Hey, look! A Goodreads giveaway for 20 print copies of Atlanta Burns.

(US only, I’m afraid.)

The book comes out next week, and certainly you can pre-order the book before it hits shelves, but in the meantime, hey, who doesn’t like the chance to win free books? FIRST YOU MUST DO THE FREE BOOK DANCE.

Okay, there’s no dance. Relax.

Anyway, check it out. I’ll be back next week to talk more about the book proper (and today I just started writing the sequel, tentatively titled, Frack You).

Atlanta Burns, out 1/27:

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.

Will Atlanta triumph? Or is fighting back just asking for a face full of bad news?

Last week, here at ye olde bloggy grotto, Delilah S. Dawson came in and rocked your faces with 25 Writing Hacks From A Hack Writer. It’s an amazing (and epic) post — before the new year started, I was working on this post, below, kind of a ranty, yelly, gesticulating mess of a screed about HOW TO ART HARDER, and looking at it now, I think (hope?) it serves as a complement to Delilah’s hai-karate dose of practical writing wisdom.

It will feature a lot of inappropriate metaphors and crass vulgarity, to which someone out there will inevitably say: “You could say it without using so much nasty language, you know.”

I do know.

But that leads me to the first item on the list:

1. Repeat After Me: “Fuck It, I’m Doing It Anyway”

Throughout your MYSTERIOUS AND WONDERFUL AND OCCASIONALLY MISERABLE ART JOURNEY, you will meet many naysayers, and you will be given enough advice that, if you wrote all this advice upon many pieces of paper, you would singularly destroy a significant portion of the world’s forests. You can always keep your ears open. You can always take in every piece of advice, every warning, every admonishment, and you can regard it the way one regards a strange animal skull in the woods (“Was this a possum? A cat? A Bandersnatch?”). But when you know what you want to do, do it anyway. Even if it seems unwise. Someone will always tell you that art is a bad idea. They will tell you that book you want to write won’t sell. They will explain to you how you’d be a far better lawyer, doctor, barista, horse whisperer, or orgy custodian. They will say: “You shouldn’t do that.” And you will say: “Fuck it, I’m doing it anyway.”

2. Stop Giving So Much Of A Shit

Said it before, will say it again: you have to learn to care less. When all the pressures and stresses and anxieties and critics and haters and assfaces and shitbirds come knocking at your door looking to carve away their pound of mental flesh, you have to get out your purse, poke through it while making hmm and ahhh sounds, and then finally say: “Gosh, I’m sorry, I have no more fucks to give.” Then you pull out your cool 1980s-action-movie submachine gun and mow them all down. (Er, metaphorically! No actually shooting anyone.) The hills should be alive with the sound of you not giving two rat pubes to rub together. If we put too much pressure on ourselves, too much weight of expectation and consequence, then the creation of cool things becomes harder. If you build a mental wall, you have to climb it. That’s just extra work. So? Stop putting it between you and the things you want to make.

3. Make Stuff All The Fucking Time

What are you doing right now? Reading this? Get out of here. Go on! Shoo! Fuck off for five minutes and go create. Make something. Then fix it. Then destroy it. Then recreate it. No, no, I’m not saying you literally have to take every minute of every day to be furiously and frantically shitting out content — I just mean, look at yesterday, look at today, look at tomorrow and make sure that those days feature a whole fucking lot of doing art. You wanna be an artist? Artists work their nipples off. Seriously. No artist even has nipples — they’re just sanded off by the sheer waves of creation that buffet them. Rhat might not be true. But the point remains: you wanna create stuff, you gotta do a lot of it. You should be doing it more often than not doing it.

4. Stop Fetishizing The Future

One day, a hypothetical person says, I’m going to do the thing. Solve for X, and that ‘thing’ becomes — well, who knows? Travel the world. Quit your job. Rub your naked butt on the window at the Burger King where you used to work. But often, this is true of artists, writers, makers, creators. We say, one day, I’m going to write that book. Or paint that painting. Or learn how to draw comics or write poetry or sculpt a statue of you rubbing your naked butt on the window at the Burger King where you used to work. But one day will never come. Because the future is always the future. The future is always tomorrow, the next day, the next year — forever out of reach of your grabby hands. Stop praising the future for its opportunity and start seizing the power of the present. Fuck “one day.” You have this day. Do not squander it.

5. Carve Out Time — And Protect That Time

Art requires your time. It is demanding. When Malcolm Gladwell says you need 10,000 hours to learn to do a thing, it’s an arbitrary number, but the truth is there: you need time. And you need time beyond those 10,000 hours because once you figure out how to do what you’re doing you realize you haven’t really figured fuck-all and the only way out is through. You must carve out and claim time and secure these minutes and hours to make stuff. And you must protect this time with tooth and claw. Anybody comes and tries to take your time away — they get shanked with a letter opener. If this thing is a priority to you, then that means you must actively seize the time to do it and ensure that other things get in line behind it, not ahead.

6. Steal Space — And Guard That Space

Artists require territory. Whether it’s a kitchen table with a laptop on it, a walk-in closet where you keep your easel, or a muddy pit in the middle of your yard where you hide from the daystar in order to write poetry on stones with your own filth, you need space to do it. The artist puts up fences and says, THIS IS MINE. Put up metaphorical barbed wire. Guard it like a starveling wolf. I am fortunate enough now to have a writing shed, but I didn’t always — just the same, I always made sure I had space to sit down and do the work. That means a door that closes, or maybe it means noise-canceling headphones. Look at it this way: you can’t grow a garden without some dirt for planting. You’re growing a garden, so find a fucking patch of dirt and get to digging.

7. Spend Your IEP Wisely

If ART were an RPG, every character would have IEP: Intellectual Energy Points. We don’t all get the same number, but we all get some, and we spend them throughout the day. We spend them on important stuff (day job, conversations with loved ones, ninja school). We spend them on… ennh, less important stuff (social media arguments, finding new porn, yelling at clouds). Thing is, the generative act of creating art and shaping it takes IEP. It costs us. So, if you have too few (or none) to give, then your art is a wilting flower, a sad trombone, a melting snowman. This means, again, giving priority. Do the work first. Make stuff as early as you can. Though, here’s a min/maxing tip: in the ART RPG, your character can take a magic potion to regain IEP temporarily. This magic potion is called “coffee.” (Also worth reading: the spoon theory.)

