Last week’s challenge: Conclude The Tale!

This week’s challenge is deceptively simple.

I want you to write one amazing sentence. A sentence that is part of a larger story but is not itself a story — a sentence that makes you want to read forward and backward, but is itself a capture of the tale. Just a slice.

(And then, next week, folks will choose a sentence to build an entire story around.)

Write one sentence — no more than 100 words, please.

Drop it in the comments below.

And that’s all you need to do.

But make that sentence as amazing as you can make it.

Go.

Well, Lord and Lady, Jeezum Crow, and King Hell!

Looks like the two Heartland books are on sale today as Kindle Daily Deals!

Both Under the Empyrean Sky and Blightborn are $1.99 today.

(And, for added fun, the Gwennie short, “The Wind Has Teeth Tonight,” is $0.99.)

Just click the links to check ’em out.

(You can also add Whispersync audio for cheap, too.)

I’m proud of these books, and I like to think that they’re a lot of fun (bloodthirsty corn, secret hobos, robot farm equipment, humans turning into plants, sky ships, corn-boats, pirates, arranged marriages for teenagers, talking birds, flying horses, love rhombuses) while also carrying forward important ideas and asking some big questions. I sincerely hope you’ll give ’em a go if you haven’t — and, if you’d be willing to spread the word, well, I’d appreciate that, too. (I’d be more than a little geeked to see this go rocketing up the charts today.)

I wrote a post yesterday declaring myself a no-foolin’ sure-shootin’ make-mistakes-but-gonna-keep-on-trying-anyway feminist. It received a kind response, so thanks for that.

One of the responses to that comes mostly from men and that response is, roughly:

“I don’t believe in equality for just women, so I cannot call myself ‘feminist.'”

And sometimes this is followed up with them preferring the term humanist or equalist.

Or calling the idea ‘egalitarianism,’ instead.

Women and men and everybody: all equal. Good. Sure. Yes.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting us all to be equal. I get it. I agree with that. And I think this idea comes from a good place, for the most part — a noble place, one without rancor or venom.

But, just the same, I see a problem.

A few problems, actually.

Instead of looking at this like a scale that needs balancing, let’s pretend that it’s about money (and at least a part of this really is about money). I say this because balancing a scale can involve taking away from the heavier side to balance scales, and I think some men look at feminism as exactly that: “You’re going to take from me to give to them.”

So, instead, let’s assume it’s about money.

Let’s say that a man has a dollar. One hundred pennies.

Let’s say a woman has — this number floats a bit, but let’s just settle on 80 cents.

Again, we could say that to make things equal that we must take money out of the man’s pocket, but that’s silly. We want a gain, here. Instead, the goal is to ensure that conditions are met where more money enters the woman’s pocket.

(And again, here ‘money’ is a placeholder for all the vagaries of equality.)

It would be easy to say, as a man with a full dollar in your pocket, that everyone should have the same amount of money. But that’s ambiguous. Generic. It has no goal, no task, no specific channel of action. We need to be specific — we need to be able to point to that woman sitting right there and say, “Godfuckingdamnit, how do we put more money in her pocket?” It’s like being in a room with a locked door. Someone needs to pick the lock to escape, so it’s worthless to say, “Well, I think all doors should be open.” Yeah, that’s super-fucking great as a theory, but seriously, we need to deal with the door standing in our way first.

Now, add to the fact that, really, men are already more equal than equal.

The door is open to us. We have the key. Again, it’s really nice to say, I think all people should have this key, except there you are, still holding onto it. You’re not handing it off. You’re not sharing it.

Another metaphor: bullying in school.

It’s bullshit when one kid bullies another, and then the victim either fights back or “tattles” (one of the most corrupted terms we can lend to our children, how dare you speak out against a wrong-doer, you little shit), that victim shares in the punishment. It’s crap. One side had the power, and used it, and now everybody pays, which means ultimately the victim pays twice.

This, is like that, at least a little bit.

Men already have the power and the privilege.

We already have All The Things. Or, at least, Most Of The Things.

So, it sounds galling to be the ones who have the lion’s share and say, “I think all people should share in the spoils, not just women.” In other words, you’ve included yourself in that generic, unfocused “everybody” group. And this is where equalism / humanism / egalitarianism feels wifty, wonky, lazy, weak — it’s a pie’s eye view, a gesture with a limp noodle fingers, “Sure, sure, yes, we should all be equal, and we should all have ponies, and let them eat cake. The ponies and the people. Let the ponies and the people eat cake, in case I wasn’t clear.”

