Some quick newsy bits of note:

First up, readers have written-in Star Wars: Aftermath to the Goodreads Choice Awards under the Best Sci-Fi Books of 2015 category, so thank you! That category and all the others have an overwhelmingly awesome array of books, so, y’know, go vote for some. And if you do end up voting for Aftermath, hey, thank you a whole buncha bunches.

Next: Zer0es is one of Amazon’s best books of 2015 in the sci-fi and fantasy category, putting me in truly enviable company. Thanks to Amazon, and hope you guys check the book out. (Oh, and an audio version is in the works!)

And reminder! Tomorrow night! 6:30PM, me and Adam Christopher will be at the Doylestown Bookshop. He’ll be talking Made to Kill. I’ll be talking Star Wars and Zer0es. We’ll both be talking The Shield. It’ll be awesome. BE THERE, PA/NJ/DE HUMANS.

Next Thursday is my Charlotte appearance, too.

And, uhh. THAT’S IT, I GUESS.

*flings down smoke bomb*

*coughs because of smoke*

*why do I keep buying these*

*stupid smoke*

SOME HORSES JUST WANT TO WATCH THE WORLD BURN

We’re now one year out from the election, and this particular election cycle has been going on for — *checks watch* — well, let’s just go with FOR AN INTOLERABLE AMOUNT OF TIME. And last night was the 3,912th iteration of the GOP debates, our current favorite sport, where yet again the candidates disappointingly failed to oust one another with sword and javelin.

I have occasionally seen some international friends marvel at our election process, particularly as regards the EAGLE THRONE OF LORD PRESIDENT, and I imagine they have a look on their faces like, “Wow, what the unholy hell is going on over there in America? Is everybody okay? Do they need an intervention?” Meanwhile, Canada elected Justin Trudeau, a certified hunk of smoldering manflesh who then filled his cabinet with people who are both actually capable to do their jobs but also represent surprising ethnic and gender diversity. (When asked why he did this, Trudeau said, and I’m paraphrasing, “Because it’s 2015 and because you have to ask me that question, you jabbering chimpanzee. Now behold my sexiness as I snowboard into your heart. WWHIISSH.”)

So, to those wondering what’s going on over here, I will take a moment to explain.

Presidential politics is composed of two stages:

The primary race.

And then the presidential race.

The primary race is the thousand-year stage where we’re at now, in which each party votes for its particular KINGSLAYER who will attempt to forcibly occupy the EAGLE THRONE during the next round of Presidential Idol, the race itself. This first half represents an ugly, inefficient and ultimately demeaning contest, and here’s what I mean:

To win your primary, you must “appease your base.” See, your base comprises the center mass of your political party tribe — and this can be viewed best as a naked, filthy throng of zealots and acolytes pawing and biting at one another. You have to make those people happy, or so the wisdom goes. In effect, your job as a candidate is to cover yourself in as much pigshit as possible in order to convince the filthy throng that you are just like them. You just keep glopping it on, the wet slaps of hog ordure echoing through the auditorium as you dance and gambol about, ooking and gabbling and urinating everywhere. I’M JUST LIKE YOU, you must grunt and gibber.

I AM JUST LIKE YOU.

Ah, but then you win the nomination.

Then you go to the big race, where you no longer are trying to appease the lunatic mass of your tribe. Now you’re trying to appeal to the larger voting body — more or less everyone. You really can’t win that election by impressing only your party. You gotta shoot down the middle. So, in the first race, you shellac yourself in swine feces. And in the second race, you now have to convince the rest of us that no sir, I never covered myself in pigshit, not once, not ever, never will, nope, nope, nope. What’s that smell? It’s not me. It’s the other guy. What’s that? You have video of me pouring buckets of farm filth over my head? That’s not me. That’s somebody else. I’m your guy.

In the primary race, you have to aim for the fringes.

And in the presidential race, you have to aim for the center.

This might sound like you ultimately appealing to everyone by the end — the farthest-flung and the most moderate — but that’s not really how it works. Because moderates and fringe people don’t really see eye to eye. This isn’t scoring points. This is allying with opposing groups and then trying to pretend you never did that. This is clan politics. This is tribal warfare. (And really, it’s a result of the very limited two-party system — but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Now, ultimately, this is true for both parties. But here’s where I attempt to shut down false equivalency (aka the excuse of BOTH PARTIES ARE JUST AS BAD) and where I further show my admittedly liberal (if not explicitly Democratic) bias —

The GOP covers itself in a far stinkier brand of pigshit.