8. Say Yes All The Time…

When you begin the path of ARTING HARD LIKE AN ARTFUL MOTHERFUCKER, you should learn to say yes with an almost automatic, thoughtless grace. I said yes to pretty much everything early on because, at that fumbling stage, being an artist of any kind is hard. You just wanna make stuff and you don’t know how or who will let you or who will pay you and so when someone is like, “I need you to write 1000 words about a goat fucking a pumpkin and I need it by 9AM Tuesday!” you’re like, yeah, yes, yes, just give me the work. Saying yes a lot early on allows you to rove and roam haphazardly toward the eventual goal of being your own self-sufficient maker-person, and at this stage you need to build the ladder out of any spare junk you can find.

9. …Until You Have To Say No All The Time

Eventually, though, you hit a point where you’ve made this crooked ladder out of whalebones and Russian dictionaries and frozen, goat-fucked pumpkins and then… you know, you need to stop doing all that crazy stuff. You need to stop saying yes and you need to start saying no. This is a hard transition — you don’t always know when it is and even when you’re not a desperate artist you remember being desperate. It’s like how my Depression-era grandmother would always steal things from restaurants: salt packets, napkins, every piece of bread she could pilfer, children from neighboring tables. It’s like, it wasn’t the Depression anymore, but she remembered it well, too well, so well that she was ready with every jelly tub or stolen fork. But beginning as an artist is like figuring out sex. You just kinda want to do it everywhere. Eventually, though: you settle down. You focus up. You start saying no more than you say yes.

10. Burn Your Parachute (But Know When To Jump)

I fucked my own exit strategy. I gave myself no meaningful way out. I said, I’m either going to be a writer, or I’m going to toil in obscurity and write anyway. I never gave myself a doorway out of the work that I wanted to do. I wanted to write, so I was always going to be a writer, and nothing was going to change that. Stubborn as a Viagra erection. I burned my own parachute — but at the same time, I knew (or tried to know) when to jump. I didn’t just disengage from all day jobbery and rip off all my clothes and leap into the shrieking maelstrom. I stayed in the plane for as long as I could. I practiced and made stuff and did the work and then, only then, did I figure out how to jump out of the plane without a parachute and, oh, not die. Which leads me to:

11. Be Hungry For Work, Not For, Y’know, Food

The idea of the starving artist is an idea propagated by those who want you to make things for them for free. It’s a real-life trope, an idea that there’s something romantic and precious about starving for your art. It’s framed as a sacrifice: if you care enough about your art, you’ll do it anyway. It’s not about money, they say. It’s about the art. (As if those two things are somehow in opposition — which, uhh, they ain’t.) Well, don’t you love what you do enough to die for it? Aren’t you a soldier fighting in the trenches, in the mud and the blood, for your work? Sure you are. And soldiers still get paid, goddamnit. Soldiers still get three hots and a cot. Don’t go hungry for your art. We don’t make good art when we’re hungry for actual food — we make good art when we’re fed and when we can focus on the work more than we can focus on not dying. Have a dayjob for as long as you can. And when it’s time to marry those two old friends ART and COMMERCE, well —

12. Get Goddamn Fucking Paid Because Art Has Goddamn Fucking Value

Goddamnit. GODDAMNIT. Get paid, artmonkey. Put the thing you made on the table and be like, “I want money for it.” Not Twitter followers. Not a high-five. Not angel farts and chocolate coins. Actual filthy lucre. Yeah, yes, you can make art without getting paid (and more on that in a moment) — but art is not just a hobby and a habit. For many, it’s a career. That’s respectable. That’s not nothing. But the reason so many people look down on a creative career as a choice is that for so long, people in power have told you that art has only ephemeral, creative value. Oh, you do it because you love it, not for this gross money, yuck, ew — gosh, if you take money for your art, you’ve compromised, you’ve sold out, you’ve basically poisoned your own water glass. Commerce makes art impure, they’ll say. And to that, I say, SHENANIGANS. That is CLOWNPANTS. That is a FOUL TREBUCHET FLINGING SCORCHED DIAPERS OVER OUR CITY WALLS. The real tragedy is when artists start to get sucked into this lie — and soon they tell themselves and worse, other artists, that getting paid is somehow dirty pool. It’s not. Stop buying the lie. Stop spreading the myth. Art has value, so claim value for your art.

13. (But If You’re Gonna Be Exposed, Expose Yourself)

Yes, you can ART FOR FREE. Yes, you should art for free. But here’s a tip: when you do it, do it because you want to. Control it. Expose yourself, like I do at JC Penney’s every Tuesday. WAIT, no, I mean — uhh. Never mind. What I’m saying is: control your work. If you put it out there for free, let it be for a real reason, a measurable reason. Again, you’ll find lots of people promising you lots of things if you just make something for them for free. If they’re earning out? You should earn out. If they’re a friend, or if it’s for charity — or better yet, it’s part of an avenue or platform you actually control, then hey, let it all hang out. Not everything is about the money. Sometimes it is about the love. But when someone asks you to create something just for the exposure, well, remember — you can die from exposure LIKE THIS GUY WHO WAS PROBABLY A WRITER:

14. Love Your Bad Reviews

Listen. Listen. You’re an artist, an author, a maker-of-stuffs, and you get a bad review and your first impulse is to fire up the old ragemachine and respond very crankily to said reviewer about how they’re wrong and they don’t get it and huff-a-puff-a-poopy-doo. No, no, no, no, no. Embrace the bad reviews. Enjoy the criticism. Here’s why: they are an indicator of your reach. They are a whittling down of your audience. Your audience will not be Everyone On Earth, awesome as that might be. Some people will love your work. Some people will hate it. I’ve had bad reviews where I wanted to like, literally bite my computer, grr, chomp-chomp. But then I read some of the comments at the bottom of those reviews. Sure, some of the comments were extra-mean with a dollop of scalding snark-sauce, but I also saw comments that said, “You know, that actually sounds like a book I want to read.” Bad reviews are awesome. Good reviews are even awesomer, sure, but hey, it’s all part of the game. Just be happy you’re out there, doing what you do, gathering the battle scars that prove you’ve been in the arena. (Extra credit: Five Ways To Respond To Negative Reviews: A Helpful Guide!)

15. Laugh When You Fall Down

You’re going to fuck up. Your career will have peaks and valleys. Your art will sometimes be shit, sometimes be gold, and you won’t always know the difference. Throughout this ARTFUL LIFE, you will fall down and skin your knee and bust your lip. Laugh it off. Enjoy the failure. Learn from it. Sometimes you fall down, you get to see a new perspective — in the gutter, looking up at the stars. Or maybe there’s two ladybugs down there making sweet ladybug love. That’s nice. That’s real nice. You gotta fall. You gotta take the hits. You have to learn to enjoy it. A creative life is a little bit BDSM. Learn to love the sting of the whip.

