Rebellion is brewing and refugees have begun to trickle into the city at the edge of the world. Looming high on the cliff is the Nest, a fortress full of mages who offer protection, but also embody everything the rebellion is fighting against: a strict hierarchy based on magic abilities.

When Isha arrives as a refugee, she attempts to fit in amongst the other mages, but her kher tattoo brands her as an outcast. She can’t remember her past or why she has the tattoo – only that she survived.

Tatters, who wears the golden collar of a slave, was once one of the rebels. He plans to stay in the shadows, until Isha appears in his tavern. He’s never seen a human with a tattoo, and the markings look eerily familiar . . .

As the rebellion carves a path of destruction towards the city, an unlikely friendship forms between a man trying to escape his past and a woman trying to uncover hers, until their secrets threaten to tear them apart.

1. Trust the muse.

When I started working on The Collarbound, it wasn’t the story I had planned on writing. I didn’t intend to write a trilogy, I didn’t intend to start the story in a tavern, I didn’t intend to write a dual magic system of mind and flesh. It was all happening in an epic fantasy setting, with rebels and mages and giant glowing lightborns flying in the sky, yet it was focused on people, nearly entirely character-driven. As I delved into the manuscript, I worried who on earth would read this slow-burn character exploration, this piecing-together of backstory through mental battles, dreams and mind-games. Yet it was the novel that got me an agent, and a mainstream editor.

Trust the muse. It knows what it’s doing. Or at least, trust that what you love and what fascinates you will be fascinating to others, and that they might love it too. If you care, if it’s what your soul is singing about, write it. Other people will care too.

2. Make it worse.

But doing what you love doesn’t mean going easy on yourself. Quite the contrary. I would recommend always making it harder, for yourself, for your characters. No looking for the easy way out. No glossing over the hole in your magic system. You’ve spotted a gap, a way the magic can be abused or circumvented? Characters will as well. Let them exploit it.

For example, if mindlink means mages have to stand still when they occupy each other’s minds, as they’re focused on the mental worlds, then what happens when someone works out how to project mental images while throwing a punch? Or say the fleshbinding magic allows people to share sensations – it’s all very well that the grizzled characters think of this as a way to share pain to avoid succumbing to torture, but what does it mean when someone comes up with the idea to share pleasure? How does that change the way the first date goes? Actually, what does it look like coming from a culture that has had centuries to explore that idea and become familiar with it?

3. Names are hard.

While we’re on creating a new culture, one aspect I bumped against was names. I hate naming things – I tend to do that last, so characters and places are often called ‘XXX’ in the first draft. Naming is hard to get right. If you get it wrong, it can carry certain cultural associations. It can belong to the wrong language group, making people wonder why this fantasy term sounds like Anglo-Saxon or Latin; it can place your fantasy world in a certain cultural space which isn’t the one you wanted it to land in. People will make different assumptions about Anwen, Arushi or Anita, just from her name on the page.

To avoid this, research is your friend. When writing the khers, a species of red-skinned, horned, nomadic humanoids, I studied the roots of an old Tuareg dialect. By looking at the language’s origins, finding words which had then split into several other words and spawned offspring to create various new languages, I was hoping to find sounds and names that were hard to place, that didn’t carry associations for the reader. For the two other main languages in The Collarbound, I based myself on Proto-Germanic and Sanskrit words. The result was distinct cultural sonorities: the Sunrisers had terms such nasivyati, stana, rohit; while the Duskdwellers had names like groniz, baina, raudaz.

Another workaround which I found useful was simply to translate words, or blend existing terms together. Languages are flexible, and you can play with them by merging words together: mindlink, fleshbinding, lawmage. Or invented words can be made to sound just right: lacunant, for people who suffer from a lacuna in their mind. Or why not simply call the cliff at the end of the world the Edge, or the high-perched castle full of mages and seagulls the Nest? It can work just as well.

4. Tropes are your friends.

The thing with writing is, you have to both zoom in and zoom out. The language is important – it’s all words, words, words, as Hamlet would put it – but the structure of the story is important as well. Knowing your tropes means knowing the building blocks of your story, and how to play with them. Sometimes a trope is a shortcut, a way to tell the reader that yes, this character is the comic relief, the foil to the main character. Nothing too bad will take place while he’s around, but beware the moment he’s seriously hurt, because it will spell serious trouble.

Once those tropes are established, they become ways to play with the reader, surprise them or tease them: how about we take ‘the rebel hero fighting the evil empire’ trope… But we’re firmly from the point of view of people living under the empire’s rule, and the horror they feel when the rebels destroy everything they’ve ever known. I love playing with known stories, twisting them into unexpected shapes, testing what they become if told from a different angle. Or telling a story in the wrong order, or after the facts. Sure, this character is a classic fantasy rogue hero, with too many skills to count, but it’s been years now, and what’s left of the adventures is mostly trauma, and he would like to live quietly in his tavern off his teaching job while pursuing romance, if you please.

