S.L. Huang said she wanted to talk about asshole protagonists, and why they always had to be men. I told her that I am the audience for that post and, I think, so are you guys. As such, here she is to talk about the subject — with a bonus table included! Also, check out her newest — Half-Life, which features high-octane math as a powerful superpower.

* * *

I love asshole protagonists.

Or rather, I love a particular breed of them: protagonists who are brusque and violent, egotistical and snarky, but when the chips are down and the friends they’d never admit they care about are in danger, they’ll break the world to save them. Characters like Tony Stark, Sherlock Holmes, the Doctor, Rodney McKay, Spike, Wolverine, Artemis Fowl, Dean Winchester…

You might notice it’s a lot, lot easier to think of male characters who embody this archetype. And, in contrast to the many sympathetic asshole men who lead their own stories, the awesome ladies who are both jerks and heroes often aren’t the main protagonists: Faith and Anya from Buffy, H.G. Wells from Warehouse 13, Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica, Hermione from Harry Potter. We’ve got a few great leads and co-leads in genre — Maree from Deep Secret, Katniss from The Hunger Games, Miriam Black from Blackbirds, just for example. But for every woman who fits this mold, I can think of many more men: Bones and Body of Proof go up against Monk/Psych/Sherlock/The Mentalist/Endgame/Elementary/House, The Heat is one film outstripped in numbers by every other buddy cop movie ever made, and so on.

In fact, I did some math! Narrowing solely to written fiction for the moment, since that’s what I’m about to talk about, I looked at the “literature” section of a bunch of the TV Tropes pages that match the asshole hero archetype I’m talking about:

Notes: Literature section only, accessed 1/15/2015. I did a search on any name that didn’t have a pronoun attached. And this is not counting who is a lead character and who is supporting — I’m willing to bet that number would go down if we narrowed to only protagonists.

Thirteen. Percent!

Certainly part of the problem is that we don’t have enough women in media, period. After all, only about 30 percent of speaking roles in movies go to women, and I’m not hopeful the written word is eons ahead. But 13 percent is way way way lower than that, and also lower than other, more positive TV Tropes categories, even those we might expect to be gendered — “Minored in Ass Kicking,” for example, is more than 1/3 female.

This disparity in such magnificent assholery disturbs me greatly. It disturbs me enough that when I started writing what would eventually become Zero Sum Game, I purposely made my asshole antihero protagonist a woman, and it disturbs me enough that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it when interacting with other writers since then.

And I have a conjecture.

You see, as I’ve meandered through the depths of the Internet Writer Community, I see one question asked time and again: “How do I write good female characters?” I see people so worried — worried their fictional ladies will come off as bitches or whores or mean girls or ditzes or doormats or damsels or Mary Sues. And I see people carefully constructing their fictional women to be sexy but not slutty, confident but not arrogant, smart but not insufferable, flawed but not too flawed.

Because good representation, amirite?

But this desire to make fictional women somehow unobjectionable can flatten out everything that makes characters the most compelling. After all, stories are not built on unobjectionable people! There’s an excellent essay by Rose Lemberg that makes the point better than I could: I want female characters, particularly main characters, who are allowed not to be good. I don’t mean that just in a moral sense, although yeah, that, too — but I also want women who are bad at things, or just fucking terrible at being human. Women who are not nice. Who fail. Who make disastrous mistakes. Women who are unstoppable in combat but a disgrace at basic human interaction, or women who are fantastic diplomats but can’t hit the broad side of a planet with a weapon.

And yes, I want more women who are assholes.

When we don’t let women live the whole range of fucked-up humanity, we miss out. Just look at the list of male characters I started with at the beginning — every one of them can be a horrible jerk, but every one of them has an intense fanbase of people who love and connect with them. Hell, if you tried to take those characters away, Tumblr would melt the entire internet in rage. And I’m one of those fans! But I want me more lady antiheroes as well — and that can’t happen unless we let female characters be jerks too.

Let’s have more Starbucks and Marees and Olivia Popes. Let’s populate fiction with women who are every type of humanity — assholes and all.

Who’s with me?

S.L. Huang is the author of Zero Sum Game and its sequel Half Life, the first two books in a series starring an asshole female protagonist. You can find her online at www.slhuang.com or on Twitter as @sl_huang.

So, measles, huh?

Let’s just get this out of the way right now: vaccinate your kids. I know, we’re taught to ask questions, we’re taught to be skeptical, we’re American iconoclasts goddamnit and we didn’t get anywhere by getting in line and marching to someone else’s beat and something something patriotism. Except, you’re marching to someone’s beat if you don’t get your kids vaccinated (and more on that in a moment). For now, it’s time to unclench your jaw. It’s time to vaccinate your children. Otherwise, what’s next? Polio? People in my family had that. It’s horrible. I’d rather my kids have autism, which is a thing not at all caused by vaccines anyway.

