This owl knows that it is Monday, and is accordingly surly about it.

VERY SURLY.

Also, dubious.

Super dubious.

(I have more macros coming soon — got a camera full of ’em, but need to process the photos.)

Anyway.

So, hey, hi, how are you?

Here’s what’s going on in this neck of the woods:

– Our tiny human is now in kindergarten. He does not approve of this turn of events and would much rather spend his time staying at home and playing LEGO thank you very much.

– I’ve been battling sudden bouts of insomnia, as if I somehow fucking forgot how to sleep? And goddamnit, I love to sleep. Sleeping is the best. It’s weird when autonomic processes become hard — it starts to feel like something is broken, because, hey, sleep is obvious and easy. I’VE BEEN TRAINING MY WHOLE LIFE TO SLEEP. And suddenly my brain is like, “Hey, it’s night-time, is this a good time to talk?” And then my heart races and the room feels hot and woo, boy. It’s anxiety, probably and maybe a little bit of reflux, too, and I don’t know if it has a source or it’s just a shift in things and the schedule with B-Dub now in kindergarten. I’m sure it won’t last and I’ve had some luck the last couple of nights changing up my routine a bit, so we shall see. (If any of y’all out there deal with insomnia, shout out in the comments. Got tricks to deal?)

– Next Thursday, I’m at Let’s Play Books! I’ll bring cupcakes! And, cough cough, some edible bugs. NO, the bugs won’t be on the cupcakes. (Or will they?) Let’s Play Books is a marvelous kids’ (or mostly-kids’) bookstore in Emmaus, PA. They’re changing locations so I’m doing an INVASIVE-slash-STAR WARS event in support of their grand reopening and you should totally come. 9/22, 6PM. Be there or be covered with ants.

– The following Tuesday, 9/27, I’ll be at the Rittenhouse Square Barnes & Noble in Philly with YOUR PAL AND MINE, Fran Wilde! She’s there launching her newest, Cloudbound. I’ll be there to sign books and give Fran dubious surly owl looks for her Knock Knock jokes. 9/27, 7pm, details here.

– HEY LOOK AT THIS COOL PANEL FROM THE FORCE AWAKENS, ISSUE 4

– Hey, a very kind review of Invasive has popped up at BiblioSanctum:

“I loved Hannah as a protagonist. She’s complex, well-written, and sympathetic. Raised by parents who were diehard survivalists, Hannah grew up seeing the end of the world behind every corner. From a young age, she was taught the skills to prepare for any possible doomsday scenario. In spite of her upbringing though, or perhaps because of it, Hannah chose not to focus on the end, but instead decided to pursue a career related to studying the future. Her current relationship with her parents is complicated, strained. She maintains that human advancement will either lead us to great things, or destroy us all. As a character, Hannah is shaped by this duality, and it’s also a recurring theme that pops up throughout the novel.

The story is also tight, fast-paced, suspenseful. It’s very reminiscent of Michael Crichton, but Invasive also carries all the elements that make it a Chuck Wendig novel, with its dark humor, snappy dialogue, and hard action. I had a great time with this book, so much so that this might have just become my favorite work of his after his Miriam Black series. And if you know how much I love those books, you know I would not say something like that lightly.”

– My NYCC schedule will be formalized soon, I hear.

– I have a handful of other COOL THINGS to share, but can’t share them yet or assassins will take my head as punishment. So, keep your grapes peeled.

– Buy INVASIVE or your flesh will be colonized by ants. You can grab it here:

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Here’s a bit of a noodle —

I want you to take a scene from, mm, let’s go with a well-known story. Ideally, it’ll be something we’ve all seen or read — so, Die Hard, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars. Even better if the scene you pick is something iconic — the showdown between John McClane and Hans Gruber, the OH SHIT YOU’RE MY EVIL SPACE DADDY scene between Luke and Vader.

Take that scene.

And rewrite it.

The trick is, rewrite it with a new genre.

What genre it ends up with is your call. Star Wars as a horror film? Die Hard in an epic fantasy context? Your call. You can change the characters and situation appropriately — though again, ideally it becomes something iconic and recognizable even with those changes.

Write it down, ta-da, that’s this week’s challenge.

