I have detected an insidious plot.

Hollywood hates our cities.

Consider, if you will, that in the following films (and there may be more) over the last ten or so years, one or several cities are prominently and obviously destroyed, frequently in the third act, sometimes due to some kind of invasion:

Man of Steel, Star Trek Into Darkness, Transformers Dark of the Moon, Transformers Age of Extinction, the LEGO Movie, Godzilla, Pacific Rim, Cloverfield, Avengers, World War Z, War of the Worlds, 2012, and Beverly Hills Chihuahua.

Wait, maybe not that last one.

Other films (Dark Knight Rises, Chronicle, the last Matrix movie) are city-destruction-adjacent.

I am left to conclude that Hollywood — acting as a self-aware hive-mind that has perhaps grown disgusted with our enjoyment of its leavings — is warning us that it will soon punch, kick and ‘asplode one or several major cities. It will headbutt holes in dark buildings. Because it angers.

IT ANGERS.

Okay, maybe not.

But I do find this interesting — I always love looking back over prior decades of film and trying to suss out, just what the fuck were people thinking? What fears and desires drove our entertainment needs? In 100 years we’ll look at the decade between 2030-2040 and ask, “What did all the orgies mean? Why all the robot goats? And all those shots of old men pooping in bowler hats. WEIRD.”

Seems that in the last decade, we’ve been afraid of the destruction of our cities.

Global warming? Maybe. Certainly some hints of that, whispered in any of the films that have nature at the heart of our metropolitan eradication, right?

Probably, though, this is the legacy of 9/11 — particularly since a lot of the films center around an invading force that fucks up our shit. Aliens, a lot of the time — even those we may not think of as aliens (Transformers, Kryptonians). And the new “Khan” is something of a terrorist, is he not? Makes sense, then, that this is the ghost of that day haunting our entertainment almost mindlessly at this point. We’re still a nation that remembers those buildings come down and, let’s be honest, it’s been a bit of a cultural splinter in the heel of our foot since then — stands to figure that it would bleed out all over our screen.

Or maybe we just get big boners when we watch buildings go boom.

Whatever the reason, for my mileage it’s growing increasingly boring.

Especially since they all look the same.

DARK SLATE-BLUE SKY

DARK ALIEN SHIPS THAT ARE JAGGED

CHUNKS TAKEN OUT OF DARK BUILDINGS

SOME GREY-BLUE LASER BEAM THING THAT’S ALSO SORTA DARK SOMEHOW

PYOOOOOOOOOO

BOOSH

DEBRIS

SCREAMING

DARKNESS

(And, if it’s a Michael Bay film, you can add in: SPACE SHUTTLE / ARMY GUYS / JETS OVERHEAD/ “JOKES” THAT ARE SUPPOSED TO BE “FUNNY” / MALE GAZE / GLISTENING SWEAT / EXPLOSIONS / MORE EXPLOSIONS / ASTRONAUTS.)

It all feels very cut and paste. You could take scenes from Man of Steel, intersperse them into Transformers, maybe grab one from the newest Thor, and nobody would know the difference. And jeez, maybe that’s what it is. Maybe once someone created these CGI assets, they’re just passing them around like a joint in a dorm room — “You want Chicago getting destroyed? I’ll just give you the thumb drive, Spielberg. It’s been in like, six other movies by now, so whatevs.”

What does this say about us, as an audience?

Maybe something. Maybe nothing.

What does it say for filmmakers of Big Budget Plotstravaganzas?

Time to actually find some original content, methinks.

I mean, how about a giant space ape who arrives and builds cities where we don’t want them? Huh? Howzabout that? BOOM. This is why I should be allowed to write movies.

Or maybe “shouldn’t.”

Probably that, yeah.

When I was a kid, I loved reading D&D so much (I hadn’t yet played it yet) that when I heard the phrase, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” I thought the saying literally meant like, an actual D&D Beholder monster — you know, the big floating one-eyed volleyball with all the phallic eye-stalks? For some reason, I assumed the Beholder was the arbiter of beauty, which I found somewhat ironic given that the Beholder was one ugly motherfucker. But maybe that, I thought, was the point. Maybe that said something about the subjective nature of beauty: if such a grotesque monster was the keeper of the ideal, maybe beauty was a wildly moving target?

And now, with a little perspective, I have come to believe that someone out there thinks the Beholder is pretty. I mean, even in its ugliness the creature is a marvel of monstrousness — beautiful in its horror, elegant in the calculations of its nightmare fuel. One assumes that other Beholders think Beholders are fucking hot. Right? A Beholder sees another Beholder across the room and licks its razor-fang teeth while rancid-smelling saliva patters at the ground beneath it. Its eye-stalks bulge and stiffen. Its crevices weep with excitement.

