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.

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“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.

* * *

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

Facebook memes are usually the intellectual equivalent of getting gum stuck in your pubic hair, but any meme that’s about books is probably one that’s okay by me.

So, the meme has sometimes mutated to “ten of my favorite books,” but fuck that. Favorite isn’t that meaningful of a metric. I prefer the original meme I saw going around — books that “stayed with you.” Like a haunting ghost.

1.) Swan Song, Robert McCammon

It was Boy’s Life that made me want to be a writer, and it’s Mister Slaughter that disturbs me the most, but while a lot of folks love epic fantasy, I fell in love with epic horror reading Swan Song. Actually, Swan Song was my gateway into horror — to King, Koontz, Barker, Brite, and beyond. (Also, thanks to my wonderful sister, I have a copy of the illustrated first edition.)

2.) Blackburn, Bradley Denton

Forget Dexter. Go read Blackburn. How does a boy become a serial killer? It’s grim, hilarious, sad, scary, sweet, and back to grim again. It run laps around most other books and is some truly amazing writing. Denton’s a helluva prose-master, good as Lansdale.

3.) Beloved, Toni Morrison

Beloved is at first blush a horror novel. The horror of slavery. The ghost (real or imagined) of a dead child. Elegant, astounding work. (I actually got to meet the author when I was in college.)

4.) Ulysses, James Joyce

It’s a book so big you could use it to kill a man. It’s long and rambling and strange. It also contains playful, powerful prose and moments of mundane bullshit elevated to mythic horseshit. It’s an astounding read. A hard slog, but worth it if you can manage. Finnegan’s Wake is also a book that will stay with you, provided you don’t mind trying to read a book that may or may not just be a cuckoo idea virus scrawled madly onto paper.

5.) The Southern Reach Trilogy, Jeff VanderMeer

Talked about this one last week. Just shut up and go read it.

6.) Exquisite Corpse, Poppy Z. Brite

This book is super-gross. By which I mean — grisly, gory, sex with dead bodies. It’s also written with such beauty, and crafted with such love, that it’s an astounding achievement. A tough book. Worth every word. All of my Brite books are a gift. All her books are horror written in neon, blood, hairspray, lighter fluid, sex juice.

7.) The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

It feels like we’re living in its prequel at times.

8.) Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets, David Simon

If hard-ass journalism had a baby with Greek tragedy, you’d get this. This is also the book that effectively parented both the television shows Homicide and The Wire.

9.) The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien

Spare, tough like jerky, and a very personal look at Viet Nam and its soldiers.

10.) Pandemonium, Daryl Gregory

Is it even fair to call this a demonic possession book? I dunno. Whatever. It’s amazing. I remember reading this while on a plane (to Hawaii, I think), and it vacuumed this into my eyeballs and it buried its head under my skin like a tick.

Runners-up: Shining Girls (Lauren Beukes), Twelve-Fingered Boy (John Hornor Jacobs — actually, anything by JHJ), All the Rage (Courtney Summers), Heart-Shaped Box (Joe Hill), Dark Tower (Stephen King), Raven (Charles Grant), Sorrow Floats (Tim Sandlin), A Dirty Job (Christopher Moore), The Adventurist (Robert Young Pelton), Pecked to Death by Ducks (Tim Cahill), anything by Joe Lansdale, and probably a whole lot more I’m not remembering because dang, man, I gotta go to bed.

Your Turn

Give me 5 – 10 books that stayed with you.

Talk about why, if you can.

Go.

Last week’s challenge: Yet Fate Choose Your Title

This week:

I want you to write 500 words of a story.

But — and this is key — do not finish the story.

Write an enticing, compelling tale that fails to end.

Then, next week, someone else will finish your story.

So: write 500 words. End it in a way that makes people wanna keep reading.

You’ve got one week. Due by next Friday, noon EST.

Post it at your blog.

Link here so we can all read it.

AND GO.

There is a right way and a wrong way to summon her.  Success requires precision: a dark room, a mirror, a candle, salt, and four teenage girls. Each of them–Jess, Shauna, Kitty, and Anna–must link hands, follow the rules . . . and never let go.

A thrilling fear spins around the room the first time Jess calls her name: “Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary. BLOODY MARY.” A ripple of terror follows when a shadowy silhouette emerges through the fog, a specter trapped behind the mirror.

