Last week’s challenge: Sub-Genre Blender!

Together, we’re going to write a shedload of four-part stories.

And by we, I mean you.

Here’s how this works:

I want you to write 1/4 of a story — roughly, the beginning of it.

You have 1000 words.

Do not end this story. It is not a complete tale. Just its beginning.

You will post these 1000 words at your blog and link back here in the comments (<– that part is really quite essential this time) so that someone else next week can pick up where you left off in order to continue the story. And we will do this for the entire month of February. (And technically a little bit into March, too, because that’s how the calendar works.) This story is due by next Friday, 2/13, at noon EST.

Doesn’t matter what genre. You have free rein, here.

Just don’t finish the story.

Kay?

Kay.

Get to writing, and see you next week for PART TWO.

The capital has fallen…

Field Marshal Tamas returns to his beloved country to find that for the first time in history, the capital city of Adro lies in the hands of a foreign invader. His son is missing, his allies are indistinguishable from his foes, and reinforcements are several weeks away.

An army divided…

With the Kez still bearing down upon them and without clear leadership, the Adran army has turned against itself. Inspector Adamat is drawn into the very heart of this new mutiny with promises of finding his kidnapped son. 

All hope rests with one…

And Taniel Two-shot, hunted by men he once thought his friends, must safeguard the only chance Adro has of getting through this war without being destroyed…

THE AUTUMN REPUBLIC is the epic conclusion that began with Promise of Blood and The Crimson Campaign. 

* * *

FOR SOME PEOPLE, BEING AN AUTHOR IS MORE THAN JUST WRITING A BOOK

There are a lot of things I’ve known about for many years—little additional (and sometimes optional) bits to being an author that they don’t tell you about in most creative writing classes (I was lucky in that my creative writing class with Brandon Sanderson did tell me about these). Tips like creating a presence and persona on social media. Knowing when to keep your mouth shut in public. Looking for additional opportunities for yourself as a writer. Diversifying your income.

Now, I say that I’ve known about these things for many years and I have. But knowing and doing are two different things. I took to a few of them early on, like Twitter and Facebook.

But it’s only been since I started writing Autumn Republic that I focused on how I could be an author and a businessman. Autumn Republic was the end of a trilogy and that made it the end of an era for me. Once that book was out I knew I wouldn’t be getting any more advance checks and was unsure if or when I’d get royalties. If I wanted to keep working full time at my art, I had to do all those other things I’d been avoiding.

Being a businessman became part of my artistic passion, and looking for new opportunities, self-publishing my short fiction via ebook, managing a bookstore on my website, or commissioning print runs of my Powder Mage novellas have all become a fun part of what I do every day.

THERE ARE UNIQUE COMPLICATIONS TO PLOTTING EACH BOOK IN A TRILOGY

A trilogy is a funny thing. Every book needs to stand on it’s own merit—a closed novel with a clear beginning and end. But as part of a trilogy each book also needs to take on a distinct role. Treat, if you will, the whole trilogy as not three individual books but one giant, single novel. Book one is the opening chapter, book two the deepening of the plot, and book three the climax.

In this way, Promise of Blood was the easiest to write because it was the framing story, the opening salvo with a definite plot arc. I had vague ideas about where I was going but I could worry about that later. Crimson Campaign was that “later” that I referred to in the previous sentence and was by far the hardest book in the trilogy to write. It was the first time I’d written a sequel and I was terrified it would bomb. I was also keenly aware of that mid-series slump of slogging through the plot that so much epic fantasy seems to suffer from.

The Autumn Republic ended up somewhere in between. It was the most clearly-plotted of all the books (because I had to know where I was going), which made a lot of the writing zip by. But I had to wrap up as many plotlines as I needed without it turning into a grind and writing the climax to a trilogy is a lot of pressure.

SOMETIMES AS AN AUTHOR YOU HAVE TO DOUBLE DOWN FOR A PAYOFF

One of the viewpoints in the Powder Mage Trilogy is a young laundress named Nila. She kind of snuck into the Promise of Blood, with only a handful of scenes compared to the dozens of scenes for each of the other characters. I knew right from the beginning that she was going to be important, and I had an inkling of the direction I wanted to take her, but I wasn’t 100% sure where her road would lead. Most fans seemed fairly ambivalent about her and I was tempted to cut her role in Crimson Campaign.

But I knew she was going to be important. I left her in book two and gave her a couple more scenes. The consequences of her actions had a little more impact, and this had the desired effect: people seemed to become more attached to her journey. But they weren’t too attached to her. I was still tempted to minimize her part and let her plot line peter off.

