Last week’s challenge: From Sentence To Story.

It is apple season, people.

Apple season.

APPLE SEASON.

And with apple season comes a chance to sample a world of weird apples.

Uncommon apples.

Like, say, from this list grabbed at North Star Orchards here in PA.

I want you to look through this list.

You can use a random number generator if you like.

But pick three of these apples.

And include them — not apples themselves, necessarily, but the names of said apples — in your story. They can be included however you see fit: character names, place names, some other worldbuilding aspect, anything and any way you so choose.

You’ve got 1000 words.

Post at your online space.

Link back here.

Due by next Friday, noon, EST.

Pick your apples.

In case you didn’t know —

Paul Feig is rebooting the Ghostbusters franchise with women doing the bustin’ of ghosts.

This with the writer of The Heat, Katie Dippold.

(For the record: I freaking loved The Heat. Not high comedy, and plot holes you could break a leg in, but man did I laugh. I am a tiny bit sad that it seems like it won’t be getting a sequel.)

Of course, with this news, I’ve seen the cry:

It’s a gimmick.

Feig is obviously aware of the criticism, too, because he says:

“I just don’t understand why it’s ever an issue anymore. I’ve promoted both Bridesmaids and The Heat and myself and my cast are still hit constantly with the question, “will this answer the question of whether women can be funny?” I really cannot believe we’re still having this conversation. Some people accused it of kind of being a gimmick and it’s like, it would be a gimmick if I wasn’t somebody whose brain doesn’t automatically go to like, I want to just do more stuff with women. I just find funny women so great. For me it’s just more of a no-brainer. I just go, what would make me excited to do it? I go: four female Ghostbusters to me is really fun. I want to see that dynamic. I want to see that energy and that type of comedy and them going up against these ghosts and going up against human detractors and rivals and that kind of thing. When people accuse it of being a gimmick I go, why is a movie starring women considered a gimmick and a movie starring men is just a normal movie?”

I think this is pretty fucking awesome.

And I think calling it a ‘gimmick’ is a little bit shitty.

Here’s why.

a.) Calling it “gimmick” is very dismissive. A gimmick is a trick, a ploy, a cheap contrivance or tactic designed to get people to buy the product. Putting women in the roles of an iconic franchise is meaningful culturally, in that it’s creating more roles for women. Roles that were once reserved for men. And narratively, it’s interesting, as it lets you tell new stories and attract new audience.

b) Assuming that putting women in the role is gimmicky assumes that women are already in a place of power — it assumes that, “If we do this, this’ll generate ticket sales.” Given how risk-averse Hollywood has been regarding the role of women in film, yeah, I don’t see it.

c) Or, it assumes it’s doing it for the controversy. If making new roles for women — or making diverse roles in general — is controversial to you, that says more about you than about the creators of the work. Also, Hollywood is known for making safe choices more often than controversial ones.

Now, someone might say, with some earnestness, that why Ghostbusters –? Why can’t you create a new cool action-horror-comedy franchise for women, instead? Well, you can (or, at least, you can try). And certainly it’s a noble goal that sounds great in a perfect world.

But here’s why it’s important that it’s this franchise.

Yeah, it’s very nice and good to say that women should be able to have their own iconic roles and not have to get the sloppy seconds of roles established by men. But there’s a danger, there, too — if you say, women can’t be Ghostbusters, or The Doctor, or James Bond, you might really be saying, “These are my toys, go play with your own.” Go find your own franchise is a very good way of dismissing them and saying “but this one’s ours.” It’s also a very good way of ensuring that they won’t get their own movie made or own roles anyway — the sad reality of present-day Hollywood is that it’s easier to make a movie if you have some pre-existing material to build off of. The Ghostbusters franchise is exactly that. It’s a great springboard to tell this new tale.

Plus, putting women characters inside an iconic franchise has meaning because it’s an iconic franchise, one formerly dominated by men. There’s a metaphor, there, if you care to find it, about the workplace — it’s vital women colonize those roles and those spaces reserved for dudes. You certainly shouldn’t say, “A woman can’t be CEO of this company, go form your own company, lady.” Saying that a woman can’t be The Doctor because The Doctor is traditionally male is roughly equivalent to saying a woman can’t be a doctor because doctors are traditionally male. It’s easy to shrug it off because, “oh, ha ha ha, this is just pop culture,” but hey, fuck that shit, George, pop culture is the food we feed our brains. Pop culture is the colloquial language we all speak — it’s the common tongue of the people. We all speak Ghostbuster. We all know the song. We all know the imagery and the story and the icons of it. It’s important for women to be here, not over there.

