Hey, did you know I’m gonna be at the Tucson Festival of Books this weekend?

OH BUT I AM.

I shall be flying in for the weekend and doing battle with various saguaro cacti and black widow spiders in order to bring you me, the beard, my books, and my wisdom — er, “wisdom.” Sorry, I was told by a court of law that I had to put that in very obvious air quotes. Whatever. Stupid judge. Point is! I’m going to be there, and so will other awesome people like, ohhh, say: Kevin Hearne, Sam Sykes, Elizabeth Bear, Jonathan Maberry, and more.

My schedule is below (or you can see it here at the festival website).

Workshop: How to Hook Readers With Your Blog

A central component of many an author’s online presence is the blog or web log, an easy-to-update website that makes it simple to keep in touch with your fans. How do you get readers to visit your blog in the first place, and what makes a blog compelling and entertaining enough that visitors will want to come back to it again and again?

Integrated Learning Center Room 137 (Seats 60, Wheelchair accessible)

Sat, Mar 15, 10:00 am – 11:00 am

Book/Movie Biz

Signing area: Sales & Signing Area #4 – Integrated Learning Center (following presentation)

Panelists: Shari Stauch, Chuck Wendig

Signing: UA Tent

Sat, Mar 15, 1:00pm

Signing will be located in the University of Arizona bookstore;s main tent on the UA mall.

Building Your Platform

What is an author’s platform, anyway? Industry professionals use the idea to refer to several things, but perhaps the easiest way to think about it is that your platform is made up of the people who know you and your work: your fans, in other words. In addition to writing great books, building your fan base is critical to your long-term success as an author: discover how to do it in this session.

Integrated Learning Center Room 130 (Seats 143, Wheelchair accessible)

Sat, Mar 15, 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm

Book/Movie Biz

Signing area: Sales & Signing Area #4 – Integrated Learning Center (following presentation)

Panelists: Vickie Mullins, Grael Norton, Chuck Wendig

Moderator: Mary Holden

World Building: Creating Imaginary Worlds

Fantasy authors use their imaginations to create richly detailed worlds with their own geographies, histories, cultures, languages, and inhabitants. Four authors will share their processes of world building.

Education Kiva (Seats 200)

Sun, Mar 16, 11:30 am – 12:30 pm

Children/Teens

Signing area: Signing Area #3 – Children’s (following presentation)

Panelists: Cornelia Funke, Aprilynne Pike, Janni Lee Simner, Chuck Wendig

Moderator: Nancy Brown

Writing for the YA Market

This panel of successful authors of young adult fiction will share their analysis of the current YA market and their strategies as authors of different genres, including realistic fiction, fantasy and science fiction.

Student Union Santa Rita (Seats 120)

Sun, Mar 16, 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm

Book/Movie Biz

Signing area: Sales & Signing Area #1 – UA BookStore Tent (following presentation)

Panelists: Nicole McInnes, Page Morgan, Chuck Wendig

I’ve talked about this before, and I certainly like to joke that my creative process takes a certain path, and that writing a book tends to go through a certain set of stages — and that remains true but as I write book after book (being fortunate enough to have a rather large slate of books released in a very short amount of time), I’m learning that while many of these emotional pivot points seem guaranteed, what isn’t guaranteed is the order in which they present themselves.

What follows are many of the, erm, feelings I seem to experience while writing books. I can experience these feelings week to week, day to day, even hour to hour.

(Oh, and the solution to many of these is simple: just keep writing. Get it done. Fix it in post.)

1. Everything Is Awesome

STORYTIME DANCE PARTY. Everything is fireworks and rainbows and hoverboards. Sometimes you’re writing and everything just feels good. Shit just works. It’s like a day where everyone is on time and you find money in the pocket of an old jacket and it’s lights and colors and you can smell numbers and taste dreams. You feel like, this is the best thing I’ve ever done, this is the next level, all the words are lining up like they’re supposed to. It’s high-fives and blow-jobs. It’s cosmic cunnilingus from the gods themselves.