Then when Autumn Republic came along, Nila managed to surprise even me. She was suddenly one of the most enjoyable characters to write, with cool, powerful scenes and a stronger plot arc than I’d given her in both the previous books combined. By simple word count, she wound up with more viewpoint screen time than any of the other characters in the book.

YOU CAN’T WRAP UP EVERYTHING AT THE END OF A SERIES…

The Powder Mage Trilogy, all told, is about five hundred thousand words long. There are four main viewpoint characters, hundreds of named side characters, and dozens of small dramas that play out over the course of the series. Many of those dramas only last a single chapter, while others span the entire trilogy. As an author, I’ve asked countless questions via the narrative that the reader expects to be answered by the end.

Problem is, you can’t answer all of those questions. First of all because you don’t have enough space—even epic fantasy readers want the story to just finally end already (a memo that some epic fantasy authors haven’t yet gotten). Secondly because the narrative might not let you. There is a cadence to storytelling, a minimum speed at which you can progress the plot and still keep the reader interested, and going off on side tangents to answer every little question a reader has will destroy the cadence of your book.

There was one particular plot thread from the middle of The Crimson Campaign that I had meant to answer by the end of that book. But it just didn’t fit anywhere. So I decided I’d answer it in Autumn Republic but what do you know? It didn’t fit there either.

Funny enough, it will get answered in the next Powder Mage Universe series, but that’s a story for later.

 …NOR SHOULD YOU

It’s a good thing to leave some plot threads unfinished at the end of a series. Not the main ones—you want to clean those up to a large extent, and part of being a writer is developing an instinct for which questions the readers must have answered and which to leave a mystery.

If you wrap everything up too tightly in a nice little box with a bow on it, there’s no mystery left at the end. The reader will just shrug and move on with their life. But if you leave some questions unanswered they will keep returning to your books, pondering, rereading, enjoying, and curious what might have been or what might be.

* * *

In addition to being the author of the Powder Mage Trilogy and a variety of related short stories and novellas, Brian is a beekeeper and avid player of computer games. He lives with his wife in Cleveland, Ohio.

Brian McClellan: Website | Twitter

Autumn Republic: Amazon | B&N | iBooks | Goodreads

Email: “Hey, Chuck, what do you think about meninists?”

Chuck: “They seem nice enough.”

Email: “What?!”

Chuck: “They’re always polite. Never say a nasty word to anybody. They’re not as hardcore as the Amish? Like, I think they can drive cars and use technology. But like the Amish, they build great sheds –”

Email: “Do you mean Mennonites?”

Chuck “…”

Email: “You mean Mennonites.”

Chuck: *clears throat* “I probably mean Mennonites. Yes. Yeah. Wait. So What are you talking about?”

Email: “Well, there’s this group out there of men –”

Chuck: “Oh, that’s never good.”

Email: “– and mostly it seems like a grab-bag of your MRA types who want to make fun of feminism and just generally be dicks to women –”

Chuck: “Somebody out there is already going to bring up that ‘dick’ is a gendered insult and it is hurtful to men.”

Email: “Probably.”

Chuck: “Then again, maybe men should just toughen the fuck up about it and if they didn’t want dick to be an insult, maybe they should stop trying to thrust themselves — literally and figuratively — into subjects and situations that have nothing to do with them and want no part of them. Anyway. Continue.”

Email: “That’s pretty much it. They kinda did exactly that — the ‘thrusting themselves into’ thing — with this #LikeAGirl meme campaign based on an Always ad that ran during the Super Bowl. The goal of the ad being to change the connotation around that phrase — Like a girl — and spin it into something positive.”

Chuck: “That sounds nice. I’m assuming these meninists shit-shellacked it all up. Like a pair of toddler underoos spackled with mess.”

Email: “Yeah, no, pretty much. They had their own hashtag — #LikeABoy — and also a lot of jerky lackwits trolled the #LikeAGirl hashtag and, as they are wont to do, were poopy butts about it to women.”

Chuck: “So, you want to know my thoughts.”

Email: “I guess? Like, there’s a subset of meninists who claim to be feminist, and that’s just ‘their word’ for being a male feminist, but for the most part, it seems to have been co-opted by a loud and noisy group that hates feminism or thinks it has somehow been victimized by feminism.”

