You poor fuckers.

You have no idea what’s coming.

Our baby goat — *is handed note* — sorry, “baby human child” will soon turn four. And you’re saying, “Uhh, it’s a bit early to be warning those of us on the road behind you. You’re like, uhhh, ten feet ahead of us.” And that sounds right. Seems accurate. I’ve got another 14 years or so before we eject this goat child into the real world with a forceful slam of the door (“TIME’S UP, NERD,” I will yell, and fling his stuff on the front lawn and then change all the locks while he’s scrambling to pick up all his weird cyborg porn or whatever’s ‘cool’ in 14 years). And parents ahead of us on the road have been warning us about all the things that will one day manifest in and around our kidling. Some of it has been right. Some of it has been so right, they had no idea. Some of it? Totally wrong. Just the same, I feel like it’s my responsibility to warn those of you with children younger than ours — perhaps even those with children that remain pre-born).

Because I see you.

I see how complacent you are.

For those of you without kids, lemme ask you: can you just like, go somewhere? Can you decide on a whim, “I am going to pee in private, then I will shower, then I plan to leave my house and go out into the world to eat food, dance, take a walk, buy a dog, buy groceries, participate in an orgy, fly a kite, kill a man, meet people, party with those people, buy IKEA furniture for my sex dungeon,” and so on, and so forth? Right. That shit ends.

For those of you with infants or babies: can you put your child down somewhere and be fairly confident that the child will remain in that space for fifteen minutes? If you return to the room, are you comfortable assuming that the child will still be somewhere near to where you left it? You won’t find the TV knocked over, clothes strewn everywhere, the window open with the curtains blowing in a breeze, a postcard from Tijuana stuck to your bedroom mirror with thumbprints of dried strawberry jelly? Yeah, eventually they get mobile.

Kids.

They get loud.

They get mobile.

And most importantly, they get weird.

They get weird quickly. The volume on their Weirdness goes from a 2, maybe a 3, all the way up to 11 pretty fast. Then they break the knob off and stab you in the neck with it.

I like to tell B-Dub stories online, and occasionally folks think I’m making them up.

I am not.

These are true things.

I would like to tell you some of the things we have seen. We are shell-shocked, like people who have witnessed something incomprehensible — an alien abduction, two Yetis making love, or this woman doing this thing with this carrot.

Please behold our tales. And tell others. Tell others what is to come.

Skeletons

The other night, B-Dub says: “There are skeletons everywhere.”

Which is true enough, one supposes, though it’s still pretty creepy when your preschooler just says that shit out of the blue. Either he can peer through our costumes of human meat to see what lurks beneath, or he’s legit seeing skeletons everywhere. And he said it in this kind of non-chalant, one-off way. Like, yeah, so what? Skeletons everywhere.

We thought that might be the end of that, but oh, no.

The next day at lunch, he starts yammering — because that’s a thing our child does now, he out-and-out babbles. Like he got an upgrade to his Language Module and is excited to use it. And he performs this monologue about skeletons, once again in a non-chalant yeah-so-what way:

“I saw a skeleton at the window this morning. And I threw something at him to make him go away. Yeah. And right now there are skeletons everywhere. They’re at the windows. They’re at the doors. There’s some right there.” *he points at the kitchen window* “I’ll punch him.” *he lazily punches both fists at the air* “Yeah. I don’t know where all these skeletons keep coming from. They’re in my room. They’re just like, running around and stuff. Yeah. They’re just so annoying. Sometimes I have to blast them.” *holds up both hands as if he’s shooting lasers out of his palms* “Skeletons. Yeah.”

He says all of this with the near boredom of a plumber describing a plumbing job. Like he’s actively irritated at the invading and presumably imaginary skeletons. I half-expected an eye-roll — and when B-Dub eye-rolls it’s notable — his eyes literally go all the way back and he rotates his entire head on his neck like he’s having a seizure. Don’t believe me? Look:

 

Anyway.

What I’m trying to say is:

There are skeletons everywhere, and my son realizes it.

Skeletons. Yeah.

This Song

Now, B-Dub doesn’t just gabble and yammer.