Feminism is there to address a very specific set of deficits. But it’s not exclusive. You can be feminist while being for the correction of other imbalances, too. You can be an EQUALITY FOR ALL person while still being someone who supports the particular cause of correcting these deficits.

If you want to right these specific wrongs — then you’re a feminist.

If you don’t want to correct them — then you’re not.

And if you’re not a feminist…

…then you’re really not much of an equalist, or a humanist, or an egalitarian. Meaning, it’s hard to say you’re for all SHAPES if you won’t be there for SQUARES in particular, you see what I mean? Being a feminist is part of it. As I see it, being a feminist isn’t taking anything away from anybody. It’s there to give, not remove — it’s all additive, not subtractive. And that, gents, is why I’m #HeForShe, and not just #WeForWe. I don’t need to confirm a world where you share with me, because the flow of power has already gone the other way. We need to learn to share.

Us.

Men.

Okay?

Okay.

It is time to vote.

We had over 60 entries to the awkward author photo contest.

They are basically amazing.

Here’s how this works.

You can check out the whole gallery at this link.

Each photo is numbered (and hastily captioned by yours truly, if you care).

Find the number of your FAVORITE awkward author photo.

Drop that number in a comment, and post the comment.

You can only vote once.

Voting will be open until Sunday the 28th, noon EST.

I’ll tally ’em up on Monday.

Given the number of great photos, I’m actually going to give a t-shirt / mug combo to two different winners (the top two), in addition to two of you randomly getting #amwritingmotherfuckers Post-It notes.

So, that’s it.

Get to voting.

(Also, a head’s up: a few of you sent in emails with multiple photos, which counts as multiple entries. Given that I don’t know which photo was actually your entry, that regrettably disqualified you from inclusion.)

Alicia Baum is missing a deadly childhood memory. Located beyond life, The Library of Lost Childhood Memories holds the answer. The Librarian is Mr. Wicker—a seductive yet sinister creature with an unthinkable past and an agenda just as lethal. After committing suicide, Alicia finds herself before the Librarian, who informs her that her lost memory is not only the reason she took her life, but the cause of every bad thing that has happened to her. 

Alicia spurns Mr. Wicker and attempts to enter the hereafter without the Book that would make her spirit whole. But instead of the oblivion she craves, she finds herself in a psychiatric hold at Bayford Hospital, where the staff is more pernicious than its patients. 

Child psychiatrist Dr. James Farron is researching an unusual phenomenon: traumatized children whisper to a mysterious figure in their sleep. When they awaken, they forget both the traumatic event and the character that kept them company in their dreams — someone they call “Mr. Wicker.” 

During an emergency room shift, Dr. Farron hears an unconscious Alicia talking to Mr. Wicker—the first time he’s heard of an adult speaking to the presence. Drawn to the mystery, and then to each other, they team up to find the memory before it annihilates Alicia for good. To do so they must struggle not only against Mr. Wicker’s passions, but also a powerful attraction that threatens to derail her search, ruin Dr. Farron’s career, and inflame the Librarian’s fury. 

After all, Mr. Wicker wants Alicia to himself, and will destroy anyone to get what he wants. Even Alicia herself.

If you don’t cut your wrists correctly, you will not only botch your suicide but also permanently fuck up your hands

When I was researching suicide for the book, I would haunt mental health forums to find out what it was like to attempt suicide and fail. One guy had done such a bad job that he’d severed all the tendons in his hands. He had to live in his parents’ basement, permanently disabled. I don’t know about you, but that could send me on a serious search for a new suicide method. Anyway, I made sure Alicia’s hands were affected.

It’s not a spoiler to say she survives the suicide attempt. I can also say that her pursuit of death forces her to confront life. LIKE A BOSS.

If you have an angry female protagonist, you might get a letter from a male agent telling you that nobody likes an angry woman

From the letter, it was clear the agent (who shall remain nameless and whose agency failed anyway) had read the entire book. Not only did he intensely dislike it, but he also found Alicia particularly offensive because she was angry. Now, she’s not constantly angry. But in the beginning when she’s ending her life? Yeah, she’s pretty fucking mad for lots of good reasons. And when she’s saved? She cusses out the doctor in the emergency room. I love reading that scene out loud at readings. It makes people laugh. But I guess some people can’t handle angry wimmins. Fuck those guys with a rolled up copy of Bitch Magazine.

Cut the cheesecake

In addition to being a short story author, I’m a critically acclaimed poet and award-winning copywriter. One would think that I would have already learned this lesson, but writing Mr. Wicker taught me the difference between being poetic and being purple. And when I say “writing,” I really mean editing. As I edited the manuscript, I found most similes are as useless as a wig on a chimp. Just fucking terminate them. Those and adverbs. If you catch yourself writing a simile, give yourself 50 lashes and turn off the computer for a week.

Actually, I give myself some slack because Mr. Wicker was the first book I ever wrote. The writing of each book since then has matured.

Historical scholars can be sweethearts

While the book is mostly dark urban fantasy, the midsection takes a left turn into historical fantasy set in ancient Gaul on the eve of the Gallic Wars. I bothered everyone I knew, including Tim Powers, for historical research tips. I hit some walls trying to find specific information about the Romans. The Gauls were obscure, but what I also needed to understand was their relationship with the Romans before the wars. (By the way, Tim is awesome. I love his books and he’s a great guy.)

I went to the UCLA library and found journal articles about the very thing I needed to know. They were written by a scholar named Dr. Maurice James Moscovich, who is now an emeritus of Classical Studies at the University of Western Ontario. When I emailed him, he took me under his wing and made me one of his students. Every time one of his emails appeared in my inbox, I must have shouted, “Awesomeballs!” Anyway, he not only tutored me on the Roman specifics I needed, but also introduced me to some old scholarly books I hadn’t found on Gaul. And if that weren’t enough, he read what I wrote and gave me feedback. I tell you, a sweetheart.

For the love of Lugh, listen to Neil Fucking Gaiman

Mr. Wicker was based on a script I wrote in 1999 that was a quarterfinalist in the Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, a prestigious screenplay competition. While I got many meetings as a result, none of the film executives I met knew the genre urban fantasy. The term didn’t even exist back then. But if it had, they would have thought it was some kind of euphemism for porn. The literary world was well familiar with stories like this. So, years later I decided to adapt the script to fiction.

The script was based on a novelette that I wrote in late 1997. At the time, I was corresponding with Neil Gaiman quite a bit. He, too, was a sweetheart, reading my stories and giving me feedback. The feedback he gave me on the novelette went straight into the script two years later. It included this: “In fairy tales, things happen in threes. Therefore, Alicia needs to see Mr. Wicker three times.” For whatever reason, I didn’t realize I was writing an adult fairy tale. And, boy, was he right. In the book, that third meeting between Alicia and Mr. Wicker is one of the most powerful experiences of the story. I can’t say anything else.

He also gave me some great advice that he has since disseminated online. “Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” I hung onto this advice at every stage of the book’s evolution and it served me well. I use it whenever I receive a critique. It’s utterly brilliant and true.

* * *

Maria Alexander writes pretty much every damned thing and gets paid to do it. She’s a produced screenwriter and playwright, published games writer, virtual world designer, award-winning copywriter, interactive theatre designer, prolific fiction writer, snarkiologist and poet. Her stories have appeared in publications such as Chiaroscuro Magazine, Gothic.net and Paradox, as well as numerous acclaimed anthologies alongside living legends such as David Morrell and Heather Graham. Her second poetry collection—At Louche Ends: Poetry for the Decadent, the Damned and the Absinthe-Minded—was nominated for the 2011 Bram Stoker Award. And she was a winner of the 2004 AOL Time-Warner “Time to Rhyme” poetry contest. When she’s not wielding a katana at her local shinkendo dojo, she’s on the BBC World Have Your Say radio program shooting off her mouth about blasphemy, international politics and more. She lives in Los Angeles with two ungrateful cats and a purse called Trog.

Maria Alexander: Website

Mr. Wicker: Amazon | B&N | Book Depository | Books-A-Million | IndieBound

In a small town along the Mississippi River, separate but nearly identical attacks have left two married couples brutally murdered in their homes. A young boy—the lone survivor of the killings—now lies comatose in the hospital. And the police’s only lead is the boy’s terrified description of the assailant: a “monster.”

Enter former homicide detective Liam Dempsey, whose estranged brother fell victim to the killer. Dragged into the investigation as a suspect, Dempsey vows to solve the case and clear his name. But two things stand between him and the truth: a web of local politics, and the grim secrets the victims held close. All the while, a murderer with boundless hatred continues to raise the body count.

As the troubled ex-cop tries to pull justice from the town’s emotional wreckage, he realizes that his could be the next life lost to the killer’s ruthless, twisted plan for revenge.

YOU CAN TAKE THE BOY OUT OF THE HORROR BUT YOU CAN’T TAKE THE HORROR OUT OF THE BOY.

I’ve always been a horror writer. Since the moment I picked up The Shining at age 11 I was hooked. That creeping sense of wrongness in a novel that’s just inexplicably there, that’s my drug. So after writing several horror novels I decided I wanted to write a more traditional thriller, partly because I like to push my boundaries and partly because of my admiration for some of the excellent thrillers I’ve read in the past. But when I started writing, the horror kept slipping in like a draft through a cracked door. I’d write a scene and then look at it and say, that would be at home in nearly any horror novel. It bothered me for a while but after reading it over and over, I realized it worked. A thriller is the better-dressed sister of horror, and once I knew that it was okay to let things ride, the book began to flow smoothly.

THRILLERS ARE HARDER TO WRITE THAN HORROR.

At least for me anyway. I know, I know, I just said I incorporated horror into the book, but since I was writing a traditional thriller and not a supernatural one, I had to play by the rules. If a man is killed in a locked room in a traditional thriller, you as the author have to figure out an ingenious way that the killer was able to get in and out of the room that readers aren’t going to find obvious. If a man is killed in a locked room in a supernatural thriller- the ghost did it and walked through the wall, end of story. Playing within the boundaries of a human adversary was trickier than writing about a monster or a ghost because mortals are governed by more laws, and thus, so is the writer.

MY STATE IS PRETTY BADASS AS FAR AS SETTINGS GO.

Everyone says to write what you know and settings definitely fall under that advice. But even with Google Earth I find that going to a place and absorbing it in person always has a deeper affect on me for when I start creating a setting. I live in Minnesota and I think lots of people would be surprised at how diverse the landscape is. In the south we have flat plains and farmland, the center of the state can be hilly and scattered with fields as well as forests, and the north is basically one big amalgam of trees, swamp, and lakes. Not to mention we’re bordered by Lake Superior and there’s some places with some pretty wicked cliffs. I used the cliffs in The River Is Dark several times for different purposes- sometimes metaphorically and sometimes as a physical antagonist. I know it’s not feasible for everyone to travel where they want to set a book, but take a moment to look at the places that are right outside your door, you might be surprised at how unique they are.

IF YOU’RE WRITING A SERIES, KNOW YOUR CHARACTER’S ARC.

When I started writing River I wasn’t sure that my characters would be continuing past that book, but about mid-way through I knew that they had much more potential than just a single story. I began to see multiple books in their future and when I did, the first thing I asked myself was what are the long-term arcs for each character? Now I already had the short-term arcs figured out (this is what I call the arc the character travels through in a single book) but I started to look beyond that, started to see what the future had in store for each of them. When ideas began floating around for the next few books, I could see an overall path that the characters would take. This is important because it ties directly into theme, and plot, sub-plots, and overall conflict. If you know your character well, the bulk of the story they travel through will emerge for you like headlights illuminating a road. They’re your people, the most intimate you’ll ever be with someone in the fact that they share your mind. Know who they are and where they’re going, they won’t lead you astray.

“IF YOU DON’T LOVE SOMETHING, THEN DON’T DO IT.” –RAY BRADBURY

This is one of my favorite quotes from Mr. Bradbury just because of the simplicity of it and also because it reminds us of a primary benefit of writing: FUN. I learned this when I wrote my very first short story at the age of 9, but it’s still as true today as it was then. Writing is work and sometimes it’s hard, but you should always be able to find joy in it. If not, then why choose to do it? Find glory and elation in your work, pull out the stops and cut the brakes. Roll that soapbox-car of a novel to the edge of the hill, rub your hands together and say HOLY SHIT, THIS IS GOING TO BE FUN!

* * *

Joe Hart was born and raised in northern Minnesota, where he still resides today. He’s been writing horror and thriller fiction since he could hold a pencil. He is the author of six novels and numerous short stories, including the books Singularity, Lineage: A Supernatural Thriller, and The Waiting. When he’s not writing, Joe enjoys reading, working out, watching movies with his family, and spending time outdoors.

Joe Hart: Website | Twitter

The River Is Dark: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound | Powells