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.

As a young woman, Jendara left the cold northern isles of the Ironbound Archipelago to find her fortune. Now, many years later, she’s forsaken her buccaneer ways and returned home in search of a simpler life, where she can raise her young son Kran in peace. When a strange clan of shapeshifting raiders pillages her home, however, there’s no choice for Jendara but to take up her axes once again to help the islanders defend all that they hold dear.

From author Wendy N. Wagner comes a new adventure of vikings, lycanthropes, and the ties of motherhood, set in the award-winning world of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

* * *

1. BABIES ARE NOT FOR EATING.

You’d think this one would be obvious, but clearly you haven’t spent time in my head, where my chain of logic went: “If cannibalism is bad, and I want my bad guys to be really bad, then they shouldn’t just eat human being,  they should have a taste for the cutest, snuggliest form of human flesh imaginable!” Certain I was a genius, I wrote a baby-snacking scene while chortling gleefully.

Luckily, other people read my novel before it went to press and pointed out a flaw in my thinking. Yes, eating babies is evil. It’s so evil that if you want the cannibals in your story to ever be more than villainous puppets fit only for destruction, you’d better not include it. That’s why zombies can eat whatever they want to eat–they’re exactly the kinds of villain you feel just fine about nuking from orbit. They’re totally beyond redemption. Besides, any group of people that sees babies as a scrumptious morsel will probably eat itself into extinction. It’s just stupid. And gross. So I got rid of both baby-eating scenes originally included in the novel

Note: I would never eat a baby. In fact, I love babies. I just want to hold them and kiss their sweet-smelling heads and nibble on their adorable toes. Ummn … maybe I should stop talking now.

2. FIND-AND-REPLACE IS A WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION

Sometimes you have to make a repetitive change to your manuscript. Maybe you’ve changed a character’s name or you realized someone’s hair really ought to be brown, not blond. (True story: I went through the entire novel thinking Jendara had blond hair, even though I looked at a picture of her every single day I was writing. Maybe I should get my eyes checked.) The fastest way to make sure you fix every reference to this erroneous word is to call in an air strike and wipe it out. That’s right: find-and-replace.

Now find-and-replace has saved my life many times. In Skinwalkers, I used it whenever I changed my mind about the spelling of one crew-member’s name–so about once a week. But one mistaken find-and-replace can cause you no end of problems. For example, I called one kind of boat a “raider” in the first draft of the novel. But I decided it sounded too Battlestar Galactica, and decided I’d better change it to “long ship” to better convey a Viking image. But did I type “long ship” into the Replace field? Nope. Instead, my nautically bemused brain wrote “longboat.” And like an idiot, I hit enter, changing a vast swathe of Nordic watercraft into the kind of large row boat Ishmael and Ahab cruised around in. I didn’t catch it until I turned in my manuscript, and my editor thought I was nuts.

Don’t be me! Be very, very careful whenever you use find-and-replace. Heck, take the time to approve every change. The extra twenty minutes might really pay off. I wound up changing half of those long ships into a totally different kind of small, clinker-built boat that’s much better suited for the book.

3. RESEARCH BREEDS SERENDIPITY

Skinwalkers may be set in an imaginary world, but I did a great deal of research on the folklore, art, plants, geology, and climate of the places on our planet that are most like its setting: Scandinavia. Outside of watching Troll Hunter, I didn’t have a lot of knowledge about that part of the world, and I wanted the book to be filled with the flavor of the former Viking realm. I read a lot of travel guides and blogs about Norway and Denmark.

And then I found the stamps of the Faroe Islands.

While looking for images from Norse mythology, I kept finding artwork on stamps from this tiny little country. The Faroe Islands are located between the tip of Scotland and the bottom of Iceland. Their language is very close to Old Norse, and they are very proud of their culture–hence the stamps. Photographs of their shoreline directly inspired my favorite setting in the entire novel, a small, spooky island called “the Isle of Ancestors.“

Research will pay off more than you can ever expect it to. Wade into the flow of information with your eyes open, and you might find gold.

4. KEEP ON KEEPING ON.

I’m not going to lie: Even though my editor reassured me that my book needed very few substantive edits, the list of changes he sent me was longer than some short stories I’ve sold. Looking at it nearly made me hyperventilate. It looked like work. A lot of work.

But there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last few years, and that’s not be afraid of doing the work. I just printed out the list, broke down the larger problems into sequences of smaller tasks, and I did it. I checked off everything as I accomplished it, and if I fixed something that broke something else, I just wrote it down on my secondary to-do list. And eventually, I fixed everything.

Remember: there’s not much you can’t do if you cut it up into smaller tasks and you just keep at it.

