Here’s a fun thing that happened:

All weekend I’ve taken to doing some random long-needed yardwork, one task of which involved attacking the invasive grasses that have, well, invaded our property. These grasses were once ornamental, procured by someone somewhere — a neighbor, our home’s former owner, some random Forest Hobo — and they bought them from Home Depot or Lowe’s or some other proprietor of invasive plants masquerading as friendly landscaping greenery. They planted these grasses. These grasses spread like emerald fire across the roads, driveways, forests.

These grasses form a pretty significant root ball, too, so they’re incredibly hard to remove.

So, I decided I was going to tackle one particularly massive patch, see what kind of damage I could do. Our weedwhacker with the blade attachment wasn’t working, though — I cleaned the spark plug and checked the filter and whispered the secret words into the motor, but still nothing. I decided to get my very own blade attachment: A MACHETE.

Machete in hand, I went to attack the grass.

I was successful not only in chopping the shit out of the grass, but given how much it has been raining lately, I was able to rip up several of the root-wads right out of the damp earth. (Sidenote: we seem to have stolen the PNW’s weather, as it is unseasonably cold and rainy — right now it’s 60 degrees. In August. Sorry Seattle and Portland! I know that you’re presently on fire and stuff. I blame those wacky climate hoaxsters, The Chinese.)

So, that was good fun, but now I am in pain. The backs of my thighs feel like Ivan Drago has been using them as punching bags. Sitting down is an exercise in sudden, unexpected misery. But it came from being productive, so I’ll take it, and also, SCREW YOU INVASIVE GRASSES.

The next day, a tree fell. And it fell in part across the road, so I went down to take a look — initially I assumed it was going to be one of our ash trees. We have problems with the (also invasive) emerald ash borer around here. (Sidenote: you can inoculate your trees against them, even if the ash borer has already begun to attack the tree. Used to be that it was a thousand bucks per tree, but I guess the patent expired or something, and now it’s produced by other companies for around a hundred bucks a pop. You literally poison the tree to poison the bug. Doesn’t hurt the tree. Kills the bug.) But this tree was very leafy and green, so I went over to it and started lopping some branches and moving stuff off the road, and then I was like, “Hey what are these green berries on the tree that’s weird,” and then I was like, “Hey you know what has berries, poison ivy, and I’ve never seen the berries but this surely can’t be poison ivy, because the leaves are huge, and they’re not in groups of thr… wait no they are in groups of three wait this tree is dead it’s just colonized by so much poison ivy it looks like it’s alive oh shit oh shit.”

I went home.

I scrubbed and scrubbed.

I used gritty soap and then Tecnu soap and then showered.

And this morning my right arm looks like I’m wearing a shirt made of poison ivy.

So that’s fun.

YAY NATURE.

Curiously, though much of my weekend was spent dealing with invasive species (including cutting down invasive Tree of Heaven trees and killing the invasive bug that eats them, the lanternfly), poison ivy is not actually invasive. It’s part of a healthy forest ecosystem, and shores up the ground against erosion. It’s also a fucking shitty asshole dick. *itch itch itch*

*scratch scratch scratch*

SO ANYWAY HEY HI WHAT ELSE IS UP.

I told you about those cool book sales. They’re still ongoing.

You saw Turok #1, right?

And since we’re talking about invasive things, hey, don’t forget that book I wrote about ants, ants, ants: INVASIVE.

Did you remember that I’m at the Writer’s Digest conference in NY on the 18th, 19th, and 20th? I’m on a couple panels — one about worldbuilding and another about building an audience with a blog. (That last one is tricky, and I am likely to offer controversial opinions about both building audiences and making bloggery.)

Also reminder that I’ll be in SF, Portland and Seattle with Kevin Hearne and Fran Wilde on October 17th, 18th, and 19th, respectively.

OKAY BRING ON THE MONDAY MACROS

please to enjoy these new photos taken by yours truly

*chops off arm in the meantime*

If you are so inclined, a number of my books are on sale, presently, at Amazon.

You will find that the following books are only $0.99 in e-book:

Atlanta Burns (Book 1)

Atlanta Burns: The Hunt (Book 2)

Under the Empyrean Sky (Heartland, Book 1)

Blightborn (Heartland, Book 2)

The Harvest (Heartland, Book 3).

(Or if you want the series links: Atlanta Burns and Heartland series.)

So that’s like, five books for under five bucks.

In Atlanta Burns, you will find a young girl who goes toe-to-toe with small-town Nazis running a dog-fighting ring.

In the Heartland books you will find bloodthirsty corn created by rich people in their flying cities — and you’ll find the hardscrabble Heartlanders living down below who plan on freeing themselves from their skyborn oppressors. Steinbeck meets Star Wars.

