Yesterday, I said a thing about #GamerGate and dinosaurs and extinction. And, in a video last night in support of the Pixel Project’s Read For Pixels endeavor (which is about addressing and stopping violence against women, and which you can watch now), I noted how something like #GamerGate reminds me of what happens to yellowjacket wasps as autumn rolls on. As the cooler months rise to replace the heat of summer, wasps start to get fucking pissed because, as it turns out, they’re facing death. Winter is coming, just like in Westeros, and the wasps know that food will become scarce and their time on this earth may be limited. As such: they become more aggressive. They’re likelier to swarm and sting.

The response I received from this was —

Well, it was m… mixed?

Okay, to put it politely, I received some total wackypants responses, and I got some emails that were… let’s go with “less than nice.” I received a lot of response from folks who may or may not have been actual humans and who may or may not have been avatars of an anti-agenda agenda (?!), or who may have been anonymous sock-puppets or trolls or who-the-sweet-fuck-knows.

But — but! — some of you appeared to crave actual discussion.

And, further, some of you claim a legitimate purpose, which is to cease corruption in game development and games journalism, which is all very nice and official-sounding, and certainly is reasonable enough. And I like reasonable things! I really do!

It’s just…

*sigh*

I want you to understand why this is going to be hard for you.

Let’s say you have a letter you want me to read.

It’s written on nice paper. Elegant calligraphy.

You say, “These are my wishes and my beliefs,” and you confirm that this letter is very official, very smart, very wise, and it contains a great many good ideas for the future. Okay. Excellent.

Except, then you place the letter on a pedestal.

And that pedestal is surrounded by four miles of diseased animal feces in every direction. I’m talking a major swampland of creature dooky. Fly-flecked, stenchy, diarrhea. And you say, “To go and read my very reasonable ideas, you will need to wade through a four-mile radius of animal waste,” you say. I, of course, make a wrinkled, upset face, because I don’t feel like hiking through Uncle E.Coli’s Taco Bell Animal Waste Extravaganza to get to your point, but okay, fine. As I churn through the muck and slurry, I am pelted by shitballs from hidden malefactors. Then, when I finally get to the pedestal, I lift your letter off the stone only to discover that stapled to it is a dozen other “letters,” and these are by no means as eloquent or as pointed as yours. Some are written in crayon. Others penned with smudges of the crapmire I just waded through to get here.

You say, “But GamerGate is about bias in journalism.”

But that guy over there? He thinks it’s about getting bias out of game reviews, which is a mostly silly idea. That guy over there wants to remove agendas from game journalism (haha what), whereas over there is another person who wants agendas out of game development (oh, god, really?). One dude says he wants bias out of journalism but what he really means is that he wants journalists with whom he disagrees to shut up because they said not-nice stuff about a game he loves and if there’s one thing we can’t abide it’s people disliking what we love or digging what we hate. Then there’s that other guy who thinks there’s some kind of 9/11 Truther-Birther-Evolution-Big-Pharma-style conspiracy going on, and then there’s that weirdo shouting at the ceiling fan about SJWs and femi-nazis and he’s foaming about Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian and threatening Leigh Alexander and basically that guy’s covered in his own rage-barf.

As I said in my MRA post, “Being interested in white linen bedsheets doesn’t mean you join the KKK.” You cannot be a part of GamerGate without acknowledging that a lot of this thing is really super-gross. All that horrible stuff — the harassment, the nastiness, the lies — get staple-gunned to your cause. You can’t separate them.

Maybe you have good things to say.

Maybe you have noble ideals, here.

But you can’t maintain that nobility while supporting a cause that has simultaneously helped to further abuse. It makes you complicit.

You can’t be part of the solution while also being part of the problem.

Could be that this movement genuinely has a pure heart.

That pure heart, though, is encased in a body of rotten meat.

Right now, at this very moment, there is an exchange going on in my Twitter feed. I’m not partaking — I’m just linked in (not LinkedIn because ew who uses that thing) because of yesterday’s post. And in this conversation, feminism has been attacked for its “rampant oppressive dehumanizing misandry.” Another tweet conjures up the phrase, “another thin-skinned faux-liberal pussie [sic]…” Only then to add, with a flair of the truly melodramatic: “welcome to the downfall of the usa.” Sarkeesian and Quinn are being called “bullies” – with a further correction of, “shaming artists into changing their work is bullying.” The conversation isn’t uniformly toxic — but more and more folks just keep jumping in, and the ugliness pervades. You cannot escape the ugliness in this.

