Holy shit, it’s out!

It’s midnight.

It’s Force Friday.

Which means…

The first of the Aftermath trilogy lands on bookshelves (and ideally into your little robot hands) today. It’s been awesome writing this book and getting it out into the world. I think it’s going to be a book people either love or hate — you know, it’s a book with a heaping helping of HOT EXPECTATION GRAVY slathered over its many pages, so, any time that happens you run the risk of the hype becoming a monster to which the book could never really compare. But this is the book that lived inside my head and it’s what fell out when I turned my head upside down.

I recognize that a lot of people are likely going to read the book with an eye toward spoilers — this is a book that offers up the first tentative steps on the narrative bridge toward The Force Awakens, and so PLOT HUNTERS are going to be combing through the sand and dust of this story, hoping to come away with a few gems of shiny What-May-Come.

So, I thought I’d get ahead of that and list ten whopper spoilers from this book, just to get them out of the way. Just to clear the slate, so you don’t have to do picking through the story like a mother monkey plucking ticks from her baby monkey’s fur. Consider it a favor from me.

I’m aces like that.

Here, then, are ten BIG-ASS SPOILERS in the book. You can thank me later.

1. Three words: Emperor Elan Sleazebaggano. And his cousin, Darth Jerkturd. They rule the Deathsticks trade on seven worlds. And you thought the Empire was dead.

2. Not just one Death Star. But a hundred Death Stars. A WHOLE DEATH GALAXY. And they’re all shaped like Darth Vader’s helmet. And the son of Luke Skywalker, Dave Skywalker (who is played by Simon Pegg in the new movie, FYI), has to OMG figure out how to blow up like, every new Death Star at the same time? He can only do it with his friends — an unlikely assortment of wacky deviants and miscreants: Dan Individual, Chorgbacon the Schnook, the Duchess LeeLee Sobieski, Mando Kardashian, and the two droids: See-Poo-Pee-You, and RU-DTF.

3. HAN SOLO HAS BEEN DEAD THE WHOLE TIME. AND HE’S ALSO YOUR REAL DAD. And he’s very disappointed in you. Not mad, just disappointed. Now hold still while he lightsabers your hand off to teach you about responsibility, young padawan.

4. Jar-Jar gives a buffoonish speech in Space Congress and his vote helps form the First Order, whatever the heck that is? Then Jar-Jar is brutally torn apart by a pack of Lothcats for 56 pages. The lesson here? You win some, you lose some.

5. YODA’S BACK, MOTHERFUCKERS. He’s young and he’s handsome and he’s on the hunt for the ladies. “When a hundred years you reach, look as hella sexy, you will not.” *plays sexy techno music, dances with tiny lightsabers like they’re glowsticks at a rave*

6. I forgot where I was in the middle of the book so I instead started a new book about the wacky fun-time adventures of Drunken Jedi Master Wig Chudneck. He has a lightsaber made of bees. (A “beesaber.”) His beard is made of hyper-intelligent cilia — basically, like, fuzzy midichlorians? He has a duck under his arm. The duck will figure in very prominently in Episode VII, so keep your eye out. Basically Wig just sorta runs around, screwing stuff up and then fixing it for people? Like the A-Team, if the A-Team did that and was only one Jedi Master riding a raggedy old tauntaun instead of five semi-competent mercs in a van.

7. Speaking of awesome lightsabers, in this book you will find a Jedi made entirely of lightsabers. And he carries a cannon that shoots little lightsaber bullets. And each of those little lightsaber bullets have the Force. True story.

8. The entire book, when read backward, is a ROT13 cipher. When you solve the puzzle, it reveals the entire backstory of Kylo Ren and the order of Knights to which he belongs. It also has a mean guacamole recipe that uses bacon.

