Nature has many assholes. I mean, not literally. (Though also: literally.)

Ticks are assholes. Those little bloodhungry, disease-curdled vampires. Mosquitos are assholes, too. Yellowjackets are super-assholes — total fuckfaces looking to fucking fuck up any picnic you have. Nature’s vast gaping assholery doesn’t stop with the insect world. It goes all the way up and down the spectrum — from the micro (crotch fungus) to the macro (hippos, no matter what Sandra Boynton would have you believe). In fact, one suspects that being an asshole is probably a biological imperative. Ducks are rapists. Chimpanzees form violent jungle gangs. Sloths are cute and all, but c’mon guys, get a job. Am I right? I’m right.

I’m sure if you watched a blue whale long enough he’d make a left turn without using his blinker and then loiter outside a 7-11, vaping while porpoises pass by and offer judgmental stares.

Bugs, cats, people: this planet is just crawling with assholes.

But I’d like to talk to you about one very special asshole.

My nemesis.

THE DEER FLY.

Look at him.

Just look at that little bastard. Sitting there like he doesn’t give a hot rat’s rectum.

The deer fly is from the family Tabanidae, which is Latin for: “Hateful Fuckery.”

The deer fly is of the genus Chrysops, which is Greek for: “Christ, Get This Thing Out Of My Ear.”

The world is home to an approximately infinite variety of deer flies, and I assume that each one of them are awful people. Just wretched. They are related to another asshole, the horsefly, who is basically the tank version of the deer fly. But horseflies are fat and dumb and slow. And the deer fly? The deer fly is fast.

Here’s what the deer fly does, and here is why I despise the deer fly with every ounce of gall I can muster inside my hate-fueled body: you’re just walking along, minding your own business. Whistling, chewing gum, checking your email, walking your dog, fidgeting casually with your genitals presuming nobody else is around. It’s summer. It’s warm. The birds are whoo-doo-doodlin’ along. A squirrel is nearby, panic-eating an acorn because squirrels are not capable of doing anything without a veneer of twitchy panic. In short? It’s a nice day.

But that’s about to get all shitted up.

Because somewhere nearby, hiding in the brush like some deviant who wants to show you his balls, is the deer fly. The deer fly senses motion. It senses the exhalation of carbon dioxide. It’s such a malodorous asshole it probably can sense the contentedness and well-being you presently feel. The deer fly launches from forth its hiding space and zeroes in on every part of your body you don’t want it to — your nose, your eyes, your earholes. It tries to get in those places and, when it fails, will just batter itself against you like some drunk bro-hole at a local dance club. It’s all just thap thap thap thwip thud thud flit flit and it’ll get in your hair and on the back of your neck and it’ll bean you in the dead center of your forehead.

And you think, okay, yeah, that’s annoying.

That sucks.

But it’s not that bad.

As they say on TV: But wait, there’s more.

The deer fly will not only harass you for a mile, but the deer fly also likes to bite. And again you think, well, lots of bugs like to bite. That seems to be a rather buggy thing to do, in fact. But take special note of the deer fly’s mouthparts: it is basically a pair of scissors. It’s a little knife and it goes snippy-snip across your skin (or even through your clothing) and boy howdy does that hurt like a motherfucker. Then it laps up your blood like a sloppy Labrador eating food someone spilled on the floor. And then it has the option to spread various diseases to you because of course it has diseases. Tularemia and anthrax and something called “hog cholera” which is about the worst sounding thing I’ve ever heard and I would’ve before now assumed it was some kind of sauce you’d find at a Guy Fieri restaurant. (“New Double-Bacon Monkey Wings With Chipotle Dingus-Crisps, Triple-Sextreme Castoreum Squeezin’s, And A Hot Slatherin’ Of Rib-Kickin’ Hog Cholera!”)

Deer flies are also territorial. So they hunt the same area every day.

They’re seasonal, to boot. For us here it starts around June, ends in July. Which is almost two months of me walking my dog or my taking a stroll with the family and being facially assaulted by one or several deer flies at any given time. I wonder what my neighbors must think of me — sometimes I suspect the true conspiratorial intent of the deer fly is to get me to look like a dum-dum in front of other people. As I walk, I’m frequently flailing my arms around like I’m in the throes of endless muscle spasms. Worse, I’m constantly smacking myself in the face, neck, and head as if for the purpose of clumsy, brutish flagellation. They must see me through their windows and think, That guy really doesn’t like himself. Then they lock their doors and hold their children and pets close in case the Strange Smacking Man would ever stray onto their yards or into their homes.

