So, some of you are probably doing NaNoWriMo.

I’m going to pop this post up and leave it here — this is where you can come and talk about how it’s going (or how it’s not going). You can ask for help or tips or ideas. You can rage and froth and grit your teeth. You can ask for commiseration and hugs and high-fives. You can oil-wrestle? I dunno. Whatever you want to do, you can do it here. Consider this a tiny little slice of community conversation for those of you jumping in and doing National Novel Writing Month this go-around.

How’s it going?

What are you writing?

Will you share the work as you go, or after?

What’s your editing plan?

And so on and so forth. Stop by, say hi, tell everyone what’s up.

Last year, I did an official NaNoWriMo pep talk.

This year, I’m doing an unofficial one. With more swearing.

LET US BEGIN.

* * *

Behold, the novel.

The novel is a big thing, a meaty thing, all the meatier if you’re holding an epic fantasy or a literary magnum opus or pretty much anything by Neal Stephenson. It is big and it contains multitudes because at the end of the day, a novel is a bit like a machine. A machine is a working apparatus comprising several interlocking and often moving parts who work together with power applies to accomplish a single goal. That is a novel. A novel is a narrative apparatus. It contains many moving parts: characters, plot, theme, words, sentences, ideas. These parts do not exist separately but operate together in order to tell a story and, ideally, make you feel stuff and think things. You power the novel with your own attention. Eyes scanning paragraphs. Fingers turning or swiping pages. Your mind drawing the story forward with desire.

The novel is a machine, and a machine is meant to be meticulous in its design.

A machine has to work almost perfectly in order to work effectively. If it’s canning peaches, it can’t not can some peaches and leave them sloppy on the conveyor belt. If it’s a power tool, it has to work effectively and regularly — if your drill does not drill or your saw won’t cut, you won’t buy it. If you’re designing a sex machine, the sex machine must sex. Nobody’s going to apply their genitals and their partner’s genitals to a sex machine that won’t sex, goddamnit. I mean, I’m sure somebody will. I expect there are whole hosts of people wandering the streets who will apply their genitals to any immobile object — parking meters, chained bicycles, espresso machines — but you’re not designing a machine for them. You’re designing the machine to meet the larger need. You’re designing your machine for the greater group.

And a novel is like that. You’re designing it not for one person, but for people all over who like the sort of thing you’re writing. It can be niche, but the niche is likely broader than Dave from Topeka.

As such, it’s hard to envision National Novel Writing Month being a good way to build a machine. The iPhone wasn’t designed by a bunch of wine-drunk chimpanzees in a weekend. The space shuttle isn’t the result of some hermit throwing shit together in his garage with duct tape and a soldering iron. These machines took time. They took effort. They took design after design, iteration after iteration. They took endless hours of thought and planning and agitation before execution even began. And NaNoWriMo certainly isn’t that, is it? It’s right to execution. It’s pen to paper, rubber meets road, go, go, go. Turn off your brain and create.

Ah, but here you may think — and you’d think it somewhat correctly — that NaNoWriMo slots very well into that iterative process if you let it. It isn’t the end result. It isn’t the final machine. No, rather, a novel written with NaNoWriMo is just one creative oscillation — it is a hastily barfed design. It is the equivalent to a late night drinking coffee and scrawling blueprints. It’s like a programming hackathon: sit down in order to ideate and iterate. So, that works, right?

You know, though, I’m gonna call bullshit on that.

Because really, a novel isn’t like a machine at all.

A machine is meant to perform a singular task and it is meant to perform it that way for most of the people who use it according to its design. A novel ain’t that.

A novel is a big, messy thing. It is a tangle of ideas. It is a subjective expression where the experience of one reader will different from the next. It’s a meth-addled Escher print.

No, a novel is not a machine. A novel is a creature. A creature who eats ideas and craps art. A creature who is adorable to some, disgusting to others. The novel is a wonderful beastie who will not be easily contained, who can be trained but not programmed, who has personality and imperfection and is unlike any other of its kind despite looking an awful lot like others of its kind. A novel features the flaws and foibles of the nearly-miraculous human body — a human body where we can bite the inside of our cheeks or stub our dumb monkey toes or go bald or get rashes. A novel is driven by its imprecision, by its charming inexactitude. A novel lives in the shadow of perfection and it does just fine there, thank you very much.

