1932, and it’s business as usual in the Windy City. Yeah, the economy’s so low it’s looking up at Hell; Capone’s gone up the river; and anyone who knows anything says Prohibition ain’t long for this world. And still the Mob’s big and bad as ever, still got their fingers in every last one of Chicago’s nooks and crannies. You wanna get by in this city? You keep your head down and your trap shut, and you don’t make waves.

Especially when you got the kinda secrets I do.

So yeah, I give the trouble boys a wide berth. I sure as hell don’t ever work for them!

Except when I do. Except when some made guy’s moll tells me her daughter’s been missing for sixteen years, and they’ve been raising a good old-fashioned changeling in her place. Then, my better instincts aside, I start getting interested.

Me? I’m a P.I. Of course I am. Ain’t all these stories about a P.I? But I’m not your typical P.I.

The name’s Mick Oberon, or at least it is now. Yeah, like in that Oberon; third cousin on my mother’s side. I’m here in Chicago mostly because I’m in exile from the Seelie Court.

And like most of you have probably already figured, I’m not human.

* * *

1. As much as I hated homework back in school, I’m an anal-retentive OCD goober when it comes to real-world research for my novels.

I mean, seriously, I looked up the precise date of the spring equinox and phases of the moon in March of 1932 to make sure I got them right. I could have just made it up, and you know what difference it would have made? Zero. Zero difference. Hell, I ended up shifting the date a little anyway, because reality actually wound up being TOO convenient; it wasn’t believable.

That’s not a particularly difficult example–it was easy stuff to look up–but it’s the kind of detail-chasing that can suck you right down the rabbit hole. And when you’re in the rabbit hole, you’re not writing. Notice that there are absolutely no modern novels written by rabbits? THAT’S WHY.

A while back, I was answering some writing advice questions for a blog post, and I said something that got me yelled at. I said that it’s possible to do TOO MUCH research when writing a novel. A number of folks took issue with that, but I stand by it. There comes a point where your quest to unearth every little detail or get every little factoid just so is getting in the way of ACTUALLY WRITING. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve learned for your book if there’s no book taking shape.

2. Sometimes it is impossible to satisfy the aforementioned goober-portion of my personality.

The technology that causes elevator doors and train doors to open back up if there’s something caught in them? That existed in 1932. Had it already been installed on the L, in Chicago, though? Do you know? I don’t know. Nowhere I searched knew. The bloody Chicago Transit Authority didn’t know. (Yes, I contacted them. See: above, re: anal-retentive.) At that point, I figured it was safe for me to make up my own answer, and it STILL bugged me a little.

Through which process I also learned that my brain is an irritating little bastard who is quite happy to keep me from writing while it throws a little tantrum screaming “BUT WHAT IF I GET IT WRONG?!?!?!?!”

Stupid brain.

3. Slang is a motherfucker when you actually have to think about it.

No, really. Every slang expression in the book is genuine, and I had to deliberately decide where to place them and when to use them. You try going through a day where you have to fully think through even a one-word response! You’ll sound so off the cob, every mug you bump gums with is gonna think you’re lit on cheap giggle juice.

On the other hand, it would all have been worth it just to learn the phrase “Chicago typewriter.” You know what a Chicago typewriter is? It’s a Tommy gun. I LOVE that.

Gangland slang is WAY cooler than modern slang.

4. Speaking of slang, the Star Trek episode “A Piece of the Action” got it surprisingly accurate.

Well, maybe not so surprising, since a good portion of the crew probably grew up in the 20s and 30s. But yeah, the slang and expressions are pretty true to life. (And no, I’m not going to explain. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it.)

(Heathen.)

It’s funny, we tend to think of some of those speech patterns only in terms of camp these days. Deliberately over-the-top. But it really was quite genuine at the time.

5. Welsh and Gaelic evolved so humanity could commune with the Great Old Ones.

Seriously, I refuse to believe those languages were developed with human jaws and tongues in mind.

Or the other theory, that Wales and Hawaii traded letters and sounds back in the day. One got almost all the vowels, the other almost all the consonants.