So, the question is, what can one do to thwart them?

Well, you can cover yourself with DEET, but they don’t seem to give an actual shit about it. I guess maybe if I sprayed it right in their eyes like it was pepper spray it might work, but otherwise? They keep on buzzing and biting. Probably be more effective to just cover myself in lighter fluid and fling a match against my chest. Sure, I could cover up — a hat helps, and if I really want to brine myself in my own fluids, I could wander outside in a pair of jeans, boots and a heavy Christmas sweater in the 90-degree summer heat, I guess? Your own personal sweat lodge!

Or, you can do this fucking thing.

See, deer flies are extra-attracted to THINGS THAT ARE BLUE for some indiscernible reason, and further are likely to fly closer to something that is higher than other things.

So, you create a deer fly trap by slathering SOMETHING BLUE in SOMETHING STICKY and then somehow affixing this thing to the top of your head because hey, congratulations, who doesn’t want to look like King Doodoo Dunceworthy of Dinkletown as you’re wandering around the neighborhood walking your dog or having a jog? Just wear this stylish sonofabitch:

LADIES.

Haute couture! You definitely won’t look like an escaped deviant with that thing rocking the top of your skull! You definitely won’t be added to a variety of neighborhood watch lists! It’s fine!

It seems then that the choice is to do nothing. Or, I suppose, I could kidnap a very tall friend and paint him blue and then duck down beside him as I take a run or whatever. Anybody willing to take that bullet for me? I’m only 5’8″, people. I pay well, which is to say, I do not pay actual money but I do have Cheezits and Tim-Tams I would be willing to share.

(Hell, it’s not even just on walks anymore. I literally killed one inside the writing shed this morning. In fact, killing a deer fly gives me a perhaps unreasonable amount of pleasure. Once in a while one will get trapped in my hair or beard and I’ll just batter the fuck out of my own body until it’s dead, and when I have its corpse, I pinch it tight and parade it around, showing it to all the other deer flies. “THIS IS WHAT YOU GET,” I bellow. “FUCK WITH THE BULL AND YOU GET THE–” And then usually another one bites me on the neck or something and I then have to run home like a whelped puppy with tail between legs and fly corpse pinched betwixt fingers.)

Won’t anybody help me defeat my dread nemesis? The winged villain that plagues my journeys?

This bug that is good for nothing?

This extra-special asshole troll of the natural world?

*slaps at head*

*punches self in mouth*

*cries*

SEND HELP OR NAPALM

Hey, kids — I’m extending the REVENGE OF THE AWKWARD AUTHOR PHOTO contest (in which you can win your own death inside a the fifth Miriam Black book) by one week (6/23). I’ve been out of commission for the last almost-week, and haven’t really promo’ed this much. So, giving it one more week for folks to jump in. Put your own spin on an awkward, cliched, silly, weird, or otherwise uncomfortable Author Photo. And then win stuff! Click the link above for tasty deets.

Let’s see, what else?

– The Decatur Book Fest author list is up, and I’m officially on it — alongside authors like Delilah S. Dawson, Richard Kadrey, Daniel Jose Older, and Libba Bray. Also means I’ll be at DragonCon, bee-tee-dubs. Which is a con for dragons, isn’t it? MY BREATH WEAPON IS BEES.

– The first two Heartland books are on sale digitally in the lead-up to the third book. You can buy both Under the Empyrean Sky and Blightborn for $1.99. You can pre-order The Harvest, too, if you’re feeling sassy. The Harvest concludes the trilogy, for those folks not interested in buying a series until it’s all tied-up-tight. Also: for those wondering how I’ll do with Star Wars: Aftermath, well, I think these books are the closest analog presently on shelves.

– Speaking of The Harvest — hey, look, a Goodreads giveaway!

– I have other news I can’t share, so just assume that it’s cool.

– Cover images for THE SHIELD #3! Go see!

