As some of you may know, I wrote this funny little book called SPACE CONTEST: CRAFTER BATH —

*receives note*

Okay, apparently it’s called something else? Whatever.

Point is, that book — like many of my books — is written in third person, present tense.

Now, that’s a particular stylistic choice. And for some, I imagine a bit jarring. I’ve seen the style more and more lately, but when I used it in Blackbirds, not so much. (Not suggesting I invented it or anything. I JUST MADE IT COOL. Okay probably not, but shut up.)

As you know, Bob, a few weeks back Entertainment Weekly released a short preview of Star Wars: Aftermath, whereupon eager fans and readers discovered that I was, indeed, taking this particular stylistic highway with the book. Some folks said they liked it, some said it grew on them, others did not like it at all, and a few were just like… fucking super mad about it. (Spoiler alert: do not read the comments under the Entertainment Weekly article. Or anywhere else on the Internet because comments sections are the Internet’s septic systems. Okay, you can read the comments here because people are cool and because I actually moderate this place, as should anyone governing any comments section online.) Some readers even said that because the classic prologue to the stories is A long time ago, that the books must absolutely be written in past tense or otherwise, Jar-Jar becomes Emperor and Greedo kills Han Solo back in the Mos Eisley cantina and BB-8 is never born.

I understand the complaint. It’s different. It’s a stylistic choice. It isn’t for everyone.

But it is for me.

And so, I’d like to unpack a little why it is exactly I like to write in this style.

TAKE MY HAND AND LET US GO ON A MAGICAL JOURNEY TOGETHER.

*takes your hand*

*throws you into the Pit of Carkoon*

*cackles*

Cinematic

Ever read a screenplay?

Third person, present tense. All of ’em.

Ever watch a movie?

A movie doesn’t happen in the past — even if it’s set in the past, it’s unfolding literally before you.

There’s an argument to be made here that, a-duh, books are not movies. Which, yeah, I know. I’m mule-bitten sometimes, but dang, I’m not that dumb. Just the same, the types of books I write — while not anti-intellectual, I hope, and certainly not in defiance of literary form — feel better to me when they’re more cinematic. When it feels like something playing out on the screen inside your head. That’s not to say I ignore the internal dimensions (mental and emotional) of the novel form. But it give me the freedom to write a book and imagine a camera running behind the words and pages. Dynamic and alive.

Urgent

I write in what you might consider “thriller pacing” a lot of the time — a sense of danger and escalation, a vibe of threat and ticking clocks and present dread. A lot of books to me read like, Once upon a time, which is to say, “This already happened.” It’s history. A re-telling, not a telling. Events gone past, times gone away, characters who have already come and gone and who did the things they did and now it’s all over.

Present tense affords me the chance to subvert that. It lets me write a story that feels all the more dangerous because its outcome isn’t set — by making it now instead of in history, it becomes a living document. It’s an evolving narrative. Just that tiny shift in timing lets the narrative (to me) become fresh, unpredictable, as sassy as a downed powerline sparking and snapping in the street. It feels like fate isn’t yet written. The destiny of the characters is ever in flux. As such, it lends itself to urgency — and you read less to find out what happened and more to find out what’s going to happen next. Every page feels like it exists only because you turn it. Less an excavation and an archive and more an act of shared narrative creation. The reader makes the story happen just by reading.

Close, But Not Intimate

Third person present lets me get close, but doesn’t demand intimacy. I don’t have any problems with first person present, but to me the combination can — though not always — feel too close. The characters run the risk of becoming irritating or over-sharing. And first person also limits us to who we know and who we see. It undoes some chances for suspense or mystery because we’re living in a character’s head all the time. Here it feels like we’re hovering close enough to hear the character’s surface thoughts — to get some internal history, but not to stand under the waterfall of their thoughts and drown there.

Simple And Elegant

No great description here to unpack — I just find third-person present to be a really clean, clear way to write. It’s not like looking at a painting, but rather, like watching someone paint.

It’s Sometimes How We Tell Stories To Each Other

Maybe this is more a factor of how we tell stories in the American Northeast, but we tell stories orally to one another, and they tend to skew to the present tense: “So then the guy at the counter says, ‘No, we ain’t got no fucking otterburgers,’ but I know he’s got fucking otterburgers because I’ve seen the guy eating ’em right out of the jar. And Betty over there, she’s walking by the Joust machine in the corner looking like someone just peed in her Lucky Charms because she wants otterburgers too and now this clown is telling me no goddamn otterburgers. Right? I mean, fuck.”

We tell stories like we’re all there, right now, present and accounted for. Even if it happened earlier that day or two years ago. We tell them actively, urgently, presently.