Chuck: “Men who think they’ve been victimized by feminism are like burglars who sue the homeowners they were burgling because they stubbed their toe on a fucking coffee table. Listen, you probably already know my thoughts on this. Meninism is not a thing. It’s just some shitty meme by troll dudes who feel somehow spurned, or who smell the shift in power coming and like fish dying on a beach after the water has receded, are flopping about and gasping for air. As I’ve noted before, any disparities or issues that primarily affect men are real and need to be dealt with, but these aren’t the groups dealing with them. These are the groups responsible for their own misery. A lot of men’s rights are actually also women’s rights, and the toxic dudebro testosterone culture harms itself more than any woman or group of women ever could. Men who are feminists are just feminists. They’re not ‘equalists‘ or ‘egalitarians.’ They’re certainly not meninists, which is, again, not a thing. It’s just gulls squawking. Mammals shrieking because they don’t have thumbs and can’t pick up that stick to scratch their itchy backs. It’s all very silly. If you’re going to do anything with meninists: ignore them, or openly mock them. Do not give them the podium, though, because anybody who identifies as that is not interested in having a proper goddamn discussion. Taser them and keep walking.”

Email: “Fair enough.”

Chuck: “If anybody’s going to be upset about any commercials from the Super Bowl, try being mad at Nationwide for that dead kid commercial. HEY, YOU SURE GOT A NICE KID THERE, Nationwide said. I SURE HOPE NOTHING HAPPENS TO IT. As they slide an insurance policy across the table.

I have written —

*checks notes*

— too many novels by this point. Like, I should stop. I’ve done enough damage to the literary world. Okay, no, I’m not going to stop (ha ha ha suckers), but regardless of that, I have written a metric diaper-load of books in my relatively short time as a novelist.

And in this magical journey where I headbutt my monitor again and again until the bloodstreaks form words and become novels, I notice that I  hit the same emotional milestones during every book, in roughly the same order, at roughly the same points-of-completion.

I said as much on Twitter the other day, and at first it was just a joke. Oh ho ho, look at these funny peaks and valleys — joy and misery, ever intertwined! — when writing a book. But as I chewed on it a little bit, softening the thought jerky, I started to believe that there might be something here worth really looking at. Because the first time you write a book, this is new. And it feels new for a couple-few books after, and each time the emotion hits you, you’re unprepared for it. They’re like birth contractions that, were you to not realize they were coming, would scare the ghost right out of you. But once you start to codify them, once you begin to expect them, you find a new kind of comfort level: your little authorboat is prepared to more take on the churning waves.

The other thing is, I’ve found a lot of authors share similar milestones — maybe not in the same order or at the same points, but they seem to hit them with some regularity just the same. Plus, oh so many of us penmonkeys share that almost perfect (or perfectly disturbed) combination of 50% Extreme Narcissist and 50% Self-Hating Weirdo. We’re like a red balloon — blown up big and floating high, but ultimately devoid of anything but hot air!

Ha ha ha *loud weeping*

Ahem.

With all that said, here are my emotional milestones:

0% — Sphincter-Clenching Panic

I imagine that this is what every divine creator thinks before He or She barfs up the world in a projectile vomit of light, sound and life — it’s just raw, unmitigated panic. It’s like standing on the edge of a cliff and staring down at Who Knows What. Clouds, snow, pure white chaos, total emptiness. Tabula rasa. The canvas here is perfect. Untainted with my meager, caveman scrawl. I know as soon as I write the first word it’ll be like whizzing in the snow — just ruining a perfectly nice thing. And there’s so much pressure at the beginning. YOU NEED THE BEST FIRST SENTENCE BECAUSE READERS WILL PUT DOWN A BOOK IF THEY DON’T LIKE THE FIRST THREE WORDS, says some advice probably somewhere. At the end of the day, it’s easier to not create than it is to create, and that’s this moment. Fuck this moment. You push on. You piss in the snow, you jump on the cliff, you shit up the canvas. Because it’s what you do.

5% — Slow And Steady

Writing a book is an act of wandering through a new house in the dark, and at this stage I move hesitantly through. I always feel like I should be writing faster, and I seem to forget that it’s totally normal to have to push harder at this stage to meet word count. I don’t have momentum. I haven’t yet memorized the lay out of the house — if I move too quickly, I’ll stub a toe or knock over a vase or wake the owners. I can’t move quickly yet. I don’t have patterns, don’t have a sense of the space. Here I struggle to meet my 2,000 words per day. That’ll change. I always forget that it’ll change, though. Because dumb.

