Apple-Obsessed Author Fella
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…
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!
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…
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.
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.
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?
* * *
Anton Strout was born in the Berkshire Hills mere miles from writing heavyweights Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. He currently lives in the haunted corn maze that is New Jersey (where nothing paranormal ever really happens, he assures you).
He is the author of the Simon Canderous urban fantasy series and the Spellmason Chronicles for Ace Books, a division of Penguin Random House. Anton is also the author of many short tales published in anthologies by DAW Books. His latest book, Incarnate,the third Spellmason Chronicles book, is coming out September 30, 2014.
In his scant spare time, his is a writer, a sometimes actor, sometimes musician, occasional RPGer, and the worlds most casual and controller smashing video gamer. He currently works in the exciting world of publishing and yes, it is as glamorous as it sounds.
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.
Julie Hutchings is a deranged lunatic who lives down by the trashcans at the end of my driveway. She either commands a small army of woodland creatures or she does battle against them? Honestly, the mythology of her situation escapes me. Regardless, despite being some kind of forested hobo, she’s hella funny and a hoot on social media and here she’d like to talk to you about panty peddling, public book pitches, and why you should sometimes do the scary thing instead of the safe thing. Her newest is Running Away.
* * *
I was a highly paid professional panty peddler. For ten years, through my wedding bells to babies crying, and I was happy as hell. Climbing the ladder from the ground up, I was treated like lingerie royalty; met models and celebs, was given jewelry and trips and praise. Loved it.
Until I didn’t.
Retail has an expiration date on it. Working your ass off to make money for someone else, even if you like them a whole lot, gets tired. I didn’t know it until I was on maternity leave with my first baby, sleep-sucked and blubbery, dreading going back to work. It was that fear and possibly weird attachment to my kids that gave me the emotional cojones to write RUNNING HOME.
RUNNING HOME took me years corporate visits, pumping milk in the office on conference calls, manhandling bras at all hours, crying during my commute, stopping shoplifters, running sales meetings, treating that store like my home away from home, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t my home.
My home had my family in it and it felt like me. I thought about scribbling away at a novel that I had no idea what to do with while I was at work. Playing with panties, not doing the thing I went to college for, not doing the thing I’d wanted to do since I was an awkward kid with my mother’s haircut.
I went to work a miserable disaster at the thought of leaving my kids to do something that at the end of the day meant nothing. Being away from my kids made me physically ill daily. My job suffered, my family suffered and I was certain that if I stayed another year, I’d be dead at the end of it. Even my staff and my boss had an intervention with me, afraid of what was happening to me.
So I said FUCK THIS and I left my career to make a life.
I’d show my boys that you don’t have to do the safe thing to survive. I didn’t want them to know me as the withering martyr. They deserve to know the mom that isn’t fearless but is brave. Passionate. A fighter. An occasional pigheaded jerk. I want them to want to take risks and know they’re worth that. I want to show them I’m worth that too.
Sure, it was scary leaving the bulk of my family income, 401K, our health insurance, to depend on the scraps of a vampire book. I threw all of that fear and clawing determination into a main character. I made her afraid, and rash, dumb at times, and defensive. But strong. Determined. And most importantly, self-trusting that she was meant for something more.
Going on a feeling when it looks like fate has something else in mind for you entirely is goddamn scary. But my entire life I’d been a jumper-inner-and-never-looker-backer, and not only was I not about to stop, I was going to do it harder and faster now that it was mine.
I went from shyly telling people in the confines of the stock room that I was writing a book to querying, blogging, tweeting, going to conventions. I did public query critiques on giant screens with agents and writers, I live pitched, phone pitched, read my first 3 pages out loud to rooms full of people.
I defended writing a vampire book by making it my vampire book. All or nothing.
I was one of only 7 authors published with Books of the Dead Press last summer, and the only woman. I knew I’d done something.
Now RUNNING AWAY, the sequel to that first book, is going public. They’ve both been received better than I ever anticipated, and for that I’m not only grateful but fulfilled. I never really cared that the world thought vampires were overdone; they hadn’t seen mine, and fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke. I strongly believe that if you write the book you need to write, readers will need to read it. I never feared rejection because I don’t write to be accepted. I write because I must. I write because I love the look on my boys’ faces when they see me pound away at the laptop. And I write because I’m an animal without it.