Which I guess would qualify as either a vowel movement, or consonantal drift.

Before I get the bum’s rush for that, I think I’ll show myself out.

* * *

Ari Marmell would love to tell you all about the various esoteric jobs he held and the wacky adventures he had on the way to becoming an author, since that’s what other authors seem to do in these sections. Unfortunately, he doesn’t actually have any, as the most exciting thing about his professional life, besides his novel writing, is the work he’s done for Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games. His published fiction consists of both fully original works and licensed/tie-in properties—including Darksiders and Magic: the Gathering—for publishers such as Del Rey, Pyr Books, Titan Books, and Wizards of the Coast.

Ari currently lives in an apartment that’s almost as cluttered as his subconscious, which he shares (the apartment, not the subconscious, though sometimes it seems like it) with George—his wife—and a cat who really, really thinks it’s dinner time. You can find Ari online at  and on Twitter @mouseferatu.

Ari Marmell: Twitter | Website

Hot Lead, Cold Iron: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound

Two dimensions collided on the rust-red deserts of Mars—and are destined to become entangled once more in this sequel to the critically acclaimed The Daedalus Incident.

* * *

The cool thing about writing is that it’s an ever-ongoing learning process. To paraphrase a certain pointy-eared son-of-a-bitch, writing really is infinite diversity in infinite combination. Each piece of writing is unique, and can be learned from – even if it’s learning what not to do. (Thankfully, I don’t think that’s the case with The Enceladus Crisis.)

I’ve been a professional journalist and communications writer for 20 years, and while I learned a lot writing my first novel, The Daedalus Incident, I was surprised at how much I learned writing the second in the series, The Enceladus Crisis, which came out just last week.  New books are cool.

So here’s what I learned this time out. A lot of it had to do with the challenges of writing a sequel, such as:

Nothing remains the same.

In a sequel, it might be a bit tempting to get the gang back together and go haring off on a new adventure and just play it like the last one, but with more knowing winks, wittier banter and bigger explosions. That only works in Michael Bay films. The first book didn’t happen in a vacuum. My characters aren’t the same, and neither is the setting. And only Dan Brown gets to recycle plot structures from book to book. I felt I had a better story when I changed it up, threw curve balls, broke up the band, blew it all to hell, swung for the fences. Insert change-related metaphor here.

Recapping is hard and needs to be done creatively.

As much as I wanted to go balls-out and write the story, I knew I’d have to do some recapping of what happened in the first book. That’s hard, man, because done wrong, it could drag the story down in a wave of boring exposition. In The Enceladus Crisis, I introduced the setting, and its changes, in the course of the story. And I dribbled out the exposition as sparingly as I could to keep the story going, while cluing in new readers. Still, there was a point when I had to explain what the “Daedalus incident” really was, in-story. So I used a military briefing as a framework, which helped introduce new characters in the process. I think it worked out well, but really, you have to take every chance you get to spread that stuff around.

Make the world bigger.

You know how your parents used to take you to the same vacation spot every year? And when you were little it was super exciting, but by the time you were 10, you were all like, “God, no, not Aunt Teresa’s lake house. It smells like old-man socks and she pinches my cheeks so hard it’s like pliers. Make it stop.” It’s fun to check in on places from earlier works, just to see how things are going. Some places can be particularly key to revisit over and over again. But there were others I just didn’t visit, because I had new places to go that were key to furthering the plot. It’s a balancing act, of course. You want to give folks a sense that the worlds are bigger than the first and the second books combined, but still, nobody cares if Venusian ur’chak tea serves as a particularly vicious, fast-acting laxative.

Make the stakes higher.

This is a double-edged sword, because strictly speaking, the assumption might be that you have to go from saving the city to saving the nation, to the world, to the solar system, and pretty soon you’re just this guy trying to save the multiverse and wondering why it’s all up to you all the damn time.