Once is not enough, though–at least not for Jess. Mary is called again. And again. But when their summoning circle is broken, Bloody Mary slips through the glass with a taste for revenge on her lips. As the girls struggle to escape Mary’s wrath, loyalties are questioned, friendships are torn apart, and lives are forever altered.

A haunting trail of clues leads Shauna on a desperate search to uncover the legacy of Mary Worth. What she finds will change everything, but will it be enough to stop Mary — and Jess — before it’s too late?

1) Scary is personal.

What scares me doesn’t scare you. Or the person next to you. Or the person next to that. There is no one novel, no matter how well written, that will absolutely get under an audience’s skin. There is no penultimate monster that will send people scurrying for bibles, holy water, and a nightlight. While people can respect how well-crafted a horror book is and appreciate relatable characters, original premise, and perfectly staged monster scenes, sometimes the scares just won’t scare. Fear is steeped in psychology.

I find this premise fascinating. For example, I have a friend who can watch any zombie or ghost movie without issue. The Exorcist made me climb the walls, he could not grok why it was such a big deal. However, we watched The Strangers — a movie about a home invasion — and he was scarred for weeks. The fantastical will not bother him. Realistic horror will get him every time.

Another friend loves zombies movies/fiction, but if you put a ghost in front of him he can’t stomach it. “If I can’t physically attack it to save myself, it scares me.” A horror author doesn’t know the audience’s push buttons. She can only go forth with what she sees as scary and hope others share her particular flavor of twitchy.

2) Scary is pacing dependent.

You can argue that all stories are pacing dependent, but to me, horror will fall flat quicker than other genres if tension is not maintained. Every one of my favorite horror novels starts small and snowballs into hideous by the end of the story. THE SHINING delivers a nibble of creepy at the beginning and escalates to some ghost activity, then major ghost activity. By two hundred-and-something pages in, Danny Torrance is being chased by an army of topiary animals and I’m trying not to vomit with fear because HOW DID WE GET HERE? WHY, STEPHEN KING, WHY?

The seed of dread needs to be planted early and steadily nourished so it can flourish into a Pee-Your-Pants Tree over the course of the pages. If the book stagnates and dips, the reader loses that uncomfortable tingle at the base of her spine. Without a foundation of creep to build upon, the mood is shot and the book fails.

The pendulum can swing the other way, too, though. Too much gore and people will see it as splatter porn. While some folks appreciate viscera dripping from the ceiling, it can desensitize the audience to the atrocities. After a while, they all blend together and will no longer evoke those much sought after trauma stares.

3) Horror tropes are plentiful. Use with caution.

Tropes exist in every genre, but horror tropes are particularly prominent. The creepy music box, the thing in the mirror reflection that wasn’t there the moment before, the haunted doll. These tropes, when spun on their heads, are fun. Horror lovers appreciate a good tip of the hat. They love fresh takes on old themes. However, using too many tropes? Or using them the exact same way someone else presented them? Derivative and stale. The audience gets that corpses look like corpses and there aren’t too many variations on the theme. What will differentiate the good piles of walking rot from the bad are the less-explored details.

The smells. The sounds. The odd tics.

And then there are the problematic tropes. The promiscuous girl who is murdered after she’s shown us a whole heaping helping of her bouncing sweater parts. The person of color who is never, ever allowed to make it to the end of the movie/book (or, if he does, is then shot right before the credits roll because Screw You, Night of the Living Dead.)  Yeah. If these tropes died in a fire, I’d be okay with that.

4) Kissing and horror go together, but not always well.

This seems to be more of a YA thing. When a protagonist is fearful for her life but spends more than ten percent of the story thinking about kissing, there’s something weird going on. I don’t care if I’m holed up with RDJ, Sofia Vergara, and Tom Hiddelston. If there are zombies coming, my girl parts have to wait a damned minute. All the makeouts in the world won’t matter if a dead thing’s munching on my spleen.

I readily recognize that having a relationship in horror can up the stakes. The potential loss, the fear of not only losing your own life but the life of a partner. I hate using another King example, but he’s the grandpappy of horror for a reason—Fran and Stu in THE STAND? Okay, I can deal with it. It worked. But remember that THE STAND had a trillion pages so King had the space to pull that off. In a shorter book, too much focus on DOES HE LIKE ME and not enough on HOLY GOD THE TENTACLE BEAST JUST ATE CHARLIE detracts from the danger. It also borders on illogical.

