Well, hey.
Amazon has both Mockingbird and The Cormorant as Kindle Daily Deals. Each is $1.99, which means you can get both for just under four bucks.
You can do so by clicking this link.
Archives (page 275 of 464)
Ancient monsters bite off more than they can chew in this action-packed adventure set in modern Japan.
Kenny Blackwood, aged 15, arrives in Tokyo to spend the summer with his estranged father only to find himself in the middle of a hidden war that is about to explode.
Racing against a near-impossible deadline, Kenny must find Kusanagi, the fabled Sword of Heaven, and use it to prevent the disaster. But a host of terrifying monsters is out to destroy him, and success will come at a price.
With the clever, fearless Kiyomi as his guide, Kenny must negotiate the worlds of modern and mythic Japan to find the lost sword, before it’s too late.
***
A MILL NEEDS LOTS OF GRIST
Ah, that old chestnut, “plenty of grist for the mill.” It’s a good plan; if you’re going to write, it helps if you live a bit, else what are you going to write about?
At the simplest level, I take this to mean try as many new experiences as you can. Try bungee-jumping – you might have a character fall from a great height. Try learning a new language – you’ll see the limitations of your own as well gain insight into another way of thinking.
Or you can push it to the extreme and snack on hallucinogenic mushrooms or wear a Ku Klux Klan costume to a hip-hop concert. Whatever you’re willing to risk, but the point is the same: try new experiences, because you never know when it will come in useful.
Taking a step back, I also apply this to leaving one’s comfort zones. Watch a movie, read a book, or listen to an album that you’d normally go nowhere near. It’s a good lesson in analysing why the particular piece doesn’t work for you, but also you might get an idea from it, however small, in which case it wasn’t a wasted exercise.
FEAR IS THE PATH TO THE DARK SIDE
Without getting all Freud-dude about this, we all have at least two selves. One passes for normal and is sensible; this is the self that functions in society, wears matching socks and knows how to queue. The other is a headcase; this is the self that wants to walk out of the house naked, to jump in front of a train, to fart in a crowded elevator. That other self is a dick – we know this – and if given control will kill us, which is why we have the Darwin Awards.
But here’s the thing; that other self has its uses and one of those is to make us chase opportunities. Nice Christopher Columbus probably wanted to stay home and play with kittens, but it was Nasty Christopher Columbus who sailed to the New World, caused mass genocide and ultimately gave us the internet which is how you’re able to read this. Sure, we can play it safe, but then we don’t achieve anything.
You have to take risks if you want to get anywhere, whether it’s the grocery store or the Hugo Awards. In my case, I went to Japan, fresh out of college, without speaking a word of Japanese. It was a life-changing decision, the best thing I did, but it wasn’t Mr Safe who made the call.
SKELETONS HAVE THEIR USES
I long ago came to the conclusion, maybe wrongly, that everyone has scars from childhood. I even picture some Mitt Romney-type, silver-spoon-in-the-mouth, trust fund beneficiary sitting in his shrink’s office bemoaning the fact that his life was too sheltered, devoid of any character-forming challenges and he’s an emotional wreck as a result.
We all have scars, skeletons in the closets, bodies under the floorboards. That’s not a bad thing at all.
I have a somewhat unusual background, being born in England to Caribbean immigrants of Indian origin. (Think AMA award-winning Nicki Minaj or Nobel Prize laureate V.S. Naipaul, depending on your cultural proclivities.) Growing up in the Seventies, this meant I experienced racism and prejudice, but that’s life. As a teenager, I had a serious battle with depression after my father died, but again that’s all valuable grist. No experience is ever wasted provided you learn from it and this is where “write what you know” comes into play.
All stories, the ones written by humans at any rate, have characters with feelings and emotions that we all share and understand. The stronger the bond of empathy between character and reader, the more engaged the audience, and one way to do that is to unearth some of those skeletons.
When I came to write this book, I wanted the character arc to include a reconciliation between father and son and the way I approached it was to have that conversation with my own long-deceased father, to say some of the things I should have but never did. Yes, it was uncomfortable, picking at old scabs, but also therapeutic and, I hope, infuses some emotional authenticity.