Length: ~1500 words

Due by: September 16h, Friday, noon EST.

Post at your place.

Drop the link below.

Go.

The last thing Zack Westland expects on a frigid night is to be summoned to an exorcism. Demonic possession, however, proves the least of his problems. Father Frank, a veteran turned priest, knows Zack’s deepest secrets, recognizing him as Anakim, an angel belonging to that hidden tribe. And Halley, the girl they’ve come to save, carries a secret that could unlock a centuries-old evil. She chants an eerie rhyme…

“HANDS TO TAKE AND EYES TO SEE. 

A MOUTH TO SPEAK. 

HE COMES FOR ME.”

As Zack’s secrets spill out, far more than his life is at stake, for Halley is linked to an ancient conspiracy. Yet Zack can’t help her unless he’s willing to risk losing his immortality—and reigniting the Blood Wars

* * *

With over two dozen non-fiction books under my belt, you’d think fiction would come easily – it’s all words, right? – but you’d be dead wrong. Maybe it’s my particular quirk, but crafting fiction is an incredible challenge, one I delight in with each new installment of my Shadowside Series. I’m Michelle Belanger. You may have seen me on TV. I write a lot of books about ghosts and demons and other spooky things. Here are a few of the lessons that I learned while writing my latest novel, Harsh Gods:

You think you have one main character? Think again.

The Shadowside features Zack Westland, linguist, gamer geek and avenging angel. Told from his point of view, the series explores the complex web of intrigue and betrayal built from the constant wrangling of his extended family – all angels, all incarnating among humanity through a variety of methods. (note: these are not your grandma’s angels).

Obviously, Zack’s my main character – except for when he’s not. When I started the first few chapters of Harsh Gods, things just weren’t moving. Sure, there were reasons. Zack had a rough time of it in the first book, Conspiracy of Angels. He lost memories, allies, and Lailah, a woman he might have loved.

Harsh Gods opens with Zack mopey as fuck, binge-gaming in an effort to keep his depression bay. And I could not get the guy to talk. Enter Lil. In the first book, she’s an avowed frenemy, only working with Zack to seek her missing sister, Lailah. Brutal, efficient, and utterly unapologetic, she doesn’t merely jump rope with the line between hero and villain. She plays double-dutch with it.

Writing Lil, I had planned for her to make appearances now and then, but I’d thought of her more as a sidekick than a main character. Boy, was I wrong. The minute she popped onto the screen in Harsh Gods, everything started moving lickety-split. Zack’s depression remained an issue – I’d be remiss if I let the guy just traipse blithely through all the crap he endured in book one without some consequences – but Lil made it work. She kept Zack on his toes and didn’t give him a chance to drag the action down by moping. More than that, she got him talking, which POV characters can do too much of, but Zack really needed the motivation to open up. After that first scene where Lil shows back up, I had to admit that I had two main characters. It wasn’t like Lil was giving me any other option.

Not every back story get seen right away.

I have a thing about side characters. Specifically, I cannot stand to have them be mere walk-ons. One dimensional cardboard cut-outs with the title, “Man with Gun” are fine in TV scripts. Maybe they’re not even fine there, but I can say for certain that I don’t like them in my writing. If my main players pass someone on the street, that someone has a story living in my head. I almost can’t help it – I resonate too deeply with Koenig’s word “sonder” from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. When a world burgeons with so many stories, there is a driving temptation to tell them all. But you just can’t – not all at once.

My best example of this is the character Sanjeet. In my notes, she started out as “random white dude sent to deliver a message,” but the instant she became Sanjeet, she grew into something else – a whole person with history and depth and a story that burned to be told (I’ll talk more about my decision to change her from “random white dude” in a minute).

There is a scene on the cutting room floor where Zack presses Sanjeet into telling her story – at least some of it. When a few points of the action changed, that scene had to be cut. Chronologically, it no longer fit. So Sanjeet’s whole backstory gets relegated to an off-hand comment about why she doesn’t really like Zack at first glance. Even that comment is obscure at best. I worried about that as I was going through the edits, because, for me, it left so much dangling. But on the final few read-throughs, I realized that it not only worked, it guaranteed that we would see more of Sanjeet in the future. Her story didn’t have to spill across the page at her first introduction like some rote recitation of a character sheet. That story was a seed planted with an off-hand line, one that should be allowed naturally to grow and unfold.

