Initially, I thought, “Potty training will be easy.”

*cue laughter here*

*waits for laughter to die down*

*17 minutes later*

I was like, “Who wants to carry around a sack of their own waste around their hips all day long?” These diapers of his, they were starting to get heavy. Like, after a nice long pee-soak, you could attach one of his diapers to a rope and use it as some kind of ninja weapon. If you froze one of these diapers, you could shove it down a cannon’s mouth and use it to blow holes in an enemy’s pirate ship. His diapers were ammunition for medieval catapults.

Plus, he was starting to show the signs of Being Ready To Use The Potty. He could hold it at night. He knew when he was deucing the diaper — he does this thing where he wanders away and stands alone like he’s in the end of the Blair Witch Project, and during this time of supernatural castigation is when he would tar his crap-sack. (Like a wolf who leaves the pack to go die alone in some quiet corner of the forest, I guess.) And, he was getting interested in our own bathroom habits. It wasn’t just that he was joining us in the bathroom — which, if you have a toddler, hey, get used to that — but also that he was starting to ask questions, like a little anthropologist trying to understand Adult Human Culture through their curious bio-waste habits. He’d want to flush the toilet. He’d ask questions. He’d get excited to see “pee foam” or “pee bubbles.”

So, we figured, this is happening. He’s ready.

Let’s potty train this little elf.

He was ready but we were not.

I mean, we weren’t entirely unready — it’s not like we were like, “I dunno, kid, you’re on your own now. You know where the bathroom is — you’ve followed us in there a hundred times. Don’t fall in. Don’t forget to wipe. We’re going to Cabo for the weekend. You and the dogs have a blast.” We had the basic regimen down. We had a potty. We had extra underwear.

We went two, three days, and it just wasn’t working.

He didn’t even want to wear the goddamn underpants, which is pretty much Step Fucking One for this entire process. We tried to convince him that we wore underwear and wasn’t that cool? But, you know, we also pay taxes and a mortgage and vacuum things, so HEY ISN’T ADULT RESPONSIBILITY SUPER FUN actually fails at a fundamental level. Plus, I maybe misunderstood his interest in absolving himself of the diaper burden. Because, on second thought, having to do all this ritual around ERADICATING BIOLOGICAL GARBAGE FROM YOUR BODY is less awesome than just shitting in a comfy, scented bag while some larger human removes it from you while you lay back and watch Caillou on your goddamn iPad. Plus, the more he filled his diaper, the more padded he became and could sustain harder falls — “I’m going to jump off the kitchen table now because I basically have a poo-filled moon bounce strapped around my middle WHEEEE.”

We took a couple weeks off because those first days were frustrating. (And I should point out here that as a stay-at-home-Mom, or SAHM in the parlance, my wife is the actual Hercules of this story, while I am largely the scribe of the mythic tale.) And there you kinda flirt with the idea of maybe never potty-training the toddler. It’s like, “Well, maybe he can do this forever. Jeez, maybe we can start wearing diapers — we’re all getting older and we’ll probably get there someday anyway, so why not just preempt our eventual commitment to Depends and learn to love carrying our yellows-and-browns around with us all day long?” But eventually you reach the point where it’s like, okay, we need to shit or get off the pot. Er, I guess metaphorically and literally? Shut up.

So, we hunkered down.

We were like Doomsday Preppers with potty-time plotting and scheming.

And we managed to do it in three days.

Now, I don’t mean we’re looking at a perfect record, here. But the first day we went through, ohhh, let’s see — *counts on fingers and toesies* — about three-hundred-and-forty pairs of underwear. We had to clean pee out of the carpet that the dogs did not put there. My wife had to hold a softball-sized glob of toddler ordure that had plopped out of his surrender pants and onto the bathroom floor — and, by the way, pooping on the bathroom floor is really very bittersweet. “Close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades” does not extend to potty-training. The potty is the vulnerable port on the Death Star — you either hit it dead on with that proton turd or it’ll blow your moonbase to space-dust.

After that first day, we started to sharply cut down on the number of accidents we were having. He could hold it longer. He could identify when he had to go and started to actually say, “I gotta go potty!” (Which again starts to feel wildly inefficient. It’s like we just added a middle-man to this proceeding. But, whatever. Blah blah blah adulthood.)

We’re now one week past and we have a pretty good handle on it.

