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.”)

This is the 2nd time someone at The Passive Voice has called me a “bad-boy” writer.

I’m not sure precisely the connotation — I’m hoping its more, When you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way rather than ooh somebody needs a spanking. Maybe it’s a combination. Maybe I’m James Dean in a soggy diaper? Danny Zuko who can’t share his toys with the other children? Maybe I’m Judd Nelson in the Breakfast Club, except also, I shoved a PB&J in Mommy’s purse.

Anyway.

Getting quoted at TPV is usually a little bumpy — understandably, as my views don’t always line up with the views of the commenters there. I think a lot of indie authors still remember me for my “self-publishing shit volcano” post (though sometimes I wonder if they actually read the post because I like to think that the post contained a very even-handed and honest look at the effects of a perceived lack of quality in that space). But this time around, getting quoted was — at least, so far — relatively painless.

But, then I saw some comments by mega-uber-indie-author Hugh Howey:

I hope so. He’s too nice a guy to go down in history as the person peeing in everyone’s art and telling them it sucks.

I don’t think that’s what he meant, but it’s what he was famous for for a while there.

… and …

He’s a really bright guy and a great writer. If he dropped the weird bad-boy schtick and just wrote his thoughts, he’d be one of the more important thinkers in publishing. I don’t think he knows how to back off the schtick, though. Which makes you wonder: Is he going to talk like that in another 20 years, when he’s into his 60s?

Working really hard to be hip is like getting a lot of tattoos. It’s hard to age gracefully.

(Which is to say, I feel I finally understand the comment, ‘damning with faint praise.’)

Obviously, I can’t control how people perceive me. Or this blog, or my books.

What I can control is what I put out into the world.

And so I thought, I’m going to take a moment to do what blogs were really meant to do…

Which is to talk about me, me, ME.

*maniacal laughter*

*rolls around in own stink for a few moments while you stare, awkwardly*

*stands up, dusts self off, looks shameful like a dog that just ate its own mess*

Ahem.

Sorry.

I’ve seen it suggested in some places that what I do here — the way I write, the attitude I put out, the overall frothing writer honey badger hobo vibe — is somehow orchestrated. That despite the ire I reserve for the topic of author ‘branding,’ this is actually my brand and it’s a very conscious one and all of this is (depending on who you listen to) either well-constructed or clumsily forced. It’s either a very nice mansion or a square-peg violently hammered into a circle-hole by me, an angry man-toddler venting venom and vulgarity.

I want to make one thing abundantly clear:

This isn’t artifice.

This isn’t a mechanism.

This isn’t my brand.

It isn’t, as Hugh suggests, my schtick.

This? Is me.

The way I write on this blog is the way I think. I have this space for me first, for you second. The dopey fuckery and wanton dipshittery that I ladle onto these blog pages are here because I like them that way. I like wonky metaphors. I love creative profanity. I really enjoy writing in a way that is both (hopefully) thoughtful and completely batshit. I write this way because I think this way. I don’t really act this way in public, of course, because it’s a very good way to get Tasered. And when people meet me for the first time (as I’ve noted in the past), I don’t scream “YO MOTHERFUCKER” before spitting in their gaping, gasping mouth. I’m fairly polite in public. An introvert playing at extroversion — or, at the least, an introvert who finds himself extroverting once he’s comfortable with people.

And at this blog, I’m very, very comfortable.

This is me kicking off my shoes and kicking up my feet. Letting the beard grow all mangy and wild, like a snarling carpet of moss or an old, hunger-mad coyote. This is me, comfortable. I’m comfortable with you and, presumably, most of you are comfortable with me since a not unreasonable number of you show up here daily. (And thank you for that. Seriously.)

I write the way I think.

Sometimes I turn the volume up. Sometimes I turn the volume down — and, in my books, I turn it down because there the voice is different. (Despite all this not being artifice, I do remain in control of all the knobs and levers that govern my voice.) But this is my playspace. This blog is for me, first and foremost, and hopefully there are enough folks who gain some kind of intellectual, creative or profane sustenance from these pages to make the juice worth the squeeze.

I’m not trying to be “hip.”

(Is that really a word people use anymore? “Hip?”)

(I still like “rad,” honestly.)