Striving for perfection is a fool’s game. You can never get there, and frankly, you don’t really even want it. Because perfection is boring. Perfection is the elegance of an unwritten page — a gleaming white unmarred expanse. As I have noted before, your job is to fuck that all up. Stomp on it with muddy footprints. Get your jam-stained fingerprints all over it. The creation of a novel is an act of glorious imperfection, a ruination of the vacuum where your novel did not exist before. The perfect is always the enemy of the good. The machine is the enemy of the art. As was said in Glengarry Glen Ross: fuck the machine. Fuck perfection.

NaNoWriMo is your opportunity to do exactly that.

Sometimes you gotta go to Wal-Mart drunk and buy everything you shouldn’t buy.

Sometimes you gotta stay up all night designing monsters and destroying worlds.

Sometimes you need to light yourself on fire and run through an orphanage.

Go have a gangbang in a mud pit. Go base-jump off Godzilla. Go punch three clowns.

Embrace chaos. Break the machine. Make some art.

Go be reckless.

Go write a novel.

* * *

30 Days In The Word Mines takes you on a month-long journey of writing, offering pages filled with practical writing tips, motivational throat-punches, and meditative ruminations on the craft of writing and art of storytelling.

Whether you’re running with National Novel Writing Month or just want to hunker down and write to see just how far you can get, this book will help you every step of the way with a new tip, trick or thought every day of the trip.

Grab the book at Amazon.

Or, right now, nab the book for 33% off here using code NANOWRIMO.

And don’t forget to check out the NaNoWriMo Storybundle — 13 writing-related e-books, plus another 12 if you meet the $25 threshold. Money split between authors, Storybundle, and charity.

First, I’ll point you to a few e-book sales going on till tomorrow:

The Gonzo Writing E-Book Bundle is five bucks off with coupon code NAPLOYONOMO. This is good until the end of tomorrow (10/31). Eight writing books for fifteen bucks.

Both The Blue Blazes and The Hellsblood Bride are 50% off right now if you use the coupon code: HALFANDHALF. This is also good until the end of tomorrow (10/31). In these books, there is a literal underworld beneath Manhattan, and the things that dwell there very much want to dwell out here, and will do whatever they can to make that happen.

If you want a mega-epic-holy-crap bundle of writing books, this next month’s Storybundle is live and is NaNoWriMo-flavored. It’s 13 books up front with another 12 books added if you meet the $25.00 threshold — remember, too, that some of your money given to Storybundle can be split to go to charity. This bundle doesn’t end tomorrow, to be clear — it goes on through November.

AND NOW ON WITH THE FLASH FICTION GOODNESS.

This challenge is simply, and goes till the end of tomorrow –11:59PM, 10/31.

I want you to tell a scary story in three sentences.

That’s it.

Keep it short — and keep it to three sentences.

You can write it right in the comments below.

GO FORTH AND BE SPOOKY

*demonic laugh*

*barfs up tarantulas*

So, here’s a thing that happened:

This blog turned 15 years old this month. On October 19th, actually.

Blink, blink.

Holy crap, this blog is old. It’s a surly teenager now. It’s slamming doors and stealing my whiskey. It just ran up the stairs and yelled down at me, YOU’RE NOT MY REAL DAD.

Oh, but I am, blog. I am.

If you’ll take a momentary trip with me in the Wayback Machine, you will discover that once upon a time, when Cavepeople rode to work on Pteranodons, I ran a BBS — a bulletin board system. (I had various names for said BBS: BizarroWorld, ShadowLands, UnReality.) It was like the Internet before there was an Internet, except my fucking shitty 486 computer ran it and you had to use a screamy dial-up modem to connect to my house. And there online I offered networked forums and games and warez and ASCII art and all those Cool Jamz, and I had a little writing group called WAR (Writers Against Reality, a weaksauce title but shut up, I was a teenager). I’m not even sure my parents knew I ran the thing? And one time, Bruce Campbell dialed in? Whatever.