I’ll forever do the thing that makes me bleed, not the thing that holds me together. Now read my goddamn vampire books.
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About Julie: Julie revels in all things Buffy, has a sick need for exotic reptiles, and drinks more coffee than Juan Valdez and his donkey combined, if that donkey is allowed to drink coffee. Julie’s a black belt with an almost inappropriate love for martial arts. And pizza. And Rob Zombie. Julie lives in Plymouth, MA, constantly awaiting thunderstorms with her wildly supportive husband and two magnificent boys.
On Running Away: Eliza Morgan is desperate to escape the horrors of her mortal life and understand why death follows her, leaving only one man, Nicholas French, in its wake. He’s the one she loves, the one she resents, the one fated to make her legendary among an ancient order of vampires with a “heroic” duty to kill: the Shinigami.
On a ghostlike mountaintop in Japan the all-powerful Master guides Eliza’s transition into a Shinigami death god. Sacrificing her destiny will save Nicholas, who is decaying before her eyes. But she’s not afraid to defy fate, and must forge her own path through a maze of ancient traditions. To uncover the truth and save her loved ones, Eliza will stop at nothing, including war with fate itself.
Julie Hutchings: Website | Twitter
Once in a while, I like to write one of those posts where I try to scare you away from this gig — I put on my boogeyman costume and jump out of your toaster and be like, “BOO. EVERYTHING SUCKS, DON’T BE A WRITER.” And then you drop your toast.
Thing is, I started to write my scary grr-snarl run away the bridge is out bloggerel, but every time I came up with one of those horror-show items, I found myself countermanding it with a BUT BUT BUT — which means, I think, that I’m growing soft. Soft and squishy like a fire-warmed marshmallow. Mmm. Marshmallows. S’mores.
*drool spatters on space bar*
Anyway, here, then, I will act as the Devil and Angel on your shoulder.
The good.
The bad.
And all the what-the-fuckery sandwiched in-between.
Blogs and tweets and self-published books and more blogs and Faceyspace updates and Ello screeds and free short fiction and novellas and the 1s and 0s of a billion e-books piling up atop one another like grains of sand forming an ever-growing mound. Everybody’s a writer now. This is why when you tell someone, “Oh, I’m a writer,” they roll their eyes and pat you on the forehead like you’re a silly doggy and they go, “Of course you are.” This isn’t rarified air that we’re breathing. It’s smog. Great gassy exhalations of authorial ego, clouding the sky. We’re all sucking it in and coughing it back out.
That also means that everyone is a reader now, too. Okay, so maybe that means that not everyone is reading books, yet, but for as visual as the Internet is, it’s also got a startling number of words that must be read. We have not yet learned to communicate purely with CAT VIDEOS and PORNOGRAPHY, so: it falls to things like sentences and paragraphs to convey information. More readers is a good thing, isn’t it? Seize them, writers! Seize them now!
More readers or no, writers are still growing at an unprecedented screws-loose monkeypants rate, and the reading public isn’t catching up yet. Let’s say that the entire book-reading public gives off approximately four million care-cubits (aka “give-a-shit units”) every year. These units represent how much attention (and money!) they can devote to writers and our stories — but here’s the rub: a sharp increase in the number of writers does not create an equally sharp increase of how much they give a shit. It’s just less attention to go around. It’s more books, but the same number of readers. And those readers are finding themselves compelled by other entertainment distractions, too: apps and movies and television shows and social media and comic books and free porn. It won’t be long before we all have 3D printers in our house and then that’s one more distraction because then we’ll all be 3D printing My Little Ponies and weird dildos and homunculi we hope to infuse with alchemical life. To sum up? More writers with more books but same level of attention except now that attention is increasingly divided amongst various new iterations of both bread and circuses. I mean, holy shit, most Americans read like, one book a year at best. Which means we’re all just a whistle in a hurricane trying to be heard above the howling wind.