But stakes aren’t about “bigger,” per se, but rather “higher,” and that’s doesn’t mean throwing an asteroid at the problem. In The Enceladus Crisis, it meant hitting characters where it hurts most and making them – and the reader – fully invested in the story because, if they fail, it’s a crushing personal loss and/or they die horribly. Stakes have emotional resonance. One man could mean more to your heroine than an entire world, and if she has to save a world to save him, she will. Or maybe she has to destroy the world to save him, which is a tough call. Of course, you’re reading advice from a writer who crashed a sailing ship into Mars in his first book. And yes, I’d like to think I topped that spectacle in the second. But even as I blew more things up, I made sure to raise those personal stakes even more. I started feeling really bad for one character in particular, and that’s when I knew I was onto something.

Vacations are awesome for writing. So is air travel.

Obviously, this isn’t about sequelizing. And you’re probably like, yeah, no kidding, Sherlock. But you should understand that, after so many years of deadline journalism, I take great pride in writing anywhere, any hour and for as little or as long as I have available. Give me an hour, I’ll give you 1,000 words. Give me 15 minutes, and I’ll at least knock out that little knot in the story that was bugging me.

But this past summer, my wife and I took our daughter to her first sleep-away camp, and then took several days to just spend together in the mountains, sans kid. We’re both writers, and our vacation in the sticks became a writing retreat. We’d write in the morning or afternoon, for several uninterrupted hours, then go do other stuff. And I swear, I cleared a good 20 percent of The Enceladus Crisis on that trip.

So whenever you read that advice about writing every day – well, yeah. Do it. Ass-in-chair for as long as you can manage, daily. But if you can set aside some time to write, uninterrupted…take it and run with it and cherish it. The daily is good, but the “writing retreat,” if you will, really does work too.

* * *

Michael Martinez is the author of “The Daedalus Incident,” the first installment in the Daedalus trilogy. A journalist and professional writer by trade, Martinez lives with his wife and daughter in northern New Jersey

Michael J. Martinez: Website | Twitter

The Enceladus Crisis: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound

Cargill’s one of those writerly bad-asses you hear about. Disgustingly talented, show-offingly able to jump from talking about film (Ain’t It Cool News) to actually writing films (Sinister) to writing books (Dreams & Shadows). We should probably throw things at his head or, failing that, actually listen to what he has to say. Let’s try the last one first, see how that goes. Here he is to talk about the writer’s career and how it leads to his newest, Queen of the Dark Things.

When I was 11 years old, my parents signed me up for self-defense classes. I was your typical nerd/geek/dork hybrid with a loud mouth, few social skills, and had sprouted up half a foot taller than my classmates a few years too early, making me the perfect target for any bully worth his salt trying to make a name for himself. “Hey! You with the book! Get over here!” My parents were tired of me losing so often, so they dragged me to the nearest gym and signed me up. What they didn’t know was that they weren’t signing me up for any mere “self-defense” course. They were signing me up for Shotokan Karate, taught by a traditionalist master who had come back from ‘nam with a knee shredded by a bullet which he’d had rebuilt after being told he’d never walk without a cane again before recovering and becoming one of the highest ranking Shotokan black belts in the United States.

Yeah. He was a bad ass. And I got a lot of life lessons out of that guy. A LOT of life lessons.

The first thing he taught me came on the very first day of class. “Every week there’s some knucklehead who walks in here thinking he’s going to be Bruce Lee after a couple of lessons,” he said. “And every week that guy leaves after a few classes pissed off because I wasn’t good enough of a sensei to do that. So if you’re the guy who thinks he’s going to wake up fighting like Bruce Lee tomorrow morning, the door is over there. Leave now and don’t waste my fucking time. If you stick with this for a few weeks, I’ll teach you how to throw a decent punch. Stick around for a few months and you’ll be able to hold your own in a bar fight. Stick around for a few years and I’ll teach you things to make sure you never have to lose a fight again…or even have to fight one to begin with. But Bruce Lee? Almost no one ever gets that good, and when they do, it takes a lifetime.”

He was right. I never became Bruce Lee. But I stopped losing fights and eventually had won enough – and learned enough – that I never had to fight again. And 25 years later, I still haven’t.

