautionary tale, and certainly not as a visionary blueprint of socio-political horrors.

I learned something about myself as a writer: I can’t write from a place of rage. Can’t do it. I just get all ripped up inside and basically get word-constipation. Took weeks of staring at blank screens to get over it. And you know what, that’s OK? Some folks can pour the piss and vinegar right into the work, and I salute them. That ain’t me.

So after figuring that out, I started outlining the third MAJESTIC-12 book, which is coming out next year, because I’m under contract and, while the folks at Night Shade Books are lovely, I don’t want to test their forbearance too badly, you know?

I wish I had a super-concise, awesome answer to that whole question of how to write while everything goes sideways. I don’t. There’s been a lot of fits and starts, and my usual methodical, disciplined words-every-day process has been replaced by frenetic bursts of writing and weary-ass screen-staring. But it’s getting done.

And there are definitely aspects of this book series that mirror my values and ideals, as I think most of our writing does on some level. These books are set in the late 1940s, and I’ve tried to tackle the racism and sexism inherent in those years as honestly as I can. I’ve tried to talk about geopolitical power and the myriad ways the United States screwed up the world via ill-considered covert action.

Yes, MJ-12: Shadows is still a spy thriller with superpowers. It’s still fun. I want it to be fun. But it’s also me, and so I’m gonna tackle that stuff alongside the gadgets and high-powered abilities and wham-bam-kaplooie. To ignore the issues of the era is, to me, just disingenuous. It’s not rage-filled, capital-R Resistance, but it’s what works for me.

So my own answer is to get down to it and create the adventures that my readers seem to like from my work, all while making sure that the ideas behind it and the values I believe in are reflected therein – without overshadowing the story, of course, because ultimately, the story is paramount. That’s it. No silver bullet. Sorry.

Oh, and one more thing. I get that writing about spaceships or elves or super-spies or whatever may seem frivolous in times like these. I’ve been there, man. We should be out there donating, marching, calling representatives – spending our time better, right? And yeah, I’ve done those things as well, and I’d encourage y’all to do that too.

But writing really does matter. I had a reader reach out on social media recently just to tell me that reading one of my books was a welcome respite from all the craziness out there. And wow, let me tell you, that was something. I hadn’t really thought of my stuff that way, and it was incredibly awesome to hear that.

I wrote 2,000 really good words that day.

So yeah. It’s OK to be angry, scared and/or discouraged at the world – or your own personal stuff, for that matter, because life throws curveballs all the damn time. Do what you gotta do to get you through it. Watch crap movies or call your reps. Donate, cry, march, hide, scream. Take care of yourself. But know that when you get back to the keyboard, you have a chance to bring stories to life that can help people think about a better future, or get some solace from a rough present.

Saddle up, wordpeople.

* * *

Michael J. Martinez: Website | Twitter

MJ-12: Shadows: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound

Life sucks and then you die…

…a cyberpunk family drama from the ingenious author of Flex.

In the near future, the elderly have moved online and now live within the computer network. But that doesn’t stop them interfering in the lives of the living, whose sole real purpose now is to maintain the vast servers which support digital Heaven. For one orphan that just isn’t enough – he wants more for himself and his sister than a life slaving away for the dead. It turns out that he’s not the only one who wants to reset the world…

* * *

I think Tolkien is one of the most toxic influences on speculative fiction.  It’s not because of his dodgy racial overtones in making all the orcs dark, degenerate Elves, or the way he pounded Tom Bombadil’s godawful Vogon poetry into our eardrums.

It’s Tolkien’s maps.  And his fancy-shmancy languages.  And all his meticulous worldbuilding.

Not that I’m opposed to worldbuilding, mind you!  My novel The Uploaded is soaking in deep, crunchy cultures, because I take a single idea – so what happens 500 years after we perfect brain-uploading technologies and no one’s afraid of dying any more? – and follow that concept all the way down.

But Tolkien’s influence hangs over speculative fiction like its own cancerous Eye Of Sauron, leading thousands of wayward nerds to believe that you need a robust cartography program and a linguistic analyst before you can write your world-busting saga.  I have at least ten friends who clutch their painstakingly-imagined portfolio of Coherent Magic Systems and Plausible Alternate Biologies to their chest, believing on some level that if they accumulate enough worldbuilding details, the weight of their imagination will spontaneously cause a novel to form.