He sings.

Which is nice. He’s got a surprisingly good voice.

But again, his songs? Super gonzo bonanza weird.

Half the time, they’re total nonsense. Utter gibberish. So much so that I’m fairly certain he’s summoning Outer Entities (who are probably responsible for all these skeletons).

The most recent song goes like this:

FLOMMO GLOPPO!

FLOMMO GLOPPO!

JELLY JELLY!

JELLY JELLY!

That’s his song. I don’t know what it means. I do not know where it comes from. I do know that every time he sings it, the air shimmers, and reality fragments like light through a prism, and I can see squirming things on the other side of the veil — interstitial creatures, mad toddlers from beyond space and time, many-eyed precognitive preschoolers with sticky jam-hands and a hunger for incalculable geometries (and chocolate milk).

Constant Flailing

The boy is constantly moving. Even when he’s sitting still, he is flailing. You will be sitting there in the living room, and one second he’s just hanging out, playing with some LEGO, and next thing you know, he’s somehow on the couch, upside-down. Then he’s in your lap and he’s kneeing you in the face. Then he’s swinging from the ceiling fan. Then he’s piloting an F-111 stealth bomber. Then he’s on the moon. He’s like a teleporting orangutan.

He can’t stop moving. Watching him will make you dizzy. If ever we enter into another energy crisis, I will submit a plan to harness the energy of four-year-olds. Just seven of those wiggly little weirdos could power an entire city with all that kinetic razzmatazz.

That’s right. I said “razzmatazz.”

It’s scientific, you wouldn’t understand.

The Poop Reversal

Poop is still a hot topic at our house, which I suppose is good news because I find it endlessly hilarious. B-Dub will sometimes just go on a litany of poop-related phrases, “Duck poop, poop butt, TV poop, Hulk poop, poop doggy,” and on and on. One of his favorite activities at present is me firing up SIRI on the iPhone and then we say these poop-related phrases to her. SIRI responds by telling us we’re not being very nice, and B-Dub cracks up.

But poop isn’t just a topic of conversation.

It’s a way of life.

Earlier I noted that kids go through these bizarre and unexpected phases, some of them quite short. One of B-Dub’s phases was: “Refusing to poop.” Which led eventually to him having to poop so much and so bad that what he deposited in the potty looked to belong not to a tiny human but rather a morbidly-obese, pizza-roll-addicted yak.

As I said, we tried incentivizing the process.

A few weeks ago, we switched gears and changed the incentive.

It was these crunchy chocolate “rocks.”

It became these little chocolate hearts.

Hardly a change at all, right?

It worked.

It worked well.

It worked too well.

Now, our child has developed super-human control over how much he poops. It’s as if his butt is a paper cutter, like he has robotic control where he can leave behind a turd that is roughly the size and shape of a slice of hot dog. Then he’s all, “Hey, look! I pooped! GUESS IT’S TIME FOR MORE CHOCOLATE.” And we scrounge up a tiny piece of chocolate and he eats it greedily like he’s Gollum with a fresh-caught trout in his hands. It happens like, 47 times a day. We are going to give our child diabetes because of how much chocolate he gets to eat because of his newfound preternatural poop control. Once more we pull back the incentive in the hopes that the habit has taken and that he will shake the POOP = CHOCOLATE habit before he reaches adulthood because otherwise, man, his life will maintain its current weirdness trajectory. (“Hey, boss? I just took a poopy in the men’s bathroom. Don’t look at me like that. Just hand over the Snickers. It’s my reward. GIVE ME THE GODDAMN SNICKERS, OLD MAN, OR I QUIT.”)

Other Things B-Dub Has Said

Here is a list of things B-Dub has said recently.

“I HATE THIS HOUSE. I DO NOT WANT TO LIVE HERE ANYMORE. I WANT TO LIVE AT TARGET. I AM LEAVING.”

“Mustard butt! Cookie dude! Big red bed head! Fridge!”

“GOOD MORNING, BATMAN. I HAVE SOME NEW MOVES.”

“I’m the Flash. I have powers like super-strength and heat breathing. But I can’t fly.”

“I have a baby in my tummy.”