9. The real spoiler is, you’re adopted. You’ll find out on page 147.

10. LUKE SKYWALKER IS REALLY DARTH VADER WHICH MEANS HE’S REALLY HIS OWN DAD AND ALSO HE’S IN MANDALORIAN BATTLE ARMOR NOW AND ANAKIN SKYWALKER IS REALLY KYLO REN AND KYLO REN IS REALLY DARTH JERKTURD AND SECRETLY DARTH JERKTURD HAS BEEN ADMIRAL ACKBAR THE WHOLE TIME AND THE REBELLION IS REALLY THE EMPIRE AND THE EMPIRE IS REALLY JUST A FLOATING EWOK VILLAGE inside a snow globe held in the hands of a young Keyzer Soze, who turns around and sees his father, Bob Newhart, sleeping on the bed next to Tyler Durden, who he also is, and then he whispers, Rooooosebuuuuud, which is the name of his lightsaber, and then we pan out the window only to see that the Death Star was the Statue of Liberty this whole time OMG IT’S AN AMERICAN METAPHOR THE EMPIRE IS AMERICA AND WE’RE ALL MINDLESS STORMTROOPERS boom! Mic dropped! Here comes Episode VII! Woooo! *barfs in your lap and on your book*

Ahem.

Now, it’s your turn.

I’ll be foregoing a flash fiction challenge today in place of this.

Your task, should you choose to accept it?

Pop in the comments and put in a TOTALLY TRUE* SPOILER from AFTERMATH.

* ahem meaning totally fake

Just one. Not two. And keep it fairly short. (Despite #10 on the list, try to keep it under 100 words.)

You can also tweet the fake spoilers using the hashtag: #fakeaftermathspoilers

I’ll be traveling this weekend (by the time this posts, I will be literally at the launch event for Aftermath), so I won’t have a chance to really look at these until Monday. (Which also means some comments may go unapproved by then if I am unable to curate and check the posts due to being firmly ensconced in the chaos of Dragoncon and Decatur Book Fest.)

You have till Monday, noon EST.

I’ll pick a single favorite out of the bunch.

And that single favorite will get from me:

A signed copy of Star Wars: Aftermath. Hardcover.

And I’ll also throw in a signed copy of Zer0es, too.

Available only to participants in the United States — those outside the USA can still participate, but if you win, know that you’ll be paying the shipping.

Again, you get one entry, and keep it short.

(art at the top of the post by @oncomingspork)

Synth is a drug able to induce hallucinations indistinguishable from reality. But it’s brand new, highly addictive, and more than likely dangerous. Even the dealers peddling the pills don’t know what long-term effects the drug will have on its users.

For Markus Olsen, Synth offers an easy escape from his crumbling life. Markus, an ex-hacker, has been caught red-handed. While his friends were sent to jail for thirty years, Markus decided to cooperate, agreeing to lend his services and particular criminal expertise to Viborg City’s secret service, aiding the oppressive state power he’d been fighting to break, in exchange for his relative freedom.

But Markus’s past as an anarchist comes back to haunt him in the form of a credit card with no account but an seemingly unlimited balance and the discovery of a mysterious novel in which he is a main character. How much of his reality is being produced by Synth? How disconnected from real life has Markus become?

Forced to face his past and the decisions he’s made, Markus must decide between the artificial comfort of his constructed life and the harsh reality of treason and the struggle for freedom.

1: Music can cure – or at least, help cure

As the title of my novel indicates, it revolves a lot about music, even if on a subliminal level. Doing research on the therapeutic virtues of music – which I took a mostly New Age crap – I stumbled on very serious articles describing how music, in some cases, can help fight depression, enhance the immune system or even give medicine a better effect. Some researchers also advocate the systematic use of music associated to chemotherapy. Once again, “science-fiction” proved lagging behind reality. Lesson learned.

2: The Real World is Just As Strange

Alexander’s tomb has never been found. Alexander the Great (356-323 BC) died in Babylon, but was buried in Memphis, Egypt, by one of his generals. It was later moved to Alexandria, but the mausoleum subsequently disappeared around 4 AD. Nobody knows of its location, and if Alexander’s remains are still there. The body’s gone. It’s not even a locked-room mystery. It’s a “disappearing room” mystery. On a writing point of view, it is excellent material, because it conjugates real history and documented historical facts, with myth, in an inseparable way. It is the canvas on which fiction is painted, the shadow behind the colors, the darkness in the background. With the story of Alexander’s tomb, I learned that it is reality that makes fiction possible, and that, in turn, fiction can augment reality in fantastic ways.