But no.  Let me tell you the first thing I learned in writing The Uploaded:

You Are Not Writing An RPG, So You’d Better Learn To Be Your Own GM

“So they’ve invented a digital Heaven,” I thought.  “Your brain’s uploaded at the moment of death, and saved to a game server where you live forever playing the most awesome MMORPGs in existence.

“How’s that change society?”

Bing! The worldbuilding centers of my brain lit up.  Because when you know as a stone-cold fact that there’s a palpable reward awaiting you when you pass on, life becomes kind of an inconvenience.  Everyone wants to be dead – especially when the dead have the votes, and the old crusty racists never die, and the living world becomes only useful as a means of keeping the game servers running.  Dead politicians would need to pass laws to prevent suicide, and living would become downright unfashionable, and people would come to hate tangible things because who wants to watch both your creation and your meat-body rot when you can craft digital items that will await you in your artificial paradise?

If I’d been writing a roleplaying supplement, all that shit would be awesome.   Some DM would get plotbunnied and generate their own adventure, and some players would devise compelling characters, and I wouldn’t have to be bothered with coming up with a story that utilized all these elements.

But I wasn’t.  I was writing a novel.  And while pure worldbuilding is fun for those of us with a what-if nature, you can get lost in generating artificial details.

Eventually, every story needs two things:

– At least one person readers will find interesting enough to follow them through 300+ pages of pure Novel, and:

– A reason to get that person out of the house and adventuring.

Thus far I had neither.  So where would I start?  Fortunately, I had a mentor who loved porn.

Neil Gaiman’s Porno Expertise Comes In Surprisingly Helpful

In 2008, I went to the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Workshop, and Neil Gaiman was one of my teachers.  And I talked to him about some half-baked idea I had for a story, and he brightened and said, “Oh!  It’s like porn!”

“Whaaaaaaa?” I said, boggled that Neil goddamned Gaiman was sharing his deep-seated lust for The Devil In Miss Jones with me.

“Or a musical,” he added quickly.  “You want an excuse plot.”

“Of course I do,” I murmured, but by then I was, unfortunately, still stuck on the porn.

“I mean, all the viewer wants in a porno is to get to the next sex scene,” he explained, not at all lasciviously.  “Just like all the viewer wants in a musical is to get to the next musical number.  Anything that gets in the way of that is going to annoy them.”

I was, by now, ablaze wondering exactly how many pornography novels Neil Gaiman had written, presumably clever Victorian pornos where gentlemen with monocles were studiously served by prim horseboys in strict adherence to classical mythology, under a pseudonym like “Melmoth The Rogerer” – but he seemed into this concept of “plot,” so I nodded.

“What you want,” he told me, “Is a plot that showcases as many of the weird elements of your world as possible.  Devise something that draws your characters through the most interesting parts of your landscape and then get out, quickly.”

“You mean climax quickly, of course!” I ejaculated.

“Get out,” he said, flinging his tea at me, and I have never heard from Mr. Gaiman or his erotic Gormenghast fanfic again.

Still, his advice rang back to me when I began looking at The Uploaded again – okay, I had a ton of weird subcultures in this world where death had been conquered – the suicidal LifeGuard squadrons who were tasked with keeping the living in line, the terrorist NeoChristians who violently rejected what they saw (not illegitimately) as a soul-destroying affront to God, the orphanages where kids were dumped after their parents nipped off to the Upterlife, the scientific enclaves where they maintained the servers.

So I needed a plot that would have someone herded through all of these locales, and then exit stage right.  Probably a rescue plot – a boy on a quest to murder his sister!  That’s an excuse if ever I’d heard one.  I’d knock this plot off before lunchtime and then return to scouring the net for Neil Gaiman’s porn.

But I was too clever, alas.  Because:

You Can’t Worldbuild Someone Into Feeling

Now, what drew me to this project was how every one of our normal emotions got inverted by the presence of an irrefutable (if artificial) afterlife.  Murdering a stranger becomes an act of charity when you know for sure that Heaven awaits your victim!  Chain-smoking tarry cigarettes becomes a clever move to bring you to death’s doorway!

That’s so cool, right?

No.  Because here’s the thing:

In the early drafts of The Uploaded – and The Uploaded had many, many drafts – I’d start out with something Very Clever, saying, “Ah ha, my lead character Amichai wants to murder his sister!”

The problem is that in this world, “Wanting to murder your sister” makes you, well, a murderer.  People thought Amichai was a dick, or wanted to know how evil his sister was that he’d been driven to plotting her death.