Maybe that’s a good thing. Or, at least, there’s value in writing not being some vaunted, sacred act performed only by properly sanctified authors (that last word said with nose in the air, eyes dismissively cast, a faux-British accent). The Internet and self-publishing has definitely given us our Martin Luther 95 Theses moment where we no longer need to be blessed by dubious arbiters within the industry — it’s weirder and trickier now to make a living at what we do, but really, anybody can do it. Low ground has been made higher. High ground has been leveled. We’re all looking at each other eye to eye now. And no, I’m not wearing pants. YOUR MOVE, WORDMONKEY.
The days of being a rockstar writer trading in stories for wheelbarrows of gold Krugerrands would seem to be fading. In fact, if the author surveys hold any water at all, writing is a very good way to get poor. Enjoy your second-hand underwear and Ramen noodle cups, jerks!
Those surveys are horseshit. They frequently fail to account for all manner of variables, including whether folks do it as part-time, full-time, what they actually earn per hour of work, or if they’re really even working at all or if they’re “writers” instead of writers, meaning they do a whole lot of blabbing about writing while never actually crafting anything to be read by other human beings. Is the age of the rockstar writer dead? If not dead, then certainly diseased, and that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. More money to spread around the center. A healthier, stockier midlist, not some narrow-trunked tree too heavy with bestselling fruit.
Luck matters in nearly all things — you think you hear someone calling your name and you step off of the curb too late and get whacked by the city bus (or, if the luck is good, the bus just misses you and then travels back in time and runs over Hitler instead). Win money from a scratch-off ticket? Luck. Get the last bagel? Luck. Sneezed on by a plague-toddler? Luck, file under: bad. One might argue that luck even figures in to the equation of whether or not the tiny tail-whipping tadpole carrying half of your genetic information crosses the finish line and headbutts his way into the Cadbury egg that contains the rest of your potential genetic information. Your very existence and identity are Luke Skywalker torpedoing a Death Star exhaust port, which is to say? Total luck, because the Force isn’t a real thing. This is entirely true with writing, too. They say that successful authors cashed in on a lucky lottery ticket, and while that’s incredibly dismissive, it also contains a wee smidgen of truth: luck fucking matters. Luck in finding an agent, an editor, a publisher, a marketing budget, luck that your book lands on the right shelves in the right stores, luck that the right people buy the book and tell other right people about it — luck can sometimes explain how a bad book does well, and bad luck can explain how an amazing book (even one with a robust marketing budget) can trip on itself, fall down the escalator, and poop its pants like the ghost of Chris Farley. Luck is a vital alchemical reagent to this thing that we do.
Luck is also not the most important thing. It matters more than you’d like, but that doesn’t change the fact that writing a good book — or, hell, writing as many good books as your frail psyche can manage — increases your chances. See, that’s the thing. You can maximize your luck by taking more shots at the goal. You can be smart and you can be prolific and you buy the ticket and take the ride as many times as you can. Optimize your experience! Keep going. You learn. You fail. You seize opportunity. You make opportunity. Yeah, it’s important to recognize that luck is a factor. It’s also important to grab luck by its nipples and twist ’em so hard it drops to its knees. (When you do, scream: “PURPLE NURPLE, MOTHERFUCKER. NOW BUY MY BOOK.”)
Writing feels very special. I’m crafting stories, you think. I’m changing the world. Fairy-spun story-magic. Biblio-sorcery. Dark powers summoned by one word placed in front of the next, as if each book is an incantation summoning something greater than the sum of its parts. Bad news: ain’t true. Writing isn’t magic. You are given over to no Muse, no wispy spirit crapping Skittles of inspiration into your open skull. It feels like magic, but it isn’t. Some days of writing feel more like digging ditches than casting spells.