3: Power Can Be A Myth

Power doesn’t know everything and certainly doesn’t know what you’re up to right now. Don’t believe the hype. They might have cameras all over, they still are blind as mice. It becomes obvious when one looks at the larger picture, and moves away from the Hollywood thrillers. When a jumbo jet disappears and cannot be found, when terrorists still manage to carry out bloody and spectacular actions, one realizes that the all-seeing satellites are just a myth. A well-designed one, but a myth nonetheless. This is what I tried to convey in The Song of Synth – the manufactured paranoia and its paper-thin existence. Contrary to what most Medias will tell you, power is not made of steel, but it is a cardboard construction. If you approach a flame close enough, you will realize that. And fiction can be that flame.

4: Drugs Are Good For You

Wait, let me explain! What I mean here is not that that it’s OK to do them – although I have absolutely nothing against them in a purely recreational sense – but that drugs can be a helpful part of a healing strategy, as they can un-frame the world in which the self is suffering. In The Song of Synth, the main character is using the drug called “Synth” not to escape his situation – he thinks it’s impossible – but to momentarily push the walls and change the settings. It is a healing process, although it is not a conscious one. In this perspective, I think the current effort to get psychoactive drugs back in psychological and psychiatric practice is very interesting.

5: Drugs Are Bad For You

With Point 4 being said, let me counter that with this: as I often tell my students (and will tell my children when they get to that age), “If you need drugs to get up and get through the day, then you’re not doing drugs, they’re doing you.”

* * *

Seb Doubinsky is a bilingual French writer, born in Paris in 1963. He has published a number of novels and poetry collections in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He currently lives in Aarhus, Denmark, with his wife and their two children.

Seb Doubinsky: Twitter

Song of Synth: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound

My son, four years old, said he wanted to go outside and play Star Wars. I said shit yeah, kid, let’s do it. So he got his Darth Vader lightsaber, and gave me this foam sword that’s more like a medieval knight’s sword, and we headed outside.

He said he wanted to be Kylo Ren. I didn’t even realize he knew who Kylo Ren was.

He told me I was Darth Vader, and that Ren was now a good guy, and he was fighting Darth Vader.

So, we battled for a while and he suddenly said: “KYLO REN’S SWORD HAS THE THINGIES.”

I did not know what thingies he meant, but he clarified when he grabbed my foam sword and pointed to the crossguard (aka the “quillons,” aka the “thingies”). Ah, right, okay. So, we traded lightsabers, which actually is totally appropriate since I’m Darth and he had Darth’s red saber.

We lightsabered for awhile.

And we chopped off hands for awhile, too, because that’s just how Star Wars rolls. (Normally, I’d be appalled at my four-year-old being excited at the prospect of lopping off limbs, but he didn’t seem fazed by it and, hey, man, JEDI GONNA JEDI.)

Then he’s like, “Oh no! My Force powers are gone. Let me see if I can get them back from my lightsaber.” And he presses his sword to his chest and makes BZZRAOW VWOMM noises. But no, sadly, the lightsaber did not give him back his Force powers. (Children, I find, understand that stories need conflict better than many adults do.) So, he says, pointing to the trees (as we live in the woods): “It’s Endor! We can ask the Ewoks to get us our Force powers back.” Which is how I learned that I, too, was now lacking in Force powers. First though, he said he had to lightsaber my armor off so I could be Anakin again.

Which he did.

BZZRAOW VWOMM VMMMMZZ.

Okay, evil Darth armor gone. Anakin returned.

Onward to our Ewok encounter.

He says, “We need to summon the Ewoks.”

Then he says, and by the way all of these are direct quotes because I wrote this shit down:

“A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I was born with a trumpet. But I never blew the trumpet. Let’s see what it does.” Then he makes a doo-doo-doo sound and: “Look, I summoned Ewoks!”

