Dear Deplorables,

(Meaning, You Folks Who Might Be Planning On Voting For Trump.)

I’m already betting you’ve checked out of this post. You either won’t click or, or you’ll share it to hate on it, or you’ll just downright disagree with it. And that’s your right. I’m a nobody to you (and really, a nobody overall). Just an uptight creative with a head full of ego, who thinks what he says matters even though, mostly, it doesn’t. I’m squawking into the void. Maybe you’re listening, maybe you’re not, but I’d like to make one last-ditch effort to convince you not to vote for Donald J. Trump, that greasy taint-stain, that Tribble merkin, that handsy orangutan. I’m not going to try to convince you to vote for Hillary. (I won’t ask for two miracles, just the one.) Though I am unabashedly a fan of the HRC, and I legitimately consider her a hard-working, smart-as-hell-bad-ass, I don’t need you to agree.

I just need you to not vote for DORMALD TORMP.

I come from what I like to think is a line of Probable Deplorables. And I recognize it. I recognize in the country a special kind of anger reserved in part for a changing world where technology and globalization have left people feeling alone and unchampioned, and I recognize too the realities of a swath of the population who is only now just seeing themselves and their default status as being genuinely (and existentially) challenged. I see too that there is a strong educational gap here, and that’s not your fault. Education is increasingly necessary at higher levels, but education is also increasingly costly — and loans are unduly punishing when made to cover those demands and those costs.

Just the same, I think Trump is a bad candidate. For you, and for everyone.

I could pretty easily make this a case about his racism and sexism, but realistically, those are issues I assume you have considered and discarded. I could also go through this and populate it with links to click-through to that clarify or bolster my points, but honestly, I’m not going to do that, either. It’ll take time, and you don’t really care anyway. This is pure opinion coming from me to you. No great substance. Just some quick bits to chew on and spit out as you see fit.

Let’s talk why voting for Trump is a bad, bad idea.

Even for Deplorables.

1. The Russia Thing.

Trump has said he never met Putin. But he also said he did. Then there’s the server. And the spy who says he’s compromised. And Manafort’s Ukraine connection. And the fact Trump hasn’t released his taxes. And he also said he admires Putin and — okay, you know, listen. I grew up in the time of the Cold War, where Russia was the bad guy in a lot of our movies. And sometimes that’s overly simplistic but Putin? Not a good guy. We don’t want a president who admires him, or who wants to be him, or who is already in bed with him as Kompromat. These aren’t just red flags. This is the entire Red Army waving red flags down I-95. As they fucking invade us because we just put a Russian puppet on the Iron Throne.

2. The Economy Is Gonna Crater

There’s a reason the market takes a hit when bad news about Clinton lands — hint: it’s not about Clinton, it’s about the increase in chances for a Trump presidency. With Brexit, the pound collapsed. With a Trump presidency, expect our economy to again suffer under a pretty significant seismic shock, one from which it will not be easy to recover.

Now, I know, some of you are saying GOOD, BRING IT ON. THE RICH WILL SUFFER. Except, I got bad news. The rich never suffer as much as you do. They just don’t. They’ll be okay. Take half of a millionaire’s money way and he’s still wealthy. Take half of a middle-class person’s money away and it’s WELCOME TO DESTITUTIONTOWN, POPULATION YOU. Trickle-down economics is half-bullshit, but one part that does trickle down are economic woes. And they don’t just trickle. The rich pop their umbrellas and the shit slurry rolls right off them and onto you. That means reduced investment in America. It means fewer jobs. It means fewer benefits.

Remember the 2008 recession? That was bad. That was from the Bush era, by the way, not the Obama era. We’ve pulled out of that tailspin to great effect. Which leads me to:

3. Things Are Not Terrible Right Now

Actually, things are pretty good.

Poverty’s down by 1.2 percent. The middle class is finally growing again, at a better clip than it has in recent memory. We’ve got an improving job market, lower inflation, lifting wages. Even the worst-off Americans are seeing the improvement.

If you imagine we’re on a boat, and the boat is in calm waters with easier fishing, it seems silly to want to steer that boat into uncharted territory. Sure, sure, the part of the map labeled HERE THERE BE DRAGONS sounds really, really interesting, but maybe it’s interesting when it’s the stuff of fiction, and not the stuff of life. Calm waters are boring. But maybe we should learn to like boring. If you want to spruce things up, go to an amusement park or try light bondage with your significant other. If the trend is good right now, and it is, let’s keep the trend going.

4. The Guy Lies A Lot

Like, really. He lies more often than he doesn’t. Check Politifact — I won’t bother linking, you’re an adult, you can Google. But the guy maybe needs to have an intervention. Lies come out of him like diarrhea out of a sick pig.

Now, the thing is, some of you think that’s okay. We live in a POST-FACT age, I hear. But I want you to reframe it a little. I want you to imagine having a boss. You maybe have a boss at work, right? You ever have a shitty boss? One of the things that, for me, earmarks a shitty boss is a boss that lies a lot. Not just massages the truth, but who says whatever he needs to in order to grandstand and position himself as the hero while casting the rest of the world in and out of the company as a gaggle of shitbirds. A boss that lies — or a parent that lies, or a significant other that lies — is shit. Nobody wants to be lied to. And here you have a guy, Trump, who purports to tell you the truth while unabashedly lying to your fucking faces.

Which is a very good sign he doesn’t respect you one whit.

Or that he’ll do anything he says he’s going to do. He says he gives money to charity, but he doesn’t. He says he never said the thing he said, even if he just said it like, four minutes before that. It’s shitty. Maybe even fucking batty. Used to be, people like that, you didn’t need to see past their curtain of horseshit because all you had to do was give a few good sniffs.

5. He’s Got A Boner For Nuclear Weapons

I am a child of the Cold War, as noted, and so I am also a child of NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST FEAR. I saw the Day After. I knew to fear the mushroom clouds. I knew putting my head between my knees would not save me from the ghosts of radiation that would possess my fragile body.

For a long time, it was easy to put that fear aside.

Now, though, nnnyeah, we got a guy who can’t stop talking about nukes.

If that doesn’t scare you, well, why doesn’t it scare you?

6. Climate Change

We like to pretend climate change is a partisan issue, but it’s not. When an overwhelming majority of scientists say, HEY THIS THING IS HAPPENING, it’s happening. And it’s not something that’s hard to see outside our door — it’s there. Epic storms, epic temperatures, weather anomalies. Even if you want to maintain the line that this is not human-caused (it is, but okay), you can’t really deny that it’s still happening regardless of whoever is causing it.