16. Finish, But Never Be Finished

Finish your shit. But never be finished. A first draft needs a second draft. Any effort needs a second, and a third, and as many as it takes — and sometimes you scrap one thing to make another thing, and sometimes one thing is a success but what about the next, and the next, and the next after that? There never is a last. A hard-arting motherfucker doesn’t think about one thing. It’s about all the things. It’s not singular. It’s not even just a career. It’s a life. A whole life of creating and fixing and destroying and creating anew. It’s a cosmic cycle. One thing down: an eternity to go. That shouldn’t be scary. That shouldn’t be stressful. That should feel amazing. It never ends until your heart quits kicking and the grave makes its call.

17. Life Is Both Medium And Material

Art is not reiterative. It doesn’t feed itself in the same way you can’t just barf up food and eat it again (though my dog believes differently). Yes, you can fuel part of your ART-TASTIC ODYSSEY through creating things and looking at that which is made by others, but art also requires a life. It demands escape. The hobbit must leave his cozy little berm and go have a crazy adventure before he comes home to write. There must be a there before there’s a back again. A life must be lived. The hobbit has to go and run from dragons and drink with dwarves and get high on wizard drugs before streaking through Mordor (“One does not simply run naked through Mordor”). Life is fuel for what you make because art is a reflection of life. Even when it’s fantastic, impossible, insane — the art we make must still be grounded in the life we live.

18. Complacency Is The Mind-Killer

It’s always sad to see complacency settle into an artist and that artist’s creations — a samey-samey feeling, a smug feeling of comfort, a settled sense of easing back into the chair and doing it all over again. Nothing new. Everything old. Habit, pattern, a hamster in a wheel, a dog eating its own barf. Never be complacent. Look for ruts. Try to figure out when you’re in one.

19. Always Be Reaching

You get out of ruts by reaching. By aiming beyond your talent. This happens right at the beginning — when we first seek to create a thing, we do so and we know nothing, Jon Snow. We’re basically infants, toddlers, pawing with boogery fingers at a thing we do not understand and yet a thing we are compelled to grab anyway. We don’t know how pieces fit together but we try anyway and we fuck up and choke on a DUPLO block and it doesn’t matter because we do it anyway. But somewhere along the way, some of us stop that reaching. We stop trying new things. We stop trying to outpace our own talent. Fuck that. Always reach. Always look for the next level, the new thing, a level up, ding. Muscle grows when we tear muscle. So tear your artistic muscles.

20. Work Is The Fear-Killer

Afraid? Uncertain? Anxious? Of course you are. We all are. But you punt fear in the crotch by working. Work through fear. Work begets work begets skill begets talent. You build confidence by doing. Riding a bike for the first time is scary. Riding a bike for the seventh time, less so. The 70th time? Not at all. Art is not so plain as that — some fear will always be present, and doubt will forever be a goblin in your pocket. And some of that is good: it keeps you moving, keeps you making and working. But the way through is always to do, do, do.

21. Self-Promote Your Art With Art

The artist promotes. Nobody else is going to do it for you. The trick is to do it with as much art and aplomb as you bring to the work you are promoting. Self-promotion is not an angry badger you shake at people — BUY MY ART OR YOU GET THE BADGER. Self-promotion isn’t even external from the art you’re making. Self-promo is part of the art. Consider it as organic as you can. You made a thing and now you want to talk to people about the thing. Engage and connect and create. Self-promotion is itself an art.

22. Write With Your Filters Off

We put up lots of walls between us and the work we do. We think conservatively. This won’t work. That isn’t right. There’s a rule against that. Nobody has done this before. *blows a vuvuzela in your face* No! Wrong! Destroy those walls. Eliminate your filters. Art without them. Already the act of creating art is a mechanical separation from the idea in our head — don’t insert more roadblocks and locked doors and angry badgers. Create with blissful ignorance. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe you’ll have to fix it in post. But rip away the filters with ruinous hands. Filters are NSFA — Not Safe For Art.

23. And Also, Your Pants

Because, really, pants are stupid. Pants are a tool of the oppressor. Fuck pants. Which was actually my nickname at the Rock Dove Ranch brothel outside Reno, Nevada. “HEY, CAPTAIN FUCKPANTS,” they’d say. “IT’S TIME TO MAKE LOVE FOR MONEY. NOW DRINK THIS PINK DRINK, PUT ON THIS CROTCHLESS ASTRONAUT COSTUME, AND GET IN THAT BEDROOM.” And I’d do it. Because I’m committed to my work. Anyway. So what happens when you remove thine pants?

24. Two Words: Epic Genitals

We think of artists as soft, gooey creatures. Wifty, wispy, bending in the wind. But art perseveres. Art is a hammer on an anvil. It’s carvings in walls, books that live inside history, images that mark our minds indelibly like a boot pressed into wet cement. You make things? You’re a bad ass. You have epic genitals. You are a creator. You urge unreal things into reality. You shit out gods and create fire from your mouth and spray ink and paint and unicorn blood from all your pores. Don’t think yourself weak. Don’t see making art — whether you write comic books or build whole goddamn buildings — as anything less than the generative, proliferant, tectonic act that it is.

25. Return To Center

Things will be difficult. Art is a rough road up a weird mountain. Life seems impermissible when it comes to living a live of making cool stuff. When things are hard? When you feel distracted, overwhelmed, pulled apart like soft, seedy bread — return to center. Go home to the worlds you create. Make things. Do the work. Create something new. A splash of blood on a canvas. A spatter of brain matter on the page. A bone chisel against a lump of stone. Be generative.

Art will not destroy you.

Art will save you.

* * *

The journey to become a successful writer is long, fraught with peril, and filled with difficult questions: How do I write dialogue? How do I build suspense? What should I know about query letters? How do I start? What the hell do I do?

The best way to answer these questions is to ditch your uncertainty and transform yourself into a Kick-Ass Writer. This new book from award-winning author Chuck Wendig combines the best of his eye-opening writing instruction — previously available in e-book form only — with all-new insights into writing and publishing. It’s an explosive broadside of gritty advice that will destroy your fears, clear the path, and help you find your voice, your story, and your audience.

Amazon

B&N

Indiebound

Writer’s Digest

How does a book cover come about? What’s right — and what’s wrong — about a book cover? What makes it good, what makes it bad, what connects it to the story or makes it insufferably distant from the material underneath? Here, author Cassandra Rose Clarke would like to talk a little bit about book covers — and then do a cover reveal of her own.

* * *

Let’s talk book covers.