“YOU BE INCREDIBLE HULK. I’LL BE A BABY PANDA.”

Me: “What do you want for breakfast?” Him: “I want to eat fresh snow. It will taste like chicken.”

“My poop looks like dinosaur feet.”

“SWEET DREAMS, REFRIED BEEF!”

“I have a baby cardinal.” *pause* “I do not have a baby cardinal. But I should. And if I did, it would be really cute.”

“The silverfish are all alone. So alone. They need me to find them.”

*hands me a headless LEGO figure* “Now he has a ghost head.”

Me: “What do you want for breakfast?” Him: “A glass of wine.”

*hands me his stuffed animal doggy* Him: “Boo is sick. He needs a doggy doctor.”  Me: “What’s wrong with him?” Him: “He was jumping in dungeons.”

*points to me* “All of this is buttness. Your feet, your arms, your shoulder. But not your head. Everything else is poop-butty.”

*gives me a correct lecture on the difference between ‘transparent’ and ‘translucent.’*

“Daddy, you’re full of teacups.”

*gesticulates wildly at the dinner table* “I AM A ROBOT. WHY ARE MY ARMS MOVING.” *pause* “I like robots. I am a robot. I like: flowers, rainbows, owls, doggies, glasses, DVDs, colors, and carrots.” *pauses to ponder this, then repeats the list again*

*points to his butt* “This is my energy compartment” *he toots* “That’s my energy release.”

See?

Kids? Super-weird.

And if yours haven’t gotten there yet, they will.

They will.

WELL, I CAN HELP YOU WITH THAT.

So, here’s the thing. I tend to be very lucky with book covers. Some authors struggle to get great book covers out in the world, but so far, I’ve won that lottery damn near every time, with a rare exception here or there. (Related: did you see that Barnes & Noble did an exclusive cover reveal of my upcoming “hackers versus an NSA artificial intelligence” book, Zer0es?) The original Miriam Black covers were pretty much the perfect example of this — Joey Hi-Fi did a trio of covers that were images that lovingly encapsulated the books, and each image was itself a collection of smaller images. They played particularly well on-screen (though maybe less so in the physical, where the mass market paperback size made some of the details harder to parse). They were beautiful, and so, when it came time for SAGA Press to step up and create new covers for the book — obviously, I felt some apprehension in my gut.

Turns out, though? I had no reason to worry.

Simon & Schuster was eager to make these covers as iconic as their former ones, and were equally interested in hearing my thoughts along the way. And the trick about creating new covers for these books is, you need them to be as distinctive, but at the same time, not ape the former covers. You can’t out Joey Hi-Fi Joey-Hi-Fi. He is at the top of his game, so you gotta go different. But you also can’t go so different that nothing of the original remains, right? Right.

So, I’m pleased to reveal:

The brand new Miriam Black covers.

These covers are done by the artist Adam S. Doyle (his website here). Adam did the covers for the beautiful Maggie Stiefvater books (behold: Raven Boys). He does amazing work.

When, you may be asking, will the Miriam books be on sale?

The new e-books should land next month: 4/21.

Then, for print, there will be a rolling series of releases:

Blackbirds: 9/28.

Mockingbird: 10/6.

Cormorant: cough cough sometime a few weeks later

The fourth book, Thunderbird will come out in early 2016 in print and e-book.

No scheduled dates on the last two books in the series.

(Stay tuned for more news and some cool giveaways.)

So, wanna see the covers already?

YES OF COURSE YOU DO.

 

 

I see an article is going around, apparently from the RWR (the Romance Writers Report, which is connected to the RWA), that talks about how authors should deal with controversial topics — which is to say, the article seems to suggest that they should take a very soft, inoffensive, middle-of-the-road, milquetoasty approach. Just smile, it seems to say. Think of England.

Here, you’ll see author Racheline Maltese offering up a few snapshots of the article.

(I don’t have the original article to go on.)

(I don’t suspect this is an RWA “official” stance.)

(I don’t even know who wrote it.)

You’ll note that it mentions both gay marriage and racism via Ferguson.