One very charming brony (wait, really?) said:

“One day, they’ll prove people like you are cheap, retarded and dickless fucking scumshit. Die in a pit of fire, you fucking fag”

Hunh. (Looking at rest of his feed — talking about killing feminists, sooooo, okay then.)

It’s very hard to extract real value from this without getting mired in all the rest.

Anyway. My advice, which you will not take:

If you really believe that there’s an ethical debate to have, don’t have it in this hashtag. You’re poisoning your own efforts. Write smart, compassionate pleas for your own agenda (and by the way — you can’t be anti-agenda because that’s an agenda). Stop jumping in with the same 20-30 toxic voices. Vote with your dollar. Don’t be an asshole. Support blogs and voices that are ethical, intelligent, compassionate. Don’t use your voice to rob others of theirs. If you don’t like Sarkeesian, Quinn, anybody — ignore them. Don’t like a game? Don’t buy it. Like a game? Buy it and write a review (and not an ‘objective’ review because, really, those don’t exist in a meaningful way).

#GamerGate is stuck in the mire of its own nastiness.

Nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way we can be sure.

Links:

Vox.com: A good GamerGate primer.

#GameOverGate: ZQ stealthily susses out the true origins of #GamerGate

Tabletop game designer David Hill (who I’ve worked with in the past, if you feel that such transparency is important here) does a good run down (better said than me in this post, really) about the problems that come with associating your cause with #GamerGate

Jennifer Hale (FemShep, voice of) says in this post: “I myself would love to see more equal representation of women in games, more empowered roles. Let’s remove gender from casting everywhere we can and play around with it. Let’s do the same with race. Let’s go on and create the next level. We can’t do that right now. I’m nervous about what this piece of the community is going to do to me for speaking up about anything, and that’s not OK. We can’t do anything until we deal with that.”

The Escapist’s Jim Sterling on GamerGate and corruption.

The end.

And no way in Hell am I turning on comments. Pssh. Pfft. Ha ha ha no.

I imagine that when the meteors were coming, and the volcanos were sharting great globs of lava into the sky and onto the ground, and mammals were conspiring to survive the pyroclasm, the dinosaurs were probably pretty pissed off. They had been phased out by nature — they saw that the world was changing and that they couldn’t survive in it anymore. They probably started a hashtag. Like, #meteorgate or #nomoreextinction or something. Carving them on trees and rocks with saurian claw. And they probably filled these hashtags with a lot of anti-mammal rhetoric. Then they stood around yelling at the sky, shaking their tiny fists or swishing their spiky tails in rage, hoping it would change what was coming. Hoping it would stop the meteors from popping their big dumb dinosaur heads like grapes. Hoping the lava would not cook them from the feet up. Hoping that this whole “mammal” thing was just a glitch, a gimmick, a short and forgettable chapter in the Big Book about How Dinosaurs Are Fucking Awesome.

And then some of the dinosaurs became birds and flew away while the rest of the dinosaurs ate hot meteor and died. Or something. I don’t really know precisely what killed the dinosaurs — Dino Flu, or Arrogance, or a Free U2 Album — but I do know that the world was eventually done with them and had moved on. Evolution and change are hard to deal with.

That brings us to #GamerGate.

If you don’t know what it is — *whistles* — oh, man, it’s fun. And you should read that word, “fun,” with all the quiet connotation of taking a bath with a plugged-in toaster. Here’s an article at WaPo about it. GamerGate seems to be a beast with many, many heads — some want ethical responsibility in games journalism, some want agendas and so-called political correctness out of their game reviews, some want that out of their games.

Thing is, all these heads lead to one common monster, and it is a beast whose hide is thick with the grease of misogyny, sexism, prejudice against… well, anybody who doesn’t live on Heteronormative White Dude Mountain. Mostly, it reads like they want social relevance out of their games. Or, worst, they just anybody who isn’t like them to shut up and stop talking.

It’s an ugly thing, this beast.

It is is, in fact, a dinosaur.

Because GamerGate feels like the rantings and ravings of a dying, wretched, angry species. All this seems to rise up from a fruiting, fungal corner of pop culture — mushrooms tended in the dark of their expectations and experiences, fertilized by great heaps of horseshit.

I said as much on Twitter last night and I received…

Well, let’s go with a lot of responses.

