so is this cannon canon or what

For a great many years, I was rather enamored with the idea of canon in the pop culture feast that I consumed. This continued well into my 20s, maybe into my 30s, and even now I still feel its needle-stitch tug inside my heart. (For those who don’t know, the idea of “canon” originates with the notion that in a given topic, study or series, there exists a genuine, bona fide list of books that are considered sacred and original. In pop culture fandom, “canon” takes this idea to mean that some stories or ideas are “true” in the context of the internal history of that particular narrative.)

As by now all of you — except that guy who has been living in a nuclear bunker from the 1950s — have figured out that I wrote a Star Wars novel. *clears throat* I have not exactly been quiet about it. And this novel is the first “canon” novel to appear and start to build the bridge between Episode VI (aka Return of the Jedi) and Episode VII (aka The Force Awakens). It builds immediately off the events in VI, while planting seeds for what will eventually become the garden of new material that sprouts in VII. Again, it is to be considered “canon” — it is real and it is true in the context of the narrative story-world (“the galaxy far, far away”).

Ah, but, post-RotJ books already existed, and they were canon-ish. Zahn’s original trilogy (which I adored as a kid and which were held as sacred texts) launched a major mission into the unknown void beyond the borders of the galaxy we knew. Lucas said, “No new trilogy,” and that opened up the doors to dozens upon dozens of new books told in that space. These books were canon more by default than anything else (they were not to my knowledge explicitly made so, and as I understand it, Lucas always considered the books secondary to the visual media around the storyworld), but the books were close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades, as the saying goes. The Expanded Universe was as the name suggested: the galaxy became bigger, richer, wider, weirder.

Now, though, all that has gone. Those books have been re-classified as Legends.

See, Star Wars has always been more Tolkien than Marvel or DC. What I mean is this: the continuity of Star Wars has mostly remained a single, unbroken chain. Tolkien’s narrative storyworld is unified in the same way — whereas with the two major comic book houses, you get a massively fractured narrative. You get hundreds of chains, some broken, others soldered together, others still just random links floating in the void. The storyworlds of Star Wars and Middle-earth are histories beholden to isolated timelines; the storyworlds of DC and Marvel are shattered mirrors representing a variety of alternate dimensions or single-shot universes. Middle-earth has little variance in its historical thrust — no alternate histories. And, up until recently, that was somewhat true of Star Wars, too. (I say “somewhat” because how exactly do you classify the video games? The comics? The “Droids” cartoon? LUMPY AND ITCHY AND LIFE DAY?

That has now changed. Star Wars now has an entire outgrowth of its narrative universe moved to that “alternate timeline” category — the most robust branch of that tree has been suddenly wrenched sideways to make way for a graft from a new, different cultivar. It was bound to happen, of course. Once Episode VII was announced — hell, once it was even a glimmer in anybody’s eye — the historicity or “canon” qualifications of the Expanded Universe had to have felt a tectonic tremor in the Force. It would take back-breaking narrative calisthenics to maintain the Expanded Universe in a trilogy of new films. The age of the actors alone makes that tricky. And the Thrawn trilogy presents clones that do not operate well against the rigors of the prequel events. And of course once you step onto the path of the Expanded Universe, you have to play host to a wild array of story events that may not be easy to keep — Chewbacca’s death, for instance. Or the existence of zombie stormtroopers and space werewolves — er, sorry, “wyrwolves.”

So, the timeline had to snap in half.

Now, you have the galaxy far, far away.

And you have, separate from it, the Legends continuity. (This post, by the way, isn’t about the people who want to bring Legends/EU back. More power to them, and as I’ve noted, I’m sympathetic to those who feel like the storyworld they were following is no longer going to have new material. I have less sympathy for those who take that mission and make it a belligerent, negative one rather than one that is positive and constructive. Be a fountain, not a drain, folks.)

I get questions now about the canonization of things inside Aftermath — people excited or disappointed that X, Y, Z thing is now canon. (Some folks are upset because I canonized hamsters. As in, I mention something inside the book is “hamster-sized,” which now makes hamsters a real thing inside the Star Wars universe. There exists some pushback against Earth things intruding upon the SW universe, though as you’ll see, Earth references like “Falcon,” or “Hell,” or “hot chocolate” have long been a part of the galaxy.) And it’s curious, because I didn’t really think that way as I was writing the book. I mean, yes, I knew that what I was writing would have resonance and would be the first steps toward the larger bridge connecting the trilogies, but that was the 30,000-foot-view. I didn’t think about the nitty-gritty nuance of canonizing things.

(Sidenote: I also canonized “space diapers.” Hey, whatever, you mean to tell me some kooky smugglers don’t use ’em? NASA has garments that are referred to as “space diapers,” I’ll have you know. See? SEE? Boom. Space diapers. *drops mic into pile of space diapers, squish*)

And so, I’ve been thinking a whole lot recently about canon. What is it? How rigorous must it be? More importantly, why are we so beholden to it? Why do we care so much?

The answers to those last questions are many-faced.

First, I think it’s that we are beholden to viewing large narrative universes the same way we view things like memory, history and religion. We see things as sacred and true — which springs from the original usage of that word “canon.” Some books are canonized. Some are apocryphal. The apocryphal ones do not govern the larger history or the religion. They are somewhat… ancillary. And in our minds, lesser as a result.

