THEY FIGHT CRIME.

It is one of the greatest websites in the history of sited webs.

You will go there. You will click on the link. It will give you an awesome pairing of two characters (I just got HE’S A BISEXUAL SCIENTIST WHO BELIEVES HE CAN NEVER LOVE AGAIN and SHE’S A PARANOID MAGICIAN’S ASSISTANT WITH HER OWN DAYTIME TV SHOW, which is really just amazing). You will take these two characters and put them in a story together.

I don’t really care so much that they actually fight crime.

You can have that as a basis, but mostly, I’m just looking to see these characters interact.

So, do that.

Length: ~1500 words

Due by: May 20th, noon EST

Post online at your online space.

Link back to the story in the comments.

Enjoy.

[EDIT: I see that the site automatically makes each of the two characters male and female — I don’t think there’s any need to enforce that in your stories. Feel free to go with whatever genders you see fit.)

Nobody wants you to be an artist.

It’s for a lot of reasons. Some come from a good place — they think, hey, we want better for you. The life of an artist is hard. Be a bricklayer, a doctor, a ROCKET LAWYER, something, anything. Art is how you lose. Art is how you die. Don’t be an artist, because we don’t want to see you struggle, starve, and go mad.

Some of the reasons come from a deeply cankerous place: jealousy (“why do you get to fritter away your hours MAKING ART and I have to sell toilets?”) or misunderstanding (“art isn’t work, it’s just lazy piffle for lazy losers”) or alien menace (“ART GIVES HUMAN BEINGS HOPE AND IT MAKES THEM MORE RESISTANT TO HOSTILE TAKEOVER FROM EXTRATERRESTRIAL FORCES”). Some governments don’t want artists because art is truth, even when couched in illusion or deception. Some schools don’t want art because how do you test art, and everything is about the test, goddamnit. Want to get a mortgage? Tell them you’re an artist and ha ha ha oh shit.

Art is a hobby, art is a waste of time, art is a thing you do when you’re in elementary school or in the retirement home. It isn’t a life. It isn’t a career. FUCK YOU, NO ARTING. It’s all bullshit, of course, because nearly everything demands art. Advertisements. User interfaces. Logos. The whole Internet is made of WORDS and IMAGES. It started off looking dog-ugly, like something a self-aware bank ATM would shit into the world — but then it became a thing of elegance and design (er, mostly). It became a thing of art, collectively.

Let’s switch gears a little.

Last week I wrote a post about anxiety, and on Twitter and across Ye Jolly Interwebs people asked, well, okay, whilst in the throttling grip of the Mighty Anxiety Snake, how do you wriggle free enough to still make art? And it’s a fine, fine question, because the business side of art can help lend cosmic-level strength to the Mighty Anxiety Snake, the one who twists around you, the one who constricts your heart and makes it feel like your throat is closing. Think long and hard about the business — not just today, but tomorrow, next year, five years — and you’ll find yourself breathless in existential despair. It’s a series of mountains and cliffs and you’re just a wee mountain climber and a storm is rolling in and ye fucking gods, why not just go home and have some liquor and a nap? Then you start thinking about what other people are able to accomplish: awards, sales, movie rights, foreign rights, six-figure deals, seven-figure deals, publishing contracts that stipulate the writer gets a pet snow leopard (by the way this is why you don’t fuck with Neil Gaiman because his snow leopard will hunt you as prey). It’s all very crushing. It’s like laying down and having a hydraulic press push in on your chest.

So: how does one deal with that?

Well, obviously, I am not you. (Not yet, not until I finish work on THE MACHINE, and then we’ll just see, won’t we?) As such, I cannot possibly speculate how you deal with it, but I can speak quite expertly on how I deal with it, because I am the me rooted in this floppy, bearded body.

And here is one of the ways I deal with it:

I worry very little about the result of what I’m doing.

Note: what I mean is not that I care nothing for the quality of the result. I care very much about my own level of satisfaction with the thing I’m writing. It’ll never be perfect, but I want it to be good. But the key here is that I want it to be good because I want to be happy with it.

I don’t care if you’re happy with it.