2. Everything Is Nuclear Dogshit

Ahh, the emotion that so frequently follows the everything is awesome stage — this is the crash after a high, this is the hard landing after a flight, this is the doom volcano erupting in order to end your civilization’s Golden Age. You hit this point where nothing works. All the words taste of ash and pee. Your entire book sounds like this inside your head: BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BUH BUH BBBBBT FZZZZ AAAAAAAAH. You’re not even sure you’re writing in your native language anymore. You seriously contemplate not only deleting the manuscript, but actually hitting your computer with a hammer so that no remnant of your awfulness may remain to poison the lovely world to which you should have never been born.

3. Everything Is Distracting

Hey, guys, Twitter is on! So is Facebook! Hey, an email. Hey, new iPhone game. Hey, the finale to last night’s Favorite Show was on. I don’t wanna miss it! Jeez, what’s the weather doing? What’s the weather doing in Chicago? Toronto? Capetown? Xibalba? How’s the moon? Is the moon good? HA HA HA look at this funny meme where they take kangaroos and dress them up as the Queen of England and then they punch children. Goddamn kangaroos, you hilarious. Ooh video games. And candy. Dopamine delights! Don’t I have some cocaine? COKE BINGE, that’ll help the writing. Jeez, what’s the weather doing? COKE BINGE PART TWO! Did I write any words today?

4. Everyone Is Bothering Me

People won’t shut up. The dog won’t stop farting in your office. A toddler is at your door and it’s not even your toddler. The trash truck is outside rattling cans and they’ve been there for — *checks watch* — 47 minutes. Car alarm. Phone calls from your mother. Overzealous helper monkey. Just as you start to gain a little momentum, something undercuts it — and then going back to the words feels like just getting going again.

5. Don’t Worry, I’m Doing Things That Feel Like Writing!

I’m researching! Worldbuilding! Outlining! Reoutlining! Re-reoutlining! I’m reading about writing! I’m reading about publishing! I’m finding celebrity photos of who should play my characters in the eventual movie! Now I’m Photoshopping them because I wanna know what Brad Pitt and Jennifer Lawrence’s children will look like (SO GOLDEN, LIKE LITTLE HUMAN OSCAR STATUETTES.) I will now take time to imagine what my book cover will look like. So photorealistic! Now I’m tweeting — I mean, “building my platform or brand or base or audience or something professional-sounding.” I’ve written nothing today! Ha ha ha *weeps*

6. The Blank Page Is A Terrifying Polar Expanse Where I Will Die

It’s a big blank page. Tabula rasa, baby. It’s biggest and emptiest on the first day of writing, though nearly any day of writing can see you confronted by a new page, devoid of words. Some writers get excited. Me? It freaks me out. It’s too big. Too white. I feel like I’m just gonna shit up this pretty snowscape with my trompy stompy dirty boots. It’s like a mountain before an avalanche. It’s like the white light of death. It’s the sheer infinity of potential. The unrefined expanse of utter possibility. And anything I do feels like ruining it.

7. Course Correction: Glue, Duct Tape, Bubble Gum, A Sextant

You realize something’s wrong. But you don’t feel like fixing it. So it’s clumsy patch job time — so you MacGuyver the story, making swift changes with the dearest hopes you can fix it in the edit. (Any beta reader would be like, “Why does the main character suddenly become a woman? And his magic talking sword just became her magic talking shotgun. Where’d that wombat come from?”) The attitude is basically: WHATEVER, FUCK IT, NO TIME TO FIX, MOVE, MOVE, MOVE.

8. I Made A Wrong Turn At Albuquerque

You realize something’s wrong. And it went wrong about 100 pages ago. Which makes the last 100 pages a miserable, meaningless wander into the wilderness. Devoid of value. Epic waste of time. You suddenly see no way forward without going back and fixing the part where your character stepped on a butterfly and ruined everything you stupid character. Behold the gut-wrenching, sphincter-clenching dread of deleting 100 pages from your manuscript. Your tears will taste of printer ink. Your mouth will taste of char.

