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!)

LOOK, I STOLE A TIGER, OKAY

THE TIGER IS MINE YOU CANNOT HAVE IT

I WILL RIDE IT INTO BATTLE AND SLAY MY ENEMIES

THEN WE WILL TOGETHER PLAY WITH A BIG BALL OF YARN AND BY A BIG BALL OF YARN I MEAN A WAD OF GUTS TORN FROM THE BELLIES OF MY MANY FOES

MY TIGER’S NAME IS TIGERTAIL JONES

WITH A SWIPE OF HIS PAW HE CAN ERASE YOUR FACE

JUST FUCKING ERASE IT

ONE MINUTE YOU GOT A FACE

NEXT MINUTE YOUR SKULL IS AN EMPTY CHALKBOARD

EXCEPT MORE BLOOD AND BONE I GUESS AND LESS CHALKBOARD

WHATEVER

OKAY SO IT’S NOT AT ALL LIKE AN EMPTY CHALKBOARD

SOMETIMES WE WRITERS SWING AND MISS

DON’T JUDGE ME YOU MOTHERFUCKER OR YOU’LL GET THE TIGER

LOOK AT HIM

BEHOLD THE COUNTENANCE OF PREDATORY TERROR

THAT TONGUE STICKING OUT IS BECAUSE HE’S ALREADY TASTING YOU THE WAY A SNAKE’S TONGUE CAN TASTE THE AIR

ALSO HE’S PART SNAKE

I DUNNO, JUST FUCKING GO WITH IT

YOU’RE DAMN RIGHT HE’LL PEE ON YOU

YOU’RE A SNACK TO HIM

AND A TOILET

A TIGER TOILET

…

Okay, fine, I did not steal a tiger.

I did steal this marmoset though.

Let’s see, what else is going on?

INVASIVE is now $3.99 at Amazon, B&N, Kobo, iBooks. Why? I have no idea. I blame the fire ants in Texas. I think it’s a conspiracy. So don’t let them win and buy the book or I’ll send rafts of fire ants to your house, and these are fire ants who washed into a petrochemical plant and then were bathed in strange chemicals and fire, and now they’re super-mutant fire ants, ha ha ha. Just kidding. They’re regular fire ants! Ha ha ha. Fire ants are fun.

But yeah, you want Crichton-esque humans versus genetically designed ant-monsters, check it out. You want a futurist FBI consultant who overcomes her anxiety on a day to day basis, check it out. If you want a praying mantis named Buffy, check it out. Plus, free trip to Hawaii.

“Think Thomas Harris’ Will Graham and Clarice Starling rolled into one and pitched on the knife’s edge of a scenario that makes Jurassic Park look like a carnival ride. Another rip-roaring, deeply paranoid thriller about the reasons to fear the future.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Blah blah blah, self-promotion over.

I’m presently reading Phasma, by the always-killer Delilah S. Dawson, and it’s a fucking blast. SHINY AND CHROME all the way through. Also I’m not saying there’s a beetle-bearded freak in there named Churkk, but maybe, just maybe, there is.

Anyway, that’s it. Light post for today, and likely lighter posts throughout September, since I am on a deadly deadline — Exeunt continues apace, now over 150,000 words, and still with probably another 40-50k to go, easy. Longest book I’ve ever written. The Stand meets Station Eleven meets… something else? I dunno. WISH ME LUCK.

*puts on helmet*

*illuminates headlamp*

*descends again into the word mines to chip sweet verbage from the schist*

You have given us titles.

You have given us opening lines.

You have given us closing lines.

Now it’s time to pick a batch and write some stories.

The job is easy enough: choose (randomly if you like) a title, an opening line, a closing line, and then write a story with… well, do I need to explain it? Use the title, the opening line, the closing line. C’MON PEOPLE JEEZ.

Length is — well, flash fiction is usually ~1000 words, but let’s forego any kind of length here and say, “Just write the damn story.”

Post at your online space, give us a link.

Due by next Friday, September 8th, noon EST.