Given that romance writers are generally women, it sounds troublingly like asking them to be more lady-like and not speak about issues that would trouble others — do not, it suggests, get all uppity and think that people want to hear your opinion on issues of import. You might further infer from there that women aren’t… something enough to opine such important matters. Not smart enough? Not savvy enough? Not man enough?

Here I’m aware that there’s a danger of me squeezing myself sideways into this conversation, as I am a) not a woman and b) not a romance writer, and you’d probably be well served by going and reading a lot of the discussion around the topic via women authors who are far smarter and better connected to this subject than I am (again, Racheline Maltese’ feed is a good place to dive into and branch out of this subject). And I know that there’s always a danger that when I get up on this rickety soapbox I’ve made out of old toilets and broken chains of binary code that it seems like AH FINALLY THE MANS HAVE SPOKEN, and then I wave my plunger — er, scepter — at you and everything feels altogether more official. I also know that I can say crazy shit and people will applaud, and maybe that’s not a luxury everybody has.

Hopefully, this doesn’t feel like that, and if it does, I’m sorry.

That said, I think there’s a larger, broader question about if any writer of any genre should speak out about reportedly controversial subjects.

And, my answer to that is, holy shit, yes.

With the caveats of:

a) if you want to.

b) if you can do it without being horrible to other people.

Nobody should make you speak out about controversial subjects. It can be uncomfortable to engage in that kind of conversation online — you might end up with an Asshole Magnet firmly bolted to your forehead. Some people’s milkshakes bring the boys to the yard, but other people’s milkshake bring all the trolls to the Twitter conversation. You might not be up for stomping that many ants or throwing rocks at wasp nests.

Further, if you do choose to speak out about controversial subjects, just don’t be horrible about it. This is a stickier wicket, of course, because you’re probably always going to be somebody’s asshole in that kind of conversation — I can say, politely as I can muster, “Gay marriage is a civil rights and humans rights issue, please and thank you,” and somebody out there in InternetLand is going to immediately going to think I’m a walking, talking, tweeting, blogging pile of demonic excrement. And the wicket gets even stickier when women and LGBT authors and persons of color have long been told to play nice, don’t get angry, don’t stand up too tall or too loud, and my intent here is not to slick this slope with Astroglide so you zip down it right back into the valley of just be nice and sell books. By horrible I mean, outright shitty. I mean, beating people down, or bullying them, or threatening harm. The very nadir of human behavior.

Now, with that said —

Why should authors speak up and speak out?

Because you’re writers, that’s why.

Writers know the power of words. Words change the world. Words have always been more effective at bullets when it comes to changing both the present and the future (and, in some ways, the past) — writing and storytelling have been a part of the human code since we figured out how to mash berries and streak red goop across cave walls with the decisive swipe of one of our hairy thumbs. Words make a difference. Stories move the fucking needle.

Ah, but: will you lose sales?

Could be, rabbit, could be.

But, I want you to ponder:

a) if you lost sales due to your having an opinion (gasp), did you want those sales in the first place?

b) if a reader doesn’t care for you or your opinions, will that reader actually like your book?

c) have you also thought about the sales you may have gained?

Let’s tackle that last one — “c.”

In my experience, having an opinion has lost me a sale here and there. I note this only because once in a while I actually get people saying, “CHAZ WENDING JUST LOST HIMSELF A SALE” and at first I’m like, “Jeez, who the hell is Chaz Wending and do I need to fight him?” but then I’m like, “OHHH they misspelled my name.”

But for every lost sale, I’ve seen more folks say they’ve bought my books because of me having an opinion. People want to read books by human beings, not marketing platforms. Human beings are complicated, sticky, thorny tangles. We’re not advertising robots. We’re not weaponized brands. We’re people, and we have thoughts and feelings and ideas and fears and gasp opinions on the world and other human beings that exist around us. Because we’re all connected, and social media — often thought of as somehow unreal — is just as real as real life and only deepens the connections we experience. We’re more bound up together, not less. (Though in opposition to this I’d also caution you to not place too much actual importance on social media in terms of selling books — it’ll sell them here and there, but I think we often overstate how much social media from the author specifically can sell books. It does. But much of your audience won’t ever be reading your tweets in the first place.)