I mention all this because every few weeks or so I run across an impatient young writer asking for advice about publishing. When pressed about their desperation, their response is almost universally the same. “I need my career to start now, not a year from now,” they say. “I’ve got bills to pay and I don’t want to wait for success. A year is a long time! And it could take even longer than that! That’s just the average!” When you ask them who they want to be, they rarely answer small. Sure, you’ll occasionally run across someone who says, “Oh, just a mid-lister with a respectable following that has to work part time to pay the bills.” But most of the time you hear “I want to be the next George R.R. Martin! Or J.K. Rowling! Or Neil Gaiman! Or Kurt Vonnegut! Or Charlaine Harris! Or Stephanie Meyer! Stephen King! Isaac Asimov! Kim Harrison! Ray Bradbury! Brandon Sanderson!”

You know. The bestsellers. The kung fu masters. The grand wizards. Bruce. Fucking. Lee.

Almost none of those names hit the jackpot with their first book. And none of them did it overnight. Few writers that get early, big success actually maintain that notoriety and position for long periods of time. And there’s a reason for that. The career of a writer isn’t analogous to that of any other entertainer; it is its own beast entirely.

In other entertainment careers, one great season, hit single, album or movie can make your career. But athletes only get from their teen years to their early thirties to make their mark. Same goes for pop stars and actresses. Actors and Rock Stars tend to start a little later – in their late 20’s – and get until their early 40’s to try and make it. And you can count on one hand the number of people who ever make it past those limits. But writers? Writers are different.

Writers are more like Kung Fu masters or fantasy wizards. We’re all genre fans here. Think about every great martial arts or fantasy epic you’ve ever seen or read. How does it start? Someone kicks in the gates of the martial arts monastery/wizard school/MFA program at age 19, fresh faced, full of piss and vinegar, ready to show the masters what for, and they declare at the top of their lungs “I am going to be the greatest kung fu master/wizard/writer who has ever lived!” And the students around them all laugh. The teachers roll their eyes. But the long bearded master in back, the one everyone fears, who passes down nuggets of wisdom wrapped in enigmas, who has battled countless foes, slain numerous dragons, published bestselling epic tomes of repurposed bronie slash-fic in iambic pentameter – he just strokes his beard, smiles and mutters “We shall see, young one. We. Shall. See.”

You see, the master knows that every Kung Fu master/wizard/writer has kicked those doors in saying the exact same thing. Sure, most that try fail, give up, get a day job while dreaming of what might have been – the styles they might have bested, the dungeons they might have purged, the awards they might have won, movies and TV series they might have spawned. But the ones who stick around learn that no master becomes so overnight. First they have to learn how to throw a decent punch or magic missile. Then they learn how to hold their own in a bar fight/tavern brawl. Soon, after years of practice, they learn how to win most of the fights they get into. And it is only then that their legend begins to grow.

The career of a writer isn’t about one fight or one dragon; it is about a career full of fights and dragons. Of victories and defeats. Of good books and bad. Of acceptance and rejections. Bestsellers and flops. Cancelled television shows and movies put into turnaround. It is about getting into anthologies only to find your name on the cover listed as “and many more!” It is about doing that for a few more years until your name actually makes the cover of the anthology…as filler between more recognizable names. Soon, if you keep writing, keep publishing, your name *is* one of the recognizable ones on the cover. And after a decade or two of work, your name might even make top billing. But not right after your first fight, or zorching your first skeleton, or writing your first novel.

Unlike almost every other entertainment career, age is not your enemy, but your ally. There’s a reason the New Yorker publishes its “20 under 40” and not “20 under 20.” The fresh faced martial artist or wizard isn’t the one to be feared or admired – it’s the wizened old bearded one in back, chuckling to himself. It’s not the 16 year old George Raymond Richard Martin who bought the first ticket to the first comic con in 1964 and frequently wrote letters to the editor at Marvel and articles for fanzines; it’s the George R.R. Martin who fifty years later, despite losing out on many of the major awards he’s been nominated for, who despite writing for short-lived TV show after short-lived TV show, whose novel A GAME OF THRONES didn’t become a #1 NYT bestseller until 15 years after publication, who has a backlist so long that virtually no one reading this has read it all, who can’t even attend comic con anymore without a security detail just to get from one side of a room to the other. It’s the Stephen King who was bagged on by critics for thirty years until he had written so many good bestsellers that they couldn’t argue with the mound of success he was standing on and had to declare him one of the greatest – not only of his generation, but of all time. It’s the Isaac Asimov with his name on over 500 books. Full stop.