– Last thing last — I’m putting my Gonzo E-Book Writing Bundle on sale. It’s eight total e-books on writing, including my newest, 30 Days In The Word Mines. Normally, $20 — but with coupon code ARTHARDERMF, you can drop that price by 25% to $15. Link to the bundle here, if you wanna check it out. Please to enjoy.

*opens DVR*

*casually surfs to GAME OF THRONES*

*selects ‘cancel series’*

*shudders with a sigh of relief*

I’m sorry, Game of Thrones, but I gotta go.

I know, I know. This is an obvious, almost obligatory post after one of the soul-wrecking finales of your show — the post-episode karate-kicking-over-your-television-while-weeping-uncontrollably demonstration. I’m the cartoon office dude flinging his office papers in the air while being all like FUCK THIS SHIT. I’m like that cat who is so done he won’t stop pawing shit off the table. And of course the expectation is, eventually the trauma will recede out to sea and next year I’ll once again tune in like a junkie to see what wacky shenanigans Tyrion is up to.

I’ve been there before, certainly. Where I was thisclose to being done with you, GoT.

And then I come crawling back. Every year.

But not this time, I’m afraid.

(I know, some of you are breathing your own sighs of relief: OH THANK A HOT SACK OF MOIST FUCKERY HE’S DONE WITH THIS SHOW NOW HE CAN COMPLAIN ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE FOR A WHILE. I hear you. I’m sorry for duct-taping you to a chair and yelling all my complaints at you. I learned it by watching you, Ramsay Snowbolton!)

It’s not you, Game of Thrones.

It’s me.

I just spent all weekend in a hospital — my mother took ill and so we buckled her into the Healthcare Express and took her on a ride through the inefficacy and poor communication of the hospital system, and while there you witness even at a distance human suffering with the volume turned way up. Next door was a man who coughed so hard and so loud and so wetly you’d think he was hacking up four soggy cats. Another woman had chronic diverticulitis — a manageable disease, but one that earned her a stay in the hospital for a week with no food. In the ER was a young girl (presumably on drugs) freaking the unholy fuck out — weeping and struggling and fighting — just to see her mother. People in hospitals aren’t there because they’re healthy or happy or just having a laugh. It’s pain all the way down.

And I need to watch some television shows that aren’t all about that. (Or, when they are about pain, they deal with that pain honestly and earnestly and not only as spectacle. The Leftovers is dreary as fuck but it looks long into the eyes of that suffering to try to understand it and to help you understand it, too.)

Like I said: it’s me, not you.

I watched last night with none of the shock I was supposed to feel at the series of deaths that it presented to us, and I felt only general queasiness and fatigue. I felt like I was making a face the whole time, a face like I had repeatedly been made to lick a lollipop that had someone else’s pubic hair glued to it with sugar glaze. I just started to feel like, why am I doing this? Why am I licking this pubic hair lolly? What’s wrong with me?

It’s not that it’s a bad show. To the contrary — it’s often amazing! It sets up these killer moments. It tells a sweeping tale with a confident hand. Some of the characters (though increasingly fewer and fewer for me) are great, complex, funny, tragic, compelling from snout to tail.

But I gotta quit, man. I gotta tap out. I just can’t do it anymore.

Here, in particular, are three areas where the show loses me. It takes these three things and for me, fails to treat them in a way that I can really understand or get behind —

*oh, and here there be spoilers*

…

*no really, spoilers*

…

*hey no, not kidding, back out now*

…

*WON’T YOU TAKE ME TO… SPOILERTOWN?*

1. Women

Obviously, I’ve spoken on this subject before — (We Are Not Things: Mad Max Vs. Game of Thrones). But, yeep, yoinks, yowch. Last night was a pretty good example of how the show hates its audience almost as much as it hates its women characters, which is to say, a great deal, indeed. It was a parade of hurt and humiliation for the women of Game of Thrones.

It was like they were going for a world record.

Let’s just go through the tally.

We open on three little girls being visibly caned. Painfully and with sharp cries. (I almost turned off the episode right there. Some pedophile caning little girls for his own pleasure right out of the gate churned my stomach. Now that I have a child, it’s one of those things that really rattles me.)