You can also add audio, I believe, to each for $1.99.

Also looks like the Invasive paperback ($5.99) and Blackbirds paperback ($7.13) are both on sale, too — oh! And the Invasive e-book has dropped down to $6.99. So that’s nice.

What I’m trying to say is, go buy my books or I’ll keep bothering you.

*stares*

*stares harder*

*entire face breaks out into hundreds of eyes, all of which stare at you*

*ants rain upon you*

Someone suggested this one to me this week, and I sadly forget who (apologies!) — but there is a Twitter account called MAGICAL REALISM BOT. I don’t know if it’s really a bot or someone is actually creating or curating it, but it doesn’t matter.

Because it is brilliant.

Especially as fodder for flash fiction.

So, go look at it.

Pick a tweet.

Write a short story based on that tweet.

That’s it.

Go do it.

Length: ~1500 words

Due by: Friday, August 11th, noon EST

Post online.

Give us a link in the comments.

The end.

Behold! A guest post from a good friend and a great writer, the mighty man with two first names, Mister Adam Christopher —

* * *

A few years back I was on a WorldCon panel with m’learned host Mr. Wendig and fellow author Stephen Blackmore, and we were tasked with discussing the subject of pulp fiction. I remember having a lot of fun, but I’m not entirely sure we ever managed to get to the bottom of what the term “pulp” actually meant, at least not in the context of modern science fiction. Okay, yes, originally, way back in the 1920s and 1930s, it literally referred to the paper fiction magazines were published on – cheap, low-quality pulp newsprint – and then because everybody in the history of everything is a snob, the quality of the paper somehow became confused with the quality of the stories on which they were printed and pulp fiction became a synonym for, well, crap. This was low-grade mass-produced nonsense for people who didn’t read the important books that other people pretended to read, stories deliberately designed by evil publishing overlords to entertain and enthral and – gasp! – excite.

Heaven forfend stories should be fun.

And sure, a lot of pulp sci-fi was written very quickly – the prolific Gardner Fox apparently wrote ten stories a week, using his morning and evening commutes to outline and his lunchtime to edit. A lot of pulp fiction is, well, not of a high quality, but considering the enormous volume produced – at its peak, reading pulp fiction magazines was actually the number one leisure pastime in America – the hit rate probably adhered to the standard bell curve.

I’d argue that reading pulp sci-fi now is no less entertaining than it was seventy years ago, but while our understanding of science and technology is infinitely more advanced than it was back then, I don’t think that needs to have any impact on our enjoyment of the original material.

More than that, I don’t think it can, or should, stop us from creating new fiction in the same vein. For some reason, there’s a secret rule of science fiction that says it has to be set in the future, but as we should all know by now, writing rules are there to be ignored, if not laughed out of the building.

It was with this in mind that I set about writing a series about a robot assassin working in Hollywood, California, 1965. In the world of the Ray Electromatic Mysteries, the robot revolution came and went in the 1950s – while robots and artificial intelligence were useful things, it turned out that people didn’t like robots taking their jobs, so the whole thing was canned – and Ray finds himself as the last robot in the world. Programmed to be a private detective, he was re-programmed by his profit-motivated supercomputer boss, Ada, to be a hitman, after she figured out that you could make more money from killing people than helping them.

That’s the concept, and it’s a simple one. What was harder was, if you’ll pardon the pun, the execution. Because now I found myself having to write a series of science fiction novels set not in the future, but in the past.

There’s a temptation here to, well, take the piss, as they say here in the UK – to mock or make fun of the genre. To our modern eyes, the science of the 1960s can be both amazing and ridiculously quaint – we managed the incredible feat of landing people on the moon using the most complex machines ever invented, yet a one megabyte hard drive was the size of a small truck and people weren’t really sure that computers had a place in the home.

But I wasn’t writing comedy. Far from it. I was writing Raymond Chandler’s lost science fiction stories, imaginary tales set in the near future of his beloved Los Angeles. To that end, Raymond Electromatic and his boss Ada had to be high-tech, state-of-the-art visions of progress.

To make these stories work, there was only one thing to do. I had to take it all very, very seriously, taking it as an established historical fact that there were robots in the 1950s and 1960s. Some were simple drones or factory machines, but others were human-like, powered by true AIs, able to take over whole sections of industry and business to allow the people they replace live that much-promised life of automated leisure.

From that, I could build the world and my protagonist. Raymond Electromatic was the last robot off the production line, a special project personally overseen by robotics mastermind Professor Thornton. So, Ray was special – more independent, able to live and work alone in the big city. The key to his success was his memory tape, a remarkable piece of hyper-miniaturisation that allowed an entire day of experiences and data to be recorded onto a small reel-to-reel magnetic tape installed in Ray’s chest. At the end of each day, the full tape is swapped out for a clean one, and he can get back to work.