So, I thought I’d share with you our not-so-secret secrets. Parenting advice is ultimately like writing advice — a child you’ve created is as unique and weird as the books you hope to write, so what works for one will almost surely never work for another. Just the same, I’m happy to drop some breadcrumbs down for you to follow while wandering in this particular potty-scented forest.

First: bribery. Shame is not a good way to get anybody to do anything — honey does a much better job than vinegar, and marshmallows, stickers and Matchbox cars does a much better job than trying to make him feel bad about it. (Life is full of feeling bad about things. Shame is a half-a-ladder.) Our system was: two marshmallows and a sticker for number one, twice all that for number two. (For the stickers, we just have him plonk the stickers down on a giant sheet. We thought about segmenting it out by day, but our son is rather, erm, independent, and we predicted he would basically want to stick stickers wherever the fuck he jolly well wanted, not in their precious little temporal boxes.) Then at the end of each day of successful potty training (more or less meaning he was amenable to it), he got a Matchbox car. Then, at the end of the first week, he gets Heatwave, one of the Transformer Rescue Bots.

Second: have him pick out his own potty. Potties are weird anyway because you’re basically placing a toilet in the middle of, say, the living room — “Just poop here where we all sit and enjoy recreational time, sure, fine, whatever” — but he picks it out and you carry it around and suddenly it just becomes normal to the tot.

Third: manufacture extreme enthusiasm. When he uses the potty we act like he just aced his SATs instead of deuced a bucket. It’s confetti and high-fives and pure blissed-out excitement. Curiously, this artifice soon becomes real, like some potty-time version of Stockholm Syndrome, because the first time he correctly turds up the potty (and, say, not your floor) you become genuinely excited and emotional and then suddenly you’re teary-eyed because next step is school and then college and then a job and then you die as your grandchildren play around your deathbed. The entire spread of life and death splayed before you as your baby’s growing up.

Fourth: lack of frustration. There will be setbacks. You know: as there are in life. Try not to get too down about that or frustrated. Even as you ponder how you got pee in your hair.

Fifth: find what the child responds to. Ours likes to say “bye” to the pee and poop and then flush it himself. I have adopted this behavior and now wish my own leavings a fair voyage. If you see me doing this in a public restroom, well, now you know why.

Sixth: very early potty prep. We got him to sit on the potty every night for the last six months. Sometimes to pee, sometimes he just sits there and plays with trucks. Ultimately it was just to get him used to the potty and not introduce it out of nowhere. “LOOK HERE IS A BUCKET SIT ON THE PLASTIC THRONE; NOW PURGE YOURSELF UPON IT AS THE ROMANS DID.”

And that’s pretty much it.

Patience and bribery and just going with the pee-flow.

Happy Potty Time, everybuggy.

I wrote some of this on Twitter this morning, but thought I’d place it here, too.

You will do many things as a writer.

Writers think, dream, scream, flail, procrastinate, market, edit, email, caffeinate, plot, scheme.

Writers gnash their teeth and pull their hair.

Writers read books, drink booze, tweet tweets, complain about Facebook redesigns.

Writers share information one minute, then greedily hoard it the next.

Writers research, then forget research, or ignore research.

Writers know that the real question you should ask them isn’t where they get their ideas but rather, holy hell, how do you make the ideas stop?

Writers work alone but travel in packs.

Writers jump the gun and then procrastinate.

Writers make excuses and find reasons and act as their own best friends and worst enemies.

Writers feel frail, powerful, godly, small, frustrated, infinite, limited, bewildered, afraid, uncertain, brave, certain — we’re all wounded ego, surefooted on broken ground, craving respect and needing an audience, introverts who are extroverts who are introverts.

Writers jump out of planes and build our parachutes on the way down.

Writers outline and worldbuild and make spreadsheets and mind-maps.

Writers create and destroy hundreds of characters and thousands of worlds — all before breakfast.

Writers burn themselves with brands and build up platforms that they have to tear back down and they get agents and find publishers or publish themselves and find the audience that will in turn find them and they’ll commune with themselves and their hearts and try to find the words and stories inside them that can’t stay inside any longer.

But above all of it:

Writers write.

They write, and they finish what they begin.

Put differently?

If this is your first night at Write Club, then you have to write.

If this is your second night, or eighth night, or nine-hundredth-and-forty-seventh night?

THEN YOU HAVE TO WRITE.

The first rule of Write Club is you can talk about Write Club all you want, but it’s no substitute for actually hunkering down and doing the work. Writers write. Say it again and again. Tattoo it on your forehead backward so you can read it when you look in the mirror. Writers write. Writers write. Writers rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. Ten words. Or a hundred. Or two thousand. As many as it takes in the order they need to be. Writers write.