10% — I Am The God Of This Place

Ten percent in — usually meaning the first 10,000 words or so — I feel like a boss. I’ve taken the jump and here I’m falling, but the falling is exhilarating. You deploy the parachute. The fall becomes controlled. I’ve laid out the opening of the book, introduced the characters, kicked shit into gear with some kind of problem or incident. My heart is a power ballad. My brain is a mastermind. I command everything. When the reader asks you if you’re a God? YOU SAY YES.

11% — Oh, Shit

And the crash after the high. It’s amazing how quickly the worm turns. I think this narrative hangover arises because for those first 10,000 words, everything is roughly lining up with your expectations. Outline or no, you still probably have a pretty good idea what’s going on — but here’s where the train bucks, swaying back and forth as it goes faster and faster. For me, it jumps the track here. Already little things have conspired to change your own expectations of the story, and at 11%, I start to realize that no matter how good my map is, it’s still pure theory. It’s a crayon sketch by an ADHD preschooler. So, at 11%, I have to reckon with the fact that my book is not going to match what I have in my head or what I have clumsily scrawled on a cocktail napkin.

20% — Septic Dread / The Internet Is So Shiny

Somewhere around this point I’m just… man, I’m easily distracted. I’m a raccoon hypnotized by a scattering of shiny nickels. It’s not because I’m failing to feel the book. It’s not the same kind of panic. It’s because writing a book is… scary? Revealing? Like you’re sometimes sticking a tap in the dead center of your chest and letting pure heart syrup come gurgling out. It’s fear, mostly. Fear of finishing. Fear of again ruining something that you started. A book is so much better when it exists in a perfect, impossible, uncreated space. It’s like a child. The idea of a child is perfect before the kid is ever born, but once it is, suddenly it’s poop and tantrums. It’s awesome, too — but boy howdy, do you get those poop and tantrums. So at this point? I’m feeling the fear again. This time, less panic and more incalculable dread, and it manifests as distraction, usually with social media or some other aspect of the Internet. The solution: fire up Freedom, turn off the Internet for 45-minute intervals, and push like you’re giving birth.

25% — Restless Leg Syndrome

I’m back in it, and the way I get back in it is right here — I get antsy so I start to fuck shit up. I pivot the plot, I give it a twist, I escalate conflict or struggle. Something that makes it feel like its progression is not preordained, something that surprises me a little bit and surprises the reader.

33% — Old Man Lost At The Mall

This is my first real I SHOULD QUIT WRITING THIS DUMB BOOK moment. Everything is dumb. I hate what I’m writing. It doesn’t live up. I possess the urge to HIGHLIGHT ALL and elbow the delete key and then laugh as it all goes away in the blink of a suicidal cursor. (This actually explains why so many of my earlier efforts at writing a book sputtered out at the 1/3rd mark.) The most toxic version of this replaces the hate and manifests as an almost demonic seduction where the succubus behind my intellectual shed hisses a come hither invitation and beseeches me to drop this hot turd that I’m presently writing and instead write this much better, much cooler book. “This new book will be the corker,” she whispers, and I say back, “Corker is not a sexy word,” and she says, “Shut up, you’re overthinking it,” and I say, “That’s usually my problem,” and she says, “Seriously, just be quiet and start a new book instead because it’ll make you feel good,” and I say, “I LEARNED IT BY WATCHING YOU,” and then I shake a skillet full of a fried egg at her and then I tell her that this is my brain on drugs and — you know, I feel like I’m losing the thread here a little. Point being: at this juncture I often want to quit what I’m writing and go pork a new manuscript behind the old one’s back. The way I fix this? I jot down notes for AWESOME NEW BOOK and then I hide them from myself and get back to fucking work.

50% — Destroy Boredom With Hammer

If you’ve never written a book, trust me when I say: it’s boring. It’s not universally boring, but it takes a long time and it’s more a marathon than a sprint, and eventually you start to feel like, uggh, god, what am I watching golf? It’s like watching two narcoleptic koala bears making love — you’re just checking your watch asking if anyone is going to pop their cookies or what. So, I find it necessary to resist that boredom and whenever I start to feel bored, I worry the audience is going to feel it, too. I willfully counter boredom here by again just kicking a big fucking hole in the story. I shake the baby until it cries. (Pro-tip: do not actually shake babies.) I blow something up. It’s barbaric yawp time. This is doubly important at the 50% mark because here’s where I start to get that mushy middle problem. The story sags like an elderly scrotum if you haven’t been doing the appropriate nether-clenching exercises. Or something.