At least 70% of your world-building will never make it to the page, and that’s OK.

With my name on titles like The Dictionary of Demons and Sumerian Exorcism, you know I like my research – possibly a little too much. For decades, I’ve immersed myself in the study of angels, demons, and beings that dance the line between, reading with the eye of a mythologist, rather than a theologian.

For the Shadowside Series, this manifests as worldbuilding.

I like worldbuilding. A lot. Inventing languages, crafting pantheons – blame my days as a game master for Vampire: the Masquerade and D&D. There are whole mythic cycles I’ve written about the angelic tribes as groundwork for the Shadowside books, and these explore key details like when the tribes arrived, what cultures they influenced, and how immortal spirits can take form in the physical world in the first place. Their names, their powers – even the fact that they arrange themselves in tribes – all stem from my study of Biblical and related history.

And no one but me needs to have access to that material, because Zack is ignorant to all of it. He has to be, for there to be relevance to the conspiracy at the heart of the series. The Shadowside books earn their label of Urban Fantasy, especially with how thoroughly some plot-threads are wound up with the city of Cleveland, but the books are also mysteries, and Zack’s quest to solve those mysteries is the real drive behind the action.

All those tales of the tribes’ mythic past – it’s tempting to find some way to squeeze them into the books. But they don’t need a place in the spotlight. They’d clutter the action. Who wants to read a book that looks like the Bible got gene-spliced with Encyclopedia Britannica, anyway? It’s taken me until Harsh Gods to fully make peace with leaving them out. The stories are things written for me. As the writer, I need to have all those details in my head. They are architecture and foundation. But the best way for those details to come out is not through unwieldy info-dumps but through light brushstrokes adding light and shadow to each character.

Just because it’s obvious to you…

This lesson played out as a fun exchange with my editor. There is a scene in Harsh Gods where several minions of the Big Bad have gotten their hands on hunting rifles. These rag-tag snipers are stationed high up on a tower, and they don’t expect company to ambush them by dropping out of the sky. Too bad for them – on the Shadowside, Zack can fly. As our hero pops back over to the flesh-and-blood world, a couple of the rifle-bearers get off their one shot, then Zack closes the distance and they resort to using the rifles like clubs.

That scene made perfect sense to me. My editor did the digital equivalent of spilling red pen all over it, dropping comments into the document asking why they didn’t try shooting a second time. And at first, all I could think was, “They’re single shot rifles. How the hell are they supposed to reload in the time it takes Zack to get into melee range?”

Which gets us to my first mistake: I assumed, because I knew about this type of rifle, the answer would be obvious to everyone else. I don’t consider myself any kind of expert on firearms, and yet, growing up in rural Ohio, I’ve had a good deal more passive exposure to gun culture than many, and certainly more exposure than I ever realized. Living in the States, it’s hard not to absorb at least some gun-knowledge through sheer osmosis, but I also associated closely with an uncle who was a police officer and a great-uncle who had a suspicious number of stories about the Irish equivalent of the mafia in Cleveland. They both talked guns, often. As a little kid, I didn’t think I was soaking up this information, as they were rarely talking to me, but exposure was enough. And because the knowledge was acquired passively, I failed to realize that it wasn’t common to everyone.

My second mistake was failing to write even one line that demonstrably showed the reader why the characters made the choice to abandon their guns as firearms and instead wield them like clubs. As writers, we make countless decisions to steer the action, but unless the reader sees some evidence for the characters’ decisions, reasons clear to us come across as muddy, erratic, or pulled fresh from our sphincters.

Rightfully, my editor called me on it. Which leads to my third error in this extended object lesson. My initial response at getting called out was to bristle, rather than thank Steve Saffel for looking out on my behalf. It is incredibly easy for writers to become blinkered to the gaps in their work, and this is why editors and beta readers are essential. Someone with distance from the manuscript is far more likely to catch those omissions, so we can go back and show clearly how things in the story got from guns as firearms to guns as fancy sticks. 

Always question familiar tropes.