Sure, sometimes I can come across as harsh — a little too much gravel in your wine, a few too many bird bones braided into my silky, luxuriant face-pelt. It is a fair critique to say, “Well, if you didn’t call that post ‘shit volcano,’ maybe you wouldn’t have upset people, and with a nicer title, maybe those people would’ve read the post.” Yeah, maybe. But I did it, and I’d do it again. Because ‘shit volcano’ is funny. Because I liked titling it that way. You might have already gotten this far in the post and wish I wouldn’t do these weird parenthetical asides, or the fake-actions-sandwiched-betwixt-asterisks, or the eyebrow-raising metaphors. Sure, I get that. But I’m going to do them anyway. And, when I’m harsh, it’s because that’s how I feel and because I’m trying to portray the path ahead with all the bumps and thorns that lurk ahead. (Though, for the record, I don’t see myself as “peeing in everyone’s art and telling them that it sucks.” I like to think of this blog as a very supportive space of writers of all stripes. Your creativity and creation is vital, and nobody should tell you otherwise. That said, once you start to charge money for something, ennnnh, you’ve gone from creativity to commerce — and there, the attitude changes a little bit. All that is, of course, between you and your personal deities. But all told, I don’t think, we can all do better is a particularly poisonous message, unless of course, you find comfort in cromulence.)

My mission at this blog is as follows:

a) to enlighten and inform, and when that fails:

b) to make you laugh, and when that fails:

c) dazzle and bewilder with inventive profanity.

The fail state of that last one is, you and me maybe just don’t like the same things.

And that’s okay.

Hell, that’s awesome.

What kind of a goofy world would it be if we all liked the same things? Or we all agreed all the time. It’s important to have different voices and different ideas. Sid and Marty Krofft, could you imagine if I was the dominant voice in writing and publishing? What an ugly pony that would be.

Just the same, this place is my voice.

These are my ideas.

Not a brand, or a schtick, or a lie, or me trying to be hip, or be a “bad boy.”

If you’re going to hang around here, this is what you get. (Sorry, Hugh.)

You’re gonna get the NSFW/NSFL language.

You’ll get all my kooky ranty-pants ideas.

You’ll probably see a lot of CAPSLOCK and italics.

Absurdity will be rampant.

I am likely to poke more fun at me than I do at you.

I will squeeze things in parentheses and between asterisks.

Sometimes things will be in lists.

I am likely to reference any of the following: hobos, unicorns, various woodland creatures, dildos, forbidden sex acts, beards, fluids, volcanoes, toddlers, Transformers, and of course: lots of blathering bloggerel about writing, storytelling, publishing, language, and all the mortar that holds those particular bricks together.

This is it.

This is me.

I hope you like it.

If you don’t, that’s okay.

But this is still gonna be it, and this is still gonna be me.

And by the way I think tattoos are cool, even on 60-year-olds.

Now, if you’ll excuse me — BAD BOY AUTHOR COMING THROUGH.

*writes a novel while riding loud motorcycle*

*flicks lit cigarette into a trash-can full of awful books*

*slams your head in a dictionary*

*throws beer cans at your head as you go into a library*

*autographs books in bat blood*

*flushes your manuscript down the toilet*

*tattoos entire text of Finnegan’s Wake on back*

*poops on your blog*

*flies away on a jetpack made of unicorn bones*

*explodes*

Last week, I said, “Hey, write a really great sentence.”

And you did.

Lots of you did.

This week, I’m saying, okay, go check out those sentences in the comments, pick one of your favorites, and use it in a new short piece of flash fiction, ~1000 words long.

Post that story at your online space.

Link back here so we can all see it.

Make sure to identify which sentence you used!

Give credit both in comment and your posting.

Due back in one week: by next Friday, noon EST.

Go. Pick. Write.

When Alexandra Belarus discovered her family’s secret ability to breathe life into stone, she uncovered an entire world of magic hidden within New York City—a world she has accidentally thrown into chaos. A spell gone awry has set thousands of gargoyles loose upon Manhattan, and it’s up to Lexi and her faithful protector, Stanis, to put things right.

But the stress of saving the city is casting a pall over Lexi and Stanis’s relationship, driving them to work separately to solve the problem. As Stanis struggles to unite the gargoyle population, Lexi forges unlikely alliances with witches, alchemists and New York’s Finest to quell an unsettling uprising led by an ancient and deadly foe long thought vanquished.

To save her city, Lexi must wield more power than ever before with the added hope of recovering a mysterious artifact that could change her world—and bring her closer to Stanis than she ever thought possible…

1. How to Survive a Twinado

May of 2014 brought much joy to Castle Strout with the birth of my son and daughter. It also brought much peril. And much shitting, puking and crying (although to be fair some of the crying was done by me and not the newborns). I have a day job in publishing and manage to write a book a year around it, but with the arrival of cuteness and demonic possession personified, I wasn’t sure how I’d bang out another contractually obligated alchemical and gargoyle filled urban fantasy. Somehow I managed it, though… just a little more tired this year than the year before. The one true saving grace in it all was that my editor also gave birth a few weeks after my family’s twins arrived, which meant her schedule was equally thrown out of whack. Thanks to her little Spudette of Doom, I was able to turn in my book a little later due to her being behind editing other books first. Suck it, Twinado! You can’t stop me!