Anyway.

Them’s my thoughts, do with them as you will.

What I wanna hear from you is —

What women should take the roles? Some of my potential choices include: Mindy Kaling, Aubrey Plaza, Tig Notaro, Katie Aselton, Uzo Aduba, Melissa McCarthy. What, pray tell, are yours?

A cross between The Handmaid’s Tale and Wicked, with a dash of Grimm and Disney thrown in, Stray is part coming-of-age story, part fairy tale, part adventure, part sweet romance.

Stray tells the story of Aislynn, a princess who misbehaves and must give up her royal trappings and enter a life of service as a fairy godmother. Will Aislynn remain true to her vows and her royal family, and turn away from everything she longs for? Or will she stray from The Path and discover her own way? Epic, rewarding, and provocative, Stray will appeal to readers of Entwined, by Heather Dixon; to those who grew up watching the Disney princess movies; and to fans of the acclaimed musicals Into the Woods and Wicked.

* * *

1. Kill your dragons

Ok, sure, the actual advice is “kill your darlings”, but in this case dragons is more accurate because the beasts had to be slain for STRAY to become what it is.

It wasn’t an easy decision for I am an unabashed dragon-lover. But when it comes to literature (and life), sometimes you have to make the tough choices. And the dragons, those magnificent scaly beasts, just weren’t working. So they had to go. Along with 90% of the original manuscript. Sometimes you have to be brutal.

2. The curse of the strong female character

Women. You can’t draw them. You can’t animate them. And you certainly can’t render them. But can you write them?

If I’ve learned anything about being a female writer and a female reader, is that no one comes under scrutiny quite like the female protagonist, especially is she’s a teenager. She doesn’t get any passes – she’s got to be a role model, a “strong female character”, but she can’t be too good, too perfect, or else she’s a “Mary Sue”.

However, the best thing about writing young women is the awesome YA community, the one that supports and loves these contradictory characters. So write those female protagonists – because at the end of the day, some pretty amazing people have got your back.

3. Screw breadcrumbs, give ‘em bread

In a previous professional life, I worked in production on a bunch of different animated movies. Animation, like publishing, is a slow process. And it can be hard to muster up a sense of accomplishment when you’re working on something that you can’t share with others for months, sometimes even years. So I turned to baking.

Comparatively, baking is a very fast process. Gather a bunch of ingredients, mix them together, put it in the oven and voila! You’ve accomplished something.

When it came time to write STRAY, I wanted to give my main character, Aislynn, something that brought her a sense of calm and order. Something that made her feel accomplished.

Most people say “write what you know”, but also write what you like. Write what excites and interests you. Get your character’s hands dirty, messing around in the things you love. Nothing will be more fun to write.

4. Diversity in fantasy

I didn’t even think about at first. My book was a nod to Europe-style fairy tales, so of course every character was white and straight. It’s not like gay folks or people of color existed in the olden days, right? And was one thing to have a world where only women could do magic and society is ruled by a strict doctrine called the Path. But diversity? That’s just crazy.

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Your story needs diversity. It just does. Aislynn’s story certainly did. There was no reason I shouldn’t populate the world of STRAY with LGBT characters and characters of color. And let’s face it – anything that makes you question the knee-jerk assumptions you make about your own writing and storytelling is a good thing.

5. Making magic bad

Magic is awesome, right? I’m the Harry Potter generation – I waited for my Hogwarts letter like everyone else (still waiting, but it’s cool, I don’t mind being that much older first year) and I’ve spent plenty of time imagining what it would be like to have magical powers.

But what if it wasn’t awesome? What if our society saw it as something untoward. Something…dangerous.

It’s easy to forget that a character like Aislynn has never read Harry Potter. In fact, if she lived in our world, she’d probably be of the mindset, like some are, that JK Rowling’s books promote witchcraft.

Subverting the impulse to think of magic as wonderful and, well, magical can be tricky. I recommend drawing comparisons to things our culture has problems with – such as women and what they should be allowed to do with their bodies. After all, there’s nothing more dangerous than a woman who does things without society’s permission.