This is the story of how “random white dude” became Sanjeet. I told you I would get to this, but I saved it for last, because it touches on an issue weighing on a lot of peoples’ minds right now: diversity. Let me be clear, this is not a call for people to play Diversity Bingo, and if you do that just because you think it earns you points as a writer, it’s the equivalent of giving compliments with the expectation of earning affection. As a writer, you should consider diversity because the world we live in is diverse, and good fiction is woven from the stuff of reality. This is also a consideration of how popular culture molds our imaginations without our ever being aware of it. And for me, that revelation came together in a galvanizing way through the character of Sanjeet.

Before outlining the action of a book, I often scribble notes – character sketches, snippets of key scenes, the occasional bit of storyboarding. During this process for Harsh Gods, when I knew the story started with Father Frank reaching out to Zack for help, I ran into one big problem: in book one, Zack not only lost his phone, he also lost any memories relevant to things like his email. Any of his old contacts, outside of Remy, Sal, and Lil, have no way of getting in touch with him. More specifically, they could be calling and leaving emails, but unless they knew his address and boldly walked up to the front door, Zack wouldn’t even know thy existed.

As the action opens up, Father Frank is busy with Halley, so he needs to send someone to collect Zack. And in my notes, this person is first given the name Mike Beale. He’s as interesting as cardboard – his sole existence was as messenger boy. Of course he had a little back story – lay person at the Church, helps Father Frank out now and then. THE END. I wanted to get this Mike dude in and out of the action so fast, I considered having him get knocked on the head during the book’s first fight scene.

That is boring. Boring and lazy. And shortly after writing those notes, I saw that.

So I asked myself, “Who is this character really? Why does he have to be a guy? For that matter, why does he have to be white? Are there reasons? Do those reasons have anything at all to do with his character or the plot?”

None of Mike Beale’s projected qualities had any bearing on the plot.

I realized, in Mike Beale, I had conjured the clone of every bit character seen on practically every show imaginable. That television cliché – the extra who walks on, says maybe one line, probably gets whacked, and then only appears as “random white dude” in the credits – had wormed its way so thoroughly into my imagination that when I groped for a non-essential character, “random white dude” was the first thing my brain spat out. Mike Beale existed from sheer ubiquity, like the O of a condom worn into the leather of a wallet.

I didn’t want that. Specifically, I didn’t want a character to exist simply because it was easier than considering an alternatie. So I returned to my series of questions.

Who is this character really?

Someone helping Father Frank.

Does he have to be a guy?

Nope. No reason.

So why not a girl?

Sure, no reason she can’t be.

Why is she working with Father Frank?

Maybe she’s his secretary – and I stopped myself right there, because that answer, as much as “random white dude,” came purely from familiar portrayals. In that moment, I got a conscious glimpse of all my media front-loading. I don’t mean anything as heavy-handed as propaganda. That requires too much effort. The main reason we see the same tropes again and again is the simple and very human refrain, “But that’s how we’ve always done it.”

Except that’s no answer at all. If we fail to check our assumptions, nothing will ever change. And the world has changed around us, regardless of how it is currently portrayed in sitcoms, in movies, and in far too many books.

So, I asked the character, Who do you want to be? And I got Sanjeet, this kind of shy college kid with Hipster-framed glasses, long black hair, and an event in her past that drove her to seek self-defense classes – only she couldn’t afford to keep going, because she helps support her little brother. Father Frank volunteers at the dojo, so they worked out a trade. She’s not Catholic like Father Frank. She’s Sikh, and as part of that, she keeps this image of the warrior-saint Mai Bhag Kaur in her car to remind her that she can be both strong and brave.

All of that, because I asked, “Why this random guy?” and was open to answers that went beyond what was familiar to me. Sure, Sanjeet required more research. She’s only a bit character, but her presence meant some cramming on the Sikh faith – whether or not she’d approve of an exorcism, how she might respond to Zack because of her beliefs, and exactly why she has known violence in her past. But now, that character jumps off the page. She’s given me a story that demands to be told. And I’ve learned that easy answers lead to familiar places, but there’s a point where familiar stops being interesting.