So go write, writer. What are you still doing here?

Let’s just get the link out of the way right now:

Click here and please pledge.

Okay, some of you are bristling and saying, JEEZ WENDIG, I NEED TO KNOW WHY. I DON’T JUST FLING DOLLARS AT THE INTERNET WITHOUT GOOD REASON, and to that I say, you are wise, far wiser than I, who uses Amazon Prime shipping to buy all kinds of unnecessary things: margarita machines, tiger tail butt plugs, monkey chow, candy cigarettes, howitzers.

So, all right.

First, the selfish angle: hey, you pledge to Fireside, it funds, you get a brand new shiny Miriam Black story from yours truly. Everybody’s favorite (*not scientifically proven) psychotic psychic.

Second: you get work by a number of great authors. That includes Lilith Saintcrow, Andrea Phillips, Stephen Blackmoore, Daniel Jose Older, Sofia Samatar, Kima Jones. Art by the splendiferous Galen Dara, who is doing the art for my current serialized time-travel-10-minutes-backward story, The Forever Endeavor — a story made possible by this year’s iteration of Fireside Magazine. (Read part one of The Forever Endeavor here, for free.)

Third: because if you take a gander at the authors listed, you will notice that it is not weighted toward the inhabitants of Heteronormative White Dude Mountain. This is a diverse cast of writers because Fireside has been committed to looking beyond the pale pink skin and dong-dangles found so often in science-fiction, fantasy, and other related genres.

Fourth: as many of you are writers or fans of writers, you should know that Fireside pays its contributors well. When I was 18 — *cough cough* twenty years ago — the pro rate for short fiction markets was five cents a word. That is still often the pro rate. What does Fireside pay? It pays 12.5 cents per word. Writing needs writers, and that culture is supported by authors who are fed, watered, housed, and liquored.

Fifth: because it is an open market to which you will be able to submit your own work.

Sixth: Brian is a great editor and a cool dude and he fears ponies for some reason.

Seventh: you can still get rewards that feature ME ME ME — like, say, signed Miriam Black books.

Eighth: because I said so.

Ninth: because your gods are telling you to do this lest they forsake you.

Tenth: because awesome, that’s why.

It’s almost over. The Kickstarter campaign ends Monday night. It’s just over halfway there, which means miles to go before we sleep. And by “we sleep” I mean “Brian White has his heart explode.” So: please. Support a great magazine. A year’s worth of fiction. A pay rate that matters. Brave work by interesting authors.

If you want to pledge now, click here.

If you can’t, please at least spread the word? Thanks!

*stares*

Last week’s challenge: Ten Little Chapters

I have chosen ten random words.

Your goal: to choose five of these and incorporate them into a single piece of flash fiction.

The words:

Whalebone

Foxglove

Djinn

Orphan

Lollipop

Casket

Hermit

Hound

Acid

Topaz

There’s your list.

Choose five.

Write 1000-word short story.

Post at your blog or online space.

Give us a link to the story in the comments below.

Any genre will do.

Due by April 4th, noon, EST.

Back in the day, Captain Abraham Idaho Cleveland had led the Fleet into battle against an implacable machine intelligence capable of devouring entire worlds. But after saving a planet, and getting a bum robot knee in the process, he finds himself relegated to one of the most remote backwaters in Fleetspace to oversee the decommissioning of a semi-deserted space station well past its use-by date.

But all is not well aboard the U-Star Coast City. The station’s reclusive Commandant is nowhere to be seen, leaving Cleveland to deal with a hostile crew on his own. Persistent malfunctions plague the station’s systems while interference from a toxic purple star makes even ordinary communications problematic. Alien shadows and whispers seem to haunt the lonely corridors and airlocks, fraying the nerves of everyone aboard.

Isolated and friendless, Cleveland reaches out to the universe via an old-fashioned subspace radio, only to tune into a strange, enigmatic signal: a woman’s voice that seems to echo across a thousand light-years of space. But is the transmission just a random bit of static from the past—or a warning of an undying menace beyond mortal comprehension?      

***

1. WRITE WHAT YOU LOVE.

While I consider myself to be a science fiction writer, The Burning Dark is my first published foray into space opera. I grew up with a love of spaceships and aliens and interplanetary adventure, so it’s perhaps a little odd that it’s only with my fifth novel that I finally explored this kind of story.