* * *

Elissa Sussman is a writer, a reader and a pumpkin pie eater. Her debut novel, STRAY (Greenwillow Books/HarperCollins), is a YA fantasy about fairy godmothers, magic and food. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and in a previous life managed animators and organized spreadsheets at some of the best animation studios in the world, including Nickelodeon, Disney, Dreamworks and Sony Imageworks. You can see her name in the credits of THE CROODS, HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA, THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG and TANGLED.

She currently lives in Los Angeles with her boyfriend and their rescue mutt, Basil.

Elissa Sussman: Website | Twitter

Stray: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound

The poor sad widdle second draft.

I’m in the midst of one of these right now, and while you see a lot of attention given to the first draft and to the overall editing process, you don’t see quite so much attention given to the second draft specifically. But there should be! The second draft is a peculiar animal. Interstitial. Imperfect. It’s frequently the growing pains draft, where two limbs grow and two limbs shrink and by the end of its hormonal transformation it’s the same creature as before but also, entirely different. The second draft is the teenager of manuscripts. Awkward, pimply, full of faux confidence and bravado, and something-something pubic hair.

Okay, maybe not that last part?

Anyway. Let’s talk a little bit about the second draft.

Psst! You Didn’t Write The First Draft

Yeah, no, I know you actually did write the first draft, but shh, shhh, we’re trying to be tricksy hobbitses here. By the time you get to the second draft, your best way forward is to somehow convince yourself that Some Other Asshole wrote this book. Because you can be cold, clinical, dispassionate when you’re attacking the draft if you think it’s not yours. It’s like having children — you can look at other people’s kids and be all like LOOK AT THOSE SAVAGES HANGING FROM THE CEILING FANS, but then you see your own kid drinking out of the toilet like a dog and you’re like, awww, he’s pretending to be a puppy — he’s gifted.

You’ve gotta treat this book like it’s some rando’s kid. Baby Rando.

Rando II: First Blood.

Whatever.

You have a few tricks by which to accomplish this. You can put in a lot of time between first and second draft. You can take the second draft and edit a printout of it instead of editing on screen. If editing on screen, you might consider changing the font, font size, margins, anything to make it look unlike the book you wrote. (Just don’t use the Wingdings font.)

A lot of writing and rewriting is tricking your audience.

But it’s about tricking yourself, too.

The Second Draft Is Often The Hardest

For me, this second iteration of a manuscript is always the hardest. It’s like, I just don’t know what to do yet. I’m still a blind man in the dark feeling for an elephant. It’s not like your novel is a simple little thing. It’s not a picture hanging crooked on the wall. It’s roughly 100,000 words of bewilderment and mystery. And every word has the potential to be hot garbage or high fashion. So much of writing a first draft feels like running a marathon while drunk — you’re just gallumphing about, yelling and laughing and crying and praying to Sweet Saint Fuck that the end is near. And then at the end you collapse in a puddle of your own liquorsweats.

The second draft is a major shift, though. You’re no longer in that period of unfettered creation. You now have to pick through the wreckage of your first narrative and find what’s salvageable. (Really, the first draft is all barf and LEGO bricks. The second draft is picking those LEGO bricks out of the barf. Also, pro-tip: don’t eat LEGO bricks.) Intellectually, it’s a different act — yes, the second draft may require considerable rewriting, but it’s still organizational. It’s still taking the ideas and notions you’ve ladled onto the page and figuring out what to do with them. It’s incisive, cruel, calculating. First draft, you’re Clotho, wildly spinning the threads of fate.

But the second draft, you’re equal parts Lachesis and Atropos.

Measuring the thread.

And then cutting it.

For me, at least, follow-up drafts after this one get easier, if only because you settle into the comfortable discomfort of ripping apart your own work.

But until you sit in the pool for a while, boy does that water feel cold.