Like, the Democrats? Their pigshit smells mostly pretty nice. You may not like it. You may not think it’s effective enough, or the right smell, or that it’s too nice, but at the end of the day, the liberals usually come out of the gate trying to convince their base of their basic humanity — right? They want health care and less war and fewer guns to kill ourselves with — their pigshit is, for better or for worse, optimistic. Maybe that optimism is ideal. Maybe it’s naive. Maybe it’s a lie. (That’s for you to decide.) At the end of the day, the Democratic party is more moderate, and so their political base lines up more cleanly (if imperfectly) with the moderate outlook.

The GOP though, they get worse every cycle. Their shit stinks louder every time. It’s as if Rush Limbaugh impregnated the party years back with his demon seed, and that baby’s been swelling and bloating inside the beast ever since. The GOP is increasingly reducing their pigshit down like a fine French sauce until its potency is truly eye-watering. It’s no longer enough to say blah blah blah you want smaller government and fiscal responsibility. Now you have to want no government at all. Now you have to somehow pull off the spine-bowing gymnastics where you convince your party that you’re running for governmental office yet are mysteriously anti-government. Worse, you have to claim to want no government while at the same time claiming to want more government intervention in things like, say, women’s uteruses. You’ve gotta be a total shithead, actually — you have to say you hate women and brown people and Muslims and science? What’s science? Isn’t science the thing that makes Jesus sad? Yeah, no, fuck science, science has never gotten us anywhere ever. Remember the Dark Ages? THOSE WERE THE BEST OF TIMES. Jesus will tell you. He loved the Dark Ages. In fact, you have to commit to the positively Satanic act of convincing people you’re a total JESUSHEAD while simultaneously taking political positions that would’ve made the Real Jesus turn into an actual white person because of how pale he’d go — if Jesus were here right now, we probably would’ve convinced him that we simply do not deserve to live. All that love thy neighbor bullshit would fall by the wayside as he reluctantly commanded the Second Deluge to sweep us all away. Maybe he’d call that Second Deluge “global warming,” and then he’d laugh as we all drowned in the boiling water that the GOP said was never coming because, if you’ll recall, science is stupid and climate change is a lie.

And JESUS FORBID you’re actually reasonable. The more reasonable you are, the deeper your poll numbers plunge. Jon Huntsman came out of the gate and was like, “Global warming is real and the GOP should’ve been leading the way on gay marriage because that’s the epitome of the government staying out of your business,” and I’m pretty sure a broken toaster would’ve gotten better poll numbers. Meanwhile, Ben Carson wants to convince you he tried to stab a kid and that Jesus filled the Pyramids with Secret Jesus Frankenstein Monsters, and Trump wants you to know that fuck you, that’s what, and those two kookaloons are soaring in the poll numbers.

All the while, you hear the moist sounds of pigshit hitting skin.

SLAP. SPLAP. SPLURCH. PBBBT.

And the tribe moans and applauds and moves together with the gallumphing sameness of a slime mold whose glistening pseudopods writhe in squishy unison.

Then they win the nomination, quick wash off, and try to convince you they don’t think all the horrible things they think — or at least that they never said the horrible things they said.

(As a sidenote, this is one of the reasons I’m dubious of Bernie Sanders’ ability to win the nomination. Setting aside the fact he’s old and yells at you like your grandpa, his politics — while smart and lovely! — are also probably outside the scope of the moderate middle American vibe. I may be cynical here and I do like him. But I worry. I worry.)

How do you fix it? Fuck, I dunno. I dunno if there is a fix. The 24-hour-news-cycle makes it worse. The 25-hour-tornado-ragey-snark-fest that is the Internet exacerbates it. The laws allowing money in politics ensures that corporate interests trump human interests. The two-party system — well, I already went there. Lots of people vote for the presidential contest, but too few vote for any of the local or state ones. Maybe it’s fixable. I dunno.

But my fear is that it keeps on swirling the drain like this. That the stench of pigshit gets stenchier. That politics continues to be a hold-your-nose affair.

Then again, Canada just elected Trudeau, so what do I know? Maybe a better day truly awaits.

Maybe we should just listen to The Oatmeal reminding us, “It’s going to be okay.”

ANYWAY. So, that’s the primary process, explained through ANIMAL WASTE.

More on the big contest later, when our party’s KINGSLAYERS have been decided!

Wooooo!