Some asserted GamerGate was a good thing and it was anti-prejudice and actually was itself the target of misogyny and racism and also truth — and then you go ahead and click the hashtags (#GamerGate or #notyourshield) and you find it full of misogyny and racism. Like, I don’t mean in the charitable sense — well, if you poke around, this might be a little bit sketchy — no, I mean like, I just got face-punched by a shit-shellacked fist clutching a handful of foul ideas that had been shoved up some jerk’s nether-hole. Down that rabbit hole is a thick, malodorous treacle of nasty business. Or you go and watch some of the Truther-like conspiracy videos. Or you read some of the blog posts (which suspiciously read like they were torn out of an MRA playbook and then rewritten just slightly, like some kind of gamer-version of Mad Libs.) I looked at all the responders to my tweets last night and, almost hilariously, they appeared to all be dudes. And when you looked at their Twitter feeds, you saw their social media existence just brining — marinating, even — in this septic nastiness of racist and sexist and prejudiced rhetoric. They claim lies and toxicity on the other side (despite having their own claims refuted again and again, like the no police reports were filed ‘fact,’ which is of course not at all a fact, jerks).

*shudder*

Forget it, Jake — it’s Troll Town.

(I also found this world populated with that least pleasant of not-Baldwin-brothers, Adam Baldwin, who I used to think was bad-ass until he started opening his mouth on social media.)

This graphic is what some in GamerGate purport to support.

Of course, the last two paragraphs conflict with one another, don’t they? And despite any message of nobody should be harassed, that’s exactly what’s happening. All over this thing is harassment and horribleness. It’ll take about four seconds to see that. One or two clicks in and it’s like —

Blink, blink, holy shit.

(Oh, and news flash: you’re against agendas? What do you think GamerGate is?)

(Spoiler alert: it’s an agenda.)

If you associate with GamerGate — you’re associating with all the toxicity that comes with it. Even if you’re not like that and you think there’s something valuable at the heart of this, guess what? This thing is deeply, grotesquely shitty. You can’t roll around in it and keep clean. You’re going to have all that feces and venom and overall awfulness spackling your every inch. You can’t support this without supporting bad people saying bad things. Talks like a troll, walks like a troll?

C’mon.

You know what? Don’t be a dinosaur. Grow wings, man. Join the birds, or hang out with the mammals. The ground is shifting. The meteors are coming. You can survive this — you can adapt and start to realize that there are other people in this world. You can start to figure out that other worldviews besides your own not only exist, but actually — gasp — have merit. At the bare minimum, you can figure out that if you don’t want to see these things in your games, you can not play those games. You don’t have to play Depression Quest or Gone Home. You don’t have to go watch Anita Sarkeesian’s videos — and, if you do, you don’t have to agree with them. (Related: good article on her at The Verge, with the money quote being: “One of the most radical things you can do is to actually believe women when they talk about their experiences.”) You want more literal game reviews unmarked by any bias or agenda? Go start a review blog. Or read some of the review blogs that basically already do this.

And then, y’know? Shut up. Because you don’t own games. You don’t own this space. The lock is busted. The door is open. The mammals are calling from inside the house, motherfuckers. The birds are flying. This space is evolving, dear dinosaur. As it should. As all artforms should. It doesn’t take away the games you have. It brings new games to the table. New voices. Voices by people who are long under-represented, speaking to audiences who have long been under-served. You can’t stop that. You shouldn’t want to stop that, because that’s something assholes want. We should want everyone to be allowed to make games that speak to their experiences — whether it’s depression or sexism or LGBT issues. We should yearn for a game industry that has room for people who don’t just want Assassin’s Creed 14 or Call of Duty: Mortal Kombat III. Just as we should yearn for films and comics and books to be able to explore both popcorn pop culture fun alongside far meatier and more meaningful territory.

We should be cheering folks like Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, Leigh Alexander. We should be championing if not their voices (though I do), then at the least their right to have those voices and use them in this industry. We should be asking for greater diversity in big games and little games and all the games journalism that surrounds it. (And this is where someone says, oh oh oh but you champion their voices but not my voice, to which I respond, if the use of your voice is used only to shut others out, then no, I do not need to tolerate your intolerance. Game over, man. Game over.)

You stand in the way, you’re gonna catch a face full of meteor.

And, frankly, if that’s the case, then you fucking deserve it.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go hang out with the birds and mammals.

(For added ranty-pants fun, check out Greg Costikyan’s rant on the subject. It’s by no means perfect, but its anger is pure, its message is righteous.)

(And noooo way am I turning comments on. I don’t think the SPAM OUBLIETTE is prepared.)