And that means needing a president and politicians who will address climate change going forward. Someone who will respond to it and attempt to countermand it, again, even if you believe mankind as a whole isn’t responsible. It’s like this — the house is on fire, so we can worry about who set the fire later. We need someone willing to put the fire out instead of pretending it’s a Chinese hoax.

7. Freedom Of The Press Is Actually Really Important

He’s talked routinely about diminishing or outright destroying the freedom of the press.

That’s not presidential. That’s dictatorial.

Now, I’m sure someone will argue, he’ll sue those corrupt media outlets, and not the good ones, but remember, Trump fights with nearly everyone. Trump loves the networks who love him, and he despises those who don’t love him enough. And that can change literally day to day — he’ll slag a network for their bad polls, then trumpet them the next day when the polls are in his favor. The game is only rigged when he’s losing. And that’s scary. Because it means he will never, ever want to be held accountable for his actions. He’s that fragile. His fear of freedom of the press isn’t a thing he cares about as a larger issue — he only cares about it in context to him. Those who oppose him are corrupt. Those who stand with him are great, tremendous, just the best, big-fingered, big-dicked people. He has all the best people, until the best people aren’t doing what he wants. Then they’re the worst people.

8. Let’s Talk About That Fragility Thing Some More

I know, we’re not supposed to do the thing where we diagnose Trump psychologically, but it’s just you and me here, right? And I think we can all quietly agree that maybe, just maybe, he’s a raging Narcissist. Like, he’s so much a Narcissist he will one day die staring at his own reflection in a pool of water. (Or, the more modern version, he will die staring at a giant portrait of himself he purchased with charity money. He’ll sit there, idolizing his painted image, and the whole thing will pop off the wall because the heavy-ass painting was put up by guys who knew he would stiff them on the bill, so they used the cheapest anchors and the thing goes — WHOOM — and crushes Trump underneath.)

Thing about Narcissists is, they don’t get help. They can’t. Help is only available to those who admit they have a problem, and one of the chief characteristics of a Narcissist is projecting all his problems onto someone else. They are, in their own minds, bulletproof. They cannot be criticized because they are a routinely, unswervingly Excellent Entity, and anybody who says differently is wrong, and bad, and maybe the Actual Devil.

Trump has shown one thing over the course of this election — really, over the course of his existence — and that is, he cannot handle criticism. He can’t hack one ounce of it. We think of Hillary like a snake, but Trump is a shark — and not a shark in the way you think, not in the way where he’s driven and fast and predatorial. Well, he is predatorial, yes (especially with women), but I mean he’s a shark in the way that he is easily baited by a single drop of blood in the water. Chum the water and here he comes, mouth open, eyes rolled back, ready to bite, ready to fall into any trap you set for him. He’ll stay up all night tweeting about your criticism. He still can’t deal with the fact that Rosie O’Donnell, of all people, came at him. Any poll, any pundit, any politician who says boo to him — he blunders at them, clubbing his tiny fists in the air like an angry toddler. You could paint a face on a wasp’s nest and tell him, “That guy over there said you have a pinky dick whose smallness is only matched by the insignificance of your bank account,” and he’d run at it, mad as hell. (Well, he’d probably tweet about it first. “CROOKED WASP NEST. SHOULD BE IN JAIL. BUILD A WALL. BEST WALL. TREMENDOUS. I LOVE WASPS EVEN THOUGH THEY’RE ALL RAPISTS.”)

To quote Louis CK from his Conan appearance yesterday, “This guy, every time he’s criticized, everything stops, and he makes everybody pay.”

A fragile president is not… super-great. Putin will use him, then tear him up like he’s tissue paper. (Putin may already have used and torn him up like tissue paper.) Other world leaders will view him as, at worst, a Useful Idiot, or at best, a guy you can bait into showing his ass. He talks a lot about stamina, but what he’s missing is a more vital upgrade to stamina: Trump is missing fortitude. He has no (to use the dictionary definition) courage in the face of pain or adversity. He’s a raw nerve buried in a tooth made from rich, soft gold.

9. He Is A Successful Entertainer, And A Failure Everywhere Else

Trump is fun to watch, and that’s about it. Most of his businesses have tanked. Many have folded. He has, to put a Trumpian spin on it, THE VERY BEST bad TRACK RECORD IN BUSINESS. HE IS A TREMENDOUSly shitty BUSINESS PERSON, THE VERY BEST at bankruptcy, and so on. Sure, he’s good at making a show and we clap along. He has the right cadence and the energy to entertain us, even if what he says doesn’t make much sense when you actually write it out, word-for-word (or, rather, word-salad-for-word-salad). He says again and again he wants to treat America like a business, that he’ll bring his skillset there to the Oval Office. Only problem is, if he does that, then statistically we can expect him to be selling us off to the highest bidder by 2018 at the latest. The American Experiment will have ended, because he set fire to the lab and sold the burned husk to cover his debts.

Note, too, that he hasn’t even succeeded in getting many endorsements. Almost no newspapers endorse him. Very few economists or generals. Very few business people. I mean, sure, he has such high-value people such as Chachi and Curt Schilling pulling for him, but I’m pretty sure a presidential candidate should have a better at-bat roster, don’t you think?

Trump is a huckster, a carnival barker, a used car salesman. He talks a good game, puts on a good show, but at the end of the day, what he’s got for you is a beat-up Ford Taurus he sold as a Ferrari. He’s got smoke and mirrors, a house of illusions.

A guy who has to tell you again and again how successful he is is like a guy who has to tell you again and again how big his wang is. And, spoiler warning, that’s a sign of:

Methinks thou dost protest too much.

10. He Won’t Serve You

There exists this feeling that he is One Of Us, he’s the Common Everyman, the Populist Demagogue who Speaks Truth To Power. Problem is, he is power. I recognize that there’s a lot of talk out there about privilege — particularly the straight white male kind — but let’s go for a more generalized version. Trump is a child of very real privilege. He started out rich. He was given a huge loan — sure, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps, except his bootstraps were lined with hundred dollar bills. No, he doesn’t own a solid gold toilet, that’s a myth — but he sure likes gold. And he owns a mansion and a penthouse and private jets and yachts and —

Well, he’s rich. Really rich. Maybe not as rich as he says he is (again, braggarts brag to overstate and project, often to cover for their own weaponized inadequacies), but damn sure richer than you me.