Of course, the side effect of this is that he doesn’t remember anything about what he’s done, but this is the bleeding edge of science. Some obstacles are just insurmountable… and in Ray’s case, having a short-term memory problem is a pretty good insurance policy for their operation. And if Ray is a technological wonder, his boss Ada is nothing short of a miracle. A supercomputer the size of a room, Ada is the brains of the operation – and being immobile, her memory banks have a considerably larger capacity than Ray’s.

But this isn’t a pastiche. Sure, it’s fun – coming up with suitably archaic yet futuristic technology for the books is a blast – but this is science fiction. Ray may be a wiseguy but he kills people for a living, and the seedy underbelly of Hollywood is a very dangerous place.

So what does that make Killing Is My Business? It’s a slice of retro-futurism wrapped inside a hardboiled, Chandleresque crime novel – but it’s also a serious science fiction novel.

Just one set in the glorious future of 1965.

* * *

Adam Christopher: Website | Twitter

Killing Is My Business: Amazon | Indiebound | B&N

Meet Greta Helsing, doctor to the undead.

Dr. Greta Helsing has inherited the family’s highly specialized, and highly peculiar, medical practice. She treats the undead for a host of ills – vocal strain in banshees, arthritis in barrow-wights, and entropy in mummies.

It’s a quiet, supernatural-adjacent life, until a sect of murderous monks emerges, killing human and undead Londoners alike. As terror takes hold of the city, Greta must use her unusual skills to stop the cult if she hopes to save her practice, and her life.

1. Your friends’ patience and feedback is worth its weight in something considerably rarer than gold.

I’ve been writing since I was about ten or eleven, and did a whole bunch of novels and novellas before the age of fifteen, bits of some of which survive to this day in dot-matrix printout form, but I’ve spent the past decade actively involved in the world of fanfiction, where beta readers are a major part of the writing process. I have at least three people to whom I send fic chapters for feedback before posting them online, and the information I get from those people is invaluable to making the fic the best it can be — but those fic chapters are generally short, i.e. 1-2K each, and there’s never more than about twenty of them to any given story. It’s a time commitment on the reader’s part, but not an enormous one. When I started writing Strange Practice in earnest, I was lucky enough to be able to have my same beta readers look over the novel as it developed, and their patience and support and advice as I struggled with various bits of it were absolutely vital to the end result.

If you can — and some writers absolutely cannot stand having people view a work in progress, but if you can  — having someone else read over a scene or a chapter and tell you specifically if a thing is working, or if they are getting what it is you want the reader to be getting, is incredibly useful. For me, I pretty much want my readers to check my work day by day or chapter by chapter, because if I mess something up and continue to build on the thing that is messed up, I’ll have a lot of extra work to do in the next round of edits. If I can catch the thing when it first happens, then the edit will be less onerous and I will have done it right the first time. This feeds into #5, below: this is advice for people who feel okay with this, not blanket commandment that thou shalt do the thing.

2. Having written chunks of a book several times before is both an advantage and a considerable drawback to writing it again.

I originally wrote the book that would become Strange Practice in 2004 as a National Novel Writing Month entry, and then it sat around on various hard drives and in the back of my mind for about a decade while some of the characters in it were borrowed for various other applications (and evolved during the process). In 2014 I dusted it off, stripped it down to the skeleton, and began re-writing it almost completely. The result was a kind of patchwork Frankenbook which needed a lot of work to make it coherent and cohesive, and when in the fullness of time it actually went through the process of professional editing I found that this patchwork structure made the edits extremely difficult. In addition, I had a kind of emotional connection with the older parts of the book, the ones I had written years and years ago, and being made to cut or to change those parts felt a little bit like breaking off bits of myself, even if the end result was drastic improvement. (Thank you, Lindsey, editor par excellence, you were right about restructuring the opening.)

With the sequel, Dreadful Company, I started completely from scratch, which meant I didn’t have to put together bits of pre-existing book into a coherent whole, but it also meant I am having to write the whole thing from scratch, all the bits of it. (2.1: start a lot earlier than you think you will need to. Trust me on this.)

3. Google Street View is your friend (unless, of course, you’re independently wealthy and able to travel the world for research purposes).

I’m a little obsessive about research. Nothing annoys me more in fiction than an author who clearly has not bothered to do the research, or who has done a little bit and then proceeded either to misinterpret it or completely ignore any further evidence to the contrary. This means that when I’m writing a story set in a place that I don’t actually have the opportunity to explore in person, I need to know what my characters would be seeing/surrounded by at any given time, location by location. Enter Google Street View, which allows me to get an accurate mental picture of the streets and buildings from several thousand miles and six time-zone hours ago.