*cry-vomits into open hands*

This is literally some shit that just happened:

As is my routine, I left the shed to go inside to make The 4-Year-Old Presently Known As B-Dub breakfast. He came downstairs, excited to begin his day. He informed me that he was SHOCKWAVE, and I was Shockwave’s best friend, SHOCKDAVE (he quickly changed his mind and determined that he was instead Soundwave, because duh).

Everyone was happy. He had awakened as usual, demonstrating the energy of a meth-addled rock drummer, and mornings are usually pretty good because he hasn’t built up all the barnacles one might accumulate during one’s daily existence.

He said he wanted to find these pipes he’d been playing with — they’re not PVC pipes, they’re narrower than that, but he uses them as lightsabers and musical instruments and whatever. (As with many things, the best toys are rarely ones you buy, but rather: random-ass trash. Note I didn’t say random ass-trash, because ew. Hyphen placement matters, kids.)

Great! Fine. But —

He could not find them and immediately began to get upset.

Most times, things like this don’t bother him, but now, it did. You could see the storm about to break on his shores. The wet eyes. The hands balling into fists at his side. His eyes shooting lasers. Okay, maybe not that last bit. But almost.

I commit to helping him look. I immediately find them — ten seconds later, I discover them on the couch under a blanket. I think, HA HA, DADDY IS A HERO. Daddy staved off the stampeding army of a coming tantrum. Daddy is basically like, the Hercules of the parent set right now. Now let’s all go into the kitchen and eat some fucking pancakes because the day is saved.

Daddy was jolly well fucking wrong is what he was.

B-Dub loses his gourd. If he could’ve flipped a table, he would’ve flipped a table. His reason for the escalation of the meltdown is this, and I quote: THOSE AREN’T THEM. As in, the things I found are not the things he was looking for, except I know they are. They are! I’m sure of it! He’s wrong! Is he just fucking with me? Have I lost my mind? And then he adds, for melodramatic flourish: I HAVE NEVER SEEN THOSE THINGS BEFORE IN MY LIFE. (Another lie!) He demands I cover them back up with the blanket — I guess the sight of them alone might make him rage-barf — and then proceeds to stomp around the room like he’s trying to kill a swarm of ants or something.

My wife comes downstairs and she tries to ameliorate the situation and that just — yeah, no. That’s just a burr stuck between his buttcheeks.

My wife is excellent because she’s basically a hostage negotiator. She knows how to speak calmly yet still manipulate him into an end game while making him think he is getting exactly what he wants — she reiterates the situation and the problem and coaches him into an emotional solution. I have this power sometimes, other times I just stare at him like he’s a malfunctioning vacuum. (When hostage negotiation fails, the best bet is to leave him alone and let the preschooler tornado burn himself out — eventually he can’t sustain his own inane rage and it sputters.)

Either way, she got him calm. He came in, said sorry, gave hugs, ate pancakes, yay, whatever.

Here, you think: kids are just… they’re just fucked, man. They can’t keep it together for fundamental, mundane stuff. They’re like Windows computers from the 1990s — they just aren’t built right. They malfunction. They fritz out. UNEXPECTED BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH even when you’re trying to do something basic like update your calendar or write an email. Kids are like broken robots. THIS ROBOT DOES NOT UNDERSTAND ASIMOV’S LAWS. It just whirrs around the house eating your plants and peeing on the heating vents. All while yelling at you.

Thing is, the door swings the other way, too.

Sometimes they’re alarmingly broken little creatures.

Other times, they can be incredibly well-put-together. They can demonstrate levels of awareness and maturity that most adults are never able to muster. Case in point:

Last week, B-Dub wanted to buy a new Minecraft texture pack. To which I said no because (and here my father’s voice gurgles up out of me like a ghost yelling through a sewer grate) WE’RE NOT MADE OF MONEY. Which ticked him off, and the coming tantrum from a situation like that is a little more predictable. I said no to a thing he wanted — it’s like denying a komodo dragon food. It will hiss and spit and bite because it wants the food. Its reptilian urges will not be denied.

Except, they were denied, and he got mad.

Fine.

Minutes later, he comes into the kitchen, calm as a summer breeze. He says that he’s okay now. He had taken a deep breath (which is a calming technique we taught him) and said that he was letting the texture pack go because it was “too much” in his head and he was going to “lose the idea” because he didn’t really need the pack. He explained to me and my wife that he really wanted it, but knew he didn’t really need it — he conceded he just wanted something. And he added, “I’m okay, now,” then walked the fuck away like a Zen master who had just given up the need for material goods, the world exploding behind him in a fiery plume.