When it came time to establish an online presence post-college and in the dawning era of the Intertubes, I decided that I needed a BLOG — which as I have noted before is like, the worst name for anything ever. Blog sounds like the onomatopoeia of my dog horking up a wad of ill-eaten grass. (Actually, vlog may be worse than blog, because vlog sounds like Dracula’s idiot relative. “Hi, I’m Vlad the Impaler, and this is my little cousin, Vlog the Inn Tailor.”) My initial plan when it came time to plan out this blog was that I wanted to have it serve as an online writer’s community, much as I did back when I was a SysOp running a BBS. Thus the name terribleminds — it was meant to evoke that feeling of, blah blah blah, a bunch of gloriously terrible creative minds getting together and shooting the shit about wordsmithy.

Except, that sounded like a lot of work and I also didn’t like people at that time so instead I said, “Fuck that shit, George,” and then I decided instead to just do a blog about me, me, me.

OH GLORIOUS NARCISSISM

As such, my programmer roommate at the time did a static HTML page — she did a cracking good job and set me up with rudimentary HTML skillz and an FTP client and I did all my updating the old fashioned way — by yelling code into a donkey who carried the blog up a mountain to the Internet.

And it was fine and nice and it was me yelling at me about me. Often about writing, sometimes about other rantylicious topics. But it had no metrics. It had no comments.

I had no idea who was listening.

Around 2009, Will Hindmarch suggested I be a big boy and actually get a WordPress installation, and I nodded and smiled and pretended I knew what he was talking about. Thankfully, he coached me through it, and next thing the world knew, I had metrics, and comments, and sweet hot hell people were actually reading this blog. It was like opening the curtain to your front windows and finding a bunch of people staring in through the glass.

The blog numbers have gone up considerably over the last several years, too.

2009: 35,000 views.

2010: 435,000 views.

2011: 1.5 million.

2012: 2.7 million.

2013: 3.2 million.

2014: 3.6 million.

And this year we’re on target to match 2014, with the added bonus of having daily subscribers — over 8,000 people who get these blog posts in their mailboxes, daily.

All the while, I’ve done it without soliciting money or posting advertising or any of that. I fuel the existence of the blog with the money I (ideally) make with my writing.

(Oh, I’m told blogs are dead now. But terribleminds will keep on, zombie-like. /braaaaains)

It’s been an amazing journey, and while I still hew roughly to the same style of blogging I did way back when (yelling at myself about myself), the original and seemingly forgotten goal of terribleminds actually circled back around and became a true thing: this really is, I feel, a community of and for writers. It exists because of all of you, so thanks for being here and being awesome. It’s mind-boggling that so many of you care to listen to the froth-mouthed gabbling of a freakshow like myself, but I really, really appreciate it.

AS SUCH, it is time to do a giveaway.

I initially though I’d give away my books, but meh, who wants that?

Then I thought, maybe I’ll give something bookish — a Kindle or what-not.

Even then, I feel like that runs counter to the spirit of the weirdness that is this blog.

So! Instead, I’m going to giveaway something TOTALLY RANDOM. Unexpected. A bizarre-o care package sent to one lucky commenter. Here’s all you gotta do:

Go leave a comment beneath this post.

Oh, and be from the U.S. — I know, that sucks, but international shipping is a terrible thing.

Then, on Thursday, I’ll pick one of you randos to receive MYSTERIOUS GIFTNESS.

*poof*

EDIT: We Have A Winner

The winner of the birthday fun is:

JEN.

Someone named Jen, no last name!

Jen, who wrote the comment, “Happy happy!”

Jen, I’ve got an email address for you, so I’ll try it, but if the one you signed in with is incorrect, ping me at terribleminds at gmail dot com so I can get a mailing address from you.

MYSTERY PACKAGE INCOMING.

That title suffers a bit from multiple personalities, doesn’t it?