And the “you” in that equation can be, well, really anybody. The nebulous Audience. Or reviewers. Or publishers and editors. Or other authors. I don’t worry about because I can’t worry about it. I don’t know what you want. (See earlier comment: I am not you.) I don’t know what the market is doing. Chasing the market is like chasing starlight: by the time I find the star that made the light, I remember that light travels slow and that star is already dead. I don’t know what reviewers want. I don’t know what reviewer I’ll get. If I sit down and I go to write and I carry with me the baggage of expectation — if I sit there and try to imagine what every single potential interaction with my book will be like — then I’ll probably freeze up. I’ll soak my shirt with blubbery fear-weeping and sadness-snot. I’ll make a low keening sound in the back of my throat like a ferret pining for its ancient ferret homelands.

The key there is: I cannot be pinned by expectation.

Some people think outlining a book robs the book of its magic. Some people think the business kills the joy of making words and creating art. But for me, the great thing that will siphon the joy out of what I do — the pesticide that murders the butterflies flitting about in the dark shrubbery that is my heart — is expectation. Not my expectation. But yours.

And now we come full circle because once again, I say:

Nobody wants you to be an artist.

Not the people who love you. Not the people who hate you. Not the people who don’t know one whit about you. Nobody wants that for you or your life.

I want you to think about that for a moment.

I want you to focus on that for a moment.

Take the idea like a pebble or a pearl, tuck it in your mouth, swirl it around.

This is what that does for me:

When I sit down and I start to write, I take a secret thrill in what I’m doing. Because this is forbidden territory. This is verboten. Everyone has built a fence of expectation around what I’m doing and yet, here I am, having climbed the fence. I’m making art and the world doesn’t want me to make art. I’m in a secret garden stealing your vegetables. I’m traipsing about someone’s home in the dark while they sleep. I’m mixing potions. I’m making monsters. I’m tap-dancing on the edge of a cliff, and the world can watch me kick off my shoes, pirouette, and lift both middle fingers in the air with a smugly self-satisfied look on my big beardo face.

Let me distill this down for you:

How do I survive my anxiety and the business and the expectations and still make art?

FUCK YOU, that’s how.

(Not you specifically! I’m sure you’re lovely.)

Don’t think I should be making art? FUCK YOU.

Don’t think I can finish this book and do it my way? FUCK YOU.

Think this is a waste of time? FUCK YOU, it’s my time to waste.

My anxiety wants to scare me away? FUCK YOU, I won’t be run off, Mighty Anxiety Snake!

Those two words — FUCK and YOU — form a glorious act of defiance, an empowering gush of confident magma in your chest that you can vomit all over reality’s face. Reality doesn’t want me doing this? Reality expects me to conform? HA HA HA HAVE MY ANGER-MAGMA, AND ALSO, FUCK YOU BIG, SUCKER.

So, when it comes time for you to sit down —

And start to write —

Or start to paint —

Or doodle or design or color or whatever it is that you do —

And you start to feel the Mighty Anxiety Snake coiling in your bowels —

And the weight of expectations pressing the air out of your chest —

And you start to look too far down the road and imagine all the potholes and broken bridges —

And you start comparing yourself to everyone else —

Extend one middle finger.

Then the other.

Scream FUCK YOU in a great profane yawp.

Then get to work.

Forget perfection. You can’t control success. You aren’t anybody else. You are you. It doesn’t matter if anyone believes in you. Let their disbelief charge your batteries. You can believe in you.

Focus on today. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Make something. Create something. Act in defiance of reality’s accord. Spit in the eye of any who expect you to do differently.

Relish in the unmitigated thrill of doing what nobody wants you to do.

Nobody wants you to be an artist.

But you do, so fuck them.

* * *

The journey to become a successful writer is long, fraught with peril, and filled with difficult questions: How do I write dialogue? How do I build suspense? What should I know about query letters? How do I start? Where are my pants?

The best way to answer these questions is to ditch your uncertainty and transform yourself into a Kick-Ass Writer. This new book from award-winning author Chuck Wendig combines the best of his eye-opening writing instruction — previously available in e-book form only — with all-new insights into writing and publishing. It’s an explosive broadside of gritty advice that will destroy your fears, clear the path, and help you find your voice, your story, and your audience.