Michelle Belanger: Website | Twitter | Facebook

Harsh Gods: Amazon | Titan

Okay, so, let’s just get this out of the way — Necrotech is a fucking blast. (If you’re a fan of my Miriam Black books, I posit you might like the hard-heeled throat-kick that this book provides. It’s edgy, don’t-give-a-shit fiction, which is probably my favorite non-genre genre.) Anyway, K.C. Alexander, who is a delight, is here to flip the script on you.

* * *

So, NECROTECH is out. Awesome. I’m pretty well excited for this one. Granted, it helps that it’s been three years in the making, and a lifetime in the learning, so I think my patience is as stretched as it’s going to get. It’s already snapped once.

But then, that snap heard ‘round my world is probably the reason I find myself in the position that I am: with a new agent, in a new genre, writing under a new name, divorced, in the studio apartment of my dreams (well, almost, needs more Hawaii), and working with a publisher who gives two flying douchenuggets and a bleached shitstain whether or not I’m “aggressive.”

You see, being aggressive is a compliment when you’re a guy. Writing a balls-out, kick-ass female character with little interest in redemption, a mouth foul enough to make a sailor flinch, and a propensity for blood and death is a bonus when you’re a man—or have the right sort of public manly support.

But when you’re female-presenting? Being “aggressive” is the same as being a bitch. Now you and I both know that bitches get shit done, but you know what they also do? Piss off fragile egos. Primarily male, but there’s plenty of room in the Big Book of People Aggressive Women Piss Off for a wide array of samples. Women are expected to be nice. Period.

One of the first compliments I received on NECROTECH was for Riko: “She reminds me of a cyberpunk Miriam Black.” Yaaaaassssssss. Given I’d set out to write an unapologetic thug of a woman with all the sexual and behavioral agency of a man, I took that as an immensely on point compliment. Riko is not a woman who cares what you think about her—so long as she’s got your attention. Love her, hate her, fuck her, fight her; as long as it’s her, she’s good.

Redemption is a word that belongs on a tattoo. Probably with, like, bloody hearts or roses or something.

With this wholehearted, bleeding wreck of a badass woman in hand, I sent my manuscript out to publishers. I did so under my previous author name—an obviously female romance author, a steampunk urban fantasy author, often accused in both of not having enough romance in my works. Or being too hard. Or too gritty. An easy transition, I figured.

So off the book went, after revisions my agent at the time asked for (revisions I’d realize much later felt like selling out to me). It wasn’t sent to romance lines—save one or two, who were dabbling in more SF/F at the time. But it was, as it turned out, sent to editors who were not ready to deal with… well, me.

The responses I’m about to list out are real, but paraphrased because, you know, I’m not trying to be an ass. Just reporting the rejections I had to wade through.

“There’s too much romance in this book.” This one makes me laugh. Once you read Necrotech, you will absolutely understand why, but for those of you may not want to, here’s the short version: Riko gets less onscreen ass than most male SF/F heroes whose goal is to “save the girl,” but she has all the sexual agency of any man ever. She likes people. Sex is a thing. So she comments on it. Blatantly. That’s romance, now? …Has anybody warned the SF/F writers with sexual material in their books?

Otherwise, all I’m left to consider is that my name, linked to past romance books, told them I’d sneak romance in—somehow magically under all the words on the pages they were (or were not) reading?

“I don’t know what Karina’s intentions are, but this is absolutely the wrong direction for her to take.” This one pissed me off. Can you guess why? Another short version: because an editor decided that my leaving romance, my writing “like a man,” was the wrong decision. That because I was a) a woman, b) a romance author, or c) me, that I could not be encouraged to take a path—that anecdotally, historically, statistically is reserved for men.

“It’s just too hard and unrelenting for the direction of this line.” Fine, fine, that’s absolutely fair enough! … Of course, the other editor then signed an equally as hard, if not harder and more unrelenting, author a few weeks later. We could chalk this up to “that’s the biz, yo.” I mean, luck and who you pitch to and all that is so very much a thing. And maybe it was exactly that. But it was also shitty timing.

I’d also like to note that most of the rejections came in with praise—brilliant pacing, very well written, the character just leaps off the page. But…

Too hard. Too aggressive. Too much romance. Too much focus on physical description. (Given this is an incredibly diverse cast of characters, that’s a whole other post on a whole other day—I don’t have the spoons right now to unpack that one. Subtext is a bastard.)