9. Oh, Crap, None Of This Makes Sense At All

That terrible moment when you realize the entirety of your story hinges on a thing that doesn’t make any sense. It’s not a plothole so much as the hole in a well-tied plot-noose. If the character on page ten would just do the logical sensible thing and throw away the Doomed Widget of Kjarn, the entire book falls apart. You realize suddenly that everything hangs on a broken hinge, the whole conflict held fast to some kind of Escherprint logic that throws the whole tale into the fucking woodchipper. “Wait, the main character could’ve just pushed a button in the first act that would’ve solved the whole thing? OH GODDAMNIT.”

10. Old Man Lost In A Shopping Mall (aka, Me In A CD Store, Circa 1997)

You wander. Aimlessly. You’re pretty sure a plot will come along and introduce itself eventually? The characters seemed like they had motivation but nothing is really happening? The conflict seemed like a good one but now seems as tense as a damp shirt draped over a drooping clothesline. You just keep writing because that feels like what you’re supposed to do.

11. I Should Not Be A Writer And My Soul Is Forfeit

This can happen at any point. Before the day’s writing begins. At the day’s end. At the book’s end. In the middle of a fucking sentence. It’s just — wham. You hit this point where existential panic throttles the little writer that pilots you. You’re suddenly all, “I can’t do this. I am not good at this. I can’t hack it. I should not be a writer. I am not a writer.” And you start looking for an eject button or a trap-door. You hit the Select All shortcut and contemplate stabbing the delete button with an angry finger. Dread and doom and lifeless void. Breathless fear of failure, fear of success, fear of judgment. Grave uncertainty. Dry mouth. Squeaky hiss from the back of your throat. Everyone is better than me, you think. My cat would make a better writer.

12. I Wrote Four Words Today (“The Trickled Pee”)

Every word is like extracting a rotten tooth with a pair of rusty needle-nose pliers. It is a day of great effort that yields nearly no result. A rich, full fruit tree with one fucking apple dangling.

13. I Wrote Forty Thousand Words Today (“Drinking From The Firehose”)

The words won’t stop. You can’t stanch the flow.  Story geyser. You’re not sure if it’s a firehose shooting top-shelf whisk(e)y or a cannon lobbing gobbets of sewage — all you know is, by the time you’re done you’re trembling and frothy with sweat and you just wrote like, 15% of your book in one day. It’s like a fugue state meets automatic writing.

14. Picking Nits

You’re afraid to move forward and so you hover, or even drift backward, editing the work as you go. You just can’t stop messing with it — like fidgeting with a hangnail instead of letting it heal. Does it come from a lack of confidence? A fear of moving forward? An obsessive nature? No matter the origin, it undercuts momentum. Like repeatedly stopping to tie your shoes during a marathon.

15. Meh

Says it all.

16. I Love This One Line So Much

One sentence out of everything you wrote today is beautiful and powerful and impactful and it makes all of it worth it. All the doubt, all the terror, all the existential dread. One sentence, its component words shining like scattered diamonds. One line, giving you the guts to move forward without hitting delete and going downstairs to cry-eat a handful of cake.

17. It Sounded Good In My Head

Your brain is such an asshole. You had an idea. It unfolded into a book. With characters. And plots. And ideas emerging from other ideas. And then you started writing it. And now you’re like, “This is just… this is dumb as shit. It’s stu… it’s so stupid. The Muse lied. What the fuck was I thinking? Oh, god. I’ve wasted so much time on this.”

18. I Hate This Character

You know characters can be unlikable. But readers have to spend time with this character. Worse, you have to spend time with him, too. And now you despise him. He’s a wanking, preening peacock. Or a dickish dickhead who just dicks everything up. He’s precious. Or dumb. Or irritating. You just wanna punch him in his doofusy face. You’re now seriously considering killing him off at the midpoint of the novel and quietly installing a new protagonist. Goddamnit.

19. I Love This Character And Cannot Hurt Them

The character is the best. You understand her. She’s already been through Hell and suddenly you don’t want to put her through any more. You’ve lost empathy and found sympathy. You’re supposed to be throwing her into a pit with demons and yetis and ex-lovers and sharp pointy sticks and instead your greatest urge is to coddle and protect and keep her safe.