That’s awesome. Magic is overrated. Magic feels like something outside you. Something you don’t control. But this thing that we do? You control it. Writing and storytelling is less a magic spell and more a magic trick — the ability to orchestrate an illusion, to fool an audience, to play with their expectations with a practiced, mechanical expression of deception and delight. Letting your work exist as ‘real’ magic takes something away from the very real effort and awesomeness it takes to do this thing that we do. Further, it makes it sound again like it’s something reserved only for the Most Special. “Only one out of a thousand of us possess the Authorspark, a shard of the original ink-fingered gods…” Hey, fuck that. If we let this thing be too hoity-toity hocusy-pocusy, then a bad day of writing feels like cosmic punishment. A failed career makes it sound like we should just give up because the Dark Deities of the Elder Omnibus haven’t granted us their magical mercy. Sometimes, digging ditches is clarifying. It’s simple. It’s something you can do. It’s craft and construction, not Muse-farts and manuscript thaumaturgy. Let your writing feel like magic. But don’t give it over to imaginary forces. Own it. Control it. Swung shovels and sleight-of-hand.
The earth shudders like it just had an ugly orgasm, and the ground is moving and cracking beneath our feet. Who the hell knows what’s going on inside publishing? Publishing doesn’t even know what’s going on inside publishing. Seriously, track an editor down in NYC and ask them, “So, how’re things?” and they’re eyes will go wide, their lips will search wordlessly for news, and then a slow pee-stain will spread across the crotch of their pants. The editor might hiss something like, “Amazon drones are watching us right now,” and then turn and dart down an alley. Publishing feels nuts right now. The future, weird and uncertain. And you might say, “Oh, ho, ho, but self-publishing is all good,” but hey, things are crazy there, too. Amazon is the biggest beast in town, and this is a beast with a drinking habit. It does two good things and then one really bad one. It barfs up candy and disco balls and then eats half your livestock without warning. Everything is goofy. We’re all fucked. Go find a bunker.
This is all good! I promise! I swear! Sure, sure, the ground is splitting like too-tight boxer shorts and everything’s gone super-fucky, but sometimes, shaking things up is just what the doctor ordered. (Er, not literally, and especially not regarding infants.) In these grave tectonic gaps, new life grows. And you can crawl into the fissures born of a shattered mantle and find new ways into a writing career — ways that did not exist before. The old paths are uncertain. The ancient rules are called into question. And so the fleet-of-foot and flexible-of-fiction can find opportunity in this time of disruption. *rips off clothes, runs screaming into the maelstrom*
Seriously. They don’t. Not publishers. Not self-publishers. Not Amazon. Nobody. I don’t know anything. This blog is basically just an agglomeration of lies and lucky guesses. The most knowledgeable group is, has been, and will always be: readers. And they aren’t telling.
Chaos is joy! Ignorance is bliss! Discovering that nobody knows anything is really, really freeing. Why? Because it’s not just you. Sometimes it feels like you’re powerless, bewildered, left wandering the snowy wolf-haunted wilderness while everyone else is enjoying snifters of brandy around a roaring fire, but ha ha ha, nope. We’re all dopes! Okay, sure, yes, some folks have more skill in navigating this wilderness than others — certainly you can hone your instincts and keep up with patterns and trends, but at the end of the day, when it comes to actually knowing things, we’re all looking up in the clouds trying to see shapes.
You’re going to write a shitty book. Maybe three of them. Or ten of them. And they won’t get published. Or they will (or you’ll self-publish) and they won’t sell. Writing is tough noogies, man. Everybody can’t do this thing well. Success isn’t a guarantee. The numbers are in, and most of you? Nearly all of you? You’re going to fail. And some of you will quit as a result.
Failure is not a dirty word, not like ‘fucksmudge’ or ‘jizzdonkey’ or ‘trickle-down economics.’ Failure is great. I’ve failed before. I’ll fail again. Failure is a ladder made of bent metal. Failure is there to cut out the gutless and gormless, the lost and lazy, the easily dissuaded. Failure is a test — not a test of talent, no, but a test of determination. And failure is itself a learning opportunity. How did I misstep? Why? What can I do better next time? Should I include more instances of the word ‘fucksmudge,’ or fewer instances of the word? Failure is a crucial first step.
You’re just part of a big noisy-ass blizzard, sucker.