Stannis’ wife hangs herself (after helping to burn her own daughter to death last episode).

Melisandre is humiliated by the defeat of Stannis.

Sansa is almost killed by… whatever her name is, Ramsay’s spurned ex-girlfriend. Sansa does little to take her own agency or power here (except to possibly willfully submit to more pain), but no, no, it’s Theon “Reek” Greyjoy the Burninator of Childrens who saves the day and flings the other girl down to the ground where we watch her head thud bloodily against the stone. (Then he leads Sansa to the castle wall where they just jump, because apparently that’s an okay way to leave a castle.) (I also think we can all agree that when Sansa discarded the corkscrew she used to unlock her room door instead of, y’know, jamming that corkscrew into the very tip of Ramsay Snowbolton’s dingus — we all shared some very real collective disappointment.)

Arya goes blind.

The little Lannister girl is killed (?) by the poison of the Sand Snakes just moments after being totally cool about being a child of incest (“Love you too, UncleDad. HRRK–!”)

Dany is taken somewhere and her dragon is a jerkoff and now she’s surrounded by a whooping war-band of… Dothraki? I don’t even know. (What an excellent visual metaphor for how the show treats women, by the way: a bedraggled dragon-queen all alone, surrounded by a noisy tornado of shirtless men of questionable virtue. See also: a metaphor for being a woman on the Internet.)

And then, of course, the 37-minute Cersei “nude walk of shame through the city.” They shave her head bloody, they strip her down and then she marches full-frontally through the city while the entire city proves that it is basically home to a bunch of cave-people as they pelt her with pretty much everything. Which I guess was supposed to be impactful but just started to feel really gross. And again feels a lot like a metaphor for women on that show or on the Internet — BE SHAMED FOR YOUR AGENCY, WOMAN. BE NUDE AND FLUNG WITH CABBAGE, FECES, AND OTHER UNCERTAIN FLUIDS. Hashtag Gamer-Gate!

That last scene was seriously like, 16 hours long. And the show very clearly wanted us to watch every moment of it. Like she was Jesus dragging the Cross through town. If you tried to look away the show reached out and grabbed your chin and demanded you watch. “DON’T YOU LOOK AWAY,” the show growls through its yellow teeth. “DON’T YOU GO TURN ON ADVENTURE TIME, YOU MOTHERFUCKER. YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENS. YOU JUST SEE.”

(I must note that all of this was startlingly well-acted, particularly the bit with Lena Headey as Cersei. And well-written and well-directed and all of that. Again, the problem with the show is not its quality, but rather for me, what it uses its deft skill to portray.)

Compounding this problem is that a lot of the suffering and saving is done by the men — Sansa is saved by Reek, Arya is taught a lesson by Jaqen, Dany is saved by a dragon and then deposited into whirling dudeland, Cersei suffers at the whim of the High Sparrow and then once inside is “saved” by that old creepy necromancer and his new pal, Zombie Mountain Man. Now Dany must be saved by her two dude lovers, and Sansa is in Reek’s hands (remember, he’s a hero even though he burned children alive), Cersei will exact revenge only at the behest of the king, and on and on — it’s women getting hurt and men doing the hurting and the saving.

Brienne, though, hey, she’s still cool.

2. Suffering

The show approaches human suffering with (to me) increasing cheapness. It’s nearly always spectacle and rarely always authentic or honest. That’s okay, usually, for a show like this — though certainly once in a while I like it when genre work actually tries to unpuzzle human emotions rather than just fling itself against them like an animal trapped in a Plexiglass box. Here, though, suffering is nearly always played for spectacle and surprise. They want your jaw to drop and your pants to soak through with pee because omg no they didn’t. But it often feels like they don’t really want to actually deal with the suffering in a meaningful way — it’s quick, mean, almost shallow. (Cersei actually gets close to it, and despite the pain of her walk of shame, Headey actually sells the emotion and makes you sympathetic for one of the most hated characters in the show. And her feelings as a mother are often sharply-drawn.)

Plus, it’s just suffering all the time.

I feel like we need oxygen in the show.

Some humor. Some moments. Some humanity.

You get them here or there, and they’re welcome and well-executed when they come.

But for me: not enough nowadays.

