When countryboy Teo arrives in the coastal city of Tabat, he finds it a hostile place, particularly to a boy hiding an enormous secret. It’s also a city in turmoil, thanks to an ancient accord to change governments and the rising demands of Beasts, the Unicorns, Dryads, Minotaurs and other magical creature on whose labor and bodies Tabat depends. And worst of all, it’s a city dedicated to killing Shifters, the race whose blood Teo bears. 

When his fate becomes woven with that of Tabat’s most famous gladiator, Bella Kanto, his existence becomes even more imperiled. Kanto’s magical battle determines the weather each year, and the wealthy merchants are tired of the long winters she’s brought. Can Teo and Bella save each other from the plots that are closing in on them from all sides?

IF YOU’RE A WRITER, YOU’RE IN IT FOR THE LONG HAUL

The book that’s coming out in April, Beasts of Tabat, is one that I’ve been working on, in one form or another, since the fall of 2005. (And before you ask, yes boy howdy, it’s extremely satisfying to see it finally coming into print.)

I put one version aside, came back to it, wrote three other novels, but kept returning, incorporating what I was learning over a long span of time. In this I’ve differed from some friends who I’ve seen publish longer works faster, but the thing that’s kept being emphasized is that writing is a marathon, not a sprint, and it’s okay to pace yourself accordingly.

One of the nice things about all that labor is that a) the three following books are mapped out (at least the overall highlights) and b) book number two, Hearts of Tabat, arrived partially written already because it focuses on two characters who got shifted out of Beasts. So a lot of it is written — it’s just that I still need to make it make sense on the page as well as it does in my head.

Even when finished, it kept being a long haul. I sent it off to my agent, he shopped it around, and there weren’t any offers that didn’t feel a bit exploitative to the point where neither he nor I wanted to say yes. That took a year and a half and if I hadn’t started working on something else immediately after handing it off, I would have gone crazy, I think. It helps to have worked in software — you gotta ship that product and then move onto the next thing.

TO THY OWNSELF BE TRUE IS ON THE MARK

I learned that you can be true to yourself and worry later about the publishing. I wrote the book I wanted to write, in a world that has fascinated me ever since I first set a story in it, and I wrote an unlikely pair of protagonists, who I deeply love. This book wanders around in both fantasy and more literary territory in a way that, I hope, will satisfy both kinds of readers. I didn’t try to write a book according to what I thought was marketable, and Beasts is strong in part because of that. There’s sex and violence, and swordfights, and all of the things that make a fantasy novel so much fun, but I put them in -because- they were fun, not because they’re part of a formula.

I don’t mean to make it sound as though I think everyone else is writing to a formula, because that’s not what I’m getting at. What I want to say is, it’s okay to sit down and write and find out what happens. What emerges is a landscape all at once already unfamiliar and totally unknown. Writing by the seat of your pants can yield amazing stuff if you’re willing to look around and readjust your course every once in a while.

YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN

I’ve learned that you can come back to a world over and over again, learning more about it each time. One of the things I’ve found myself doing is assembling the history of the world out of the stories that I’ve written in it so far, I think close to a dozen now, and I’ve found in doing that task that many of those stories fit in some way with the overall novel. In fact, “In the Lesser Southern Isles,” a story that appeared in a pirate anthology called Black Sails and then in my collection Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight, prefigures a good part of Book Three, tentatively titled Exiles of Tabat.

One of the concepts key to the book came out of a short story of mine that Clarkesworld Magazine published, called “I’ll Gnaw Your Bones, the Manticore Said.” It’s a detail that stuck with me, and in the novel we learn more about it and the people who’ve employed. (I apologize for being ambiguous, but I hate spoilers.)

The city is almost as much a character as any other, and one of the things I love about it is the history of it that I’ve developed over time, including all the little quirks that make it distinctive, some of which I hope come across in the book. For more of that texture, I’m running some flash pieces set in that world every weekday through the last week of March and the first half of April.