Second, as geeky nerdy type folks, we love to become dogmatic about the things we love. It’s in our nature to be protective and knowledgeable — even hyper-knowledgeable — about the things we love. It’s a way to identify with our tribe. (Of course, that dogmatic adherence can also lead to fandom toxicity. Witness the dipshit fuckwhistle tradition of calling out “fake geek girls” or cosplayers, both of whom have a perfect right to engage with their fandoms as deeply, innately or intricately as they so choose.) We like rules. We like rulebooks. We are fans of data and detail.

Third, and connected to the last point, we love the things we love and want to know them through and through. Consider it a kind of rigorous exploration.

Fourth, and also connected to the second point, loving all the rules and the data and the details gives us a deeper reach into the worldbuilding aspect of the universe. It is a touchstone to the experiential — we perhaps more vividly connect with material that is continuous and true.

Fifth, the elegance of simplicity is not to be denied. If Gandalf acts one way here, then to have him act entirely different elsewhere feels abrasive and impossible. Keeping things together in a singular thrust of narrative consequence is, frankly, easier to keep track of in the long run.

And now, here’s why all that is a little bit bullshit.

History, religion and memory are fucked. History is often ret-conned because history is written by humans and humans are notoriously unreliable narrators. Much of our history is witnessed through secondary or tertiary resources — proxies who did not witness the events about which they are writing — and that makes it utterly shitty in terms of its factual dependability. Even primary sources must be viewed through the lens of perspective. As the saying goes, history is written by the weiners — sorry, winners. We are routinely given sanitized or spun versions of history, and that starts when we’re children. In the US, we’re shown these lovely images of pilgrims sitting down to Thanksgiving with the First People of America, but nobody tells you then about smallpox blankets or the Trail of Tears or how the Pilgrims were concerned about their religious freedom but not so much your religious freedom. Most people still don’t hear about how truly advanced the civilization was of the First People, or who Columbus was an asshole or —

Well, that list goes on and on.

And religion? C’mon. The Bible alone is not really one book but actually several books — you can watch the bone-breaking contortions or hamfisted cherry-pickings necessary to glean hard-and-fast moral life lessons from the Bible. Reading the Bible as a strict interpretation of fact is a pretty good way to miss what’s awesome about the Bible. By devoting yourself to those persnickety details, you lose what it means to be a good person and instead gain what it means to slavishly restrict your moral code to that of people who lived a long, long time ago and in a worldview far, far away. Once again, as children they’re taught the nice stories (“Noah got all the animals to save them from a flood!”) and later learn the whole story (“GOD DROWNED THE WORLD oh except for this Noah guy who has a thing for animals”).

Oh, and don’t get me started on the shame of losing a lot of the apocryphal books. You miss those, you miss Jesus’ teenage years. You also miss him being like, Harry Potter and shit. The Gospel of Mary Magdalene is a fascinating gnostic text concerned about the spiritual soul and actually talks a bit about some lofty things (“. . . Will matter then be destroyed or not? / The Savior said, All nature, all formations, all creatures exist in and with one another, and they will be resolved again into their own roots. / For the nature of matter is resolved into the roots of its own nature alone”).

Okay, how about memory? Also totally untrustworthy. We are all unreliable narrators.

Even science, which is by its definition devoted to the slavishness of data and detail, is wildly flexible — it has to be for it to work as designed. If science cannot evolve, our understanding of the world will fail to evolve, too.

In our narrative storyworlds — in our big spaceship galaxies and our fantasy kingdoms and our superhero cities and our SEX UNIVERSES WHERE I AM THE SEX KING — if we become too rigorous in our slavish devotion to canon, we lose the chance to tell stories. The more strict and detailed the canon becomes, the more reverence we devote to it. And the more it restricts the future of that narrative. The more it chokes off what can be told. Doors close. Windows slam shut and are boarded over. Options are lost. The more we care about what’s “true” — in a universe that has never been true and whose power lies in its fiction — we start denigrating those things that aren’t. We view alternate timelines as somehow inconsequential. We dismiss fan-fiction as just some wish fulfillment machine instead of what it often is: a way to tell cool new stories in a pre-existing pop culture framework that aren’t beholden to the canonical straitjacket.

The truth is, canon has never even been all that canonical. Even the canon of Tolkien is muddy. Which is true? The work of JRR? What about the added work of his son? What about the video games? The films? LEGO Dimensions posits a little LEGO Gandalf running around with Batman and Marty McFly. Which, by the way, is flarging awesome.

I think as trivia, it’s fine. Canon is cool when you view it as a puzzle to be put together. But when it becomes the point of our investment, when we become religious about its value — we lose something. We forget why stories are great in the first place. We fail to enjoy a story for being a story and instead try to view it as a series of binary data points. YES it exists. NO it doesn’t.

Does it really matter?

That’s not to say those interested in canon are wrong to like it — we like what we like for whatever reasons that please us the most. If you read or watch a thing and your interest is in piecing together the mystery of facts-within-the-fiction, then hey, you do you. But at the same time, if your love of canon gets you into fights online or limits what stories you’ll pick up in the future, it’s worth asking if you hold it in too high an esteem.

Maybe the best way forward is to view canon as a curiosity and not a set of slate tablets etched by God-lightning and brought down from the Holy Mountain. Maybe it’s time to enjoy the peculiarities intrinsic to a world where canon is flexible and uncertain, and where narrative apocrypha is allowed the precious room to stretch and breathe. Perhaps the joy in the broken mirrors of DC and Marvel is that I can have my Batman, you can have yours, and nobody has to arm-wrestle over which one is right, which one is true, which one belongs, which one does not.

* * *

ZER0ES.

