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.

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

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

It’s that time again where I ask you:

Hey, whatcha reading?

Like, right now. What are you reading?

Are you digging it?

Not digging it?

Why?

It’s booktalk, time, folks. Hell, if you feel like it, tell us too what books you’re excited about coming up. Share the sweet, sweet book-love.

This one is so damn easy.

And yet, so damn hard.

See, coming up with the new and proper titles for stories is a difficult act, sometimes — you either have the title going in (which makes it easy), or you need to think of a title for a story, and that’s when (for me, at least) it gets hella hard. Thinking of a title for a pre-existing story is the one time when I really get vaporlock in my writing. I just sit there, stammering. “THE… THING ABOUT THE STUFF. THE… THE NIGHT THE EVENT HAPPENED. THE HAPPENING. THE STUFFENING. THE SWORD OF THE NIGHT OF THE REVENGE OF THE RABBIT OH GOD THIS BOOK DOESN’T HAVE SWORDS OR RABBITS AND BARELY ANY REVENGE AT ALL.”

I’m not good at titles.

Ray Bradbury was famous for making up a list of titles and then writing stories to match those titles. And that’s a little bit of what we’re going to do here, today.

All I want you to do is come up with a title.

One title.

No more.

Then take that title and plop it into the comments below.

Next week, you will all have a chance to scout out the completed list of titles in the comments and write a story geared toward one of those made-up titles (one you did not yourself invent).

That’s it. That’s all. Easy, and yet, difficult.

GET THEE TO THE TITLEMOBILE

Aftermath is again on the NYT Bestseller list. Coming in at #5 amongst hardcovers.

Second week is actually sweeter than the first. See, first week, you could argue that it’s there because a bunch of folks pre-ordered it and because it’s Star Wars and blah blah blah. And then, second week, you might think that the book would drop off the list like a stone. Mmmnope. Still there. Top five. Second week means people are reading it, liking it, and telling their friends. Second week means the book has a little word-of-mouth.

So, thank you all for the SWEET N’ MUSKY EWOK LOVE.

Some of you have asked what’s going on with those Amazon reviews, and I’m not going to address that right now — I’d rather just bask in the glow of the moment. (That said, anybody who takes a long look at the 350+ one-star reviews hovering around it will discern a number of patterns and repeated words, phrases, and ideas. Maybe someone other than me cares to unpack that.)

The book is in its fifth printing (in two weeks). It’s selling well. The publisher is happy. I’ve got two more books in the trilogy to write, so I’m happy, too.

MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU WOOOOOOOOOO

*ignites lightsaber and flails drunkenly around garage*

I GOT MY RANTIN’ HAT ON.

*rantin’ hat is actually just a frightened shrieking lemur duct-taped to my skull*

I write a lot. Because I write fast. This is known.

I developed this skill working freelance because, as the saying goes, you have to be two out of three things: FAST, FRIENDLY, or GOOD. I was definitely friendly, and I knew I could be fast. No telling if I was any good or not, but I like to think I don’t suck, despite what that passel of one-star reviews might say on that book we won’t talk about right now.

Ahem.

Lately, though, there’s been some chatter about writers who are prolific and if that’s somehow problematic — Stephen King wrote a fine piece asking if a writer can be too prolific (his answer as a somewhat prolific author is both yes and no), and then came that Huffington Post piece, “Dear Self-Published Authors, Do Not Write Four Books A Year.”

This is the part of the meeting, I think, where I’m supposed to stand up and announce:

HI, MY NAME IS CHNURK MANDOG, AND I WRITE FOUR NOVELS A YEAR.

Now, before anybody thinks we need to take this woman’s article and flay it to pieces — at the end of the day, she’s making a reasonable point that you should be focused on quality over quantity.

The author, Lorraine Devon Wilke, says:

…take your time, work your craft; look for the best possible ways to tell your story and allow yourself time to change your mind, sometimes often, until you know it’s right. Allow your editors time to help you mold your narrative into peak condition. Give your formatters and copy editors time to comb through your manuscript, again and again, to make sure everything is perfect. Work carefully with your cover artist to create the most gorgeous, most professional book cover you can.

Nothing at all unreasonable about that. And it’d be hard to disagree. I mean, what are you gonna say as a retort? “You should rush hastily through your draft, speeding by it so fast you miss all chances to refine the thing into something meaningful, and by the way, editors are just going to slow you down and if you need a book cover here’s a picture of a monkey sexing up a cat so just slap a title on it and you are ready to reap the rewards.”