Last week’s challenge is quite relevant, sooooooo —

Make with the clicky clicky.

Now, I misled you a wee tiny bit, because last week I was all ha ha ha oh you should write the first half of a story. Except now, because I’m a jerk, I’m changing the rules.

The rules are: you’re still going to continue a story from last week’s.

But you’re not going to finish not. Not yet.

You’re going to write the middle 500 words.

So: pick a story written by someone else from last week’s challenge.

Then, add your own 500 words onto it to continue the tale.

Post the entire story so far at your site (~1000 words).

Then, next week a third writer will actually finish the tale.

DUN DUN DUN.

*crash of thunder*

So: to reiterate?

Pick a story.

Not your own.

Write another 500 words.

Don’t finish it.

Got it?

Good.

Continue the story!

Due by next Friday, noon EST.

Unemployment has ravaged the U.S. economy. One of those struggling is Benjamin Cade, an expert in cognition and abstract literature. Without income, he joins the millions defaulting on their loans—in his case, the money he borrowed to finance his degrees.  Using advances in cognitive science and chemical therapy, Ben’s debtors can reclaim their property—his education. The government calls the process “Repossession Therapy,” and it is administered by the Homeland Renewal Project. 

But Ben has no intention of losing his mind without a fight, so he begins teaching in a municipal park, distributing his knowledge before it’s gone in a race against ignorance. And somewhere in Ben’s confusing takedown, Chimpanzee arrives. Its iconography appears spray-painted and wheat-pasted around town. Young people in rubber chimpanzee masks start massive protests. As Ben slowly loses himself, the Chimpanzee movement seems to grow. And when Homeland Security takes an interest, Ben finds himself at the center of a storm that may not even be real. What is Chimpanzee? Who created it? What does it want?

And is there even enough of Ben left to find out?

1)   Repossessing an education isn’t as science fictional as you’d think.

One of the key premises in Chimpanzee is that you can have your education repossessed. It’s not as inelegant as men with bats showing up to take back your Prius in the middle of the night–it involves a bit more science, some therapy, and a whole bunch of drugs–but still. The economy has gone so bad in Chimpanzee that taking back someone’s education becomes profitable–you can sell their memories on the black market, or Pharma companies will buy them for their never-ending R&D. With everybody unemployed, all those degrees have lost their competitive, employing edge. Taking a few back might just help out some folks at the top of the ladder.

But the idea isn’t as far-flung as you’d think–or as I thought. Researchers at the University of California in San Diego have successfully erased and re-created memories in genetically modified rats]. Using pulses of light, no less. It’s just a coincidence that I tossed around so many light metaphors in the book, but we can pretend that I was forecasting this process all along.

2)   Asheville, N.C. makes a great Ground Zero for the New Depression.

I began writing Chimpanzee in 2009, just before the release of my first book, Noise. That first book was largely influenced by all the time I’d spent living and growing up in Texas, but by 2009, I was living in Asheville, N.C., where I taught at a couple of different universities in the region. Asheville survived some hard times of its own after the Civil War, so it made a great backdrop for a story about the New Depression. Its compact downtown, walkable cultural districts, and re-purposed industrial depots are not only picturesque, they’d also make for great stomping grounds should the shit hit the fan. Asheville’s up in the Blue Ridge mountains, so you won’t get hordes of people looking for food or work, it gets plenty of fresh water from the Swannanoa and French Broad Rivers, and it’s decidedly a beer-loving arts city . . . so you can stay drunk and entertained through the hard times. The city in Chimpanzee isn’t a direct copy of Asheville, but it’s close enough to give you an idea what to expect.

3)   When you write what you know, it writes back . . .

Writing gurus will tell you to write what you know. And that’s largely a good idea–I do it in my own work all the time, ripping off my own memories and experiences for the sake of my characters. But what they don’t tell you is that depending on what you write that shit can get real. Chimpanzee is about the cognitive disassembly of a man who has fallen prey to the collapse of the U.S. economy. Without work, he can’t pay his loans, which makes him subject to Repossession Therapy and mandatory public service in the Homeland Renewal Project. For a guy who spent his life studying theories of the mind and attempting to understand the very nature of art, losing his ability to fully reason is tantamount to losing any reason to even exist. I studied the same courses as my character Ben–earned the same degrees and worked the same jobs. I even shared some of the experiences he remembers with his wife with my own in the real world.

So when you build yourself a fictional simulacrum, be careful how much time you spending thinking about taking it apart. After all l’appel du vide, and all that. You’re better off writing yourself a happy and fulfilling life as a basket weaver in the Caribbean.