Now, I don’t think that disqualifies him. Not at all. I think it certainly challenges the assumption that he’s a man of the people, or that he’s somehow a common man from common origins — but for me, I don’t need a president to be common. I don’t need to “get a beer with him.” I need him (or her) to to be quite uncommon, actually, in that I need a president who knows what it means to do things I’ll never know how to do — lead a nation, navigate global politics, be sensitive to the thousand moving parts that make up American society.

The problem with Trump goes much deeper.

The problem is how Trump treats people. Common people.

Trump doesn’t pay them. He stiffs them. He insults them. He sues them. Your common problems aren’t problems he understands or cares about. He cares about Trump problems. He has no interest in white supremacy. He has interest in Trump supremacy. He’s just telling you what you want to hear — remember, he’s a liar — to satisfy his own Narcissism. Your concerns are not his concerns. Watch him pick up somebody’s child — it’s like watching a giant praying mantis hold a puppy. He doesn’t know what to do with that thing. He has no idea what’s right or what’s common. He wants to fuck his own daughter, for Chrissakes.

A president is supposed to serve us. For better or for worse, it’s their job to work for the American people, and that’s the legacy they get. Trump’s legacy has never been about helping people. He doesn’t donate to charity (except when his feet are held to the fire). Oh, he shows up to charity events to make it look like he’s done it, he’ll say he’s done it, but he hasn’t done shit. He says he helped on 9/11, says he worked, gave money, but when? To whom? Where’s the proof? The events of 9/11 were a singular moment in recent American history — to exploit that for your own gain, wow. (He even boasted after the towers fell that now his building was the tallest in Manhattan.) That is about as far from the common struggle as you can get. That is vicious, that is selfish, that demonstrates the most vain and venal traits of the uber-elite you can imagine. This is a guy who would kick a baby for a hundred bucks.

That’s not a guy who cares about your bridges or your health care costs. He’s not a guy who thinks about water supplies or sick kids. He’s not a guy who gives one slick fuck about your 401k or your job. Those are human problems, and in his own head, he’s Zeus, motherfuckers. He’s on Mount Olympus and the pleas of the common prole are not his goddamn problem. He’ll fuck a goose and shoot lightning up your ass if you look at him sideways.

Or, to go back to the carnival barker metaphor —

We’re all rubes to him.

He’s a user. And we will be the used.

He’ll grab us all by the pink parts, he’ll kiss us where he wants to kiss us.

To Conclude

To segue a little, my father was probably what one might consider a “deplorable,” in that, you know, he was a blue-collar guy who loved guns and was more than a little racist and sexist because that was just how you were where we lived. I think about him often in an election like this, and wonder what he would’ve made of it. I think I know, because I remember when he died in late 2007, he was pretty damn grumpy about the rise of Obama — but he was just as grumpy, even grumpier, about the turn of the GOP toward the religious right. (My Dad was not a religious guy.) Palin had just appeared on-scene, not yet a VP pick, and the simmering of the soon-to-be-nascent Tea Party were in play, and it wasn’t the GOP he remembered. (He was a lifetime NRA guy, too, and the NRA had become something he didn’t recognize anymore.) I suspect now he’d be Libertarian. I dunno that he could’ve voted for Obama, but I don’t think he would’ve voted for McCain, either.

One thing I know is, he was pretty old-school in a lot of ways. He was never much of an uber-patriot, but he had a cowboy’s way of looking at things. He was a John Wayne fan, a straight-shooter, a tough guy whose hands were callused and who ran our farm and drove a truck and worked in a factory. And he could spot a bullshitter at a thousand yards, and I like to think he would’ve cottoned pretty quickly to Trump’s very special, very transparent brand of bullshit. (He certainly didn’t like Trump back when he was alive.) He sure wouldn’t like someone who stood up there and talked about the weakness of America and the strength of Putin. Who winks to Neo-Nazis (remember WWII, when Nazis were the bad guys?). He wouldn’t like someone who didn’t pay his people, because for my father, paying debts was how you had to be. You paid what you owed, goddamnit. He didn’t like liars, either. He caught you in a lie, boy — *whistles* You better get correct, quick. He was a tough guy, and we didn’t always agree, but he was a man of principles. Those principles did not waver, good or bad. And Trump violates those principles on the regular. And I wonder what guys like my Dad — ones who are still out there — are thinking about all this. I hope they’ve seen the bullshitter for what he is.

I hope you have, too.

Even if you think of yourself as a deplorable, whoever you are, whatever you believe, you need to take a long look at Trump and ask yourself if this is a guy who’s going to serve you. Who understands you. Or if he’s a spoiled Narcissist who will tell you whatever lie you want to hear in order to take the cash in your pocket and slide it into his — just so he can spend it on a portrait of himself, or blow it on another bad business.

I know I’m not swaying anybody with this. I get that. But it makes me feel better to write. And maybe, just maybe, I gave someone out there something to think about. Even in this supposedly post-fact age, even if you’re a self-styled run-of-the-mill deplorable, even then there’s pretty good evidence Trump isn’t your man. You’re just a pile of shit he can use to climb on. You’re fucking firewood to him. He’ll tell you what you want to hear to get him there. He’s probably somebody’s Useful Idiot. So don’t be his Useful Idiot. Don’t vote for Donald Trump, that oleaginous dysentery stain, that sentient pile of cantaloupe-colored chlamydia, that fake-bronze huckster, that bloated baboon, that leathery lie-filled liar-face, that gold-capped canker sore, that pompous puppet, that nuke-happy numbskull Narcissus.

You need to vote for Trump, hey, you do you. I can’t stop you. That’s your right, your freedom to do so. But here I’ll quote Louis CK again — “If you vote for Hillary you’re a grownup; if you vote for Trump you’re a sucker; if you don’t vote for anyone, you’re an asshole.”

Comments are closed because, c’mon.

Our son, a bonafide kindergartener, had his first conference this week. Or, rather, we had his first conference, sitting with the teacher to hear how he’s holding up in THE GARDEN OF CHILDREN.

The conference was, by and large, a glowing one. I’ll brag a little here and say he’s excelling in school — despite him telling us how much he despises school and does not understand what’s happening at any point ever, the truth is that while there, he’s focused and interested and performing well above his five-year-old pay grade.

We are justifiably proud. I mean, I’d be proud of him if he licked wall sockets and rubbed gum in his hair, because he’s my kid and I love him. But as someone who is a writer, you know, I take a special thrill to hear how he’s leaping headlong into learning language and how he’s spelling words on his own just for the joy of spelling them. 

The only tiny ding in the conference was this:

He is very afraid to get things wrong.