This is a post more about our idea of beauty than it is about the D&D Monster Manual, by the way.

Anyway, that weird preamble leads me to this blog post — “Not Everyone Is Beautiful” — which is one of those posts I’ve seen ping-ponging around Facebook. Facebook seems to be where I get my rage from these days (seriously, it’s like a neverending well of fresh, clean scowl juice).

So, here I am.

The title of that post makes its point clear.

Not everyone is beautiful.

Okay.

That idea, and the post that supports it, is at least half-bullshit.

I understand its point, somewhat, and at the core of its argument, I agree: beauty, physical beauty, is given way too much priority. In fact, let’s fast-forward to the end of the post:

I want to tell you something, whoever you are. I don’t know if you’re beautiful, funny, smart, friendly, musical, caring, diligent, athletic, or anything else about you. All I know is this:

You are valuable.

You are important.

You are interesting.

You are worth loving.

So forget about “beautiful”. It’s become an ugly word anyway.

That’s great! Well-done, sir! I agree.

That’s a killer end to that post, and is just, aww. It gives my tummy a tickle of warmth and possibility. Unfortunately, you have to slog through some less… erm, agreeable stuff to get there.

Everyone is not beautiful. Some people have tumors the size of a second head growing out of their ears. Some people have skin like the Michelin man. Some people lose fingers, legs, or eyes in horrific assembly-line machine accidents. People have warts and blemishes and hair loss and dead teeth and lazy eyes and cleft palates and third nipples and unibrows.

YES HA HA HA THE DEFORMED AND DISABLED CANNOT BE BEAUTIFUL

THEY ARE UGLY AND SHOULD JUST ACCEPT THAT

I MEAN JEEZ

whoa, wait, wut.

Holy crap, really?

A cleft palate takes you off the beauty list?

My father was missing a finger.

Hair loss? Hair loss? I’m going bald. Uh-oh.

(And a third nipple is just one more nipple to love, I’ll have you know.)

He goes onto say:

There are plenty of people that are not physically appealing to look at, the primary and most widely used meaning of the word “beautiful”. So why do we use the word as a catch-all for any sort of positive attribute?

Nobody says, “Everybody is a good listener.” Nobody says, “Everyone is athletic to somebody.” Nobody says, “You are an amazing writer, whether you know it or not.” I keep waiting, but they never say it.

But then later:

Last week’s challenge: “Doing The Subgenre Twist”

This week —

You’ve got 1000 words to write about bad parents.

Whatever that means to you? Write it down into a story.

Any genre will do.

Write the story at your blog, drop a link in the comments here so we can read it.

And that’s it.

Due by Friday, July 4th, at noon EST.

That is pretty much the grossest blog title I have ever written.

But it’s done. It’s too late. I can’t delete it now.

(I can totally delete it. And yet, I don’t. What’s that say about me?)

(HINT: IT SAYS I HAVE BEEN DRINKING.)

Anyway.

Let’s talk about store-bought salad dressings.

Most of them are shitty.

Like, I don’t mean that they contain actual feces, I just mean — they’re kinda weak. They may in fact be where the phrase “weak sauce” comes from. A lot of store-bought things are weak, honestly, but the ability to buy them is so much easier than actually making them. That said, salad dressings do not fall into this category, because salad dressings are hella dopey easy to make. You could literally, while concussed from a cantankerous mule kick, while high on benzodiazepine, while blinded in one eye by a misting of cat urine, make salad dressing. It’s so easy, you’ll feel like an asshole for ever having procured salad dressing from the store.

Anyway, I wanted to make my own Russian dressing. Or Thousand Island dressing. I dunno why it shares those two names, and really, I’m too lazy to Google it, so I’m gonna go ahead and assume it’s similar to the “French Fries became ‘Freedom Fries'” thing — maybe we were mad at Russia because of the Cold War, and so we stopped marketing Russian dressing because who would ever buy Communist Red Sauce to put on their Fresh American Lettuce. Could be we called it “Thousand Island” because that’s what we were going to do to Mother Russia with our nuclear bombs — turn the big-ass country into a thousand little islands with big kaboom.

I don’t know and I don’t care.

You can call this what you want. Hot Wendig Dressing. Gulag Gravy. Putin Coulis. Zesty Vegetable Fluid Blanket. I’m happy to take suggestions in the comments below.