I know some people are on the fence about whether or not to do NaNoWriMo, and that’s a bad place to be because sitting on a fence is very unhealthy for you. Guaranteed hemorrhoids is all I’m saying. And then you have to go to the doctor and explain that. “Why the hemmorhoids?” the doctor asks, shrugging. “Sitting on a fence again,” you say. And then he chides you for your indecision and then has to shoot your butthole with a laser —

Okay, that’s probably not how they get rid of hemorrhoids but it’d be cool if they did. I mean, c’mon. Lasers should be involved in more things, not less. Except maybe buttholes? Hm.

You know what? I’m driving way off the road here, so let’s get back onto the asphalt.

Here, I will give unto thee reasons to partake in National Novel Writing Month…

…and reasons to avoid it like a hot cup of gonorrhea.

Ready? We begin.

Why You Should Partake

• It will teach you discipline and diligence.

• Writing every day will teach you a lot about writing, good and bad.

• Writing every day will teach you a lot about your own writing habits, good and bad.

• It’s goal-oriented. Writers live by deadlines.

• It’s geared explicitly toward finishing your shit, and finishing your shit is about the only single piece of writing advice you can really, genuinely count on to be true.

• It’s also community-driven — writing is quite explicitly an individual and often lonely endeavor, but this has the spirit of a creative word orgy. You come into the room, put your keys in the basket, lube up the ol’ story-makers, and start writing like a motherfucker. Community in this regard is a good way to feel less alone. It gives you shoulders to cry on, minds to bounce ideas off of, and ink-stained hands to high-five. It’s the closest you’re gonna get to a bunch of writers just humping the sweet hell out of each other, unless you’ve spent any time at Harlan Ellison’s love ranch.

• I don’t know that Harlan Ellison has a love ranch, I’m just making that up. I’m clarifying this because Harlan seems like the kind of guy who would hunt me for my pelt if I angered him.

• But, I am saying that if anybody has a love ranch, I could believe Harlan Ellison has one.

• That or just a room where he sometimes goes to yell at cats. About how they’ve failed him.

• I think I need a love ranch.

• Okay, getting back on track now in 3, 2, 1 —

• Modern writing careers — successful ones, anyway — are increasingly predicated on producing a lot of content quickly, and, well, this is a good way to practice exactly that.

• It will help you take your Internal Editor and drown him in a mud puddle. Writers have to, have to, have to grow comfortable with writing shittily. Shit happens. Shit also washes off. Put differently, it is sometimes necessary to write badly so that you can edit and rewrite and turn bad writing into good story.

• This is a very good way to sprint through and create a zero draft.

• Treating it like a month-long writing exercise instead of The Future Of Your Writing Career lends this a strong mindset that creates bonafide self-instructional value.

• Gamification works wonders for some people in terms of motivating action.

• Being a writer is about writing. Full-stop. Partaking makes you a writer. End of story.

• Time isn’t going to wait for you and you’re going to die someday so, fuck it. Write now. Not later. You might be dead in December. Maybe the world will blow up. But that story inside you? It’s ready now. So, fire up the ol’ wordithopter and fly yourself to the distant land of Bookopolis.

Why You Should Run Far Away

• Actually, maybe that story inside you isn’t ready now. Maybe those brownies aren’t done baking yet and if you try to rush it all you’re gonna get is a goopy pan of chocolate slurry. Which, admittedly, also sounds delicious, so if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I’m going to go slather choco-goop all over my body.

• Back now. I am delicious. Mm. *licks self*

• A month is not a lot of time to write a book and most people take longer than that to write one. Let’s be honest, it’s setting a fairly unrealistic pace to complete a book. I write fast like a squirrel with a Roman candle shoved up its fuzzy nethers, and even I can’t finish most books in 30 days.

• The win/lose condition through gamification can be toxic — to speak frankly, writers often have issues with depression or anxiety, and this really doesn’t help. (I speak from experience on the latter. For some reason, NaNoWriMo amped up my anxiety rather than dampened it. No idea why. I don’t get that way with deadlines, but this made me feel really agitated when I tried it years ago.)