I use GSV to scout for locations before working out where to set particular scenes, and I use it to verify that I haven’t done something both hilarious and impossible with my description of the geography. Google has even done some even more extraordinarily awesome work inside particular landmarks: you can tour the British Museum and the Paris Opera House click by click, floor by floor, getting the sightlines and the layout exactly as they are in reality. Sometimes I really do love living in the future.

4. Do the kind of research where you will, afterward, be able to write an intro chapter to a textbook on your version of magic — and then cut almost every detail of that out again so as not to lose your audience.

Along with doing the goddamn research, one of the most important things to me in the process of worldbuilding is internal consistency: if you’re going to use magic, great, but you have to think quite hard about the rules that govern that magic, how it works, what happens when you do it wrong, etc., and then you have to make sure that the magic in your story adheres to those rules.

For the Greta Helsing universe I spent a long time talking to people who know physics in order to come up with some believable and coherent rules for a system of magic. Mine works along quite similar lines to physics, particles and strong/weak forces and spin and so on, and I had a fantastic time writing a scene in the book where one character gives the others a basic lecture about it — and of course, during edits, almost all of that detail got cut. You need to know how it works, but you don’t need to make sure your entire audience could score 80% or above on a pop quiz.

5. Prescriptivism is shit.

This one I knew already — but the vast and contradictory body of How To Write Properly literature is, in my opinion, largely unhelpful and sometimes actively counterproductive. Everyone’s process is different, and even an individual author’s process can differ from day to day based on God knows how many variables — their mood, the things they’ve had to do already that day, what they’d rather be doing, what the cat just knocked over, etc. Some people write better to a word count —  I have to get 2K done today — and some go by page number — I have to write ten pages today — and some go by content — I have to get through this scene — and all of these are exactly as valid as the next.

With Strange Practice, because large chunks of it were already present and needed only to be rewritten, word and page count weren’t very useful to me in terms of measuring my progress. With Dreadful Company I am finding that the word count is much more effective as a motivational metric: I want to get to X number of words this week, which means I need to do at least Y number of words a day. It all depends on the situation, and the prevailing atmosphere of you must write Like This or you are doing it Wrong is not something I subscribe to. Budding writers who don’t find themselves able to stick to one classification or another can feel like they’re failing, which is one of the world’s least motivational experiences, and established writers who don’t fit into, or stay in, the classifications tend to resent being told they ought to.

The best advice I can give anyone who wants to be a writer is write, and don’t stop, even if people are nasty to you about it, even if you don’t think you’re doing it right, even if you don’t think anyone will ever want to read it: don’t stop. Because you’re making a thing that’s new, and every time you write words down you are getting better at it, and that itself is a kind of magic no pseudo-physics technobabble can describe.

* * *

Vivian Shaw: Website | Twitter

Strange Practices: Amazon | Indiebound | Hachette

WELL HELLO EVERYONE.

I HAVE RETURNED FROM THE WILDS OF THE TECHPOCALYPSE.

Here’s what happened:

I got the one-two punch of:

a) my website stopped loading for me (still for you, just not for me)

b) my computer started to, in slow-motion, shit the bed — it would slow down and freeze and be wildly inconsistent. It was like watching someone choke on a hoagie through frosted glass.

SUPER ANNOYING.

(Less annoying but considerably weirder — Sam Sykes and I did that slasher thing last week, and it went cuckoo viral, and now I think we were made the Lord Regents of Twitter or something, so that happened.)

So, it took me many moons to get both of these tech problems sorted in good order, but sorted they are. I have a new computer (basically the same computer, an iMac that’s just four years newer) and turns out my web host was blocking my IP ha ha ha what fun.

We will once again try to return to some semblance of normalcy.

In other news:

I hit 100,000 words on the current manuscript (Exeunt), and I did that in two months (!), and I think this book still has another 100,000 words to go (?!), so wish me a big screaming bushel of fucking luck. Also the book probably sucks, but that’s why Jesus invented “second drafts.”

OH AND HEY LOOK WHAT’S OUT TODAY:

It’s got dinosaurs! And fascism! And fascist dinosaurs! And a guy who will shoot arrows into fascist dinosaurs!

It’s out where comics are sold.

Including Comixology.

I hope you check it out.

Tomorrow, keep your grapes peeled for a couple guest posts, and then next week we will ideally resume normal service at These Here Bloggerypages.

In the meantime, here have a pretty picture of a dragonfly I took.