Amazon

B&N

Indiebound

Writer’s Digest

My father always said it was a good idea to have your neighbors think you’re a little cuckoopants. Like, not full-bore batshit, because then they’ll KEEP AN EYE ON YOU, but just crazy enough that they know not to like, throw trash on your yard or encroach on your land like land parasites. I dunno if this counts, but by our driveway near our house there sits a stump, and on this stump sits a deer skull I found in the woods because, I dunno, skulls are fucking cool that’s why.

Anyway, so, I thought I’d snap some more pics of GLORIOUS SKELEDEER ALL HAIL THE LORD OF THE DEAD WOOD, some of which are macros. I like photographing bones and death and dead things, and as a point of trivia, I once crawled underneath and damn near into a decomposing deer to capture a shot. No, really, here is that shot. And here’s another one, a bit closer.

Anyway, please to enjoy:

This link will take you to a random photo. You can keep clicking NEXT RANDOM IMAGE if you so choose. Click through the images until one of them speaks to you in some way — it scratches a creative itch somehow. Then write a short story based on that image as inspiration. (Try to nab a link to the photo, so you can put it in your story so we can see the inspiration.)

Length: ~1000 words

Due by: May 13th, noon, EST

Post at your online space.

Drop a link to it in the comments below.

Grab a photo and write.

GET IT

BECAUSE IT’S MAY

AND IT’S THE FOURTH

OF MAY

AND THERE’S THAT THING THEY SAY

IN THOSE MOVIES

MAY THE FORCE — snicker — BE WITH YOU

MAY THE FOURTH — tee hee — BE WITH YOU

I DIDN’T INVENT THE JOKE

BUT IT’S A GOOD ONE

anyway

So!

To celebrate May the 4th, as you may know, I’ll be at the Cherry Hill Library tonight, and you can nab tickets here or, I assume, come by and buy tix at the door. I’ll talk Star Wars and other stuff and sign books and do a nude performance art piece to the Ewok’s YUB NUB song, slowed down as if in a David Lynch movie. And maybe I’ll talk a little bit about Life Debt, too. 🙂

Speaking of Life Debt, I’ve been given clearance to give away one tiny little piece of the book — an itty-bitty amuse-bouche of information, which is to say, the first sentence of the first chapter.

Which is…

wait for it

wait for it

waaaaaaaait for it

spoiler space

spoiler warning

SPOILER ALERT –!

“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”

SEE WHAT I DID THERE

DO YOU

SEE IT

okay fine, jeez, no sense of humor around here — tough crowd.

Here, then, is the first sentence of Life Debt‘s chapter one:

“Luke Skywalker vigorously drank a tall glass of blue milk, kicked a womprat, and died.”

Wait, no, that can’t be right.

“Call me Obi-Wan.”

huh, no — shit, wait, is this it?

“Malakili rolls over and sits up –“

GODDAMNIT, NO, hold on, hold on — *ruffles through papers*

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single Kowakian Monkey-Lizard in possession of a jaunty hat must be in want of a Hutt…”

NO NO NO NO

I’m sorry for wasting your time, hold on, just sit still.

Oh. Here it is:

“Poe Dameron and FN-2187 study each other’s bodies the way a navigator studies a star chart in the dark…”

WAIT DAMNIT that isn’t right either, sorry, that one is from my, erm, private collection.

Ah!

Ah.

Here it is.

The for-realsies, totally-legit, honest-to-Yoda first sentence of the first chapter of Life Debt:

“Leia paces.”

THANK YOU, GOOD NIGHT

Hope to see some of you tonight in New Jersey.

Life Debt comes out on July 12th, so pre-order now: Indiebound | B&N | Amazon

(And while you’re at it — don’t forget to check out Bloodline!)

May is Mental Health Awareness month.

It is now May.

So, hello, mental health. I am aware of you.