Point is, you want to make a dressing for your salad.

I’m going to tell you how to do that.

Take mayonnaise.

One cup of it.

No, not Miracle Whip. Don’t bring that nonsense up in my house. You know what Miracle Whip is? It’s emulsified diabetes. With sadness oil stirred in for extra sadness. It’s gross. Don’t use it. If you use Miracle Whip, then Flavor Jesus will come down from his restaurant in Heaven and burn your soul in the castigating fires of a George Foreman grill.

Miracle Whip. What is wrong with you?

Mayonnaise.

You can make your own mayonnaise, but that really is one of those things I think it’s maybe easier to buy than make. Whatever. I like Duke’s. Your mileage may vary. (And now I fully expect you homemade mayo types to freak out in the comments about how easy it is — so, please do, I accept any and all mayo recipes you care to share, food nerds.)

One cup goes into a blender. Or into a receptacle where you can use one of those cool stick blenders. Note that I did not say “dick blender.” That is a whole different thing.

Did I mention I’ve been drinking?

WHATEVER NO YOU SHUT UP

*throws a jar of pickles at your head*

Wait, gimme those pickles back, we’re gonna need ’em.

Okay, so, like I said: one cup of mayo.

Then, four tablespoons of ketchup.

Then, one tablespoon of hot sauce. Your choice of hot sauce is your own — obviously, these days, Sriracha is quite popular on pretty much everything. I eat it on rice, hot dogs, hamburgers, pandas, street urchins. (Hey, jerk, don’t judge; street urchin is my favorite sushi.) Here, though, I might casually suggest Frank’s Hot Sauce. Because Frank’s.

One tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce (which is pronounced WOOSHTERSHURESHEER SHASS). Also, if you did not realize this as apparently many do not, Worcestershire sauce is actually just fish sauce. Seriously. People blanch at using fish sauce in their Thai dishes but then liberally dose something else with this stuff? It’s fermented anchovies, people. At least it’s not fermented people, people. Because, really, people are gross.

Three peeled shallots.

You could do onion or garlic but just suck it up and go buy some shallots. Shallots are awesome because they’re what happens when onion and garlic have a baby.

Then 1/4 teaspoon of smoked paprika (sweet or hot).

The smoke is key because I said so.

Two tablespoons of sweet pickle relish. (Or, if you don’t have relish, but do have bread-and-butter sweet pickles, toss a rough equivalent into the mix.)

Pinch of salt.

Pinch of pepper.

Blend until… well, blended. What else would you do? Blend until the world ends? Blend until your house catches fire? BLEND UNTIL YOU STARVE TO DEATH, STANDING BY THE BLENDER LIKE A SAD HOUND WHOSE MASTER DIED AT WAR AND WILL NEVER RETURN HOME.

Just blend it up, for Chrissakes.

Then put it on your salad and eat it. Or just drink it if you’re one of those weirdo adults who are averse to vegetables. Though, point of fact, if you’re one of those weirdo adults who are averse to vegetables, you’re a dumb person. And probably unhealthy. Enjoy your scurvy and your rickets, your weak bones and your tumbling teeth. Vegetables are amazing when they’re cooked right and you need to grow up right now and learn to eat a fucking carrot once in a while.

Meat is awesome, too, but vegetables are just meat that grew in the ground.

Whatever. Enjoy the Hot Wendig Sauce.

Goes good on salads, burgers, pandas, and street urchins.

Brian McClellan is my beard brother. TREAT HIM WELL, INTERNETS. That is all. Anyway, here he is to talk about some things and some stuff. Stay frosty.

* * *

A week ago I put out a new novella called Servant of the Crown. It’s the second novella and fifth piece of short fiction based off the world I created in the Powder Mage trilogy. That trilogy, starting with the novel Promise of Blood, is published by Orbit Books, the science fiction and fantasy imprint of Hachette. The short fiction is something I put out myself electronically.

This makes me a “hybrid” author. You may have heard the term. Our own friend Chuck Wendig has written about it for Writer’s Digest. In short, a hybrid author is someone who has fingers in both traditional and self-publishing. These kind of authors are becoming more and more common.

In my experience, most authors approach hybridization by putting out some novels themselves and others with their publishers. Maybe it’s every other book. Maybe one in three. Everyone does it differently and that’s something that I took to heart when I got my initial idea for the Powder Mage short fiction.