5. You’re putting in a lot of stuff you’re not aware of.

I once heard Jeanette Winterson say that fiction is a lie detector. I think that’s particularly true of writers – we put stuff in our stories, convinced they’re things we invented, only to find out that they’re things we believed, or lived through, or worried about. I found myself writing about a mixed-race young girl, cut off from one of her cultural identities; about a White-passing man from a faraway land; about languages and mixed identities, trying to live at the threshold between three cultures; about violent revolutions failing and what we might do instead to make this world a better place. And then a friend, or a relative, points out that I’m mixed-race, White-passing, that two of the three cultures I’ve been influenced by – French and Iranian – both have violent revolutions which end with a worse dictature taking over in its wake, in 1789 and 1979 respectively.

It seems so obvious in retrospect, I’m not sure how I missed those themes while I was writing the manuscript. I was convinced the story was about two mages making friends or sometimes failing to, exploring mindmagic and fleshbinding powers, and fighting off the violent rebel army of Renegades – and it still is all of that, of course, but a lot more is hidden in there that I hadn’t realised I was putting in.

Maybe that’s why, in the end, it’s important to write what you love, what the muse whispers to you in your dreams. Because it’s what moves you, whether you realise it or not at the time. Because looking back on the book will be like looking into a mirror – and hopefully, you’re not the only person who will see themselves reflected there.

***

Rebecca Zahabi is a mixed-heritage writer (a third British, a third French and a third Iranian). She started writing in her home village in France at age 12 – a massive epic where women were knights and men were she-witches which set out to revolutionise feminism. Since, she learnt how to actually write, and has slightly re-jigged her expectations of what she can achieve with a keyboard and a blank page. The plan of taking over the world, however, has not changed.

After honing in her craft in a variety of genres – playwriting, short stories, an attempt at Icelandic sagas – she hopes to write novels that can make a difference. She is currently working on Tales of the Edge, an ambitious trilogy blending magic and structural violence.

Her début adult novel, The Collarbound, was longlisted for The Future Bookshelf program at Hachette UK before being acquired by Gollancz, and made it to the top 10 Sunday Times bestseller list.

The Collarbound: Bookshop | Amazon

Hi there! My name is James L. Sutter, and for almost 20 years I’ve worked in science fiction and fantasy. I was a co-creator of the Pathfinder and Starfinder Roleplaying Games, and worked as both Starfinder’s Creative Director and the Executive Editor in charge of Pathfinder’s tie-in novels with Tor. I’ve written official Dungeons & Dragons adventures, comics, video games, short fiction for places like Nightmare and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and two adult fantasy novels set in the Pathfinder world.

With all of that in mind, here’s the pitch for my newest novel, Darkhearts:

When David stormed out of his band, he missed his shot at fame, trapped in an ordinary high school life while his ex-best friend, Chance, became the hottest teen pop star in America.

Then tragedy throws David and Chance back into contact. As old wounds break open, the boys find themselves trading frenemy status for a confusing, secret romance―one that could be David’s ticket back into the band and the spotlight.

As the mixture of business and pleasure becomes a powder keg, David will have to choose: Is this his second chance at glory? Or his second chance at Chance?

Perfect for fans of Alice Oseman and Red, White, & Royal Blue, Darkhearts is a hilarious, heartfelt, enemies-to-lovers romance about love, celebrity, and what happens when the two collide.

Not exactly what you expected, right? Yeah, me either. Genre-wise, young adult contemporary romance is about as far from my previous work as you can get. But while it’s been a sometimes bumpy road from there to here, I’ve never been happier with my writing career, creatively or financially. So in the interest of transparency, here are a few lessons I’ve learned along the way.

You are not too big to fail.

In 2017, after leading the Starfinder RPG team through a wildly successful launch, I left my job in the game industry in order to write novels full-time.

I know, I know—I can’t count the number of times I’ve told people to hold onto their day job as long as possible, and especially a creatively fulfilling one. But I honestly thought I’d hit the point where working full time was holding back my career as a novelist. I already had two well-received fantasy novels under my belt, and a respectable following online. I had a bigshot agent and a new novel out on submission. I also had a wife with a tech job who was happy to support me. It was time to stop building my runway and actually take off… right?

*ahem*

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

A month after I quit my job, my wife got so sick that she had to quit her job—permanently. Suddenly I, the freelance author, was our sole breadwinner (plus full-time caretaker and househusband). Fortunately, we’d planned ahead and had a comfortable safety buffer. And I still had that novel on sub.

Except that novel didn’t sell.

So I wrote another novel.

But my agent didn’t like it.

So I got a new agent.

Except that novel didn’t sell either.

So I wrote another novel.

But my agent didn’t like it.

So I got a new agent…

That’s not a copy-paste error: despite having sold the first two novels I’d ever written, it took me four years, three more novels, and three agents to sell another. And that’s with an established fanbase and all the industry connections you could ask for.

Which brings me to my point: It might seem like success in one genre should transfer over to an adjacent one. And sometimes it does! But just as often, straying from your lane even slightly means you’re going to have to start all over again at the bottom.

You don’t need an agent—you need the right agent.

We don’t talk enough in this industry about the importance of switching agents. We worry that people will wonder what was wrong with us that the relationship didn’t work out. We remember how hard it was to get our first agent, and worry that we’ll never get another. (Which is bullshit: if your work was good enough to get one agent, it’s good enough to get another. And if it’s not, it’s probably better to polish it some more before you go public anyway.)