An Anonymous-style rabble rouser, an Arab spring hactivist, a black-hat hacker, an old-school cipherpunk, and an online troll are each offered a choice: go to prison or help protect the United States, putting their brains and skills to work for the government for one year.

But being a white-hat doesn’t always mean you work for the good guys. The would-be cyberspies discover that behind the scenes lurks a sinister NSA program, an artificial intelligence code-named Typhon, that has origins and an evolution both dangerous and disturbing. And if it’s not brought down, will soon be uncontrollable.

Out now from Harper Voyager.

Doylestown Bookshop| WORD| Joseph-Beth Booksellers| Murder by the Book

Powells | Indiebound | Amazon| B&N| iBooks| Google Play| Books-a-Million

The elevator pitch.

The logline.

The query letter.

The back-of-the-book marketing copy.

One of the skills of the author, regardless of publishing format, is pitching your book in a way that is both concise and exciting to people who might be editors, agents, booksellers or readers.

So, it’s time to practice those skills here and now, in Ye Olde Comments Section.

You’ve got a WIP (work-in-progress), yeah? Then I want you to go to the comments section and give us the shortest possible pitch you can give for the book while still maintaining maximum engagement. You want to hook us with this pitch — not necessarily reel us in. Meaning, the pitch isn’t used to describe the entire novel. Just the most exciting part — the promise of the premise. A glimpse into the protagonist, the conflict, the stakes. Why do we care? Why would that pitch make us salivate? What is it really about and why will that grab us?

It’s a tricky skill.

As I say with a query letter, it’s like taking a 500 lb. pig and putting it into a 5 lb. bucket. Except with a logline, it’s more like shoving a 500 lb. pig in a fanny pack. Epic rendering necessary.

Keep your pitch between one and three sentences.

That’s the only restriction right now.

The other thing, though, is that once you post it?

Expect people to comment upon it. The goal here is to refine your pitches, not put them up for museum display. And if you post a pitch, please make a comment on someone else’s pitch, too.

Now, step up to the pitcher’s mound and let fly.

Last week, I said, “Come up with a title.”

And you did. Over 400 of them.

Now, your job is to go into the comments section of that post and find a title you like. Then, write a story (under 2,000 words, we’ll say) to fit that title. Please do not choose a title you came up with. The challenge is to pick up something new!

You have one week — due by Friday, October 2nd.

Post the story on your online space and link to it in the comments below.

Please give credit to the person who came up with your title. Credit is good.

Go. Pick. Write. Enjoy!

This Saturday, I will be tunneling into Murder By The Book in Houston, TX along with fellow deviants Richard Kadrey and Beth Cato! I’ll be there talking about and signing ZER0ES — event starts at 4:30 and you find find the other event details here at the bookseller’s website.

I’m also at NYCC in a couple weeks, and my schedule is there on the website — though that may be evolving? I don’t really know, yet, but I’ll post a final schedule here in a week or so.

Oh, also, I’m told AFTERMATH will once again be on the NYT Bestseller list, so, please excuse me while my molecules vibrate so aggressively I phase through the floor.

What else?

Zer0es Reviews

– Lightspeed talks about Zer0es a little:

“Five hackers—of different backgrounds, ages, and vastly different temperaments and motivations—are hunted down by the US government and forcibly persuaded to work on a secret project for the NSA, testing the electronic defenses of myriad corporations and nations to undisclosed purpose. But over the course of their strange work—already fraught because of the personalities at play, white and black hats clashing, trolls trolling—one question above all preoccupies them: What is Typhon? The need to find out goes from casual curiosity to imperative urgency as the stakes rise and the pace goes into overdrive in this tightly plotted, character-driven thriller.

I am out of practice with this kind of book. My heart could hardly take it. Halfway through, I was so tense and the threat level was already so high that I couldn’t fathom how there could still be two hundred pages to go. It also broke my narrative expectation: Three full acts take place within that first half, and it’s amazing to realize that there can be more, and fascinating to take stock of how conditioned I am by films in this respect. Here’s how you assemble the team; here’s how they learn to work together; here’s how they obtain their objective. But there’s a lot more going on here.”

– Crimespree’s review (where they grok that the book is kinda THE HACKER A-TEAM):

“It’s been my experience that when you start to read a book written by Chuck Wendig, you’re going to get a fast-paced, in your face story. ZER0ES is no exception to this. Here he quickly lays out why the hackers are being sought out by the government. Then he lets everything about Typhon slowly unravel and you can’t help but continue turning the pages to learn more about the AI code and what is really going on with it. The suspense about Typhon makes the book an excellent government conspiracy theory thriller.”

– A nice review of Zer0es at The Reader In The Tower —

“If you’re baffled and sometimes bored with long descriptive paragraphs or pages of explanatory backstory, never fear. Wendig is the writer for you. You’ll find yourself whipped along by the pace of his writing, without feeling like he’s skipping anything important… As someone who struggles with pacing in action sequences, I am deeply and profoundly jealous.”

– And one from SQ Mag…

“Zer0es is a worth addition to the ‘To Read’ pile of any fan of cyberpunk, any conspiracy nut, or anyone who wants to be immersed in a great action/suspense/horror plot without all that tedious business of messing around with the TV. Be warned though: the language and violence might be a bit much for some, although any fan of Wendig’s work will not be surprised by any of it. You may even find yourself contemplating going off the grid once you’re done reading.”

– Bev Vincent has some thoughts on Zer0es:

“It’s a thrilling seat-of-the-pants ride that alternates between some sophisticated hacking and brutal hand-to-hand combat. The enemy has tentacles that quite literally reach into a dizzying array of people, and the Zeroes are forced to seek assistance from other covert organizations to pull off their mission. Fans of the recent TV series Mr. Robot will find similar themes at play.”