Back when I had just signed my first contract, I asked an author what he thought about writing in other universes for pay. Star Wars, video game freelancing, that kind of thing. I had gotten a nice advance but I knew it wouldn’t pay all my bills, and was looking around for other options. He told me to forget it. Freelancing for another intellectual property is fantastic and can pay well, but I had a good a contract for a shiny hardcover trilogy. Focus on my own universe because it was just that: mine.

I thought about this a lot. I considered applying for a creative position at Riot, one of my favorite computer game companies. I daydreamed about writing for Blizzard or Star Wars. After all, I grew up reading Star Wars novels and playing Warcraft. How stinking cool would that be to write in those universes? I never pursued it seriously.

The idea of self-publishing came up once in a while when my bills were tight. I had some old novels laying around that I could clean up and put out myself, but that seemed kind of silly when I have an agent and a publisher. If I was going to go to that effort I might as well try to sell them traditionally. But I worried about trying to juggle two original universes. I don’t have that kind of brain power.

Like looking for a creative job in another EU, I never took the plunge on self-publishing a novel. Then, strangely enough, I read an article about erotica.

The article talked a bit about the success some erotica authors were finding on Kindle, Nook, and the other self-publishing platforms. They’d go for volume, pumping out a 4000-word piece every week or two, and build themselves a big backlist. Over time, that turns into a pretty solid income stream.

We could have a debate over “art” and “selling out” and “oversaturation of the market,” but I thought that was a smart business model. Maybe I could make a serious go at self-publishing with shorter stuff like what these particular erotica authors were doing. But I was writing in fantasy, not erotica, with a different end-game in mind. I didn’t want to just pump out a bunch of content to make a buck. I wanted to create something with the depth of a fantasy world and, happily enough, I had a universe already handy.

I took an idea for an origin story of one of the side characters from my trilogy and wrote an 8000 word piece called “The Girl of Hrusch Avenue.”

I had a budget of exactly $0. Using some awesome friends and family, I had it edited professionally and threw together an adequate (if generic) bit of cover art. The only hiccup came when my agent asked if my publisher was going to be cool with this. After all, they had the rights to the trilogy that this universe was attached to. After a stressful day or two waiting for my agent to check with them, I got the green light.

The result wasn’t overwhelming at first. The way Amazon’s royalty rate is set up I would only make $.35 off of a $.99 sale, and I could not in good conscience charge $2.99 for one of these short pieces (the minimum required to make a 70% royalty rate). But they kept selling consistently, and my first book Promise of Blood was doing better and better, and I noticed that when my novel had a good week the short piece would often have a good week as well. It was a small spike, no more than a few books, but a logical and easy correlation.

I wrote another short piece and did the same thing. Zero budget but with professional editing and lots of beta readers. Put it out. It did a little better than the first. Then Promise of Blood went on sale for $1.99 and got some well-placed publicity and there was a (for me) huge spike on the short pieces as well, which put money directly into my pocket every month. For someone who gets paid sporadically, that’s kind of a huge deal.

Over the fall, a bunch of awesome things happened. Promise of Blood was a finalist for Best Debut Goodreads Author in the Goodreads Choice Awards and a semi-finalist in the Fantasy category. It garnered a few more cover quotes by really awesome authors. The sales continued to increase (it was still $1.99 at this point) and with them the sales of my short fiction. For about every ten sales I got of the novel, each piece of short fiction sold one. Small, sure, but that does add up.

I was pounding out book three, The Autumn Republic, at this point. I had ideas for other short fiction and fans had started to ask me about putting out more. But I was pretty busy. That’s when Orbit delayed The Crimson Campaign by two months. It was a good decision in the end and I’m glad they did it, but I was the one who had to tell fans that it would be late. In the end, I delivered the news and immediately tore into writing what would become my first novella, Forsworn. I hoped if I could put out something new, they might forgive the delay easier.

I revisited the Powder Mage Universe, this time with a prequel featuring the mother of one of the main characters. I gave myself a $500 budget, which I quickly went over, and I commissioned my first professional art and was able to pay a copy editor. With a longer piece and real cover art, I felt good about charging $2.99. Note that this means Forsworn would make six times as much money per sale as “The Girl of Hrusch Avenue.”

From start to finish, Forsworn went from an idea to readers’ hands in about six weeks, reaching them a full two weeks before Crimson Campaign‘s original release date. It sold well and no one complained about the price, which is something I worried about a lot. I never want people to feel like I’m trying to rip them off.

This is the point I realized that I had created my own expanded universe.

There are a few downsides to self-publishing an EU. For one, I have to keep all this stuff straight. If I write something in a short piece it’s technically cannon. I can’t just pull a Star Wars and wave my hand, saying none of this actually happened in-universe.