And I was like, dang, kid. I certainly cannot manage that kind of confidence and security. When I want something, it’s like the desire for it lives in my salivary glands — and it’s worse if someone tells me I can’t have it. I don’t care if it’s a cookie or a chainsaw. When I want it, I want it, and damnit why can’t I have it? I WILL SLAPFIGHT YOU OVER A CUPCAKE IF YOU DENY ME. So, here’s this four-year-old illustrating a kind of calm, collected bad-assness that was really quite amazing.

See, sometimes they’re broken robots.

But sometimes they are Bodhisattvas sent here to shepherd us toward better habits.

I don’t have any great takeaway here, really.

Kids are weird, is what I’m saying. And we have the tendency, I think, to respond to children like either they should already be adults or instead respond to them like they’ll never be capable of becoming adults. I know I’m guilty of both — sometimes I want to do the thing my Dad did which was get firm and angry and be like, THE REAL WORLD WON’T ACCEPT THESE SHENANIGANS SO WHY SHOULD I, even though the reality is, he’s not ready for that kind of logic. He’s this kinetic bundle of emotions, and all his synapses haven’t learned to fire together yet. His logic centers are sometimes dominated by his emotional ones — and sometimes his emotional ones are like the wires of the Millennium Falcon, pulled out of the ceiling and draped in a tangle over Chewbacca’s shoulders. But at the same time, you don’t want to treat him like he’s just some wackadoo dum-dum who can’t handle the things that life throws at him, because all too often he shows full well how stalwart he is in the face of problems that would sucker-punch most adults.

I think the best thing we can do is trust them and to have empathy for them. They’re going to get it wrong a whole lot, and we have to accept that. But they’re going to get it right, too — and while we don’t have to expect that, I think we have to allow room for it to happen. We have to help them learn to be people. That’s still so weird to me. They’re not really fully-formed human beings, not yet. We have to teach the broken robot to become a real boy — and, eventually a real grown-up. A grown-up hopefully better than the ones we ourselves became.

NOW WHO WANTS TO SLAPFIGHT ME OVER THIS CUPCAKE.

Ha ha just kidding I already ate it.

soon to be a HEY WAIT A MINUTE

Miriam Black is pretty much the poster child for bad news delivery. Her entire curse in life is to touch people and see how they’re going to die — which sucks for them, and frankly, sucks for her. It’s why, I think, she’s such a spectacularly unpleasant person (by the way, unpleasant people are often the most fun to write, and occasionally the most fun to read).

It’s bad to have to get the news, sure. But I think it’s also bad to have to give it.

Which is where we come around to me giving you guys a couple parcels of bad news.

First item on that list:

The Miriam Black TV show adaptation at Starz is dead. Kaput. Miriam touched it, failed to see its demise, and yet — IT DEAD. I don’t really know why. Things were going quite well over at Starz! We had infrastructure. We had something just shy of a confirmed pickup. Scripts! Producers! Things! Stuff! And yet, it was not meant to be. (One theory is that they also bought Gaiman’s show, which while quite different on paper is also a crimey-flavored urban fantasy show, and his is almost assuredly both more expensive and more exciting than mine was. Not slagging on BLACKBIRDS, but c’mon. It’s Gaiman, baby.)

We’ve had rumblings from some other networks, and before it was a TV show at Starz it was once (almost!) a film, so — I’m hopeful that it’s still going somewhere. And if not, hey, whatever. A book is not made better or somehow valid by its adaptation (even though it would’ve been cool).

Hey, I got paid, at least.

Now, onto the next item on the list:

THUNDERBIRD, the fourth Miriam book, is delayed.

It’s delayed by less than a year — it’ll land now in March, 2017.

It’s a bummer, I know. It’s not because the book isn’t done — it is, more or less. But it’s due to a couple reasons. First, because it’ll allow people to get caught up on the series properly. Second, because it’ll let us do a slightly more inventive (and much faster) release schedule for the next three. That means all three books will drop quite quickly — three over the course of one year. I don’t have firm dates on all of them, but roughly:

THUNDERBIRD in March 2017.

Then THE RAPTOR & THE WREN in fall (?) 2017.

And finally, VULTURES by or before March 2018.

Which means with this release schedule the series will conclude earlier than it would’ve on the previous schedule. I figure that’s a silver lining on this dark cloud of angry birds.

What I may do now is populate the space in between now and THUNDERBIRD with some short stories / novellas that tell Miriam-focused tales set after CORMORANT. And there’s already the bridging novella, INTERLUDE: SWALLOW available now as part of THREE SLICES.

Regardless — eek, sorry! More as I know it.