Deadlines, Tracked Changes, Redundant Backups

Before you do anything:

a) Set a deadline if one has not been set for you. A reasonable one. Not too tight, but not so far out that it’s meaningless. Tomorrow is too soon, and 2038 is probably when we’ll all be dead from GLOBAL HEAT DEATH, so, give yourself a proper window. I don’t know you, but for me, it’s a month, maybe two, maybe three.

b) Make sure you turn on track changes. It is very, very helpful to be able to go back through and see how you molested and mutilated your poor first draft. I turn track changes on, but I leave them hidden until I’m done. Also, I make liberal use of comments to myself and any potential editors or readers who might be going along on this cuckoo bananapants journey with me.

c) HOLY SHIT, back up your work. Back it up always, back it up obsessively. I save as I go and I backup to the cloud and I back up to the hard drive and I do this daily with a separate file for every day’s worth of work and I have Time Machine on my Mac so that everything gets backed up regularly to an external hard drive and I also carve my manuscripts onto the backs of various transients that I have chained to the radiator ha ha ha I’m just kidding I don’t have a radiator.

Re-Read, And Do It Aloud

I think very few pieces of writing advice are “true” in the sense that they are universal.

And this one may not be, either, but for me it’s damn close.

You need to re-read your work.

And you need to do it aloud.

I don’t mean like you’re doing a performance in Central Park. I mean — a quiet reading of the prose out loud. Even if you don’t read the entire manuscript that way, read those spots about which you’re unsure. Reading your work aloud is equivalent to closing your eyes and running your hand over a broom-stick or bannister: you will feel the uneven parts, the splinters, the popped-up nails. Even those you would’ve missed with your big dumb eyes.

Outline Anew For Mad Organizational Mojo

Make a quickie outline.

A new one to match the finished first draft.

It doesn’t need to be a book in and of itself, but go through the quick beats. Outline each chapter, maybe — one sentence per. Or outline the arrangement of tentpole plotpoints (meaning, those moments in the story that are vital to hold the whole thing up). You can get detailed, if you want — I’ve gone through and used Excel to chart the minutiae of a story (plot, character beats, thematic punctuation, appearance of certain motifs). The reason for doing this is — your novel? It’s a big trash bag full of who-the-fuck-knows. It’s the forest and you need to see the trees. An outline lets you get your hands on it. You can break it down, break it apart, and feel more comfortable understanding how individual components contribute to the whole.

Two Lists: Shit That Works, Shit That Sucks

Now is your time to be like a housecat on a countertop — you will use your paw to select the things that have violated your feline majesty and you will paw them onto the floor, FOR OH HOW THEY DISGUST YOU. Fuck this shit. Fuck that. Not that. Also that.

*paw swiping*

*glass breaking*

Go through your whole draft. Find things in the draft and put them in one of the two aforementioned lists — THIS IS BALLS AND I HATE IT or OKAY YOU CAN STAY. (You might have a third list, which might be roughly titled BLOODY HELL, NO IDEA, or simply, ENH…? In this third list go all the things that you can’t figure out if they’re total pants or utter genius.) You don’t need to commit to doing anything yet with this list — but it’s a good jumping off point for getting you to think about your work as an agglomeration of Things That Work and Things That Don’t.

Those things that work can, at least temporarily, remain unpoked, unprodded.

That which does not? Well, you’ll have to decide what to do.

Repair?

Or eradicate outright?

I Reach For Low-Hanging Fruit First

Entering into a revisions on a second draft, I am both lazy and timid. I pick and fritter and wince. I rarely make any motions right away that would startle the beast — I’m basically doing the equivalent of poking a teddy bear in its soft, round tummy. I don’t just scoop up low-hanging fruit; I look for the rotten stuff on the ground that’s already acting as a buffet for hungry bees.

I attack things that:

a) I know are super-broken because I probably knew it when I was writing it (“Mental note: in chapter 4, I call the protagonist Dave when her name is really Annabeth, and also I got high and wrote a random leprechaun sex scene so that needs to get chopped out with a fire ax.”).

b) I know won’t mess up anything else if I fix it — so, removing the aforementioned leprechaun lovemaking scene doesn’t then cascade through the rest of the draft.

So, in other words:

Obvious and easy.

I do this because again, I’m lazy.