Well, I could, but it would be a jerk thing to do.

I worry about oversaturation. More publishing credits means I’m hawking more things on social media, which is a dangerous line to walk before getting all of your friends and fans annoyed with you. I also worry if I put out one of these short pieces too often if people will get sick of them, but I suppose if that happens I’ll just see sales dry up.

In the end, it has too many upsides to ignore. It’s good for me because I get to pull down an extra small salary from a half dozen electronic publishers. I get to explore all the little side plots and prequel stuff that would never make it into the novels. I also have greater control. I can see how many of each story are selling each week and on what format, with all that data at my fingertips. Deadlines and production times aren’t really a thing. The last novella, Servant of the Crown, went from an idea to published in less than four weeks.

It’s good for my publisher because I’m creating things that draw my fans deeper into the world, getting them more excited for the next book to come out. And it’s good for my fans, because they get to explore the world alongside me. Every time someone emails me and says they can’t get enough of the Powder Mage Trilogy, I have someplace I can point them.

All of this is because, as a friend once advised me to do, I’ve invested in my own universe rather than one that belongs to someone else.

* * *

Brian is a flintlock fantasy author of the Powder Mage Trilogy, including Promise of Blood, recent winner of the Gemmell Morningstar Award. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio with his wife, where he plays computer games, gardens, and tends his hive of minions honey bees.

His newest is the novella, Servant of the Crown:

Captain Tamas is an ambitious young officer in the Adran army. As a commoner, he is one of very few without noble blood to hold a rank. When he challenges the son of a duke over an insult, the subsequent duel lands him in hot water with the nobility and the royal cabal of Privileged sorcerers. Tamas is soon drawn into a conflict that goes to the very highest office in the land, and his only ally is the most unlikely of people: a young noblewoman named Erika, who needs Tamas to teach her how to wield her powers as a powder mage.

Brian McClellan: Website | Twitter

The Powder Mage Series: Amazon | B&N

Hey, sooooo. Here’s something.

Planning on pre-ordering Blightborn?

If you do, you could win a Kindle Paperwhite.

Blightborn, Book Two in my Heartland series, continues the adventures of the Big Sky Scavengers in a cornpunk agri-dystopi-pocalyptic future where the poor Heartlanders scrabble in the dust and the bloodthirsty corn while the rich Empyrean flotillas float above their heads.

The official description:

Cael McAvoy is on the run. He’s heading toward the Empyrean to rescue his sister, Merelda, and to find Gwennie before she’s lost to Cael forever. With his pals, Lane and Rigo, Cael journeys across the Heartland to catch a ride into the sky. But with Boyland and others after them, Cael and his friends won’t make it through unchanged.

Gwennie’s living the life of a Lottery winner, but it’s not what she expected. Separated from her family, Gwennie makes a bold move—one that catches the attention of the Empyrean and changes the course of an Empyrean man’s life.

The crew from Boxelder aren’t the only folks willing to sacrifice everything to see the Empyrean fall. The question is: Can the others be trusted?

They’d all better hurry. Because the Empyrean has plans that could ensure that the Heartland never fights back again.

Chuck Wendig’s riveting sequel to Under the Empyrean Sky plunges readers into an unsettling world of inequality and destruction, and fleshes out a cast of ragtag characters all fighting for survival and, ultimately, change.

It also features more than one Pegasus. And a grackle named “Erasmus.”

Just so you know.

Anyway!

So, the book comes out next month in Kindle, paperback, and hardback (yep, all three formats at once). Preorder any of these — and send me proof of said pre-order — and you might win the aforementioned Kindle Paperwhite. (Extra bonus: pre-order the Kindle version, which is only $3.99, and you get a free short story set before Under the Empyrean Sky.)

I’ll also toss a prize-pack to a runner-up.

Prize-pack is a handful of my books devalued with my signature:

The Kick-Ass Writer

Under the Empyrean Sky (hardcover)

Unclean Spirits 

The Cormorant

You can send proof of preorder to me at terribleminds@gmail.com.

Subject of the email must be: [Blightborn Preorder Contest Entry]

Brackets included, please.

Proof of pre-order should be easy to obtain. Just screencap the order information (you can grab it on Amazon in Your Account > Your Orders / Digital Orders > Open Orders), then email it to me.

This contest is good up until 11:59 EST on Monday, July 28th.

United States participants only, please.

I’ll pick two winners (one for the Kindle, one for the books) on Tuesday, July 29th.