THINGS ARE CHANGING

Not so much in the writing, but in the selling, I learned a lot about the ways that publishing is changing. I’m publishing Beasts with a small press, Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta’s Wordfire Press. I’d published two collections with small presses before then and learned that I had to do a lot of things myself, but refreshingly enough, Wordfire isn’t like that. It is one of the most professional outfits I’ve worked with, actually, and one of the things I’m looking forward to seeing at Emerald City Comic Con is how they use their booth to push books as well as awareness of the press.

NETWORKING = DOUBLE PLUS GOOD

I learned that networking really is important. I sold the book myself due to a chance conversation at MileHighCon in Denver when my spouse and I stopped there on our way through town. And now that I’m trying to push the book, a lot of the contacts that I’ve made in the past are coming into play.

One of the fun things is that the book owes a good bit to a session of Taos Toolbox where Saladin Ahmed was workshopping Throne of the Crescent Moon and Scott Andrews was thinking about forming an online magazine that would become Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Now the book’s got a lovely blurb from Saladin on the cover, and Scott is running a companion novelette, “Primaflora’s Journey,” in April along with a book giveaway.

I’ve tried to go to places where I knew I had fans already is promoting it — as another example, there’ll be another piece of fiction, a flash story called “A Souvenir of Tabat” will be appearing as a free read on Quarterreads.com, where I’ve published a lot of flash pieces for the first week the book’s around. I’m not saying that writers should be meticulously tracking who owes them favors — but when it comes time to promote a book, it’s a good time to see who you feel comfortable enlisting and spending a little time putting together that roster.

 * * *

Cat Rambo lives, writes, and teaches by the shores of an eagle-haunted lake in the Pacific Northwest. Her fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Tor.com as well as three collections and her latest work, the novel Beasts of Tabat. Her short story, “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain,” from her story collection Near + Far (Hydra House Books), was a 2012 Nebula nominee. Her editorship of Fantasy Magazine earned her a World Fantasy Award nomination in 2012. She is the current Vice President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. For more about her, as well as links to her fiction, see:

Cat Rambo: Website | Tumblr | Twitter

Beasts of Tabat: Amazon | Wordfire

There exists a new app called Clean Reader.

The function of Clean Reader is to scrub the profanity from e-books.

Their tagline: “Read books. Not profanity.”

You can dial in how much of the profanity you want gone from the books.

Author Joanne Harris has roundly (and to my mind, correctly) condemned the app, and I would recommend you read about her and condemnation. I would further suggest you go on and read the email she received from the Clean Reader people and, more importantly, her response to that email. (Oh, also: check her tweets, too: @JoanneChocolat.)

I am an author where much of my work utilizes profanity. Because fuck yeah, profanity. Profanity is a circus of language. It’s a drunken trapeze act. It’s clowns on fire. And let’s be clear up front: profanity is not separate from language. It is not lazy language. It is language. Just another part of it. Vulgarity has merit. It is expressive. It is emotive. It is metaphor.

So, as someone with a whole pig wagon full of fucks at stake, let be be clear:

Fuck you, Clean Reader.

*cups hand to mouth*

Fuuuuuuck. Yoooooooou.

*fuckecho through the canyon of fucks*

Please let me condemn your app in whatever obscene gesture you find most obscene.

Let me unpack this a little.

When I write a book, I write it a certain way. I paint with words. Those words are chosen. They do not happen randomly. The words and sentences and paragraphs are the threads of the story, and when you pluck one thread from the sweater, the whole thing threatens to unravel — or, at least, becomes damaged. You may say, Well, Mister Wendig, surely your books do not require the profanity, to which I say, fuck you for thinking that they don’t. If I chose it, and the editor and I agree to keep it, then damn right it’s required. It’s no less required than a line of dialogue, or a scene of action, or a description of a goddamn motherfucking lamp. Sure, my book could exist without that dialogue, that action, that goddamn motherfucking lamp.

But I don’t want it to. That’s your book, not my book.

My consent matters when it comes to the book.