– You can grab Zer0es where books are sold: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N — you can also add it on Goodreads, and if you liked the book, I’d sure appreciate a review.

Aftermathy Stuff

– Me and Alexandra Bracken show up for Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy and talk about Star Wars and fandom (both the awesome side and the, erm, less awesome side). Check it out.

– Donna from HitFix interviewed me at DragonCon and the result is: Imperial Sexuality, Murder Droids and Fan Rage. So, go and make with the clicky clicky.

– Moviepilot offers a lovely review:

“Although, towering above all else in this is Wendig’s incredible written voice carrying the entire novel. This was my first experience of the author in his natural habitat (not including his writing books and the Terrible Minds blog) and I can safely say that he has not let me down. Managing to balance a decent plot, fantastic characters and have space to piss off the galaxy’s loudest bigots while staying true to the essence of Star Wars is quite an achievement and I wholeheartedly recommend Aftermath to any Star Wars or just pure Sci Fi fan.”

The Shield

You know what comes out next month? Dark Circle’s THE SHIELD, written by Adam Christopher and myself, and drawn by Drew Johnson. We’ve done some interviews recently which you can find at HitFix, Comics Beat and Comicsosity, with more to come. And at the HitFix link you’ll find a number of inked and colored pages, such as this beauty right here:

I know Lucas from my time in the Transmedia Trenches — he’s a smart dude with big ideas and plans to get them done. So, when he wants to sit and talk about story and the form of story, hey, I’m listening. And, I hope, you’ll listen, too.

* * *

(or, How To Spend Five Years On One Crazy Project Because You Care, Damnit)

A few years ago, I wrote a story called Azrael’s Stop. It’s a fantasy story about a teenager named Ceph who’s had to deal with a lot of death in his life—his whole family, a childhood friend, his best friend from school… And it’s kind of fucked him up. He thinks that everyone he loves is going to die, and so he won’t let himself get close to anyone.

Then a mysterious man brings him to a bar called Azrael’s Stop—said to be the watering hole of the Angel of Death Himself—and sets him up as the bartender. People start coming to the bar, people who are either ready to pass on from this world and just need someone to share their story with, or people who, like Ceph, have experienced death and need help dealing with it.

Why did the mysterious man bring him here? How is Ceph supposed to continue to live his life? How can he let himself have friends, or fall in love? Why is there a crow living in the bar, why does she keep shitting on the floor, and why does she only caw when someone dies in Azrael’s Stop?

The story takes place a day at a time over the course of a year, and is about depression and alcoholism and friendship and love and music and of course death—but more than that, it’s about how we live, and how the stories we share help us live better.

***

Azrael’s Stop was first conceived at the start of 2011 — a date which still reads to me like yesterday but was, in fact, a while ago.

I was just out of school and starting to figure out what I wanted my career to look like—starting out as mostly a freelance writer working towards his own original projects, novels, and more. I was not yet even considering that my company Silverstring Media would end up primarily making videogames.

I had dreams of working on big projects, games and transmedia franchises of my own creation, but I decided I needed to start something new first, something small, something that could help find me an audience. I liked the idea of serial fiction, which I could roll out over time and slowly build an audience as the project itself grew—but I also didn’t want something that would take up all of my time.

I wanted something small. And easy. That wouldn’t take much time at all.

And this is the point where present-me would slap past-me. Because what I ended up with is much more than my original concept imagined—and took a lot more time.

So rather than try to write full stories every week or even every month, which I figured I wouldn’t be able to have time for or keep up with, I landed on the idea of “Twitter fiction.” I would post one single tweet every day, and over time it would all come together to form the full story.

However, I didn’t want to simply have each tweet be a sentence, with all the tweets needing to be strung together to form the story; Twitter is too ephemeral for that to work, and the story would be too disjointed for potential readers. Rather, each tweet would in itself be a micro-story, a complete thought or scene contained in 140 characters, each one taking place a day later, chronologically, from the previous one.

Thus, each day would be a snapshot into the lives of the characters and the setting they inhabit—it would be about a small core of characters and a single setting, so that over time the audience would get to know those characters and that tavern, without needing a lot of extraneous explanation, and without needing the audience to necessarily see every single tweet.

The story would be very thematic, about establishing a particular tone and themes, characters that grow only slowly over time. I developed the concept of the bar where death visits, the mythology that would grow around it, and the characters that would inhabit it.

Then, I started writing content, one tweet at a time. It was a challenge to keep everything in 140 characters, sometimes, but it was good practice to keep writing succinct (and finding ways to squeeze more in, like leaving out occasional spaces…). Once I had a small buffer of content, I launched by project—exclusively on Twitter, at @azraelsstop—with my first tweet:

They said people came to the Stop to die.
They said Death himself was a patron.
But Ceph didn’t trade in rumour. He just served drinks.

By the end of the first month of content—content I was certainly proud of, but by no means had achieved much of an audience yet—I was ready to introduce the second part of my story concept: I wanted each month of tweets to be augmented by some other kind of content. Wanting this to be an experiment in “transmedia”—which I was particularly into at the time—I didn’t want to limit what kind of content that could be. I envisioned short stories, music, games, photo essays, comics, audio plays, and whatever else I could think of.

That first month, I posted a fairy tale—Biggles and the Departed—which as purely text-based fiction was something I could produce myself. I hoped to attract others to work with me on future installments, as I didn’t have audio or art skills or anything.