4)   Open, public education isn’t anything new . . .

I thought I was pretty clever when I decided to let Ben create a free, open-air university in Chimpanzee. After all, he didn’t have anything better to do. They were repossessing his education, so he might as well give it away to as many people as he could before he fully reverted to something more . . . well, simian. I was even delighted to watch the Occupy movement spring up in 2011–I was working as the administrative editor of Studies in the Novel on the campus of the University of North Texas, and I used to take breaks from collating literary criticism to stand at the window and watch the Denton Occupy chapter gather in groups to teach each other about economics, politics, footbag (they needed some breaks, after all) . . . whatever they were interested in. It told me that there was some honesty to my chimpanzee movement in the novel.

But then I learned that while I was patting myself on the back, there were others in the world doing the same thing, and to much more meaningful effect. Like Rajesh Kumar Sharma, who opened a school under a bridge in New Delhi to teach the city’s poorest children]. His school is cooler than mine.

5)   Neither are subversive U.S. economies . . .

While I’m outing myself for being Not That Clever, I might as well point out that the subversive economy in Chimpanzee isn’t all that revolutionary either. See, in the book, if you’re out of money, you can trade goods and services for an underground currency: SHAREs. You can swap these with other folks who’ve bought into the SHARE registry, circumventing the useless American dollar and avoiding the tax man (for a while, at least). The idea seemed pretty cool to me, and it made sense, especially given the Hard Times we all started going through in 2008, which haunted the country all throughout the drafting of the book.

And it was a good idea. Especially to the people who were actually creating and using their own currencies.] The next time you’re dreaming up ideas to add content and depth to your stories, be sure to go track down some real-world analogs. Necessity is the mother of invention, so save yourself some brain cells and go see what the people in the trenches are already doing.

* * *

Darin holds a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. in English Literature and Theory. He has taught courses on writing and literature at several universities and has served in a variety of editorial capacities at a number of independent presses and journals. He lives in Texas with his wife, where he dreams of empty places. Chimpanzee is his second novel.

Darin Bradley: Website

Chimpanzee: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound

Well, hello, Hugo-winning author, Kameron Hurley. Why, yes, you may swing by the blog to talk about writing as a business, and slap a little sense into all of us gabbling little art-monkeys. And sure, people should totally know about your brand new epic fantasy, The Mirror Empire, which is written with such punk verve and angry earnestness that I cannot help but adore it.

Everybody else: gather around. Kameron has words for you.

* * *

“Look man, I do what I can do to help y’all. But the game is out there, and it’s either play or get played.”

– Omar Little, The Wire

I had a colleagues come to me recently gushing excitedly about selling their first novel in a two-book deal. “That’s fabulous!” I said.

“I mean… the advance isn’t a lot of money, but I know the publishers and they are great people,” they said.

“Do you have an agent?”

“Oh, well… it’s not for very much money. It’s like $500.”

Alarm bells started going off in my brain. A $500 advance is basically just “go away” money. It’s pat-you-on-the-head ha ha money. “Oh, well… what kinds of rights are they asking for?” I said.

“Oh, you know, everything. World English rights, foreign rights, movie rights…”

“OK, stop right there. You’re going to give a publisher complete ownership of your novels, including movie rights, for $500?”

“Well, the publishers are really nice people…”

Ok, my friends, let’s back up. I know a lot of people in publishing. Many of them are super nice. Very few of them are your actual friends. Publishers are running a business, and surprise! Your work is the product. It’s their job to get it as cheaply as they can and control as much of it as they can. It’s your job to license it to them for as much money as you can, with as little control over its various formats as possible. That is the game. That’s the business.

Whether you’re self-publishing through online platforms (yes, by publishing on a platform you’re agreeing to a business arrangement – ever check the terms and conditions?) or publishing traditionally, you are a vendor/contractor agreeing to give someone else a portion of the proceeds of your work in return for a service – in the case of those online platforms, you’re paying for the platform itself. In traditional publishing, you’re paying for editors, marketing, covers, distribution, and sales teams.

Either way, you have entered into a business relationship. You’ve become a businessperson, whether you like it or not.

And those businesses you’re partnering with? Are looking out for their best interests, not yours.