If changes are necessary to the book — then I consent to making them.

An editor sends me edits, I can say whether those edits fly or not.

Just as the publisher can consent to the book they publish.

That’s the deal. That’s how this works.

And here you may say:

But what of the consent of the reader?

To which I respond:

Your consent as a reader is being able to pick up the book or not. Your consent as a reader comes into play as to whether or not you put down that book at some point throughout because something within it was objectionable: bad story, unlikeable protagonist, toxic ideas, or even yes, crass and septic vulgarity. That’s the contract the reader and the author share, and this is true with books and movies and comics and really all stories. You consent to buying the ticket. I consent to taking you on the ride. Neither of us get to modify that contract halfway in. We don’t get to change the experience unless somehow the engine of change is built into the content (as with many games). You can’t change the story. I can’t steal your book.

(Here I’ll note that on an individual level, if you really want to go through my book and hand-edit out the profanity, fine. Thing is, you still have to read the profanity to do that — and that means not relying on an app to categorically and programmatically make edits to the text.)

You may say, But I want to read your books, just without all that nasty business.

To which I say, then I don’t want you reading my books. Nothing personal, but I wrote the thing the way I wrote the thing. If that troubles you, then I don’t want you reading it. No harm, no foul. Surely there are other sanitized, anesthetized stories that will grant you greater comfort. But don’t sanitize mine. Don’t anesthetize my work or the work of any author. Do not take that consent away from us. It is immoral. Is it illegal? That, I don’t know, but honestly, I’m hoping it turns out to be true (as honestly, I’d want this thing shut down).

I’m not a fan of slippery slopes, but programmatically removing or changing information from a book? It’s bad shenanigans. Given that this app seems custom-made to serve Christian ideals (see: replacing “bitch” with “witch”) where does it stop? Cutting out an abortion scene and replacing it with a scene where the child survives? Moving a sex scene and replacing it with a scene where the young couple sits and quietly reads the Bible? If a character is objectionable, will you replace it with a goddamn motherfucking lamp so that it doth not offend?

(Sorry, I mean, “Gosh-darn Monday-through-Friday lamp.”)

Look at their website, where on their blog they note that author Mark Henshaw “…makes it a point to write well enough that he doesn’t need to include profanity in his writing.”

Oh, no you didn’t.

Conflating quality with a lack of profanity?

*vomits up a whole bag of middle fingers and dumps them into your lap*

In another blog post, they talk of this like you’re just someone ordering food at a restaurant: oh, ha ha, I don’t like blue cheese so I just order my food without it, and this is exactly like that. Except yeah, no, it’s not. Never mind the problem with conflating food you buy and books you read, let’s instead assume that if you find blue cheese so categorically offensive that you shouldn’t order food with blue cheese in it. Chefs fucking hate when you order food with inane substitutions. Instead of viewing our books like customizable meals, let’s instead pretend like our words are the ingredients list on a procured food product — just because you don’t like maltodextrin doesn’t mean I can whimsically pluck it out without the chemical composition of the food product falling apart. It’s in there. Too late. Don’t like it, don’t buy it.

Their purpose in creating the app was:

“One day our oldest child came home from school and she was a little sad.  We asked her what was wrong and she said she had been reading a book during library time and it had a few swear words in it.  She really liked the book but not the swear words.  We told her that there was probably an app for this type of thing that would replace profanity with less offensive words and perhaps we should get her a tablet that she could use to read books with.  To our surprise there wasn’t an app like this.  The more we thought about this idea the more we wanted it to be a reality.  Eventually we decided we would do all we could to bring Clean Reader to the world.  We’ve been putting as much time and money into it as we could over the last few years and we’re excited to see it launch soon!”