That’s the guy you watch out for.

That’s Bruce Lee. Wong Fei-Hung. Fong Sai-Yuk. Gandalf. Merlin. Morden-fucking-kainen. Being a writer isn’t about writing one great book. It’s about writing 20 good ones…and maybe three or four great ones…if you’re lucky. That’s the job. That’s the career. It requires patience. It requires devotion. It requires decades of sleepless nights curled into a ball asking yourself what the everloving fuck you are doing with your life. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be that kung fu master, to be that wizard. You just have to think about it that way.

Blazing a career as a writer isn’t about where you’ll be next year; it’s about where you’ll be in five, ten and twenty. Are you a talented 16 year old with your own ideas for becoming the next George R.R. Martin? What are you doing for the next fifty years? Because *that’s* what you need to be thinking about. No career requires nearly as much devotion and time to develop, but none pays out such dividends for so long either, or affords so many chances to get it right. Maybe, if you’re lucky and play your cards right, some day you too might have fans walk up to you on the street and ask you not to die until you finish your latest opus. But you’ve got time; you’ve got a lot of living to do between now and then. A lot of fights to win, dragons to slay, knees to get shredded in ‘nam. That’s the career you’re embarking on.

Welcome to the monastery. We all want to be Bruce Lee here. And that’s okay. But if you’re not ready to put in the time, if you think it is going to happen overnight, the door is over there.

C. Robert Cargill: Website | Twitter

Queen of the Dark Things: Amazon | B&N | iTunes | Indiebound

In other words: “Fuck the rules.”

WHOA, JEEZ, ME. SLOW YOUR ROLL, WENDIG.

Okay, so, at cons and conferences — or via e-mail — someone inevitably mentions in a question something that writer is “not supposed to do.” This person has been reliably and repeatedly informed at some point that This Particular Thing is Fucking Anathema, a Dealbreaker Of Epic Narrative Proportions, and to Do This Shitty Thing is Tantamount To Kicking A Baby Down A Flight Of Steps Into A Pile Of Burning Books. (No, I don’t know why I capitalized a bunch of those words, but it felt good at the time. This is probably appropriate given the post I am about to write.)

This can be anything, really.

Don’t open on weather.

Don’t open with a character looking in a mirror.

Don’t open on a character just waking up.

Never ever use an adverb ever.

(Related: “In Writing, There Are Rules, And Then There Are Rules.”)

And for all that’s fucking holy, writing a prologue is a major biggum no-no, on par with and as pleasant as prolapsing one’s anus. You may in fact be told that a Prologue killed Jesus in the Gospel According To… I don’t remember. Dave, maybe. Dan? Eh.

Point is: Somewhere, you’ll find a list of prohibitions that some writer somewhere decided was an official bad idea. This is maybe a published writer. This is maybe just some yahoo.

But what I want you to realize is this: for every prohibition made, for every supposed forbiddance, you will find a book that defies that supposed dictum. Not just a book — you’ll find a published book. A good book, too. Maybe one that sold a metric keister-load of copies. For every rule, many notable exceptions to that rule.

I mean, okay, I dunno how good it is, but I wrote Blackbirds by breaking a ton of these narrative norms and storytelling mores, these purported prescriptions. I open with a character looking in the mirror. It’s present tense, but third person. It’s a mish-mash of genres: frog-hopping from horror to crime to urban fantasy. I use lots of dream sequences and flashbacks. I wrote a theoretically unlikable character (though I prefer to think of her as quite lovable just the same, but then again, I’m kinda goofy). I actively and openly wanted to defy rules.