20. This Subplot Just Took Over

It’s like an invasive species, this subplot. A root that started small but now it just choked out the biggest tree in the forest without you even realizing it. You’ve created a subplot that is way more interesting than the main plot. Crap crap crap crap crap. On the one hand: yay for a compelling plot. On the other hand: boo for having to rewrite the whole story to make it work.

21. Wouldn’t It Be Cool If…

A flash of inspiration! Like a spear of light pinning your mind right to the story. Revelation and epiphany! Wouldn’t it be cool if [insert cool plot hook here, maybe something featuring orangutan spies or jetpack ladies or some kind of time-traveling pterodactyl paradox].

22. Wait, Shit, That Doesn’t Work

Your balloon animal just popped. The cool idea you just had? Won’t work. Wilting story boner. Sad trombone. Cool idea cannot justify its own existence. Back to the idea factory.

23. I Have Way Too Much / Not Enough Story 

You’re 50,000 words into the story. And you realize one of two things: a) “Hey, I’m almost done this bo… oh god I’m only 50,000 words in and the book is already done? This is supposed to be an epic fantasy!” or b) “Holy fucksocks, I’m 50k deep and I haven’t even introduced the main character yet.” You have not enough story or too much. You are feast or famine. You have underwritten or overwritten. Cue the cold saline rush of terror.

24. Everything Just Clicked

Hear that sound? It’s the sound of dominoes falling together in a neat line — it’s like the playing card in a child’s bicycle spokes. Everything clicks. Everything works. Everything makes sense. You don’t know if it’s good or right or how much you’ll have to fix but none of that matters. Because it all feels right and your march to the end of this story feels suddenly ineluctable — forward progress is now unstoppable. You can do this.

25. Apex Or Nadir

The ending. Game over, man, game over. You don’t know if it’s the height of art or the deepest pit of poo-slurry. Maybe it’s all 1s, maybe it’s all 0s. You have no perspective, but what matters is, you’re done. And finishing a story — particularly a whole novel — comes complete with a host of its own divergent emotions. Maybe you feel excited. Triumphant. Tired. Spent. Maybe you’re hungry. Are you hungry? You’re probably hungry. Maybe you’re happy it’s done. Or mad because you want more. Happy-mad. Mad-happy. Who knows? Whether everything is sheer apotheosis or just raw open ass, you did it. You’re done (for now). Walk away as the building explodes behind you. Go have a snack and a nap. Then hunker down for the edits.

* * *

Eight episodes and done.

Which, by the way, is a great way to do a TV show. The story was told. The story is finished.

We are getting a True Detective, Season 2, though one supposes it’ll be more like American Horror Story — different cast, different narrative, maybe some shared territory. Or, given the events in season one, maybe we’ll see some aspects of the case continue somewhere else?

Anyway. Gonna talk a bit about the show here. And the finale.

Which means: spoilers are incoming.

I’m gonna put some spoiler space here

SPOILERTOWN, POPULATION YOU

SPOILERS LA LA LA

YOU ABOUT TO BE SPOILED

TURN AWAY

BRIDGE OUT

SPOILERS AHEAD

AWOOGA AWOOGA

AAAAAAAAH SPOILERS

CAUTION CUIDADO VERBOTEN

SUH POY LURS

Ahem.

I think that’s good enough.

All along, folks were looking, I think, for a twist — a whodunit-style pivot where we find out Marty is the King in Yellow or Carcosa is really a strip club in Des Moines or all of this has been inside Rustin Cohle’s nihilistic little snowglobe all along. And we did indeed get a twist — but I suspect it wasn’t the twist folks were imagining.

We got a happy ending.