Then he explains that the Ewoks make for him “wood armor” because sure, why not, and then we’re off for more adventures. He tells me that my Darth armor keeps growing back and that I have to occasionally lightsaber it off (and now I’m like, man, that’s awesome, some kind of self-aware dark-side armor that keeps resurrecting itself like the Venom symbiote), and later we hang out with Wookiees on Kashyyyk and we also find a patch of discolored driveway asphalt that he assures me is a “blood puddle” (!) from a clone trooper (!!) who got squished by a “speeder motor” which is a speeder bike but with a bigger motor and then the speeder motor spread the blood around (!?) and that we can use our Force powers to resurrect the clone trooper from his blood (!!!#@&*!). (Also in there, he stirred his sword into the dirt and said, “A long time ago in another different galaxy far far away, this dirt is old. It is from BEFORE THE DARKNESS.” Holy shit, what?)

It was gonzo bizarre-o good stuff.

It’s certainly not the only storyworld in which he’ll play. He’s a huge (and sudden) My Little Pony fan. And other times he just makes up his own weirdo narrative events — this morning he was playing with (no joke), two stuffed lizards, a plastic egg and a plastic potato. (The egg’s name is Eggy, the potato is Angry Potato.) And they were playing some kind of stealth game with the lizards? I have no idea what was going on. And sometimes, too, we’re treated to more stories of robot dog Hamslice and his detective pals, Baloney and Hair.

But Star Wars has stuck. Just as it did me when I was his age. He loves the world and the characters. We’ve bonded over LEGO Star Wars. It’s a thing.

I was his age, in fact, when I first saw Empire Strikes Back in the theater.

A drive-in theater, actually. My sister and her boyfriend took me and his little brother. We watched the movie. I cannot promise that they also watched the movie, but that was their teenage business, not mine. Given that I had no way of returning home and just popping the movie into the Blu-Ray player or pulling it up on the AppleTV, I was content to replay the experience with toys and costumes and crayons and comics. Then when Return of the Jedi came out, we waited in line around the block only to have it sell out. (We ended up seeing a movie called Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, which inexplicably starred Molly Ringwald, was in 3-D, was terrible.) After college, I lined up and actually camped out for Phantom Menace tickets. I’m covered in nerd froth for the new one.

I had the Burger King drinking glasses.

I had a lot of the toys — including ones you had to get by sending away Proofs of Purchase.

I still have a lot of the toys — and my son, B-Dub, still plays with them.

I have the new First Order stormtrooper from SDCC (thanks to Adam Christopher).

I made lightsabers out of sticks when I was a kid.

I used my swingset as an X-Wing.

I still have my ratty, dog-eared hardcovers of the original Zahn trilogy.

And now, of course, I have my own Star Wars book coming out. My own little postage stamp of canon. Actually, my head-canon kind of… became real canon? In one of the biggest narrative universes to have ever existed? That still trips my breaker every time I think about it.

Star Wars informed my early understanding of storytelling. Thankfully, my understanding didn’t stop there, but it was the seed that started it all, I think. It gave me characters I love and a simplistic, elegant view of both narrative and morality that inevitably you push back against while simultaneously reaching for it. It made me friends. It was a love my family shared then, and it’s a love my wife and my son share now. It is the universe that keeps on giving. It made me feel like I could do anything, because if a literal dirt-farmer from some galactic nowheresburg could somehow change the galaxy — along with a princess, a walking carpet, a scoundrel, another scoundrel, and a couple of Laurel & Hardy droids — then maybe I could change the galaxy, too. Or, at least, maybe I could someday write my own chapter in the Star Wars mythology.

That’s what Star Wars means to me.

It means friends and family. It means the power of story. It means the power of possibility. It’s about the underdog versus the bully, about the righteous against the oppressor, about fun and derring-do and heroism and understanding that we all have a little Dark Side in us, and all have a little Light Side in us.

I’m happy to be a part of it.

And I love that my son is all-in, too.

I’m glad you’re along for the ride, too.

May the Force be with you, nerf-herders.

See you when Star Wars: Aftermath releases this Friday.