Hey, listen, I have a kid. He’s not even four. I don’t edit the material that reaches his eyes. I control the flow of that information and when something lands in front of him that’s deep or confusing or in conflict to my beliefs, I don’t water it down. We talk about it. My son isn’t even four and we can have conversations about it. That discussion is meaningful. Far, far more meaningful than if I had simply edited out unlikable material and replaced it with something more comfortable. (You’d be surprised how often this happens even with kids books — children’s books are surprisingly judgeypants toward obesity, and as such, requires some discussion with the boy.) What books are these people letting their fourth grader read? “This book, Requiem for a Dream, sounded so polite. I mean, requiems! And dreams! But it wasn’t! No, sir, it wasn’t! What poppycock! Wait, is poppycock profane? There’s that word, ‘cock’ and so we must create an app to find all the ‘cocks’ and replace them with pictures of happy chickens. Chickens can’t be offensive! Especially because they’re so delicious, at least when nobody has put that blasphemous blue cheese all over them ha ha ha condemn Satan praise God burn foul-mouthed witches.”)

Education isn’t about concealment of information. It isn’t about the eradication or modification of offensive language, or ideas, or information. It’s about presenting truth when a child or an adult are ready to hear it, and then talking about it. Anything else is how you get Jesus riding dinosaurs, or a loss of climate change, or the eradication of women or people of color from the pages of history, all because it doesn’t line up with preconceived notions and pre-existing comfort levels.

Stories aren’t bulletin boards. You don’t pull down thumbtacked bits and replace them with your own. And that’s what this app does — it doesn’t merely censor. It edits. It changes. You can’t do that. Changes cascade. It’s like stepping on a butterfly in the past and waking up to a future where a T-Rex is your accountant. Stories aren’t echo chambers. They’re wild, untamed, unkempt territory. You don’t get to prune it into a bonsai shape that you prefer.

Authors write the books they want to write.

And you can read them as they are written.

That’s it. Game over.

You want differently?

Go buy Mad Libs. They let you insert whatever fucking words you like.

Well, fuck.

Yesterday, I said, Hey, Ask Me For Advice.

And a lot of you jumped in and asked great questions.

Which is awesome. It’s gonna take me some time to pick through and find suitable questions with answers that I pluck indelicately from my most hindmost netherquarters.

But between the comments section and the Tumblr page, one big question stood out:

SHOULD I QUIT WRITING?

Ahhhh.

Uhhh.

Whhh… ennnh whhh… well.

*whistles*

That’s a hot humdinger of a question, isn’t it?

Let’s get this out of the way right now: I am not qualified to answer this question. You should probably not listen to anything I have to say on this subject. Your entire writing life and career should not hinge on anything that comes oozing out of my beard-hole.

My answer to this is a completely unhelpful YES and NO.

Let’s start with the “no.”

I say to you, no, you should not quit. Quitters are assholes. You try to quit, and I will hunt you down and I will break your legs with karate. I will literally ruin your legs so bad they will be like tube socks filled with rice pudding. And I will take your broken, shitty, quit-ass body and I will plunk you down onto an office chair. I will bolt the office chair to the floor. I will staple-gun your wrecked body to that chair. I will boot up the word processor of your choice. And then I will watch you write. Your fingers aren’t karate-broken, are they? NO THEY ARE NOT. You will write 2000 words or I will explode you with grenades. Because writers gonna write. Writers gonna write right now, if these hand grenades and karate have anything to do with it. Thus I will confirm that you will do the opposite of quitting which is anti-quitting which is to say you will make a LEGAL SOUL COMMITMENT to write a little something every day even if it’s ten goddamn fucking words and if you fail to make this commitment your soul is forfeit to me and I will use your soul for whatever grim and salacious purpose I can imagine on that particular day.

Now, let’s go the other way — let’s check in with “yes.”

YES, you should jolly well motherfucking quit. If you’re seriously asking me if you should quit, then that’s it — that’s your answer. Quit now. Give up. Goodbye. You even asking that question is a sign that you already have all that you need to know. Oh, what, you’re not good enough? Probably true. You’re not. See ya. Don’t let the door hitcha where the ANCIENT GOD MITHRAS splitcha. What, you think every writer who wants to be a writer can and should be a writer? Mmmmnope. Some folks can’t hack it. Maybe that’s you. Maybe you’re meant to be a painter, or a rocket scientist, or a horse jockey. I don’t know. I don’t care. The road behind is littered with scads of writers who couldn’t put it together. I always say that a creative career is you putting a bucket on your head and trying to headbutt your way through a brick wall. Sometimes you get through, but most times? The wall wins. Quit now. Save yourself the headache.