All signs pointed to a Se7en-style conclusion: men driven mad by their exposure to the horror of the world, a Lovecraftian sanity-loss as they pick apart the rotten layers of mankind’s ugly soul until they stare into the unblinking void-eye at the center. And certainly it looked like it was moving that way. Wandering the labyrinth. Into the pit. To the throne of the Yellow King. Through a world far more Texas Chainsaw Massacre than we perhaps figured on. And then both men locked in battle with a monster, attacked and victorious but seemingly left to die in a charnel house pit. Grim, grisly stuff. And we were all but assured one of those men was dead, if not both.

And yet —

We got a happy ending.

We got a happy ending.

Not like — ha ha, shiny happy, ponies raining from the sky, but both men passed through that unblinking void-eye and emerged with souls somehow not rent to ribbons. In fact, these two patchwork men — in what is the most cantankerous, nihilistic bromance perhaps ever conceived, a friendship truly earned — have come out possessing something resembling enlightenment.

(I won’t spoil the end conversation between these two men, but even if you never watch the show, it’s probably worth digging that up and watching it. Writing and acting in a one-two-punch.)

I think what’s most fascinating to me about the whole show — aside from it being an intense character study more than it is a detective story — is how the story-world is supernatural-adjacent. By which I mean, the supernatural would not seem to exist (we have no direct evidence), but it has left its mark just the same. This is a world where metaphysics matter, where the cuckoopants geometry of the cosmos has injured men’s souls. We are given no evidence that the bird’s nests and antler skulls and ritual markings have any physical effect on the world around these characters, but the point, perhaps, is that they don’t need to. These rituals have spiritual implications. They have power over these people emotionally, intellectually. The supernatural here is natural. Unreal. Impossible and unseen, yet evident just the same. The killer is like a minotaur at the center of a maze — human, but monstrous. Cohle is truly affected by realms beyond, even though we can’t see them or touch them. The Bayou is still married to old magic, and though the magic doesn’t seem to work in the classic sense, it still twists the family trees.

And of course, the conspiracy of the Carcosa cult is still out there. We know they found their killer, but we also know that he’s just one notable branch of this rotten tree. (Again, I wonder if a follow-up season will continue to pursue this storyline, just with new characters and a new timeline.)

Fascinating stuff that culminated in a potent, if too easy, finale. (I say too easy because some of the logical leaps are a bit strained. The “green ears” — which could’ve and should’ve perhaps been a reference to the ear-muffs worn by a dude mowing the lawn — felt like a hasty conclusion that frankly didn’t rely on much of anything from the rest of the investigation. It seemed random and convenient and for me is perhaps one of the only real mis-steps the series has taken. A mis-step that is pretty forgivable given the strength of the writing and the acting.)

Great show.

Looking forward to season two, whatever it may be.

Author Jamie Wyman — @BeeGirlBlue on the Twitters — wanted to talk a little bit about her first year in as a professional author, and I thought that’d make for an interesting post. But I also add some of my thoughts throughout, if you care to hear ’em. Here’s Jamie!

*she breaks through your door with an ax* 

* * *

So, as of 30 January, 2014, I have been a professional author for one year. That is the day I signed my first contract of sale to Entangled Publishing for my debut novel WILD CARD (nee “Technical Difficulties.”) At the time, I knew this wasn’t some golden ticket leading me into a chocolate factory of dreams. I didn’t expect editorial oompa-loompas to whisk me off for pedicures and bon bons or anything. However, with a year gone, I see that there were things I didn’t know about being a professional writer.

Here are some of the things I’ve learned that I wish someone had told me a year ago.

1. It doesn’t get better.

This can be taken two ways: It gets worse, or it stays the same. I’m going to err on the side of optimism here and say it stays the same. Basically, you’ve just arrived from the land of querying obscurity that comes with submission. You’ve been popping antacids and checking your email 30 times a day and your house reeks of unwashed clothes and peanut butter. Your hair…? Well, we won’t discuss that. Everything in your life has been on hold while you’re waiting to hear, waiting to know!