Music I knew I could do, since my best friend and now multi-project-co-creator Devin Vibert is a composer, so the end of the second month featured the song Elegy of the Twilight Prince, as performed by one of the characters of the story. Over the course of the project, I did manage a fairly wide variety of content: an interactive fiction game, a kind of photo essay, an audio play (with what little talent I could find at the time)…

But it was only a couple months before two problems caught up with me: Azrael’s Stop was, despite my original intent, still requiring too much of my time; and I wasn’t seeing the kind of results from it that I had hoped for. And so I decided to put the project on hiatus and reevaluate my strategy.

I ended up doing this twice over the course of the project. That first hiatus, I realized that being only on Twitter was restricting my potential audience; while I liked the easily-shareable potential and content size limit, and knew that even people without a Twitter account could follow along, for my friends without Twitter it still seemed overwhelming or unintuitive to follow. So I brought Azrael’s Stop to Facebook as well—and took the time to make sure I had more content to post before relaunching.

By the time I took the second hiatus, I transformed the project into what it is now. I needed a central hub for the project online, rather than just the multiple disconnected social media accounts, so I created azraelsstop.com. I scrapped the idea of having so many different media between months—those pieces of content were becoming more vital to the story, but having them all be different was both alienating to the audience and impossible to keep up with as a creator (especially without a larger team). I added a prologue to help bring readers into the world, and finished writing all the content so I wouldn’t run out again before the end, then compiled it all into an ebook—hoping I could interest readers in purchasing the full book immediately rather than waiting for it to roll out one day at a time. And Devin composed music not just for the three songs the character sings over the course of the story, but for every major chapter, comprising the one transmedia extension that ended up in the final product, and the one I thought was most important and useful.

All in all, Azrael’s Stop didn’t come to its final conclusion until December 2013—a full year later than intended. It found its biggest audience on Wattpad, where being featured led to it receiving about 3,200 reads all the way through (with 325,000 of just the prologue), but otherwise had remained modest in audience. Azrael’s Stop was an experiment in storytelling, and while much of it never worked out the way I originally envisioned, or got as big as I had hoped, I am very proud of the book and album that resulted from it.

***

In the tavern, stories are shared as a form of rebirth. The stories of both the main characters and the often-nameless patrons that visit allow the characters to learn and grow, to move on from the pain of death or move on from the pain of life.

While creating the project, I always envisioned a way for my audience to join the patrons of the Stop, to provide their own stories. Early on, I had some friends and family share their own Tweet-sized stories with me.

When a dream of her long-dead father was gifted, it was bittersweet: wonderful to hear his voice, but then she missed him all over again.
~ Freda Johnson (hi mom!)

But ultimately I wanted something bigger, and so I developed the idea that became Tales of the Stop, an anthology of short stories that took place in Azrael’s Stop alongside my main story. I reached out to my audience on social media, to friends, and even to sites that list public writing opportunities.

It was an interesting proposition, because I wasn’t simply asking for stories around a particular theme, but stories that existed in my world, with the characters I had created. I was inviting people into my original space, to take my creation further, but in doing so was asking a lot.

But I was thrilled with the response. I received a good number of submissions, some from friends (such as previous-Terrible-Minds-guest-poster Andrea Phillips) and some from strangers who had simply liked Azrael’s Stop. Not every submission was fantastic, but I ended up with ten new stories (including a one-act play and a piece of Interactive Fiction) that I loved.

It was a lot of work to corral those stories together, to edit them, to work out the legal details and compile everything into an ebook. It took a lot longer than I had anticipated, especially with life and other projects getting in the way. But I am extremely proud of each story that ended up making it into this anthology, from friend and stranger alike: from the examination of motherhood in Changed and Changing to the examination of suicide in Pieces; from accepting the past in Facing Secrets to accepting the future in The Hammer and the Nail; from exploring the stranger places in the world I made in Long Journey’s End to exploring other worlds entirely in Death and His Deer; from the powerful friendship exhibited in The Ones We Leave Behind to the liminal journey in The Ghost of a Memory to the exploration of our place in our stories in This, At Least, Is My Story.

And of course a new short story of my own, where I could finally look at what happens long after Ceph leaves the Stop.

***

And so this month Silverstring Media released a brand new Second Edition of Azrael’s Stop, and today we release Tales of the Stop, a journey back to Azrael’s Stop, back to the time that Ceph spent there as barkeep, back to the stories we tell to each other about life and how to live.

It’s been a long journey and a tumultuous one, but I’m glad to have made it—and glad to be able to tell my own story of creating this project, that I can learn and grow and perhaps you can learn something too. Despite the troubles I had, from the faulty initial designs to the effort to reach out to new authors to the legal arrangements required and everything that goes into indie publishing, I never gave up on this little project. And however it may fare, I am extremely proud of it.

***

Lucas J.W. Johnson is a writer, game designer, producer, and entrepreneur. He founded the new media company Silverstring Media in 2011, where he’s written for award-winning games like Extrasolar and Crypt of the Necrodancer, and produced original projects like Glitchhikers, which was a finalist for Best Indie Game of 2014 at the Canadian Videogame Awards. He’s had several short stories published in anthologies and magazines, including “Subtle Poison” in Speaking Out!, and Remaker, Remaker and A Clockwork Heart, both for Fireside Magazine. He first created Azrael’s Stop in 2011, and much of his work can be found at silverstringmedia.com. He lives with his boyfriend in Vancouver, BC.

Azrael’s Stop and Tales of the Stop, along with the Azrael’s Stop Official Soundtrack, are all available now for digital download.