So, your turn.

Do you like present tense? Why?

Or, moreover: why don’t you like it?

Better with third, or only in first?

Sound off in the comments.

* * *

The journey to become a successful writer is long, fraught with peril, and filled with difficult questions: How do I write dialogue? How do I build suspense? What should I know about query letters? How do I start? What the hell do I do?

The best way to answer these questions is to ditch your uncertainty and transform yourself into a Kick-Ass Writer. This new book from award-winning author Chuck Wendig combines the best of his eye-opening writing instruction — previously available in e-book form only — with all-new insights into writing and publishing. It’s an explosive broadside of gritty advice that will destroy your fears, clear the path, and help you find your voice, your story, and your audience.

Amazon

B&N

Indiebound

Writer’s Digest

This blog is very often me yelling at me about me, and for some reason folks actually want to tune in and listen to that. This post is no different. This post is about me as much as — if not more than — it is about you. So, please, take this in the spirit that it is intended:

Me yelling at me about me.

*clears throat*

I love my phone.

I mean, I don’t make love to it or anything, though maybe I ought to given how much time I spend with it. It’s always right there in my pocket. Near my Wendig Bits, which is a reference to my genitals, as it were, and not a darling name for a brand new breakfast cereal.

The smartphone — in this case, my iPhone — is a pretty fucking batshit gonzo amazing device. Ten years ago you could not have convinced me that we would’ve had a handheld computer tricorder motherfucker that was more powerful than the computer I had on my desk. A computer that in fact also operates as a phone, a camera, a GPS, a game console, a social antenna. You can use it to find recipes, movie times, porn, bars, porn, books, friends, fuckbuddies, bars, porn, weather, and porn. That is a fantabulous device. It’s smaller than my hand, bigger than my mouth, and it contains NEARLY ALL THE INFORMATION.

It’s wonderful.

And you need to put it down.

What I mean is, I need to put it down.

Because there is no better way to be up your own ass than to be constantly staring into the shiny glitter pit that is your handheld mobile smart-device.

The phone-makers know that. They count on it. Just as food manufacturers know that food becomes more addictive with the right ratio and release of SALT SUGAR FAT into your bloodstream, the phone-makers have their own ratio of shiny icons and satisfying dings and injections of hot social connection and constant updates and probably porn. They’re not dum-dums. They want these devices to become the center of your existence. And that’s not unreasonable. Again: my smartphone is fucking amazing. I can’t imagine what will even be around in ten years provided of course that we do not drown in our own boiling oceans by then. Our phones in ten years will probably be enslaved artificial intelligences that can fly and make frittatas and give us orgasms and I dunno probably turn into lightsabers. I’m not knocking the considerable awe your phone should inspire. They are amazeballs. They are wondernipples.

And seriously, we need to put them down.

Not all the time.

But some of the time.

Look around you most days and you will see two things:

1) The world in all its glory. You will see birds flying and squirrels fucking. You’ll see traffic and airline contrails and pretty clouds and ugly clouds. You’ll see some guy with a triangle-shaped pizza stain on his shirt as if he literally just rested the slice of pizza on his chest. You’ll see a woman with a tiny dog. You’ll see some kid picking his nose and making his sister eat it. You’ll see bees and ants and boats and baubles and trash and treasure and maybe if you look hard enough you’ll see Donald Trump’s rabid skull-merkin chasing down neighborhood cats and eating them.

2) You will also see people ignoring the world in all its glory and instead doing damage to their cervical vertebrae as they crane their heads forever downward, shoving their noses and eyeballs into their handheld mobile time-sucking dopamine-releasing endorphin-chugging devices.

Do you remember the time before phones? Sitting there in an airport or waiting for your car to get repaired — what did you do? Flip through a magazine, maybe. Or maybe you talked to someone near you. Or even better: you just fucking looked around at shit until you realized that was boring and then you crawled inside your own head for a while and just thought about stuff? Daydreaming? Zoning out with a thousand-yard-stare? Figuring out life, the universe, and everything?

Now, we go right to the phones.

Which is okay, mostly. I’m at the airport, I like that. I like having that time with social media, with friends online, with games in my pocket. I like having a book there on my iPad. But once in a while, too, I forget to charge my device and I’m left with a brick and for a few moments, I have this mad panic. “AH WHAT WILL I DO WITHOUT MY CONNECTION BASICALLY I’M AS DEAD AS THE PHONE IS HOW WILL PEOPLE KNOW WHERE I AM OR WHAT I AM DOING OR HOW WILL I KNOW WHERE THEY ARE OR WHAT THEY ARE DOING OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT hey look at that lady her hair actually looks like a well-coiffed facsimile of that big orange monster guy from Looney Tunes.” (I did not realize that character had a name: “Gossamer.”)