Now that you’re a published author, though, you’ve traded one set of anxieties for another. Now you have editorial deadlines and market expectations and publicity and readers and Goodreads and social media. You have reviews to say you’ll ignore but read anyway (at least at first). And you probably have some day-slave grind you use to farm cash and pay the bills. You might have kids, too. That’s an added bonus, right there. Point is this: all you wanted to do was write, right? You can’t do that. You’ve got this other stuff to add to your life. Writing, no matter how much you love it or treated it as a job before, has now become a profession and needs to be treated as such. There are a lot of little things that will try to mire down production. Keep your head down.

But not all the time…

Chuck’s Thoughts: “I’d say it falls under a third axis — ‘it gets different.’ I do still smell of peanut butter because that’s how I exfoliate, but I will say that becoming a professional author is a little like leveling up in a video game, or like watching your child grow up a bit. You master older, smaller challenges but and you think, ‘Oh ho ho, now I’ve got the Sword of Editorial Dominance, the Save Against Query spell, and armor made from all the rejections.’ But of course what you’re going to face are new challenges. New deals, new contracts, book marketing, fans who form cults around your work and kill in your name. THE USUAL.”

2. Have a hobby.

You need something that isn’t writing, or work, or family to refresh you. As much as you love your art, you need something else because there are days where writing will be work. It will be aggravating and you’ll be ready to throw your computer into the blazing heart of Mt. Doom. On those days you need something else. Something to calm the mind. Yoga, painting, meditation, cooking…these things work for some people. Me? I play with fire and other circus tricks. I also game with friends. Which leads me to the next one…

Chuck’s Thoughts: “For me, writing is always work. But not ‘work’ in the dirty four-letter-word way — ‘work’ doesn’t have to be a bad word. It can be clarifying. You can love what you do for work. I mean, writing as work? It’s a lot better than filling potholes or hiding bodies. Or filling potholes with bodies. Either way, she’s right that mitigating this has real value. Through hobbies and through #4, below.”

3.  Make friends in the business.

We talk all the time about how writing is lonely. Fuck that. Make friends. You need comrades, partners in crime. You need other published authors in your corner, people you can vent to who understand. People off of whom you can bounce ideas or concerns. People you can drink with at conventions. Don’t try to be some crazy hermit…it doesn’t build character or make you enigmatic. It makes you lonely, insane and unprepared. A lot of stuff is going to happen–mostly little things, really, but some big things–that you just can’t talk about publicly. When I’ve tried talking to friends who have no clue about publishing, they stare at me like I’m a hagfish with rubber ballgags for eyes. Or, if you’re venting steam, you get the, “why are you complaining? this is what you wanted.” You can try vaguebooking, but it only scratches the itch to rant so much. Enter your writer friends. Peers. A friends list: build one.

Chuck’s Thoughts: “Yep. We like to think that we can go all Ronin-Writer-Without-Clan, but that’s tough. You write your book in relative isolation but then that book goes out into the world. And you go with it. And it needs friends and cohorts the whole way. Further, it’s nice to have folks in the business off whom you can bounce questions and concerns.”

4. Don’t forget to have fun.

At some point you will find yourself finished with edits and wondering what to write next. For the past weeks you’ve been immersing yourself in making something fit to sell. Take time to say fuck that shit and write what gets you off. Don’t write for a market or worry about if/where it will sell. Just write the story for the hell out of it. It’s like swimming in a pool of Jelll-O for your muse. You don’t do it for any reason other than to do it and have fun.

Chuck’s Thoughts: “I’ve long said that the important territory for a writer is the intellectual space in the Venn Diagram of WHAT I WANT TO WRITE and WHAT READERS WANT TO READ. The better you thread this needle, the happier you’ll be, and the better your book may do. Or so I suspect. Oh, and I don’t do anything for my Muse. That jerk works for me.”

5. Shit happens.

At some point someone will rain on your parade. Sales will be lower than you want, you’ll get a shit review, you’ll get a rejection…something will happen that will take you right back to those horrible insecurities you experienced when agonizing over querying agents. It will happen. When it does…don’t stop. Don’t give up. Write more. As Chuck would say, “Art harder, motherfucker.” You don’t just get back on the horse, you brand that bitch with your mark and ride it over a tank full of ravenous great whites.

