El Paso and Ciudad Juárez sit across the Texas / Mexico border from each other. They share streets, share industry, share crime. One gang claims territory in both: Barrio Azteca. This single criminal organization is responsible for most of the homicides committed in Juárez, and Felipe Morales is one of them. Recruited in prison, and now on the streets of El Paso, “Flip” has no choice but to step further into that world, but he has a secret that threatens his life. A witness to murder and intimidation, he tries playing both the cops and the outlaws in a bid to escape. On the American side, El Paso detective Cristina Salas struggles to balance the needs of single motherhood with those of life in the city’s anti-gang unit. When her path crosses with Flip, their relationship will spell the difference between a life behind bars for the young gang member, a grisly death or freedom. Meanwhile, Mexican federal agent, Matías Segura, must contend with the scourge of Los Aztecas while coordinating a long-term operation with the American authorities. The Aztecas, north and south, stand in the way of three lives. They have no qualms about crossing the line, about killing, about moving their deadly product, and it all comes together in a confrontation where the stakes are, truly, a matter of life and death.

•••

Black is not the only shade.

When The Dead Women of Juárez, my debut novel, came out it was pretty much agreed by all who read it that it was dark, dark, dark.  And then there was more dark added to that dark.  I don’t think there’s a single moment of levity in the entire book.  Maybe this is appropriate given the subject of systematized female rape, torture and murder, but I couldn’t help but think that maybe the book’s darkness limited it somewhat.

Fast forward to Tequila Sunset, which tackles Mexico’s almost unimaginable violence, and the stage was set for another pretty grim telling.  I had included hints of warmth here and there in The Dead Women, but I felt it was necessary to expand the emotional palette of the next book to both avoid the impression that I write nothing but bleak ruminations on the futility of life and to give myself a break.  To that end, I made a concerted effort to give each of the book’s three main characters a positive relationship that showed what they were living for.  For Flip, the gang member, it’s a chance at a normal love affair that could lead out of “the life.”  For Cristina, it was her bond to her mentally disabled son.  For Matías it was the wife for whom he’d give anything.

I’ll never say my first book was bad, but I will say that leavening the cheerlessness of the subject matter with brighter shades made for a much stronger second work.  I’ve kept that lesson with me ever since.

Personal storytelling is the best storytelling.

What crippled me in my early writing formation, and I suspect this is true of many others, is the old saw, “Write what you know.”  As if being an airline pilot who writes means the only really good stuff he or she will ever create has to do with being an airline pilot.  It’s a dumb, reductive piece of advice that does no one any favors.  But I don’t think it’s the fault of the advice itself, but rather how people take it.

Everybody has life experiences.  Everyone knows what it’s like to be alive.  And maybe you’re not a DEA agent or professional hitman or whatever, but that doesn’t mean you can’t write about those things.  I’ve never been a gang member, but I know what it’s like to have made critical errors in life and suffering because of them.  I’ve never been a cop, but I am the father of a child with autism, so I know the hopes and fears of a parent who lives with that burden daily.  I’ve never fought crime in Mexico, but I’ve experienced the push and pull of a marriage stressed to the breaking point by outside factors.  All of these insights I was able to put into Tequila Sunset.  The rest is almost window dressing to the human story.  We care about the plot because we care about the people.  We care about the people because they’re drawn from real stock.

I did a little bit of this in my first book, when I tried to exorcise the memory of my brother’s violent death at the hands of a hit-and-run driver, but it wasn’t until Tequila Sunset that I realized the fuel for compelling writing is quite literally everywhere, whether you’re writing slice-of-life stories or crime fiction or books about international espionage.

Mexican and American crime are more closely linked then you’d think.

One of the things most people know about Mexico these days is that it’s wracked by incredible drug-related violence, responsible for killing tens of thousands of people since the mid-‘00s.  What they don’t know is that is that criminals in the United States are the ones providing the fuel for this particular conflagration.

Say what you want about the rightness or wrongness of marijuana being illegal in this country, but the fact remains that in forty-eight states it is illegal, and with that illegality comes money.  Lots of money.  Scarcity drives up prices and almost all of that cash flows south toward Mexico.  The drug cartels then turn around and do in the United States what they can’t do in their own country: buy guns.