He wants near-constant confirmation that what he’s doing is the right thing and not, say, the wrong thing. He wants to do things the right way from the beginning, and never wants to do them wrong. Because wrong is bad. It’s baked right there in the word.

Wrong is not right. Wrong is wrong. And wrong is shit.

We tried to think if we’re somehow inadvertently instilling this in him, but the teacher assured us: this is most kids. Most children want confirmation that they’re doing this right. I said, chuckling oh-ho-ho, that this is true of most adults, too, especially writers.

I said it as kind of a throwaway, but then I thought:

Yeah, no, that’s exactly writers.

It was me, certainly, once upon a time. Hell, it’s me even now. I remember writing a “book” in like, fifth grade, and I wanted it to be perfect. I remember writing short stories in high school and I wanted them to be like all the short stories I’d read and loved — meaning, I wanted to be operating at a master level while simultaneously being a dumb-ass 11th grade shitbird. It’s like wanting to go from “learning to crawl” to “performing perfect parkour over a shark tank.” It’s like turning on American Ninja Warrior and thinking not only, I want to do that, but worse, I want to do that right now, at that level. Even presently I start a book and I feel THE FEAR, the one that says, this needs to be right, this can’t be wrong, you know how to do this, don’t fuck it up or… I dunno, goblins will eat you or something, I’m not entirely clear on the consequences.

Except, I am clear on the consequences.

There exist no consequences for getting it wrong as a writer.

And so, I thought, let’s talk about getting it wrong.

Moreover, let’s talk about the fervid fucking joy of getting it wrong. Because I believe it is exactly this joy that will carry your ass through NaNoWriMo and out the other side.

1. To repeat: there exist no consequences for getting it wrong as a writer. If you’re splitting atoms or last-at-bat during the World Series or sniping aliens in the nega-zone, okay, sure, have some consequences. You don’t want to fuck some things up. But writing is one of those things where you have basically no consequences at all. You can get it wrong all day and nobody will die, your house won’t catch fire, your pets won’t go go mad and eat you. It’s not carcinogenic. You don’t have to pay money for every misspelled word. Yes, there are consequences should you choose to submit the wrong thing to the wrong people. And okay, yeah, you could argue that one consequence of writing badly is that you sacrifice your time, but to that I’d argue:

2. Getting it wrong is a vital part of getting it right. Spend the time getting it wrong because that’s how you learn to do this thing. The book you want to write is up there on a high shelf, and sure, you want to build a perfect, structurally-sound ladder to get to it. That is a fair impulse. But please understand that it is just as valid to build a mound of garbage that you climb like a hill to get to that top shelf. Still works. Elevation is elevation. It is the truest truth and yet it feels somehow like a lie that to do a thing at even the barest level of competency, you need to practice. That’s true whether it’s surfing or making soup or hunting vampires. It’s true in all the creative pursuits: painting, music, narrative orgy design, and of course, writing. You know how the first time you have sex it’s awkward and uncomfortable and wait where does this hand go and hold on why is there a desk lamp in my ass-crack? Yeah, you get it wrong then, too, and I think we can all roughly agree that it’s worth getting wrong so you can learn to get it right. What this means is, in writing, the time spent getting it wrong is not a sacrifice. It’s certainly no waste. It is, in fact, an essential part of doing the thing. You do it one way, you find ways to do it better next time. IN BOTH SEX AND WRITING. And, probably, writing about sex.

3. Fear of judgment is bad juju. Kids are afraid of getting it wrong because they’re afraid of being judged. That’s the consequence they fear. They’re young and untested little proto-people, and their job is to mimic adult people, so they want to convince us that they’re just like us in order to fit in and be allowed to do more cool stuff. It’s a natural inclination, but it’s one we foolishly carry with us. We bring that from childhood into adulthood, where we supplant “adult people” with “our peers,” so we are constantly trying to blend in with the rest of the tribe. We’re saying, look, look! We can do this. Don’t judge us harshly. We’re good, we’re fine. It’s doubly worse when we start to realize that art and creativity are not well-respected (despite them being vital parts of nearly every career out there), and so we want to get it right in order to prematurely defeat those who would judge us for choosing such a shit path in the first place. But that’s all garbage. Art, especially art in its formative stages, withers under the laser-like focus of judgment — particularly the judgment we imagine will happen, not the judgment that will actually occur. The judgment that comes later in the form of criticism — that is real, but even that, it can be useful and we must not fear it. (Ignore it? Sometimes. Fear it, never.)

4. Getting it wrong is fun as hell, man. The page is a safe space. It’s your space. It is a kingdom you invented. You can go do whatever you want there. I said this in my ‘official’ NaNoWriMo pep talk a couple years back — you can do whatever you want. It’s an empty field and you’ve got the keys to a Ferrari. Stop thinking about getting it wrong, and start thinking of it as engaging in the forbidden. The forbidden is a no-no, a naughty proscription replete with finger-wagging and tongue-clucking. It’s rules and fences, and there is nothing more fun than giving the middle finger to rules and crashing through fences in a fast car. We love to break the law and countermand what we’re supposed to do. So, do that. Have fun. Behold the forbidden, then do it anyway, because nothing is more fun than that.

5. Nobody knows what the hell ‘wrong’ is, anyway. Wrong is bullshit. Right is bullshit. Art knows no such boundaries. Writing and story exists in this penumbral margin — yes, there is right by way of what an agent or an editor or the audience says, okay, but even there, it’s not like you have some stiff, unyielding definition. There exists no rigorously tested place of truth. This is a land of pure theory. It is lawless and wonderfully fucked. You can do as you please and in getting it ‘wrong’ you may already be getting it right. We often like to think of ‘right’ as being a replicable thing, a series of examples from those who came before. But also remember that many of the greatest successes in fiction are those who took a hard left turn away from HOW IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN DONE — they drove right off the cliff, and in that, did something new, something different, something very much wrong. Wrong is right and right is wrong and nobody can much tell which side is up and which side is down. Dogs and cats living together. Go forth. Embrace wrong. Nobody knows anything. Seize the freedom that comes with that.

To speak to that last point, and to bring it all back together:

Watch children play. Not learn in a strict academic environment — but play. That is when you see kids unburdened by judgment. That’s when you see them operate in a way unfettered, uncaring, and they perform feats of athletic impossibility and they spout gibberish that pinballs between batshit cuckoo and actual literal genius. That is where you need to be. You need to be unafraid to get it wrong. You need to view this as an opportunity not to get it right —

But rather, as an opportunity to play.