3. Death

The show similarly treats death as spectacle — and it works in that regard, narratively, when you use it sparingly. But the show takes its thematic motto (ALL MEN MUST DIE AND USUALLY PRETTY HORRIBLY IT’S NEVER LIKE A HEART ATTACK OR A SLIP DOWN SOME STAIRS IT’S ALWAYS ‘GUY GETS HIS PENIS CHOPPED OFF AND THEN FIRED THROUGH HIS SKULL WITH A CROSSBOW WIELDED BY THE HOWLING ZOMBIE OF HIS OWN FATHER’) pretty seriously. Almost too seriously and eagerly. Almost like a young Orson Lannister smashing beetles.

This is very much a personal thing but there’s a line you cross where you say oh no no character is safe and then once you kill off too many it becomes no, really, everybody is going to die, so it’s not even worth being surprised anymore, just be resigned to it, yawn, oh another death, oh and there’s another, and another, and that guy, and her, and hey I liked him, and oh she was horrible, and I think I’m going to go have a snack now, please send me a spreadsheet tallying all the dead-people data points in the morning for my recap.

It gets a little boring.

And it’s also somewhat disruptive, narratively speaking. Characters have arcs to fulfill. They are woven into the quilt of the narrative. But when you kill too many of them, the quilt stops demonstrating a pattern — it no longer looks like the end result will be a cohesive thing, a thing of vision and design but just some haphazard tangle of meaningless fabric-scraps. Death robs the narrative of shape and opportunity when used so quickly. Death becomes a series of check-boxes instead of the fulfullment of an arc. It’s bread and circuses. It’s a gladiator arena whose dirt floor is soaked with red.

(And it’s also a problem with TV, I think. So many shows become WHO WILL DIE THIS WEEK rather than WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THE CHARACTERS. Death becomes a titillating expectation. Tune in to find out who gets hit by a car / mauled by a bear / killed by a hobo / crossbowed in the face by a dick-arrow.)

Granted, the show does often try to make the deaths add up — meaning, they culminate tragically, as a result of the character’s actions. They make their beds and then they lie in them, often quite dead. But more and more, it feels like in this storyworld what earns you death is literally anything at all. “Ah, she once looked at Cersei askance. A tragic death is earned again as she is torn apart by Westerosi coyotes on a tavern floor as the tavern patrons watch and visibly masturbate! All deaths are earned! All men must shit themselves upon morbidity! VOOLAR MORGLOBULIN!”)

Death works in the show and it’s woven into the theme.

But for me, it’s again become too much.

I get it. We all die. But the weekly reminder is wearing me down.

And So…

I’m out. Can’t do it anymore. I like grim and I like dark but this feels like grimgrimgrimgrimdarkdarkdark (aka GRRMDRRK™). I can only watch a show like this for so long before I feel gutted. I like the tragic thrill of watching horror movies (and make no mistake, Game of Thrones is basically a medieval mashup of a slasher film and a zombie movie), but horror movies are like, 90 minutes for a reason. Seeing this every week mostly just makes me upset. (See also why I had to check out of both the comic book and the show of The Walking Dead.)

It’s a shame, because it’s a show with some truly wild, wonderful moments — the riding of dragons and the death of gloriously cartoonishly evil villains and that super-amazing-bad-ass scene of all those scary-ass White Walkers pouring over the walls as they attack Jon Snow and the Wildlings (pro-tip: new band name if Scalzi doesn’t steal it first).

But I gotta say bye.

It’s okay if you still like it! No judgment. This is about me, not about you. It’s still a great show. Talented people are making it awesome every week. You do you. Me do me.

Maybe after the show is all done I’ll binge watch the horror and purge the toxins.

But week to week, can’t do it anymore.

Because right now, I’m rooting for the White Walkers.

*holds up foam finger*

*White Walkers #1*

woooooooo

So many stories begin with a dead body.

A dead body is a gateway to mystery.

A story to be solved.

The aftermath of incident that leads to further incident.

It works across a variety of genres, a plethora of storytelling styles.

Dead bodies: they do a story good.

AND SO, today’s flash fiction is precisely that — I want you to take your story and it must begin with a dead body. That’s it. That’s the only stipulation. In the first paragraph you must introduce a dead body. Doesn’t matter the context or the genre. But you gotta check that box marked

[ ] DEAD BODY.

You get 1000 words, as usual. Due by the 19th, at noon EST. Post the story at your online space, then drop a link in the comments below so we can all go check it out.

Begin.

Ashley McKenna is a blunt instrument. Find someone, scare someone, carry something; point him at the job, he gets it done. He generally accepts money upon completion, though a bottle of whiskey works, too — he’s comfortable working on a barter system. It’s not the career he dreamed about (archeologist) but it keeps him comfortable in his ever-changing East Village neighborhood.

That’s until Chell, the woman he loves, leaves him a voicemail looking for help–a voicemail he gets two hours after her body is found. Ash hunts for her killer with the grace of a wrecking ball, running afoul of a drag queen crime lord and stumbling into a hard-boiled role playing game that might be connected to a hipster turf war.

Along the way, he’s forced to face the memories of his tumultuous relationship with Chell, his unresolved anger over his father’s death… and the consequences of his own violent tendencies.

***

SOMETIMES YOU NEED TO BURN IT DOWN AND START AGAIN

I finished the book. Or, I thought I finished the book. It was three years of work and I was done. I sent it out and a bunch of agents rejected it, but that’s the game. I wasn’t worried. Then a very cool writer I admire a great deal—a New York Times best-seller!—offered to read it.

And he said I needed a page one rewrite. There were a lot of things he liked, but he also pointed out spots where I lost the plot or dropped the ball. He saw the potential and encouraged me to really take it back to the beginning and rethink it.

I was devastated. I thought I was ready to move on to the next step. My life was sunshine and butterflies and a fat contract right over the horizon.

Then I got over myself and rewrote the damn thing. That was the rewrite that won me an agent, and then a deal, and then another deal (ho-ho, we’ll get to that in a second). It’s a better book thanks to that author’s input, and his pushing me to work harder.

Sometimes the answer you need is not the answer you want, but it’s the answer you’ve got—so you have to put your head down and do the work.

BAD THINGS HAPPEN AND IT’S NOT THE END OF THE WORLD

I signed with a publisher. They loved the book! They loved the pitch for the sequel—which I hadn’t even written yet—and bought that one too! My entire life was thunder!

They never sent out the advance check. I’m a patient guy, and figured it would be fine. Then I didn’t get edits or a cover. Okay, this is the new face of publishing. They shall move swiftly and surely any day now. At six months out, with nothing in hand, I got scared. And then I got the call: The imprint was closing and canceling my contract. I went from a two book deal to a no book deal.

Remember how sad I got when I was told I needed a major rewrite? This was apocalyptic. After I got off the phone with my (ex) editor, I went outside and sat on the sidewalk, convinced this was the end of my foray into publishing, and tried to not cry. I know it’s just a book, and this world is full of terrible things, but nothing in my life hurt the way that hurt.

The next day my wife and I walked down to the hospital to have the first sonogram for our impending snorflebeast. I heard her heartbeat. A little tiny baby heartbeat!

It’s exactly what I needed at that moment. A reminder that things aren’t so bad. My agent got me back in the game. Publishers even came knocking on our door.

Sometimes bad shit happens. That doesn’t mean bad shit is always going to happen. And sometimes the bad shit turns out to be good shit. Because now I’ve got an even better deal.

PERSPECTIVE MATTERS

Regret is a strong word and I’m not going to use it. But there’s a part of me that feels uneasy, in retrospect, about the inciting incident of New Yorked. Ash McKenna’s story is set into motion by the rape and murder of Chell, the woman he loved.

On one hand, the book is about death and cycles of violence and how to cope with grief without shattering someone’s jaw. On the other hand, the “dead woman as plot motivator” is such a common trope, especially in crime fiction, I’m sure I’ll invite a few unkind comments. I might even deserve a few.

I understand as a straight white writer dude, there are times where I need to think about my perspective and approach. Still, this is the story I’ve told and I’m proud of it. Chell is stronger than tough-guy, wannabe-PI Ash. I worked hard to get that across. And she’s the one who saves him, even though it takes him years to recognize that it happened.

This has influenced how I’m approaching future work. New Yorked is the start of what I hope will be a five-book series. I’m done with the second (City of Rose, coming early 2016 y’all!), and as I’m sketching out the final three entries, I’m staying far away from putting women in peril. I don’t want to be the “violence against women” guy.

Because the first book taught me that perspective matters. As a storyteller, you can’t make your reader feel devalued—no matter who your reader is.

Unless that reader is a Nazi. Nazis are fair game for ridicule.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS DIVINE INSPIRATION

I spent most of my 20s waiting for divine inspiration before I put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard keys). The time of day had to be perfect and I needed to have drunken just enough wine but not too much, and the planets needed to be aligned just so…

You know how much writing I got done?

Not much. Hardly any, in fact.

Writing is work. It’s fun work—you get paid to make up weird shit in your head!—but it’s still work. And sometimes you need to knuckle down and write. Even if you don’t want to. Even if the words aren’t coming. You need something on the page.

Drafts do not rain from heaven on the wings of inspiration angels. Drafts come from applying your ass to a chair and writing like a motherfucker.

Don’t believe me? Let’s look at the numbers.

New Yorked – Five years and 20+ rewrites

City of Rose – Six months and three rewrites

Sure, the second book came a little easier because I found my voice and my process. But I also had a deadline and treated it like a job. An awesome job that I love, but a job none the less.

THE POWER OF TOUCH

You’ve heard a lot of this advice before. Writing is a job! Perspective Matters! Et cetera!

Here’s something I hope you haven’t heard before: How much touch matters.

This is a thing I learned two years ago in Tom Spanbauer’s workshop, Dangerous Writing. An incredible opportunity, given that Tom is one of this generation’s great living authors (read In the City of Shy Hunters and tell me I’m wrong, I fucking dare you).

Dangerous Writing is about telling the truth, because fiction is the lie that tells the truth truer. Tom has been teaching the workshop for years (counted among his students is Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club) and while I learned a great many things in Tom’s basement that weekend, the thing that sticks with me is the power of touch.

It is so rare that we get touched. Think about that. How many times are you touched during the day? By loved ones, by strangers, by friends—whoever. Touch means something. It transfers power. It can be a moment that stands in time.

We were still on sub after I finished that class, but I asked my agent if I could do a quick pass on the book. I wanted to apply what I learned in Tom’s workshop. And all those moments of touch jumped out at me. I never really thought of them before, and now I was finding another layer of meaning in the work.

Another way to dig deep into emotional truth.

* * *

Rob Hart is the author of The Last Safe Place: A Zombie Novella. His short stories have appeared in Thuglit, Needle, Shotgun Honey, All Due Respect, Helix Literary Magazine, and Joyland. His debut novel, New Yorked, will be released in June 2015, with the sequel, City of Rose, to follow in early 2016.

Rob Hart: Website | Twitter | Facebook

New Yorked: Amazon | B&N | iTunes | Kobo | Google | Powell’s

Here’s how the Internet kinda works.

I have something that I think is cool or interesting or that I desperately wish people would recognize. I have this thing — think of it as a beach ball or some kind of many-pronged sex gizmo or perhaps the glowing briefcase from Pulp Fiction — and I’m trying to get other people to take it. I want them to grab it and then pass it along. It’s like a funky little game of Whisper Down The Lane except for the most part, the information remains intact. It is, in its way, a viral transmission: a bacterial replication of information. A graphic I think is funny. A blog post I wrote. A ghost story about cats. An article espousing the propaganda I believe about vaccinated GMO grandmother hipsters. A campaign to raise money for toilet dogs — meaning, dogs found in toilets who now must be rehabilitated to live once more among people and other dogs, acclimated anew to Life Outside Big Porcelain. This is memetic transference: the epidemic of ideas.

We are all nodes on this network of sharing.

Some of us are doorways — open for the transmission of pretty much whatever. Our door is mostly open and we pretty much hand shit through that open space day and night.

Some of us are walls with tiny windows or little boltholes in our brick. We block most everything except a tiny extruded Play-Doh tube of meager information that we find somehow vital.

Some of us are kept gates: portcullises monitored to make sure whoever comes into our castle isn’t covered in plague buboes or won’t try to sell us on cults or Tupperware or meat sold out of a van.

I received an email the other day about some… writing thing. A website with a free something and a contest for something and something-something I don’t fucking know. But one sentence in that email struck me: “I’m contacting you because you represent the doorway to a larger audience.” (The email also used words like “micropublicity” and “a bonafide movement” and then also said he’d shout-out my blog and also hey he wrote a novel too well what a shocker! Ahem.)

Here’s the thing:

I do not represent the doorway to a larger audience.

You people reading this are my audience.

And I am not the way to get to you.

What I mean is this — I am not going to take any old thing handed to me and just jam it into your hands. “Here, someone gave me this because I am a doorway to you,” I mumble as I hand you a jizz-hardened mitten filled with old potato salad. “Someone said I should share this so I am sharing it.” And then I use your hands to give the mitten a good squish.

I despise the word “tastemaker” with the heat of a thousand fire ants nibbling my perineum, because I have little interest in somehow making tastes or setting trends. But what I am interested in is being a trusted source for… well, whatever. Good books or smart ideas or tasty coffee or the finest animated GIFs the world has ever seen. I curate what I pass along.

My social media footprint these days is bigger than I had anticipated. This is inadvertent bragging time, but I now have over 40k Twitter followers and almost 8k subscribers to this blog and 10k of additional visitors to this space daily. Which means over 3 million visits annually. I think I’m operating at 0.3 Scalzis? Something like that. Point is, for whatever reason, you poor misguided mooncalves keep on coming back here and hearing whatever inane shit I have to say and share with some regularity.

I thank you for that.

And one of the ways I thank you — or try to, anyway — is by not sharing total garbage. Or even passing along anything that has the potential to be secret garbage — like, “Oh, look, a pretty vase, OH GOD WHY DIDN’T ANYBODY LOOK INSIDE IT’S A SCORPION ORGY THEIR LITTLE LEGS AND BITS SCRAPING AND TINKING AGAINST THE CERAMIC NOOOOO WHY CHUCK WHYYYYYY.” I don’t have the time to curate everything you want me to to share. And I get a lot of requests to share things — writing contests, events, charities, pleas for financial aid, self-published books, and on and on. Sometimes people are trying to engage me by talking to me directly, and sometimes it’s folks just throwing spaghetti at the wall that is Wendig and seeing if anything sticks. They don’t even bother engaging. They’re just trying to hand off their Internet Thing in a dark room and hoping somebody like me will be dumb enough to grab it and sleepily pass it along.

So, this is why I won’t share the thing you want me to share.

I don’t know it and I don’t trust it.

I won’t share your writing contest. Or your publishing opportunity.

I won’t share your book no matter how you published it.

I won’t share your GoFundMe campaign to rehabilitate Toilet Dogs.

I won’t share your IndieGogo campaign to fund a smartwatch that also contains Nano-Bees to attack your enemies okay wait I might actually fund that one so bounce me an email, okay?

I won’t share most of the things you’re going to ask me to share.

Because I don’t know you and I don’t have the time to curate. That curation would become literally a full-time job. I have a hard enough time answering my actually important emails — how am I supposed to vet your plea for charity? I won’t even donate to or recommend an actual charity without first running it through CharityNavigator. How am I supposed to know that you’re not going to take the money you raise and fuck off to Fiji for 10 days? No, no, I’m sure you’re not a scammer — but everyone else is, so how am I supposed to know?

In this game of viral memetic transmission, I like to cover my mouth when I’m talking with you. Meaning, I won’t just cough on you and pass along any old cold. You won’t just get boring old warts from me, my friends. If I share any of my diseases, it will be the good stuff. The primo vintage gonorrhea. The rare flu that killed all those bats that one time. A very special Norovirus from a cruise ship featuring that celebrity you love so you can have the same diarrhea as Donnie Wahlberg or I dunno, whoever. Only the best for you, my darlings. Only the best.

Note: all this changes if we actually know each other. I’ll endeavor to take that time if we’re friends or, at the very least, friendly online (though no promises, of course). But otherwise? Your pleas to share things will thud against me like a shoe thrown at a bear’s head. It will drop into the mud, unregarded and ignored. And then I will eat you because I am an actual bear.

I am not, however, your doorway.