Mexico has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the world, but gun battles are common.  Why?  Because of the deluge of weapons crossing the border from America.  So-called “straw buyer” purchases have legal sales done on behalf of those who can’t buy for themselves, private sellers circumvent the law and sell directly to the cartels or others simply ferry weapons southward to feed the ravenous demand.  As much as we Americans like pot, the cartels like money and guns.  Maybe if we stopped giving them so much of both, things would be a lot more peaceful down there.

Oh, and locally source your weed.

The world is full of people who do good.

It may seem like the world is packed with nothing but bad actors, particularly when you look at the Mexican drug war situation.  Corrupt cops, gun smugglers, dope dealers, money launderers… the list goes on.  But you can’t have a war without having two sides, and I realized when writing Tequila Sunset that it was reductive at best, and flat-out wrong at worst, to simply assume everyone involved in this situation is tainted.

My book has three main characters: a convict and gang member, an El Paso police officer and a Mexican federal agent.  They are all, to a one, honorable people doing their best in a situation where honor is considered a weakness.  I could easily have had Flip, my gang member, be an irretrievable scumbag with no redeeming qualities, my El Paso detective a hapless victim of the back-and-forth drugs-and-guns trade, and my Mexican federal agent corrupt.  And it’s definitely true that people of these types exist.  But what’s the point of a story told from that perspective?  We all know things are bad.  What we don’t know is that there are forces on the side of right who will sacrifice anything, even their lives, for the cause of justice.  There’s more drama there than in a million tawdry stories about drug-addled losers.

I had an interviewer ask me about this very point, and I told him I believe in people.  It’s way too easy to stop believing, and I think that’s a tragedy.

Don’t go too big.

The problem of Mexico and the drug war is, as I mentioned, enormous.  When more than 60,000 people die over a six-year period, that’s huge.  Under other circumstances a body count like that could be called a genocide.  Massive agencies on the federal level, American and Mexican, struggle with this issue daily.  Millions are being spent.  It’s the central preoccupation of the entire country of Mexico, when all the people really want to do is make a living and do right by their loved ones.

In a situation like that, the temptation is to go big.  Really big.  Movers and shakers make for high drama, right?  But people don’t read novels to hear about policymakers.  They want to know about other people, and that means telling stories that are meaningful on an individual basis.  I boiled Tequila Sunset down until its focus fell on just three people, each representative of a greater part of the conflict, but people nonetheless.  That’s where the heart is found.

I once tried (and failed) to write a novel that tackled these gigantic issues with similar scale.  Tequila Sunset works, if it works at all, because I learned my lesson from that book.  When you get right down to it, those most directly affected by Mexico’s drug war are the ones who are most important.  Not the suits in Washington, DC or Mexico City.  To catch the big fish, go for the smallest lure.

***

Los Angeles Homicide Detective Elouise ‘Lou’ Norton catches a case: a seventeen-year old girl is found hanged at a construction site. Lou’s partner, Colin Taggert, fresh from the Colorado Springs police department, assumes it’s a teenage suicide. But Lou doesn’t buy the easy explanation. For one thing, the condo site is owned by Napoleon Crase, a self-made millionaire… and the man who may have murdered Lou’s missing sister thirty years ago.

* * *

As Lou investigates the girl’s death, she discovers links between the two cases. She’s convinced that when she solves the teenage girl’s case she will finally bring her lost sister home. But as she gets closer to the truth, she also gets closer the killer.

I learned many things while writing this story, but here are the most important:

JUST CUZ IT’S INTERESTING, I DON’T GOTTA TELL YOU EVERYTHING.

‘Damn, will you just SHUT UP?’ I’ve thought that any time That Guy/That Girl cornered me and proceeded to tell me everything he learned about a newly-discovered millipede in the forests of Peru and goes on and on about I-don’t-even-know-what-the-HELL-he-or-she-is-talking-about. And it started all because I asked ONE question about the ant creeping across the slice of cantaloupe.

We writers can be That Guy/That Girl. Because murder and forensics and cops… Interesting! And so, as I learn stuff like how blood changes over the course of a week or the psychological profile of the typical serial killer, it’s all so cool and my first reaction is: This will be great in Chapters 6, 15, 26, 33 and 70!

But I’ve learned to grab the imaginary spray bottle, give myself a spritz and a firm, ‘No!” Cuz talking about everything is boring. Get in. Get out. Skip the parts people skip.

WHEN IN THE PRESENCE OF REAL-LIFE POLICE, AND I ONLY HAVE TEN MINUTES TO ASK QUESTIONS, DON’T BE DUMB ABOUT IT.