Both of those answers are bullshit.

Because I don’t know you. I don’t know your heart. I only know my heart, or rather, I know the soot-black thatch of dead birds I call a heart. And I know that I have been writing since I was 18, which means I have been writing for 21 years, which means I have been writing for longer than the period where I wasn’t writing. (Further, let’s be clear that even during the first 18 years of my life I was writing — I wrote my first ‘book’ in like, fifth grade or something. It was horrible.)

Now, that may sound like, God, he’s been writing for that long, he’s really got it together. But I want you to realize that my goal from the age of 18 was to be a novelist, and I also want you to realize that my first novel was published in 2011, which means that I was a failed novelist for — *does some quick math* — 4,591 years.

Okay, that can’t be accurate.

*asks wife to do math for him*

There we go. I was a failed novelist for 17 years.

That is not a short amount of time.

That is a rather long time to dick up the thing I thought I was meant to do.

Yes, okay, for a period of about ten years in there, I did quite a bit of freelancing for pen-and-paper roleplaying games, so by some metric I was still a successful writer. But just the same, the thing I really wanted to do — write novels and maybe short stories — was a thing at which I failed repeatedly. I wrote lots of shitty unfinished novels. I wrote a handful of shitty finished novels. I ejaculated into the world a crass spray of horrible short stories. Sometimes I made incremental improvements. Sometimes I took steps backward and felt like I was making worse “art” than I had been producing five years prior. I mean, Blackbirds alone was a novel that took me five years to write. Hell, it took me five years to finish one complete draft.

Five years.

Also not a short amount of time. I mean, okay, short in the grand scheme of all temporal existence. But five years is still a pretty good stretch of road, you dig?

And along that way, I thought more than one time:

I should quit.

Should I quit?

Probably should quit.

I’m gonna quit.

I’ll do this one last thing and then… ennh that’s it, game over, goodbye.

I’m horrible, I suck, I’m a talentless toad, a worthless wang.

Better to give up than keep embarrassing myself.

And it’s not like the world disagreed with me. Gods, I still have family members who think the life and career I’ve chosen for myself is utterly irresponsible.

Yet, here I am.

Still writing.

Haven’t quit yet.

What’s this mean for you?

Well, again, I have no bloody idea. What it means for you is really up to you. If I had to really force you to consider this and to come to an answer, I’d say, okay, ask yourself three questions:

First: do you actually like writing?

What I mean is, a lot of writers want to write but actually hate the process. And I don’t mean a little bit — we all hate it a little bit. I mean there are writers who consider it an execrable task. They talk about writing like they’re just punching themselves in the face all day, every day. OH GOD HAVE TO WRITE. *punch punch punch* THIS ART WON’T COME OUT OF ME UNLESS I *punch punch punch* BOOKS ARE DUMB WORDS ARE DUMB WHY DO I DO IT *punch punch punch* *teeth clatter on the floor* *the sound of ugly crying*

Some folks will say to me that they hate writing and yet they do it anyway, and hey, more power to them. I don’t see the allure. If writing as a total act is just a long stretch of misery on par with letting a drunken goat perform rectal surgery upon you with his mouth and horns, I’d say that’s a pretty good sign to quit. Not because you’re no good but because the act is no good for you. Life is too short to punish yourself that way.