Hell, pick up a bunch of genre books and you will find contained with them a — drum roll please — prologue. Despite its reported Jesus-killing powers, the prologue continues to pop up like an errant credit card charge, like a bad smell, like the aforementioned prolapsed anus. Prologues are like a dietary restriction that we say we don’t wanna eat and yet there we are, gobbling the damn things down like we don’t care if we end up with a barely-chewed kielbasa clogging our aorta.

It is with this you need to realize:

This is your story.

It’s your book.

You can do whatever the flippy, floppy fuck you want.

Nothing is forbidden. Everything is permitted.

If you listened to every prohibition out there about writing, you’d be trapped in so tight a box I’m not sure you could even write a story at all. You’d probably just be writing the repair manual for a 1990 Geo Tracker.

With this, I offer two very important caveats:

First, just because everything is permitted doesn’t mean everyone likes those particular things. Some agents and editors — if you are going that route — will immediately throw the Kill Switch upon seeing one of these boogers appear. “She began her story by addressing the reader,” the editor says, then promptly spaces the manuscript through the merciless mouth of her spacecraft’s airlock. (All editors live in spaceships floating above the dystopian island of Manhattan. I originally thought this was to protect them from Amazon in a kind of Reagan-era defense program, but now I think it’s just because: hey, spaceship.)

Second, if you are going to break any of these prohibitions, know that they exist for a reason. Defying them is meaningful — an act of rebellion that says two things: one, “I don’t give a shit about your rules,” and two, “I am good enough to step on them and break their little bones.” Your contravention of expectation — your demand to be an exception — has to be one made of great effort and skill. Most prologues? They’re dogshit. That’s why everyone hates them, because people tack them on not because it’s essential to the tale but because they saw some other asshole do it and they thought, “I dunno, it’s a trope?” Like they’re checking a checkbox. People who overuse adverbs are frequently amateurs. People who start with weather do so not because the weather is essential to convey something about the plot, or the setting, or to lend us mood, but rather because the storyteller doesn’t know what the fuck to talk about. “I dunno — uhhh. The sun… is up? But a storm is… coming? Wait, is there supposed to be something relevant here?”

Do not ignore the prohibitions.

Know them.

And give them the middle finger when and only when you know why you need to go the other way. Nothing is forbidden, but a whole bunch of shit isn’t particularly recommended, and when you decide to walk the challenging path — when you pull a stunt — you better own it, and rock it like only you can. Write with purpose and awareness. It’s your story. So know why you’re making the choices you’re making. That is the way of the wise storyteller.

* * *

The Gonzo Big Writing Book Bundle.

*pay what you want, starting @ $10*

Last week’s challenge: “Behold Your Theme.”

Here, then, are three random sentences:

“The borderlands expire thanks to the hundred violins.”

“A poetic pattern retains inertia.”

“The criminal disappears after the inventor.”

That’s it.

I generated them randomly, online.

You will choose one of these three sentences and include it in a piece of flash fiction, maximum of 1000 words. (For bonus kudos, use all three sentences in one story. Ooooh.)

Due by this Friday, the 16th, noon EST.

Post at your blog.

Drop a link to it here so we can all see it.

Go forth and write!

(For those asking, sadly the flash fiction challenge on Friday failed to post! Actually it failed to save and I never noticed — been having some up-and-down website issues since last week and I think this was a result of that. Since I was in Canada with limited access to the web, hard to do much about it. As Canadians would say — sooorry! I’ll get one up later today.)

Here’s where I ask you:

How’s the writing going?

What problems are you hitting?

Not only does this give me stuff for future blog posts but it lets the rest of you fine folks here act as a hive-mind to discuss how you might solve a problem. This is less about me helping you today and more about you helping one another. In a weird way, terribleminds has become a kind of community of penmonkeys these days, right? So, hell, let’s use that.

Need advice on writing or storytelling, ask.

And check out the other comments, see if you can offer advice of your own.

Do this, or you will all get the hose.

And by “hose,” I mean, “upended basket of rabid ferrets.”