Even still — sales (gaining or losing) isn’t a good reason to have an opinion online.

Have an opinion because you’re a person.

And you’re a writer, with your own unique means of expressing your feelings.

Don’t be a brand.

Don’t be so hyper-focused on selling your book that you forget to act like a human being. I don’t pay much attention to those writers who just bark out advertisements for their books day in and day out — I just squeegee their greasy spam tracks from my monitor and move on. I do, however, pay attention to writers who are bold enough to be people — that’s not just about them sharing opinions, but just about how they come across online. More like humans, less like SkyNet.

You are more than your book sales.

Speak up and speak out if you so choose.

Or, put your opinions into the work, instead.

You shouldn’t feel pressured to get loud.

But you also shouldn’t feel pressured to be silent, either.

Having an opinion doesn’t give you any authority, no. But it’s one of the milestones of being human. And being a writer ostensibly gives you a way to put those opinions out in an interesting way.

So, should writers have and share opinions on matters both small and uncontroversial? Absolutely. Engage. Talk. Share. Join up with the human experience. Connect in that way if you so choose. Opinions, as the saying goes, are like assholes: we all have them. And it would be weird for you not to have an opinion just as it would be weird if you did not have a butthole. That’s actually how we test for alien marauders, by the way. We scan them at the TSA to see if they have rectal passages. It’s how we know you’re not human — surely we’ve all been there at TSA when a xeno-terrorist suddenly realizes he’s been butthole-scanned and been found lacking, and then his flesh splits and his gelatinous tentacle-body explodes forth in protest and then —

Okay, I think I’ve lost the thread.

And I probably just lost a couple sales, too.

DAMNIT

I knew I was supposed to pay attention to this series of Post-It notes stuck to my monitor: “STOP TALKING ABOUT THE ALIEN NEGA-BUTTHOLE CONSPIRACY; IT REALLY FREAKS PEOPLE OUT.”

I am such a fool.

*hangs head in shame*

[Apologies that this challenge is late — I set the other one to post but, without realizing it, had been logged out and the scheduled posting did not save.]

This challenge? Pretty straightforward.

Pick one of these five randomly generated sentences.

Use the sentence in a flash fiction short story, ~1000 words in length.

Post that story at your online space, and give us a link to that story in the comments below — this story is due by this coming Friday the 13th at noon EST.

Bonus challenge: use more than one of these sentences in the story.

The sentences are:

“The mysterious diary records the voice.”

“The stranger officiates the meal.”

“The shooter says goodbye to his love.”

“A glittering gem is not enough.”

“The memory we used to share is no longer coherent.”

“The old apple revels in its authority.”

“Rock music approaches at high velocity.”

“Sixty-Four comes asking for bread.”

“Abstraction is often one floor above you.”

“The river stole the gods.”

Night Owls bookstore always keeps a light on and evil creatures out. But, as Lauren M. Roy’s thrilling sequel continues, even its supernatural staff isn’t prepared for the dead to come back to life…

Elly grew up training to kill things that go bump in the night, so she’s still getting used to working alongside them. While she’s learned to trust the eclectic group of vampires, Renfields, and succubi at Night Owls bookstore, her new job guarding Boston’s most powerful vampire has her on edge—especially when she realizes something strange is going on with her employer, something even deadlier than usual…

Cavale isn’t thrilled that his sister works for vampires, but he’s determined to repair their relationship, and that means trusting her choices—until Elly’s job lands all of the Night Owls in deep trouble with a vengeful necromancer. And even their collective paranormal skills might not be enough to keep them from becoming part of the necromancer’s undead army…

***

YOU GUYS LOOK AWFULLY FAMILIAR

When I originally wrote Night Owls, I wasn’t sure there’d be a sequel. I left the story open-ended enough for there to be one, or for it to stand on its own. So when Ace wanted a sequel, I had to revisit a cast of characters who’d been out of my head and off my desk for just about a year.

It was a wee bit terrifying – what if I’d forgotten their voices? What if I’d didn’t have a good story to tell? There came the Impostor Syndrome, right on cue: Everyone’s going to know you’re a terrible writer. A one-trick pony.