And it’s worth reiterating here the difference between short-term happiness and long-term satisfaction. Every day of writing is not a jizzy giggle-fest for me. I don’t end every thousand words with a pantsless pirouette. It isn’t rainbows firing from my nipples in glorious prismatic beams. Some days are shitty. Some days I want to just hide under my desk and eat a bowl of chocolate ice cream and by chocolate ice cream I mean chocolate ice cream plus a whole bottle of whiskey. But the overall thing is satisfying to me. I am satisfied by the craft of writing and the art of storytelling. Satisfaction matters. Happiness is an unpredictable bullseye. Satisfaction is like the climate, but happiness is like the weather.

Second: can you envision yourself not writing?

Look ahead. To tomorrow. To next week. To five years from now.

Pretend the life you see is a life without you writing.

If that fills you with dread? That’s telling.

If it fills you with relief? That’s even more telling.

Regardless of making money or being published or whatever, I know that no matter what, I’ll always find a way to tell stories. Break my fingers, cut off my hands, club me in the head with a horsehead bookend (“perhaps man’s highest cultural achievement is the horsehead bookhead“), I’ll still find a way. Will you?

Third: is your goal to write or to be published?

Some writers want to write.

Some writers want to be published.

You can want the latter, as long as you also want the former.

If your only goal is to have a book in your hand with your name on it — if you’re more interested in the romantic notion of *swoons* being a published author (HOLD FOR LAUGHTER), then that’s maybe a sign, too. Writing and storytelling — both the act and the career — are all about the journey. Wanting only to be published is like wanting to read only the end of a book. It’s maybe a sign that you have your priorities twisted up like a pair of wedgie-bound underwear.

Maybe those three questions will help.

Maybe they won’t. If you’re worried about not being good enough? Hey, let’s remember, I wasn’t good enough for 17 years. (If you read some of my negative reviews, then ha ha ha, oops, I’m still not good enough.) You don’t have the skill or the instinct yet. Maybe you haven’t found your voice yet. Keep at it. Eventually you’ll knock over that brick wall if you commit to the vigorous act of endless headbutting. If you’re worried about the business side of it? Best not to agonize over what you cannot control.

So, quit or not to quit?

Like I said, I don’t know you. Not really.

You gotta check your gut. See what gurgles around in there.

Here’s one last thing:

If you’re still not sure? Then quit. Quit right now. Walk away from it this very moment. Because here’s the trick: it’s not permanent. It’s not like I’m asking you to remove the WRITING MICROCHIP from your brain so I can pulverize it with the heel of my boot. Quit writing now and if in a day, a week, a year, you wanna come back? You can. That’s important to realize. If you walk away from it and your life has been enriched by your escape from the shackles of your own miserable expectations — then that’s important to realize, too.

But you can always quit the quitting.

No exile from writing needs to be forever.

And if it is? That’s good, too. Moving onto something else — that has meaning. Not everything we begin is a thing we must finish. The sooner we move the roadblocks out of the way and find the thing we really want to be doing, the better. No harm in quitting, and no harm in keeping on.

Gotta follow your own truth on this one, I’m afraid.

So, I’m hanging out my shingle, here —

Need advice on writerly concerns? The writer life? The business side? Most important of all, the craft of it? Feel free to ask me, and I’ll pick some questions and over time answer them here at the blog in their own posts. (And I suppose you don’t need to keep your questions writing-focused. You wanna ask me about parenting or profanity or whiskey or whatever, hey, feel free. You want to solicit my fool-headed advice on things, I AM HAPPY TO PLY MY PRETEND EXPERTISE.)

What this means is, if you don’t want your question answered publicly: do not ask it.

You can drop the question in the comments section below.

Or, if you’d prefer straight-up anonymity:

Use this function at my Tumblr and ask there.

GET THEE TO THE ASKERY.

This week’s challenge is not one of subject, theme, or other detail — the challenge is simply one of length. Because normally? You get 1000 words. Today? You get only 100. (I think this is technically called a “drabble.” You can call it “Bobo” for all I like.)

So:

Go to your online space.

Post 100 words (no more!) of fiction.

Link back here so we can all see it.

Due by next Friday, 3/27.

That’s it.

I double dog dare you to do it.