In a prose-driven medium they are a quick flash of visual representation, something to appeal to what is for most of us the dominant sense. A good cover will distill a story down to its key elements, providing the picture to the book’s 100,000 words—a bad cover will come in like a wrecking ball and annihilate that shit. As a writer who dreamed of becoming a visual artist in high school, book covers have always been an interesting topic to me. They blend a wide variety of graphic design elements—not just the images themselves, but font, composition, color choice, text layout, and so on, and they do it all in service of a completely unvisual medium. It’s actually completely fascinating.

One cool thing about books covers is how they represent current aesthetic trends—and I don’t just mean in terms of just book covers. Each decade tends to be associated with certain aesthetics: in the 20thth century alone we went from art nouveau to mid-century modern to whatever the fuck was going on in the 90s. And that’s an extremely cursory overview. These aesthetics grow out of fashion and design and advertising and, oh yeah, book covers.

One of the coolest ways to track changing aesthetics is too look at the different editions of a book over the years, and one of my favorites books to do this with is the Lord of the Rings. There’s a website that looks at all the different LOTR covers from its fifty-year history, and you can really see how the covers and marketing for epic fantasy evolved over that time. The original covers, designed by Tolkien himself, are among my favorite. I especially like the cover for the Two Towers:

Look, I’m the first to admit I don’t know much about Tolkien. I’m sure there are massive Tolkien fans out there who can tell me the design was inspired by some Norse artwork from 1000 CE or some such, but to me the most striking thing about the cover is how modern—as in mid-century modern—the design looks. The art style does have a whiff of medieval Elvish about it, but I love the simple, symbolic design of the two hours and the ring itself. It’s not at terribly detailed cover, but it still manages to convey loads about the tone and story in the book.

In contrast, check out this cover from an (I believe) mid-80s edition:

Forgive me if you’re a fan, but my first reaction to this cover when I saw it in a Half Priced Books awhile back was a Channing Tatum-style AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Actually, all of this edition’s covers are pretty amazing:

LOOK AT ARAGORN. LOOK AT HIM.

But the thing is—these covers actually fit in pretty nicely with other epic fantasy covers at the time. The original Tolkien editions are gorgeous, but these covers fit in better along the Fantasy shelf of Totally Awesome SFF Books, circa 1986. I imagine if the movies hadn’t come out, we’d be stuck with editions featuring a scowly unshaven hobbit in a hooded cloak. Because that’s what Fantasy shelves look like these days.

Book cover trends can be a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing, too. Those Totally Rad LOTR covers were created because it was the trend at the time, but somebody was the first person to say, “Hey, what about vaguely photorealistic paintings of dudes looking awesome? Can that be a cover?” And then they did it, and then everybody else ripped it off for a decade. For example, we are still seeing the effects of the Twilight covers ten years on:

Whatever your feelings on Twilight might be, there’ s no denying that cover is iconic as fuck. Literally. It’s a black background with a single iconic image. As an image, it raises questions and associations: a proffered red apple is emblematic of no less than the fucking fall of humankind in the Garden of Eden, so yeah, definitely iconic. But beyond that, the cover suggests certain themes in the books, in particular the notion of temptation and desire that runs rampant through that story. Does Bella “fall” at the end of the quadrilogy by becoming a vampire? Or is her new-found immortality, combined with her new-found knowledge about the true nature of the world, a reverse fall—a way for her to enter back into the Garden of Eden?

Look at all that English major shit I pulled, all from looking at a single cover!

The Twilight covers went on to inspire tons of YA book covers, including that of The Hunger Games, which replaced the apple with an emotionally significant pin. I even remember spotting some new editions of classic novels like Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice with Twilight-style covers, hard evidence that publishers are colluding with high school teachers to trick students into finishing their required reading.
Then there’s the Twilight/Fifty Shades of Grey connection. Obviously, Fifty Shades started off as Twilight fanfic, but do you really think it was a coincidence that the Fifty Shades covers share a lot in common with the Twilight books?

There’s the same empty background and the same iconic image—this time of a sexually suggestive tie rather than an apple, as befits a romp through rich guy BDSM land. Oh, and everything’s done up in.. wait for it… wait…

SHADES

OF

GREY.

Perhaps even fifty of them. Again, whatever your thoughts on the book itself may be—I’ve never actually read it, so I’m not going to comment on it—the cover itself does a pretty phenomenal job of capturing the two biggest selling points about the Fifty Shades books: sexy times and a Twilightified origin story. And I find that fascinating.

I spend a lot of time thinking about book covers, as you can probably tell. I did this long before I became a writer. As a kid I had an elaborate system for determining which books would be well-written based on their covers alone—don’t judge a book by its cover? Nonsense! Now that I am an adult and a writer, book covers have become even more important to me, because they’re an integral part of my livelihood. Chuck let me come onto his blog and blather on about the covers of books, as opposed to the actual stories, because I have a new book cover of my own. I said at the beginning of this post that a good book cover will turn a story’s words into an image, and I’m delighted that the cover for my next book, Our Lady of the Ice, does exactly that:

I could give you the blurb for the book, which distills my 130,000 word story into 250 words—or I could show you this cover, this gorgeous fucking image, that does the same thing with five words (or as I like to call them, “the title”). There’s a reason “Ice” is the biggest word on that cover. There’s a reason that city is trapped under a dome. And there’s a reason that face belongs to a woman.

A hundred and thirty thousand words to one picture. Not a bad exchange rate, after all.

* * *

Cassandra Rose Clarke grew up in south Texas and currently lives in a suburb of Houston, where she writes and teaches composition at a pair of local college. She holds an M.A. in creative writing from The University of Texas at Austin, and in 2010 she attended the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in Seattle. Her work has been nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and YALSA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults. Her latest novel is Our Lady of the Ice, forthcoming from Saga Press in 2015. Her website is: cassandraroseclarke.com.

[Note: some spoilers below. Mostly light. Comment section may be a spoilfest.]

As you may have noticed before, I like to take the stories I have in some way consumed with my grasping psychic tendrils and then I like to rip them apart like warm bread to see what seedy, grainy bits lurk within. The purpose of this is just to think a little bit about stories, their power, their mechanics — and since story is somewhat universal across all media and formats, I’ll do this with whatever crosses my path (example? My post on Prometheus: In Which The Gods Of Plot Punish The Characters For Their Precious Agency).

And so we come to Dragon Age: Inquisition.

For those who haven’t played a current era Bioware game like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, it’s important to realize that the thing you think is the game (level up! get weapons! punch dragons!) isn’t really the game. The game is the story. By which I mean, Bioware has done a very cool thing where the actual characters and plot are moveable. Throughout your gameplay you have choices that actually modify the course of the story — something that is a little bit putting together a narrative puzzle and Choose Your Own Adventure. Mass Effect in particular ensures that the changes you make in early games actually cascade to later ones (DA does this a little less successfully, I think, but it’s still there). Which means both game and story are neatly, if sometimes inelegantly, merged. It’s a wonderful effect and you don’t see a lot of it in gaming.