I am aware of you because my mental health is on the whole plenty good, until it’s not. And when it’s not, it’s like my brain and my heart are Thelma & Louiseing it off a cliff — driving the car right off the edge. Zoom. Crunch. Explode. What happens when this happens is I suffer rather intense anxiety. My anxiety is a many-flavored thing, though usually it focuses on DEATH and HEALTH and IMMEDIATE SOUL-SHITTING PANIC. Like, I’ll be chugging along, and things will be good? And then I’ll think I’m inexplicably dying, or that everything I have is going to go away, or my very existence is a mote of dust in the eye of a God and holy crap what if God blinks and — gaaaaasp, then I can’t breathe, and it feels like I’m trapped, and maybe I have cancer, and maybe my heart is exploding, and what if my son dies, and what if my house burns down, and couldn’t someone in the middle of the night just fucking murder me and my whole family, and —

The cascading emotions run roughshod over me: fear, panic, existential terror. It’s like an amusement park ride: once you’re strapped in, it’s taking you where it wants to go.

I do better with it now than I used to. Growing up was this, every hour. Daily. Nightly. These days my anxiety is a dull roar in the background, a psychological tinnitus that only once in a while chooses to spike into shrill, noxious signal. Mostly, I control it rather than letting it control me. Mostly. And that’s a mental luxury that a lot of people can’t afford for various reasons.

Why am I telling you all this? I talk a little bit about it here and there, but last week I acknowledged it more boldly on Twitter and also noted that generally I don’t care to speak about it, because for me, speaking about it gives it a little power. Depression lies, as they say, and so does anxiety, and one of those lies for me is that it’s an accepted (note I didn’t say “acceptable”) part of who I am — an ally, if you will, the Louise to my Thelma. Anxiety at the time you feel it tends to seem perfectly normal, at least inside my head. It feels like it’s part of the fabric, part of the Tapestry of Chuck, like the panic it creates is totally justifiable, dude, even though it’s the furthest thing from it. It’s a slippery slope, lubricated with fearsweat — THIS PLANE IS TOTALLY GOING TO CRASH, I’LL GO TO THE BATHROOM BUT WAIT WHAT IF THE PLANE STARTS TO CRASH WHILE I’M IN THE BATHROOM AND ALSO THE BATHROOM IS PROBABLY SHELLACKED WITH MRSA AND I’LL CATCH MRSA IN ONE OF THESE HANGNAILS I HAVE ‘CAUSE I CAN’T STOP BITING MY STUPID NAILS SO IF THE PLANE CRASH DOESN’T KILL ME THEN MRSA WILL AND IF THAT DOESN’T KILL ME THEY’LL STILL HAVE TO CUT OFF MY ARMS AND THEN I WON’T BE ABLE TO WRITE ANYMORE AND THAT’S FINE BECAUSE MY CAREER IS PROBABLY ONE OR TWO BOOKS AWAY FROM BEING TOTALLY OVER AND

It sounds absurd, right? But my brain will do those kinds of meth-fueled psychological calisthenics, bounding around like if the Cat in the Hat were covered in a colony of bitey fire ants. And frequently it takes just one step onto the path of anxiety to go shoop down the chute and into cuckoo-town. It’s like how if you pee you “break the seal” and now you gotta pee like, every four minutes. Except here instead of “pee,” it’s “invite a Panic Monster to nestle into your heart where she can start laying eggs.” So, mostly, I don’t talk about it. I don’t even look in its direction because I recognize it to be the lying liar-pantsed liar that it is, and I don’t feel like it’s worth it to let it have the mic. That is not something everyone can manage, mind you, and further, others are strengthened by talking about it. Me, I do better ruminating on all the things that aren’t anxiety, and that seems to serve me okay.

So again, why am I telling you this now?

Because some folks said it would be helpful to know. To know that you can do it — you can have this problem and live with it. You never really conquer it, but you can lock it away, or at least do a country line-dance on its head. I’m not ashamed of what goes on in my head, though I damn sure don’t like it. You shouldn’t be ashamed of it, either. Mental health issues are incredibly common, and I suspect even moreso amongst artists and writers and other creative types. I know that it’s always going to be a part of me even as I can stand here with my Wizard Staff, reminding the Panic Monster that YOU SHALL NOT PASS. I banish it to the dark, then I get to fucking work.

I thought, too, that I’d offer up some of the techniques that I use to manage this. I’m not on medication and I don’t do therapy — which is maybe a bad idea, I don’t know? (I’m also not suggesting you should get by the same way I do. Everybody has their own way forward here, and there is nothing wrong with meds or therapy or whatever gets it done.) I manage okay without those things and have developed coping skills outside that particular prescription.