66% — You Know What, Just Fuck It

Once again, I hate what I’m writing. Happens roughly at 1/3rd, happens roughly at 2/3rds. Now it’s less about what’s to come and more about what’s already happened. Here’s where I start to really doubt what I’ve already put down. I start imagining ways I’ve screwed everything up. Sometimes it’s not imagined — here is also where I start to realize plot problems or mistakes I’ve genuinely made. It seems like I’m building a house on a shaky, shitass foundation. It’s a house of cards and, psychologically, it’s already falling down. Impostor Syndrome is the new king on the throne: suddenly it feels like I’m just a kid wearing Daddy’s overalls, like I stowed away on the boat and finally, finally this is the book where the rest of the crew (other authors, publishers, the audience) will figure out what an apple-cheeked poser rube asshole I really am. It’s bullshit, of course. The errors that have been made can be fixed later. And it’s probably nowhere near as bad as I think it is. Further, writers write, and that’s that — doubt does not make me an impostor, but doubt is a pesky monkey who hides so well on your back you can barely see him. Best way forward is to just write past it. Onward, upward, the only way out is through.

75% — I Got This, And Besides, It’s Too Late Now

For better or worse, I’m in. Committed. I know how cuckoo that sounds — it takes me 75% to get emotionally committed to the story?! But it syncs up right about at 3/4 through. I feel like, hey, even if this whole thing is a smoldering trash-pile of old Chinese food and melted mannequins, it’s my pile, damnit, so I might as well build it as high as I can and finish what I started.

90% — Dominoes Tumble

This has been true of every novel I have written — but I tend to write the last ten percent of the book in one day. I sit down and I think, “Maybe I could finish this,” and then next thing I know I’m soaked in sweat, the air tastes of coffee and hot metal, and my fingers throb. Before me: a story lays complete. It’s got that toe-curling orgasm vibe to it — like, you know it’s gonna happen, and you couldn’t stop the choo-choo now even if you wanted to. (And no, I do not regularly refer to my orgasms as “choo-choos.” Man, that would upset my wife. CHOO-CHOO IS COMING INTO THE STATION, BABY. CHUGGA CHUGGA WOO WOO. I am so sorry for even putting that image in your mind. I feel enough shame for all of us, it’s okay.) I think in part it’s because when writing a novel, you’re carefully lining up dominoes — straight lines, up hills, through PVC tubes, around a sleeping monkey — and then the last ten percent is me knocking them down. It’s a clamor and a clatter as they fall. Gravity and momentum have the tale, now. Writing the end of a story, I feel like a man possessed — like I’ve been huffing God Vapors out of a crack in the ground and I am now just an instrument for divine execution.

100% — Clean Up / Cheez-Its / Whiskey / Ice Cream / Nap

Guh, buh, wuzza, wooza, fuzzy, flooza. I’m wiped at the 100% mark. Buzzing and tired all at the same time. My brain is full of bees at this stage, but none of them make much sense. It’s just the humming of wings. So, I save everything in a thousand places, I power down, and I towel off. Then: snacks, whiskey, more snacks, aaaaaand pass out.

110% — *Loud Breathing, Blank Stare*

The next day is just like — *wind whistling through a bottle, a vulture endlessly wheeling in the sky, a piece of trash blowing across a desolate beach* It’s oblivion. It’s why I need a day to gather my bearings. Or, ideally, a week. And then, once the elastic in my brain has snapped back —

0% — Sphincter-Clenching Panic

*fires up blank document, bites lip*

Here we go again, motherfuckers.

* * *

500 Ways To Write Harder aims to deliver a volley of micro-burst idea bombs and advisory missiles straight to your frontal penmonkey cortex. Want to learn more about writing, storytelling, publishing, and living the creative life? This book contains a high-voltage dose of information about outlining, plot twists, writer’s block, antagonists, writing conferences, self-publishing, and more.

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Buy ($2.99) at:

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Direct from terribleminds

Or: Part of a $20 e-book bundle!

[Trigger warning: this post talks about trigger warnings.]

So, let’s just get this out right at the open: this is a topic about which, it seems, some people feel very strongly. I ask that you remain polite in the comments, or you will find a bootmark on your ass as you tumble helplessly into the spam oubliette.

[Trigger warning: spam oubliette.]

Let’s talk about trigger warnings.

I wrote a book: Atlanta Burns.

Here I note that it is $3.99 for your Kindlemachine, and under $10 for print.

[Trigger warning: total shamelessness.]