So, what lessons do we learn from DA: Inquisition?

Character Agency

You have actual agency in the story. This isn’t on rails. As defined in my post on character agency:

Character agency is, to me, a demonstration of the character’s ability to make decisions and affect the story. This character has motivations all her own. She is active more than she is reactive. She pushes on the plot more than the plot pushes on her. Even better, the plot exists as a direct result of the character’s actions.

Very few games actually give you something approaching genuine agency. Bioware gets as close as you can get, at present. It’s imperfect, of course — unless someone designs a video game that has as much narrative flexibility as a pen-and-paper RPG, you won’t see true agency represented. But this is pretty damn good.

And further, the other characters in the story have agency, too. They don’t just stand around and fiddle with their buttholes all day long — they want things and have agendas and secrets, etc.

Speaking of them…

Supporting Characters

The game understands that supporting characters are meaningful. Not just in the “they stand around waiting to support the hero” way. These are characters of agency and consequence. They are not always the heroes of their own tales, but they are fully-fledged and -fleshed characters in their own rights. They are characters who have already changed the world and will go on to do it again. You have (slight spoiler warnings here) characters who include: a world-renown novelist, two characters who might compete to be the head of one of the game’s largest groups, one character who may or may not be some kind of fallen god, one character who has a mother who may or may not be some kind of fallen god, and so on. These are the side characters. They support you. But they’re not just like, no-name no-fuck who-gives-a-shit characters. They are epic in their own right. But intimate, too! Sometimes you just have scenes or quests that are about who the characters are rather than based on some half-ass fantasy trope. If the game and in fact all the Bioware games get one thing right: it’s the cabinet of characters who travel with you.

The Game Plays Like A Novel Reads

It’s a well-paced, well-plotted story. It escalates well and it’s almost worth studying how it escalates — it even does the best that it can in terms of mitigating your own rise to power because, of course, there’s still the game side of things, where you level up and get bigger weapons. It’s a tricky balance, but it pulls it off. And it also measures out the sub-plotting and support character interaction throughout, so it’s not just a single plot shot straight to the end — it’s this mixed-up woven-in tale with lots of narrative braiding.

The Big Plot Fails Because Of All Of The Above

Ennnh. So. Yeah. Here’s the problem — the big plot is kind of a big ol’ poop noise. It’s not bad, exactly, but where the previous games felt a little nuanced in who you initially thought were good and bad guys, this is a pretty straight shot to, LOOK HERE IS A BIG EVIL MONSTER-MAN AND HE’S GOING TO DO BIG EVIL MONSTER-MAN THINGS SO HEY GO PUNCH HIM. And then the ending — again light spoiler warning — is pretty much HEY NOW’S YOUR CHANCE TO PUNCH HIM OH YAY YOU DID IT NOW THE GAME IS OVER. The game does such a good job telling the stories of the characters and institutions within the game that when it comes to the epic plotline, it feels completely dull. All the bad guys act like bad guys because bad guys.

Bonus Points: Diversity

This world felt a little less white and a lot less straight. The games have done well with diversity in the past, but here I feel like they’re making a bigger effort. That being said, I also found the in-world diversity somewhat lacking — like, no look at the abuses elves took in their alienages, no deeper glimpse at dwarven culture? But it does feature the first trans character I’ve encountered in a video game, and two straight-up gay characters (wait, can a gay character be straight-up? I SAY YES). Characters who are addressed as such and who are complete and compelling characters with, again, their own agency in the world.

Oh You’re Damn Right I Can Complain

I have a laundry list of complaints, many not even all that story-related, and I will put them here because I am a jerky-faced poo-head who likes to grouse about stuff sometime as is my right as a denizen of the Internet.

• Why, for the sake of Andraste’s Sacred Nipples, am I picking weeds and rocks? I guess I get it in the beginning, but eventually I’m the Inquisitor. Which is like — like what? Warrior-Pope? Fantasy President? I dunno. Point is, it’s like imagining Obama having to hunt and kill his own chickens, or expecting the head of Al Qaeda to go and make his own shoelaces.

• Also, how exactly am I harvesting actual ore and metals from rocks with my bare-hands? In Minecraft I at least need a pick-axe. This I just stoop like I’m gonna pass a stool, and then delicately pick an entire lump of iron from the mountainside. And then I put it where, I dunno. Up my ass, I guess. Inventory in games is always kinda silly because somehow between my four characters I can carry like, 40 swords if I want to. And infinite amounts of goddamn Spindleweed.

• For some reason, during cutscenes, my Inquisitor — a woman — walks like she’s got a load in her pants, or a secret tail. Kinda bow-legged, with tons of weird digital thigh-gap. Do I have hemorrhoids? Is being Fantasy President really stressful?

• Ugh so many laundry list quests. FIND 72,000 SHARDS. DISCOVER 40 LETTERS. KILL SEVEN RACCOONS, ALL OF WHOM MAY ALSO BE VENATORI WIZARDS. The world-and-local maps are loaded for bear with questing symbols by the thousand, and so many of them are impersonal, dumb, hunt-and-fetch quests. Sure, you’ve got a game that’s 100+ hours, but at least 47 of those hours I’m running around like a goon looking for a hundred-and-fifty magical goat turds to unlock the magical goat turd depository where I’ll have to kill seven revenants and — ugh. I’d much rather fewer quests with more impactful narrative.

• I am a fan of the epic game, and this one feels like an epic fantasy novel, but there’s this weird line that you cross, too, where I start to want the game to just be over already. And because the game is so variable in its story, it’s a game I want to replay. But I literally do not have another 100 hours to commit to this game, so it will go entirely unreplayed. Idea: keep making your A++ Dragon Age and Mass Effect games, but also introduce some interstitial story-only adventure games that operate similar to how The Walking Dead works. Bonus: have the story decisions there play out and cascade to the larger releases. Honestly, so many of the people I know who play these do so just to find out more about the characters (translate: discover how many of them they can sex up). Give us some story-based character games in between huge releases. Double bonus: let me write them because I said so. *gesticulates with grabby hands*

• I often out-leveled areas. While auto-leveling sometimes feels forced, here I’d stomp into a new region of Orlais thinking I was going to have a challenge only to discover that the bad guys possessed the toughness of rat farts. I’d clear through them the way a lightsaber bisects butter.

• And yet, some fights were seriously fucking hard, too. Dragon Age is puzzling in the challenge, because when I keep it on normal, things will seem fine but then I’ll suddenly get owned by like, a fantasy antelope or something. And boss fights are impossible on normal, so eventually I just jam the lever on EASY and coast through trying to get from one story point to another.