Okay, but wait, hold on — a blizzard is still composed of itty-bitty unique snowflakes, right? At a distance it’s just a white whorl, but capture an individual snowflake and — such elegance, intricacy, and architecture. Snowflakes separated from the whole are unique, are special. And, they also melt fast. Therein contains a vital lesson, I think: every writer really is her own creature. Your voice does make you special. You have things to say and experiences and ideas and metaphors that nobody else has on offer. But — but! — if you act like a special little snowflake, you’ll turn to a drop of common water lickety-quick. It’s vital to recognize that what you bring to the page is all you, but the way you engage with the rest of the world is the same as everyone else. We’re all trying to be our own special snowflakes in this sightless, screaming blizzard. Manage that task, and you may find yourself the success you seek.
Be special.
Just don’t act like the world owes you something.
Now go and write. And know nothing. And fail proudly.
Rip off your clothes and go careening into the maelstrom.
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The Gonzo Writing E-Book Bundle:
(Related post: a survival kit for a loose toddler roaming your home and neighborhood.)
I have not been one of those grown-ass men who collects toys for himself. It’s not that I look down on those that do — it just, I dunno, hasn’t been a thing I cared much about. I have other oddities hanging around (a pheasant killed by a grandfather I never met, an evil clapping monkey, old typewriters and cameras, a phrenology head), but toys? Not so much.
Of course, I have a toddler (really, a burgeoning pre-schooler at this point, as he’ll soon cross the three-and-a-half threshold), and the toddler? Well, the toddler likes toys.
More to the point, the toddler likes Transformers.
We tried to hook him on Transformers Rescue Bots a year or so ago hoping that it would be something new and different from the ceaseless parade of trucks and cars the child has accumulated (seriously, he has approximately 47 monster trucks, 82 tow trucks, 178 pickups, and 742,313 tractor trailers). And it didn’t quite click until he saw the show on Netflix (seriously, Rescue Bots is actually fun toddlerian Transformer-based TV), and then it was like, boom, we had our gateway drug toy. Sure, sure, they’re trucks, but they’re also ROBOTS, and in a way, they’re also puzzles, so — yay.
He’s gotten deeper into the whole Transformers thing, and has watched many of the shows, and can name probably more of the damn things than I can at this point (and hell, I grew up loving them). He has a few of the Transformers Prime toys and I fumble with them like a bandage-fingered invalid, but he’s all like — *ninja-flip, clicky-twisty, press, push, pivot* — yeah, done, shit got transformed, Dad. He pretends to be various Transformers: Bumblebee, Cliffjumper, Ratchet, Heatwave. Inhabiting these character helps him conquer sometimes scary situations like learning to swim or meeting new kids. (Sidenote: the Prime toys are actually really great. Solid, fun, stylistic. And the show is good, if a little grim. YOU KNOW, IF YOU CARE.)
So, he’s kind of a Transformers fanatic right now. Which is not odd, because toddlers are either a fanatic for something or it’s dead to them. On the knob marked INTEREST LEVEL, the numbers goes from 1 to 10, and 2 through 9 are scratched out with a rough penny.
All in all?
It’s nice.
Plus, they’re toys I liked as a kid, so it’s this weird psychic bridge from my youth to his.
(Which is exactly what the toy companies want, of course. “BACK TO THE NOSTALGIA MINES, JIMMY. WE GOT MORE STRAWBERRY PONYCAKES AND G.I. NINJA GO-BOTS TO DIG OUT OF THE RICH LOAMY EARTH OF YOUR YOUTH, MWA HA HA HA HA.”)
Back to the original point:
I don’t really collect toys.
Except, okay, I’m getting this new writing shed put in — a place for me to go write during the day, where I can pretend I’m har-de-har going to work like a real person, where I will temporarily put on pants like a bonafide human (at least in order to cross the lawn in inclement weather). And I figure, okay, it’s a good-sized space so maybe, just maybe, I’ll put in a small shelf for toys.
And, there’s a recent Transformers comic featuring a fan-created female character named Windblade. When I was a kid, I played with toys (GI Joe, Star Wars, Transformers) that offered up storyworlds featuring approximately 1 to 3 female characters and a whole universe of dudes, so it’s nice to see cool female Transformers — the comic is great, written by a woman (Mairghread Scott), drawn by a woman (Sarah Stone), and all around awesome.