I hear this a lot in publishing “Oh, but they are such nice people!” The people at my current publisher, Angry Robot, are super nice people. I love them to pieces. But I’ve seen their boilerplate contracts. Many of the editors at Tor – also nice people! But… I’ve seen their boilerplate, too. Name a publisher and I can name you nice people there who nevertheless will hand over boilerplate contracts to new writers because that’s simply corporate policy (“Boilerplate” refers to a standard, unnegotiated contract that the publishing house’s lawyers have approved and hope authors will blindly sign, thinking it can’t be negotiated or that it must be totally on the up and up because shouldn’t a major publishing house be trustworthy? No more than any other corporation, my friends). Publishers and online platforms like Amazon and Kobo are not here because they necessarily love authors and the written word (some do) but because there is money to be made. They offer their services because they are businesses.

You are too.

There have been a long string of really nice people running publishing houses who still stole their authors’ royalties, went bankrupt, or worse. Someone being “really nice” says nothing about what kind of deal they’ll offer you. At the end of the day, you can be sure that even if you’re thinking that writing is a happy, pleasant friendly circle jerk among friends, your publishers are thinking they’re engaged in a money-making business, and they’re treating it as such. Even if you’re signing with some mom-and-pop shop publisher that’s your best friend and her husband stapling pamphlets themselves, if you sign over all your rights to them, your rights become something they own, so if they go bankrupt or want to sell off rights to license your work to someone else, you’ll have zero say in the matter.

All that protects you in this business is the language in your contract. And that’s language that you sit down and study before anything goes wrong, when everything looks great, when you’re heady with the idea of publishing your first book, or your first book with a major press, or your first series, or whatever. It can be difficult to imagine, in that heady, carefree moment, all the things that could go wrong. But having been through many things that went wrong in my career, let me say this: there’s a lot that could go wrong, and you need to keep your head out of the clouds when you’re sitting down with a contract.

I get, though, I do: it’s easy to forget that publishing is a business when you’re just thankful somebody bought your work. A lot of newer writers get terrified that if they push at the contract in any way, that the offer will be rescinded.

But here’s a secret, folks: publishers buy your work because they think they can make money on it. If they don’t think they can make money on it, they’re not going to offer you a contract at all.

Secret number two: having a crappy publisher who owns your series and squats on all the rights to it is far, far, worse than having no publisher at all.

I have a colleague who, on realizing he wasn’t just a writer, but an actual small business now, went through the Small Business for Dummies book cover to cover, looked up additional resources from the book, and read those too, just to get a solid understanding of stuff like taxes, negotiations, profit and loss, vendor relationships, contracting workers (assistants are awesome, when you reach a certain level of busy). It’s been invaluable to how they think about writing and publishing as a business, and getting ahead in said business.

The biggest mistake writers make when they first get into the publishing game is thinking we’re all friends and everyone is here because words are magical. I love stories. I’m quite passionate about them, and I understand their power. But after the meltdown of my first publisher, and the horror and agony of realizing all that protected me was contract language, I’ve become a lot more savvy to the business end of things.

And that doesn’t just mean signing everything your agent sends you without looking at it, either. Having an agent isn’t enough. Agents are human too, and stuff slips through. At the end of the day, this is your work, and you’re the one responsible when you affix your signature to a legal document. When I signed my new deal with Angry Robot Books for The Mirror Empire and its first sequel, I went over the contract so carefully that I ended up catching a typo in the boilerplate that apparently no other author or agent in Angry Robot’s six years as a publisher had ever caught.

I am very careful about what I sign.

I’ve spent my whole life studying writing, from storytelling basics to matters of craft; learning the rules only to bust them all down again. I’m working constantly to get better – at plotting, at character, at slow information reveals. When I read books now, I don’t lose myself to somewhere else so much as I’m actively studying these novels the way I would a text book. How did the writer pull off that narrative switch? How did they lead up to this big reveal?

Yet few writing workshops or writing advice essays talk about the business end of being a writer. Folks who level up in craft well enough to start selling work are a far smaller pool of potential readers/consumers of writing advice than people just generally interested in writing, so you don’t see these frank discussions happening as often. Pair that with the notoriously tight-lipped nature of writers about the publishing business, who still fear reprisals even for talking about stuff publicly that everyone knows (like the fact that boilerplate contracts are not friendly to writers, duh), and you get a perfect recipe for naïve writers raised that just being creative and knowing how to word well will make them super successful.