2. The Food Network Presents… Iron… err, Stone Chef!

First off, I watch way too many cooking shows or contest cooking shows. I spent one New Year’s Eve watching the entire 24 hour marathon of the old school Iron Chef from Japan. Hello, my name is Anton and I clearly have culinary issues. Over the course of seven books, however, I’ve discovered that if I wasn’t writing about creepy things doing even creepier stuff to the fine people of New York City, I’d probably want to write about food or restaurants. Some of my favorite scenes I’ve written have involved food. In DEAD TO ME, Simon Canderous makes dinner for his soon to be love, Jane, and I enjoyed the hell out of adding all the culinary details. In INCARNATE, Alexandra Belarus brings a breakfast smorgasbord to her friends as a peace offering. For that one of the culinary delights I created was the Cruffin (patent pending). Clearly based on the Cronut craze here in NYC (a croissant donut), the Cruffin is obviously a cross between a croissant and a muffin. It’s dumb, and makes me giggle just typing it again, and it doesn’t exist, BUT IT EFFING SHOULD!!!

Now I’m hungry, dammit…

3. Fuck Frodo & Sam… Tell Me More About This Ring-Forging Hobby Of Yours

If The Spellmason Chronicles is about anything other than kickass gargoyles and alchemical explosions as far as the eye can see, it’s about makers. I’m kind of obsessed with them. In The Fellowship of the Ring, there is a scene in Galadriel’s narration where she glosses briefly over the forging of the rings and the one true ring of power. I wanted to shout, “Hold on! Go back and tell me about that!,” but alas, elves do not give a shit about my needs, apparently. Thankfully, THE SILMARILLION covers a lot of that, but that desire in me stressed how much I want to write stories that cover that type of thing, and I realized it had been with me my whole life. In playing Dungeons & Dragons I always wondered about Mordenkainen or Elminster, and what the hell caused those wizards to come up with half the magic items they concocted. With The Spellmason Chronicles, I decided to explore that, delving into not just the world of gargoyles, but of who would make them and why. That’s the kind of mystery I wanted answers to, the one I wanted to uncover, and hopefully readers want that too.

4. Not In The Face! (or: I Know Why The Sidekicks Cringe)

There is a fantastic episode of The Tick where Arthur (a grown man in a moth suit who is often mistaken for a giant bunny) gets relegated to the Sidekicks Lounge. There he meets many cast aside boy wonders and such while the heroes party down in the main club. That’s sad state of affairs always stuck with me… and because of it, I think I write stronger secondary characters. They’re not just there to be kicked to the side like sidekicks can be, nor are they one note companions to the hero. Each of them has their own dreams, their own goals, their own strengths… in the Spellmason Chronicles Marshall Blackmoore wants nothing more than to run his game shop while also dabbling in alchemy making D&D inspired magic items. I also deeply love my dancer-turned-modern-day paladin Rory Torres because the woman falls in love fightdancing with a glaive guisarme, which is not the most concealable weapon for New York City. She’s got style. I adore them both, and I get a swell of pride whenever I see love thrown the way of my sidekick characters.

5. NYC is my Frenemy

I came to Manhattan around 1994—in love with the life, the sights, and everything it had to offer, especially the architecture. Yet over and over I seem to destroy it like some giant ape or radioactive lizard. Why do I feel compelled to rampage through my precious City That Never Sleeps? In the Simon Canderous paranormal detective books and the alchemy and gargoyle filled Spellmason Chronicles, I’ve destroyed:

The New York Public Library, Fashion Week at Bryant Park, the Museum of Natural History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, bookstores, monuments, Times Square, and ships I’ve sunk off its coastline…

Wow. Looking that over I really hate art, huh? Who knew?

I’ve tried to work though the destructive why of it all, but always come back to the clichéd maxim: You always hurt the ones you love. If that’s the case then I must friggin’ adore New York City, one dysfunctional blow at a time.

Now let’s sink this island, shall we?

* * *

He is currently hard at work on his next book and be found lurking the darkened hallways of antonstrout.com or talking with your favorite SF&F authors on The Once and Future Podcast (www.theonceandfuturepodcast.com), where he is host and content curator.

Anton Strout: Website | Twitter

Incarnate: Amazon | B&N | Powells