There.

Now that’s out of the way.

Which brings me to the larger question: how does this happen?

How does the anti-vaxxer attitude gain enough prominence that diseases we have eradicated or at least marginalized begin to surge anew? How does an anti-science parade march down the middle of our city squares and we not only fail to run the parade-leaders out on rails but, instead, give them a podium and a microphone and an ounce of credibility? What the crap is happening? What the hap is crappening? Wuzza wooza fizzy fuzzy muh? Whuh? Buh?!

I started to noodle on it.

Just turning it around and around in my mouth, like a soft glob of food where you suddenly bite into something hard and then have to wonder: “Jesus, what is in my mouth? Eggshell? Piece of glass, plastic, or is it a fingernail? Oh, god, it’s a fingernail.”

As I started looking closer, I started finding empathy.

Not sympathy. The difference is critical. Understanding the problem and the mindset (empathy) is a whole shed-load different from feeling emotional kinship to it (sympathy).

Because, a lot of anti-vaxx people aren’t total scramble-brained moonbats. They can spell. They have college degrees. Contrary to what people think, gasp, they might actually even be liberals. (If you think either party has the lockdown on bad information and fear-mongering, ha ha ha, ohh, you naive stripling, please let me show you the world.) Hell, I’ve been a guy who has spread bad information before — usually with the all-too-easy click of a SHARE THIS UNVERIFIED HORSESHIT link at Facebook. I’ve seen people I consider smarter than me pass around information dumber than a bag of socks.

I wanna know how. I want to crack this nut.

And I think it begins when our trust in certain institutions begins to break down.

Erosion

We are taught to trust. To have faith in systems and structures and disciplines.

One such system is our health care system.

(Please, hold your laughter.)

It’s true, though, right? Even in the snark that’s already building at the back of your throat when I even mention the health care system, we still go to doctors and still go to hospitals because that’s ultimately where our trust lies. They are the experts. They know things we don’t. Even when we say we don’t trust them — we have to trust somebody, and it might as well be them.

But, inevitably, those people will fail you. And they might fail you in a spectacular way. I had an aunt who had leg and hip problems and for months tried to get it diagnosed beyond muscle strain, and eventually, she didn’t have to — because turns out, it was cancer. My mother had a friend who had neck problems and the doctors misdiagnosed too long — turns out, it was a form of meningitis, and she almost died.

We’ve had our own brushes with this. When our son was born, we heard through our crunchy hippie liberal idea chain that birth is often over-managed — it’s pitocin and an epidural and not long until a C-section is on its way, and sure enough, when we get there that was exactly what they wanted to do. It’s like a train you get on and can’t get off. And they push that shit hard. Like drug peddlers. (An epidural, before insurance, can cost anywhere from $1000 – $3000.) Last year, our son was sick — not real sick, not sick in a scary way, just with a cold, but it had lingered a while and so we took him to the doctor just to see what they had to say. Our doctor, who we love, said without hesitation that he needed antibiotics. I said, “Did you test for a bacterial infection?” because it was right at that time we were started to hear about the post-antibiotic age and how doctors overprescribe antibiotics (when I was a kid if you sneezed once, you had a week’s worth of amoxicillin), and he said, “No, it’s just a preventative.” Which is weird, given that few colds are ever treatable by antibiotics. Again, I stress: our son wasn’t problematically sick. He was happy, running around, fever long-gone. We neglected to give him the antibiotics (a scary moment because — hey, the doctor told you one thing, and if you go the other way, oh boy howdy you just fucked up), and two days later he was all good.

It’s enough to give you pause.

Just a moment’s worth — but that’s all it takes.

Because once that mirror is chipped: the whole thing shatters pretty damn easy.

Somewhere along the way, the system is going to disappoint you. Education will fail your child. Your government will launch missiles at a wedding or a school or it will raise your taxes or betray your confidence. Your insurance won’t pay for something you swore was covered: flood, accident, an injury. All of these things are threads, and once you start pulling on them — *whistles* Hoo boy, will your faith be shaken. You hear about some outbreak of food-borne illness and it doesn’t take much to see how the FDA doesn’t have the power you think it should have, how they cannot institute recalls and how recalls are entirely voluntary. And then you think about those studies that say eggs are good for you, and now they’re bad, and now they’re good, and they raise cholesterol, but they don’t raise cholesterol, and how the first thing the doctor asks you when they note your high cholesterol is, HOW MANY EGGS DO YOU EAT followed by CAN WE PUT YOU ON A CHOLESTEROL MED NOW? And you start to see how maybe the eggs-are-good study was paid for by the Sinister Egg Lobby, or how the eggs-are-bad study was paid for by goddamn Lipitor, and then CBS asks you DOES YOUR DOCTOR HAVE TIES TO BIG PHARMA (warning: the devil lurks there as an autoplaying video) and healthimpactnews-dot-com says DOCTORS EARN $3.5 BILLION IN KICKBACKS FROM PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES. And healthimpactnews sounds like a real thing — you like health, you like news, and those things should impact the shit out of each other, so yeah, yes, cool.