Go play.

And soon you realize one of the great secrets:

We learn more through play, anyway. Play is how we learn to do it right.

Have a happy National Novel Writing Month. Go play, go write, go get it way, way wrong.

* * *

Through the end of November, use coupon code NANOWRIMO on my Gonzo Writing Book Bundle to nab eight of my writing e-books for 25% off the $20 price (so, $15). Or, if you want something in print: hey, look, The Kick-Ass Writer.

About two years ago, right around this time, my wife and I had just let our heads hit the pillow, planning as one does to go to sleep. The boy was already asleep in his bed. A few moments passed in the dark and then —

A massive flash and the sound like the earth cracking open arrived together as one. Pulse and boom. We shot up out of bed, not sure what the hell was going on — but it was the start of a storm, a storm that had up and decided to announce itself literally out of nowhere with this cannon shot thunder and this coruscating crack of lightning. The storm came in fast, but that opening salvo was the worst of it.

In the morning, I went outside and surveyed the damage, and saw what happened.

Lightning struck a tree of ours about a hundred yards from the house.

The tree stood next to the driveway, and you could see along it where the lightning had snaked up the side of it in an erratic zag — and as it did so, it blasted the bark off the tree in a perfect line. You could walk out from the base of the tree and follow the trail of bark pieces.

And yet, the tree did not die. Not yet. Not then.

The tree was an old oak, and at the base of it we had growing a maitake — hen-of-the-woods — mushroom. Those mushrooms only come up near certain trees, as I understand it, and I was glad to have it around still. But, little did I know, that mushroom had one more year to come up before the tree would finally give up the ghost.

And, as it turns out, the tree would also give up its bones.

The bones it had been keeping inside of it.

(More on that in a moment.)

Once the tree was dead and done, it was starting to come apart, so we had our Tree Guy — a botanist who takes special care to keep the forest ecologically sound in a way that makes sense for the area in which we live — come on out and take a look at it and then cut the tree down. He and another guy came, they cut it apart, felled it away from the driveway, and… the end.

Or so I thought.

The innards of the tree had gone rotten. Looked like soft, rich dirt instead of tree. Some of it was pelleted, balled up into little mulchy Tic-Tacs. The rot had gone up through the tree in a cleft shape, and that was that. We decided we’d leave the tree there — most of the trees we bring down, we just leave because each dead tree creates its own weird little ecosystem. Pill-bugs and fungus all around, micrathena spiders hanging from the branches, deer and other mammals using the fallen tree as a hiding spot, for respite.

Here’s the thing, though. Out of the tree came two bones.

Looked like a pair of leg bones (one femur, one tibia, I think) from a deer. The ends, the knobby ends, had been chewed up, and the middle had been gnawed, too. (I’m not a bone expert, mind you, but we have a lot of deer around and further, I grew up on a farm where we raised whitetail deer.) The bones spilled out from the rotten middle of the tree.

I thought, well, that’s creepy. I mean, I recognize there was likely a logical explanation — I was not literally scared by the idea, but just the same, it was fascinating in a grim, grisly way. Lightning struck a tree that had contained actual bones, and now those bones were coming out of the tree. My mind spins stories out of that, as I’m sure yours does, too. The tree, eating animals or people. Or growing up around a buried human corpse, containing it in its bark as it grows larger and larger. Or a murderer hiding the body of a victim in a tree, thinking they’ll never be found until one day — flash, crack, boom. The bone tree, exposed.

Where it gets interesting is, the tree was not yet done yielding its osseous treasures.

Over the course of the year, more bones came out.

Some were little. Like the jawbone of the squirrel you’ll see below. Some were larger, like more bones from the deer — including, I believe, some deer teeth. The bones would come up out of both the stump and the fallen tree — and they’d either be on the stump or around its base. They weren’t there before — I know, because I went out with the camera and poked around pretty good looking for cool shots. Now, again, the explanation here is almost surely less grisly than you think — not that I want to pop anybody’s bubble, but squirrels chew bones. They do it for the minerals and to shorten their growing teeth. And, given that squirrels sometimes, well, squirrel away things into trees, it’s fair to say that this is exactly what happened here. Some squirmy, chattery bone collector squirrel was hiding his finds in a tree so other squirrels would not come upon them. (Or hell, maybe it was a SERIAL KILLER SQUIRREL.)

But, again, the story doesn’t really end here.

I found the new bones in May. With those bones, I also found a strange substance — it honestly feels (felt) like plastic. White plastic… not webbing, exactly, because it was not structured to any apparent design but was rather just a tangle. (I have a picture of it below.) It was all over. I tried to pull it apart, thinking maybe it was some kind of weird fungal growth, but it wouldn’t break. Again, like plastic.

Then, around August —

The bones were all gone. All but one, one of the femurs. And something had ripped up the side of the tree, pulling bark off. No claw marks that I could see, and no footprints — but something had pulled bark off the side of the stump. Further, that was also the day I found, down near the road (and about another 100 yards from the tree), parts of a dead deer. The parts I found were: a ribcage, with considerable meat upon it, and the lower half of a deer leg — the tibia, but with skin still on it, also the hoof. The smell was rank and stayed for days because it was hot and humid. The parts were in a grassy blind, right where deer like to sometimes lay and sleep during the day. Eventually vultures pulled the gory pieces out into the road, like a buffet — and they somehow pulled out what could best be described as a blanket of skin. This rotten deer leather literally tanned on the road for days.

I don’t know what happened or what any of it means. Occasionally I ponder on there being a bear around here — we do get them from time to time. A neighbor shot one a few years ago (which, by the way, you’re not supposed to do and he rightly got his ass in trouble for it). Our other neighbors also have a couple hellhound dogs which are about as unpleasant as you get. (Not the dogs’ fault, mind you, but they’re still some unfriendly beasts.)

Since then, a rank dead smell has come up out of the woods another three times since then, the most recent being last week — I’ve not yet been able to track these smells to their source. But the smell was strong enough it was more than just a dead mouse or something. (Oh, and yesterday I found half of a mole by our doorstep. Once again, probably nothing creepy: likely a red-tailed hawk who failed to eat the whole of its meal. We had a hawk at college who was fond of leaving squirrel heads around.)

It is what it is, I suppose. That’s life in the forest, man.

And that’s the story of the bone tree.

Happy Halloween!

(Pics at the end of the post.)