(And if you’re at DragonCon or anywhere near Atlanta: Thursday night is the release event — I’ll be at the Edgewood B&N starting at 10PM. Come say hi. Or catch me at DC/Decatur!)

Aliette de Bodard is one of those authors whose talent will destroy any sense of self you have, which means you really have no choice but to jump in and be taken away by the power of her prose. She wanted to come by and talk about the nature of character inside fiction — and how the world is seen through their lens, and how the character is seen by the reader.

* * *

In a modern genre book, the protagonist is an important notion: working out who they are (and who the antagonist are) are a major part of most writing advice books I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot of them: in addition to the ones I got out of the library, I own an entire bookshelf of the stuff ranging from Le Guin’s Steering the Boat to more technical stuff like Nancy Kress’s Beginnings, Middles and Ends). The protagonist is the driving strength of the plot (or of a plot strand): they might be reacting to the antagonist’s ploys in the beginning, but by the end, they’re clearly in charge and they’re clearly steering things.

With The House of Shattered Wings, I ended up doing something a little different.

I didn’t exactly set out to do it. The novel is set within a Paris devastated by a major spell-war, where magical factions, the Great Houses, now fight over the ruins. Magic in this universe is powered by Fallen angels — they tumble from the Heavens, bloodied and amnesiac, and make their way through the world as best as they can –more often than not, they join a House and become indispensable to it.

My idea was to explore this universe via three characters in the same House: one would be the head of the House, one would be a little further down the scale, with interest in magic but little in politics, and one would be a newcomer, a newly born Fallen angel who would be the perfect vessel to explore this universe, since she’d be discovering it at the same time as the reader. She’d also be headstrong and impulsive, and pushing forward a lot of the plot with her decisions.

Except that. Hum. It turns out that I really can’t write amnesiac characters. Not when the amnesia is total, and the character had no prior life to speak of, at least none that they will remember, or that will affect their interactions with others. I need something to cling to, something to help me get into the character; and it turns out that with me, that something is character history. I made several attempts at writing the character, but they all fell flat.

I still liked the idea, though. Really, really liked it and couldn’t quite let go of it — except that it clearly wasn’t working.

Until I had the proverbial light-bulb going off in my head–what I needed wasn’t so much an ingénue; as an outsider: someone to whom the system wasn’t natural or inbred, but odd and repellent at the same time. This is how I ended up with my third point-of-view character: Philippe, a Vietnamese ex-Immortal dragged away from his home, conscripted to fight in the spell-war, and now stranded in Paris and doing his best to survive in a world that was fundamentally and irretrievably hostile to him (and not entirely happy about the situation, to say the least!).

The other character, though — Isabelle, my naive Fallen angel — is still here. The book opens with her Fall over Paris, and she’s the one thread that connects every plot line. She remains, in many ways, the protagonist: the one who initiates things and drags people, willing or unwilling, behind her. She’s the heart of the book, but you only ever see her through other people’s eyes.

It was a very interesting thing to do, actually — because it enabled me to do another thing I’ve always wanted to try, which was to show the different facets of a character. We all act differently with different people (think, for instance, how different a king would be to a peasant vs the same king to his mother. Or how loving and kind the Dark Lord can be with his family, vs the face he actually presents to the people he’s conquered).

In this case, since the reader is never in Isabelle’s head, you can only ever guess at what she’s thinking. You build an aggregate picture from everyone around her, and they all have a slightly different perception of her: hopelessly naive, headstrong beyond prudence, generous to a fault; a weapon to be used against other Houses, a gifted student in magic and alchemy; a friend and fellow outsider within the House. She’s one of the prime plot movers, but she’s always at a remove–weaving in and out of the narration, always at the centre but never fully encompassed.

It’s a mostly classic trick; in this case, it makes her more alluring and more compelling, I think, than she would have been as an amnesiac. And her counterpart, Philippe, ends up doing a lot of the heavy lifting I’d foreseen for getting exposition across, except he’s mostly doing it by pointing out both how the system works and how inherently unfair it is to people like him — resentment and anger making for great emotions around which to anchor the plot (and the character).