Cops are busy. And they don’t like spending time talking about their day-to-day to us twee writing assholes. So, if a cop is sitting there, not chasing nuts and felons, and is willing to talk to me, I’ve learned not to ask them about the type of gun they carry or what a radio code means or what’s in their patrol car. Those details can be found on the Inter-webs or learned by watching good television shows.

I learned to ask good questions, especially of female cops. And since Lou is a girl, I asked those lady cops very nosy questions. Un-Google-able questions, like, ‘If you’re at a crime scene, and it’s going on the third hour, what do you do when you’re on your period?’ Un-Google-able. Or, ‘Your partner Bruno is a man. You’re married. But you’re with Bruno all day. He’s watching your back, and you’re watching his back, and umm… Is it natural that you wanna, you know, stop sometimes at the Travelodge over on Century Boulevard, the one near the airport, and umm… you know?’

Un-Google-able.

IT’S EASIER TO WRITE A COP WITH NO LIFE OUTSIDE OF DEAD BODIES AND GLOCKS.

I read stories involving these cops a lot. And these stories have many readers. Good reviews. TV series, even. But I discovered that I didn’t want to write that cop. Nor did I want her to be explained simply by the type of music she listens to or what she pours over ice. I set out to create a character that reflects my friends, women, me. Yes, music and liquor, but also religion, politics, family relationships, boxers or briefs, M.A.C. or Estee Lauder, Foxxy Brown or L’il Kim.

Lou is more than murder police. She’s married, is a daughter, has lost her sister, has BFFs, reads bad romances, and loves BBQ ribs and wine. How do I incorporate all that without going overboard? Yeah, that’s the rub. But Lou is worth the trouble, and she’s more interesting now—kind of like leather bags getting better as they’re scraped and battered by life.

READING CHANDLER, DASHETT, CONNELLY, MOSLEY AND LEHANE HELPED – BUT ONLY HELPED A LITTLE WHEN CREATING A FULLY-REALIZED FEMALE DETECTIVE.

I didn’t want Lou to be John Rebus with ovaries nor did I want her to be Bridget Jones with a Glock. I wanted her to be a contradiction wrapped in a riddle trapped in a conundrum of steel and puff pastry. Crime: it’s a man’s world. And fictional men, just like men in real life, have more privilege than women. Don’t make that face. It’s true. And white men definitely have more privilege than black women (psst – Lou’s a black woman, if you didn’t know that by now). Unlike Harry Bosch, she can’t go off the grid, curse out her superiors, smoke in the no-smoking zone—not if she wants to keep her job. Because they physics of her world and our real-life world are the same. She has to show up and take deep breaths and constantly prove to the Bosches and Spillanes of the crime-fighting world that she belongs, that she won’t faint at the sight of blood, that her boobs won’t keep her from hammer-fisting a nut with a knife.

THERE’S SOME SCARY CRAP OUT THERE.

As a crime writer, I lift the city’s skirts to see the ugly so that I can then write about it. And boy, oh, boy, what the city has under her skirts.

However!

Just because I’ve come across horrid, wicked shit doesn’t mean that I have to write it. In my humble opinion, too many writers engage in torture porn, stories that get off on cruelty against the females in their stories. Some writers would argue, ‘Hey, it happened in real life. And you have dead females in your books!’ True dat—and I’ve read that same article in the newspaper about that monster who did those awful things to those women. And yeah, the victims in my novel are female. But I aim to report, not glorify their deaths. Reflect and not bask in the ways they’ve died. Sometimes, I’ve learned, you gotta just say, ‘Hell naw, I’m not writing that.’

But that’s me. You do you… you sick f#&%.

* * *

Rachel Howzell Hall lives in Los Angeles. Her new mystery LAND OF SHADOWS (Forge) featuring Detective Elouise ‘Lou’ Norton is available everywhere!

Rachel Howzell Hall: Website | Twitter

Land of Shadows: Amazon | B&N

To catch a killer, one reporter must risk it all …

San Francisco Bay Area newspaper reporter Gabriella Giovanni spends her days on the crime beat, flitting in and out of other people’s nightmares, yet walking away unscathed. When a little girl disappears on the way to the school bus stop, her quest for justice and a front-page story leads her to a convicted kidnapper, Jack Dean Johnson, who reels her in with promises to reveal his exploits as a serial killer. But Gabriella’s passion for her job quickly spirals into obsession when she begins to suspect the kidnapper may have ties to her own dark past: her sister’s murder.

Risking her life, her job, and everything she holds dear, Gabriella embarks on a quest to find answers and stop a deranged murderer before he strikes again.

* * *

1. I don’t know a comma from a hole in the ground.

After a career as a newspaper reporter, writing sometimes four articles a day, you’d think I’d have even a slight grasp on comma use. Nope.

When I was polishing Blessed are the Dead for publication, part of that process involved the publisher hiring a copyeditor to go over the entire manuscript and marking it all up to hell. Demoralizing.

Especially, when I realized that ninety-nine percent of the copy editor’s changes involved commas. Humiliating.

(Incidentally, I also learned from the copy editor that douche bag is two words and barstool is one.)

2. My first chapter sucked.

And so did the second.

Originally, my first chapter had my character, Gabriella Giovanni, lollygagging around at some Farmer’s Market smelling flowers, talking Italian, and picking out the most primo loaf of sourdough bread.

Boring.

So eventually I got rid of the entire chapter and began with what once was chapter two. Guess what? That was just as boring.

Now, the first chapter in my book is actually what once was the third chapter—where the action is. Go figure.

Don’t be afraid to vomit those words on the paper just to get yourself into your story because you can always go back and slice and dice like I did.

3. Even though I have a book deal, there’s not much difference between me and every other writer out there busting their butt to get published.

The best thing I have going for me is my perseverance. It’s not about talent. I’m not any more talented than my friends without a book deal. In fact, in many cases, they’ve got heaps more talent than me.

What I’ve got going for me is the desire to work hard, to be stubborn as hell about not giving up, and a smidgen of luck.

For instance, during my path to publication, I’d hear people say things like this: “I’ve queried my top three dream agents and none of them saw the greatness of my writing so I’m just going to give up.”

Every time I heard that, I’d think, well, after I’ve queried about 400 agents, then maybe I’ll consider writing a different book and querying that.

4.  Writing a novel takes less time than you think.

I’ve become a member of the Church of One Thousand Words that Brad Parks mentions. To be a parishioner is easy, just write one thousand words a day. Minimum. If you do this, you will have a book in three to four months. Period. It’s that easy. Of course, you might spend another year revising that first draft, but to me, that’s the fun part. Once I realized that writing a book could be broken down in this simple way, I was home free.

Five days a week I make sure I write one thousand words. Most often, I write more, often double that, but when I have those thousands words as my bare minimum, I make progress. I also end my day with a feeling of accomplishment. I made my goal.

5.  I don’t know jack shit about writing.

Last but not least, I realized how little I truly know and how much I have to learn and improve. But I’ve learned that this is a healthy attitude to have. The day I think I know it all and give up learning craft or abandon my efforts to be a better writer is the day it all ends.

* * *

Kristi Belcamino is a writer, artist and crime reporter who also bakes a tasty biscotti. Her first novel, “Blessed Are the Dead,”  is inspired by her dealings with a serial killer during her life as a Bay Area crime reporter. As an award-winning crime reporter at newspapers in California, she flew over Big Sur in an FA-18 jet with the Blue Angels, raced a Dodge Viper at Laguna Seca, and watched autopsies.

Kristi Belcamino: Website | Facebook

Blessed Are The Dead: Amazon | B&N | iTunes

Ubisoft has determined that the ladies are not a vital part of its next Assassin’s Creed game, Unity. Female avatars for multiplayer will not be featured because, and this is paraphrased: “I can’t even right now with the women. Animating men is easy but women? Pssh. The boobs are like, millions of dollars to get those things right because I’m pretty sure they don’t work according to physics? They’re like, ghost spheres or demon orbs. And don’t even get me started on vaginas. What even are vaginas? Where are they? Do they have powers? Given that we do not know any women, and we have not been able to capture any of these elusive creatures, we will be striking their mythic presence from our game because honestly, nobody has even proven to me they exist. The game will, however, feature a Bigfoot Robot to replace Napoleon.”

Okay, they didn’t say that, exactly.

From the article:

“It’s double the animations, it’s double the voices, all that stuff and double the visual assets,” Amancio said. “Especially because we have customizable assassins. It was really a lot of extra production work.”

In the game’s co-op mode, players will have custom gear but always view themselves as Arno, Unity‘s star. Friends are displayed as different characters with the faces of other assassins.

“Because of that, the common denominator was Arno,” Amancio said. “It’s not like we could cut our main character, so the only logical option, the only option we had, was to cut the female avatar.”

Speaking with Polygon during a different interview, level designer Bruno St. Andre estimated more than 8,000 animations would have had to be recreated on a different skeleton.

Oh, well, jeez, that is tough.

Creating a diligently, realistically-imagined version of Paris during the French Revolution was easy, apparently, compared to including women as playable avatars. Something that many other games accomplish — Bioware makes an effort to do this, which is what you have to do, isn’t it? Make an effort. Something Ubisoft cannot be bothered to do, it seems.

I mean, The Sims lets you play as a man, woman, boy, girl, or androgynous space Frankenstein.

Oh, but maybe history plays a role, right? Because there surely weren’t women assassins —

Wait, wuzzat?

Charlotte Corday was a female assassin from the French Revolution?

Oh. Huh.

Huh.

But, hey, history is too much work.

Women? Just too much work, too.

Thankfully, me spending money on this game is also — say it with me — too much work. Acknowledging approximately half of your game audience was just too hard for Ubisoft, and so do not be surprised if it’s just too hard for me to spend money on a game that cannot even do the bare minimum in terms of inclusion. C’mon, Ubisoft. Really? Fucking really? You’ve been progressive in the past, so what gives? Why the backpedaling? Why the lazy lean toward the outmoded (and unproven) assertion that women don’t play AAA games? Do better. Make effort. Spend the coin.

Otherwise, why will folks spend their coin with you?

Vote with your dollar, folks.

Oh, hey.

I hear Bioware has a new game coming out…

I go to conventions and conferences, that’s the question I get asked.

Either:

“How do you write?”

Or —

“How do I write?”

The question can mean all kinds of things. How does one write day to day? Or how does one become — and remain, and simply be — a writer? What’s it like? How to start? How to keep it going? WILL THERE BE BOURBON AND SHAME? (Yes to at least one of those.)

It’s sometimes accompanied by the look of a truck-struck possum.

It may come with an exhortation of bewilderment and exasperation.

A sound not unlike, whuhhh, or pffffffh. Cheeks puffed out. Lips working soundlessly.

This is a difficult question. It’s difficult because you’re you and I’m me. Each writer isn’t a snowflake until they are, and this is one of the ways that they are — we are cartographers of our own journeys, charting the map as we go and then burning it soon after. The way I did it isn’t the way that Joe Hill did it, or Kameron Hurley, or Delilah S. Dawson, or Kevin Hearne, or Heinlein or Dante or that one weird dude who wrote the Bible (his name was “The Prophet Scott” and he had one eye and a romantic eye for tired sheep).

Just the same, I feel like I should draw you a map.

I should attempt to answer the question.

None of this will be helpful. Zero of it will be factual.

But maybe it’ll give you a glimpse — a sense — of the scope of the thing.

The very short answer is:

“YOU JUST DO,” and that’s it.

You do it by doing. It’s like asking, “How do I open a door?” You just fucking do it. I dunno. Part of me thinks this should always be the answer, often jabbered in loud, caps-lock volume.

The still-short but not-as-short answer is:

You clench your buttocks together and tighten your middle and bite down on the belt and then you stab the fountain pen into your heart to suck up a draught of your vitalmost blood and you write furiously and without hesitation or pretension the story that lived there in the deepest part of your pulsing aorta. And you keep scribbling over it and rewriting over the scribbles until that story is as good as you can make it without killing yourself or taking up all your time.

That, too, may not be helpful.

So, let’s try the all-too-long version.

You start by reading because to want to be a writer you should first need to be a reader — no writers need to be writers despite what they’ll tell you but all writers need to be readers, full-stop, no arguments, don’t sass me. You learn to want to write by loving to read.

Then you decide to write and at first you write for yourself but soon you realize you write for other people — or at least one other person — and you write silly stories as a Wee Tiny Person, stories that might be called MOON BADGERS or THE DAY THE OCEAN POOPED THE SKY or some mythic pop-culture syncretism like FINN AND JAKE FIGHT THE KRAKEN or SCOOBY-DOO VERSUS THE BOYS OF ONE DIRECTION and maybe you illustrate these stories with whatever burnt umber crayons you’ve got hanging about.

Somewhere along the way you maybe stop writing for a while because it feels weird to not be that good at it, because it just doesn’t match the stories you read and love.

Eventually a teacher teaches you things about writing. They teach you good lessons and bad ones. Some things stick. Some things don’t. The bones of the skeleton form, awkward and herky-jerky and with a funky palsy lean, but it’s there, these bones, and it looks familiar, and somewhere you think, “This would look better with some meat and sinew packed onto its frame.”

So, you write again.

And it’s still not great, but you try to emulate the voices of other writers you love. And it’s a crass mockery of their work but it’s better just the same, and so you do this for a long time, as long as you need to. You likely run through other voices like it’s a catalog — you pick them and write them, Lovecraft to Frank Herbert to Stephen King to Margaret Atwood to Some New Young Writer I Haven’t Heard Of Yet Because You’re Just That Cool And I’m Just That Not.

Somewhere along the way, you think, I could really do this.

Like, professionally.

And people laugh. Or encourage you to your face while making panic-stricken faces behind your back. Or they tell you do to something else, anything else, be an accountant, doctor, truck driver, artificial horse inseminator (which is to say one who inseminates artificial horses artificially), and they wave their hands around like you’re careening toward a bridge that’s out ahead.

You drive past them, heading toward the shattered bridge.

And you drive off the bridge because all writers drive off the bridge.

You take the plunge.

You write and write and write, and you write to whatever direction you think the market is going. You write the Hot Genres, from Vampire Nuns to Erotic Kalepunk to Literary Doge to whatever is you think is going to sell the book, and you study agents and you study publishers and you think about self-publishing and really, honestly, you have no fucking idea what you’re doing. You finish one out of every ten books you start. The ones you finish feel weird, like they were written by someone else, like maybe you just walked into a room where the angles are off and the mirrors are cracked and it sounds like a television is on with that white noise weirdness but you see no TV — these books seem written by a doppelganger, some alt-world version of you, but you figure fuck it, this is what writing is, and so you keep trying to do it.

Writing and writing and writing.

And reading and reading and reading.

And thinking, too. You study writing advice. You get good lessons. You get bad lessons. You take it all to heart, all the useful bits and shitty rules, and maybe along the way you go to school for writing and you give some institution tens of thousands of dollars to make you a writer, and once more: good stuff, bad stuff, all of it goes into the crockpot to make the stew-beef slurry that is your writerly soul. Bubble, bubble, bourbon and trouble.

You think: I NEED THESE RULES BECAUSE RULES MAKE THE WRITING GO. You cleave to them like a thirsting man licking tears from the face of a sad panda.

Then later you decide: I HATE THESE RULES BECAUSE ALL RULES AND NO CHAOS MAKE WRITER A DULL BOY. You discard them like ruined underpants.

Eventually you figure out: SOME RULES ARE CRITICAL AND OTHER RULES ARE LESS SO AND SOME RULES AREN’T RULES AT ALL AND WRITING IS DIFFERENT FROM STORYTELLING AND I CAN’T FEEL MY LEGS I SERIOUSLY CANNOT DECIDE WHAT TO DO WITH THIS.

So you go back to the basics.

You keep writing.

You keep reading.

You start to submit work.

Maybe something small. Maybe something big.

Maybe to a magazine. Or an agent. Or a publisher. Or to a digital marketplace as a self-publisher.

You, of course, are rejected. Or reviewed poorly.

And, of course, it stings like a motherfucker.

It hurts your heart. And within the tear made in that most necessary of muscles, the fungus of self-doubt grows — fuzzy and black, sucking the confidence out of you with the hunger of a leech, with the tenacity of a tumor, and for a while you just sit and rock back and forth on your heels wondering if you should really do this thing. And others hesitantly agree out of what they perceive to be a kindness — once more they try to steer you from a sure collision with disaster, hoping you’ll turn your boat away from the waterfall ahead.

And yet you chug on.

The boat goes over the falls.

Another plunge.

Over the falls, rejection letters trailing behind you in the moonlit mist.

You start to think, fuck it.

I’m going to do this my way. At least a little bit.

At the bottom of the churn, the water punching you into the rocks, you decide that if you’re going to drown you’re going to drown your own way, and you’re going to write the book you really want to write, the one that squirms inside your guts like a pit of eels, the one story that chokes you with its emotions, the one tale that’s scary as a clown with spider-teeth and serpent-fingers and a Tea Party membership, and down there in the dark you put that story to paper.

You don’t know if it’s any good but it’s yours.

And that makes you feel good.

Because it sounds like you. It feels like you.

You ran after your voice for so long, but your voice found you.

You were the voice all along.

You submit that book.

And for once, it pings some radars.

Ping.

Ping.

Ping.

Holy shitwich. Holy fucksnacks. Holy handjobs-from-hell.

Someone responds. You call out into the lightless space, your plea just a flurry of bubbles, and an echo responds, and they respond that they want the story. But they want you to make changes because it isn’t quite there yet and that scares you, frustrates you, makes you mad because it’s perfect of course it’s perfect you finally figured out how to do this execrable job and now some cocky know-it-all piss-ant hyphen-loving word-nerd is telling you otherwise.

And for three hours or three days or three months you sit on it and pace back and forth upon those notes like a jaguar trying to suss out how to escape its zoo cage and suddenly there’s this moment, a moment like when you figure out how to open a puzzle box and — click — you realize, oh, you know some things but mostly you know nothing, Jon Snow, and so you go ahead and take the notes to heart and you make the changes and suddenly, you have a story.

You learn that writing is really rewriting.

And you rewrite it once, then again for another reader, and again for an agent or an editor, and again and again, writing until it’s right, cutting through your own nonsense, carving through your own fog, recognizing your own stink — and you see your work out there.

A shining moment. A diamond in the dark. A beam of light through it, made prismatic.

An imperfect moment because the story still isn’t perfect.

But you’ve got the scars of rejection to show you’re fighting the battle.

You realize you’ve gotta suck to not suck.

You embrace the time you tried to be someone else just to realize you had to be you.

You push past the idea of trends, because chasing trends is trying to catch and bottle lightning — some do it, but most don’t, so maybe it’s time to make your own motherfucking lightning instead.

You submit and you hate yourself and yet to push on you spear self-doubt to the earth with a spear made not of unearned confidence but with a pike formed of experience and instinct and awareness of what you’re doing and why.

You have your rules and your ways.

You have your process, cobbled together over many years and wordy iterations.

You have your voice.

Each ginger step into this dark forest becomes quicker, nimbler, more sure-footed as your eyes adjust and your muscles tighten. You run, unabashed, unfettered.

And you write.

And you read.

And maybe, just maybe, you get published.

And soon, you do it all again.

Again and again and again.

Because you’re never really done forming.

You’re always a protoplasmic blob.

But at least you know that you can twist into shapes when need be.

You know you can always — and will always — write.

You will write to stave off the cuckoo bananapants feelings.

You will write because you love to read.

You will write because you want to be read.

You will write because you want to be paid.

You will write because you love it even when you hate it.

You will write because you want to, not because you need to.

It’ll get easier and it’ll get harder.

Everything will change and sometimes you will, too.

And some day someone will ask you how you do it, how you be this thing called a writer, and you’ll have no idea how to answer them, so you’ll shrug or yawp or lie, you’ll write a tweet or a blog post and answer their question with a question or with a short answer or a long solution and most of it will be true even when it’s made-up because truth is almost never beholden to fact.

But at the end of the day you know the reality is, everyone does this differently. And no map through this dark forest will look the same, but all will carry themselves through it with the same conveyance: we all step through by reading, by writing, by living our lives, and by doing it again and again and again until we maybe, maybe, think we know what the fuck we’re doing.

All this is just step one.

Who knows what step two looks like?

* * *

The journey to become a successful writer is long, fraught with peril, and filled with difficult questions: How do I write dialogue? How do I build suspense? What should I know about query letters? How do I start? What the hell do I do?

The best way to answer these questions is to ditch your uncertainty and transform yourself into a Kick-Ass Writer. This new book from award-winning author Chuck Wendig combines the best of his eye-opening writing instruction — previously available in e-book form only — with all-new insights into writing and publishing. It’s an explosive broadside of gritty advice that will destroy your fears, clear the path, and help you find your voice, your story, and your audience.

Amazon

B&N

Indiebound

Writer’s Digest

If you go to Goodreads, I am now participating in their ASK AN AUTHOR thingy.

If you go there and deposit your question, I WILL ATTEMPT TO FIELD YOUR QUERIES, MEATSACKS. … uhh. I mean, “I will do my darndest to try to answer your questions, readers!”

Because I’m definitely not an insane robot masquerading as a human.

One who wishes to milk the blood from your precious meatsack to fuel my cyborg crusade.

Totally not.

Pay no attention to the robot behind the curtain.

And go and click that link.

And ask me questions.

…

…

…

MEATSACKS.