Switching isn’t necessarily about good agents vs. bad agents, either. Obviously, if your agent sucks—if they aren’t behaving ethically, if they don’t treat you with respect, if they aren’t selling books for anybody—you should move on. But more often, as with dating, it’s about finding the right fit for you. Someone who meshes with you on communication styles, editorial comments, and vision for your career.

In my case, my first two agents were objectively good at their jobs—they have big clients, get good deals, conduct themselves in a professional manner. But like any relationship, agents and clients can grow apart. My first agent had signed me based on a YA fantasy romance, so when I came to her with an SF thriller that read more like adult—and a bunch of other ideas that felt similarly outside her wheelhouse—she suggested I find someone else. So I signed with an adult SFF agent—which was fine until I found myself unexpectedly writing YA contemporary romance and loving it. Neither situation was their fault.

Yet while it was these basic logistical conflicts that led me to my current agent (Josh Adams of Adams Literary), now that I’m here, I’ve discovered just what a relief it is to have an agent whose style perfectly matches mine. When I have a question, he gets back to me immediately—sometimes within minutes. For an anxious author like me, who would otherwise probably spend the hours between question and answer pinned to the floor as my brain does panic-donuts inside my skull, those quick responses save me a ton of lost productivity. Plus, he’s excited to represent me in all the different directions I might want to take my career. (And of course, the fact that he sold Darkhearts in two weeks sure doesn’t hurt!)

So if you’re not thrilled with your current agent, or if they don’t support the direction you want to go next, consider switching. It won’t necessarily be easy—the seven months I spent looking for my third agent were significantly more painful than either of my previous agent searches—but now that I’m here, I’m so, so glad that I did it.

Different genre, different money.

Back when I was commissioning tie-in novels for Pathfinder, all the stats I was able to gather suggested that a “normal” advance for a first adult science fiction and fantasy novel was around $5,000 unagented, or $10,000 agented. Sadly, that number doesn’t appear to have changed much over the last decade. So I went into selling my first young adult novel with that as my benchmark.

Turns out, young adult has more money—like, a lot more. Of course, part of that is my glorious shark of an agent, but Darkhearts has only just launched, and I’ve already made an order of magnitude more money off it than from my Pathfinder novels. If you’re considering hopping genres (or media), do some quick googling and see what numbers you can turn up. You might be surprised.

Follow your heart, trust your gut.

Strategically speaking, writing Darkhearts was a bad idea. I was a speculative fiction guy, with a speculative fiction agent and a speculative fiction fanbase. But when the pandemic hit, I found myself struggling with the dystopian book I’d been working on. On the advice of a friend, I started reading a bunch of contemporary YA romance—and absolutely fell in love (no pun intended). It was just such a wonderful escape to sink into something with a funny, sassy voice, where character rules all and you know you’ll get a happy ending. Because I can never read something great without wanting to try my hand at it, I decided to experiment, drawing on my own experience as an underage musician in Seattle (not to mention a confused bisexual teen). And it felt great. The words flowed, the voice felt natural, and suddenly it was all I wanted to work on.

I knew writing this book wasn’t a smart decision. (In fact, I held off on telling my agent about it until I was almost done.) But I’ve come to believe the best indicator of whether an audience will have fun with a book is whether you have fun writing it. And Darkhearts was fun—there are text-message dick jokes between the two boys that still make me laugh. Now, several years and a new agent later, it’s already the most successful fiction I’ve ever written, giving me a whole new career as a YA author.

Maybe I’d feel different if the book had flopped, but all I know is that I wrote the thing that felt good, that pulled from my own experience and talked about the issues I wanted to discuss—and it worked.

Darkhearts is a novel about realizing you no longer fit inside the box you’ve assigned yourself. That’s true of its protagonist, who has to wrestle with not being the rock star (or the straight guy) he thought he’d become. Yet it’s also true of me as the author, realizing that maybe I’m not meant to exist solely within the genres I’m used to.

So if you’re feeling stuck, if writing’s lost its luster—try something out of left field. Play around with genre, media, voice, subject matter. You might find that you’re a more versatile writer than you thought—and that you’re a whole lot happier that way.

***

James L. Sutter is a co-creator of the Pathfinder and Starfinder Roleplaying Games and the author of the young adult romance novel Darkhearts, as well as the adult fantasy novels Death’s Heretic and The Redemption Engine. His short stories have appeared in such venues as Nightmare, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Escape Pod, and more. In addition, he’s also written comic books, essays for publications like Clarkesworld and Lightspeed: Queers Destroy Science Fiction, a wealth of tabletop gaming material, and video games. He lives in Seattle, where he’s performed with musical acts ranging from progressive metalcore to musical theater.

James L. Sutter: Website | Twitter | Instagram

Darkhearts: Bookshop | Indiebound | BAM | Amazon | B&N

What you need to know first is, I wasn’t supposed to write this book.

I had an entirely different book on the docket: a direct sequel to Damn Fine Story which was about applying the principles of that book to a variety of genre stories while also examining genre and sub-genre and all that fiddly stuff.

But then, Writer’s Digest’s parent company went insolvent, then it got bought by PRH, then everything about that book was in limbo.