I saw that they were going to be making a toy of Windblade.
I was like, fuck yeah.
I’m going to buy this Windblade.
And no, I’m not going to be one of those weirdo collectors who keeps them in the packaging and squirrels them away in a box. Nor am I going to delicately place her behind a glass door, only taking her out once a year to pfft pfft hose her down with a jet of canned air. (“WORRY NOT, MY PRECIOUS PLASTIC ICON, I WILL SAVE YOU FROM THE CORPSES OF DUST MITES.”) I’ll totally play with her. (Er, that sounds creepy. By “play with her,” I mean, “occasionally pose her doing robo-karate, kicking my grandfather’s pheasant in its petulant peak.”)
Windblade is of course a sought-after toy, which means on eBay and Amazon she goes for Way Too Much Money, sold by jerks who buy all the good toys and then jack up the prices like straight-up toy baron villains, but whatever. Luckily, I was able to find her on Hasbro for the normal price — fifteen bucks. Yay. Bought.
And? Received. Via UPS. Just the other day.
The box arrived.
I brought it upstairs.
B-Dub was in on his potty, so I assumed I was safe, but the kid? He can smell toys. He’s like a human toy detector. Something about the plastic — he comes wandering in like a bloodhound on the scent of a triple homicide. “Father, I smell points of articulation,” he didn’t actually say. (Though he does use the word “articulation” when referring to his toys — a word he picked up watching YouTube videos where grown-ass adults obsessively review toys in videos that are not child pornography so much as they are pornography for children. He’ll seriously demo his toys for you like he’s trying to get you to buy them. “Look, this one has excellent articulation. Custom paint, no stickers.”)
So, here comes my son, naked from the waist down, staring at me with a new Transformer in my hand. And his eyes narrow — he knows something is up. He asks, “Is that for me?”
And so begins the grown-ass man trying to explain to his half-naked toddler that, no, this toy is Daddy’s toy, and it’s not Daddy’s toy in that it’s like, a goddamn compound bow or a bottle of whiskey or something, it’s a Transformer — like, for children, except Daddy is claming it’s his.
B-Dub goes into freak out mode.
“You can’t have toys,” he says, his eyes starting to tear up.
“Why?” I ask.
“Only I can have toys.”
“So other children can’t have toys?”
“They can have toys, too.”
“So why can’t Daddy have a toy?”
“Because you’re old.”
…
…
Oh, shit.
Emotionally shivved by a three-year-old.
“Grown-ups can’t have toys. You’re too old to play with toys,” he went on to explain, sticking his sharpened Elmo toothbrush once again into the meat of my beating heart. (Perhaps he’s just trying to finish the job he began when, a week ago he declared, “I do not like books.”)
We had a long talk after about how he likes it when I play with him and we race cars and have Transformers run around (and hug, because damnit, giant robots don’t always have to blast the shit out of each other), and how wouldn’t it be fine if Daddy could bring his own toys? And just as B-Dub shares his toys, I can share mine with him. And then he was okay with that, and a vital lesson was learned about sharing.
And about oldness and grown-ass men like me playing with toys.
What I’m really trying to say is:
Never underestimate the ability of your child to speak truths that cut deep.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to play with Windblade in defiance of my mortality.
One last look at the awkward author photo photoset, if you care to see.
NOW, TO THE TALLY.
Over 300 votes (!).
I actually had to sub in my wife to do a pivot table to count these up.
The results of that are:
Which means that our TOP TWO winners are:
(#2)
(#1:)
These are amazing.
Hell, so many of those photos were amazing.
(I need to actually think now of the next photo contest because I love this SO MUCH.)
Anyway! YOU TWO WINNERS.
Email me at terribleminds at gmail dot com.
And now, a set of two random winners who will get #AmWritingMotherfuckers Post-It notes:
#13 and #16!
(aka CHICKEN LADY and RAIN OF IRONY.)
Again, you two? Email me at terribleminds at gmail.
Congrats to all.
You’re all super-weird.
Which means you are kin to me.