But I also do this as it lets me get my bearings. It’s like warming up with stretches. I feel like I’m still accomplishing things. It lends the revision momentum, and once I get a little momentum…

Then I Just Start Fucking Shit Up

It’s like flipping a lever. For a while — a week or two — I do the gentle tweaking and tickling of the teddy bear, but then it goes all torture-porny as I suddenly wade in with a leather apron and start chainsawing the teddy bear down to the stuffing and buttons. I go from 0 to 60. Comfort, once gained, lets me move more swiftly and more dramatically. Chapters killed. Characters culled. Entire sections rearranged. It’s like having a room which doesn’t quite come together: you sit for a while and stare at it, but eventually you have to start moving some motherfucking furniture around. You gotta throw paint. Rip up carpets. Only way you make change is by doing the work.

The Second Draft Might Be Worse Than The First

Here’s a tough reality to the second draft:

It might be worse than the first draft.

It’s a weird phenomenon and you think it shouldn’t be that way, but if you think of your story as the wandering of a maze, sometimes in that wandering you must be forced to choose a new direction and in choosing that direction you discover you just ran like, 10 miles the wrong way. Dead-ends do not reveal themselves immediately and sometimes must be written toward —

Sometimes you have to write the wrong thing to figure out how to write the right thing.

It Might Be Your Last Draft, Or It Might Not

You might complete your second draft and the angels will descend upon you, skateboarding down their crepuscular rays while blowing shiny God-forged trumpets and you shall be done, hands clean, draft fixed, story gonna story, huzzah, game over, goodbye.

But you might need a third draft, too.

Or a thirty-third.

OR THREE THOUSAND AND  — okay at that point you might just wanna give up. We can’t all be writers. Some of us are meant to be detectives, superheroes, and secret Vatican baristas.

But still, the point remains: finishing your second draft is not a guarantee of finishing the work. It may be time to hand it off to an agent, reader or editor at this point, yes — but it by no means guarantees the tale’s true completion. You rewrite till its right. Because, as I am wont to say: writing is when we make the words, editing is when we make them not shitty.

Good luck on your second draft, ink-flingers and word-slingers.

* * *

Storybundle: The “Get Your Ass Ready For NaNoWriMo” edition. Six books (plus another six bonus books if you reach the $15 threshold) — pay what you want, give 10% to charity, determine the author/bundlemaker split. Buckets of cool authors, including Kevin J. Anderson (who also curated this bundle), Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinettte Kowal. 

I get it.

I do.

You’re a writer.

That means whatever it means in terms of technical format — you write novels or comics or blogs or webisode scripts or dirty jokes on clean napkins. Beyond the vagaries of format, it means you took something of yourself, you wrenched it free, unmooring it from your intellectual viscera, and you bled. Boy howdy did you bleed. You bled a story. You bled your ideas. You made up people out of your guts and your gore. You hemorrhaged time and effort and hope and dreams. You gushed some of your very identity onto the screen and onto the page. It’s arterial, this act. It is life — your life — soaking into the tapestry fabric of creation.

Nobody can take that away from you.

And fuck anybody who tries to diminish it.

But.

(You know there was gonna be a ‘but,’ right?)

But but but but but but but.

Buuuuuuuut.

(butt.)

But just the same, nobody owes you a damn thing.

I mean, unless they owe you like, cash, or a dinner, or a knuckle sandwich. And certainly if you’re with a publisher, they owe you money and all the things that they should be doing as per your contract. (My contracts all stipulate I get one pound of exotic, illegal animal meat. For instance, Harper Voyager just sent me a package of ground lemur. Fragrant and delicious. Tastes a little like marmoset, though, so if you like that, it’s all good.)

Still, the point stands in the larger sense.

You writing anything doesn’t mean anybody owes you a good goddamn.

Let’s talk about books and novelists in particular.

There’s an article going around.

Cut to: “No, I Don’t Want To Read Your Self-Published Book” at WaPo.

Cue the complaints, which I’ve seen around (Facebook a good example) of gatekeepers and legacy-fried-jerky-jerks and why-they-gotta-be-down-on-the-indie-publishers.

Understand something: at this point, writers are multiplying like an orgy of Tribbles. And each writer is writing more books than ever, which means not only are writers multiplying, but every writer is barfing up a dozen books and we just need to thank the gods that books aren’t then barfing up smaller books or soon we’d literally be buried in the damn things. I’m pretty sure that if you buy two Kindles and put them in a dark room with smooth jazz, you will have fifteen Kindles by morning, each of them packed with 666 e-books.