*flashes the MORE YOU KNOW banner across your screen*

Next thing you know, you’re off on a little mental adventure. You’re looking at things. Connecting with your own brain instead of everyone else’s. Existing in the moment rather than in a thousand other moments from a hundred other people.

But it’s hard. Isn’t it? I find it hard, anyway. Disconnecting is tough.

Just putting the phone down — it’s such a habit. Twitter. Email. Weather. Music. Everything.

It doesn’t help that the phone wants to constantly poke the button in our brain that lights up our internal switchboards — it compels us to stay, hang out a while, keep looking. You open your phone to check the weather or take a photo and suddenly there’s a Twitter notification and an e-mail ding and a note about a new unlockable in that freemium game you just downloaded. It’s digital quicksand. It’s an informational sugar rush. It is glorious. It’s like drinking from a way-too-delicious caramel firehose. And it’s too damn much.

Our smartphones are like bridges carrying us over boring moments — but sometimes those boring moments are secretly, subversively amazing all on their own. Especially for us writers and artists. Sometimes it’s our job not to dive into the device but instead to stay rooted in the world — to watch it, and then to fuck off not into a screen sometimes, but into our own head-caves to process what we see and hear and smell. Sometimes we should stop taking the bridges our devices afford us, and instead take the long way. Slink down into the gulch. Descend into the canyon of existence. Be in the corporeal world and not the digital one.

Because sometimes those bridges also carry us over other people. And vital moments with those people. I’ve been talking to people who were looking at their phone and at best it’s like talking to a distracted raccoon. At worst it’s like trying to have a conversation with a tree. “HELLO ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO ME, TREE.” Hell, my son the other day was like, “Daddy, put your phone down, I’m talking to you.” He was. And I didn’t even realize it. I was like, “WHO ARE YOU, SMALL PERSON, HOW DID YOU GET IN MY oh shit yeah, hey, Gerald,” and he’s like, “My name isn’t Gerald.” “Dave?” “Nope.” “Don?” “No!” “I’ll just call you NINJA ROBOT 9000,” and he was cool with that, and now I should probably try to remember his name. But until then, me and NINJA ROBOT 9000 are going to have some great adventures where I’ll be putting down my phone and paying attention to what’s-his-name as best as I jolly well can.

Which is actually my solution, I think: to be mindful of the phone and to put it down at crucial moments. No phone at meal times. No phone on walks. No phone at bedtime. No phone when I’m hanging with the tot. The phone is like booze, ice cream, TV, video games, masturbation — everything in moderation. I can’t be staring at it all the time. Some of the time: yes. It’s a great vacation and a powerful tool. I love my phone and that won’t stop. I use the king hell out of my phone and that won’t — can’t, really — stop either. But I will put it down. I have to put it down. Because what’s inside it isn’t actually the world, no matter how much it feels like it sometimes. It’s time to pay attention to what goes on beyond the borders of my device screen.

I will try to be present when the world asks that I be present.

That, I think, is my mission statement.

You don’t have to accept it as yours, of course, but if you start dicking around with your phone when I’m talking to you, I might pick up your phone and eat it. *chomp*

* * *

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.

Coming 8/18 from Harper Voyager.

Read the first five chapters here, then pre-order from:

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

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

In which I ask you to RECOMMEND A BOOK.

This time, with a small caveat:

Rec a book you do not think we’ve read. A book that’s something of an underdog — a fringe case, a book you want everyone to read but none of your friends have ever actually opened.

Also, the larger caveat applies, and I wish I didn’t have to give it, buuuuut:

Do not recommend your own book.

Because ew. Why would you do that?

Share the book-love. Don’t book-masturbate on us.

Oooh, one final caveat:

Recommend one book only, please and thank you.

In just over one week (8/18), ZER0ES comes screaming out of the ether with a shrieking 2400 baud modem noise, and it crawls inside your head and uploads itself into your psyche.

*breathes into a bag*

*wobbles*

Ahem.

As such, I’ll be a little noisier that week, and I figured now would be a good time for that One Last Big-Ass News Post about the book and its launch, and remind all you crazy kids about where I’ll be supporting the book and all that good stuff.

First, where I’ll be:

8/17: Pre-launch at the Doylestown Bookshop, 6:30PM. Hometown book signings are the best. Will have early copies of the book for sale! Event page here.