Oh, also? A global pandemic happened.

And so when WD came knocking and said, “Hey, you still wanna write that book?” — well, it turned out, I kinda didn’t. My heart really wasn’t into the idea anymore, and further, I certainly didn’t feel like I wanted to kick over any hornet nests on the subject of genre and make statements I was ultimately not smart or wise enough to support. But: I gave it a shot, just the same. Freelancer mindset and all that, I figured I’d rally and get it done.

As I was trying to write that book, a whole other book began to emerge, first as bits where I thought “well, maybe this can become a separate book somewhere down the line.” But eventually it leapt forth as a colonizing entity, swallowing the original book. At this point I had to say to myself, “I guess this is the book I’m writing right now, and hopefully the publisher is going to be okay with that.” (This is not advisable, by the way, but hey, the pandemic made us all pretty weird.) The whole other book that emerged was a book that attempts to tackle the rigors and tribulations of being a writer — both from an emotional creature trying to make a story happen and a writer who needs to sometimes pay his bills with those stories perspective. Because honestly, writing is hard. The act is hard, the business is harder, the pandemic made it even worse — it’s chaos, all the way down. Making a book is a strange experience and it only gets stranger once it gets tossed into the churning maw of the publishing industry, or out into the eyeballs of a waiting audience.

I wanted to write about that, it seems.

So, the book that emerged is all about… being a writer, and how hard it is sometimes, and how we deal with that difficulty. That’s it, at the end of the day. It’s a book about surviving, and then, thriving as a storyteller. It’s a book about writing advice as much as it is a book of writing advice. And with a lot of it, it ends up quite personal, too, because at the end of the day I can really only talk about me as a writer, and not that much about you. I’m a pretty privileged, pretty lucky writer, and at the end of the day I can only guess what’s going on with you and in your head — but I damn sure know what’s up with me. It also ends up a book of me in conversation with myself — the myself who was a freelancer once upon a time, the myself who started writing novels just over ten years ago, the myself who wrote writing advice then and now, too. That conversation is about exhuming and reexamining and challenging old ideas, too. It’s ultimately about being gentle on yourself through this mad maze of writing, storytelling, and publishing. Because the rest of the world won’t be gentle. Not ever, not really.

Some of this too comes out of my experiences writing Wayward — which were, in fact, discussed in the afterword of that book. There, I had to write this giant post-apocalyptic novel in the midst of living through an Actual Fucking Pandemic, and… I was coming up bone dry. It was like being in the dark in a cave with no echo. There was no there there. I had a book to write, but no book in my mind to write. It was eerily comforting in a way that was profoundly disturbing.

I had to find my way through that, and have had to find my way through many dark forests through the years, and I thought a book talking about that was maybe useful to someone. Not necessarily as a “whole picture” thing, where all aspects of my lived existence will be relevant — but the hope is, something in this book inspires a greater connection to yourself as a writer and an artist.

So, Gentle Writing Advice was born.

And as it turns out, the publisher was more than okay with it.

As such, it has since leapt its containment paddock and is now rampaging loose in the world. It contains footnotes. It has bad words. It tries not to take itself too seriously because I never, ever want you to take writing advice too seriously. It contains no answers — which, for some, I recognize is frustrating. I can’t give you the map. I can only show you the way I went. I can mark trails, but those trails might not even be there anymore. But maybe I can help give you the tools to blaze your own path through the shadows.

Hopefully you’ll check it out, and find something in it that sparks some part of yourself or your process. Maybe you’ll read it and take just a little better care of yourself as a writer-of-words. After all, it’s dark down there in the word mines. Take a lantern and a snack.

If you want signed, personalized copies: Doylestown Bookshop is your place. They will absolutely ship to you! Wherever you are! Except probably the moon.

You can also use Bookshop.org or just go to your local store.

Certainly e-books are available where e-books are sold. Kobo, Kindle, Apple, and, well, all the other places.

And — audio! Right out of the gate. It’s erm, not me reading it? Which is a good thing because I’d totally screw it up, but Adam Verner nails it. Libro.fm, Audible, plus other audio retailers here.

Finally, though I’ve no events specifically around this book, next week I’ll be at Doylestown Bookshop with Clay McLeod Chapman (6/14, 6pm) to talk about the paperback release of the most excellent Ghost Eaters.

Also if you don’t care about any of this fancy-pantsy writing crap — well, BLACK RIVER ORCHARD is out 9/26, and you can preorder that now.

OKAY BYE

So, a few things upfront: first, I am a privileged author who sells well and is able to support himself and his family on writing books. Second, none of this post is to be taken as fact, but rather, as opinion — it relies, quite frankly, on “artisanal data” (aka anecdotes) and also, y’know, vibes. As such, I am, like many, looking at a room through a keyhole and will certainly not be seeing everything.