And then you click a little deeper into the healthimpactnews site and you find talk of ozone therapy curing ebola (but of course it’s repressed!) and hey look at this vaccine cover-up and did you know application of broccoli sprouts improves autism — and at first some of those things seem woo-woo weird, like, hey, that can’t be right, but then you follow the pulled thread back and you remember, oh right, big business pays for studies and doctors were pushing meds when I didn’t want them to and the government blows up children and OH GODDAMN SHIT I CAN’T TRUST ANYTHING ANYMORE. Soon you learn that healthimpactnews is bullshit, and so you either have to go deeper down the I can’t trust anything rabbit hole or you have to plant a flag and say, this far, no further, I trust in this random asshole website who actually probably doesn’t believe its own lies and is really just selling content and advertising and clicks.

You no longer know what to believe.

Because that thing you just read sounds crazy, but we’re fans of crazy. We like to think we know things that the BIG SYSTEMS and CORPORATE MONSTERS don’t want us to know. And some of it is real! Some of it isn’t horseshit — we see how big companies legitimately abuse people, how banks give wafer-thin mortgages, how a corporation will pollute water that people drink. Corporate and governmental abuse is no myth. It happens. Not all the time, maybe not even all that often, but that doesn’t matter. We’re shit at risk analysis. Driving in a car is a lot worse than riding in a plane, but one plane crash and suddenly we’re like, nope, fuck that, I’m not a bird, I will not violate God’s own laws just to get to Tulsa more quickly. People die endlessly of flu but we get a statistically non-existent blip of ebola in this country and everybody’s shitting out their internal organs hoping they don’t catch the disease that makes them shit out their internal organs. More people are killed by hippos and cows, but fuck you, sharks.  *throws dynamite at sharks*

So, all this adds up, and then you go onto a place like Facebook, where ideas transmit fast. See, once, you wouldn’t read this post — you’d hear me tell it to you at a conference or in an elevator somewhere. And when I told you about my aunt or my Mom’s friend, maybe you’d nod and say, yeah, yeah, that happened to a friend of mine, or a friend or a friend, and we’d take our respective stories — true, false, or statistically improbable — and we’d carry them onto other groups. But we’d do this very, very slowly. Many times the idea would die out. Ideas in this way transmit like viruses or bacteria — they used to be slow, but now, Facebook? Facebook makes transmission of ideas fast. (Hence: “gone viral.”) We share bad information quickly, and we rile each other up about the things we thought were true — our distrust cracks the windshield collectively, now, not just on an individual, singular basis. Even this post that I’m writing? I told you about my experiences, about my aunt, about my mother’s friend — and we take those things in as data points when really they’re just fucking anecdotes with no meaning in the greater scheme. And god, even when you go looking for data, you can find all these correlating points still are open to wild interpretation (remember the ties between Internet Explorer and the murder rate?).

You eventually have to return trust and faith to something, so you start to put it in those people or those sites that you perceive are telling you the truth. People who have not yet betrayed your trust.

(So far as you know. You may see their agendas soon enough.)

And we spread the information.

And we nod and smile and tell each other we know things others don’t.

And we feel good because we found some inherent truth. Some signal amidst noise.

And we append to these things our own agendas, often unrealized.

It’s mostly a lie, of course. The truth is usually out there if you look hard enough. You can find a consensus on most topics — an imperfect consensus, but one that is often better than trusting like, that one guy on that website.

But this is how we get there.

This is how we stop vaccinating our kids.

This is how we disbelieve in climate change.

Or how we start to wonder if Obama really is a Kenyan socialist. Or we share inflated numbers of the dead to support our gun control wishes, or we pass around up other bullshit statistics to counter the efforts of gun control. We eat up mis- and disinformation with a spoon because we need to eat something. Doubt has opened the door, and when that happens, if we’re not careful, a whole lot of bad information can get in through the gap. We don’t always lie to each other knowing they’re lies.

We lie to each other because we’re waystations for other people’s deceptions.

We’re idea conduits. Agenda flingers. Little doubt factories.

So, how do we combat it?