8/18: Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Lexington, KY for launch — plus fellow bad-ass authors Richard Kadrey and David Wellington. 7:00PM. Event page here.

8/20: WORD Bookstore Zer0es event with bad-ass author Daniel Jose Older. At Brooklyn store, which is really one of my favorite bookstores. Event page here.

9/4 to 9/7: Dragoncon and Decatur Book Fest in Atlanta, GA. I’m told the Dragoncon schedule is up, though I’m not sure how to find it online? I’ll be at the Decatur Book Fest on Sunday, doing an event with Richard Kadrey. Oh, and that Friday (the 4th) I’ll be doing a Star Wars: Aftermath midnight launch event at a nearby Barnes & Noble. More as I know it!

9/26: Murder By The Book in Houston, TX. Signing and talk with me, Richard Kadrey, and Beth Cato! Starts at 4:30PM. Event page here.

10/8 to 10/11: New York ComicCon — not sure of my schedule yet, but looks like I’m there!

Plus, I’ve a couple bonus events:

8/25: I’ll be at the 92Y in NYC helping Libba Bray launch her newest, Lair of Dreams.

9/2: I’ll be back at the Doylestown Bookshop helping Fran Wilde launch her debut, Updraft!

Second, some new reviews:

The Barnes & Noble book blog says lots and lots of nice things about the book in their review (“Chuck Wendig Stages A Brute-Force Attack On The Technothriller Genre“), and if I may cherry-pick a paragraph:

“Outfitted with their own specialized skills, Wendig’s hodgepodge gaggle of hackers—a social engineer, a post-punk nihilist, an international activist, an old-school coder, and a credit card scammer (who soon adopt the titular nickname for themselves) — are quickly abducted into service, and the author wastes little time getting to the meat of the story, moving at whipcrack speed as things get dangerous and dark. Sequestered at a remote government facility known as The Lodge, Wendig’s crew of anti-social misfits must learn to adapt to prison-like surroundings, get in sync with their tech-phobic handler, consider the threat of a traitor in their midst, and ultimately work together to decipher the conspiracy behind a top secret NSA program known as Typhon.

We end up reading nothing less than a man vs. machine end-of-the-world thriller, slathered with raw wit and frenetic pacing, in which renegade black hat hackers don good guy garb, reluctantly forced into battle against something very powerful and very, very evil.”

And Sci-Fi Bulletin says:

“Each new novel has seen Wendig’s talents become more finely honed, and Zer0es (the 0 in the name isn’t a misprint) is his most focused and best-written book to date… Zer0es will grab you from the first page for Chuck Wendig’s finest story so far.”

And io9 calls it one of the sci-fi/fantasy novels releasing in August that you must read, listing it alongside such amazing storytellers as NK Jemisin, John Scalzi, Lilith Saintcrow, and one of my all-time authorial idols, Robin Hobb. (/fangirlsquee)

A reminder that you can read the first four — sorry, now first five — chapters here.

And if you pre-order the book (from anywhere!), you will gain access to the first couple of chapters of MYRMIDON, my next sci-fi thriller coming from Harper Voyager. Go here to enter pre-order data and you’ll be ready to roll with even more reading material.

You an add the book on Goodreads.

And, finally, if you want to pre-order the book — well:

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.

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

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

We’ve done this one before, and it’s always a blast — roll a d20 or use a random number generator, once for each of the two tables below. Then, take each of the results and mash them together in a flash fiction story.

Note: the goal is not to tell a literal fan-fic story set in those pop culture storyworlds — though, I guess if you wanna do that, hey, YOU DO YOU. The goal is to take the spirit of those two properties and find a story that embodies the weird mashup. (The origins of this particular challenge come from that old Hollywood conceit of pitching your original story to executives as X meets Y — “It’s Dennis the Menace meets Game of Thrones ha ha ha right? Hand me money.”)

You have, mmm, let’s say 2000 words for this one.

Due back by next Friday, 8/14, noon EST.

Post the story at your online space.

Give us a linky-poo so we can follow it back.