• No, I still don’t like reading on TV screens. I don’t care how compelling a read it is, I hate to read digital books inside a video game on a TV screen. That shit is onerous.

• This one was a lot better at inventory and making sure I wasn’t opening every barrel just to find a pair of torn pants that I could sell for a tuppence. But even so, dang. There’s only so much dumb armor and weapons and little treasures you can pick up before it becomes rote and dull. Just give me gold. Always give me gold. Because that’s its end game — I’m going to sell all this trash for gold. Don’t make me do that. Stop putting things in games that are not fun. You know what’s not fun? Trudging to a merchant to sell 52 spider rectums so I can afford a new staff for my mage.

• I still don’t understand half of what I was supposed to be doing with potions, tonics, grenades.

• I didn’t feel like this one had as many jaw-dropping choices as earlier games — these felt fairly down-the-middle, like the choices were mostly obvious. I’m a fan of when you get those choices that you have sit and stare at for five minutes because you literally cannot predict the outcome of either. This had some, but not enough, maybe.

• No game-breaking glitches, but lots of little ones.

• All told, my complaints seem major — but hey, I played. I finished. I have no time and no patience for mediocrity and yet, I persevered here and feel rewarded for it. The characters are amazing, the worlds fully realized (and in some cases, beautiful as anything I have ever seen in a video game), and for the most part the writing is heads and shoulders above what you get in other games. Worth it, with caveats.

Your Turn

What did you think of the game?

Who was your character?

Who did you romance / sex up?

Bonus: show off your character!

Double bonus: rank your favorite supporting characters from DA (this game or all of them!) from best to worst. Do this now or I will lock you in a room with Sera the elf so she can snark at you.

So, the other day I said something about how in publishing no real debate exists and hey isn’t it super-nifty that we have lots of options and all options are equal and valid in the eyes of WRITING JESUS and I dunno, I probably said something else but I tend to fade out.

One such comment on that post was the following, by addadinsane:

You think that’s just vanity publishing? There’s no difference between how much work you have to do in marketing whether you’re trad published or self-published. The only authors that get a marketing budget nowadays are the huge sellers. (Even my friend who is A-list doesn’t get one – he’s still not big enough.)

It was funny, I was on a panel a couple of months back with a bunch of traditionally published authors and someone in the audience brought this up, said to me “But don’t you have to do all the marketing yourself?” So I turned to the other five panellists and said “Hey guys, how much marketing do you have to do?” Answers ranged from “Loads” to “All of it”.

And trad publishers take a lot more than 50%. One wonders what for.

I’m all in favour of “no debate” but I think people should be accurately informed about the truth of traditional publishing rather than looking through rose-tinted spectacles. Then they can make an informed decision.

Frankly I don’t know why anyone goes trad published to be honest. The only reason I’ve heard recently is that they want to be a “proper” author. And if that isn’t vanity, I don’t know what is.

And I wanted to respond to it. But I started to write up my response and found it too long for a mere paltry comment, and figured, hey, well, I’ll take up some oxygen at the blog, proper.

The commenter followed up with an additional comment that bears looking at:

The most accurate statement of my viewpoint would be: “I personally can see very little benefit for someone who is serious about being published to pursue traditional publishing because the negatives that I perceive far outweigh any benefits (of which I have trouble seeing any).”

Negatives include: (a) Years chasing agents/publishers because it’s not only about having a great book, it’s whether you hit the right person at exactly the right time and you might never hit it just right; (b) If you get the contract, its years before the book comes out; (c) Only allowed to produce one book per year; (d) restrictive contracts (my A-list pal is *not allowed* to promote except on FB, Twitter and his blog (he is *not* allowed to create a mailing list of fans) other restrictions apply; (e) poor royalties on ebooks (trad publishers are raking it in on over-priced ebooks and not passing the money on to authors; (f) loss of artistic control (if they think it would be better a different way, you have to change it); (g) no marketing budget; (h) book goes the shelves sale after a few months; (i) long delays in production of paperback and ebook (because they make more money out of hardbacks – even though tests by Hugh Howey has demonstrated no loss of income producing all formats simultaneously); (j) Two book deals – fail to sell and you’re out; (k) loss of rights to your books;

Benefits: (a) Book on shelves for a couple of months? I have bookshops wanting to sell my physical books. (b) Professional editing? I have that; (c) Professional covers? I have those. (d) Global distribution? I have that. (d) Translation? I can get that (Babelcube website – yes that’s real human translation); (e) Film rights? Hire an entertainment lawyer for that one deal; (f) Audio books? (Go to ACX) (g) Advances! (Yeah, right, don’t give up the day job); (h) … um …?

The one thing I learned from my A-list friend is that he was clueless about the true state of the indie market, which presumably represents the state of most people in the traditional publishing world, since he most definitely is not a fool.

Do I think there is a lot of indie crap? Yes, of course there is. However I don’t associate with indie authors who think publishing their vomit draft with a cover drawn by their dog is a good idea. Most of use care about what we do. (And what reader checks the publisher? Only the totally anal ones.)

Ultimately, of course, it is the individual author’s decision.

Everyone must indeed make a private decision about their books and how to publish and promote them. And going indie — self-publishing — is one such path forward. That said, I find in that indie community you sometimes find some bad information (or, at the least, very weird assumptions) about publishing with a publisher big or small, and some these misconceptions are on display here. Suggesting that traditional publishing is equivalent to vanity publishing is one such thing — it’s an analogy that fails at the most fundamental levels, given that a) traditional pays you where b) you pay vanity. The flow of money is different. (Now, if you want to talk about how some traditional publishers also run vanity publishers? That’s nastier business.)