How many books come out in a given year is a hazy, shifting number — I’ve given these numbers before, but it looks like there were around 300,000 books published traditionally in 2013, with about 50k of those being adult novels. Self-publishing easily doubles that number, and that’s only counting those who bought ISBNs. Which means the real number is probably a whole lot bigger.

But for now, let’s say that between the two forms of publishing, you get around 600,000 books released into the wild every year, like a stampede of lemmings. (Lemming meat? Not so tasty. Stringy. Greasy. Tastes like sadness and panic.) So that means, over the course of one year, around 11,500 books land in a given week. Roughly 1600 in a single day.

Now, okay, you can probably chop that number in half because a lot of those are so marginal they don’t even count — they’re naught but fog, but noise, but a sneeze in a starless void.

And certainly the number gets wonkier when you figure the spread across various formats, genres, categories, age ranges. It starts to dice up a good bit due to the taxonomy of books.

Still, let’s carve away a lot of that gristle and fat…

Shall we say that ten percent of that total number equals meaningful books?

And by that I mean, those books that share the same air as you and your book. Not direct competition in that it’s all New Adult Erotic Space Westerns, but I just mean in a general sense — competing for attention, social media, reviews, shelf-space, even competing for the weird algorithms and insane discoverability engines that guide the web.

Ten percent is 60k.

Or, around 160 books published per day.

Can you imagine that?

In the time it takes you to wake, do all the frivolous flopping about that goes into your day, then go back to sleep, 160 new books just teleported into existence. Six new books an hour. It’s like there’s a giant book monster somewhere just squatting over a Barnes & Noble dumpster shitting out books. CLUH-CLANG. “Another six books.” CLUH-CLANG. “Six more, high fiber.” CLUH-CLANG. “There we go — ooh, a new Stephen King, that one was really blocking me up.”

And all that competes with games, movies, TV, that video where a guy gets hit in the nuts with a skateboard on the YouTubes. Lotta competition for eyeballs and wallets and hours in the day.

Self-publishing has really dialed this up — overall, in a good way, in that yay books, yay authors making a living, hoo-fucking-ray for new options and opportunities. But it complicates things at the same time. This isn’t a knock against self-publishing — but it is a reminder that with gatekeepers fleeing their posts, this wonderful time of unfettered creation still comes with issues and complexities. Because of this, author-publishers and the traditionally-published alike need to recognize the new realities, the new difficulties, of being a writer. This is the best time to be a writer, but also a time of upheaval and bewilderment, a time of great coyote bedlam. The noise and signal are both increasing, and that old adage of “90% of everything is crap” probably holds true — but it’s a lot easier to find one diamond within nine shards of broken glass than it is to find 10 diamonds amidst 90 shards, or 100 shards among 900. It’s a challenge. And it’s really a challenge for those who help to curate interesting content — reviewers, critics, bloggers, bookstores, libraries, and so forth. (It’s also why many of them shut out self-published authors: the noise there is too great, the ratio of quality too imbalanced, the chaos too large. Don’t be irritated at them for not built to handle these tectonic changes yet. You just colonized a brand new world, so don’t be pissed off if there isn’t a Starbucks on every corner yet, mmkay?)

Life is full of kept gates.

In and out of writing.

Even author-publishers are beholden to them. Amazon is a kept gate, though one with nicely loose hinges. Reviewers — professional and otherwise — are gatekeepers. BookBub and its ilk is one. Editors better damn sure be a kept gate for you. And at the end of the day, readers are one, too. They’re the final gate, the last of the infernal portals. Any outlet of discoverability, any axis of transmission, is a gate watched over by somebody. Traditionally-published authors just pass more of them on the front end — that cattle-chute is far narrower (which is both very good and very bad, but is a reality regardless of the pluses and minuses).

The point is, it’s hard being a writer.

It’s hard having a book and having it get seen.

It’s hard no matter which choice you make in terms of getting it out there.

You’re not better because you traditionally-published.

You’re not better because you did it yourself.

We’re all our here, struggling to find our way, working to put our books in the hands of readers. It’s harder for some than it is for others, but it ain’t easy no matter how you whittle this stick.

Recognize that.

Let it be hard.

Accept and expect the challenge.

Recognize that you’re not the only one doing this.

As I said last week, you’re just one special snowflake in the whole damn blizzard.