“But wait!” I’d cry.  “This world is different than ours!”  And I would dump a nice, steaming load of Infodump on my poor beta reader to explain that in this crazy world, murder was kindness and up was down and bell peppers actually taste good (don’t @ me), at which point my reader would check out.

Let me tell you something someone mercifully told me: If readers do not empathize with what your character wants by the end of your first page – and that’s the stubby little three-quarter page of text floating under the title – it will be remarkably difficult to sell your book.

Now read that again: not just understand what your character wants.  To empathize.  As in, to go, “Oh, I could want that too.”  You need to trigger a resonant emotion within 250 words or so.  It likely won’t be a deep emotion by that point, but that first “I get this person” has to be birthed on Page One.

You don’t get emotion by explaining things to people.  And as such, “Everything is inverted in The Uploaded!” became a liability.

So what do you do?

Find The Origin Of Your Character’s Greatest Ache

There’s a lot of ways to generate sympathy, and good writers should know as many of them as possible.  But here’s a classic:

Find the moment that hurt your character so bad they never recovered, and tell it.

For Amichai, I kept starting in the present, just before he broke into a hospital to kill his sister.  But that wasn’t where the average reader could emotionally hook in.

So I went back to where Amichai himself learned what the Upterlife was.  Back when he was nine years old, having watched his parents die of a new drug-resistant plague, being told that their anguished screams was just temporary meat-trauma, they’d get to paradise soon.

Then they died.

And they didn’t call.

And his sister was stuck trying to keep them in their apartment while Child Protective Services kept threatening to put them in the orphanages, and she was only twelve, and she kept telling him that Mom and Dad still loved him, but if they loved him then why were they spending all their time playing stupid Upterlife games, why did Mom and Dad get to go to this awesome place and leave my stressed, impoverished sister to struggle alone…

And then Mom and Dad called.

The opening chapters are here – but the point is that “finding the moment where someone discovers why their world is unfair” is a time-honored way of cutting to the bone.

And by the time we get to “Why is Amichai breaking into a hospital to murder his sister” in chapter two, well, that question’s been established.  The emotional line of “Why he cares” and “Why he’s upset” is clean.

Except there’s one final problem….

Know Which Tropes Are Offensive, And Do Your Best To Avoid Them

You know what people with disabilities are fucking sick of seeing?

The story that tells them they’d be better off dead and “happy” than alive and with a disability.

And man, do they get that one a lot.  Too many stories involve anguished, paralyzed people peacefully put to rest by their lovers because you couldn’t possibly want to keep breathing in a wheelchair, amiright?  Having dirt shoveled on your dead face is better than being blind, right?

So even in a world where everyone is measurably better off dead, where even the healthiest people long for the electronic grave, a plot like “Amichai wants to kill his plague-stricken sister” is gonna poke a few buttons.  Maybe volcanically.

Now, I know people with disabilities are sick of this storyline because I follow a lot of people with disabilities on Twitter.  Which is, honestly, the least you can do if you’re gonna write a book about people.  And so I wisely realized before feces impacted the fan that this plot needed to be retooled.

So things got switched around a bit.  Amichai has a bit of a grudge, which fomented when his fucking parents abandoned him – he hates the Upterlife.  He hates how everyone’s ignoring the wonders of our world to stare into a goddamned monitor.  And he hates how the dead only value the living for their muscle, not their brains.

Which, thankfully, made it easy to make Amichai’s quest not to murder his sister, but rather to help convince her that life was still living even if the dead didn’t value her.  (A quest that rapidly transforms into him uncovering and then interfering with a plot designed to brainwash the living, but spoilers, people.)

Furthermore: I had some of my friends with disabilities read the text to ensure that it didn’t kick them in the jimmies.  Then I paid a sensitivity reader – or, as I think of it, “A super-informed reader” – to check my goddamned privilege.

I’m not saying The Uploaded is perfect, of course, even if it features two wheelchair-enabled leads very prominently.  I’m gonna fuck it up somehow.  And even then, “people with disabilities” are not a hive brain and just because the four readers with disabilities I got to spot me were cool with it doesn’t mean that every single one will be.  Someone might get offended.

But I did as much due diligence as I was capable of.  I asked people.  I know the tropes.

That is, I feel, what you owe people when you write about, you know, their existence.