Then again, looking back at my first four novels, are they really science fiction? Empire State and The Age Atomic are – they are at least based on a sci-fi idea, even if that idea is the stuff of pulp fiction, complete with a pulp detective as the lead character. Seven Wonders is a superhero novel, all spandex and muscles and people shooting laser beams out of their eyes. Is that science fiction? Partly, but superheroes occupy a weird grey area all of their own. And Hang Wire is urban fantasy, fair and square.

So… science fiction writer? Hmm, sometimes. But sometimes not!

I’m often asked why – and how – I write across different genres. My answer to this is pretty simple: I write what I love. I love science fiction. I also love superheroes, urban fantasy, space opera, crime, and noir. When I write – and I’m sure most writers will recognize this – it’s less a case of deciding to sit down and write, for example, a space opera. You sit down and write the story that is burning in your mind, write the characters that are so alive in your imagination that your brain will melt out of your ears if you don’t let them tell their story.

With practice and experience, you can tame your imagination – and you have to, if you need to write a contracted book with a deadline attached. But you’re still writing what you love, because that’s why the book was contracted in the first place.

Some writers love epic fantasy, and they write epic fantasy. Some love military SF, and they write military SF. And that’s brilliant, because when you know your genre inside-out and upside-down, you’re in the perfect place to make your mark on it.

Some writers shift around. Writers like me. I write because I love writing, and I write the stories I love. To me, it’s irrelevant if it’s science fiction, or urban fantasy, or crime. The genre is the last thing I consciously think about. Okay, if I start a new project and it’s full of spaceships, it’s obvious that’s science fiction, but with The Burning Dark, I never said “I’m going to write a space opera”. What I did say was “I’m going to write this story about a forgotten war hero sent to a derelict and haunted space station.”

From there, I build the world, and characters came to life. It just happened to be a mix of space opera and ghost story. And I absolutely loved it.

2. THE EDITOR IS ALWAYS RIGHT.

You have no idea how serious I am about this point. The editor is always right. Always. Right. It’s their job: you write the book, they edit it, and together – together – you make it the best book you possibly can.

As a writer, you live with a story for months, years even. By the time you’ve done a zillion drafts and a zillion-squared edits, you’ve read and re-read the damn thing so much that it becomes less a book, more a collection of words that seem to form some kind of sequence, if only you could see what it was.

You are way, way too close to it.

The original version of The Burning Dark had a very different ending. It was pretty vague, and I knew it, but I wasn’t really sure what else to do. I’d tried to reassure myself that it was the journey that mattered, not the ending, but it bugged me.

Then my editor sent back his notes. They were great, because not only were they a full line-edit of the manuscript, as I suspected, but he has a habit of asking questions and posing theories in the comments. A lot of these don’t require any specific actions, they just show how he is processing the story as he reads it.

But sometimes they lead in some very interesting directions.

Some story background: A thousand years in the future, humanity is united into a single military entity, the Fleet, to battle a swarming machine intelligence, the Spiders. The Spiders are a gestalt mind, the individual components of which are linked together by a psychic communications network, which humans call the SpiderWeb. To combat this, the Fleet developed a division of psi-marines, psychic front-line troops who can tap into the SpiderWeb with their minds, disrupting the network while the regular marines go in for the kill.

In The Burning Dark, there’s just one psi-marine left on the space station with the crew. We learn about her job, about how the psi-marines work, how she could attack the Spider network with her mind and… that was it.

My editor put a comment against this, which said:

“Cool. Too bad we don’t see this happen.”

With that simple comment, he’d not only identified what was missing from the story, but had pointed towards what should really happen at the end.

On the basis of that single comment, I completely rewrote the final third of the book. The end result was orders of magnitude stronger than the original version.

So remember, kids: the editor is always right.

3. CHOOSE YOUR SEASONING. SPRINKLE LIBERALLY.

Repeat after me: The Burning Dark is not a horror novel. Sure, it’s dark and creepy, and scary too – one editor at Tor said the book freaked her out so much she couldn’t finish it! But it’s not horror. It’s space opera, or if you really want to push me, I’ll say it’s a science fiction ghost story. That’s where the idea came from, anyway – what if you had a traditional ghost story, but instead of a haunted house, you had a haunted space station?

That seemed like a pretty good hook, and led me in all kinds of interesting directions as I kept as many of the tropes of a clanking-chains ghost story in the book as possible. Strange moving shadows show up on surveillance feeds. Doors open and close by themselves. The station is plagued by cold spots, and eventually a bunch of foolhardy marines even hold a séance in the mess.