BEING A STUBBORN S.O.B. ISN’T A BAD THING
Being a writer is a vocation. Like the priesthood, it requires sacrifice, dedication and faith. Unlike the priesthood, there is no promise of reward nor grateful parishioners. You’re on your own, sweetheart, and all you have to keep you going is blind faith in your own abilities.
This is easier to manage if you’re a raging egomaniac but, if not, then stubbornness isn’t a bad back-up trait.
The Sword of Kuromori is the third book I wrote but it’s the first one I sold. Back in 2007, when I started writing seriously again, the first fruit of my labours was a 144,000-word monster which I quickly buried without ever sending off to anyone.
It was too long for a debut novel and needed a lot of rework, but it was finished and I’d learned so much from writing it. For a complete break, I next wrote a fast-paced, action thriller for my kids. It got me an agent but not a publisher. I then wrote Kuromori but it took me a year and a half to find a new agent, during which time I went and wrote a fourth book, to keep me from fretting.
Once I landed my new agent, the book was sold four months later, but it took six years, four books, two agents and 78 rejections to reach that point.
The funny part is that I’d set myself a target of 200 rejections before I quit and moved on to another book, so I came in under the line.
RESEARCH IS GOOD BUT WHEN IT FAILS MAKE STUFF UP
I spent five years in Japan, which is why it was a natural move for me to set the novel there. Having said that, it’s been a while since I left and I’d never studied Japanese myth or folklore so I had a lot of homework to do, both directly for the novel and indirectly to re-familiarise myself with the language, customs and traditions.
Fortunately, thanks to the power of the internet, I could do a lot of that on my PC, such as using Google Street View to tour the back alleys of Tokyo. Nonetheless, it still took over a year of digging to gather the material I needed for the tale, but what do you do when you can’t find that elusive kanji or obscure god you came across in the Kojiki?
For me, that was easy. A fiction writer is by definition a liar. Plato wanted to banish all poets from his idealised Republic because as soon as you say, “There was once a man who had two sons,” you’re making stuff up and lying your ass off.
In this light, it then becomes simple to create the things you need, as long as you play by the rules of your world. For example, I created a system of using magic by writing out Chinese logographs in the air. It seemed to make intuitive sense to me and I later discovered folk tales in which that happened. Similarly, certain types of Japanese monster follow patterns, such as the chimera-style transposing of one type of head on to another body. Knowing that gives me licence to create new beasties if I can’t find one that serves the story’s purpose.
For me, research is still king and will often dig you out of a hole, but don’t become a slave to it. The beauty of writing fantasy is that no-one can really bust your nuts over it, not anyone sane at least. “But a real wizard wouldn’t do that,” isn’t going to carry a lot of weight. So long as you stay true to the spirit of the world you’re working in, you’re free to create anew.
Here’s a final example. I wanted to include a variation on the “five finger death punch” because, hey, it’s a kid’s book with martial arts and it’s really cool, but I couldn’t find any solid references in the literature, so I made it up. Enjoy!
“The remaining oni stopped to size up the frail-looking old man. Genkuro bowed to the creature and then adopted a fighting stance. The monster grunted and smashed at him with its club. Genkuro’s left hand flashed upwards and he parried the blow, blocking the huge metal beam with his bare hand. With his right, he landed a chop on the oni’s wrist.
Kenny winced at the sound of bone snapping and stared as a ripple went up the oni’s arm. The staccato sound of crackling bone continued as the shock wave travelled to the monster’s shoulder, along its rib cage and down its spine. The oni flopped to the ground, its body reduced to a large bag of skin, as its pulverised skeleton could no longer support it.”
***
Jason Rohan has worked as a staff writer for Marvel Comics in New York and as an English teacher in Japan, where he lived for five years.
It’s been three months since Drothe killed a legend, burned down a portion of the imperial capital, and found himself unexpectedly elevated into the ranks of the criminal elite. As the newest Gray Prince in the underworld, he’s not only gained friends, but also rivals—and some of them aren’t bothered by his newfound title. A prince’s blood, as the saying goes, flows just as red as a beggar’s.