Here are some of my coping skills:

I run. Running has done a lot for my mental health. It is a thing I am very bad at, as much as you can be bad at such a seemingly simple thing — I mean, I can put one foot in front of the other, but I do so as gracefully as a legless gazelle kicked around an ice-skating rink. Just the same, running feels like control. It is me, the asphalt, the pain, the clarity, the blood pumping. While running, I’m still alone with my thoughts, but there exists the very distinct feeling that I can outrun all the bad thoughts and keep with me all the good ones. At the end, it’s like fleeing the cops in Grand Theft Auto — eventually the bad thoughts lose their way and I’m scot-free, baby.

I avoid news whenever possible. This one’s tough, because sometimes my job is helped by looking at the news. But if I’m feeling panic settle in, I’ll turn away from news because the news is rarely good, and it’s very easy to feel a sense of distinct hopelessness. The news shows a world that is an ever-deepening sinkhole, and rarely does the news report on the things that buoy us as a society. So, for the most part, fuck the news.

I find interesting news instead. Just this morning I saw this: GIANT HIMALAYAN BEES PRODUCE HALLUCINOGENIC HONEY and I’m like, yes, fuck yeah, this is news. No presidential election will ever matter to the universe as much as hallucinogenic bees. Bonus fun: did you know gorillas make up little songs when they eat food? Finding stories like that, that show how amazing the world is? It helps. My life and my death will be insignificant when compared against the wonder of gorilla food-songs and trip-tastic honeybees.

I curate my social media with angry laser-beam eyes. I like to obsessively prune my social media feeds because I consider it my living room — admittedly, a very loud living room — and as soon as someone becomes more noise to be instead of signal, I have to shut them out. It may not even be their fault, but I gotta practice self-care online because if I don’t, looking into the dark heart of social media is like having Sauron’s eye fixed on you. It’s not drinking from a firehouse so much as it is standing underneath Niagara Falls and opening your mouth. So, I unfollow, mute and block on a hair trigger. Sometimes that’s not your fault, it’s just a thing I gotta do.

I write. This seems obvious, and it’s not always the thing that helps everybody, but for me, writing is purgative — the creative act of sucking out venom. I suck it out, then spit it on the page. Not just as anger, but as everything: it’s a way for me to address the the wasp nest that lives inside my skull. All the ideas, all the fears, all the questions. I squirt them onto the page, then fingerpaint with all the bad stuff and see what stories I can tell. I’ve got Invasive coming soon and the protagonist is a futurist who consults with the FBI. Hannah Stander is the daughter of doomsday preppers, and she’s a character who walks the line between hoping to have optimism about the future and trying not to fall into the chasm of fear about the future we’re creating — climate change, antibiotic resistance, artificial intelligence. She’s not me, but she has that part of me. Her struggle gets to be my struggle, a little bit. It helps me deal. Miriam Black from Blackbirds is like this, too — she helped me come to terms with death and the helplessness we experience around it. She was such a vital character to help me dissect fatality.

I write horror. More to the point, I write horror. Most of my books are horror, even though none of my books are labeled as horror. (A curiosity of the industry.)

I meditate. Meditation for me isn’t meditation for you, necessarily — like, I don’t sit in a space and clear my head, but I do go out into nature and take pictures, or I walk, or I read escapist fiction, or I go to the movies. Anywhere to get out of my own head.

I am the Zodiac Killer. Just kidding. Seeing if you were still paying attention. Besides, we all know that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer.

I actively think of good things. Sometimes, my mind needs to be forced — a square peg hammered through a circle hole until its sharp corners are sheared clean off. That means I have to will myself to think of good things. In my life, in your life, in all the world.

I practice empathy. My anxiety is a very selfish liar and it is very solipsistic and would like me to think about ME ME ME and that’s a good way to center panic in your heart. Instead, I look beyond myself at other people and — I mean, in a way empathy is selfish, too, but moving beyond my own margins tends to put my anxiety off-center. Put more plainly, thinking about other people helps you stop thinking about yourself. It robs power from my anxiety.

That’s it, I guess? That’s what I got.

I have anxiety.

And it’s okay.

You’re okay, too.

No shame, no stigma, we are who we are.

Go forth and be awesome. More importantly, go forth and know you’re not alone.