Now, the two tables —

Table X

1. Scooby Doo
2. How I Met Your Mother
3. Nightmare on Elm Street
4. Terminator
5. Star Wars
6. Chronicles of Narnia
7. The Mothman Prophecies
8. Snow Crash
9. D&D
10. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
11. My Little Pony
12. The Stand
13. Captain America
14. Inception
15. Babylon 5
16. District 9
17. Princess Mononoke
18. Avatar: The Last Airbender / Korra
19. Twin Peaks
20. Mad Max

Table Y

1. Dune
2. How To Train Your Dragon
3. Nightmare Before Christmas
4. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
5. Gremlins
6. Hellraiser
7. Indiana Jones
8. Toy Story
9. Ready Player One
10. Discworld
11. American Gods
12. 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea
13. Teen Wolf
14. Saving Private Ryan
15. Donnie Darko
16. The Walking Dead
17. Princess Bride
18. Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
19. Snow White
20. L.A. Confidential

Jim Hines is a dude who knows his way around funny, awesome fantasy — and now he brings his talent to the Fable franchise. Jim wanted to write a post about writing tie-in fiction, how could I say no? Frankly, Jim could say he wants to write about plaid sweaters, vintage recliners, or even chickens, and I’d let him. … wait, did I say chickens? Motherclucker.

* * *

A year or two back, my agent emailed to ask if I’d be interested in writing the official companion novel for the Fable Legends video game. The Fable franchise is fantasy with a good dose of quirky humor. Or “humour,” since the company (Lionhead) is based in the U.K. I said yes, and thus began what would come to be known as Fable: Blood of Heroes. And you know what?

It’s clucking poetry, man!

(Side note: Since both the Fable Legends video game and my tie-in are YA friendly, any profanity in this blog post has been automatically replaced by chicken-related terms.)

“Poetic” isn’t a word oft applied to tie-in works, but I think it applies. Bear with me here. Almost half a lifetime ago, I took a poetry course in graduate school. I learned several things that semester, one of which was that I’m pretty flocking bad at writing poetry. But it forced me to write in a different format with different constraints. I learning to tighten my writing, to cut away every extraneous word, and to use language in different ways. (That forced economy of language also gave me the foundation for some mad Twitter skills.)

That class made me think within a differently shaped box. Everyone talks about thinking outside the box. Outside of the box, you’ve got infinite space. You can write anything. You have total freedom, complete with Braveheart-style face paint and authorial battle cry! Sometimes that freedom is overwhelming. Sometimes you find yourself forging new paths. Sometimes you start to realize you’re trodding some of the same paths over and over again in your work.

Along comes a specific poetic structure or format. Suddenly, you’re forced to work within new constraints. To find new ways of fitting words together to evoke emotions and create images and tell stories.

Writing a companion novel pushed me in the same ways, with the added bonus of not having to listen to my professor tell stories about smoking pot with other poets.

With Blood of Heroes, I had the freedom to create my own story, but I needed to include eight predefined Heroes from the game. I had to write a book that would be accessible to new readers and at the same time familiar to those who’d played Fable before and were playing Fable Legends. I was writing in the world of Albion, a world other people had already mapped out and created and explored.

You might think having someone else do all that worldbuilding makes the book easier to write, and in some ways, that’s true. Lionhead’s maps are certainly prettier than anything I ever scrawled out for my own books. But it was also limiting.

You’re sitting there, plotting out your story, and your characters have to get from point A to point B. If you’re inventing your own world, you can mess with the map however you need to make that work. In my case, I discovered that given the problems I’d already dumped on the characters, you couldn’t get there from here. I sat back, glared at the map, and said something along the lines of, “Molting feathers!”

As annoying as that was, it forced me to be more creative, and to find a solution I might not have come up with in my own “original” work. The same thing happened with the characters. The work Lionhead had done developing the game pushed me to write about different kinds of characters, people (and non-people) I wouldn’t have come up with on my own.

I understand Mister Wendig has also done a minor tie-in project of his own recently, so I’m sure he’ll agree with me about everything I’ve said here. Tie-in work doesn’t always get a lot of respect, but in this case, I found it to be not only fun to write, but also a way of pushing my own abilities and growing as a writer.

If I’ve done my job right, the end result should be a lot of fun for everyone. Fable fans will learn more about Albion and (hopefully) appreciate some insight into the new game. Readers who’ve never played a game in their life should enjoy a rather madcap adventure about larger-than-life Heroes fighting a unique team of villains. There’s action and comedy and flirting and fighting and a dead king who still won’t shut up, and much more.

I hope you’ll check it out. And to my fellow writers, if you get the chance to work with a good company and publisher on a tie-in project, I highly recommend it.

* * *

Jim C. Hines made his professional debut in 1998 with “Blade of the Bunny,” an award-winning story that appeared in Writers of the Future XV. Since then, his short fiction has been featured in more than fifty magazines and anthologies. He’s written ten books, including Libriomancer, The Stepsister Scheme, and the humorous Goblin Quest series. He promises that no chickens were harmed in the making of this book.

Fable: Blood of Heroes comes out on August 4. You can read the first few chapters on the publisher’s website.

Jim C. Hines: Website | Twitter

Fable: Blood of Heroes: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N