Behold:

A brand new set of AWKWARD AUTHOR PHOTOS to gaze upon.

Folks entered. A whopping 73 of you, actually.

And holy shit, am I ever laughing.

Anyway — here’s how this works:

You click that link.

You look at the glorious buffet of authorial silliness.

You choose the one photo you believe should win the title of MOST AWKWARD AUTHOR PHOTO.

You take the number of that photo and you pop it into the comments below.

Please make the number of your choice clear. Begin with the number. If you have comments to add, add them after the number, and don’t use any other numbers (“Well, I like 16 but 42 is funny and 37 is awkward but maybe I’ll choose 71”) because I won’t know which one you’re voting for.

Translation: make this easy on me.

You get one vote.

I’ll tally the votes in one week (Wed, July 1st!) and we will have our winners.

DO YOUR CIVIC TERRIBLEMINDS DUTY. (Doody?)

And vote.

Ugh. Publishing stuff. I’d much rather be talking about something else. Anything else, really. Like wombats on hanggliders. Like all the cheeseburgers I have ever eaten. Like this amazing rhubarb barbecue sauce I had last week. Like all of the awesome words you can form just by smashing a mundane word (preferably a noun) up against a vulgar one: cocktrumpet, fuckrelish, jizzglisten, shitnoodles, and so on, and so forth.

But here I am, talking again about Kindle Unlimited.

(Sorry, everyone. Music has Taylor Swift. Publishing has me.)

I do not mind Kindle Unlimited in theory.

In practice, I remain unsold.

Amazon has made changes recently to this subscription program — changes that now say authors in that program will get paid by the page if someone downloads the book through the Kindle Unlimited service. (Note: some articles are going around that suggest that this is how Amazon is paying all authors now, by the page, and that’s just a bag of horseshit that got struck by lightning and is now walking around like it knows a thing or two. It doesn’t.)

This contrasts with how the program originally worked which is that folks reading the book were all paid the same rate once someone read to a certain point in that book (10%). So, if you wrote a 250,000-word epic fantasy brick or if you wrote a 10-page pamphlet on the dangers of ostrich syphilis, when someone reads to 10% of either book, you receive $[INSERT DOLLAR FIGURE BASED ON SOME MYSTERIOUS CALCULATION BASED ON AN OCCULTED ALGORITHM BASED ON THE MAD WHIMS OF WHATEVER INSANE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE THAT RUNS AMAZON.COM]. The payout was once thought to remain steady at a couple-few bucks, but this year hit a new low at $1.33 in March. The guy who wrote the pamphlet gets paid more than a buck if someone reads one page of his syphilitic manifesto. The lady who wrote the bludgeoning weapon known as an epic fantasy book would get paid that same amount if someone read to 25,000 words of the book — roughly the size of a novella.

That sucked and Amazon changed it.

Now, it’s pay-per-page.

I’d argue that this is better. It fixes the weird inequity and stops punishing people who wrote… y’know, actual-size novels. And it stops incentivizing people to write tiny little no-nothing stories, or for writers to break up actual-size novels into hitching seed-spurts of “serial content” (“My novel, THE RAMTHONODOX CONSPIRACY, is broken up into 215 downloadable chapters!”)

So, yeah, it’s better.

I’d also argue that it’s still not great.

Here’s why:

First, the entire program continues to demand exclusivity from those enrolled. Meaning, you still have to be all in with Kindle Unlimited. No direct sales (though some say Amazon doesn’t really watch that closely). No B&N. No nothing. Exclusivity has always in the publishing world been a thing you get paid for — or, should be, anyway. If someone says to you, “I want you to be in with us, and out with everybody else!” then that offer better be an actual offer. It’s not a favor to you — it’s a favor to them. (And it’s why you should be wary of that kind of language inside any traditional publishing contract, by the way. Authors make a living by not being locked down, and if you are a Kept Penmonkey, then you should be paid for that.)

Second, it’s remains based upon some mysterious algorithm. There’s still this “global pool” of KDP Select money which seems to be arbitrary (and going down, down, down), and what you’ll be paid per page every month is not a fixed number. Whether their pool is high but the payout is low due to the sheer number of self-published titles or whether their pool is simply too low to pay those authors well, I don’t know. It’ll probably pay well at the outset and then begin to pay less and less as it goes, which is what happened with Kindle Unlimited. And we have no idea how any of this is calculated going forward. For all we know, there’s a chimpanzee high on DMT throwing darts at a bingo chart taped to the wall. I mean, that’s what I’d do. Hell, that’s what I do now any time I have to make a hard decision. His name is Jeepers P. Montesque, and he wears these frilly suits and fancy boots and — well. I’m digressing.

Third, it takes away the author’s financial independence. So-called “indie” authors (which is in some ways a misnomer because we’re all independent authors, not employees) find power in doing things their own way. It’s one of the reasons I love self-publishing — you have the power to make choices about your book that not every author gets to make. And really, one of the biggest choices is price. The value you choose to assign your book is an author claiming governance over her financial destiny, and she has the power to course correct that price over time. Taking that away from an author is a sin. It robs them of their sovereignty and actually diminishes part of the value of being an author-publisher in the first fucking place.

(Some have noted that this program will also change the way books are written, which is to say, books will become salacious cliffhangers driven toward getting people to turn to the next page. Maybe? I’d argue this is a pretty brittle bone of contention — and I’d further argue books are already written that way. We already want books that are meant to be read quickly and to completion. Books that readers don’t finish are books readers don’t talk about. And books readers don’t talk about are books that will sink and die at the bottom of the ocean. Word-of-mouth matters most above all else, and that means writing books that — gasp — people actually want to read from front to back and then maybe front to back again.)

So, Amazon — you and me, we’re pals. We’re cuddlebuddies, right?

I’m going to fix Kindle Unlimited for you.

I’m going to blow it open and make it awesome for authors.

Ready?

Let’s do this.

a) Remove the exclusivity. Because fuck exclusivity, that’s why. Unless you’re offering me a pony when I sign up for the program, don’t pretend this is some kind of favor to me.

b) Make payouts based on the price that I set for the book. In a perfect world, that means the price I set for my book is the money I get paid when someone completes my book. You can tie it to percentage — so, if they read 15% of my book, I get a 15% payout on the price that I set.

That’s it! Ha ha ha, fixed.

Okay, let’s tackle that second point, because it could present some problems.

It might, for one, encourage high prices — meaning, authors will take whatever books they sell and bump them up to $9.99. Pamphlet about ostrich syphilis? $9.99. Though that’s also a downside for those authors because now their e-books sell for that price, and they have to worry if someone’s going to pay it. Solution to this could be that Amazon could set programmatic limits on the payouts associated with works — meaning, they assert that books that are too short cannot receive the full percentage of the payout. This, probably based on average prices of certain length books — Amazon already calculates that and recommends pricing to author-publishers, after all. So, if your average novella is going for $2.99, maybe it only pays out that much per read.

Another solution would be to pay authors a reduced royalty — a fixed percentage that does not change month to month — of, say, 50% of the price instead of the normal 70%.

The point is that, authors should get to choose their own prices.

That’s always been part of the advantage of being an author-publisher.

And it should remain an advantage, one that cascades through all of Amazon’s programs.

(As a sidenote, some have suggested that Amazon has wonked up the algorithms to help ensure that books enrolled in KDP Select/KU are given more favorable rankings. This is not something easily proven, because again, everything Amazon does behind the wall of their marketplace is shhh seeeecreeeet. For all we know, it’s a hyper-intelligent ant colony deciding what happens. Maybe Jeff Bezos is just a thousand praying mantises stuffed in a skinsuit stuffed in a business suit. UNTIL AMAZON SHOWS US THE TRUTH WE WILL NEVER KNOW.)

Amazon, as always, is a beast to be reckoned with. They single-handedly made independent publishing a bona fide thing. And it’s why I don’t want to see them shitting up what has been ultimately a pretty good deal. Innovation is good. And I think their fix for Kindle Unlimited is a move in the right direction. But it’s still not enough. To me, the program needs to be changed to be more in favor to the authors, and more in line with what traditional authors already get.

*does a sassy version of SHAKE IT OFF*

*crowds run screaming and streaming from the building*

*music cuts short, lights turn on, seats are all empty*

*sad mic drop followed by one lone tear on top*

*bloop*

Quite recently, my four-year-old (the increasingly infamous “B-Dub”) has become enamored of the idea of stories — not just stories you watch or read at bedtime, but the kind of stories we speak aloud and… y’know, just make up. Pulling silly, weird, absurd, even scary things right out of the air — catching them like curious birds and then cupping your hands around them and pulling back one finger at a time to reveal the strange and squirming beast you have made captive.

He wants me to tell him stories, as kids often do of their parents, and because I am both a) interested in his creative development and b) a fundamentally lazy human being, I decided to instead include him in the storytelling act. I don’t just want him to sit passively as I tell him stories; I want him to co-create. I explain to him that it’s his dime and he might as well get the stories he wants — and so before I begin the (usually very short) story, I ask him who the story is about and what’s the situation. Like improv, except with a kooky preschooler who frequently likes to include “poop” and “toots” in the narrative arrangement. The most interesting thing, perhaps, is not just that he helps me tell the story — but if you keep leading him down the road with questions, eventually he ends up telling the story himself.

As such, we’ve developed a rotating cast of regular characters which he has named (and to some degree invested with personality): Detectives Baloney and Hair; their robotic dog, Hamslice; the protective and kind forest monster; Pinky the Bigfoot; another dog named Blue; an animated chair named, duh, Chair; Spot, the Ladybug (also occasionally called Dottie); Snowball, the animated snowball who has a propensity to kill zombies by shooting snowballs from its body; Leafy, a giant talking leaf; Daddy Long-Legs, a spider who everyone thought was a bad guy but is actually a good guy; and Steppy Stone, who is for some reason a stepping stone that talks? Just go with it.

Anyway — so, hey, it’s Father’s Day, right? (Happy Father’s Day to all of you DADs out there with your HOT DADBODS and your CHARCOAL GRILLS and your SKEET SHOOTING and your incompetent portrayal on American TV commercials!) My wife, my wonderful wife, my glorious wife, my amazing wife, went ahead and actually had B-Dub draw up all of his famous little characters and then she bound those drawings together with needle and thread which means holy shit my son wrote his first book.

No, it’s not going to land on any bestseller lists — but hey, neither have I. (Which reminds me hey ha ha ha preorder ZER0ES or I’ll scream.) But it’s amazing and creative and weird and frankly the kid will probably out-sell me in a hot New York minute. I actually don’t know what a hot New York minute is, but I’m guessing it smells like hot dog water and humid, aerosolized rat urine.

I mean, damn, check out the sheer rumpled ruination — the bedraggled world-weariness! — of Detective Hair, pictured above. I want that guy solving my murder, okay? I’m just saying.

You can check out the gallery of his drawings from the book.

And now, another round of:

Things B-Dub Has Said (No Context For You)

– “Sometimes it’s good to do things yourself. But it’s okay to ask for help, too.”

– (on creating a new “game”): “You smell R2D2. Then R2D2 hides. Then you have to smell where he’s hiding.”

– “I’m Blood Spider-Man. I shoot blood. And I drink blood, too. I mean, what else would I drink? Webs? Yuck that sounds awful.”

– “Nobody knows what Wonder Woman eats. Ultron gives you a rash. Iron Man heals it with his Boo-Boo Gun.”

– “I’LL make the cuckoo. YOU make the clock. Let’s go.”

– “I’LL CENSOR THE WEINER.”

– “I WILL BE A FROST GIANT AND I WILL PUNCH HOMES AND OFFICES.”

– “I AM MOPBOT 3000. I PEED MY PANTS. GOODNIGHT MOPPO BOTTO.”

– “Girls can play with trucks, too,” he said, irritated at a commercial for toy trucks aimed at boys.

– “That guy pooped out a monkey, and the monkey pooped out a snake.”

– “If I eat a ton of coconuts, I will become COCONUT MAN.”

– “You Should Give A Cat A Hot Dog And It Will Walk Behind You Forward Or Backward,” he said, deciding that this needs to be a children’s book he should either write or read.

– “Darth Vader is Han Solo’s father.”

– “Daddy? “Yes?” “Do Transformers poop?” #toughcosmicquestions

– “They have hard energon poops,” he said moments later, answering his own question.

– My wife: “It’s time to sit down now and read. Or we can just go to bed.” B-Dub: “Fine. I will sit here on this PILE OF NONSENSE.”

– Him: “Do you want a Cheezit?” Me: “Sure.” Him: “I’ll repulsor-blast one over to you!”

– “I built a laser gun. It shoots lasers, missiles, syrup, and bees. But not all at once.”

– As a morning greeting: “Looks like we’re all powered up with BEES!”

THE OUROBOROS BITES HIS OWN TAIL.

Ahem.

What I mean is, hey, once in a while someone emails me with an idea — “Hey, I think this would make a neat flash fiction challenge!” — and sometimes, that actually pans out. A lot of times, I fall asleep on my keyboard and accidentally delete your email. Sorry!

So, I thought, let’s streamline this process a little.

This week, your challenge is to come up with a flash fiction challenge.

Go to the comments.

Drop in a 100-word-or-less idea for a flash fiction challenge. If I like one and end up using it in the future, I’ll toss you some kind of prize — an e-book or e-book bundle or something. (And here’s where I am shameless and remind you that with coupon code ARTHARDERMF — which is to say, Art Harder, Motherfucker, not ARTHAR DERMF — you can get 25% off my gonzo writing e-book bundle, thus dropping the total cost for eight books down to $15. That coupon expires 6/23.)

(Oh, also — don’t forget the Awkward Author Photo contest runs till Tuesday.)

So, drop in your ideas — one per person, please, if you have it — into the comments below.

You’ve got one week: due by Friday, 6/26, noon EST.

(One more shameless plug: I’ll be at Seton Hill this Saturday, 6/27, in Western PA giving a big-ass writing talk if you care to hear me “Tell It Like It Is.”)

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.