All that being said —

Being an author — aka, the fancy word for “writer of books” — vibes real weird right now. There is worry on the wind. To be fair, it’s always a little weird. Being a creative person in any realm is, I assume, a chaos reigns situation on the best of days. Nothing is certain. The ground is ever weak beneath our feet. A career as a “writer-of-books” has for me always been in part the strategy of eyeballing the peaks and valleys, and making sure that you’re building the proper ramps and bridges over the gaps before you ramp the car and crash it into a fucking ravine. In this sense, worry is always part of the bargain. Shit could go sideways one of a hundred different ways we can foretell, and another hundred we can’t. Worse, we’re kind of low-hanging fruit in a lot of ways — books are (to my mind, incorrectly) viewed as a luxury, a frippery, a whiff of the ol’ fol-de-rol.

So, what’s bringing the extra worry?

The pandemic fucked a bunch of shit up. Book events are erratic in terms of attendance, and as a result, publishers don’t seem to be using them as much, which means booksellers are asking authors, “Hey, can you tell your publishers to please send authors to us?” If booksellers are hurting, we’re hurting. (I have deeper thoughts about book events and how to make them consistent and amazing, but that’s for a different post, I think.)

Hardcovers are problematic, now? Hardcovers are maybe too expensive, probably — whether that’s inflation or greedflation, I dunno, but your average wallet paid too much for eggs and rent, and that doesn’t leave money for the Fancy Big Book Purchase. Some bookstores carry fewer hardcovers now because of this (also, space issues), and some publishers are committing to fewer hardcover releases and jumping instead to paperback. But if we lose that first step entirely, it shortens the long tail of the book, putting everything on, say, the paperback. (Sidenote, I have said and will always say, I really miss the MMPB format, and wish that format was still a thing. I know I am an OLD MAN YELLING AT CLOUDS, but boy fucking howdy I’d love to see spinner racks of paperbacks again. Put them everywhere! Pharmacies! Tire shops! Pet stores!) To be clear, a lot of books have forgone the hardcover step in the past — but the number seems to be dwindling anew, which to my mind is less than ideal.

Mainstream media is closing doors, not opening them. Once upon a time, a lot of media outlets had (said with naive reverie) coverage devoted to books. Oooh! Ahh! Except, ennh, uh-oh. Some outlets have now shut down all book coverage or have narrowed the aperture so tightly that the only coverage allowed is for the Mega Big Bestsellers. BuzzFeed News, which once upon a time covered book stuff, shut down entirely. And now there’s a surge in news coverage simply being farmed out to “artificial intelligence,” which is to say, clumsy algorithmic plagiaristic aggregators (because there is nothing intelligent about it, and a whole lot that’s artificial, though more on AI later). So, where once we could count a little bit on maybe, maybe getting some breadcrumbs of media coverage… well, the Gulls of Capitalism have gobbled up those crumbs, leaving us naught but an empty plate.

Social media is more or less collapsing. The internet in general is getting less reliable overall, in part due to misinformation, disinformation, and the waves of garbage and glurge barfed forth by various bots and algorithms. Once upon a time, Googling something was a reliable way to learn about it, but now you’ll likely find yourself on a raft floating on a sea of bad information. Social media has become the staging ground for all this shit (and also how, in part, it leeches into the groundwater of the rest of the internet), and as such, social media has started to fall apart like everything else. Twitter is shit, run by a vain maniac who keeps holding up anti-Semitic and anti-trans and anti-vaxxer and other bullshit like he just opened a bigotry blind bag and wants to show you the “cool thing” he just found, lol, lmao, laughing-crying emoji. The wheels are coming off everything and now attention is fractured across social media. And publishers — long having us and themselves lean very hard on that very same social media — are left with shattered landscape on which to walk. Where do you go to talk about your books? There are places, but attention is now diffuse, and it’s hard to know who’s even going to see it given how engagement is throttled unless you’re paying $8 a month for Twitter Blue, which doesn’t seem to do shit anyway, and also marks you as a chump helping to enrich an asshole.

The writer’s strike is unabashedly, unswervingly good. But, as a writer-of-books, it does mean one avenue of opportunity has narrowed, if temporarily — nobody is going to be optioning much of anything for (hopefully only) the short term. This isn’t the fault of the WGA, to be clear, but the fault of the giant companies who need to come back to the bargaining table to ensure that writers — the bedrock of all the storytelling that goes onto any screen anywhere — are part of the conversation and paid what they are worth.

The advance spiral is real. The advance spiral is this: you write a book, a publisher pays you XYZ advance for that book, but also doesn’t support the book well enough and as such, on the next go-round, you are offered a smaller advance, which actually means even less support because drum roll please, the marketing support is often tied to size of advance. And print runs are smaller and so bookstores/libraries order less which means on the next next go-round, they want to give you even fewer chits and ducats for your storywords annnnd now you’re paid in like, Chuck E. Cheese tokens. It’s not new, this spiral. It’s been a thing for a long time. But I’m hearing a lot more about it again after feeling like it was less of a phenomenon over the last several years. (Sidenote: Hana Lee, an author, most excellently crafted a “when will I earn out?” calculator here. It also helps show you that the book becomes “successful” long before you reach that actual threshold of earning out.)

Self-publishing is a narrower path. This is, again, a limited perspective, but talking to self-pub/indie friends, the gist is this: we put so many eggs into Amazon’s basket that Amazon gets to control most of of the indie narrative. Kindle Unlimited payouts are reportedly down. (As of April 2023, it seems the payout to authors was at an all-time low.) My toes do not wiggle in this pool as often, so feel free to correct my information here — maybe that indie thing is going really well. Again, looking through a keyhole here. Both here and with the above “advance spiral” problem — note that with inflation/greedflation, writers are not paid more, but rather, less, despite everything costing more.