A writer with no head for business isn’t going to make a living with the words they write, no matter how glorious, how well-crafted, how extraordinary they are, outside an incredible run of good luck. In truth, there are few things more heartbreaking than an absurdly talented writer who cannot take criticism, budget for taxes, cut loose from a bad agent or publisher, or look out for their own interests. When I look back at the writers who came before me, I see a lot of seminal work from writers who died poor and in pain, owing huge amounts of back taxes, ground under by a business that is built – just like any other business – to benefit corporations and the already-well-monied. Words are grist for the mill. Words run the world, and like any other worker, we’re very often ground down to get that product.

This rule applies wherever and however you publish that work, or generate income from writing, because the reality is that most successful writers are publishing with big houses, putting up their own work online, and doing freelancing work for corporations and small businesses on the side – yes, all three, and more, in varying combinations. Becoming a one-person writing business, an entrepreneur, is a far less romantic idea than drinking a beer on the beach for an hour while fiddling with your laptop and cashing checks, I know, but welcome to being a professional author.

This is a business, and the sooner you start thinking of it as a business, the less time you’ll spend mucking around yelling at clouds because the world hasn’t recognized your genius yet.

So get an agent. Educate yourself about publishing contracts, about rights splits and licenses, about taxes and negotiations. Start studying up on how to manage yourself as a business, not just a person who writes. There are a billion places out there who want to tell you how to write, and sell you on how to write. But once you can write, you need to do more. You must take charge of your own career, or someone else will take charge of it for you.

You will get a lot further, and be a lot happier, as the master of your own game.

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Kameron Hurley is the author of The Mirror Empire, as well as the award-winning God’s War Trilogy, comprising the books God’s War, Infidel, and Rapture. She has won the Hugo Award, Kitschy Award, and Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer. Hurley has also been a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Nebula Award, the Locus Award, BFS Award, and the BSFA Award for Best Novel. Her short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed Magazine, Year’s Best SF, EscapePod, The Lowest Heaven, and the upcoming Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women.

Kameron Hurley: Website | Twitter

Mirror Empire: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound

Okay, so, if you don’t know RJB here, he’s basically one of the most amazing writers out there. Years from now, when humanity has been reduced to its barest cinder after some self-made cataclysm or another, the remnants of this world will find his books and elevate them to the religion they deserve to be. He’s also one of the most batshit Twitterers (tweeters? twatters?) around. Anyway — his newest is out today, and you should read this, and then go get a copy. Or stick around and grab a free one in the giveaway below.

Also, here’s a video of him you should watch because.

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Last week my wife did something that I suspect counts as a transgression to most writers: she pulled out an audiobook of a novel of mine from 2011 and put it into our home stereo system. Suddenly I was hearing words I’d written three or four years ago echoing throughout the house, and I was unable to escape them.

The book was The Company Man, and I feel like most writers have a leery relationship with anything of theirs that’s over two or three years old. Reading your own old novel is essentially like looking at a photograph as yourself when were a kid: you immediately spot all the juvenile, ridiculous affectations and gimmicks that you were stupid enough to think might work back then. Only it’s, “I can’t believe I didn’t realize that was the passive voice!” versus, “I can’t believe I thought overalls were actually cool back then!”

But I had a special animosity for The Company Man. Sure, some people like it, and yeah, it did win an Edgar Award.

But I’ll let you in on a little secret: I fucking hated writing that book.

Why? Well, some of it was bad timing. It was my sophomore effort, which is a tricky place to be in. When you’ve got one book going out and you’re working away on a second, it feels like everyone’s asking you, “You did it once, kid. Can you do it again? What kind of a writer are you actually going to be?” You have to prove you weren’t a fluke. You have to do the second thing better, bigger – and it can’t be the same thing you did before. Yet it feels sure to disappoint. The sophomore slump, as they call it, feels inevitable.

So I had that hanging around my neck. But the real problem was that I wasn’t really sure what I could or couldn’t do in a book.

Every choice I made in writing my second effort felt totally ridiculous. My first book had some SFF elements, but not nearly as many as I was putting into The Company Man. I’d write a chapter, sit back and read it, and think, “This isn’t going to fly. None of this is going to fly.”

Let’s go ahead and run down the list of the stuff I was doing in there:

Psychic detective. Steampunk-ish 1920’s. Alternate history that completely rewrites the history of Washington (a state I’d never visited, at the time). Apocalyptic visions. And spycraft and convoluted conspiracy stuff out the wazoo.

I’d go to bed at night and lay awake thinking, “I am writing the biggest piece of shit that has ever been put on paper. This is going to get published, and I’ll get tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail.”