Title

1. We Never Heard Them Coming
2. I Held Your Heart Once
3. How To Run While Falling
4. Once Hidden, Three Times Found
5. Neptune’s Rain Cuts Like Diamonds
6. The Empire Of All-Knowing Eyes
7. Electric Boy Meets Conductor Girl
8. When They Called Her Home
9. The Limits Of Our Imperfection
10. The Rest Are Your Problem

Opening Line

1. “Listen to the goat,” Valerie said, “it will change your life.”
2. The pale pink rabbit, some child’s lost toy, blinked at him from the kitchen chair.
3. “I told you this was a bad idea!” he shouted.
4. Three days without sleep was the least of my worries.
5. Some people don’t follow direction very well.
6. Martin spread the folders out on the table, “These two.”
7. The odd man remained silent, forcing a small, copper box into my hands.
8. The bodies were bobbing on the sea, and a raft drifted behind.
9. Deep inside the twisting wood, there is a house, in a gully.
10. No one had ever bothered to tell her about this part.

Closing Line

1. Silence blanketed the meadow.
2. We huddled low in the arroyo as wind wailed across the weeping sands.
3. She spread her wings and stepped off the cliff.
4. They would never know what she had done.
5. And that, my son, is how I learned to wrestle alligators.
6. And though the light was still blinking in the distance, never again could it harm her.
7. She plucked a hair from the severed head, and threaded her needle.
8. The children formed a circle, lifted their heads, and watched as the body disappeared into the sky.
9. The smoke was blue and grey and smelled like a promise.
10. I watched the butterfly escape the spiderweb and I laughed.

Ellie Baum feels the weight of history on her when she arrives on a school trip to Berlin, Germany. After all, she’s the first member of her family to return since her grandfather’s miraculous escape from a death camp in 1942. One moment she’s contemplating the Berlin Wall Memorial amidst the crowd, and the next, she’s yanked back through time, to 1988 East Berlin when the Wall is still standing.

Nobody knows how she got there, not even the members of the underground guild–the Runners and the Schopfers–who use balloons and magic to help people escape over the Wall. Now as a stranger in an oppressive regime, Ellie must hide from the police with the help of Kai, a Runner struggling with his own uneasy relationship with the powerful Balloonmakers and his growing feelings for Ellie. Together they search for the truth behind Ellie’s mysterious travel, and when they uncover a plot to alter history with dark magic, she must risk everything–including her only way home–to stop the deadly plans.

* * *

Cats belong in boxes. Stories don’t.

When I was writing The Girl with the Red Balloon, people asked, “What is it?” and I said, “It’s the story of a girl who–,” and they’d interrupt me and say, “No, no, I mean, what genre?” and I didn’t know how to answer them. Historical urban fantasy? Historical time-travel with fantastical elements? Alternate history because magic? And a few times, that nearly tripped me up with this book. It had to be something, right? It has to fit somewhere. Someone has to shelve this book, therefore someone has to know what it is, and what about the metadata on Amazon? How will it be labeled? And if it has to be something, I have to pick because then there are conventions in that genre I need to adhere to! If I don’t adhere to them, then everyone will know I’m a fraud because I just picked that genre out of a hat!

Look. Cats belong in boxes. Stories don’t. Yes, it can be helpful for marketing, and yes, readers have certain expectations in certain genres, but it isn’t one hundred percent necessary. It isn’t a precursor to getting published, or to success. When I was writing Girl, I had to learn to let it go. When someone asked me what I was writing, I started answering, “I don’t know.” It was honest. I wrote the book I wanted to write: it’s historical, and contemporary. It’s both science fiction and fantasy. It has time-travel, but only one jump…so is it reallllllly a time travel book? Does that matter? Not really. I wrote the story I wanted to tell, and it blends genres until I can’t see distinct colors anymore. I’m really glad I didn’t force my book into a box. I love cats, but my book is not a cat.

I worried my book was too Jewish. It isn’t.

There’s Yiddish and Hebrew in the book. There are two Jewish protagonists and only one of them is a victim of the Holocaust. I talk about Shabbat, and prayers, and Jewish stories. One of my main characters, Benno, tells Jewish stories to a girl on the other side of the ghetto fence, and she tries to tell him that when the Jewish people are gone, she’ll tell his stories. And he gets angry with her, the same way I get angry with gentiles telling Jewish stories now. Because we’re not gone. We’re still here.

I’m aware that publishing continues to view certain stories as ‘too niche.’ Publishing believes the only people who want to buy those stories are the people within those communities. That stories with marginalized protagonists will be books that live in the margins.

I worried about that a lot with Girl. I worried that a girl saying the Shema in the first chapter, and a girl who does Shabbat on Friday nights throughout the book, and who says the Mourner’s Kaddish for people who die in the book, and a boy who sings in Yiddish to his sister and dreams of escaping to a land that doesn’t even exist yet would alienate non-Jewish readers.