So, let’s hash it out a little bit. Why would anybody go “trad?”

a) The simplest and most forthright reason is: “I don’t want to publish my own work.” In much the same way not everyone wants to open a storefront or do their own home repairs or 3D print their own sex toys, sometimes you do not possess the skill-set and/or the interest to self-publish. Because, to some people’s surprise, self-publishing requires more than just writing a book. You’re now a publisher — with all the work that being a publisher now entails. (Translation: you have less time to write. Maybe you’re okay with that. But maybe you’re not.)

b) Because bookshelves. Yes, you can get on bookstore shelves with self-published work, but a bookstore friend estimates that this is less than 1% of the books on her shelves. And “book on shelves for a couple months” isn’t necessarily accurate — I poke through bookstores and find books from a couple years ago bobbling around there. Which is both awesome (woo hoo! they carry me!) and anxiety-inducing (oh god are the books just not selling?!).

c) Because advances. Advances are not universal, but can be pretty great and are pretty common in some genres. I’m a fan. I dunno what to tell you — sure, you can take all the risk yourself, and I’ve done that and will do it again. But it’s also nice to have someone give you several thousands of dollars right out of the gate. The commenter says, “Yeah, right, don’t give up the day job,” but it is exactly this that has helped me to give up the day job.

d) Because marketing and advertising. It’s easy to say, “PUBLISHED AUTHORS GET NO MARKETING BUDGET,” but that’s provably untrue. Now, whether they spend that on you or not is up for debate — some authors get nothing, bupkiss, shit-on. Others get a little or a lot. My anecdotal mileage is that I have received efforts for marketing from all of my publishers. Do I wish they did more? Sure, because I will always wish they could do more. They could put my naked ass on a Times Square billboard display for four weeks and I will lament that it wasn’t there for five. And yes, traditionally-published authors still do a helluva lot of on-the-ground marketing of their work because, honestly, human connection (me talking to an audience and also selling books that way) is not something a publisher can really do. (That being said, some publishers will say: “Okay, our marketing plan is a blog tour,” to which you should respond, “That’s my marketing plan. Now I’m waiting to hear yours, motherfucker.” Except don’t say “motherfucker” because jeez, rude.)

e) Because access to doors that are, at present, more open to traditionally-published authors. Interviews, blogs, professional trade reviews, foreign rights, film/TV rights, and on and on. This isn’t always fair and it isn’t universally true, but being traditionally published is a larger foot in that door. It just is. Self-publishing can be a little noisy, and occasionally unprofessional, and sometimes the unwashed throngs in that group form an unfortunately noisy minority and rush the gates of review blogs and other outlets, which forces that door closed more tightly for the rest. Sure, you can sell foreign rights or film/TV for your self-published book. Many have. But I promise: it’s also a lot harder. Maybe that will change over time, but right now, it is what it is. It’s easy to say, “I want to sell the rights to my self-published book,” but it’s a lot harder to get those people to take your fucking meetings, I assure you.

f) Professional editing and cover design: yes, you can get both of these things as a self-published author, and if you are an author-publisher, you jolly well should. But they will cost you money, and they will cost you time, and you will have to wrangle it into existence. Further, professional editing is tricky because you have to find the right editor — one who will edit your work accordingly, but also won’t edit it just to make you happy. The freelance editor has a weird, weird job — you’re literally hiring someone to criticize your work. You’re paying them to attack your book with scissors. That can be a fraught relationship. And not every author wants to or knows how to navigate those storm-churned waters.

So. There you have some reasons.

Now, I’ve also known folks who have been kicked around when going that way, too. Hell, I’ve encountered some pretty gnarly shit on my own (and am, in fact, dealing with some publishing drama even now). But you’ll also encounter it going your own way. No matter how you write and publish, you’re going to cross antlers with some nasty elk, and you just have to harden yourself to the realities that all roads to art are hard. Life is tough. Protect thine genitals accordingly.

(I tackle the pluses/minuses of both publishing paths in a different post, should you care.)

Now, to tackle some of the perceived criticisms of the traditional path:

a) “The only authors that get a marketing budget nowadays are the huge sellers.” Provably untrue. What I mean by provably is, I can provide nearly endless exceptions to this. Including me. *waves hands* Now, the question is, do enough authors get marketing budget? Is that budget big enough? That’s a meaningful question, and one you need to consider.

b) “There’s no difference between how much work you have to do in marketing whether you’re trad published or self-published.” Also untrue. Even my earliest books reached places I never could have with my self-published efforts. Trying to get seen as a self-published author is, honestly, pretty hard — and increasingly so as the elevator gets packed to the walls. But my externally-published work just sorta… went out into the world. I had reviews in places I never expected. Had film interest I didn’t drum up. It felt a little bit like magic. But it wasn’t magic. Because I had publishers actively working on my books’ behalf. Agents, too.

c) “Years chasing agents/editors.” Well, true, to a point. I spent a lot of time chasing agents for a book that, I realize now, was kinda crappy. For Blackbirds, I got an agent fairly quickly — and this seems to be the experience of a lot of authors once they have the right book. Editors, yeah, it took a while. Was quite some time for that book to reach a publisher and then to reach shelves. But that series, the Miriam Black series, has continued on and on for me. New authors mustn’t be freakishly averse to time. Patience is key. You don’t just throw some grape juice in a bottle and then drink it two weeks later hoping it’s wine. It’s not wine. It’s just old-ass grape juice. Good books and good authors take time. This is part of that. That said — it’s usually not “years” before the book comes out. It can be — but these days, if I had to eyeball it, it’s about 9-12 months. Which is not unreasonable. If you’re self-publishing, it could take several months to get proper editing, to make the edits, to design the book.

d) “Only allowed to produce one book per year.” Holy shit, what? Not seeing too many authors held to that. Not saying it’s not there in some contracts — maybe this is an overly restrictive non-compete clause? I dunno. But most authors these days, indie and traditional, seem to get by writing multiple books a year. I’ve got… well, a lot of books coming out this year. Like, it’s so many I’m pretty sure only an imaginary number can represent it. A good agent should be able to run clauses like this over a fucking table-saw to whittle them down.

e) “my A-list pal is *not allowed* to promote except on FB, Twitter and his blog (he is *not* allowed to create a mailing list of fans)” — Double-triple-jaw-drop-holy shit, what? This is beyond sense. Again: maybe it’s a real clause. But one I literally can’t understand. What’s the takeaway here? You can’t promote on someone else’s blog? Or on Google-Plus? Or Ello, Tsu, Faceplate, Wonkcircle, Wankbag, Flippr, Pornhub, or any other social network that comes along? Why would you not be “allowed” to create a mailing list of fans, which, by the way, is not something a contract could even mandate. This sounds like either it doesn’t exist, was misunderstood, or the supposedly A-list author has a D-List agent.

f) “poor royalties” — well, that’s a meaningful concern, innit? Publishers could do better here, particularly on digital. And if they don’t, more authors will defect and publish their own work. So, this is one of those things that goes into your calculation of worth it/not worth it.

g) “loss of artistic control” — A little too vague to be a meaningful criticism, as ostensibly you have a great deal of artistic control over the book itself. Less so the packaging of said book.

h) “long delays of production of paperback and e-book” — Nearly all publishers produce e-book immediately, and most books are also released in paperback. Those that come out in hardcover — I understand the desire to have all forms at once, but that also means bookstores have to make a decision which version to carry. Libraries, too. Indie authors do not universally require bookstores or libraries, but that doesn’t mean they’re not still a thing. Bookstores and libraries, are in fact, total fucking aces.

i) “Fail to sell and you’re out.” Depends on what that means — fail to sell. If you sell nothing, yeah, you might be shit out of luck, which is harsh and unkind and maybe even unfair, but I don’t mean to belabor the obvious when I note that publishing is a business. Further, many publishers continue to take risks on authors they believe in. But lots of midlist authors survive despite having midlist sales. They continue to publish. If they see a good book from an author who hasn’t sold well in the past… from what I’ve seen, some will invest the time and the money. Not always when they should, and sometimes when they shouldn’t, but writers are best served on all sides of the publishing fence by continuing to write past the point of failure and back toward success.

j) “loss of rights to books.” A meaningful concern, and some contracts won’t let you out easily, if at all. This is rarely eternal, and many authors do indeed get their rights back (*waves hands*), but if it’s something that truly concerns you — then either get an agent who will ninja that shit out of your contracts or don’t sign ’em.