I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t. I think you look for consensus. I think you look at everything with a skeptical eye and try to search out experts. I think you trust known sources of journalism and distrust fringe journalism — but even here, already I can feel my certainty in that eroding because plenty of journalistic sources are really just entertainment cloaked in the thinnest, most diaphanous veneer of “news.” Best bet is to recognize that you know less than you know, and that growing up is about embracing uncertainty rather than proselytizing the gospel truth.

It’s hard. It’s really hard.

And I think that’s what this post is about: just acknowledging that it is hard to get good information, and that distrust is overwhelming and damaging, and that the disruption of the Glorious Internet sometimes means awesome things but it sometimes means really shitfucky information gets transmitted really quickly. Anecdotes become artisanal data very, very fast — often without us realizing it. And before we know it, we’re all giving Jenny McCarthy a microphone, and kids are dying from measles they caught at a goddamn amusement park.

P.S. vaccinate your kids, for Chrissakes.

P.P.S. global warming is totally a thing.

P.P.S.S. Read this book: You Are Not So Smart.

You don’t mess with Atlanta Burns.

Everyone knows that. And that’s kinda how she likes it—until the day Atlanta is drawn into a battle against two groups of bullies and saves a pair of new, unexpected friends. But actions have consequences, and when another teen turns up dead—by an apparent suicide—Atlanta knows foul play is involved. And worse: she knows it’s her fault.

You go poking rattlesnakes, maybe you get bit.

Afraid of stirring up the snakes further by investigating, Atlanta turns her focus to the killing of a neighborhood dog. All paths lead to a rural dogfighting ring, and once more Atlanta finds herself face-to-face with bullies of the worst sort. Atlanta cannot abide letting bad men do awful things to those who don’t deserve it. So she sets out to unleash her own brand of teenage justice.

“Give Nancy Drew a shotgun and a kick-butt attitude and you get Atlanta Burns.” — Joelle Charbonneau, author of The Testing Trilogy

Hey, look, everybody!

Atlanta Burns is now out.

Check it out at:

Amazon US (Kindle, trade paperback, audio)

Amazon UK (Kindle, trade paperback, audio)

B&N (trade paperback, audio)

Indiebound (trade paperback, audio)

or Add on Goodreads

The Book

Young Adult — crime/noir.

Veronica Mars on Adderall. Nancy Drew meets Justified.

I wrote this book a couple years ago, and published it as two separate volumes — a novella, Shotgun Gravy, and a follow-up novel, Bait Dog. (The latter published with the help of Kickstarter.) It was a foray into young adult and crime writing at the same time, and the result was something with which I was honestly very happy. Atlanta Burns is a character after my own heart: she is a real-deal social justice warrior, an underdog who helps other underdogs — a saint to freaks and geeks, a foe to bullies and racists and other human monsters.

The book did well enough — or was at least intriguing enough — that Skyscape, the publisher of my young adult Heartland cornpunk trilogy, decided to pick up the first volume and a follow-up. (That follow-up is tentatively titled Frack You, and I am writing it now.) The first book is a re-edit of both Shotgun Gravy and Bait Dog, so that the two separate-but-connected stories are bound up as a single narrative volume. For those wanting to ask: that means this text is different from the two earlier self-published releases, substantially enough that this is a new book, but not so substantially that the story has dramatically changed.

It’s a tough book. I don’t know what trigger warnings to give it, so assume it’s got a basket of them. The book deals with suicide, sexual assault, dog fighting, bullying, guns. Yes, it’s young adult, but it’s got a lot of violence and more than its share of nasty words (though, honestly, probably nowhere near as nasty as what you hear out of most kids’ mouths). But despite all the Pennsyltucky grit, I like to think it’s funny and it has heart, too.

Some books you write and publish are books you like and you want people to read. (Some you hate and just want to bury.) But as an author — at least for me — some books end up as more than that. They’re more than just, HEY, I HOPE YOU CHECK IT OUT AND LIKE IT. Some books are your weird little book-babies. You love them more than you maybe should. You care more than is reasonable. Atlanta Burns falls into that category for me — as a character, she means a lot to me, and the book has been an underdog, like her, all along.

And So, A Plea

This book is published by Skyscape.

And Skyscape is an imprint under Amazon Publishing.

They have been aces about this book. Excellent editorial work. I adore the cover (which is by Cyanotype Book Architects). They’ve given this book a great deal of love. I have not a bad word to say about my experiences publishing with them.

But! Here is the reality check: this is a young adult book and young adult books do well in print because teens, apparently, like physical books more than they do e-books. Further, Amazon being Amazon means this book is not going to make it into a lot of bookstores easily. Some stores will carry it — a wonderful local children’s/YA store nearby, Let’s Play Books, carries the book (and if you want signed copies, I’d say to contact them). This would be less of an issue if my book were SFF, where digital reading is more prominent. But with YA, the physical book really matters. (I’ve actually been “banned” from the shelves of one prominent children’s store because of publishing with Amazon, actually — this isn’t the norm, as most stores are good or at least polite about it.)