But, at its heart, The Burning Dark is a science fiction novel. It just happens to be a creepy one.

In my mind, horror is not even really a genre – it’s a flavour, something that can be applied to any kind of story at all. Noir is another good example – noir is complex and misunderstood, but a noir novel doesn’t necessarily mean it’s about crime, or features detectives (private or otherwise).

Horror and noir (and I’d add steampunk to that list) are nebulous, more about tone and theme than plot. In contrast, a police procedural is a police procedural. Epic fantasy is epic fantasy. Some genres have strict rules and tropes which readers expect. Others are looser. Others, like horror, are so loose than can fit over nearly anything.

The Burning Dark is scary, for sure, but that’s not the aim of the book. The aim of the book was to tell this story about some people trapped in a bad, bad situation, one beyond their understanding at the edge of space. That it happened to be creepy was just part of it.

4. FOLLOW THE STORY QUESTIONS.

As I said over at The Big Idea , The Burning Dark sprang from two different “what if?” questions: What if you had a traditional ghost story, but instead of a haunted house, you had a haunted space station? And what if that old legend of the lost cosmonauts – Soviet spacefarers sent into orbit before Yuri Gagarin but doomed never to return, their failures erased from all official record – was real?

Those were the hooks – the central concepts, around which I built the story. One thing I’ve spoken about before was how sometimes a writer can confuse an idea with a story, when really they’re two separate things. Sit down to write an idea, and you’ll be out of things to say within a few pages. Start writing a story, and the sky is the limit.

From those two ideas, all I had to do to build the book was follow the logical trail of questions. If a space station is haunted, what is it haunted by? Is it a ghost in the traditional sense? What if there was something else going on? What if somebody in authority knew the truth? If that truth was kept secret, how much do the crew know? How do they react to the weird situation  – and how do they react when they figure out the secret? What would happen if someone arrived in the middle of it all, unaware that some serious shit was going down? What if that person had been sent there deliberately? What if they didn’t know that?

And so on. One question leads to another, leads to another. Each answer provides another piece of the jigsaw puzzle, creating a complex narrative with a whole boatload of mystery – which is exactly what a story like this needed.

5. IF YOU DIG IT, YOUR READERS WILL DIG IT TOO.

Writers go through a lot of phases during the writing of a book, ranging from “this is the best idea in the history of literature” to “I hate myself and this book, I’m just not sure which I hate more.” Most of the time, if you’re lucky, you exist somewhere in between, squeezing words out like squeezing blood from a stone, then being pleasantly surprised later to find that the last few pages you wrote don’t suck as much as you thought they did.

This is normal. In fact, if it didn’t happen this way, I’d suspect something was going very, very wrong.

But there is a point, somewhere along the line, where you like what you’ve done. It might be a fleeting sensation to break the monotony of self-doubt, and it’s often surprising, but eventually you’ll understand that you might just have something worth a damn.

I can still remember when this happened with The Burning Dark. I was doing a final re-read before sending the manuscript to my agent. It was late at night, and the house was quiet. On the space station, a marine was chasing shadows before confronting something that nearly breaks his mind.

And you know what? It was as creepy as hell. I had to stop, go downstairs for a cup of tea, and put something mindless on TV for a while.

As a writer, when that happens, grab the moment. Remember it. This is why you write in the first place. You create something new out of nothing, and when the stars align, it can take on a life of its own. Even in the mind of the writer.

And as the saying goes, if you enjoy what you write, then your readers will enjoy it too.

Just so long as they don’t mind going to bed with the lights on…

* * *

Adam Christopher is a novelist, the author of Empire State, Seven Wonders, The Age Atomic, Hang Wire, and the forthcoming The Burning Dark. In 2010, as an editor, Christopher won a Sir Julius Vogel award, New Zealand’s highest science fiction honour. His debut novel, Empire State, was SciFiNow’s Book of the Year and a Financial Times Book of the Year for 2012. In 2013, he was nominated for the Sir Julius Vogel award for Best New Talent, with Empire State shortlisted for Best Novel. Born in New Zealand, he has lived in Great Britain since 2006.

Adam Christopher: Website | Twitter  

The Burning Dark:  Amazon | Amazon UK | Indiebound | B&N | Add on Goodreads

1. It’s far too easy to make assumptions (or, how I didn’t end up maligning the Hell’s Angels).

I try to avoid making assumptions about the types of characters I write.  But unquestioned stereotypes are so freakin’ easy to fall into; they sneak in and breed like warty little gremlins, cackling with glee as they wait to embarrass the author. Case in point: My main character gets attacked by a motorcycle gang, and when I first wrote that scene, I painted their violence as being entirely unremarkable.