That awful little imp never truly goes away, but I learned that – at least when it came to finding the characters – it was wrong. I thought a bit about where everyone would be a month after Night Owls finished. How would they be processing (or avoiding processing) the events of the first book? The walk between the train station and my office turned out to be the perfect length for me to noodle on how different people would interact with one another. I paired ’em up and watched ’em go, and it was a bit like meeting up with a bunch of good friends you haven’t seen in a while – after the it’s-been-too-longs, it was like we’d never been apart.

Soon enough, Chaz was dropping f-bombs everywhere, Elly was ready to climb the walls, and I even had a plot.

OUTLINES ARE NOT POISON

Oh my god, you guys, I’m such a pantser.

Okay, not entirely true – I will plot a few chapters ahead, and when I’ve written up to that point, I look where the story’s going and plot a little more. If a scene comes to me out of order, I jot down notes. Even without a solid outline, I generally have an endgame in mind. But the squishy middle? I let it stay squishy.

When I was a wee writer, back in the days where I talked more about writing than actually, y’know, writing, I liked to trot out a quote from Stephen King about how outlines were for bad writers. Sweet zombie Jesus, that was pretentious of me. I can look back on those days and count the projects I actually, y’know, finished on no hands. I was lucky if anything got beyond the first 10,000 words.

So when my editor, the lovely Rebecca Brewer, asked for an outline of what would become Grave Matters, I spent a couple of weeks wibbling. Not because I still adhered to that King quote, but because it’s more planning than I usually do. But hey, your editor asks you for an outline, you give her one. She’s a professional. She knows shit’s going to change. It’s okay.

I put my butt in the chair and got it done. Sometimes my brain made sad whirring, clunking noises when I got stuck on a plot point, but part of the writing process, even for a pantser like me, is figuring out what comes next. I called on my RPG-writing and GMing skills, here. I imagined the characters as PCs, tried to figure out what I would do if I were playing them in someone else’s game. What questions would I ask the GM? How would I apply the knowledge I had gathered? On the flip side, if I were running a game for these characters, what wrenches could I fling into their works? It got me past those sticking points, and I was able to move ’em along toward the endgame.

Neat things I learned: Writing an outline did not sap my soul. Nor did it kill the fun of writing the story. In fact, it helped me figure out the next two things…

THAT SUBPLOT’S GOTTA GO

In its original form, GRAVE MATTERS had an extra subplot. It wasn’t a terrible subplot. It followed on from things that happened in the first book, and it helped set up more terrible things for me to do the characters down the road. Writers are mean, you guys.

But it was also way too convoluted. George RR Martin I am most decidedly NOT, and in the 90-100,000 word scope of an urban fantasy novel, there simply wasn’t enough wordspace to pull it off – or, at least, not pull it off well.

So I made with the cutting.

I was a bit scared, since it meant mostly cutting the Jackals from the first book out of the second. Part of me insisted they had to be there, doing evil, Jackally things. Yet, when I pulled their threads out of the synopsis, the rest of the plot didn’t unravel. What emerged, in fact, was a better story, one that made more sense. Bonus – my editor didn’t set the revised outline on fire and send it back to me.

MORE VOICES!

It wasn’t all about excision, though. Another thing I learned while outlining was, I had to put something in. Someone, actually. Book one had three point-of-view characters: Val, Elly, and Chaz. That was plenty, thought I. (see “not-GRRM,” above). Those three, I knew, were absolutely coming back for Grave Matters. I had their shenanigans all planned out.

But looking back at my beats of what-needs-to-happen, I realized I had events jotted down that no one in that trinity would be present for. I could, I supposed, have the character who did witness them explain it all after the fact (which put me in danger of Too Much Exposition). OR. Or! I could do that thing I hear writers ought to do and show the audience.

Just a scene, I thought. Just to try it out, see if it works. I had this warlock, you see, Elly’s brother, who’s been through a whole lot of bullshit and hardship in his life. He’d finally started building a life for himself, when suddenly his estranged sister shows up on his doorstep at the start of Night Owls. How’s that working out for him? For both of them?