The other thing I found interesting with doing this was getting the narration away from the character who would have been the natural “Chosen One” — the one slowly learning about their powers and having unique abilities. In this particular case, with Philippe, I wanted to explore what it meant to be away from this classical narrative centre: Philippe doesn’t have any nascent powers (if anything, his are waning); he doesn’t receive any particular favours or help or signs, but simply tries to stay alive as best as he can (and his best bet would actually be away from the maelstrom that is Isabelle!). It was a lot of working against the expected narrative in my head, but I think it makes for something slightly different, and a point of view that is both unexpected and fresh.

So the whole “amnesiac character” didn’t quite work out like I originally envisioned, but I think the book is much, much stronger for it!

* * *

Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a System Engineer. In her spare time, she writes speculative fiction: her short fiction has garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and a British Science Fiction Association Award. She blogs, reviews fiction and writes recipes for Franco-Vietnamese food at http://www.aliettedebodard.com.

Her newest is The House of Shattered Wings:

Multi-award winning author Aliette de Bodard, brings her story of the War in Heaven to Paris, igniting the City of Light in a fantasy of divine power and deep conspiracy…

In the late twentieth century, the streets of Paris are lined with haunted ruins, the aftermath of a Great War between arcane powers. The Grand Magasins have been reduced to piles of debris, Notre-Dame is a burnt-out shell, and the Seine has turned black with ashes and rubble and the remnants of the spells that tore the city apart. But those that survived still retain their irrepressible appetite for novelty and distraction, and The Great Houses still vie for dominion over France’s once grand capital.

Once the most powerful and formidable, House Silverspires now lies in disarray. Its magic is ailing; its founder, Morningstar, has been missing for decades; and now something from the shadows stalks its people inside their very own walls.

Within the House, three very different people must come together: a naive but powerful Fallen angel; an alchemist with a self-destructive addiction; and a resentful young man wielding spells of unknown origin. They may be Silverspires’ salvation — or the architects of its last, irreversible fall. And if Silverspires falls, so may the city itself.

Aliette de Bodard: Website | Twitter

House of Shattered Wings: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Fran Wilde said she wanted to answer all the publishing questions ever in the universe, and I said, hey, sure. I could use the vacation. So here she is, with all the answers to all* the publishing questions you have ever had. Also, her debut novel Updraft is out today, which you need to go get with your sticky book-desiring hands. Oh. Oh! I’ll also be at Doylestown Bookshop with her tomorrow night, talking with her about that very book. Come say hi!

* two publishing questions

* * *

When Chuck offered me the keys to his blog, I decided to do what you’d normally do with someone’s finest vehicle: fill it with bees and infographics.

But What Bees. And Which Infographics.

I turned to some pressing questions that plagued me throughout my first pass through publishing’s gut, and picked two.

(There are more where these came from, but Chuck needs to send me more ink cartridges and a gallon or two of coffee.)

As for the bees, I’ll let that question linger.

Question 1: HOW THE HELL DOES A BOOK GET THAT FANCY TITLE

Darling pendraggers, this is a difficult one to get detailed answers on… especially any answers that agree, so I’ll give you my own story. Updraft? Not originally titled Updraft.

Titles in descending chronological order included*:
Bone Arrow, Glass Tooth
Bone Arrow
The Mouth of the Sky
Bob Gets Eaten On Page Two
Titles! How Do They Work??
Title TK
Title Goes Here
Someday There Will Be A Title
[cursing]
[redacted]
Skybound
Updraft (WOOOO!)

(*possibly the first time this list has ever been revealed.)

There are a lot of titles – REAMS of titles – that aren’t listed here, but you get the idea. There were also a lot of terrible puns. Reasons titles get changed? Well, I drew you a map. Some reasons come at you like boulders or meteors (I drew those too), some are more like umbrellas – marketing, for instance, can tell you that your multisyllabic unpronounceable literary title makes their teeth itch, and that’s good feedback for those planning on actually selling books.