Then I ended up working on a film with a bunch of actual Hell’s Angels. (My “day job” is working in Hollywood.  Yes, my life is awesome.)

It turns out they were all very nice guys.  Tough, yes, and I DEFINITELY wouldn’t want to cross them, but if you didn’t fuck with them, they weren’t going to fuck with you.  And they were great people to work with: respectful and on the ball and dedicated to doing the best job they could.

And one of them said to me when we were shooting the breeze off set — he told me about how much it bugs them, the way they’re portrayed in the media, and how they’re trying to fight against that.  Show the world that’s not who they are.

I said, “Oh.  Um.  Yeah.”  Then I went home and completely switched around the way my main character responds to the biker attack.

It’s so fucking easy not to question things.

2. Write what you love.  You can get the haters to love it, too.

As someone who was essentially writing mathematical fiction — which is even further down the Mohs scale than hard scifi — I was terrified that NOBODY WOULD ENJOY IT.  After all, hating math is practically a meme.

What happened: My non-math betas not only loved it, they demanded I add MORE MATH.  And they told me over and over again, “Your audience is not just math nerds.  This has much wider appeal than you think it does.”

Well, that was more luck than anything, I admit.  But I am now utterly fearless about writing pretty much whatever I feel like — because if it’s possible to make a book about math entertaining to math-haters, then hell, it’s possible with anything!

3. Sometimes you have to fuck the research.

I’ve always been a research fiend.  Get everything right.  Down to the smallest detail.

I researched the shit out of everything in Zero Sum Game.  And I remember very clearly the moment I found out a very minor detail of law enforcement procedure, sat down to fix it, and realized (1) I COULD fix it, but (2) fixing it would utterly fuck up my pacing. It would make the book less enjoyable.

After much agonizing, I fudged things a little and left it the way it was.

And a part of me died a little inside, the super-obsessive-research-fiend part of me.  (That part of me still can’t believe I did it.)  But I’ll stand by the decision, no matter how guilty I feel admitting it — because it was what the story needed, and the story had to come first.

I now understand better why some creators take the liberties they do.

4. Good editors are amazeballs.

I write super clean prose and I had four ridiculously good beta readers and an expert linguist who copyedited dialect for me.  I’d been told professional editing would still level me up, but I’m not sure I truly grokked how much until I started working with my editor.

Boy howdy, then I got it.

My editor’s name is Anna Genoese, and she was incredible.  Many of her changes were seemingly tiny — a suggested comma here, moving a paragraph break down one sentence there.  But the difference was like the difference between a nice, serviceable handgun versus one with a retouched trigger pull and customized sights and fancy custom grips that fit in your hand like they’re growing out of your palm.  One you might look at and say, “Yeah, cool, this is a solid piece of work,” but the other one you say, “OMG I’M SO TURNED ON I WANT TO LICK THIS WEAPON.”

. . . it’s possible I’ve been writing about guns for far too long.

Anyway: Love your editors.  Love them like the godlike beings they are.

5. Community matters.

Once I finished the rough draft of Zero Sum Game, I decided I needed some sort of online presence . . . thing.  So I started a blog and joined Absolute Write.

Holy motherfucking crap.

The knowledge on those boards was like drinking from a firehose.  I learned more in my first month on AW than I’d learned in all of my prior research combined.

And then I started to develop relationships.

Friends.  People I bonded with about writing like we were covered in barnacle glue. Writing began eating my life whole even more than it already had, because it became something I was doing with my best friends.

Now we gather in a chatroom every morning and do writing rounds together.  We beta for each other and brainstorm with each other. We also support each other and mock each other and recommend books and make sex jokes and more often than not devolve into depravity.  They’re immensely talented people, to the point where I look at myself and say, “Self, I am so knock-down jealous of you for having such cool friends.  You do not deserve these people.”

Granted, a lot of this was luck, but if I’d known beforehand how awesome it would be, I would’ve done everything in my power to make it happen, including rewriting the laws of the time-space continuum to make sure I met them. Because if I look at before I had a writing community versus now, it feels like I went from eating only gruel to discovering the world contained PIZZA AND MANGOS AND BACON AND CHOCOLATE.

Plus, you know, now I know at least nine people will buy my book.