Now! Before I forget, some news-slathered snidbits:

The Forever Endeavor is out now! PRESS THE SHINY BUTTON. For $2.99, you get a story about the consequences of traveling back in time ten minutes, and how exactly that relates to a pumpkin patch full of matching identical dead bodies. It also has connections to the overall “Wendigverse,” and helps to bridge the Mookie Pearl and Miriam Black series in kind of a weird-ass fate-versus-free-will way.

Amazon | B&N | iTunes | Kobo

Also, Sci-Fi Bulletin did a very nice review of Invasive:

“His key figure is Hannah Stander, an FBI consultant who has been brought up by survivalist parents, which stands her in good stead for the events of the second half of the book, as everything that you start to fear as you read the opening pages begins to come to pass. She’s investigating the work of a group of scientists, and their charismatic leader who may or may not be responsible for creating a new strain of ant that isn’t going to be easily dealt with. Exactly who’s done what is a key part of the novel and Wendig constantly throws curveballs at the reader, with one in particular making me want to kick myself for overlooking something that was obvious in retrospect!

“Wendig’s style is always punchy, providing just enough information about characters and situations for the reader to be able both to understand what’s happening and to get inside the heads of the people in the scene. It’s a skill he’s honed over the last few years and puts to good use here. If you don’t find your skin crawling at certain times then I’ll be very surprised.”

Invasive also gets a shout at BookBub as one of 12 books to read if you love Michael Crichton.

(If you’ve read Invasive, or any of my books, or really any book by any author, I’d appreciate a review somewhere. Reviews are currency in online marketplaces, for better or for worse.)

Finally, today is the last day to get Atlanta Burns and its sequel, The Hunt, for $1.99. Note, both books are very triggery in a variety of ways — the stories are rural YA crime/noir. They get nasty. Be advised.

Onto the pics:

I write horror novels, mostly.

I just don’t call them horror. They’re urban fantasy. They’re supernatural suspense. They’re near-future sci-fi thrillers. But definitely, totally, super-not-horror. Wink-wink, nudge-nudge, a finger thrust up before my rubbery latex clown mask where I shush you long, low and slow, shhhhhhhhhh. Don’t worry! Not horror at all.

*squeaks clown nose to comfort you, honk-honk*

Except, psst: they’re totally horror. I don’t even necessarily mean they’re horror as a genre. Horror as a genre is a bullseye on the back of a galloping horse — sure, there are certain tropes and conventions that mark something as horror, but these usually mark it more as a subgenre of horror rather than an overarching convention. Horror, to me, is as much a mood as it is a convergence of tropes or ideas. That mood goes beyond merely invoking fright. It’s about traipsing into the dark, about shining a flickering flashlight beam on some nastiness, and probing fear and discomfort up and down the spectrum. From big stuff (surveillance state, religion, apocalypse) to little stuff (hey guess what there’s a guy in your closet covered in someone else’s skin and he has a camping hatchet covered in blood and hair). I love it. I grew up reading it. I write it. Zer0es is a wet-wired hacker thriller where the surveillance state is so intrusive it might literally be drilled into the back of your skull. Invasive is a fun thrillery Jurassic Park romp ha ha ha oh and did I mention it contains ants who will cut off your skin with their mandibles in order to farm your flesh snippets for delicious fungus? Miriam Black can literally see how you’re going to die, and people get eaten by flocks of birds and there are folks with no eyes and a guy gets chopped up in a garbage disposal. Doesn’t matter that nobody wants to call them horror — the Miriam Black books are horror novels from snoot-to-chute. Exuent will be apocalyptic in its scope, and though I’m sure it’ll be labeled a thriller, it is intentionally meant to be scary, creepy, unsettling in the same way you find The Stand or Swan Song. In other words: It’s horror.

(Okay, no, my Star Wars novels aren’t horror, really. Though they contain scenes of horror — the spiders from Kashyyyk, the Acolytes of the Beyond, and so forth. And the films contain scenes of horror, too: the scary-slasher-masks of the Tusken Raiders, the Wampa attack scene, the seduction of the Dark Side across all the movies and shows.)

It’s not just me. It’s not just my work I’m talking about. Lots of books are horror novels, and don’t really get labeled as such. Jurassic Park is, as noted, a fun thrillery romp, ha ha ha, but yeah, no, that shit is still horror. It’s maybe a sillier variant of horror, but not that silly. (A passage from the book: “Nedry stumbled, reaching blindly own to touch the ragged edge of his shirt, and then a thick slivery mass that was surprisingly warm, and with horror he suddenly knew he was holding his own intestines in his hands.”) Recent novels I’ve read and loved that are clearly horror novels despite not generally being labeled as such:

Paul Tremblay’s Disappearance and Devil’s Rock and Head Full of Ghosts; Sarah Lotz’s The Three and its sequel, Day Four; Lauren Beukes’ Broken Monsters and The Shining Girls. Jason Arnopp’s Last Days of Jack Sparks is wry and twisted and often creepy as fuck. I don’t know what they called Scott Hawkins’ Library at Mount Char, but to me, it’s horror in the Barker mold — abstract, fantastical, and wonderfully unhinged. The work of Cherie Priest and Christopher Golden and Seanan McGuire is frequently scary as hell. And yet, very little of it earns the horror moniker and is eased quietly into other genres and marketing categories. Fantasy! Urban fantasy! Supernatural suspense! Scary thriller, oooooh!

Is Joe Hill horror? I’ve seen his work discussed as supernatural suspense, but c’mon.

C’mon.

*stares at you like Jim Halpert*

*stares at you like Jim Halpert with cockroaches pouring out of his mouth*

Other books lean into horror, even if they’re not horror novels. Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon has chapters that read like they’re out of a horror novel. Game of Thrones takes on a new dimension when you view it less as epic fantasy and more as epic apocalyptic fiction — a fantasy variant less like Lord of the Rings and more like The Stand. The James S.A. Corey Expanse series frequently puts forward scenes of epic space horror with the advent of the Protomolecule. Again, here horror serving as both a reflection of mood and of its genre trappings, even if it doesn’t ‘take over’ the whole of the narrative.

These are books that, were they given the label of horror, would elevate the genre above the schlock some people believe it to be and give it the credit the genre is really due.

And yet, despite all this, horror really isn’t a thing. You won’t find many bookstores who have horror shelves anymore. (And here I pour a little on the curb for Borders, whose horror shelves were a dark land in which I dwelled often.) Publishers shy away from the label. Agents do, too.

And so do writers, then.

Because, as we’re told, “horror doesn’t sell.”