Now, some people sell their soul or practice various levels of title-god appeasement that could get them arrested in states including West Virginia and Pennsylvania (which is why I had to do it the hard way, because Hi Pennsyltucky, don’t think I didn’t consider it) – but most have an experience similar to the one pictured… possibly without the Buffy re-watch and the wizard.

And when you have the right title, and you say it aloud, it rings like a bell. And that’s what Updraft sounds like to me. I’m darn pleased with it, and I hope you will be too.

(For more on titles, see Elizabeth Bear’s “How To Title Your Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel or Series: A Tutorial in Three Parts.”

So, now that’s out of the way, the next most pressing question is:

Question 2: WHY THE @#@! DO BOOKS COME OUT ON TUESDAYS?

Don’t worry, I’ve done research on this one. Here are three major theories:

Have other questions you want to see turned into terrible infographics?

Let us know in the comments.

But what about the bees? The other ones that you wanted to fill the blog with? Oh.

Chuck will find them, eventually.

My thanks to Chuck and the terribleminds readers for giving me a place to draw terrible things!

* * *

Fran Wilde’s short stories have appeared at Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Uncanny Magazine, and in Asimovs’ and Nature. Fran also interviews authors about food in fiction at Cooking the Books, and blogs for GeekMom and SFSignal.

Her first novel, Updraft, debuts from Tor Books today.

Fran Wilde: Website | Twitter

Updraft: Indiebound | Doylestown Bookshop | Amazon | B&N

this owl is judging you

This past week I put up a post about some mistakes I see in the stories of new(er) writers, and it’s one of those posts that went further and wider than I expected — and for the most part, the response was pretty positive. But there’s this other effect that happens, and sometimes this effect is revealed in emails or I see it in social media, and the effect is this:

I have discouraged you.

My nonsense has stitched into your soul quilt a BLACK SQUARE OF DOUBT.

That saddens me for a number of reasons.

So, first, let me get out of the way a disclaimer — one I think regular readers here recognize, but one that perhaps those who are new to the terribleminds experience (which sounds like a really weird laser light show) do not know:

I’m full of shit.

Just bubbly with it.

And all kinds of shit, too. Horseshit, bullshit, monkey shit, and all of it gets hosed down with a gurgling spray of hogwash and then slathered over with a gluey coating of PURE SHENANIGANS.

Nothing I say here is true.

It is nearly always my opinion. Okay, sometimes I’m talking about things that are writing “rules,” but even there, the rules can flex or even snap satisfyingly in the hands of a savvy craftsman. In fiction, everything is permitted — all magic is manifest if you’re a wizard of proper talent. Exceptions often make for the finest fiction. (They also, contrarily, comprise the bulk of the worst mistakes. Risk big, and you win huge or lose like a motherfucker, I guess.)

My opinion should be weighed in the hand and brought to the nose like any other opinion. How does it feel? How does it smell? If it feels and smells like a big ol’ pile of bloggerrhea to you, then you need to drop it on the sidewalk, wipe your hands on the nearest businessman, and run.

And now, with that disclaimer out of the way —

Listen, if my posts cause you doubt and discouragement, you’re in some trouble.

I try very hard to mix it up here — when I post about writing, I aim to keep a saucy blend of craft advice, publishing talk, storytelling neepery, inspirational tickles, motivational taint-kicks, and so on. Sometimes it’s so-called tough love, and sometimes it’s a big slobbery sobbing hug. We’re all in this together and that means we all need pep talks. But we’re also all friends, or so I like to think (which is why I am standing in your shrubs right now watching you read this), and that also means sometimes we need to speak truth about the things we’re doing poorly.

Ultimately, what I’m trying to say is, we can all do better.

That’s not just you. That’s me, too. I own that. Every book for me is an opportunity to improve my craft, up my game, and understand something new about the art, the life, the business. I pray to the ashen reliquary of Sweet Saint Fuck that I never become complacent — that I never become one of those authors who refuses to be edited or who thinks their prose-piles don’t stink.

Doubt is an insidious thing. I’ve commented on it many a time. Once you let that demon under your skin, he lives there like a parasite — except instead of leeching your blood, he starts siphoning your confidence. Just as you start to feel good, the worm turns and feeds anew.