Of course, as you may know, the books are returning to e-book and print. (CORMORANT returns to book shelves in February.) You can check out the books if you so choose:

BLACKBIRDS (Indiebound | B&N | Amazon)

MOCKINGBIRD (Indiebound | B&N | Amazon)

THE CORMORANT (Indiebound | B&N | Amazon)

Or pre-order THUNDERBIRD (Indiebound | B&N | Amazon).

(And if you haven’t seen the book series trailer, here goes.)

And I’ve also got a bunch of other new releases coming up —

ATLANTA BURNS: THE HUNT (Feb 2016).

STAR WARS: LIFE DEBT, Aftermath Book 2 (June 2016).

INVASIVE (August 2015, was called “Myrmidon,” August 2016).

STAR WARS: EMPIRE’S END, Aftermath Book 3 (2017?)

Also, if you’re in PA or NC, I’ve got two appearances of note:

Doylestown Bookshop, this Friday, with Adam Christopher.

Queen’s University, Charlotte, NC, on November 19th.

So! Some bad news, but hey, some good stuff, too.

*grins maniacally while trying not to sob openly*

It’s vital for you to realize that I do not recommend books unless I really like them. I also don’t blurb books unless I really like them. Folks have occasionally described a blurb-sharing universe that is at best morally corrupt, where agents and editors and authors trade blurbs in back alleys for, I dunno, exotic pets or fancy Japanese sneakers or multidimensional designer drugs. I have never received these things. I talk about books I love — and I’ll blurb ’em, too — because I need you to trust me. I can’t just go blurbing any ol’ hunk of monkeyspunk — that’s regardless of whether you’re a friend or someone I’ve never met.

So, right now I’m going to recommend a pair of books, each by a close friend, but I want you to realize that my recommendation is in no way corrupted by this fact.

I loved both of these books, and you may, too.

First up: Lila Bowen’s Wake of Vultures. It’s a wonderfully weird-ass supernatural Western. It has shapeshifters and monsters and monster-hunting. It has knives. It has harpies. It tackles issues of identity and gender and objectification. It’s violent and funny. (I might recommend it, actually, to folks who like my Miriam Black books.) Nettie Lonesome is your new jam. Thing about this book though that really struck me is the way it was written — it’s sodden with voice. Just drips with it. The prose stomps right up to the edge of almost too damn much and then stops and stays there, and it’s just fucking perfect. (Reminds me a little of Pretty Deadly, in fact.) So, hell, mount up and take the ride, will you? (Indiebound | Amazon)

Next: Adam Christopher’s Made to Kill. This is another book where the genres kind of bleed into another a little bit — it’s a Raymond Chandlerian story set in the 60s with a robot “detective” (cough cough assassin) at its heart. He loses his memory every day due to his tapes erasing. He’s got a cantankerous AI named Ada in his head. He takes on a job from a young girl who might be the damsel in distress or might be the femme fatale or who might be something else entirely — and in classic noir fashion, the story everyone thinks they’re getting is really just the tip of the sinister iceberg. It straddles the line between silly and serious, and it’s a lean book with nary an ounce of fat on it — Adam’s writing is forthright and no-nonsense and quick as the stick of a switchblade. (Indiebound | Amazon)

So, I’ve named two books I liked recently.

I’m asking you to name just one.

Go into the comments, talk about a book you read within the last few months that you really liked. Tell us why you liked it. Tell us why we should read it.

Looking at that title, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was my snapping moment — that finally I have achieved total author meltdown, and now I’m running through the streets, pants on my head, frothing on about how WRITING ADVICE IS MADE OF PEOPLE and CONTRAILS ARE HOW GMO BIG PHARMA SOMETHING SOMETHING OBAMA and BEN CARSON SHOULD BE PRESIDENT.

This is not that moment.

I know, I know, it’s very disappointing.

It’s just — it’s that month. It’s the month where lots of folks entertain the idea of being a novelist and they hunger for information, for direction, for truth.

My blog hits go through the roof during October and November.

I sell a lot of books about writing during this time.

Which is nice.

It’s all perfectly lovely.

It’s also all bullshit.

Now, before I go further into the cuckoo mines, I want to say — here’s another thing that happens during this month. People get mad at me for telling them how to write. I am, quite admittedly, a privileged guy even beyond the Normal Reasons. I’m a full-time writer. I make actual money writing. Not like, fake money. But the kind of money where I can support my family on it. I can pay all my bills and then buy Star Wars toys. I can buy myself a magical fucking writing shed to plonk down in the woods like a very pretty apocalypse bunker where I have an arsenal of books instead of an arsenal of guns. I’m not wealthy, I’m not famous, but I’m doing more than just surviving. I’m plump (hey shut up I lost weight) and pleasantly keeping on.