* * *

Ferrett Steinmetz’s debut urban fantasy trilogy FLEX (and THE FLUX and FIX) features a bureaucracy-obsessed magician who is in love with the DMV, a goth videogamemancer who tries not to go all Grand Theft Auto on people, and one of the weirder magic systems yet devised. His latest book THE UPLOADED, well, you just read about it, didn’t you?  He was nominated for the Nebula in 2012 and for the Compton Crook Award in 2015, for which he remains moderately stoked, and lives in Cleveland with his very clever wife, a small black dog of indeterminate origin, and a friendly ghost.

Ferrett Steinmetz: Twitter | Website

The Uploaded: Excerpt | Indiebound | Amazon | B&N | Powells

In which we have a holy crap gorgeous cover from Adam Doyle.

Miriam Black is back in her penultimate story.

Miriam Black, in lockstep with death, continues on her quest to control her own fate in The Raptor and the Wren, the brand-new fifth book in the Miriam Black series.

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.

It’ll land on shelves January 23rd, 2018.

Vultures, the sixth and final book, will come out in 2019.

These last two books are, I hope, one helluva ride.

Preorder Raptor & Wren: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Check out the other books in the series by clicking below:

Self-promotion.

Marketing.

Advertising.

You gotta do it, they say.

You have a new book out, you have to let them know.

You have an old book out, you have to let them know.

A book sale, you gotta let them know.

You gotta dance the dance. Wave your arms. Shake your hips. Show a little thigh. Wink and a smile. Milk your appendages. Shimmy out of your old flesh and reveal the chromatic scale of your extraterrestrial forebears. HA HA ha what I mean, no, I don’t do those things, I am a humanoid like you, let us go and get… ice cream? People get ice cream, right?

Whatever.

Point is, I mostly just want to whine and complain about how self-promotion is haaaaard, and specifically how it’s haaaaaard right now at this particular point in time. I don’t know what I’m looking for. Pity? Commiseration? A kitten? Someone send me a kitten. And it’s definitely not to eat. Humans don’t eat kittens! Right? *checks the handbook* Yes, yes, humans snoogle with kittens, they do not make soup from them, cool, got it.

Still, I’ll try to offer some counterbalancing points — advice to overcome some of these problems. Let’s see where we land.

1. Selling Stuff Is Different From Sharing Stuff

As I am wont to remind people, my anecdotal information (aka “artisanal data”) shows me that, on this blog, links out to my own books are clicked at a significantly lower frequency than me recommending a book I loved. If I say MUH GOD DID YOU SEE I HAVE A NEW WRITING BOOK COMING OUT AND IT CONTAINS A STORY ABOUT ELK MASTURBATION, people are like, *muted yay* and then maybe they click. If I say, HEY HOLY SHIT I JUST STARTED READING C. ROBERT CARGILL’S SEA OF RUST AND FUCK IT’S GOOD IT’S GOT DEAD PEOPLE AND SHITLOADS OF ROBOTS AND IT’S COOL, you’ll perk those eyebrows up and you’ll click click click.

I don’t think that’s weird. I think it’s natural. I think we instinctively distrust sales pitches. And even if I’m not hawking my wares during some kind of book infomercial like it’s the literary equivalent of the Slap Chop, I think people overall… intuit that a sales pitch is a sales pitch and it’s ultimately driven by self-interest. Whereas sharing a thing I love is a RAINBOW OF DELIGHT emanating from my tummy as if I am an authorial Care Bear.

It’s pure. It’s perfect. It is a band of color and wonder.

Solution: First, talk about the stuff you love. People will appreciate it and it will also help the authors of the books you’ve read that you’ve loved. Second, when the time comes for your reluctant shilling, do so in a way that is as authentic as possible. Not a hey here’s why my book is awesome but instead more of a yo here’s what this book means to me and why I wrote it. 

2. Hey Have You Seen The News Lately?

It used to be this thing where people wanted to be respectful and not sell or promote things online during a time of tragedy. “There was a shooting, this is not the time,” someone would whisper at you. Yeah, I dunno if you’ve read the news lately, but it’s basically an endless log flume ride down a chute slick with boiling diarrhea. The news is a constant cacophony. It’s just people yelling bad news 24/7 — and understandably so, because the news has gotten super fucky. Fucky up and down the pike. Fucky fuck-ass fuckery, from snout to tail. Hurricanes! Fires! Deportations! Actual Nazis! The oceans are lava! The sky-knives are falling! The flesh-reapers have begun their apocalyptic harvest! Buy my book before you die!