Nobody owes you anything. They don’t owe you a review. Or a retweet. Or any consideration at all. They don’t owe you a blurb, or a blog post, or blog space. The bookstore doesn’t owe you shelf space. The library doesn’t owe you circulation. Nobody owes you attention, and they certainly don’t owe you a career. They don’t even owe it to be nice to you.

But you can earn those things. Not just by writing a good book — though that damn well better be Step Fucking One. You earn it by doing better. You earn it by being nice, and humble, and recognizing that it’s not the world’s job to bend its knee to you, but your job to bend knee. You gain audience by being the sharpest, smartest, kindest version of yourself you can summon. You overcome the challenges implicit to a creative life and career not by raging against them or by being sour about them, but by acknowledging them and dealing with them either head-on or with your own clever solutions. You get these things by being honest and earnest and authentic.

You wrote a book.

That’s a truly special thing.

To you, to me, to your mother.

But it’s not a golden ticket.

Don’t complain. Don’t pout. Kick your excuses and whinges out the door.

You wrote a book? So did that woman. And that guy. And that llama.

You’re gonna have to do more.

Recognize this up front. Arm yourself with that information now.

Nobody owes you anything.

But you? You owe them a lot.

You owe them the best of you.

The best book.

The best effort.

The best you.

Now go and earn your place. Give more than you take. Offer more than you want.

And always do better.

* * *

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

I have this big seawall of huge news items I cannot yet share.

But, some stuff is starting to trickle through, so let’s get right to it, shall we?

NYCC Appearances

Will I be at NYCC this weekend?

By gosh and by golly, I will. My schedule is:

Sunday, 10:30AM I’ll be at the 47North booth (#806), signing Blightborn.

Sunday, 12:15PM: I’ll be on a Dark Circle / Archie panel discussing The Shield (which, if you missed it, is my first official comics gig — sharing the writing burden with friend and cohort Adam Christopher — and the image at the fore of this post is Shield fan-art done by Patrick Thomas Parnell). I’ll be on that panel with Duane Swierzcynski, Dean Haspiel, Alex Segura, Paul Kaminski. Also present: the wraith of Adam Christopher, telepathically attending in spirit.

Sunday, 4pm-5pm, a signing at the Archie booth.

I’m also at NYCC on Saturday, but have… well, nothing to do, yet! SO I SHALL HOVER.

Come say hi.

I’ll sign books.

We’ll thumb-wrestle.

Something! Anything!

Other Appearances

I’m going to be at Let’s Play Books in adorable Emmaus, PA!

October 16th!

6:30PM!

I’ll sign books. I’ll talk! I’ll pirouette!

More details here.

Also, I’ll be in Vancouver at the Surrey International Writer’s Conference. October 24-26th.

Other upcoming appearances are likely to include:

Camp NECon, Paradise Lost, and Context (in Columbus, OH).

Storybundle

I am once again part of the very cool Storybundle.

This one curated by Kevin J. Anderson and focusing on NaNoWriMo writing tools.

You will find in there my own 500 Ways To Be A Better Writer, but therein you’ll also find work by KJA, Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, and more. It’s six books for pay-what-you-want plus another six book bonus if you pay at least fifteen bucks. Pretty cool stuff, and if you want it to, some of that money goes to charity, too — including GirlsWriteNow. You get to decide how much of the money goes to authors, as well, which is its own neat little function. So, anyway:

Check it out here, consider grabbing the bundle.

Book Riot Lurves Me

I have infected Book Riot with the Me Virus.

They let me appear twice on two different recent podcasts?

What were they thinking?

Better question: what hallucinogens were they greedily gobbling?

First up, you’ll find me at the Dear Book Nerd podcast answering questions about Jane Austen, Strong Book Opinions, and Self-Publishing. Thanks to Rita Meade for having me on!

And then, in what turned out to be I think one of my favorite podcasts of all time — Reading Lives, with yours truly. Host Jeff O’Neal digs into my reading history and what books have really affected me and mattered to me, and it was so much fun to think about these things. (Their description for the podcast is great, so I’m using it: “Reading Lives is an interview podcast with interesting people who love books. My guest on this episode is Chuck Wendig. Chuck is a novelist, screenwriter, and game designer. In this episode, We talk about the greatness of Ulysses, what happens when you try to take away a Stephen King novel from a teenager, his mother’s reaction the first time she read one of his stories, and more.”)