And I recognize that posts like mine can contribute to that.

It’s why I suggest that authors are best when they ignore that doubt. Like, I know that’s way easier said than done, but what I mean is: just say fuck it. The doubt is there, and the doubt is a liar demon shitty-pants asshole, so you speak aloud: YOU HAVE NO POWER OVER ME. And then you keep on keeping on. You write. You rewrite. Write. Rewrite. That’s how you beat doubt. By doing. By doing and iterating endlessly to spite your own fear and shame and uncertainty. Because that’s how you gain confidence, really. And instinct. You do a thing enough times, you start to get a sense of it. You start to see its edges, feel its margins. You know the shape. To go with a metaphor I like to use, writing a novel is like running through a dark house — and the more you do it, the more you start to figure out where the furniture is. You learn how not to bump your knees and shins and knock over lamps. In fact, let’s go with the lamp metaphor, too — you start turning on lamps as you go. Click. Click. Click. Let there be light. And doubt cannot abide the light, so it shrinks into the darkness of rooms where you have not yet been.

And by the way, when I say doubt, I don’t mean the normal feelings of uncertainty you get that suggest your work isn’t perfect. Of course it isn’t perfect. What are you, some kind of Word Angel? Disgorging shining gems of prose from your sanctified maw? No, no, I know my writing isn’t perfect, and I know it’ll never be perfect, but I know I can fix it and I get as many chances as I want or need to fix the damn thing to my liking. That’s not doubt. That’s a comfortable, confident awareness of imperfection. That’s a happy understanding that my work sometimes will need a scalpel, sometimes it’ll need a truckload of Juggalos with chainsaws, sometimes it’ll need orbital lasers. I get it. I’m all good with that. You should be, too.

The kind of doubt I’m talking about is that aforementioned demon doubt.

(Note: I consider this separate from depression. For that, read: “The Writer And Depression.”)

Here’s where I get, though, a little mean — or at least uncomfortable — again.

Let me reiterate:

If my posts cause you doubt and discouragement, you’re in some trouble.

Here’s why you’re in trouble:

First, because I’m just trying to help. If general criticisms of unspecified work have you experiencing the shivering shits that you’re not good enough — enough to paralyze you where you sit, fingers poised over the keyboard and never again to dance on those keys — that’s trouble.

Second, because you’re going to get rejected. Rejections will come from agents, editors, and readers in the form of reviews. And those rejections? They’ll be specific to your book. Not my “painting with shotguns” approach to criticism. But they will be very explicitly pointing their critical laser at the exact thing you wrote. And it’ll hurt. It always hurts. I’ve had a dozen-plus books out and… yep, still burns. Even when it’s a rejection you can discard for XYZ reason, you still feel stung by it. And then eventually the sting wears off and you get back to work.

Third, because this is art. Art is made through agitation. Not necessarily unkind agitation, to be clear, and maybe sometimes I drift too far into the realms of unkindness, and if you feel that way, my apologies. (Er, I’m probably gonna keep doing it, though? So, I guess I’m not that sorry? Is that what sorry not sorry means? I GUESS IT DOES.) This shit isn’t easy. It’s not supposed to be easy. You’re not supposed to just write a book and then be like YAY I DID IT SO GOOD YAY and then launch it off into the ocean. That boat has holes in it. That vessel shall sink unceremoniously to the bottom of the drink. Your work needs to be tested. Gone over. Rent asunder and put back together again. As authors and artists, we’re supposed to chew it up, spit it out. We have to let other people kick the tires, rub it on their gums, give it a little slap-and-tickle.

You gotta learn to take criticism.

Sometimes that means taking criticism to heart.

Sometimes that means taking criticism and flinging it over your shoulder.

But it doesn’t mean giving into doubt.

That’s what the demon wants.

And fuck that demon.

You can do this.

No matter what I say.

You won’t do it perfectly.

But you can always make it right.

So go write. And rewrite. And write again.

That’s how you exorcize the demon.

* * *

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 Harper Voyager.

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