So when another Gray Prince is murdered and all signs point to Drothe as the hand behind the knife, he knows it’s his blood that’s in danger of being spilled. As former allies turn their backs and dark rumors begin to circulate, Drothe is approached by a man who says he can make everything right again. All he wants in exchange is a single favor.
Now Drothe finds himself traveling to the Despotate of Djan, the empire’s long-standing enemy, to search for the friend he betrayed—and the only person who can get him out of this mess. But the grains of sand are running out fast, and even if Drothe can find his friend, he may not be able to persuade him to help in time…
* * *
1) Plans Shmans
I went into Sworn in Steel knowing I had to do things differently. I mean, I spent ten years (off and on) writing my first book. That kind of turn-around time just doesn’t work in publishing, especially not for a debut author. So I had to up my game. I had to have outlines and word counts and story arcs and the whole nine yards. I’d pantsed my way through Among Thieves (meaning I made it up as I went, no outline), but that wasn’t going to fly this time around. This time, I needed a Plan.
And by god, I stuck to that plan. In well under a year, I was 90,000 words into my projected 125,000 word novel with plenty of room to spare. I had this.
And then I stepped back and looked at the book. It was, in the words of a good friend, a hot mess. Steaming, even.
I froze. Not just for a week, not just for a month. For over a year, I froze.
That isn’t to say I didn’t write. I wrote like hell. I revised like a demon. I fixed and fiddled and tweaked, trying to fix the mess that was my first draft. At one point, the book was up to 190,000 words.
No, when I say I froze, I mean that I got stuck in the story as it was. I had tied myself to a plan, and I was going to follow that plan, dammit. Except it was the plan that ended up messing me up.
And I couldn’t see it.
2) Tunnel Vision Will Kill You
When you wait tables, there is a phenomenon known as “Being in the weeds.” Essentially, it is a situation where you have so many tables and so much to do, there is no way you can keep up with it all. Every time you clear a table, two more seem to be sat in your section. When the food comes out, it is wrong, or half the order is missing, or something needs to go back. You can never get on top of things, and it feels like you are constantly teetering on the edge of complete disaster. Offers of help go unheeded because, frankly, it seems like it would be more work and take more time to tell someone what you need than to simply go do it yourself. The only way out of the weeds is to hack your way through, alone.
You are, in short, in extended panic mode.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but this is where I was for much of Sworn In Steel (especially after I blew past the first deadline). And, just like when you are in the weeds, what seems to make sense from the outside doesn’t compute on the inside. You want to help me solve this plot problem? Talk me through the indecision I’m facing over this part of the book? Get me out of the house to just breathe fresh air and gain some perspective?
You know nothing, Jon Snow. I have to do this myself. It would take me too long to explain the problem to you; be too hard to tease out the difficulties that are dogging me; eat up too much time and energy to catch my breath and paint the big picture for you, because of course its all about the big picture and how it isn’t working!
Except that isn’t true. What took me a long, long, looooong time to figure out was that, while I might see only the problems and errors and mistakes in the book, they aren’t the whole work. What I needed, desperately, was a bit of perspective. But I was so far in the weeds, so busy whirling like a distracted dervish, that I couldn’t see what I needed to do: I could only see what I thought I needed to do.
It wasn’t until I broke down and had a long talk with my editor about just where I was (and wasn’t) in the book that I realized…
3) Editors want to help you, you idiot!
This may seem obvious, but when you’ve missed deadline after deadline, you start to get a bit gun-shy, ya know? You dread talking with your editor because you know the inevitable question – “So, how’s the book coming? When do you think it will be ready?” – is going to drop, and you just don’t want to answer that question any more. Because you honestly don’t know at this point (see Weeds, above).
But here’s the thing: your editor is on your side. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t have bought your book in the first place; wouldn’t have persuaded the publisher that your work was worth investing in; wouldn’t have put their neck on the line give you extension after extension (after extension, after….). Plus, they want to not only get the book out, but they also want it to be good.