Azrael’s Stop: Amazon | B&N | iBooks | Kobo

Tales of the Stop: Amazon | B&N | iBooks | Kobo

Azrael’s Stop Official Soundtrack: iTunes | CDBaby | Amazon

Or get all three in all available formats and for a bundled discount price at the Silverstring Media store or itch.io.

Two pieces of reading homework before we begin:

First up, the ever-smart Kameron Hurley — the Cold Equations that govern publishing.

Second, the big news surrounding the Author’s Guild survey that suggests more and more authors are getting paid less and less, and something-something poverty line.

Kameron’s link — I got nothing to add except, high-five to her for talking about this stuff.

The Author’s Guild survey — nnnyeah, I’m not really willing to count that as meaningful information. The data in that survey, according to Publisher’s Weekly, skews this way:

The survey, conducted this spring by the Codex Group, is based on responses from 1,674 Guild members, 1,406 of whom identified either as a full-time author, or a part-time one. The majority of respondents also lean older—89% are over the age of 50—and toward the traditionally published end (64%).

Note that I am not a guild member. I’m not sure I know many (any?) guild members.

It’s a very narrow slice of the author cake, and made even narrower when you consider how many of them are strictly traditionally-published, and how many are over 50 years of age. (I’m not suggesting any age-ist critique, but rather, I’m noting that the more you dwindle survey participants, the shallower the pool becomes of meaning.)

That said, regardless of the depth (or lack of depth) the author’s guild survey possesses, I think once in a while it’s a good idea to wad up all the financial realities that surround a writer’s existence, cram them into a cannon, and then fire them top speed into your solar plexus.

I am a full-time writer.

I do pretty okay for myself. I support my family with my words, which is pretty cool — and, no doubt, pretty rare. I am aware and have been privy to the many peaks and valleys of a writer’s career, and the key to surviving as a writer is learning how to survive the valleys — either figuring out how to glide from peak to peak, or having a plan to weather the lean times when things go down. Surviving the peaks is easy — everyone enjoys good news. But some authors can’t navigate the stark elevation drop and, understandably, move on to more stable ground.

Let’s talk about the financial realities that you’ll deal with — both peaks and valleys.

On advances, sure, there still exists those advances that are $100,000, or are up over a million. But if you’re a new author, you’ll probably find yourself in the $5k – $15k range. And if you’re a practiced, published author, you might drift higher, which is from $15k-35k.

You’ll note that none of those numbers individually make for good full-time money.

You can do okay on $35k, but depending on where you live, it might strain the budget.

(And here, a digression: where you live actually matters to the writer. It doesn’t matter in terms of BEING CLOSE TO THE ACTION — your proximity to NY Publishing is not as important to an author as proximity to LA MovieLand is to a screenwriter. No, it matters because some parts of the money cost less than others. If you are one of those writers who wants very badly to live in New York City or its surrounding environs, be prepared to discover that your book advance will pay for 14 minutes of rent, and you’ll be able to maybe afford an apartment that is roughly the size of a dented Porta-potty. In fact, spoiler warning: it is a dented Porta-potty. This is also true if you want to live in most of the big cities. Everything in the cities is more expensive. I live in Pennsyltucky, where things are more expensive than, say, Down South or the Middle Of American Cornsville, but remain a helluva lot less expensive than NYC. So, if you want your advance money to stretch like Spandex — don’t live in the city. Also don’t forget to budget for health care.)

Now, one of the ways that this is softened somewhat is that an author often ends up signed for a multi-book deal — usually two or three, or if you’re the mighty John Scalzi, a 43-book deal to the tune of a basket of golden dodo eggs. (That monster doesn’t even hoard his eggs like a proper person would. He just eats them. Greedily eats the baby golden dodos right out of their little luxe eggs. The crunch of tiny porcelain bones echoing across his moon veranda.) So, a $5k book deal becomes $10k or $15k. A $33k book deal, when tripled, becomes a low six-figure deal. And when that happens, that’s you cresting a peak — but it’s also good to keep your eyes peeled ahead for when that money dries up and leaves you again in a valley. (Valleys are when you try to write the books you owe and also try to stir up new book deals.)

Ostensibly, this is a good thing.

Except —

Consider the nature of the multi-book deal. Often they want to turn this into a series deal — three books might mean a trilogy, or two books might mean the start of a series (or more problematically, two-thirds of a trilogy, which means if those two books don’t sell, the trilogy will never complete). This is a tough row to hoe because traditional wisdom says that book sales for an SFF series don’t tend to go up — so, if you sell 1500 copies of that first book, it’s not expected that book two will sell more than that and is likely to, in fact, sell fewer copies. I distrust the logic behind this, as some readers want to buy into a series after it has a few books out — or they want a trilogy only when it’s completed because they’ve been burned too many times by trilogies that failed to complete — and ironically, it’s this exact logic that sometimes causes trilogies to die in the crib. B&N will see that the first book didn’t sell that well, and they will cut order for the second book — which helps ensure that second book will sell more poorly, at least in physical format. (B&N has a surprising amount of sway when it comes to traditional publishing. They can demand new covers, new titles, and so on. As the last big player in books, they have juice and they use it. Of course, they also lose more and more of their retail floor space to Things That Are Not Books.)

(Also worth a good news note here: indie bookstores are on the rise, sales-wise. But back to the bad news, B&N has suffered a loss again for the fifth straight quarter.)

Of course, that’s all physical stock. E-books are a different world, and Amazon rules that world.

Mostly. Sorta.

We now have news that says e-book sales are plateauing or even slipping in the face of print sales — the logic being, people are going back to print sales and that print is more future-proof against the digital insurgency. (Anecdotally, I have gone back to mostly print reading except when I’m traveling. Electronic devices are sources of distraction, and even when they’re walled off from those distractions, they still tickle that twitchy internet-social-media-gamer gland in me and I find it harder to lose myself in the book). Of course, what you also need to note is that publishers set the e-book prices, and have in the last several months bumped those prices up, up, up — and Amazon undercuts those prices by dropping the physical copy cost.

So, what about e-books? All of this has been very firmly traditional-flavored — what about the author-publishers putting their own work out there? I’ve discussed this in the past, but obviously with self-publishing you lose access to any kind of advance and you cut off access to certain outlets and resources, but you also gain immediate access to data plus them sweet, sweet percentage cuts of each sale. (Though the larger cut of sales should feed back a little into the ecosystem as you pay for things like covers and editors and majordomos and jet-skis.)

Self-publishing has serious value for any author, but Amazon now dominates that ecosystem. Amazon sets the rules and can change them with the fickle whimsy of a maniac artificial intelligence. NOW YOUR PERCENTAGES ARE CUT IN HALF AND ALSO FOR EVERY BOOK SOLD YOU WILL RECEIVE AN ELECTRICAL SHOCK, Amazon yells through your computer speaker. And you say, quite correctly, But I can leave you any time, Amazon. And Amazon tells you to go ahead, sure, you go right ahead and leave. And then you leave and you discover that because so many people invested their time and effort into the Amazon ecosystem that really, the other sales environments are nowhere near as robust and so while you technically have other options, that’s like saying to a food vendor, “You don’t have to sell in the grocery store, you could just set up a farmstand on the side of the road.” A viable option for some, and some will truly rock the freedom of that. Others will find the lack of access to a wider audience a struggle. Plus, Amazon institutes new programs with the distractibility of a toddler on bath salts. KINDLE UNLIMITED. KINDLE SCOUT. KINDLE WORLDS. KINDLEFACE. KINDLE UNIVERSE. KINDLE DEEP DREAM. KINDLEPALOOZA. SOYLENT KINDLE. Those present new opportunities — opportunities to make more money and sell more books sometimes. And sometimes, opportunities to have the algorithms shift like tectonic plates, losing you sales and cutting your income.

The majority of your sales will come from Amazon and, if you promote it, from direct sales. B&N, Kobo, Smashwords — those sales will be, by most experiences (though not all!) marginal.

Let’s talk a little about sales numbers.

A book that sells a few thousand copies is probably a book that’s doing well.

A book that sells a few thousand copies in its first week is really spiffy.

Some books sell a few hundred copies. Which is, erm, not ideal.

If you want on a bestseller list, expect that you’ll need to sell (roughly) 5,000 copies. Each bestseller list is curated differently and fails to factor sales from certain sources (libraries, f’rex).

For the record, that means that in a country with a population of 320 million, a bestselling novel might reach less than 0.002% of the total population. Books are a niche market.

Selling a few thousand copies also might mean earning out your advance — note that the higher the advance, the harder it is to earn it out. There is no guaranteed metric on earning out. Depends on format, book cost, where they sold, who the publisher is, if a butterfly flapped its wings in Tokyo, and if you put out the proper sacrifices to all the local and national gods. Note too that booksellers can also return unsold books which can ding your sales numbers and, for all I know, impact your spiritual karmic debt and force you to be reborn in your next life as an unpaid Huffington Post blogger. *sad trombone*

Some publishers share sales data quickly. Some won’t share it until your statements are due, and publisher statements arrive with all the speed of a three-legged, antediluvian mule. You have access to BookScan through Amazon, but BookScan is notoriously unreliable (expect it to reveal about 50-80% of actual print sales, and no digital sales — also it puzzles me to this day that Amazon refuses to offer authors the added value of telling them their daily sales numbers of traditionally-published releases, though that might undercut the value of their passive-aggressive impossible-to-discern “sales ranking” numbers, which have about as much meaning as the backwards-talking dwarf from Twin Peaks). A lot of time you operate under the auspices of grave, anxious uncertainty when it comes to the question of exactly how well your book is doing.

And how well your book does goes into the equation a publisher runs when considering whether or not to publish your next book. Again, go back to read Kameron’s post, where she lays this equation out as Books Sold + Marketability + Love. This equation also factors into bookstores choosing to carry — and hand-sell — your book. They’ll carry books that sell well. They’ll push books that will look good on shelves or that the publisher has promoted to sales tables or endcaps. They’ll carry and promote books by authors the booksellers or sales team likes. Amazon is of course outside of this — as they are outside many of the traditional systems (and mostly, thankfully so). Amazon gives little shit about you as an author or your book. They’ll sell it. It’s an always open access channel because they have theoretically infinite shelf space. Sure, this changes when it comes time to promote inside Amazon — getting onto deal pages or into certain sales — then who you are and what your book is might matter. Those are curated by people, not by whatever roving Spider Robots govern the rest of the site.

All of this is to say, it’s all quite tricky.

Peaks and valleys. And the “realities” I’m talking about are variable and unknown — so variable and so unknown that it’s hard to even peg them as confirmed realities. Writers don’t actually have a lot of data. We’re not sure what works, what doesn’t. We’re not given hard facts on why a book does well or why it doesn’t. You hear urban fantasy doesn’t sell, and yet Jim Butcher, Seanan McGuire, Kevin Hearne are all rocking. You hear horror is anathema, but some of the best books and writers out there right now are ostensibly writing horror novels (Paul Tremblay, Stephen King, Joe Hill, Mira Grant). As I am wont to say, publishing is positively oracular. It’s a lot of splayed-open pigeons and futures discerned through loops and piles of bird guts.

To go from peak to peak, you do what you can do.

What you can do is write the best book you can write.

That is, of course, nowhere near enough to save you or survive — bad books can do well, and good books die on the vine all the fucking time. Luck is a factor. You can lean into luck, but you can’t manufacture it. (Put differently: it’s easier to summon lightning than to create it.)

So, you not only write the best book you can write, but — you write as much as you care to write. How do I do this thing that I do? How do I personally survive the financial aspect of the writing life? I do it by writing a whole goddamn lot. That softens the valleys and lengthens the peaks because I keep a steadily rolling series of advances, royalties, and D&A payouts. Plus, I ameliorate all that with self-publishing money — that money comprises maybe 25% of my total annual income, but it comes faster and with monthly regularity. Ah, but here’s the rub —

Some traditional publishers have non-competes, which makes it harder to publish across multiple publishers and, if they’re being really rough on you, harder to publish self-pub work, too.

This can shiv a writer right in the kidneys if you’re not careful. Not that it’s not that understandable that publishers would want this — non-complete clauses that directly highlight specific competitive products (meaning, YOU CAN’T PUBLISH NOVELS IN THIS DIRECTLY COMPETING GENRE versus YOU CAN’T PUBLISH ANYTHING EVER EVER EVER AND DON’T EVEN TRY OR WE WILL MURDER YOUR FACE) are totally understandable. And even the broader competition can be problematic in terms of booksellers. Unlike Amazon, they don’t have infinite shelf-space and if two of your books are coming out close to one another, that means the bookseller may make the choice to carry one over the other — which further means that one publisher will lose out over another. Plus, if you’re hoping to hit awards or best-of-lists or gain media for the book season upcoming, having multiple books so close together again forces a choice. Do they talk about Book X or Book Z? Who wins? Who loses?

And yet, it’s very difficult for an author to survive publishing one book a year.

So, again, what do you do?

A savvy, sassy, diverse mix will keep your bills paid. Make a budget. Have a calendar.

Write some for a traditional publisher.

Write and publish some yourself, and time the releases accordingly.

Don’t sign contracts with clauses that box you up and choke you out. Help publishers who help you. Avoid publishers who treat you like anything less than a partner.

Get an agent — a good agent who works for you, not one who treats you like you work for them. Then, when you have this good agent, trust that agent. (But listen to your gut, too.)

Write across a variety of formats  — a novella here, a short story there. Write across media if you can manage it — freelance an article here, write a comic there, something, anything. Try a small press. Serialized content. Non-fiction. Keep loose. Get ready to jump to something new. Write only in one genre at your peril. Write only one type of thing to your detriment. Go all-in with any ecosystem and if that ecosystem dies, then what? Multi-class like a motherfucker. NINJA NECRO-WIZARD ACCOUNTANT. SORCEROUS DARK SIDE PALADIN. INQUISITOR FREMEN MONKEY TRAINER. Be a writer like those cool-ass assassins in movies where they unfurl their weapons case and it’s got like, knives and guns and grenades and lightsabers and shit. What you write is like your fighting style. Know many styles for maximum punch-fu. Be versatile. Be awesome. Be as productive as you are able and as career-focused as you can muster.

Don’t be some drunk driver just wildly veering through your career. Aim for stuff. Have goals and accelerate toward them aggressively. Stay sharp. Stay frosty. Be ready for the next thing, but not at the cost of the thing you’re currently doing.

Have a plan for the next year, for two years, for five years, and for ten years.

Course correct when you must.

But stay on target until you’re forced to do differently.

And fuck anybody who tells you that you can’t do this.

You got this. But you gotta have a hard head and a callused heart to survive.

Note that none of this information is going to be perfect — and no advice found here is perfectly applicable across the board. But it’s a good start.

A writing career is tough, financially, but far from impossible.

What else? What am I missing? Got questions?

Either me or other AUTHORIAL or PUBLISHING PROFESSIONALS might have answers.

[EDIT: Fellow penmonkey Django Wexler brought up a good point about subsidiary rights — one of the other ways to shorten the valleys and sharpen the peaks is through subsidiary rights. That means foreign rights, plus variable editions of the books [library, book club editions], audio, film/TV, games, etc. — you can’t really control those, strictly speaking, but what you can do is have you and your agent maximize your rights in that space. Keep as many of those rights for yourself and sell off the rights. The foreign rights for the Miriam Black series have paid considerably more than the domestic rights across two publishers. Add in the film/TV payment, and that number only jumps higher. Some publishers will keep certain rights, and when they sell the book’s rights, the advance is paid against your advance. Leading to theoretically quicker royalties. This isn’t ideal, though — the best and sharpest way to utilize those rights financially is to keep them for yourself and to sell them through your agent or through a sub-agent.]

* * *

ZER0ES.

An Anonymous-style rabble rouser, an Arab spring hactivist, a black-hat hacker, an old-school cipherpunk, and an online troll are each offered a choice: go to prison or help protect the United States, putting their brains and skills to work for the government for one year.

But being a white-hat doesn’t always mean you work for the good guys. The would-be cyberspies discover that behind the scenes lurks a sinister NSA program, an artificial intelligence code-named Typhon, that has origins and an evolution both dangerous and disturbing. And if it’s not brought down, will soon be uncontrollable.

Out now from Harper Voyager.

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