And now we lead into the two biggest problems currently facing us writers-of-books — artificial intelligence and the nightmare bigotry that has used book banning as a cudgel across the nation.

First: AI.

I had a dream two nights ago where I was asked by a Major Intellectual Property Franchise Brand That Features Space Wizards to come in as a freelancer and “punch up” a novel in that universe that had been written by Artificial Intelligence. And for some reason, my Dipshit Dream Self took the job and then ended up, of course, rewriting the entire book from ground zero, because it was awful, and everyone knew it was awful, and I got paid half as much as I would have had I just been hired to write the thing fresh.

Now, usually, my dreams are goofy and weird. They are rarely of the “too real, this anxiety” variety, but this one? Felt pretty damn real.

How so? Well, let’s look at comments from Thomas Rabe, of Bertelsmann (aka the parent company of Penguin Random House), talking about AI: “If it’s your content, for which you own the copyright, and then you use it to train the software, you can in theory generate content like never before.”

(The phrase generate content gives me the shivering shits, tbh. And again, a lot of big franchise IPs are the ones who own big content… and they’ll start to use it soon to train the algorithms… and then hire writers at a cut-rate to fix all the shitty “content” that algorithm “generated.” Endless screams ensue.)

Further, from the article:

‘Rabe revealed that he was an enthusiastic personal user of the “impressive” ChatGPT, saying that it was already enhancing his job as a chief executive. He recently used the chatbot to help him prepare for a staff event at Penguin Random House’s office in Munich. “I asked ChatGPT what the impact of ChatGPT or generative AI is on publishing. It prepared a phenomenal text. Frankly, it was pretty detailed and to the point,” he said.’

What this should tell you is that publishers are starting to go “hmm” about artificial intelligence, under the auspices of how it could somehow enrich the authorial experience when, in reality, they and we all know that the only enrichment will be in the pockets of the already-rich. (Spoiler: I don’t mean the authors.) Some executive somewhere is trying to figure out how they pay authors less (and maybe their own staff) by “augmenting” the “content” with “artificial intelligence.” This is fundamentally one of the same issues the WGA is grappling with: the higher-ups are definitely dreaming of a day they can just tap a key and have a Magical Content Machine puke up a thousand loglines that they can then have the Magical Content Machine turn into scripts that they can then have some half-starved penmonkey “edit” (meaning: rewrite entirely) the mess into something resembling a film or TV show.

Let’s be clear about a few things: first, artificial intelligence is not what it says on the label. It is not intelligent. It is a content scraper, an aggregator, a copy-pasta information thief, and all it does is stick a bunch of pre-existing shit in a can, shake it up, and pour it out. It’s basically Link wandering around Hyrule, cooking up weird fish and bokoblin guts and hoping it turns into an edible stew.

Second, it also sucks. Really bad.

It cannot create something truly new because all it knows is what’s already been done. It can only remix, and remix poorly, pre-existing material. It lives no life. It has no inspiration or ideas of its own. AI is not equivalent to an artist or a storyteller — it has no perspective, no viewpoint, no opinion but what you tell it to have. The damn thing has no soul. And anybody who makes the argument “hur hur well don’t artists also basically get inspiration from pre-existing material so basically they’re the same basically” should be forcibly kicked out of the airlock into the cold void of space.

As has been pointed out by many others, we’d much rather have a world where artificial intelligence does basic, fundamental tasks like governing the best path a Roomba takes through our house. “Oh good, the AI in our vacuum has learned not to happily bobble its way through a pile of dogshit — no more smearing it across the entirety of our carpets.” Yes, that is the role for AI, to help our stupid appliances be better appliances. The human experience is one where we hope to be free to make art and tell stories and sing songs, so if artificial intelligence is doing that part, too, then what’s the fucking point of it all? When the robots make the music and the humans are cleaning up the dog shit — WTF?

Thus we must hold the line. Demand publishers not use AI covers. Demand they do not use AI editors. No AI in the writing, editing, production, or marketing of our books. Because somewhere that’s going to cut somebody out of a job, and that somebody is a clever person with ideas, and an artificial intelligence is not clever, it has no ideas, it has only stolen information from those who came before and then deploys it in order to make its Tech Bro Masters richer.

Now, book banning.

There exists a vibe among some authors, and I’ll note that this vibe is precariously privilege-flavored, whereupon they say, “Oh, being banned is good, actually,” as if it is a mark of honor and will lead to more sales. A few problems with this, though:

First, because book banning has focused primarily on schools and libraries, that means those places cannot purchase your book, and more importantly, means that audiences cannot access those books — which, yes, are for free, because schools and libraries provide a public service by offering free and unfettered access to entertainment and information. It is a Net Good, and any attacks on the books in these places is bad, and further, the attacks go well-beyond just the books, to the institutions themselves. School funding gets cut. Library funding, slashed, sometimes to the fucking ground, sometimes to the point the library has to close its doors. This is bad for everybody. There is no good here.