But I also worry that the only narrative Publishing seems to like about Jewish people is the Holocaust, where Jewish people die, where Jewish people are victims, Othered, and memorialized in their Otherness.

I worry a lot, I know. It’s kind of my thing. But this was a worry I couldn’t shake until recently, until people started reading the book and saying that a Jewish voice mattered to them as a Jewish person, and from gentile readers, that they learned and connected to the victims of the Holocaust through Benno’s life. He mattered to them, and what happened to him and the people around him, matters to all of us.

The book wasn’t too Jewish. I was too worried.

Some stories are born with structure. Other stories have structure thrust upon them. It’s like greatness, but more necessary and more mundane.

The first draft of Girl was 93,000 words and only three sentences survived. I know. That’s still vaguely nauseating to me and I rewrote it well over three years ago now. That first draft included a ten thousand word scene that wanders through a circus for no discernible purpose other than to include a flashback so Ellie could learn about her grandfather’s story. It’s a hot mess of a draft, I won’t lie. The fact that my critique partners had to read through that…I really should apologize to them again. Maybe buy them cupcakes or something.

When I rewrote it, I outlined everything and marched right down my outline. If left to my own devices, I would regularly write full length novels where people walked around cities, holding hands and having feelings. That would be the book. And then I’d be confused about why it didn’t accomplish the thing on paper that it did in my head. Because in my head, a book hurtles toward an inevitability. And without an outline, my books tend to flop about on a deck like confused fish.

I wrote an outline. I followed it. And I wrote each POV in a separate Word doc and copy-pasted into a master document (don’t bother telling me about Scrivener. It has its place for some books I write, but it didn’t work for this one.) The last POV I wrote was Benno’s. He’s Ellie’s grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, and his POV takes place in 1941-1942. I wrote his POV straight through, and then chopped it up, inserting chapters into the main narrative to explain plot points or to foreshadow or to increase tension.

The book wasn’t in my head in that exact order. I had to sit down with all the pieces and construct it, again, and again, and again. Some books, and some writers, have to work harder to find their narrative structure. That’s okay.

You won’t get everything right.

I had to let go of getting everything right. I did a ton of research for the book, and even with all of that, I had to learn that I wasn’t going to get everything right. And some of this was more theoretical: when you’re writing something in history, there will be people who disagree with your interpretation of the mood, tone, or level of oppression at that exact moment in time. The way we view and treat history is inherently political (as we are seeing firsthand these days on our screens.)

But on a practical level, there are some details that are difficult to research: exactly how this part of the city smelled on summer mornings; the way that East German cigarettes smelled and whether they burned your nose or your throat or clung to your hair in different ways; the finickiness of an East German toaster; the sound of a light switch; the sound of Stasi boots on wet streets. Some of this you just have to invent and guess and imagine. You cannot research every single detail of the book. Get the important stuff right–laws, dates, locations, racial relations, food, clothing, slang, names, gender relations, etc–and the rest, wing it. It’ll be okay.

Pride isn’t hubris.

Full disclosure: I’m still working on this one, plus learning to separate anxiety about how a book performs as a Product from my pride in having written this book.

We’re socialized to talk about our work in such a way that we don’t sound like we’re bragging. Bragging is bad, we’re told, so we avoid it. “Congrats! You wrote a book.” “Oh, you know. It has a long way to go. But thanks.” As I was writing it and getting feedback and then sending it into the world, I had to work on training myself to say, “Thank you! That means a lot to me.” Because that’s the truth. And having a long way to go doesn’t diminish the fact that I wrote a book and it accomplished what I set out to accomplish, and that’s awesome. I did the thing! I did the thing well! I met my own expectations which is honestly shocking because I am, like many of us are, my own worst critic.

Being proud of the work you’ve accomplished is not bragging. It isn’t hubris. It is not your fatal flaw. And it is critically important to developing resilience and continuing to create. “I wrote a book, it is awesome/it’s going to be awesome, and I’m really proud of myself” is a legitimate statement. Start practicing it now.

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Katherine Locke lives and writes in a very small town outside of Philadelphia, where she’s ruled by her feline overlords and her addiction to chai lattes. She writes about that which she cannot do: ballet, time travel, and magic. When she’s not writing, she’s probably tweeting. She not-so-secretly believes most stories are fairy tales in disguise. Her Young Adult debut, THE GIRL WITH THE RED BALLOON, arrives September 1^st, 2017 from Albert Whitman & Company!

Katherine Locke: Twitter | Instagram | Website

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