Libraries matter. Bookstores matter. Schools matter.

What that means, practically speaking, is that this book is a little bit hobbled out of the gate.

And that means, I could use your help.

Er, obviously, I hope you buy the book and check it out — but beyond that, a book lives or dies on its word of mouth and this one? I think it could use the word of mouth.

I need your help spreading the word.

What does that mean, exactly? Well, it means whatever signal boost you can give it, I’ll take it with great gratitude. A word on social media. A review. A call to your local bookstore, library, school, whoever, whatever, wherever. Climb a tree and yell it at some squirrels? I dunno. Bottom line is: tell somebody, if you can. Especially if you like it! If you like a book, the best gift you can give the author (besides like, a bag of good coffee or the keys to a new Maserati) is attention — word of mouth is where writers and our stories live or die.

So, if you dig this website, if you like my other work?

Check this one out, and maybe boost the signal.

Thanks!

Reviews

Bookworm Blues, Sarah Chorn:

“Wendig breaks down boundaries and challenges his readers, and that’s part of what is so addicting about his books. Atlanta Burns is a no holds barred train ride through Hell and Wendig is an incredibly talented engineer.”

Michael Patrick Hicks:

“With Atlanta Burns, Chuck Wendig lobs one helluva hand grenade into the middle of the Young Adult genre… Temporarily trading in the far-future cornpunk pastures of his Heartland series for the redneck noir of Pennsyltucky, Wendig fully delivers with this terrific thriller. It’s stocked to the gills with white supremacists, dogfighting rings, drugs, murder, and mayhem. It also has plenty of heart in between, and the titular heroine, Atlanta Burns, is wildly worth rooting for. If you’ve followed Wendig’s other heroine, Miriam Black (Blackbirds), Burns may feel familiar and has a similar world-toughened outer shell and a mouthful of razor-sharp sarcasm.”

Tangled Bookmarks:

“The feels. OMG the FEELS! Seriously, a Chuck Wendig book breaks your heart into a gazillion million pieces and then holds the superglue just out of reach, saying na-nah-naaa-nah! Also? The best characters EVER in the history of fiction. I am so in love with Atlanta Burns that she has surpassed HitGirl as my all time hero.”

Melanie Meadors:

“Wendig has accomplished something pretty cool with this novel. Not only does he deal with topics like suicide, homosexuality, bullying, dog fighting/animal rights, absentee parenting, sexual abuse, and drugs—he deals with them all in one book in a realistic way that doesn’t feel heavy-handed. We don’t get that syndrome I see so often in teen books, where so many things happen to one person that it’s unbelievable. Most importantly, however, he captures the helpless, powerless feeling of being a teen so well, and in a way adults can understand, which is possibly the most interesting thing. Atlanta’s problems are not petty, and they are far-reaching. I never felt the eye-rolling exasperation I get when I read some YA “issues” books, I never felt like the main character had to get over herself, because she wasn’t in it for herself. She puts her life on the line for her friends, and while yes, life would have been easier had she just lain low and let things happen…well, this is Atlanta Burns we’re talking about here.”

Adan Ramie:

“Atlanta is my new hero. She’s not stupid, and she knows what she’s doing is dangerous, but what drives her is a need to right wrongs and put an end to the injustice that runs so rampant in her small town. I can definitely relate to the sentiment.”

Bookie-Monster.com:

“Girl Detectives. You know them: Nancy Drew, Ginny Gordon, Trixie Belden, and so many others. Atlanta Burns is the newest name on that list. The difference in this series is that author Chuck Wendig takes that beloved trope and drags it out behind the dumpsters of its safe little world. He roughs it up and hauls it onto a stage set by the mundane horrors of poverty, racism, and abuse.”

Pamela @ Goodreads:

“First of all, Wendig, get on that sequel because I need more Atlanta Burns in my life. Please and thank you…. Watch out for the ending, because the story will tear out your heart and stomp on it like a bee-stung elephant before allowing you to gently pick up the pieces and place it back in your chest, where it will start pounding in anticipation of Atlanta Burns’ next outing.”

Steven @ Goodreads:

“The titular main character, Atlanta Burns, is a FRIGGIN’ BADASS. I can tell you right now, on January 8th, that she is going to be one of my top favorite characters of 2015. She’s rough around the edges, has been through hell and back, and has decided that, with all the corruption and evil around her and adults who won’t do anything about it, she is going to take a stand against the darkness.”