It is a young adult book, ostensibly crime fiction, about a young girl who straddles the line between detective and vigilante. It is a book about bullies. About people who abuse other people and also about people who abuse animals — in this case, dogs, through a dog-fighting ring. I had to do some pretty gnarly (as in challenging, not as in radical, dude) research for this book. The book also features teenage drug use, bullying, references to sexual assault, lots of naughty language, teenage suicide, and a teenager who uses a gun to mitigate her problems (though that is not without its complications in the story). It’s a hella rough book. “Mature YA.” (A lot of reviews in fact seem to gravitate toward: I hated it before I loved it. Which is probably right on.)

Should the book have trigger warnings? Should any book?

If so, who’s responsible for them? The author? Publisher? The bookstore?

The audience, through reviews?

Is a trigger warning an extra set of warnings similar to what you see with movie ratings or drug side effects? [WARNING: this book may cause sphincter-clenching psychological trauma and also restless leg syndrome.] Or should it be artfully folded into the description of the book?

I’m not opposed to trigger warnings — I understand that some argument against them is that fiction should be uncomfortable at times and blah blah blah if you don’t want to risk discomfort don’t pick up a book. And then, something-something, life should have a trigger warning.

Except, for me, I don’t want people to just blindly stumble onto things that traumatize them — the point of fiction can be discomfort, but often a kind of controlled discomfort. A book is a controlled environment. Safe, even when unsafe. But when that book runs the risk of clipping a tripwire and setting off trauma-bombs inside your own head, that safety factor is hell-and-gone. And trigger warnings are ultimately granular in that they help people understand what’s in the book. It’s not a vaguely ominous warning, but rather, something more specific.

(And actually, it would be quite helpful if life did have trigger warnings.)

The question becomes, what counts? What’s a suitable trigger warning? Obviously, some seem obvious: child abuse, animal abuse, sexual assault. Trauma, though, comes in a lot of ways: the violence of war, for instance. But some folks are also traumatized by clowns, so should Stephen King’s It have a trigger warning: “WARNING: CONTAINS CLOWN” –?

(Actually, maybe that’s not a bad idea. *shudder*)

I think the fear becomes that trigger warnings are a slippery slope toward a rating system — the rating system that governs film is basically inconsistent and downright nuttypants. It’s a fucking mess, that system. It’s governed and shepherded by a secret cabal of out-of-touch Hollywoodians who are prejudiced against sex and toward violence. And the ratings system over time has almost perfectly guaranteed that going to the theater means almost never seeing a film for proper adults. It’s superhero reboots all the way down — comfortable PG-13 line drives right down the middle. Not too many R-rated bonanzas at the theater anymore.

(Another comment about trigger warnings is that they’re spoilery. I dunno if that would be a problem, really, if they were handled somewhat generically — though something to watch for?)

I’d never be comfortable with mandated trigger warnings — because mandating them means someone, some moral body, some council, is in charge of it, and councils are very often how you subvert the goodness of the thing you wanted and turn it into a hot crap sandwich. But I’m eager to get your thoughts. (Again, be polite.) What about trigger warnings? What say you, commenters?

[Trigger warning: there’s a comment section.]

Last week’s challenge: Must Contain Three Things.

This week is one of my favorite brands of challenge — the subgenre smash-up.

Your goal is simple: pick one subgenre from each of the two tables below (preferably randomly, using either a die or a random number generator) and then mash those two genres up into a single story.

This time around, let’s say you have 2000 words. Write it at your online space, link back here in the comments so we can all see it. You’ve got one week — due next Friday by noon EST.

Subgenre Table 1

1. Haunted House
2. Space Opera
3. Cryptozoological
4. Sword & Sorcery
5. Cozy mystery
6. Dystopian
7. Zombie
8. Espionage
9. Arthurian Fantasy
10. Vampire Erotica
11. Greek Mythology
12. Kaiju
13. Utopian
14. Lovecraftian
15. Extraterrestrial
16. Conspiracy Thriller
17. Steampunk
18. Dieselpunk
19. Cornpunk
20. Urban Fantasy

Subgenre Table 2

1. Weird Tales
2. Technothriller
3. Noir Detective
4. Biopunk
5. Heist / Caper!
6. Slasher / Final Girl
7. Alternate History
8. Disaster Porn
9. Superhero
10. Eco-Thriller
11. Bumbling Detective
12. Wild West
13. Artificial Intelligence
14. Comic Fantasy
15. Psychological Thriller
16. Regency Romance
17. Magical Realism
18. Bodice Ripper
19. Paranormal Romance
20. Satanic Horror