Two years ago, when I got my last rejection decrying my efforts to write a bold, badass woman in the vein of what I dare to call “man-SF/F” firmly tongue in cheek, I shelved the book and returned to writing what everyone said I did best—woman books, romance books, redemption books, hero books. Safely ensconced in the genre that the industry had decided I belonged.

And then something changed.

One day, I cracked open Riko again. I stripped out all the edits that pulled her punches, removed all the requested softening that made her “likable”. I sharpened her edges and bloodied her wake and as I lifted layers and layers of “be nice” and “be likable” and “be considerate and respectful and submissive,” I realized how much of that bullshit I’d internalized. How much of the gendered expectations of women authors in any genre are encouraged to absorb. “Be glamorous, ask instead of declaring, soften your questions, pitch your voice high, defer to industry standards that have been around for a hundred years.”

Never let them see you struggle.

My life has been a struggle since the moment I was born. My marriage was a struggle. My career a struggle. My finances are a struggle, my depression is a struggle, my desire to stop kissing ass and start kicking it is a struggle that feels like it never ends. The gendered expectations around me are a struggle.

Sometime over the next year, I scrubbed Riko free of the stain of those expectations and as I did, I scrubbed them off me, too.

It was hard fucking work.

The first thing I had to lose was my name. My name, you see, is incredibly feminine—so feminine that I have never really liked it (sorry, mom and dad). When you see the name “Karina,” you cannot help but thing “girl.” Girl. (Or Karina Smirnoff, and rowrrrrr, but definitely womanly.) Karina is a girl’s name. It’s a romance author’s name. It’s the name of a girl who grew up internalizing the expectations levied upon a girl, a woman, a female author, a romance author.

It declared loudly on the cover, “This sci-fi was written by a girl!”

Not that anyone pays attention to the gender of the name on a book, amirite? That’s okay. I just made it easy to ignore entirely. That’s why I chose the name I did. It’s me and not me but it’s way more me than Karina Cooper was allowed to be.

My perseverance landed a new agent who will swing hard and fight smart for me and my work, who is patient and supportive and doesn’t expect anything of me but what I want to write. I landed a publisher who read Necrotech and immediately loved her aggression, her swagger, and my words. “Go harder,” they said. “Go edgy and bloody and raw.”

Somewhere between that last rejection and this book launch, three years in the making, I stopped sitting down when told to. I started to stray from my lane—and when I realized how much hate I got for doing it, I also realized people do not like it when a woman is anything other but what a woman should be.

Well, I am a pansexual nonbinary fierce motherfucker and I will write what I know. Keep up.

As Necrotech launches, I’m daring you—yes, you—to read Riko’s story without any gendered expectations at all. To get to know Riko from page one and take her as she is. To love her, hate her, want to fuck her, want to fight her; whatever it is she makes you feel, I dare you to feel it without mentally adding “like a man” or “like a woman.”

And then when you deal with me, online or in person, I dare you to do the same. You can call me Kace when you do.

* * *

K.C. Alexander is the author of Necrotech, an aggressive transhumanist sci-fi with attitude. She has contributed SF/F stories to Geeky Giving and Fireside Fiction, obsesses over art journals and washi tape, and will not tolerate your shit. Visit at kcalexander.com.

Necrotech: Amazon | B&N | Powells | Indiebound

I met Mike back in the Summer of ’69 — wait, no, that’s not it. I forget when it was. Secret Beard Convention? Beer Heist, 2014? Whatever. Point is, he’s got a new (and damn good) book out, and with that, he’s got some words of advice for you whippersnapper writer upstarts out there.

* * *

I was about 10 years too old for The Magic School Bus when it first came out, but having a kid will bring you full-circle on stuff like that, so I’m now quite familiar with that hapless band of elementary school students hijacked by a demented science teacher who obviously used Satanic magic to force a demon to possess a vehicle and then utterly endanger her charges via horrific tortures designed to “educate” them about science….

Er. No, wait.