Sunil @ Goodreads:

“I don’t know how many times I can praise Wendig’s prose, but the man is a fucking master of the third-person present noir style. The words feel supercharged with energy and creative metaphor… By the end, you’ll be ready for Atlanta Burns to take on all the bullies of the world and show them who’s boss (spoilers, it’s her).”

52 Book Minimum:

“Good gravy is she fantastic! It’s January 7th and I can GUAR.AN.DAMN.TEE that Atlanta will go down as one of my Top 10 main characters for all of 2015.”

Sci-Fi Bulletin:

“Chuck Wendig’s latest novel, originally self-published under the title Bait Dog (in case you’re thinking both the description and this review sound familiar!) is as much of a horror tale as his Double Deadvampire tales for Abbadon or his Miriam Black stories; it just doesn’t have the supernatural element that those two are based around. Atlanta doesn’t have super powers; she doesn’t know when you’re going to die. The only person whose death she has a pretty keen idea about is her own – and it’s likely to come quite soon if she continues the way she is going.”

I’ve wanted to be a writer since —

*checks watch*

— since I karate kicked my way out of the dragon cloaca that birthed me. I’m pretty sure I come from a dragon? That’s what my mother told me. MY MOTHER, WHO IS A DRAGON. (Actually, for real, if you see my mother’s feet? You might be inclined to agree. I’m pretty sure that she could scalp a man by gripping it with her foot and just twisting.)

I had a momentary desire to be a cartoonist, but for the most part, it was writer, writer, writer.

Which means I started writing very early. I’m still one of those dips who keeps the “books” he published when he was in elementary school. (The earliest I have is a story about who go to the core of the earth to save it. A story that later became the Delroy Lindo filmic masterpiece, The Core. Okay, maybe not. But seriously, it was kinda the same plot.) I had a piece of software for my Tandy 1000 SX called Print Master (or was it Print Shop?) and I’d make book covers and typeset my own books and they were terrible, though probably no more terrible than some of what you find on Amazon Kindle these days (ba-dum-bum). I continued this habit of writing lots and lots of things through elementary school, high school, and college.

My first published short story was when I was 18. I published — professionally, though for very little actual money — a few times throughout college.

Thing is, all throughout this journey, I encountered awards. They offer writing awards throughout the various school-based strata, and when I say I “encountered” them, I mean to suggest I got close enough to smell them, but never near enough to hold onto one. I met these awards on the road, like you might meet a hobo or a vampire. Purely in passing.

Other people always won the awards.

And for a long time, that bothered me. I was young and I thought, awards are validation. Doubly important at that time because I was struggling to convince my family and the rest of the real world that writing was in fact A Real Thing, not just some artsy-poopsy dalliance. I figured, whoa, hey, if I can win an award, that will be irrefutable proof that I’m supposed to do what I’m supposed to do. It’ll prove it to me and it’ll prove it to everyone else.

I didn’t win any.

I sometimes won runner-up.

The winners were always very literary — sometimes amazing work, sometimes confounding and pretentious. The winners were never genre-based. You didn’t see any fantasy, horror, or sci-fi winning — and those were the things I wrote. I even tried to write a few literary-style stories at one point. Which was a good exercise, in that it let me stretch my muscles and extend my voice and also decide very plainly that, no, I don’t want to write purely literary work.

One of the stories I wrote won runner-up in a college writing award.

Ironically, that after I’d already been published. Published for real. And yet, the publication felt somehow less important than winning the award — validation from peers and academics rather than from the market.

That was, and remains, poopy-cuckoo shitty-pants shenanigans.

Awards are not validation. Awards don’t mean something is good or that other things are bad. Awards are accolades and kudos pinned to the sleeves and lapels of art, but their margins are very narrow, the window is very small. That’s not a failing, it’s not a bug — by their nature you can’t take a MASSIVE BULK of art and give out awards to all of them. You have to winnow. You have to whittle. Sometimes that winnowing and whittling feels right. Sometimes it’s driven by social trends, crowd interest, sales, politics, visibility. Sometimes it’s the result of toxic trends, sometimes it’s the result of overturning those toxic trends. Sometimes its great art that wins awards. Sometimes it’s not. (I will remind you that Forrest Gump is an Oscar-winning picture. THAT’S RIGHT, I JUST BURNED YOU, TOM HANKS. I GOT YOU GOOD.)

I say all this because right now, it’s coming up on awards season. That’s true in TV and film, and it’s also true in books — you’re starting to see a lot of chatter about Stokers, Edgars, Hugos, Nebulas. (That will be the protagonist of my next novel: STOKER EDGAR HUGO NEBULA, THE THIRD. An astronaut dragon-riding detective! It’ll win awards!) The chatter rises, and in that chatter I get a sense of award-oriented anxiety — who will win, who should, will I be nominated, I’ll never be nominated, and so on and so forth.