So, folks get galled that I would be so presumptuous to tell them how to do this thing. Which is both fair and also strange — yes, I’m privileged, but I like to think that I earned it. I didn’t buy my way into this gig. I have been working at it for almost 20 years (*weeps into open hands at the ineluctable march of time*). I have gone through many full time jobs, most of which sucked mightily. I have had years where my writing made me alarmingly little. I have endured the tooth and claw of rejection, countless rejections, so much rejection, goddamnit rejection. Plus: hey, occasionally crippling anxiety. That’s always a hoot.

Oh, and I still get bad reviews. I still get rejected. Writing is hard. Easier for me than many. But still hard. And publishing is harder. Publishing can be “passing pumpkin seeds through your urethra” hard. It can be “pushing a rock up a hill until the rock rolls back down onto you and then vultures eat your fingermeats but now it’s time to push the rock again, dummy” hard.

That’s me yelling at the clouds and shaking my fist at trees, screaming: I EARNED THE RIGHT TO YELL AT YOU ABOUT WRITING. And then I hiss at birds. Stupid birds.

I have an educated, practiced — if also narrow! — view of writing, storytelling, and publishing.

But please, let me reiterate: it’s all bullshit.

To explain:

Nothing I say is right.

Writing advice is not science.

About the only provable thing you can say about writing is that to be a writer, you have to write, and hey, it’s probably a very good idea to finish most, if not all, the things you begin. My “secret to writing” message remains: WRITE AS MUCH AS YOU CAN, AS FAST AS YOU CAN; FINISH YOUR SHIT; HIT YOUR DEADLINES; TRY VERY HARD NOT TO SUCK. And that’s it. That’s the end of it.

Everything else is just opinion.

Gassy, half-formed opinion.

What works for one person won’t work for another.

What reads well by one author will read poorly when written by another.

A technique works for me, fails for you. Or for you it is amazing and for me it is puzzling.

I love my word processor. You hate it.

Don’t ever open a story with weather, except when you should.

You should write in the morning unless you can’t or shouldn’t or won’t or whatever.

Be more literary! Be more genre! Be less this more that wait no the other thing.

This won’t sell until it does and then it sells a lot until it stops selling and nnngh.

You should do XYZ except unless ABC or 123 or wuzza wooza buzzy fuzzy.

Here you might be saying: well, then, why do it? Why yammer on about writing at all? WHY ARE YOU WILLFULLY HORSESHITTING US, YOU FANCY ASSHOLE?

It’s for a few reasons.

First, because as I have noted in the past, because I like to yell at myself, and this blog provides a convenient platform to scream at my presumed Audience Of One.

Second, because I am a noisy, opinionated jackhole.

Third, because bullshit still works as fertilizer. What I mean is this: the things I say at this blog and in my writing books is just advice. It’s not right. It’s also not automatically wrong. It’s just advice. It’s like if you ask me about sneakers and I’m like, “I wear these sneakers called Hoka One Ones, and they’re really great.” They are a real sneaker. I actually own and wear and love them. They’re great for me. It’s true. It’s like walking on air. It’s improved my running. They’ve ended my plantar fasciitis and also ended other associated running pains. And they might be great for some of you. For others? You might fucking hate them. But these shoes are what I know and so I will recommend them if you ask. Hell, even if you don’t ask.

My writing advice is that.

I have been doing this for a while.

I have learned lessons applicable to me and possibly applicable to some of you.

And so, I share them in the hopes that you will swill this briny brew around your mouth — maybe you like the taste, or maybe you make a face like you just licked the ass-end of an irritable llama. The goal is that somewhere in the spongy fungal morass I grow here at the blog you will find that the bullshit sprinkled about has been a proper fertilizer instead of just a nasty-ass, stink-making air-destroyer. But at the same time, don’t treat what I say — or what anybody says — as gospel truth. Consider it. Taste it. Smell it. Lift it in your hand. And then use or or lose it. You do you. I mean, shit, even if the writing advice gets you pissed at me — good. Then it’s making you think about this thing that we do. It challenges you. That’s a good thing. Maybe it clarifies why you do what you do even if it’s not how I do it. Good. Great. Rock the fuck on.

So, yes.

Writing advice is bullshit. But maybe, just maybe, you can use it to fertilize your own work.