So yes, making that call and having that talk and sending the mis-matched, cobbled-together unfinished mess of a manuscript to my editor was, without a doubt, the hardest thing I have ever done as a writer (and may well be for a long while, I hope). But it was also the smartest thing I could have done.
When my editor and I finally got back on the phone and went over her editorial notes, it opened my eyes to a lot of thing that both worked and didn’t work in the book. Suddenly, what had seemed like a mountain of mistakes became a collection of smaller foothills, most of which I could see the path over. Oh, I needed to cut a lot and rework more, but I could see the end of the book. Turns out it wasn’t that far away.
4) It’s never as bad as you think
It’s easy to forget the parts you like about writing when things aren’t going well. But they’re still there – you just have to trust in them. Even when I was hacking away at the manuscript, I would stumble across a situation here, a bit of dialog there, an expected character around this corner, than delighted me.
I say “stumble” because, at heart, I am still a “discovery writer.” This means that I write the story not to get to the end, but to see where it goes, how it gets there, and who comes along for the ride. I forgot that for part of this book, but fortunately my brain didn’t. Sneaky bugger that it is, it kept doling out little treats here and there—so much so that when I went back to look things over, it wasn’t as horrible as I’d convinced myself. Parts of it didn’t quite suck. And some parts were even…arguably…maybe…kinda…good?
5) Readers are awesome
The thing that struck me the most through all of this, though, was how generous readers can be.
We’ve all heard the complaints online about how George R. R. Martin / Patrick Rothfuss / [Insert Author Name Here] is taking too long writing their next book. And yeah, that happens. But for everyone one of those, there are more people not complaining and patiently waiting.
I didn’t realize this last bit until I started having to post updates and explanations about why my release date was at first being moved back, and then cancelled altogether (since my publisher couldn’t leave the book in the catalog and keep moving the release around). I expected a torrent…well, okay, not a torrent, I don’t have that many readers…but at least any angry trickle of complaints from the people who were waiting for the next installment of the series. But to a post, e-mail, or response, every single reader who either asked or replied said something along the lines of, “That’s okay, take your time. I’d rather you write a good book than a fast one.”
This blew me away. In a world where we’ve gotten used to having everything NOW, where the complaints about a book’s speed of release are a Google search away, to have people saying they were cool with the delay? That they understood that Shit Happens? Well, it was damn nice, and damn reassuring, let me tell you.
That was also the best possible thing I could have learned writing this, or any, book.
* * *
Douglas Hulick is the author of the Tales of the Kin series, which currently consists of Among Thieves and Sworn in Steel. He is a full-time stay-at home father, part-time writer, and part-time swordsman (no, really). When not walking the dog or trying to determine the relative might of pens vs. swords, he can often be found haunting the aisles of books shops, usually in either the sf, crime, or history sections. He is very fond of breakfast.
Doug’s first book, Among Thieves, was a finalist for both the Gemmel Morningstar and Kitschie’s Golden Tentacle awards in the UK. It was also nominated for both the 2013 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire and Prix Imaginales awards in France.
Douglas Hulick: Website | Twitter
Sworn In Steel: Excerpt | Amazon | B&N | Indiebound
As you may know, I’m an advisor for Storium, a digital storytelling / storyworld platform. And right now, Storium has just crested the $200,000 mark (!) which means we’ve unlocked Storium for Schools (!!) and still has about 24 hours to go. Consider checking out the Kickstarter before it ends. Wanna know more? Stephen Hood wants to tell you what he’s learned so far:
1. We are all wired for storytelling
It doesn’t matter who you are: the ability — and need — to tell stories is encoded into our base pairs. It’s part of what makes us human.
Now, that doesn’t mean we all have to be novelists, poets, or screenwriters. And that’s OK! Storytelling takes many forms, and it’s often something we do in everyday life without even realizing it. Whenever we talk to another person and tell them about our lives, we are telling a story.
It’s been fascinating to watch how people play Storium and observe the kinds of stories they tell. Sure, some of our players are writers and storytellers, professionally or otherwise. But a great many are not. Or rather, they don’t think of themselves as storytellers. And yet there they are, doing it, and having a blast!