You want to be excited that you have a book out, but it’s like, “I have a book out, but the world is falling apart, sorry.” *sad trumpet* bromp bromp

Solution: I dunno, do it anyway? Life is stupid and people are always dying, but people always need to read books. And I don’t mean that in a wagging finger way — I mean, books are instructive, books are escape, books are doorways out of whatever miserable dipshittery is ongoing. Just try to be as respectful as you can, and acknowledge if you have to that yes the world is under assault by monstrous forces both human and inhuman, but hey you have a book out and it’d sure be neat if people would take a peek.

3. So Much Noise

Everybody is selling their books. A lot of books and not a lot of time and though your audience is theoretically infinite, not everybody is a reader, not everybody is a book-learner, you know? Sometimes author self-promotion has the feeling of beings crabs in a bucket. We’re all clicking our claws and our mouthpieces are foaming and none of us are actually out of the bucket.

Solution: Try to be different, for one. Look at what other people are doing, and find an angle. A way in. And when that fails, don’t do the thing where you get noisier — being louder and more obnoxious doesn’t help. (Spoiler warning: neither does shitting on other people’s books or other authors. Don’t do pissy-pants stunt marketing like that. It just tells us that your book isn’t very good so you have to noisily poop your pants to get our attention.) Instead, do the thing where you help other people out of the bucket. Signal boost books. Again, not some kind of selfish quid pro quo (or squid pro quo!) nonsense, but just because it’s the right thing to do. Helping people feels good. It will cleanse your soul of the stain of having to hawk your own books.

4. I Actually Don’t Know What I’m Doing Or If This Shit Even Works

I am not a marketing guru. I am not a social media expert. When you say things to me like, “Have you optimized your SEO?” I hear, “Have you slargified your tumgargle?” and then my guts clench up because I don’t really want to know more about what you’re talking about. “Well, with the algorithms and the target audiences and the slargified tumgargles, your book will succeed beyond your wildest dreams.”

Listen, here’s what I usually tell authors: you can, with some earnestness and enthusiasm, maybe sell a few books. Maybe you can even sell tens or hundreds of your book. And that’s not nothing. Every sale of your book is a pebble thrown into a pond, and a pebble thrown into a pond creates ripples that may reach the shore. Meaning, even one person who reads and loves your book might share their love of that book with others — and if they love it, they share it, and on and on. A CHAIN OF LOVE. Like an orgy, but slower!

Even still, your publisher needs thousands of sales. Even self-published authors need those kinds of numbers and those kinds of numbers are difficult without a real marketing plan and real self-promotion — which, generally, is not part of an author’s set of expertise.

Once upon a time I made it clear that authors can’t just be authors, and that remains true. Especially as new authors you’re writers, and editors, and maybe web-designers, and possibly bloggers, and hey did I also mention marketers? I’ve revised my thinking on that a little bit, in that if you’re not actually good at all the other stuff, it’s just half-measures. And as we learned from Mike Ehrmentraut, NO MORE HALF-MEASURES, WALTER.

So, what to you do?

Solution: This is tough, because at the end of the day you need to push on your publisher — if you have one — to make this work. If your publisher’s marketing plan is them asking you what your marketing plan is, then you need to quote them your price, because that’s not your job. Your job is to write the best gull dang book you can muster. The entire reason you partner with a publisher is, in part, their marketing muscle. If they won’t flex for you, don’t dance for them. Push on them. Have your agent push on them. Demand a plan. Demand to see the plan. Otherwise, self-publish, and hire out for experts to do this job. Social media is a wasteland, an unholy din, and it’s not really the best place to rely on one author to somehow achieve BOOK SALES APOTHEOSIS.

Obviously, yes, you should talk about your book.

You should share it.

You should be ready to commit to interviews and podcasts and exploring ways to get the word out. And your publisher should be your guide through that. If they’re not, you should be self-publishing because what’s the point?

Beyond that the solution to all of of this is the solution to many a writer’s woes:

Write the next book.

Always, always, always write the next book.

Writers write, and you’re a writer.

So go write, writer.

Go write.

* * *

Coming soon:

DAMN FINE STORY: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

by Chuck Wendig, from Writer’s Digest, October 17th

A new writing/storytelling book by yours truly! All about the fiddly bits of storytelling — creating great characters, growing narrative organically, identifying and creating theme. Hope you dig it.

Pre-order now:

Indiebound

Amazon

B&N

(Come see me launch the book on October 17th at Borderlands in San Francisco with Kevin Hearne launching the amazing Plague of Giants and Fran Wilde supporting her sublime Bone Universe books! 6pm!)