And when the inevitable shit doth happen, there’s something else you need to do: remember. Remember that you worked your ass off to get here. You have created a world (or worlds!) inhabited by people who breathe and eat and weep and need. You’ve made strangers give a damn about fictional characters. YOU, my friend, have done the impossible and are made mighty thereby. Do not forget that when you are knocked down and start with all the author existential questions. Shut up. You do belong here. No one is going to take away your Author Card and kick you out of the clubhouse. (Well, unless you’re a douche.  Don’t be that guy, k?)

So do what you do.  Take a day to drive fast with the top down or hail to the beauty of the lotus or spew flames out of your face. Whatever rocks your boat. Then pucker up, buttercup, and kiss the words. You’re a professional now.

Chuck’s Thoughts: “They kicked me out of the clubhouse because someone, I won’t name who, but someone who looks like me, ate all the food and drank all the liquor and threw up in the fishtank. But that’s neither here nor there. Point is, Jamie’s only in the first year, here — I’ve been at it a bit longer than that, and I’ll confirm already that This Thing We Do has peaks and valleys and you gotta enjoy the heights but always find a way to climb out of low places or you’ll never make it. My best advice to writers is to cultivate calluses. Keep your expectations in check. Have a thick skin — don’t just be a raw nerve squirming out there, or every hit is going to feel like the apocalypse. Thanks, Jamie, for coming by.”

Last week’s challenge: Describing one thing ten ways.

This week’s pretty straight forward.

I’ve got two lists at the bottom. Pick (or randomly choose with dice or a random number generator) one from each list, then make sure your flash fiction contains each of those things.

That’s it. Easy-peasy, Ramona-and-Beezy.

You’ve got an upgraded 1500 words. Due in one week (March 14th). Post it at your online space of choice. Drop a link to your completed story in the comments below. Any genre.

Now, the lists…

Must Contain #1

1. A lover’s betrayal.
2. A dead body without a face.
3. A mysterious — perhaps even magical — photograph.
4. An antique gun.
5. A terminal illness.
6. An ancient tree.
7. A time machine.
8. A monster.
9. A faithful hound.
10. A talking cat.

Must Contain #2

1. A distant outpost.
2. An infernal bargain.
3. A pair of detectives.
4. A stolen treasure.
5. A forgotten manuscript.
6. An escaped prisoner.
7. A hard drive filled with secrets.
8. A plane or train ride.
9. A piece of lost technology.
10. A comatose patient.

The Internet can sometimes be a kooky place.

Let’s go over a few ground rules on how best to address one another. These are things I know I most certainly need to work on. And I know these are themselves complicated ideas that may not always seem to agree with one another. This list is neither absolute nor exhaustive. It is meant to be a thinking point. A starting place for renewed conversation.

Here goes.

1) Honesty and empathy go well together. You can be honest and forthright as long as you attempt to try to understand the point-of-view of other people.

2) Anger and outrage are not without value, but understand that anger comported without focus and with only rage is not as useful as you’d think. Anger and outrage are good when they’re trying to accomplish a goal, but not so good when it’s just anger for the sake of anger. Piss and vinegar splashed in someone’s eyes won’t get much done. Cold and calculated response is far better than a lava gusher of grr-arrgh-gnashy-teethy. Snark and insult only reduce the effectiveness.

3) When you are met with anger and outrage, do not meet it with anger and outrage in return. Assume that the angry person is angry for a reason. Try to understand it. Approach it with, again, honesty and empathy. Someone saying to you: I’M ANGRY is not going to get less angry when you say GO FUCK YOURSELF. Either attempt to understand their concerns, or just cut bait and run. Do not pour whisk(e)y on the campfire in part because you’re wasting precious whisk(e)y.

4) Think before you tweet. Or post to Facebook. Or post a blog. Ask yourself: “Is this demonstrating the best version of myself? Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

5) Consider sitting on your anger for an hour. Or, as Teresa Frohock suggests, 24 hours.

6) Do not silence, diminish, or dismiss another person.

7) Don’t shut down the conversation. Have the conversation.