But that’s fucked. And it’s sad. It’s both fucked and sad because horror is having a moment. Horror is not a genre at the fringe. Walking Dead is arguably the biggest damn show on TV — and it’s about as straight-up nasty-ass horror as it comes. It’s not the only horror on TV, either. Black Mirror? Channel Zero: Candle Cove? The Exorcist?

Horror movies — especially when made with quality and care — cost little to make and tend to bring in bank (The Conjuring, Sinister, Lights Out). Ye cats and fishes, have you seen the trailer for Jordan Peele’s upcoming Get Out? Holy fucking fuck does that look creepy. (And socially relevant, to boot. Jordan Peele, you magnificent bastard.)

Horror comics? Sure, got those, too. Wytches, Afterlife with Archie, Outcast, Nailbiter, Clean Room, No Mercy, and of course, Walking Dead.

That’s all just a sample of what’s out there.

It’s great stuff. It’s astonishing fiction. It forms my diet.

And it’s part of a legacy, too. Stephen King is maybe the only one out there who gets to wear the horror moniker easily and proudly, because he’s so damn good and so damn old-school that if you try to take it away he’ll drag your ass behind the barn to fight you like he’s Uncle Joe Biden. But I grew up reading King, McCammon, Barker, Poppy Z. Brite (who is now Billy Martin, but who holy shit just released a brand new pair of stories, Last Wish & The Gulf under the Brite name), Yvonne Navarro, Caitlin Kiernan, and on and on. And then there are those authors I read who are horror-adjacent: Joe Lansdale, Robin Hobb (sure, the Assassin’s Apprentice series isn’t horror, but c’mon, it’s often horrific), Christopher Moore (funny horror!), Bradley Denton (holy fuck you guys, Blackburn). Consider the horrific dimensions of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

We need to look long into the dark. It’s part of who we are. We like to be scared. It gives us context. It gives us control. It helps us take the horror of the real world and give it shape so that we can conquer it, if only a little. Out of discomfort we find comfort.

I miss the days where I could find a shelf labeled horror. I miss the days where we didn’t shy away from that genre label as if it were a dirty, cheap word. Horror isn’t marginal, not at all, yet we still treat it like it is — like it’s the weird cousin who accidentally got invited to dinner, all the while failing to realize that the weird cousin grew up a long time ago and now runs a successful tech company and makes more money than the rest of us combined. It’s not that the genre isn’t well-represented. Like I said, it is. I just hope we get back to the point where we can call it what it is, loud and proud, with hiss and with shriek, with gibber and wail.

Me, I’ll be over here writing my supernatural suspense, my creepy near-future thrillers, my explorations of dark and urban fantasy. But you and I, we’ll share a little wink and a high-five, because we know what it is I’m really writing, and what it is you’re really reading. Then we’ll clink our butcher knives together and drag the latex masks down over our faces once more so we may resume our hunt for the blood of the innocent.

(Shout out in the comment your favorite horror novels — even if they’re not labeled as such.)

(Or even your favorite scary scenes in otherwise non-horror books!)

Imagine that you find a box. The box is red metal. On it is a button — black, shiny, inviting.

Imagine too that when you press that button, you are transported backwards in time.

By ten minutes.

And suddenly, you realize:

Here is a solution to all of life’s problems. Ten minutes in time may not seem like much, but it’s not much more than we’d ever really need. Want to bet on the winner of the big game? Want to go back and take back that thing you said? Or use a snappy comeback you thought of nine minutes too late? Or maybe you need it for bigger things: to save your life, or someone else’s. Most of our lives hinge on a series of decisions, some small, some big, and with a chance to go back in time ten minutes — it’s like a SAVE and RELOAD for your current game.

But, using the box has strange, dire consequences. As Dale Gilooly is about to find out.

Welcome to The Forever Endeavor. And it’s out now.

More formal flap copy:

Dale Gilooly has a problem. Well, Dale has a lot of problems. Addiction. Rent. A girlfriend he let slip away.

But Dale has a solution. It’s a Box. And it will let him go back 10 minutes in time. Enough to fix his new mistakes as they happen. And give him an edge to fix the old ones that haunt him.

Oh, but one other problem: Where did these other Dales come from?

Walter Bard has a problem. Well, Walter has twenty problems. Each of them a body buried in a pumpkin patch. And… they’re all the same. Down to the teeth.

But Walter has a solution. It’s his job. Solutions. He’s a detective, after all.

Publishers Weekly praised The Forever Endeavor for its “creative narrative and a sense for visceral action” and said “Wendig successfully busts the niche’s conventions wide open, and he throws in a few winking asides to his previous work that will evoke a grim chortle from his fans.”

A horror-laden sci-fi read with some nods to the Wendigverse! Hope you check it out and enjoy it. Cover art by the ever-astonishing Galen Dara. Thanks to Fireside for publishing this (it originally appeared inside the magazine), and don’t forget to check out Fireside’s other books here.

Buy now (ebook): Amazon | B&N | iTunes | Kobo

So, you’re going to take part in National Novel Writing Month.

Good for you. Excellent. As John McClane said in Die Hard: “Welcome to the Party, pal.”

Here, then, is a list of quick advice nuggets. You may nibble on these and sample the many tastes. Some of this stuff I’ve said before, some of it is new-ish — whatever helps you, helps you. Whatever doesn’t, just wad it up and throw it into the nearest incinerator. Let’s begin.

1. You win when you finish the book. We set win conditions on writing a book in 30 days, and that’s cool. It is. But also, if you don’t, fuck it. The success is in finishing a first draft, whether that takes you 30 days or three months or three years.

2. This is the beachstorming draft. You’re just trying to get off the boat and up the sand without getting shot. This isn’t about perfection. It’s about survival. Survive to the end of the first draft and you deserve a cookie and a cold one. And by a “cold one” I mean chocolate milk. And by “chocolate milk” I mean a whole bottle of whiskey and by a cookie I mean an entire cheesecake.

3. Have a schedule. Seriously. If you’re going to try to hit a novel in 30 days, you’re better off setting a routine and sticking to it than trying to cram like it’s a high school history final. Slow and steady wins the race. Hitting 2k a day is not impossible, and it’s better than trying to evacuate your word bowels into a painful 10,000-word story-spree. That is how you prolapse your narrative anus. You know, between you and me, I regret ever writing the phrase “narrative anus,” but here we are. We came here together and we just have to deal with this now going forward.