• You have a pace, and maybe this isn’t it. A story takes the time that it takes. Maybe you write it in two weeks. Maybe it takes you two months or two years. There exists no “one schedule fits all.” Acting like that is a good way to feel like a giant fail-flavored crapsicle.

• Further, for some, writing every day is a boon. For others, a bane. Again, trying to conform HOW YOU WRITE to this one pattern can be like trying to headbutt a square peg through a circle hole. All you end up with is a throbbing headache and a feeling of shame and worthlessness.

• Sometimes doing something different from what everyone else is doing is clarifying and valuable. Writers are not particularly good at following orders, I find. In fact, every writer is basically ten ferrets. You can’t control one ferret, much less ten. Ferrets will not be commanded. FERRETS CARE LITTLE FOR YOUR NATIONAL FERRET WRANGLING MONTH (NaFerWraMo).

• Put differently, this month is very much about comparing yourself to other writers, and engaging in uniformity. And comparing yourself to other writers and trying to conform to their habits and their schedules is a very good way to feel very bad.

• November is a dogshit month to accomplish, well, basically anything. At least for me. Forget it, Jake, it’s Holidaytown. The way the holidays are around these parts, the festivity shit-parade kicks up around Halloween and doesn’t stop stomping down the road until January at the earliest. Plus, right at the end there you get Thanksgiving — so, instead of 30 days, you kinda have like, 20-25. And then if you have kids they usually end up with a whole week off, and if you’ve eaten too much turkey and potatoes you probably lose a day on a recliner — bloated and serene.

• Fifty thousand words does not a novel make. I mean, by most expected metrics.

• Sometimes writing crap is good. Sometimes writing crap is sad-making. And this isn’t just writing crap — it’s extruding crap quickly. Speed is the essence. The finish line is king. At the end if what you have is just a handful of wet shit, how will that make you feel?

• NaNoWriMo focuses overmuch on writing, but here’s the dirty truth — writing is a crass, mechanical act. It is a necessary part of the process, but it’s just pure craft — it is fingers going pok pok pok tap tap tap on the keyboard until a giant block of prose is regurgitated. But if fails to focus on story. Story is why we write. Prose is secondary and supportive. Story, character, theme, all that stuff isn’t background. It’s great and it’s glorious and it’s why we come to the page, most times. (Sure, some folks come only for writing, but I think most people come for the narrative and the ideas presented by that narrative.) Story only exists in permanence when we transcribe it, and writing is one crucial method of transcription — but make no mistake, that’s all it is. Transcription. By focusing so much on that, something threatens to be lost.

Reminder: 30 Days In The Word Mines (And The Gonzo Bundle)

Last year I wrote and put out a book called 30 Days In The Word Mines — and the goal of that book is literally to take you through thirty days and, every day, give you a little something to think about. It’s motivational, philosophical, and practical advice all in one, and every day is different. Some folks told me that it fared them well day to day through NaNoWriMo and beyond, so that’s cool. If you wanna check it out, you can find it at Amazon, B&N, or buy it direct from me here.

Alternatively, if you want it as part of a larger bundle of writing-related e-bookery, then the eight book gonzo bundle is $20 — or $15 if you use coupon code NAPLOYONOMO by 10/31.

Max Gladstone is basically the smartest guy in any room. He may in fact not be human at all, but a benevolent alien to make us all better people. Just last week he riffed off of the new Star Wars trailer in a post tackling the myth of the Jedi –“Galactic History, or Galactic Folk Tale?” And this week here he is to talk about game design and, in particular, Deathless: The City’s Thirst.

* * *

“Play your old stuff!”

My friend Chris once called those the most vicious words in rock & roll. An artist stands pinned by spotlight, trying something new, and the audience cries back: no, thanks, do what you did last time!

Cue blood sacrifice of goats in hotel rooms, instruments smashed on stage, various substances injected into various veins, et cetera.

The worst part is, both audience and artist are right. The audience wants something they recognize; they want to connect with the selves they were in middle school when they first heard (insert That Song From Middle School here—you know, the piece that made you sit up and think, “They really get me!” Might be “One Headlight,” or “Sing,” or the Brandenburg Concerto). The audience wants to reclaim that first taste of forever. And there’s nothing wrong with that! The artist scorns the audience’s desire at her peril.