8) Have a discussion, not an argument. If you must argue, don’t let it become a fight.

9) Insults and accusations are ugly business. Accusations in particular carry scary weight. Far better to attack ideas than to turn around and attack the people you think represent those ideas.

10) People are shitty on the Internet, sometimes. Do not engage. Or, if you must: kill them with kindness. I like to tune out poisonous voices. I will use the ‘block’ button when necessary.

11) Online lynch mobs are a real thing. But be careful not to assume that “lynch mob” is synonymous with “people who disagree with me.” It is also not synonymous with “people airing concerns.” There’s no metric for when something is a real lynch mob and when it isn’t, but understand that labeling it as such has the potential to diminish and dismiss people’s concerns. (One supposes that a good way to identify a lynch mob is when it’s full of actual vitriol and insult rather than full of people being honest about their anger and their worry.)

12) Just because you don’t agree with someone’s concerns doesn’t invalidate them.

13) Nobody likes being told, “you’re wrong.” Even if you think they are.

14) You can always walk away from a conversation. Politely disengage.

15) Respect people’s right to disengage.

16) Understand that things you say may be taken out of context or read differently than you intended. This may be the fault of the reader. This may be your fault. This may be due to some cultural divide of which you are unaware. Research. Investigate.

17) Having big, large, complicated discussions on social media is not impossible, but it’s hard (particularly on Twitter, where the 140-character limit is excellent for brevity but less awesome in terms of conveying tone, nuance, complication).

18) Try to spend time sharing happy things. Pictures of very small ponies, for instance. Or dogs driving cars. Or babies dressed up like superheroes. Spend some time engaging positively. Be a fountain, not a drain.

19) People are allowed to like things you don’t. And people are allowed to dislike things you love. Respect the subjectivity of preference and opinion. The other day I was drinking beer and B-Dub, the Toddler Inquisitor of the house, asked what I was drinking and I told him. He said, “Yuck,” because he thinks beer is gross. (Er, not that we let him drink beer — but I do let him smell it and he found it ugh-worthy.) His response, and this is a response nearly all of the Internet should learn, was: “I don’t like yuck. But you like yuck, Daddy — that’s okay!”

20) Sometimes, interacting on the Internet can cause a kind of “Social PTSD.” Things feel faster, and negative stuff hits quicker and in greater number. This can be an anxious place. the Internet can be a watercooler for fun chatter, but it can also be a watercooler filled with urine surrounded by bitey goblins. Understand this both in terms of how it might affect you and how it might already be affecting other people. “Outrage fatigue” is also a real thing, which can mean being tired of all the outrage going on, or mean being tired of feeling angry all the time. Again: respect someone’s right not to join in your outrage even if you think they are or should be an ally. Sometimes we just have to tweet animated GIFs at each other to feel normal for a while.

21) Social media can sometimes feel like various wars going on across multiple fronts. Again: empathy is necessary to try to understand the other “side” — the truth (“truth?”) of things is usually somewhere in the middle, in a place of compromise where even if people don’t agree, they at least attempt to understand one another. This can make it feel less like a war and more like a meeting. And while I am not fond of meetings, it’s a whole lot better to have one of those then a shooting match from within our muddy trenches.

22) Realize that some people are used to being dismissed and diminished. This is, in part, that PTSD I’m talking about. Again, empathy has value in trying to understand the source. Is there a legitimate concern? What else is going on? Open the door instead of building a wall. Seek truth and wisdom and find compassion — compassion is perhaps most important when it is hardest to find.

23) Those who live in hair houses should not fling lit matches.

24) To quote Kameron Hurley:

KameronHurley Words matter. And it sucks to make words on the internet that can be misinterpreted, but we’re responsible for them, for better or worse. 3/5/14, 10:53 AM

25) In the gospel of Pope Wheaton,above all else cleave to the precept: “Don’t be a dick.” Or, if you’d prefer to sing from the hymnal of Hierophant Vonnegut: ”

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies: ‘Goddamn it, you’ve got to be kind.'”

Amen.