(edit: I also double dog my friend, Erin Lynn Jeffreys Hodges, to try it, too.)

Harry Connolly’s an awesome dude — I had the pleasure of including one of his stories in an anthology I edited, Don’t Read This Book, and he’s a real talent. Harry’s out there kicking ass with a series of new novels, and so I’m happy to host him and his thoughts here.

* * *

I’m coming to the end of a long (long) blog tour, and I’ve spent most of it talking about how we write, how we can improve our writing, and the way to analyze stories.

But terribleminds is already full of good writing advice, so I knew that I needed to dig a little deeper when Chuck offered to lend me his space.

Then I saw his pair of posts about talent. I’ve got my own rather unflattering view of talent as a concept, and I agree with Chuck that the best thing any writer can do, no matter where they are in their career, is to study writing as though there’s no such thing.

With that in mind, I want to talk a little bit about the way we study, and the best way to learn.

Recently, I came across a book called Make It Stick: the Science of Successful Learning, by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel (hereafter “BRM”) which gathers up a crapton of recent test results in clinical psychology to lay out what the latest research says is the optimal way to study in order to master a subject.

I know, I know. There are always books like this, and if you’re in education you probably see them zoom by more often than 18-wheelers on an interstate. But, it’s a respectable press and the reviews were solid, so I gave it a try.

And not just for myself. In addition to being a writer, I’m also a homeschooling parent. So, not only have I been trying to adapt the lessons in this book for a lazy, immature student who resents the time that study takes away from computer games, I’ve had to do it for my teenage son, too.

The book is geared toward people in college or beyond who are studying complex academic or vocational subjects; it doesn’t specifically address learning the arts. That complicates things, because writing is full of good/bad/better choices rather than right or wrong answers. Still, I found much that was applicable.

First we should look at Bloom’s (revised) taxonomy of learning, which you can see here on Wikipedia. The most basic layer at the bottom is simply knowing something. Above that, understanding it, then being able to apply it in new situations. The level above that is split in three: Analyze, Evaluate, Create.

So, for instance, if you were to ask me how Seattle can have such mild weather when we’re at the same latitude as the northern part of Maine, I’d tell you that it’s because of our “Oceanic” climate and mountain ranges. Boom, I’m at the lowest layer of Bloom’s taxonomy for that question, but sadly I can’t go higher to actually explain it. I know it has something to do with the jet stream and the Cascades, but the actual mechanics slipped my mind long ago.

The reason why I’ve forgotten is where we hit the first technique that BRM recommend: self-testing. In fact, according to the studies they’ve looked at, high stakes testing designed to measure how much students have learned is not an effective way to teach, but low-stakes testing where students are asked to recall what they’ve learned is an excellent way to reinforce that learning. “Testing interrupts forgetting” is their conclusion.

And it’s not just pop quizzes from teachers, either. Self-quizzing is the basis of study and learning. Trying to find the perfect word for the end of a sentence? Research suggests that making an effort to recall it before looking it up in the dictionary (rather than looking it up immediately) will make the word stick in the memory better.

Research also suggests that lessons that do not require much effort leads to forgetting them quickly. Reading text in a difficult font or that’s slightly blurry leads to better reading comprehension than text in a clear, comfortable font. Being forced to make that effort feels like an impediment to learning because the student experiences it as uncertainty, but studies have shown that, however it may feel at the time, it’s the best way to retain knowledge in the long term.

To apply it to writing, I have stopped being so quick to grab the thesaurus when I know the word I’m about to type is the wrong one. I use it when I have to, but first I spend a minute trying to come up with the right word on my own. Yeah, it slows me down in the short term, but I expect to need it less as time goes on.

Also, when I’m reading, I stop every couple of chapters to review (like study guide questions in school textbooks). What’s happening with the plot? What thematic elements are emerging? What stakes are the characters facing? What tricks is the author using to speed or slow the pace? And so on. If I feel the need to look back at the text to check the way the paragraphs are structured, or to see if there’s a recurring color or image motif, I’ll test my memory first.