So it was with an intense, unspeakable dread that I started doing laundry the other week with The Company Man in my ear…

…and to my complete and utter shock, it didn’t completely suck.

Now, I’m not saying that it was, like, fuckin’ Margaret Atwood level brilliant, but it was pretty decent stuff, I thought, especially considering a 23 year old wrote it. (Especially a 23-year-old-me, which is a dumber than normal version of a 23 year old.) The characters had interesting dialogue, and the atmosphere of the setting worked pretty well, and so on.

But here’s the thing: the stuff that worked the best, from what I heard, was the super pulpy, genre stuff that I jammed in there at the last minute, thinking all the while that I was putting the final nail in its coffin of suck. I remember thinking, “It’s too pulpy! It’s too ridiculous! It’s too unbelievable!”

But that was just what the book needed. It needed to embrace what it really was, a super pulpy genre romp. And I think I knew that, somewhere in my brain: my instincts were telling me, “Stop trying to write a realist noir story! Go full genre!” but I was doubting them and fighting them every step of the way. “I can’t do crazy genre! I’ve never done that before, and my last book wasn’t like that at all!” But in all honesty, the book could have used some more genre elements, the wackier the better.

Instincts are some of the hardest things to hone when you’re first writing. Instincts thrive on experience, on constant immersion in the conflict inherent in writing: trying to realize abstraction, to take an idea and make it solid. The best metaphor I’ve heard for instincts is that it’s like a sculptor sitting down with a block of stone, and just knowing the shape of the sculpture waiting inside, understanding that there is a thing waiting inside of this raw material, and it wants you to carve away the excess. The unrealized work has a definitive self-identity: your job is simply to take all the stuff that it isn’t and remove it, to separate chaff from wheat.

But instincts are often torpedoed by doubt, especially at the start of your career. Your instincts will propose what feels like a completely arbitrary leap – Let’s throw in some homeless prophets! – and you’ll think, “Well that obviously came out of nowhere and could never work,” while not realizing that, actually, it didn’t come from nowhere. Some subconscious part of your brain has been doing your work for you, and you ignore its advice at your peril.

I’m currently writing a sequel to my fifth book that’s coming out in September, City of Stairs. Its sequel, currently titled City of Blades, originally had a device in it that fundamentally functioned as an obstacle: the main character had to run a difficult intelligence operation in an impoverished region where a massive construction project was taking place. The overseer of this construction project was primarily going to work in opposition to the MC: in other words, both the project and this particular character would exist to make the MC’s job harder, and otherwise did very little else.

I wrote a third of the book, and stopped for a while. And I realized my instincts were telling me, “This isn’t working. No one will want to read about a character and a place whose sole purposes are to make the main character’s life harder.”

And then I realized my instincts were telling me something else: this construction project and this character could operate on a much, much broader thematic level. What was being built in this region – a massive harbor and shipping channel , bringing wealth and resources to a place that desperately needed it – had the opportunity to literally change the world, to upend global economies, to bring a better future.

So my instincts were telling me: “Why the fuck are you staging this as just a problem?! These things aren’t obstacles, they’re the promise of innovation, the opportunity of the new!”

So I went back and essentially rewrote the entire first third of the book. And I’m really glad I did, because now all the characters are much, much clearer, the plot is much more streamlined, and I’m pretty sure I just shortened the book by 10,000 words. It’s clicking along merrily now, whereas before I felt like I was just hacking away.

I’m glad I listened to my instincts, who knew all along that there was a shape waiting in the stone. All I needed to do was to stop telling the unrealized work what I thought it was and listen, because it knew what it wanted to be all along.

Win A Copy Of The Book!

Chuck here.

Time to give away a copy of this bad-ass book.

How?

It’s easy.

Comment below with a fantasy book you read and loved.

We’ll pick a random commenter tomorrow morning (US only, I’m afraid) and get you a free copy of City of Stairs. It couldn’t be easier. Well. I guess it could? SHUT UP THIS IS EASY.

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Robert Jackson Bennett‘s 2010 debut Mr. Shivers won the Shirley Jackson Award as well as the Sydney J Bounds Newcomer Award. His second novel, The Company Man, won a Special Citation of Excellence from the Philip K Dick Award, as well as an Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original. His third novel, The Troupe, has topped many “Best of 2012” lists, including that of Publishers Weekly. His fourth novel, American Elsewhere, won the 2013 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel. His fifth, City of Stairs, is out now.

He lives in Austin with his wife and son.

Robert Jackson Bennett: Website | Twitter

City of Stairs: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound