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.

So, I figure while I’m at Phoenix (presuming this challenge posts and doesn’t give me any issues), I think it’d be nice and thematic to stay with the Phoenix motif.

Except, forget the city.

Let’s go with the mythological creature.

Or, at least, the ideas or visuals or powers surrounding the Phoenix.

So: write 1000 words of fiction that ties in some way to the legend or theme of the Phoenix.

You can interpret this as loosely as you choose.

Story due in one week, by the following Friday at noon EST.

Post at your online space.

Link back here in the comments.

RISE AND BE REBORN, SQUAWKING FIRE BIRDS.

Whenever I talk about character in storytelling — seriously, I’ll talk about this stuff with Target clerks, zookeepers, parking meters, carpenter bees — I frequently bring up the notion that, for me, good characters possess agency. And this, I often say, is one of the things that really matters in a so-called “strong female character” — not that she is a character who can bend rebar with her crushing breasts, but rather that she has agency within the story you’re telling.

Often when I talk about this in public, someone — maybe the zookeeper, maybe the parking meter — raises his hand and asks the question:

“Wait — what is agency, again?”

And it occurs to me I don’t know that I’ve ever defined my terms.

And that is a Naughty Wendig.

(The Naughty Wendig is also the gamboling goblin-like creature who will steal the teeth right out of your mouth if you throw cigarette butts or fast food containers out of open car windows. The Naughty Wendig is a vengeful spirit, also known for gobbling down human toes as if they are cheese doodles in recompense for your shitty behavior.)

(Oh, also? The Naughty Wendig is also the name of a tavern in D&D, a sandwich you can buy at various transdimensional delicatessens, a sex toy, a sex move, and a Japanese candy that squirts blood when you eat it. Please update your records.)

(Parenthetical asides are awesome.)

(Whee!)

(Okay, sorry, moving on.)

So, let’s talk a little bit about character agency and why a character needs it.

Character agency is, to me, a demonstration of the character’s ability to make decisions and affect the story. This character has motivations all her own. She is active more than she is reactive. She pushes on the plot more than the plot pushes on her. Even better, the plot exists as a direct result of the character’s actions.

The story exists because of the character. The character does not exist because of the story.

Characters without agency tend to be like little paper boats bobbing down a river of your own making. They cannot steer. They cannot change the course of the river. The river is an external force that carries them along — meaning, the plot sticks its hand up the character’s cavernous bottom-hole and makes the character do things and say things in service to the plot.

Because characters without agency are really just puppets.

It sounds easier said than done. In the writing of a story it’s common to find that you had these Ideas About The Story and the character appears to be serving those ideas — she is not driving the car so much as the car is driving her. And it’s doubly tricky when you write a story that has more than one character, which is to say, uhhh, nearly all stories ever. Because one character who has agency can dominate the proceedings and set too much of the pace, too much of the plot. Other characters lose their agency in response. For example: an antagonist puts into play a particularly sinister plot that forces all the other characters to react to it again and again, never really getting ahead of it. That’s not to say that reacting to events is problematic — just that reacting to events shouldn’t be passive. It shouldn’t be the character going another way just because the plot demands it. At some point reaction has to become action. It has to be the character getting ahead of the plot, ahead of the other characters. The power differential must shift.

And it’s the character who should be shifting it.

Look at your characters. Are they fully-formed? Ask yourself: if the character in the middle of your story went off and did something entirely different from what you planned or expected — something still in line with the character’s motivations — would that “ruin the plot?” That might be a sign that the plot is too external and that the character possess too little agency.

Characters without agency feel like props.

Worse, they’re boring as watching a bear wipe its ass on a pine tree.

(Okay, that’s pretty comical for the first 30 seconds, but then it gets boring.)

(I’m just saying.)

Characters with agency do things and say things that create narrative. Plot is spun out of the words and actions of these characters. And their words and actions continue to push on the plot created by other characters, because no character has agency in a vacuum.

(Those who play tabletop roleplaying games understand this in a practical way, having embodied characters at the level of agency. If you’ve ever rolled bones with an RPG, you know when you’ve got a gamemaster who railroads the plot versus one who puts the characters into a situation and lets the plot spin out of their actions and reactions around that situation.)

What gets interesting about a story isn’t when some Big External Plot is set into motion. What’s interesting is when the agency possessed by multiple characters competes. This push-and-pull of character motivations, decisions and reactions is how stories that matter are created. Because they’re stories about people, not about events, and people are why we read stories. Because we are all made of people. Our lives are made of us and all the other people around us. We live in a people-focused world because we’re solipsistic assholes who think that unless we behold it and create it, it probably doesn’t matter. And in stories, that’s pretty much true.

Stories must be made of people.

And that can only really happen when those people — those characters — have agency.

(Because after all, your characters shouldn’t be parenthetical to their own story, should they?)

(Whee!)