The Magic School Bus is cool! Embark on adventures inside a polymorphic bus that sends you into someone’s intestines or to the furthest reaches of the galaxy, and still be back in time for recess! My science retention would’ve gone through the roof that way. As it stands, the only thing I remember about science from grades K-12 is dissecting a rat (gross) and spilling water all over myself and my lab partner as we tried to learn how to use the gear in chemistry class. (“If that were acid, you’d both be in the hospital,” my teacher said as he passed by us. We nearly died of laughter.)

Anyway, if you were gonna point to the single most important lesson from The Magic School Bus, it would be the catchphrase from the teacher, Miss Frizzle: “Take chances! Make mistakes! Get messy!”

Words to live by, y’all.

I took a chance five years ago by submitting a novel to agents. It worked. My Daedalus trilogy of Napoleonic Era space opera mash-up shenanigans did pretty well despite nobody really knowing where to stick it on the shelves. (Is it space opera? Steampunk? There’s no steam, but it’s old-timey!) Fans actually sought me out at cons. I got to hang with some pretty amazing people. It was a whole new world. (Cue the song. Yeah, it’s a different cartoon. Whatever.)

So now what? The Known Worlds universe of that trilogy is huge and theoretically infinite. I could’ve done more. Maybe I will later on. But that felt like the safe play. Meanwhile, I’d been doing some short fiction that was scratching my itch to try other things — I did a Pathfinder Web serial, a Cthulhu Mythos story for a Lovecraft anthology and a strange humor story about art, feces and fraud that landed in another anthology. I donated a hard SF story to charity, and have another short coming out in a Vampire: The Masquerade anthology that makes my proto-goth college-self happy…or at least less tragically morose.

And now, this week, I have a new novel out. It’s not space opera, or Napoleonic. It’s not any of the other stuff I just mentioned either. It’s a Cold War spy thriller…with superpowers. And Area 51.

Why? Because just as I read a lot of Lovecraft, and just as I played D&D and Vampire back in the day, I also loved the classic Tom Clancy thrillers, too. Heck, I even applied to CIA once, and got invited to the informational session (whereupon I decided that a newlywed who wanted to have kids would not, in fact, be well served by haring off on such a journey in a post-9/11 world). I write about the stuff that interests me. This interested me.

Is it, strictly speaking, a logical career move? I have no idea and really don’t care a whole heap. I’m fortunate enough to have opportunities to explore, and I jump on the opportunities that appeal to me at the time. I wanted to write something dark and morally gray and nuanced, about real people in the 1940s who are suddenly imbued with strange abilities. I wanted to explore how the government would treat, and ultimately use, these poor souls in an era where paranoia was considered a virtue against the godless Red barbarians at the gates threatening to destroy our way of life. (Yeah, there’s no parallels there. None at all.)

I want to write the stuff that does heart and soul good. And right now, that’s the MAJESTIC-12 series. I think MJ-12: Inception is a nifty book, and there are enough blurbs on the cover to make me think others see it that way as well. But we’ll see. It’s different and I’m taking a chance on it and let’s ride this horse for a while and see what happens.

Of course, I have…three? Four?…ideas right now for stand-alone novels. I’m gonna get to them eventually, current contract and day-job permitting. (And family. Priorities, man.) These novels are all utterly different from both paranormal Cold War spy thrillers and Napoleonic Era space opera. One may involve a chef. (No, really.) But I’m gonna get to them and write them and throw them out there into the void and see if there’s an echo that replies back.

Look, if there’s room on bookstore shelves for my books, which smash together genres like a toddler with building blocks, then there’s room on shelves for whatever you got going. Don’t worry about the ephemeral vicissitudes of “the market,” or fret over what’s trending with agents and publishers right now.

Write the story that screams to get out of you. Take chances. Make mistakes. Get messy. Don’t be like Arnold on The Magic School Bus, the kid who always said, “I knew I should’ve stayed home today.”

Nobody liked goddamn Arnold. He should’ve stayed home. Don’t be Arnold.

***

Bio: Michael J. Martinez writes all kinds of things for a living, from PowerPoints to pastiches, and is only occasionally alliterative. He lives in the greater New York City area with a fantastic wife and wonderful daughter, along with two cats and three chickens. They’re Jersey chickens, which means they have attitude.

Michael J. Martinez: Website | Twitter | Untappd

MJ-12: Inception: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Goodreads

The English language is a machine made by mad engineers using whatever spare parts they had at hand. The whole kit and kaboodle was not designed intelligently from the ground up — it was cobbled together over many years, MacGuyvered as new widgets are smashed indelicately into open slots, as a fan belt is replaced by the elastic in old underwear, as words are thrown into a meat grinder to lubricate the whirring gears. Because of this, English as a language is constantly evolving — and in some cases devolving. It defies easy categorization. Every rule is buried beneath a teetering Jenga tower of exceptions. For every DO THIS or DON’T DO THAT, there exist countless opposing examples illustrating glorious violations.

Of course, though, this leads some young writers to think they can just make shit up as they go, even though the reality is that they still need to learn the rules. As I am fond of saying:

We learn the rules in order to break them, and we break them in order to learn why we needed those rules in the first place.

That brings us to this bit that’s been winging around Author Social Media:

(That is from a book called The Elements of Eloquence, by the way.)

I like it because it speaks to some of the unspoken, unstated patterns in language.

It’s also not entirely true.

It’s true-ish. In that it feels true, and it’s true some of the time.

(Never mind the fact that a green great dragon would be just fine, as long as we’re talking about cumulative adjectives instead of coordinate ones.)

Consider instead that the list of adjectives is subject in part to preconceived but unspoken patterns (“little old lady” is a common phrase, for instance) but also subject in part to rhythm — to the way a sentence sounds, to the way words work when spoken next to each other in a given order. Words on the page are a proxy, a middle-man. Words spoken aloud are the real deal — we form these complicated grunts and bleats and bugles in other to identify THAT THING or THIS OTHER THING or DON’T EAT THAT, IT WILL MAKE YOU SHIT UNTIL YOU DIE. The words on the page are a proxy for the spoken tongue. We do not necessarily read the words on a page aloud, but our brain still does a little trick where it translates them mostly as something we hear with our ears, not just with our mind. As such, the sound of the arrangement of words matters, even when it’s written on the page and not bugle-bleated directly into our ears.

We cleave more to the rhythm, the sound, than we do to this above pattern.

If you limit the list, restricting it to only a couple of the aforementioned adjectives, you can play with the order and see how things sound differently — and in some cases, better, when they vary from what’s noted. The book notes that shape precedes color, which would be a “rectangular, green knife.” (And yes, I’m putting commas in here because we are talking coordinate adjectives. And the list misses that a bit, because “whittling knife” is a singular object, the adjective cumulative to the noun.) But I’d argue that “green, rectangular knife” sounds — and looks — better. (By the way, what is a rectangular knife?)

Would I say “raw, red wound,” or would I say “red, raw wound?” Both sound fine to my ear. (Would “raw” be considered opinion, or material?)

Consider the issue of size — “a lovely, little knife” works fine, as per the rules. ([Opinion, size noun].) But change “little” to “large” and the rhythm changes — I no longer like “lovely, large knife,” and favor a switch up to “a large, lovely knife.” ([Size, opinion noun].) Consider that “little old lady” is, as discussed, a common phrase. But consider the phrase, “young, dumb idiot,” which to me sounds better despite it breaking the pattern.

The pattern noted is generally accurate, but it’s not written in stone, and it varies quite considerably under real world use. (I understand however that this pattern noted above is actually being taught officially in some places? Um.) Rules are rules in writing until they’re “rules,” until they flex and shift and shimmer and become something else. They’re “rules,” wink wink, nudge nudge, which is to say they change shape and become insubstantial when we need them to. And sometimes things we think are rules (“don’t use adverbs, don’t start a story with weather, don’t name a character Spaetzlenuts Amberjack Filigree, the 3rd”) are really just cultural ideas someone got a hold of and people parroted because we need a lifeboat in this formless, watery, white chaos.

At the end of the day a rule fails and falls apart when either function or style eliminate the value of the rule in the first place. Or, as the saying goes, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. It’s good to know the rules. It’s also good to know when — and why — the rules stop working, or at least, when they stop mattering. We don’t break the laws because we love anarchy. We break them because it is the right thing to do at the time we do it. And because we jolly well fucking want to, goddamnit.

Even if it makes us sound like maniacs.

* * *

INVASIVE:

“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)

Out now where books are sold.

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