5) Urban legends and local lore are fascinating.

Bloody Mary came to prominence in the 1960’s. Over in England, she was a toilet bogey associated with the dead queen. In the US, her story got wonky. She’s not always Bloody Mary—sometimes she’s Mary Jane. Sometimes she’s a mother mourning for her children (a more traditional Lady in White type ghost.) Sometimes she’s associated with the Salem Witch Trials. Sometimes she’s a student who died in a school and wants to torment the living for having the audacity to breathe. The only common thread is a blackened bathroom, a name said three times, and a ghost in a mirror.

When writing MARY, I did a lot of research on the legend and found myself studying the Hockomock Swamp in Massachusetts (which is where the fictitious town of Solomon’s Folly is located.) It’s a marshland in southeastern MA that spans four or five towns and considered one of the most haunted places in New England. Not coincidentally, it’s where King Philip’s War was fought back in the 1600s and thousands of people died.  All sorts of weird claims have been made about the place, the most entertaining of which is the whole yeti thing. Like, there have been enough yeti sightings in the swamp that I’m pretty sure the yeti have built condominiums and play golf in there. Ghosts, phantom swamp gas, old gods, Indian curses—all part of the local lore and it’s amazing.

 * * *

At night, when the lights are dim and the creepy crawlies scuttle around in the dark, Hillary Monahan throws words at a computer.  Sometimes they’re even good words.  A denizen of Massachusetts and an avid gamer dork, she’s most often found locked in a dark room killing internet zombies or raging about social injustice.

Hillary Monahan: Website | Twitter

Mary: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Mildly hapless Edinburgh accountant Gwenllian Maule is surviving. She’s got a boyfriend, a rescued pet bird and a flatmate to share rent. Gwen’s biggest challenges: stretching her last twenty quid until payday and not antagonizing her terrifying boss.

Then Gwen mistakenly drinks a mysterious beverage that gives her heightened senses, accelerated healing powers and astonishing strength. All of which come in handy the night she rescues her activist neighbour from a beat-down by political thugs.

Now Gwen must figure out what else the serum has done to her body, who else is interested and how her boss is involved. Finally—and most mysteriously—she must uncover how this whole debacle is connected to the looming referendum on Scottish independence.

Gwen’s hunt for answers will test her superpowers and endanger her family, her friends—even her country.

* * *

Lesson the First: Be Yourself

This is the first full story I ever wrote:

It’s admittedly brief. But even as an almost-thirty-year-old human-shaped thing, I’m rather impressed with its themes. There’s an obvious moral in there about, you know, not peeing on people or sentient flowers, but there’s also undertones of vengeance and retribution and a certain dash of whimsy that I rather like to this day.

When I scribbled that little comic in 1989 or so in an Alaskan apartment, I don’t remember feeling like I had a flash of brilliance or that one day I’d win a Nobel Prize for literature or anything. There was joy in creating – and of course, the gleeful satisfaction of making a pee joke.

It was another fifteen years or so before I came to understand that the stories I wrote and bled onto hundreds of pages of 1s and 0s on a decrepit laptop as a teen could be, in all seriousness, a viable career choice.

Lesson the Second: Do What You Gotta Do

My high school guidance counselor, a panic-prone man in the waning days of the 20^th century, was a big fan of the “flipping burgers” threat. “If you don’t go to college, you’ll be flipping burgers! BURGERS! FLIPPING THEM!” he’d squawk, then run out of the room cackling and leave the rest of us scratching our heads wondering how that threat would play out in a one-stoplight rural Montana town that had exactly one place that served burgers at all. Would we all be forced to crowd behind the register and take turns with the spatula and grease-spatters?

I never found out. Because of course, even once I realized that writing stories did, in fact, pay some people money, I went to college for other things. I followed the advice of the Wise Grown-Up Sorts in my life and got a degree. I graduated a year late in the illustrious, economically booming year that was….2008.

Take that, Mr. Counselor Man. I don’t flip burgers. I hand them to people for dubious amounts of money. BOOYAH.