But before that, she says:

…if your point and purpose as a writer is to take someone’s breath away, capture a riveting story, translate an idea — whether fantasy, love story, science fiction, human interaction, tragedy, thriller, family saga, memoir, non-fiction — in a way that raises hairs or gets someone shouting “YES!”; if you’re compelled to tell that story so beautifully, so irreverently, with such power and prose as to make a reader stop to read a line over just to have the opportunity to roll those words around one more time, then don’t listen to that advice.

When she says “that advice” (the bold part is on her), she’s referring to that which is referenced in the article’s title: do not write four books a year.

So, again, she’s not saying anything patently wrong — I mean, yes, your goals could very well be to rob readers of their breath, or tell an amazing story, or hold court on big ideas. I always say the two biggest and most important goals of fiction is first to make people feel and second to make them think. (A third one, less necessary but still vital, is perhaps to make them laugh, but that’s a discussion for a different time.)

The problem is based in the assumption that quality is separate from quantity.

As in, to write a lot, you must sacrifice skill.

To churn out books, art is lost beneath the whirlpool of your effort.

If you write a lot, she is suggesting, then you cannot be as effective as you want to be — you can’t raise hairs, get readers shouting. You can’t be beautiful and irreverent at four books a year.

To which I cry, HAMFIST AND SHORNGOGGLE.

Neither of those things are actually words, but trust me when I say: they sound good when you yell them aloud. I will allow you some time to practice this now. Shake your fist and yell those words at something that frustrates you. Go on, I’ll wait.

Done?

Excellent.

So, let’s talk about this a little bit.

First up, quality and quantity are not exclusive. You do not sacrifice one to get to the other. Some authors do. Some don’t. Sometimes a book is like baking brownies, which means it takes a certain amount of time to keep baking. Sometimes it’s a smoothie — frothily frapping away in the blender for a quick pulse, pour and guzzle. Blackbirds took me five years to write. All three sequels took me under two months to finish apiece (and I’d argue Cormorant is the best book of the bunch — jury’s out yet on Thunderbird.)

Second, to build off of that, you’re the kind of writer that you are. You have a process. Maybe that process is slowly and painstakingly crafting a novel over many years — a dedication like that of a watchmaker’s artifice. Or maybe instead you prefer write like a squirrel covered in fire ants. And like I said, every book demands its own thing. It takes the time that it takes.

Third, writing a lot does not preclude publishing a lot. You can write a lot with the intent to just flail around and see what coming squirting out of your fingertips. Sometimes, you just write to write. You have to. You write to practice, to fail, to fuck around, to iterate and ideate and have fun with whatever it is that’s driving you batty on any given day. That said, it might mean publishing, too. (I’ve had three new books out this year, plus the rebirth of Blackbirds with a new publisher.)

Fourth and finally, and I’m mighty sorry to report this, but a full-time writing career is not easily maintained by writing slowly. That’s a reality of this business, and it’s true whether you’re publishing traditionally or whether you act as your own author-publisher. No matter the means of production, writing slow offers you less chance to make money than writing fast. Writing money isn’t the only goal, no, and crafting great stories should be paramount. Just the same, you also might wanna pay bills. I know my mortgage is pretty assertive when it comes time to get paid. The bank’ll break my knees if I miss a payment.

So, that’s it.

In short: write as much or as little as you jolly well fucking feel like it.

You do you, penmonkey. YOU DO YOU.

* * *

Miriam Black Is Back (In Print)

Miriam Black knows how you’re going to die. This makes her daily life a living hell, especially when you can’t do anything about it, or stop trying to. She’s foreseen hundreds of car crashes, heart attacks, strokes, and suicides. She merely needs to touch you—skin to skin contact—and she knows how and when your final moments will occur. Miriam has given up trying to save people; that only makes their deaths happen. But then she hitches a ride with Louis Darling and shakes his hand, and she sees in thirty days that Louis will be murdered while he calls her name. Louis will die because he met her, and Miriam will be the next victim. No matter what she does she can’t save Louis. But if she wants to stay alive, she’ll have to try.

“Fast, ferocious, sharp as a switchblade and fucking fantastic.” — Lauren Beukes

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