Turns out, boy did I like writing from Cavale’s POV. You get a little more worldbuilding, access to another facet of Elly’s background, and, as one of my beta readers pointed out, MORE FEELS.

FUCK YEAH BOOKSELLERS

Okay, I’m cheating on this one a bit. I mean, it’s something I already knew, and I’m utterly and completely biased about the subject anyway, but the last year of my authorly life has only reinforced my love for booksellers. I have a folder in my email labeled “Awesome,” and it’s filled with congratulations from the people who work their butts off day in and day out to get books – sometimes my book! – in readers’ hands. Bookstores, and the booksellers who staff them, are essential, important parts of our community. Any new city I visit, you can be damned sure I’m visiting one of its indie stores. Which always makes checking baggage on the flight home a game of how close to the weight limit can I get without going over but… worth it. It’s been a little surreal to stop in at a bookstore I don’t have a personal connection to and see Night Owls on the shelf, or have a friend tweet a picture to me of seeing it out in the wild.

Plus, booksellers get all the bookstore jokes I’ve sprinkled through the series.

(And hey, if you have a favorite local bookstore, maybe give ’em a shoutout in the comments?)

Lauren M. Roy: Website | Twitter | Tumblr

Grave Matters: Indiebound | B&N | Amazon

The gaslight and shadows of the underground city of Recoletta hide secrets and lies. When Inspector Liesl Malone investigates the murder of a renowned historian, she finds herself stonewalled by the all-powerful Directorate of Preservation – Recoletta’s top-secret historical research facility.

When a second high-profile murder threatens the very fabric of city society, Malone and her rookie partner Rafe Sundar must tread carefully, lest they fall victim to not only the criminals they seek, but the government which purports to protect them. Knowledge is power, and power must be preserved at all costs…

***

JUST GO WITH IT

Writing your first book is a dare to yourself.

It starts with the embryo of a story and the nagging suspicion that, just maybe, you could grow it into a real book. So you carve out quiet little moments after work or school, pecking away at the keyboard and thinking, “Ha ha, look at this, I’m putting one word after the other, just like a real author.”

You don’t tell anyone about your little hobby—not yet. It feels too soon. Like introducing the parents on the first date. But late evenings and early mornings speed by in front of the computer, and you catch your wandering mind turning more and more to the next scene, the next plot twist, or the next juicy bit of worldbuilding.

You’re not entirely sure you’ve got the stamina to make it to the end. But somehow, seven thousand words become twenty thousand words, and before you know it, you’re sitting on fifty thousand words, and you’re too invested to quit.

Nothing demystifies the writing process so much as attempting it yourself. There’s no professional certification for it, no real prerequisite. By the time you’re waist-deep in it, what keeps you going is the sheer curiosity to see what happens next (both in and for your manuscript) and the challenge you continually issue yourself to get through one more chapter.

…BUT IT’S OKAY TO TAKE A STEP BACK

The first draft of THE BURIED LIFE took about a year to write. That’s not terribly unusual, especially for a first effort.

But I finished that draft over eight and a half years ago. All that time between then and now? Most of that’s been revising, editing, querying, and catching my skills up with my ambitions.

Writing a book is hard. But cleaning up the lump of coal that emerges from your fingertips at one in the morning and polishing it into something shiny and wonderful?

That’s harder.

You write this first draft, and typing “THE END” feels like reaching the summit of Everest, even though your manuscript only clocks in at 60,000 words, which is about 20,000 too short for the genre you’re writing.

And that’s only the first of your problems.

Then, you look back at paragraphs of lovingly crafted description and see them weighed down with adverbs and redundancy. You read through your first halting efforts at dialogue, and you shudder.

You close your laptop with the jarring realization that this misbegotten child of a manuscript is not the book you sat down to write.

Worse, you don’t know how to fix it. You don’t know how to make your worldbuilding feel compelling and interesting, and you don’t know how to make your dialogue believable, let alone entertaining.