Lesson the Third: Write Crap Sometimes

By that point, I had completed a novel that I thought would change the world. (Feel free to cackle at me like my old guidance counselor.)

I eventually came to realize that said novel was actually a festering turd, and then later that even “turd” was giving it too much credit, because turds have some structure to them.

Through that time, I started writing the sequel, which was half turd-like in the sense that by the time I finished the second half of it, I’d learned enough to actually give it some structure. Or literary Imodium. Do with that metaphor what you will.

Lesson the Fourth: Know Thyself

My mind did a funny thing in the years between 2008 and the completion of my second novel in 2011: decided that writing might actually be the only thing I could do to simultaneously keep what was left of my questionable sanity and possibly earn a living that would allow me to stop slinging beers for a living. And because I slung beers for a living, it wouldn’t have to be a good living – I’d settle for one that allowed me to keep my now-normal routine of treading water and slurping it down various throat-tubes when breathing got boring.

After all, Sallie Mae was coming for my soul, because I had of course followed the decree of my elders and gone to university.

Let’s pause for a second. If you’re expecting this to go to a “NOW I MAKE VERITABLE FOUNTAINS OF MOOLAH AND WEAR NOTHING BUT GOLD LEAF WOVEN INTO CARDIGANS,” let me disabuse you of that notion immediately.

Lesson the Fifth: Do What You Love, Goddamn It

I’ve yet to make a single penny to pinch and hug and love and dub George.*

I might never make enough single pennies to feed the gobbling Sallie Mae monster (or, alternatively, to bury my high school guidance counselor whilst other former classmates flip burgers onto his head). The point isn’t that, after this long slog from my comic strip debut to my actual prose debut, I can see people queuing up to chuck money at me money for stories.

The point is that after several years of working jobs I really hated, I found one I could tolerate that allowed me to expend my mental energy on something I love. I might not always adore the people who sit at my tables and watch me run up and down the stairs for one beer at a time because the four of them get more of a kick out of ordering one beer every three and a half minutes than allowing me to get all four in one trip. (What would be the fun in that?) But I get avoid seeing 6 AM’s obnoxiously chipper face. I work three doubles a week and have three or four days off per week.

It’s not gold leaf cardigans, but it pays my bills. It sometimes gives me inspiration. It sometimes makes me new friends who like to geek out about Doctor Who and play tabletop games. When I’m home, I get to curl up with my cat (see exhibit B) and tell stories.

That’s what makes this whole thing worth it. I don’t have to give a flying fire-bellied toad of fucks that my degree will probably only be useful in future survival situations as kindling. I don’t have to feel bad when peers buy homes I can’t or won’t ever afford. I don’t have to worry that I missed my calling and got stuck in a career that drained me of creativity. Even though handing someone a burger isn’t glamorous or particularly lucrative, the only bottom line I have to worry about is the bottom line on a page full of words I made.

I still get that gleeful joy of creation, of making something up that wasn’t there before. Spinning yarns and universes, tales and talismans. Part of being a grown-up writer is maintaining the wonder of a child regardless of whether you make money for the stories you tell, beyond the employment history on your resume, in spite of the degrees you earned and use – or don’t.

So do the thing. More importantly, do what you need to do in your life that allows you to do the thing. Books only sort of grow on trees these days – you have to plant them yourself. Learn. Get better. Evolve your word-making craft.

I myself have come a decently long way from that first comic strip. I moved on from pee jokes…to wedgies.

Because I’m a fucking grown-up.

* * *

Emmie Mears was born in Austin, Texas, where the Lone Star state promptly spat her out at the tender age of three months. After a childhood spent mostly in Alaska, Oregon, and Montana, she became a proper vagabond and spent most of her time at university devising ways to leave the country.

Except for an ill-fated space opera she attempted at age nine, most of Emmie’s childhood was spent reading books instead of writing them. Growing up she yearned to see girls in books doing awesome things, and struggled to find stories in her beloved fantasy genre that showed female heroes saving people and hunting things. Mid-way through high school, she decided the best way to see those stories was to write them herself. She now scribbles her way through the fantasy genre, most loving to pen stories about flawed characters and gritty situations lightened with the occasional quirky humor.

Emmie now lives in her eighth US state, still yearning for a return to Scotland. She inhabits a cozy domicile outside DC with two felines who think they’re lions and tigers.

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