The next principle to good study is spacing out practice and what’s called “interleaving.” Basically, to really learn something well, it’s best to self-quiz with a delay between study sessions, so that we can call up and reinforce the knowledge we need to acquire. Also, it’s best to mix up the topic of study.

Therefore, instead of doing several problems on fractions, then several on decimals, then several on negative numbers, it’s best to switch between them. Again, this will feel as though the student is less sure of their knowledge, but mixing the study of math problems (or techniques of famous painters or basketball drills, or…) has proven to be the best way to retain the information, because it lets students compare and contrast problems and their solutions.

This one is harder to apply to writing. I write pretty much every day, and mixing up different sorts of scenes is perfectly natural. One day I’ll be writing a fight scene, the next a mellow scene between friends, the next a tense planning session. Variety is the spice of fiction, and it’s sort of built in.

Except when it isn’t, obviously. If I’m writing 20,000 words of action adventure to wrap up a book, I’m certainly not going to stop every other day to work on a contemplative or funny short story. I’m going to tear through to the ending with as much momentum as I can muster.

However, I am going to apply this principle to my reading. For example, if I want to study up on private investigator novels, I’m not going to tear through a stack of five of them any more. I’m going to mix them up with a police procedural, a heist novel, a romantic thriller, that sort of thing. According to this theory, I’ll learn more about PI novels by comparing and contrasting them with other subgenres than I will by studying them alone.

The final study principle that I’m going to discuss here is what the BRM calls “Generation.” Basically, it involves restating a new piece of knowledge in your own words, or tying it to previous learning, or tying it to your personal life in some way.

I use this trick every time I talk to my wife about a story problem I’m having. Just describing it to her usually makes me realize what the answer should be. Another way to use Generation comes with one of the questions I ask myself when I’m reviewing a book I’m reading: “What do I think should happen next? Where would I take the plot from here?”

Closely related to Generation and self-quizzing is what BRM call “Reflection.” When using Reflection, the student mentally reviews what they’ve learned and assesses how well they know the material. They also try to apply what they know to problems they might foresee.

This is something I do all the time. Before I wrote Child of Fire, I spent several weeks thinking about the best ways to combine crime thrillers with magic. It wasn’t necessarily fun work, but it was invaluable to the success of that novel. Lately I’ve been thinking about those cinematic action heroes that never speak and rarely change their expression. Personally, I find that sort of thing compelling as hell, so sometimes I spend an hour or so (usually during a long walk) trying to figure out how I’d make that work in text without using cinematic POV.

What I’m offering here aren’t tips for better writing; I doubt I could provide better than what Chuck regularly posts. I’m writing about study methods that will help create mastery more efficiently. That’s my goal.

Ob sales note: in the fall of 2013, I ran a Kickstarter for my new trilogy. It was successful.

That series, part apocalyptic thriller, part epic fantasy, was delivered to backers and is now available for sale. Book one received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and a favorable review on Boingboing. Check out the cover:

You can find out more about that first book here, or you can read the sample chapters I’ve posted on my blog.

More recently, I’ve released the last of the stretch goal books from that campaign: a pacifist urban fantasy called A Key, an Egg, an Unfortunate Remark, which features a 65-year-old socialite protagonist who is equal parts Auntie Mame and Gandalf. You can read more about that book, or go straight to the sample chapters.

Thank you.

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Harry Connolly’s debut novel, Child Of Fire, was named to Publishers Weekly’s Best 100 Novels of 2009. For his epic fantasy series The Great Way, he turned to Kickstarter; at the time this was written, it’s the ninth-most-funded Fiction campaign ever. Book one of The Great Way, The Way Into Chaos was published in December, 2014. Book two, The Way Into Magic, was published in January, 2015. The third and final book, The Way Into Darkness, was released on February 3rd, 2015. Harry lives in Seattle with his beloved wife, beloved son, and beloved library system. You can find him online at www.harryjconnolly.com or on Twitter as @byharryconnolly