None of this means that traditional is best, or easiest, or smartest. In fact, even in this post you may find reasons to avoid going for a traditional publisher — just don’t make that decision based on bad calculus. However, it remains one option for writers, and one to which many are suited.

*disappears in a puff of boring publishing talk*

So, I guess someone hosted a debate about blah blah blah, Is Amazon Your Friend or Is Amazon Your Enemy or something-something mumble-mumble Which Flavor Of Publishing Is Most Bestest. (I think Laura Hazard Owen said it best with: “Four brave white men decide future of publishing.” A headline that had me literally laugh out loud.)

I didn’t watch the debate because I have more important things to do. Like write books. Or horse around on Twitter. Or eat my own hands to bloody stumps.

I cannot and will not comment on the actual points of the debate but rather, instead, focus on the existence of the debate in the first place for a brief little reminder I like to call:

NO SUCH DEBATE EXISTS. LIKE, AT FUCKING ALL. NO, SERIOUSLY.

What I mean is:

Some folks would like you to believe in a completely false dichotomy that forces you to choose sides as an author regarding how you will (or hope to) publish your work. This argument will be expressed as being something so plain, it might as well be a pair of ruby red testicles dangling from the end of your nose — it’s just that unavoidably obvious. They will characterize this in an almost cartoonish, buffoonish way. One side is evil, exploitative, and callous. The other side is beneficent, sacred, heroic. One side is the censorious Empire. One side is the plucky Rebellion. And the sides move: the coins flip depending on who’s tossing them up in the air. The sides will be belligerent about this point, making you feel the fool for choosing one side or the other. Individuals from each tribe or army or guild (those words said with an eye-roll so dizzying it might as well be an amusement park ride) will choose proxies for their crusade — some company or corporation, or perhaps some mouthpiece or martyr. The rhetoric will be full of bad logic and injections of shame. They’ll lambast the successes on the other side as outliers while championing their own as heroes embracing good old-fashioned common sense. They’ll tell you how the water in that other well is poisoned and hope you don’t notice how many people are drinking from it and not only not dying but, in fact, quenching their thirst completely.

And when the debate seems over…

You’ll either feel pleased you chose the right banner to carry.

Or you’ll feel silly that you chose the wrong path and now are doomed, doomed, doomed.

But, I will say again:

It’s an illusion. A rub. A bit of chicanery and legerdemain.

No debate exists.

No sides exist.

All that exists are options.

Options that allow you a surprising amount of flexibility in how you choose to write your work and reach your audience. It’s not just traditional publishing and self-publishing — it’s those two broken down even finer. Big publishers, small publishers, digital publishers, Amazon, Smashwords, Payhip, blogs, Wattpad, Createspace, Lulu, White Glove, agents, no agents, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, B&N, blogs, podcasts, fanfiction, Oyster, Scribd, Kindle Unlimited, and on, and on, and on. Many of these options are literally new to the last decade or so — most, the product of a disruptive Internet, a glorious digital monster who is the true Godzilla in all of this, pulverizing institutions into rubble and forcing diversity and evolution where none before existed.

The thing is, when you’re asked to pick sides in this, you’re quietly also being asked to take one whole set of options and shovel them into a furnace and burn them. Further, once you have chosen your side, you will find that other battles are fought within your given tribe — oh, sure, self-publish, but how dare you not be exclusive with Amazon. Ah, yes, of course, it’s good you traditionally published, but why would you choose a publisher who is going to ask more than nine dollars for your e-book? It all gets shuttled from chute to chute, the path narrowing as you go.

And narrow paths are antithetical to the point.

Narrow paths are bad for authors. That is the Old Way.

THOSE ARE THE FORBIDDEN TIMES.

We want wide paths and myriad options.

Those that ask you to choose a side in this fake debate not only want fewer options for the writing world, but further, are often themselves selling something. They’re salespeople and politicians, shilling for a side because they gain if that side does well. Or they’re emotionally invested because they feel burned somehow — and they refuse to see how what happened to them is not emblematic of what happens to everybody. Sure, some people have been abused by huge publishers. Some have been destroyed by Amazon or Kindle Unlimited. And the reverse is also true: you’ll often hear how each side has changed lives and given hope where none existed before, which is true! But it’ll be framed as if the other side could’ve never given you that and has never before ever, ever, ever, done anything nice, and also, it kicks kittens into woodchippers just for the craven thrill. Because many folks have had their lives made by traditional publishing. Many have had it made by self-publishing. Some have been given a fresh chance through Kickstarter, or social media, or some scrappy small publisher you’ve never heard of before. Lots of writers find a different, comfortable fit across this wonderfully weird, diverse landscape.

A landscape that, as noted, has never before been this weird or this diverse.

(Never mind the fact that each option plays off each other, competing and keeping things flexible — all these forms of publishing big and small act as counterweights to one another.)

The only debate is for you, as an author, how you’ll write and publish your work. And that debate is not one with hard and fast sides — it’s one with a spectrum of colors, and one that will rage on, ideally, not once in your career but from book to book to book. Nuance exists, you see. Gasp. I know! How mad! Ah, but you see: each book may have a different fit. Your career may change skins like a chameleon. The environment will shift, too, and you with it.

But we need our options to be present, and flexible, and limber as a lubed-up, liquor-fed gymnast.

So: embrace options.

Don’t shout anybody down.

Be smart about your own career, but don’t assume that what’s smart for you is automatically what’s smart for everyone else.  Recognize that not everybody will make your choice, nor do they have to — and hell, that’s not a bug, that’s a goddamn feature.

Keep the doors open, keep the rhetoric kind, keep the air moving through this once stale room.

Reject the war, the battle, the tribalism, the debate.

You don’t need to choose sides.

You can, in fact, choose all sides.

How cool is that?