Second, it won’t stop there. It’s already moved onto bookstores. Which is the place you probably think you can still sell books.

Third, by saying book bans are Good, Actually, you’re definitely signaling that you are a person of privilege and power whose books and life really won’t be affected. But these bans focus predominantly on LGBT books, Black books, Jewish books, and books by other marginalized authors — the goal of erasing these books is the goal of erasing those people. Book bans are authoritarian anti-freedom efforts designed quite literally as the first wave of assault on the literal existence of these people. That’s the long-term. In the short-term, denying access to these types of books ensures that some folks simply do not get to see themselves, their problems, their histories, their futures, represented in fiction. It’s bad all around, and it will lead to self-censorship, suicide, and eventually, if left unchecked, genocide. I know that feels like a big leap. But book bans are where it starts.

To go back to the “publishing environment” angle, it’s chilling, too, in that booksellers, libraries, and publishers might get cagey about what they publish. Publishers already have a spotty track record on engaging with marginalized communities through the work they put out and the people they hire internally — this is not designed to make it better. It will rewind any progress that has been made, no matter how robust or meager that progress was. And be advised, it’s designed to go beyond the communities it currently targets. It’ll wash up on your beach eventually, so start caring now, not later.

(Sidenote: did you know most book challenges in this country have been coming from the same eleven people? It’s true!)

(And also please read what Scholastic asked Maggie Tokuda-Hall to remove from one of her books — and why she did not relent.)

AI and book bans are pretty existential in terms of the threat they represent to authors. And add in the rest, oof, it definitely feels real weird out there, if not apocalyptic. What can you do? I don’t have great answers here. If you’re an author, get a damn good agent who cares about this stuff. Push back on the invasiveness of artificial intelligence wherever you see it. Support your fellow authors, particularly those without your privilege — always try to leave a ladder out and a light on. (Plus some snacks.) Support bookstores. Support schools and libraries in buying books and standing up against oppression. And try to remember that it’s on you to keep writing your own weird, messy, Very-Much-You stories. As for readers, some of it is the same: support writers, bookstores, libraries wherever you can. Signal boost trans and Black and Jewish books — any book that isn’t by, well, a cis white guy like me. (I mean, selfishly, I want you to yell about my books, too! Obviously! Because I am a monster and I need to eat! But I’m probably going to be okay. My identity is not in the crosshairs.)

Is there any good news? Well, I guess there always is some, sure. I know some new bookstores are opening (check out The End in Allentown!). B&N has had its ups and downs but I’ve found them to be far more supportive of authors these days than they used to be. The horror genre is bouncing back in a big way, I think, and, I dunno, I’ve read some really good books lately. And we at least know the word-of-mouth phenomenon online can still do wonders, which we know because of someone named *checks notes* Bigolas Dickolas. While that’s all well and good, it’s a wad of Band-Aids patched over a sucking chest wound, so we must all remain vigilant and try to demand better for ourselves and readers.

This post is too long.

Black River Orchard comes out 9/26, and you can pre-order a signed, personalized copy through Doylestown Bookshop.

And my next writing book, about the writing life and self-care, is out next month — Gentle Writing Advice. Also available signed/personalized at Doylestown Bookshop, if you’re so inclined.

May we all find our Bigolas Dickolas.

Økay bye.

You, me, Kevin Hearne, and the Northshire Books bookstore in Saratoga Springs, NY. May 17th, 6pm. Come by! Buy books! Sing the ancient songs! Dance the heretical dance! Perform the rites! Uhh I mean, talk to us about tacos and birds. It’ll be great. Deets here.

I went to a small liberal arts college that was around 70% women — it was one fraternity and, if I recall, four or five sororities. It was a nice school, emphasis on nice. Parties were never huge. It was pleasant, if not always entirely exciting.

Then, one day, I was invited to a party at a Big University. This one, at PITT. So, I went to this party, and my first image of that party was that, outside on the sidewalk, there was a couch. And that couch was on fire. Not a raging fire, I think just the arm? But it was on fire.

The party would escalate from there. There was a dog fight on the front porch (not the kind you bet on, but the kind where two people brought dogs and they got into a fight). A meth dealer wandered in at one point. (He was, if I recall, quite friendly.) There was a lot of drinking and throwing up. Hallucinogens were at play. It was a blast. It was also the kind of party where you think, pretty constantly, “This could get fucked up kinda fast.” Like, it was already on an edge, teetering like a car on a rock at the lip of a cliff. One person gets in or out of the car and the whole thing is going over.

Related: yesterday I joined the Newest Social Media Network, Bluesky.

(No, I don’t have an invite code for you. I’ve no idea how to get one.)

Bluesky — which should really be BlueSky, because otherwise it reads like “blooski” — is almost exactly Twitter. Which makes sense, because it was ushered into existence by Jack Dorsey who, y’know, ran Twitter. It looks like Twitter. It acts like Twitter. It vibes like Twitter. More specifically, it vibes like Twitter from the early days of 2008. It has a wild, feral-cat aura about it. It’s shitposter central, right now: memelords rule the wasteland, and honestly, it’s a lot of fun. It has an energy that the other social media replacements haven’t really manifested yet.