So you set it aside, you keep reading the authors you love, and you find a regular critique group. You start to notice how other writers solve the very problems you’re having. After a suitable moratorium, you go back to your neglected manuscript and realize that you know how to solve many of those problems, too.

So you solve them.

But you recognize other issues—bad habits you’d never noticed before, tendencies you’d never seen as problematic.

You make a note of these issues, take another hiatus, and get back to the business of reading and critiquing. You’ll come back when you’re ready.

KEEP YOUR FRIENDS CLOSE AND YOUR BETA READERS CLOSER

Most writers will, at some point, show their works in progress to trusted peers and mentors for feedback.

This is important for many reasons, only one of which is the actual feedback.

Beta readers help you develop your calluses for the long road ahead. They’ll get you used to hearing frank assessments of your work. They’ll help you adjust to having your flaws noted and remarked upon by others.

These tough love lessons will be invaluable when you start querying total strangers in hopes of interesting them in your writing. Even more so when you start to get reviews.

But even that isn’t the most useful function of beta readers. Beta readers help writers most of all simply by reading.

Writing can be a lonely endeavor. You spend months crafting your story, only to wonder: is anyone’s ever going to read it?

A beta reader is an answer to that question. He or she is a promise that you’re not doing the work alone. Someone’s waiting on the other side of that Dropbox folder, so you’d better switch off the television and finish your chapter.

The motivation that comes from having a reader—even one you’re bribing with pizza and beer—is not to be discounted. It presents a goal, and it fans that hope that, one day, you’ll find an even wider audience.

Meanwhile, it’s still great to have someone there to help you catch your mistakes and find your blind spots.

But don’t give your beta readers all the hard work. There’s plenty you can do on your own.

SHOUT IT FROM THE ROOFTOPS (OR JUST READ IT ALOUD)

Most of the problems in a manuscript—repeated words, unnatural dialogue, clunky phrasing, pages where nothing of interest happens—become apparent when the work is read aloud. Your ear catches the hiccups and doldrums that your forgiving eye skates past. And your ear is a better proxy for the first-time reader’s experience.

Those spots where you trip over your own wording? Revise ‘em.

The places where you bore yourself? Cut ‘em, or find a way to build in tension and action.

Reading 80,000-100,000 words aloud is time-consuming. But it’s a lot faster than the dozen-or-so silent reads that you’d need to catch the same problems. So think of that read-aloud as an investment, and promise yourself Scotch at the end.

Averse to the sound of your own voice? Even better. Just pretend it’s Idris Elba reading your work. Would he use “enthused” as a dialogue tag? No, he would not.

PUT IN FACE TIME

There comes a point when you’ve prettied up your manuscript as best you can, gotten feedback from your beta readers, and sent out some queries. Maybe you’ve even gotten some nibbles, but none of them have amounted to anything more than chapter requests.

It may be time to up your game.

There’s a whole bevy of conferences, conventions, and workshops you can attend virtually year-round. Some are places for writers to meet with editors and agents, some are venues for authors to hone their skills, and some are gatherings for fans and creators to celebrate and discuss the genres they love.

Some of these will cost more money than you’re willing to spend, and others will require time off that you don’t have. But chances are good that there’s something in your area that’s feasible for a weekend jaunt.

Case in point, I met my future editor at Worldcon in San Antonio and pitched THE BURIED LIFE to him there. A couple months later, I had a contract for a two-book deal.

Take my sample size of one and do with it what you will, but when I visited with the Angry Robot staff that weekend, they indicated that, while they usually require agented submissions, they sometimes make exceptions for authors they meet in person. I’ve heard similar sentiments from other industry professionals, too.

Now, it’s still entirely possible (and, for many people, preferable) to go through the entire process of selling a book without ever having a face-to-face meeting. But there’s always something to be said for the personal connection. It may not sell your book, but it will help you stand out above the thousands of faceless authors who are nothing more than names in an inbox. Hopefully in the best possible way.

***

Carrie Patel is an author, narrative designer, and expatriate Texan. When she isn’t working on her own fiction, she works as a narrative designer for Obsidian Entertainment and writes for their upcoming CRPG, Pillars of Eternity. Her work has also appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Carrie Patel: Website | Twitter

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