It’s in our bones.
2. Play is the engine of creativity
Growing up playing tabletop games like D&D, Traveller, and Champions, I was introduced to this concept very early on. Roleplaying games are inherently collaborative storytelling experiences, and they’re one of several inspirations for Storium. But in truth, I started telling stories through games even earlier.
I have hazy memories of playing in our basement with a Lite-Brite. I don’t remember the colors and shapes that I assembled, but I do remember that they had the power to drive back the creepy ghosts peering at me from the eye-like knots of our pine-paneled walls.
As a kid I also played Wizardry on my Apple II. The provided “story” was spare. After all, the computer can only do so much with a wire-frame corridor and a hand-drawn 8-bit green slime. And yet, to me, my imaginatively-named wizard “Allanon” wasn’t just blasting those slimes with the spell tiltowait; he was getting revenge for what the slimes did to his deceased party members. Damn you, slimes. Damn you all to hell! *fireball*
Toys and games are like writing prompts. They give us a place to start. They turn the menacing Blank Page into something smaller, less intimidating. By adding creative constraints, they actually help us to create! Multiplayer games — both analog and digital — take this to the next level by allowing us to combine our imaginations in infinite ways.
We created Storium with the mission of using technology and games to unlock creativity. Based on these many childhood experiences, I always believed that it would work. But to actually see it happening is quite a thrill.
3. Games can teach
No matter your age, games have a way of disarming us. When we play, our mood changes. We automatically set aside expectations and judgment. We relax a little.
After all, it’s just a game, right?
This can be powerful in many contexts, perhaps none more so than in the classroom. For many, the best way to learn something is to experience it hands-on. And you can’t get much more hands-on than playing a game. Combine that with a task that feels more like “fun” than “work,” and you’ve got something interesting.
Going into this Kickstarter campaign we believed that Storium, as a game of collaborative writing, could be useful to educators. But the actual response from teachers and parents sort of blew our heads apart. *worriedly looks for pieces of head*
The reaction has been overwhelming, to the point where we added a major stretch goal that will enable us to create a version of Storium designed specifically for schools. I can’t wait to do it.
4. Ship it
The ideas that led to Storium have been rattling around inside my head for years. The team and I have now been working on Storium full-time for 16 months. We believe in it, we love it, and it’s deeply important to us.
But what if no one else cared?
This is a fundamental question every creator faces, and it leads to other ones that can paralyze you. Is it ready? Will they love it? Will they mock me? Or worse yet, will they just toss up their arms and say The Word That End Dreams: “meh”?
Ultimately, the only way to answer — or banish — these questions is share your work with others. In the tech world, we call it “shipping.” [from Chuck: in fan-fic “shipping” means something else, but given how Storium is mashing up cool storyworlds and genres, maybe that’s appropriate here, too…]
At some point, you just have to ship it.
It may seem easy for me to cheer “ship it” when I’m standing at the tail end of a healthy Kickstarter campaign. But you know what? This isn’t the first time we “shipped” Storium. We shipped it many times before, and believe me: some of those early days were… well, rough. We faced our share of “meh.” But that’s what allowed us to make Storium better. Without shipping, we never would have gotten here.
5. It’s dangerous to go alone — take allies
Ever notice how Tony Stark is able to create whatever he wants, entirely on his own, without any help? He just goes into his well-stocked, perfectly-equipped, self-aware lab and conjures incredible inventions directly from the ether.
Please.
Who built all the equipment? Who maintains it? Who keeps his automated CNC routers supplied with the 100% pure ridiculanium ore they require? My theory is that, one floor below his workshop, Tony has a team of, like, a thousand.
Of course, people do create things on their own. But for all of us, there comes a time when we need help. Allies. Friends. The problem is that we often don’t realize it until it’s too late, and then suddenly we’re raising our eyes from our desks to find ourselves in the thick of it. I’ve been in that position myself. I’ve worked on things that I believed in, but I failed because at the end of the day I stood alone.
Standing alone isn’t cool. It sucks. I make it a point to avoid it, and suggest you do the same. But it takes time to gather allies, so no matter your project: start early.
I am insanely grateful for Storium’s friends and allies. From our advisors (Will Hindmarch, J.C. Hutchins, Mur Lafferty, and our cheery, beardified host Chuck Wendig); to the many writers, designers and storytellers who are contributing worlds to our campaign; to the thousands of people who are playtesting Storium — without them, none of this would be real. It took time and trust to assemble this force of awesomeness. But it was worth it.
* * *
Storium Kickstarter: Click Here
Over there? That’s your gravestone.
It’s there, on the hill. Or in the valley. Maybe under a cherry blossom tree or by a babbling creek. Or maybe you’re a sack of kitty-litter-looking ashes on a mantle somewhere. It doesn’t much matter because, drum roll please, you’re dead.
Or, rather, you’re going to be dead. One day.
No, I’m not threatening you. I don’t have to. Life paired with time have together earned that pleasure. Unless you’re some kind of vampire, you were born with a ticking clock whose watchface was turned inward so that none can see it.
You are totally going to die.
I’m not Miriam Black. I don’t know when. Might be 50 years from now. Or ten. Or ten weeks, days, minutes. I certainly don’t know how. Cancer might juice your bowels. A hunk of frozen shit might fall off a 747 turbine and crush you in your recliner. Bear attack. Meth overdose. Choke on a hot wing. Stroke. Heart attack. Robot uprising. No fucking clue. And I don’t want to know the specifics. I don’t need to know the specifics because we are all given over to the universality of a limited mortality. The one aspect of our lives that is utterly and irrevocably shared is death.
That’s grim shit, I know.
I’ve spent a goodly portion of my life worrying about death. Or, more to the point, about how it’ll get me. I picture death less as a comical specter and more as the black dog of myth, always hounding my steps, ducking out of sight as I look for it, but always regaining my scent and waiting for the opportune moment to strike. Sometimes this manifested as a kind of hypochondria, a condition no doubt exacerbated by a Reader’s Digest Medical Guidebook I found in my house when I was around 10 years old, a book whose graphic flowcharts aimed to help you discern the truth of your symptoms — though of course they usually ended up convincing me I had some kind of rare tropical doom parasite. (For a while I seriously thought I had worms in my face. For no reason other than my teeth had left marks on the inside of my cheeks and became convinced that these divots were WORM TUNNELS. So, y’know, thanks Reader’s Digest.)
If it wasn’t hypochondria plaguing me, it was sheer existential terror. The realization that one day everything I know and everything that I am would one day hit an invisible wall and drop off into a deep, black sea trench, never to be reclaimed. And maybe never remembered — after all, all those who care about me would one day be dead, too.
I know. WHEE, right?
There comes a point when all this either was going to keep pinning me to the ground like a heavy boot or it was going to be the thing that I could push past or even use as a springboard to fling my dopey ass forward. One day it occurred to me that this revelation about death could be viewed as something representative of freedom. A grim, unruly freedom, one with a somewhat grisly underpinning, but freedom just the same. Because we all share this thing. We all share the reality of an impending death. We are all dying. Right now. All part of a cycle of birth, life, decay, death, all part of the washing machine tumble of chaos and order, structure and entropy, light and dark.
None of us — not a single one — are promised tomorrow.
We share that because we share the possibility of death.
But we share something else, too.
We share This Fucking Moment Right Fucking Here.
This one. The one with the masking tape across it and the permanent marker signifying:
NOW.
We all get now.
We all get the moment in which we exist.
A lot of you are writers. (Or “aspiring” writers, a term I hate so bad it causes a sudden chafing of my testicular region as if some surly ghost were rubbing a spectral bootbrush against my nads even as I sit here and type.) And whenever I talk to writers and we get down to the nitty gritty of what they’re doing or hope to one day accomplish, they’re often mired in a sense of fear. Paralyzed sometimes by the what if’s and the big blinky question marks that look as much like a swooping scythe as they do a piece of punctuation. And a lot of writers are forward-thinking or future-leaning, expecting that the day will come that everything will work itself out and life’s magic highway will present them with an endless series of green lights…
…and they’ll finally get to do what they want to do.
My father lived his life in preparation for his retirement. Set everything up so that he could retire a bit early, move out West, and live his remaining years with the pleasurable, simple life for which he had waited. Of course, he died a few years into that retirement — so, while he had the privilege of living some of his dream, it sure wasn’t much when seen in the shadow of an entire life prepared for it. Too little time in the sun, too long in the anticipation of it.
Writers, artists, anybody: you are not promised that time.
You are promised right now.
I’ve said this before and I like to give a lot of these go forth and do it, please excuse my Doc Marten firmly ensconced in your spongy squat-grotto talks, and this one probably isn’t all that different from things you may have heard me say before. But it’s a thing I sometimes like to remind myself, and since this blog is primarily me-yelling-at-me, it’s a thing I’m going to remind you about, too.
You’re going to die, writer-types.
But you have now, right now, so use it.
And you may think that this advice for the aspiring-types only, for those novitiates on the Sacred Penmonkey Order, but it’s not. It’s for you story-seasoned word-brined motherfuckers, too. Because writers with careers short and long, we sometimes get a little lost in the weeds. Lost in things outside of us. Trends and markets, industries and Amazon rankings. We find ourselves jealous of other writers or fearful of the uncomfortable arranged marriage between the forces of art and commerce. Sometimes we forget that we have things we want to do, stories we want to tell, and we lose that in that the briar-tangle of uncertainty and anxiety and existential unease. Because just as we can as humans worry about the very nature of our existence, we can worry about our existence as writers, too. We worry about how long we’ll be allowed to do what we do. We wonder when someone will figure out that we’re stowaways on this ship, imposters at this party, strangers in our own chosen lives.
None of that really matters. I mean, it matters in little ways — in intellectual, commercial ways. But it doesn’t always help you to tell the tales you want to tell. It doesn’t always force that quantum entanglement between your ass molecules and the chair protons so that you can create some motherfucking art quarks, does it?
You can’t control a lot of the things you’re worried about.
You can maybe adjust them, or nudge them.
But you can’t control publishing. Or the audience. Or bookstores.
You can’t control whether a fridge-sized shit-glacier will drop off a plane and kill you.
What you can control is the height of your chair. You can control a little of your comfort as you sit at the desk — or stand, if you prefer. You can control which word processor you use, or which notebook you prefer. You can control what words you put down, in what order, and what story grows up from those words. You can control the work. That’s yours. Everything else is open to your occasional influence, but the one thing you can control is that you are writing this book.
And you have that control right now.
In this moment.
Not tomorrow.
Not in ten years.
Because you don’t know what happens then.
You do know that one day, it’ll all be over. And I can’t speak to what comes after — Heaven, Hell, Hades, Happy Hunting Grounds, Toledo — but that’s not the point. You don’t live for the end. You live for the moment. You live for this thing you want to do.
So, do it.
Right now.
You’re temporary.
Use that to create something permanent — or, at least, closer to permanent than you.
Let death motivate you. Let your inevitable demise impel you forward.
Go. Create something. Be the best version of yourself. Now. Here. This very second.
While you’re still alive.
So, heyyyyy.
I’ve been sitting on this for — *checks watch* — maybe a little while now, but…
Ahem.
Blackbirds is in development at Starz as a television show.
Brought to life by amazing creative humans David Knoller and John Shiban.
News at Deadline here.
News at Hollywood Reporter here.
No guarantee you’ll see it happen, of course, but I can tell you that what they’ve put together so far is an amazing — and appropriately faithful — adaptation of the book. They grok Miriam. Further, Starz is a helluva network. They’re a crafty, confident, and capable company.
All kinds of stuff I can’t really talk about yet, but fingers crossed this happens.
*stares at you until you cross all your fingers*
TOES, TOO, C’MON.
*stares more*
Anyway.
If you haven’t checked out Blackbirds yet, well, hey, now’s a good time:
Amazon | B&N | Indiebound