And yet, it’s a lot like that party. Or put differently, it’s like a Philly sports game. We’re all having fun and the team is winning and woooooo. But the energy in the air is weird, and at any point people might start flipping cars or throwing batteries at Santa Claus. The hunger for people to dunk on is tightening everyone’s jaws. (Heidi Moore posted a good thread about the vibe here. As one user said: “too many predators in the ecosystem. where are the deer.” And yes, ironically, that thread is on Twitter. Sue me.) It doesn’t take much to turn shitposts into something else, something worse.

Pretty fast you can see that the biggest downside to the place is that there is…

No way to block people.

I just want to say that again:

You cannot block other users.

You can mute them.

But they can see you.

You cannot block other users.

This, to me, is a bedrock basic-ass social media necessity. There is no safety in a place where you cannot block other users. You can be harassed, stalked, threatened, and so forth, because there is no block and, far as I can tell, minimal moderation. I understand there are reasons for this, I guess, in terms of how the coding happened (the service will be diffuse and decentralized, more like Mastodon)? And it’s reportedly coming, the ability to block other users. But for me, blocking as a functionality should be a day one priority. It’s like designing a sports car without any windshield. Without it, you’re eating bugs and dust.

Also, the current name for posts over there is “skeets.”

As in, I skeeted on the blooski? Eeennh. Hmm. Okay. Skeets is funny. It’s hilarious. And no serious platform will ever survive calling them that. I may be wrong (and part of me very much hopes I am wrong) but I just don’t see a celebrity saying seriously about how you can find them skeeting on the blooski. A newscaster, “The shooting suspect skeeted violent images on his blooski…”

Then again, stranger things have happened.

So for me part of the question is always, how valuable is this for writers? As yet, not very — there’s not much Writer Community happening there, nor do I see a lot of promotion. Or news or serious talk of any kind. It’s honestly mostly shitposters. (A fascinating choice to have opened the platform up to that before, say, more serious journalists or celebrities. Probably smart? Also weird?) But I also figure it could become something. If they open the gates wide on this there’s very little stopping it from becoming The New Twitter, in the sense that it is mostly The Old Twitter, just without Elon Musk. (This is not an endorsement of Jack, to be clear, only that he, unlike Musk, is not likely sitting there at his computer with his pants unbuttoned, fondling himself as he talks to someone named Cat Turd on His Big Boy Platform.) It feels like, once they start… you know, making Bluesky a safer place, it could go big.

Then again, it will just as likely belly flop into pig shit, as most of the other platforms have. I mean, on the one hand, we’re all just looking for Next Twitter. On the other hand, Twitter wasn’t that fucking great before, so to replace it with… itself? Well, that’s also not ideal. (And there’s a thread about Bluesky’s terms of service being pretty problematic for content creators, but I also find that panic about terms of service is often quite easy, and further, the creators have said they’re going to work on it. Even still, keep your eyes open and remain generally wary. No social media platform is your friend.)

How are those other platforms doing, by the way? A quick rundown from me, from my POV, anyway —

Twitter is a front row seat to the apocalypse. It is the Champagne of Doomscrollers. But the fun is nearly dead. Musk fucked it all up, and it wasn’t even that great before. Engagement is also extra-fucked. Tweets are erratic in if they’re even seen at all. It’s not awesome. It is the walking dead.

Facebook is, well, who fucking cares. It is only a walled garden for me.

Tumblr, I dunno, I don’t yet use it much, but I know Chuck Tingle was just saying he still digs it over there, and for writers, seems like there’s meaningful value.

Post is boring. Are people even on Post still? Did I dream Post? Was it real?

Hive is — well, I dunno. I haven’t checked, which probably tells you how Hive is doing. I really liked it before the wheels came off. Not sure it can come back. I wouldn’t hate if it did. I liked it, in theory. It had just enough to feel like it was different from Twitter while still vibing like Twitter.

Mastodon — honestly, I still like it. It’s like an oaty bran cereal. I think I want something more exciting but inevitably I return to it. No algorithm, and despite that, still good engagement, lots of chatter and conversation.

Spoutible is real quiet. Maybe just down to the communities I follow bailed on it. But they did. And now it’s quiet. Most of my timeline comprises retweets, er, reskeets, er, respouts from like, one or two people.

Instagram is part of Facebook and so it is by its nature, awful, but I can’t lie, I still like it, and use it, and have a generally good time there.

TikTok is probably great, readers love it, writers seem to like it, I remain off it lest I destroy it with my cringe. I have thought about migrating Heirloom Apple Reviews there, but not sure the juice would be worth the squeeze.

And finally, why am I even talking about this at all? Why does it matter? It may not. But social media for a long time has been one of the ways writers and artists connect in part with their audience and doubly so with their communities. And publishers have shoved a lot of our collective eggs into those baskets, so when Twitter really shits the bed, we need to find alternatives. We were kicked out of the plane without a parachute, and we either need to figure out how to build one while falling, or somehow dive into another fucking plane.

Otherwise, we’re gonna pancake into viscera when we hit the ground.

So. Those are my thoughts. Very personal, YMMV, you likely have very different views of this stuff, and that’s entirely fine.

Okay bye.