4. Have a space. NaNoWriMo is effectively you taking on a full-time writing career in a very short span of time. One thing I can tell you, as I have told you before, is you need a space, and you need to vigorously defend it with tooth and claw and stabby quill. I don’t care if you’re writing on the toilet in the half-bath downstairs. I don’t care if you’ve chosen a quiet dumpster somewhere like you’re some strange mash-up of both Oscars (the Wilde and the Grouch). Pick a place and defend it. This is your home for thirty days.

5. The perfect is the enemy of the good. This is a vital truth in all creative acts. Tattoo it onto your eyeballs so you always see it. Hire somebody to whisper it into your ear.

6. Fuck impostor syndrome. Yes, you’re an impostor. We all are. This is a career of impostors. It’s okay. Embrace it. You don’t belong here. None of us belong here. That’s the awesome thing about a creative career — we’re all a bunch of stowaways and exiles.

7. Be aware of tracts of bumpy road. See them. Know when they’re coming. For me, I’m going to hit trouble writing a novel somewhere around the 33% mark and the 50% mark. I know a lot of newer writers, and this was true for me, had problems right at the start and then also around the middle. I dunno when they’ll be for you, but they’ll be there. The road will get bumpy. You just have to keep driving. Meaning, you just gotta keep writing. Put words on paper next to each other. One after the other, like footsteps.

8. Momentum is your friend. Progress begets momentum begets momentum.

9. Writing is not magic. It feels like it sometimes, and that’s rad. Other times it feels like raking leaves or running through quicksand. It is what it is and every day will be different. Don’t expect every day to feel the same. Don’t expect a good day to lead to good writing and a bad day to lead to bad writing. And don’t let it be magic. Magic is fickle. Let it be science: practiced, ritualized, with an outcome based on experience and effort and study. It can be magic again later.

10. The community is your friend. Other writers are great. I mean, really. In your genre and out, writers are — on a whole — lovely. You get a few peckers and jerkholes in there, but for the most part, when you feel like you’re falling, just whistle — the community will catch you.

11. The community is also your enemy. Writing is still an isolated thing. We can get lost in the community. We can take bad advice. We can compare ourselves to others. A bad pocket of community is as bad a pocket of poisonous air.

12. Have a plan. I don’t think outlines or other prep are an essential part of writing for everybody. I mean, they are for me, but I also find it necessary to drink coffee and dress up in a clown outfit and terrorize neighborhood children. That’s what gets my creative juices flowing. You gotta do you. However! NaNoWriMo is not necessarily a normal writing schedule. We’re talking an intense transitional effort. You’re going from ground to atmosphere as fast as you can, with yourself and your burgeoning novel strapped to a rickety-ass rocket. You may want to have a plan. That might mean an outline, sure. Or it might mean one of these 25 ways to plot and plan and scheme your novel.

13. Recharge your creative batteries. We have only so many IEP — Intellectual Energy Points — to spend in our day. And that tank is finite. You get some back from sleeping and eating. But you also have to take time to refill the coffers. Go for a walk. Read a book. Talk to other writers. Any activity that might jumpstart your UNICORN ENGINE, do it.

14. It’s not about getting published. Have your eye on the right goal — the goal is not publication, the goal is the writing and the finishing of that writing. Finish your shit.

15. Try not to read in the genre you’re writing. I find it confusing. I tend to accidentally start crossing wires — the book I’m reading might bleed into the book I’m writing. YMMV.

16. Have an idea. Like, an overarching idea. A theme. An argument. A thing that pisses you off or a thing about which you are passionate. Write it on a Post-It note. Stick the Post-It note to a 2×4. Bludgeon yourself about the head and neck with this 2×4 every day before writing.

17. Write down character traits and beats to keep in mind. Write down a few characteristics or emotional arc beats for different characters. Keep these notes visible. You can always use them as a lifeline to pull yourself through the narrative.

18. Seriously, it’s all about characters. Just remember that. It’s not about plot. It’s not about mechanism. It’s about characters. Characters are why we care. Characters are why we come to the page and why we read to the next page. Follow the characters to the end of their journey.

19. When in doubt, fuck shit up. Avoid comfort in fiction. If you start to feel stuck, make things worse for the characters. Someone makes a bad decision. Someone lies, or someone dies. Break something. Betrayals. Drama. A new threat. An evolved problem. It’s like a blender — you turn it up, then back down, then back up again. If the story has settled into a status quo, disrupt it. Create a new normal. Challenge the characters, advance the stakes.

20. Let the characters talk. Dialogue is lubricant.

21. Exposition is fine in a first draft. People hate on exposition, and I do it, too, as a lot of exposition is information delivered by wrapping it around a brick and then throwing it through the reader’s front window. It’s blunt, ugly, and occasionally boring. But this is a first draft. I like exposition in a first draft. I like to let myself talk through it on the page. I’ll cut it later.

22. Kill your editor. Er, not your actual editor? Like, the editor that lives inside your head. Now is not the time for the Critic. Now is the time for the Artist. Silence the Critic. Release the Artist. Again: you can always cut it later or fix it in post. Your book is not a stone monument. It is not a painting. It is a flowing stream. You can play with the flow as you go, again and again. You get as many drafts as you like. Reminder: please don’t actually kill anybody, kay, thanks.

23. Fuck the haters. Haters are a persistent presence in the universe. They’re the dark matter of humanity, spun up out of some sphincter-shaped black hole. People will hate on you for wanting to write, or not writing enough, or having the wrong process, or for daring to think you can do NaNoWriMo. Hate is like a dead bird around your neck. Throw it overboard and get back to your COOL CREATIVE BOAT JOURNEY.

24. Enjoy it. Or at least some part of it. Listen, this thing we do? This writey-writey story-making bullshit? It’s hard. And the rewards are often slow and minimal. Every day won’t be a fucking rain of happy balloon animals, and some days will be so tough and frustrating you want to literally bite your own hands off because of the crimes they have committed against narrative. Still — learn to enjoy it. Learn to find happiness — or even better, satisfaction — in it. Force a smile. Throw up jazz-hands. Roll around in it like a dog in the rotten paste of a dead squirrel.

25. Shut up and write. Wait till November 1st if you want. Or start now. Don’t talk about writing. Just write. Don’t get on Twitter or Tumblr to see how everyone else is doing. Just write. Write, write, write, then write some more. Write until you’re done.

Then have ice cream and a nap.

Or whiskey and a cheesecake.

Good luck. Have fun. Don’t chew your hands off.

* * *

So, starting now and through the end of November, use coupon code NANOWRIMO on my Gonzo Writing Book Bundle to nab eight of my writing e-books for 25% off the $20 price (so, $15). Or, if you want something in print: hey, look, The Kick-Ass Writer.