You need to understand, though:

Awards are not infallible.

The best book will not always win an award.

The best book sometimes won’t ever even be nominated.

Sometimes, it will be nominated, and it will win, and you’ll cheer — at the same time someone else boos that very same decision. The book you love isn’t a book everyone loves. And vice versa.

Awards are subjective, strange, and imperfect.

They’re not the whole elephant; they’re just a blood sample.

And at the same time: awards are awesome. The people who win them? Awesome for them. And deserved. Those who are nominated but lose? Awesome for them, too. And also deserved. Those who are never nominated? Hey, fuck it — awesome for you, because you’re out there writing books and reaching an audience and doing what you fucking love to do. You didn’t win an award? Most people didn’t. A hundred other amazing authors and books and pieces of art failed to win awards. Most failed to even score nominations. You’re in good company.

Awards generate interest, conversation, controversy — they’re bubbles in the boiling pot of water. Not always relevant to your world, not always ideal, but it keeps the whole thing cooking.

So, we should celebrate awards and those who win them.

And, at the same time, we should be able to celebrate not winning them. Because awards? Not the end all be all. They’re one part — an admittedly small part — of the total equation. My advice? Relax. Write the stories you want to write. Try to reach an audience, not an award. Awards are too weird, too unpredictable. You win one? Victory lap. You don’t? Then you still get your victory lap.

Just remember that an award doesn’t validate you.

You were valid when you got here. You already have the cake — an award is just icing.

Man, that post title makes it sounds like I don’t think a whole helluva lot of Myke Cole, doesn’t it? That would be utter horseshit. Major shenanigans. I love Myke. Myke’s a stand-up guy, tough as nails but nice as cookies, and a helluva author, to boot. He’s living it, he’s doing it, he’s working his ass off, and so here he is to talk a little bit of shop — this time, about originality in fiction. (Er, and Myke named the post, damnit. Quit lookin’ at me.)

* * *

My novel Gemini Cell comes out on January 27th [hint: that’s tomorrow — c.], and I wanted to come on Terribleminds to tell you that it’s absolutely unoriginal.

And that’s just fine.

If you work in any artistic discipline, you’ve had this experience: You have a great idea. Not normal-great, but GREAT-great. A thumbnail for a painting that will supplant the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. A novel plot that will make George R. R. Martin throw in the towel. We’re talking scintillating. Game changing. True genius.

And then you go to do your due diligence on the Internet, and find that it’s already been done. Not something vaguely similar. The same damn thing in every last, damnable, niggling, particular detail.

Yes, folks, it’s true, absolutely EVERYTHING has been done before. Professional artists have been burned too many times, we KNOW this. We don’t even bother trying to come up with new ideas.

And that’s okay. Because there’s another great thing happening, it’s called time. Time works hand-in-hand with the incredibly short memory and attention span of the average fan. People FORGET, and they forget quickly. Culture is organic, an ever-evolving phenomenon whose only constant is change. What does this mean? That if you wait long enough, and often not very long at all, enough time will pass, and trends will change enough that your stale idea will suddenly seem original again.

Let’s look at comics for an example. Up until the 80’s, comics were all wrapped up in a set of standards promulgated by a group known as the Comics Code Authority (CCA). Now, I’m not going to get into a history of the CCA, but suffice to say that it existed to protect all the innocent children (and adults) reading comics from stuff they already knew about anyway. Things like, you know, violence and gore, masturbation and boobies. To sum up, the CCA existed to make comic books suck.

And suck they did, from the CCA’s founding in 1954, up until the mid-80’s, when time and changing attitudes forced them to relax their standards (publishers finally abandoned the CCA in the 2000’s, but it was defanged long before that).

Now here’s the thing: you would think that there’d be some grand gesture marking the departure from the shadows of censorship and dancing into the light of depictions of dicks and severed heads and dropping the occasional F-bomb. Batman would be replaced with Buttman. Spidey would web sling his way onto a porn set in the middle of filming. Everything would change.

But that’s not what happened, and that’s okay. Because what happened was way better.

Art is in the details, in the nuance, not the grand gesture. In 1986, Frank Miller brought us Dark Knight Returns, the same Batman we knew and loved from the CCA days, but with a darker cast, updated for an audience ready to be confronted with life’s unrelenting demands on all of us, superhuman or otherwise. A few years earlier, Alan Moore had updated Swamp Thing from his neutered 70’s origins, making him a creature at once dedicated to and utterly cut off from humanity. Neil Gaiman took Wesley Dodds out of his 30’s fedora and gasmask, and made him the deathless master of dream who was as relentless and uncompromising as a hurricane, condemning people, races and worlds to destruction on a whim or at the direction of protocols only he fully understood.

None of this was new. Miller, Moore and Gaiman revived and refreshed characters they hadn’t invented. They took an old thing and played with it, just a little. Just enough.

Anyone who loves comics knows that in all three cases, the result was nothing less than revolutionary.

Zombie stories are popular enough now to constitute their own subgenre. Like most folks of my generation, I grew up on Romero flicks, the slow, dumb zombies in Night of the Living Dead, and their faster counterparts in Dawn of the Dead (the ’04 remake). I sucked down all the Honestly-These-Aren’t-Zombies-Okay-Maybe-They-Are films like 28 Days Later, Resident Evil and I am Legend (both the Vincent Price and Will Smith variants). I started reading Kirkman’s Walking Dead comics in ’03, and stuck with him when the TV series on HBO became stratospherically popular. I’ve downloaded my fair share of mobile-device zombie shoot-em-up games, which are ubiquitous on both the Apple and Android online stores. The Last of Us, which postulates fungal infection as a means of transmission, was such a good console game that I actually watched a two-hour walkthrough on YouTube like it was a feature film.

The zombie genre has been done to death. Romero has been working in the field since 1968. Kirkman has been making “zombie” a household word for over a decade now. Zombies are dead, they eat the flesh of the living. They can be slow or they can be fast. It can be a virus or it can be a bacteria. They can be easily contained or they can bring about an apocalypse. There isn’t a lot left to explore.

Except there is. And writers are doing it. Diana Rowland’s White Trash Zombie series has been well-received (won an RT Reviewer’s Choice award for best Urban Fantasy Protagonist – and that protagonist was a zombie), with the 4^th novel hitting stores this past July. Rowland is asking the question, “how does a zombie get on with life after . . . you know, not being alive?” and it’s clearly resonating with readers. Mike Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts, is one of the most celebrated genre novels in memory, drawing intense praise from Slate, the Guardian and Entertainment Weekly. Carey’s book is a bildungsroman for a 10-year old girl growing up in the post-apocalyptic wreckage. Like Rowland’s Ashley Crawford, she is infected, and coping with what it means to grow up when your life is already cut short.

Make no mistake, these are zombie novels. There is nothing grandly bright or new here. It’s just the lightest touch on an old, familiar standby, and it makes all the difference in the world.

Gemini Cell’s protagonist is a U.S. Navy SEAL who is killed when an op goes south. Raised from the dead, he must share his own corpse with a demon and return to the service of his country. But our hero has more on his mind than his job, he left a wife and son behind, and won’t rest until he’s learned their fate.

Gemini Cell is a zombie-novel, but it’s doing other things as well. Schweitzer’s death and reanimation is a bald stand-in for PTSD, and how it cuts those who go to war off from the rest of society, as surely as if they were dead walking among the living. He’s a zombie with a family, and his status as walking-corpse hasn’t changed his love for them, or his desire to continue on as a husband and father. It’s a light touch, to be sure. That’s by design.

If I did it right, it will play like Miller, or Moore, or Gaiman. Readers will feel rooted in the old trope, but spun in a new direction different enough to make them feel that sense of resonance and wonder that brings us to speculative fiction in the first place. If I did it wrong, it’ll be tired, or incoherent, or both.

But either way, Gemni Cell is nothing new. And that’s just fine with me.

* * *

As a secu­rity con­tractor, gov­ern­ment civilian and mil­i­tary officer, Myke Cole’s career has run the gamut from Coun­tert­er­rorism to Cyber War­fare to Fed­eral Law Enforce­ment. He’s done three tours in Iraq and was recalled to serve during the Deep­water Horizon oil spill.  All that con­flict can wear a guy out. Thank good­ness for fan­tasy novels, comic books, late night games of Dun­geons and Dragons and lots of angst fueled writing.

Myke Cole: Website | Twitter

Gemini Cell: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound

Last week’s challenge: It’s X Meets Y!

This week is easy enough:

Roll randomly on the three tables below, and you will select three things that must be contained within your story. A story that will be 1000 words long, posted at your online space, and linked back here by next Friday, noon, EST.

That’s it. Easy.

Use a die or a random number generator for the tables.

Now, get to writing!

Table 1

1. A spider
2. A pocketwatch
3. Betrayal
4. A murder
5. A journal
6. Poison
7. A strange bird
8. A talisman
9. A library
10. A sword

Table 2

1. An assassin
2. A lost comic book
3. A found dog
4. True love
5. The end of the world
6. Survival
7. A divorce
8. A shopping mall
9. Public drunkenness
10. A vampire

Table 3

1. War
2. A magician
3. A bomb
4. A horse
5. Resurrection
6. A cave
7. A forbidden tryst
8. A gateway
9. A shoebox full of photographs
10. A prison