But the artist knows, too: nostalgia only goes so far. And while the audience is hungry to recover that moment the walls fell down, they also want the walls to fall down again—they want to feel the way they felt when they first heard that bass line—when those words crawled across the screen—when they warped into Myst.

The problem is, no one knows how to ask for that, because anything we know to ask for isn’t new, by definition.

So, where does that leave us?

And how does all this relate to skeleton lawyers, undead gods, and giant scorpions?

Good question.

Two years ago, I released Choice of the Deathless, an interactive necromantic legal thriller set in the world of my Craft Sequence books. Players take the role of a junior associate at a demonic law firm—that is to say, it’s a firm specializing in demonic transactions, not a law firm of demons, though there’s overlap—and try to pay off their student loans, make partner, find love, and survive to payday. I had a great time working on the game, it sold well, got nominated for a couple awards, and the publisher came back: we’d love a sequel!

You see my problem.

I couldn’t write the same game again. People who want to replay the last game can always do so—since the game’s text-based, it’s not even as if technology’s progressed in the meantime. The imagination’s as high-res as ever. A proper sequel also wouldn’t work. Players can end the first game dead or alive, working for the firm or not, in love or out, having made drastically different impacts on the game world. Crushing all those options down to a sequel hook seemed one step away from saying the player’s choices in the first game didn’t matter.

So I wanted a game that worked like the first one, but differently. Which meant asking, what was the first game doing, anyway?

This is an uncomfortable question. My first instinct is always to answer with a joke—to disarm, or failing that to run away.

“What is this game doing?” “Look! The Badyear blimp!”

“Why did you write $Most_Recent_Project?” *punches interlocutor in face* *adopts fake Russian accent* “VE ASK ZE QVESTIONS HERE, KOMRAD.”

“Really, I just want to—“ *Dons James Bond jetpack* *Rockets through skylight* “I’m sho sorry, but it sheems I have to jet.”

But since I was the one asking, I had to come up with an answer eventually.

Choice of the Deathless wrapped its setting around a question. The modern fantasy world I built, with skyscrapers and student loans and demons and necromancy, is complicated and morally ambiguous. In that kind of a situation, do you help others, or put yourself first? How much does power matter to you? Is the power you get by collaborating with monsters really power at all?

Writing these questions out, I realized they were internally focused. I kept asking the player: who are you? (Or: who’s your character?) How would you respond?

So, to explore the same setting from a different angle, I could flip the question. The first game was inwardly directed, so the second should revolve around the character’s goals and methods. Rather than “who are you,” I’d ask: “what are you doing?” How will change the world? What problems will you fix? What methods will you use? What’s worth the price you’ll pay?

And with that, I had the core of Deathless: The City’s Thirst — a world of dead gods and the wizards who killed them. The player controls a survivor of the God Wars, working for a necromantic water utility, trying to get enough water for a desert city that’s successfully rebelled against its bloodthirsty rain god. What will you do to save your city? What compromises will you make?

Whose side are you on?

From that seed, and months of crunch time, I grew a game. It’s out this week—we’ll see what people think!

There are other ways to do the same thing differently. You can keep the theme and change the trappings; you can keep theme and trappings but change structure to subvert or bolster either. Flip. Spin. Tell the story from the inside out. Change the angle. Add plot, or subtract it. Ask an old character new questions. (I love how Lois McMaster Bujold does this; every few books she throws Miles Vorkosigan an enormous curveball. Poor guy barely figures out the answer to one question before another smacks him in the face.)

But even so, at the end of the day some folk will just want to hear your old stuff.

You know what? That’s okay. You wouldn’t have played your old stuff if it wasn’t worth playing.

But this game, this story, will connect with some people in a way the last one didn’t. And when you next sit down to write, the new stuff will be old stuff—and people will want to hear that again, too.

On the one hand: great. You’ve grown your thematic range. You’re doing more work, better.

On the other hand… No pressure.