5. I AM AN INADVERTENT MISOGYNIST. 

Let’s just get one thing straight: Pathfinder is a game for anyone, no matter their gender. That’s something I like about the organization, and I was really excited to get to write them a character who is a strong woman with many facets. Jendara spends a lot of time fighting, but she’s also a caring mother, a semi-successful homemaker who is happy to share the domestic load with her son and companions, and she’s a great friend to men and women alike. I felt really good about turning in a manuscript with characters who were good role models for equality.

But when it was time to revise, my editor pointed out many, many instances of gender-biased language. I lost count of the number of times I referred to a group of fighters as “men.” In situations with a crowd, I almost never described anyone but the guys. Jendara may have been a well-rounded female character, but she was definitely a rarity in her world.

I’m a woman and I believe very firmly in equality for all human beings. I was pretty ashamed to see my own work, and I’m glad I got a chance to fix it before it went out in the world. It’s all too easy to use those same old phrases without thinking about them, but as a writer, it’s my job to think hard about the world I’m making with my words. Do I want it to be the same world that’s told women they have to stay home out of sight, or do I want it to be a world where everyone can adventure, no matter their gender?

Writing Skinwalkers was a major learning experience. I couldn’t be more glad for the education.

* * *

Wendy Wagner: Website | Twitter

Skinwalkers: Amazon | B&N

I receive questions over email. I get questions at conferences. I thought I’d sum up some of my answers to those questions here! Please to enjoy.

How Do I Write?

I don’t know how you write. I know how I write. And how I write is, I line up a bunch of words and jam them together into sentences, then I jam those sentences together into paragraphs, and those paragraphs cram together into pages, pages into chapters, chapters into a whole story, and when all of it is said and done I try to make sure all of it is saying something, that all of it has a point, a purpose, a narrative connecting ideas and characters and events and that all of it is buoyed by some kind of hidden but not-that-hidden message called a “theme.” I do this a little bit, every day, until I’m done, and even then I’m not really done, because writing is rewriting is rewriting is rewriting is [insert me wandering through a hedge maze covered in ink here].

How Do I Find The Time To Write?

You do not find the time to write. You make it. You snatch it from the jaws of whatever temporal beast has your minutes and hours clamped between its gnarly teeth. We all fight for our time, whether it’s time for a meal, time for a TV show, time to mow the lawn, time to masturbate wantonly on the neighbor’s front porch so that their cat can watch you from the family room window. Time is not a lost set of car keys. It’s not extra money you find in a pants pocket just before you wash them. Time is a thing for which you fight. And if you want to write, you need to fight for the time to accomplish that task. Because time doesn’t care about you. It keeps on keeping on until you’re mulch for the fucking marigolds. Seize it. Or don’t. It doesn’t care.

How Long Should It Take Me To Write My Book?

It takes between one hour and one glacial epoch. Jesus, I dunno. Every book has its own clock. I know, that’s a dumb and obvious answer but that’s the goddamn answer. This book over here can be written in three weeks. That book over there can be written in three years. It takes the time it takes. You can make it go faster with practice and determination. Faster doesn’t always mean better, though — it just means faster.

How Do I Edit My Book?

I dunno. You just… you just fucking do, okay? Imagine that you want to take a sentence, any sentence, and edit that sentence. You might rearrange the words. You might excise words or add new ones that are more appropriate, that have more dramatic weight. You would aim to make the sentence be both clear and interesting to the ear. That’s editing. Now do it with a whole paragraph, page, chapter, book. And now it’s not just about little sentence-flavored bits but about character and ideas and events and theme and blah blah blah — there’s no “one way” to edit. You just do it. It’s like crawling through an earthquaked city in the dark, through the mud and the broken glass, trying to put the whole thing back together again. It takes time. There’s no magic, no equation. It’s just you putting the world right, one thing at a time.

How Do I Get Published?

You write something that doesn’t suck, maybe something that you even love a little bit, and you either flash a little narrative leg to an agent or an editor or you publish it yourself. Write the best book you can write.

How Do I Get An Agent?

You find a way to get your book in front of them, ideally via whatever means they prefer. Query letters, pitch sessions, a hand-up from a fellow writer. Whatever. If an agent says, “I want you to give me your logline, except you should tattoo it onto the back of a shaved grizzly bear and that bear should be trained to fight four New York City taxi cabs in front of my office,” then hey, there’s your way forward. Do all this with the best book you can write.

How Do I Market?

I have no fiddly fucking idea. Writers are supposed to be good at writing, not marketing — I wasn’t trained in that particular discipline. I feel like asking a writer how to market best is like asking a writer how to grow good string beans or how best to dismantle a rogue mechanical chimpanzee. Here’s how I market: I try to be the best version of myself, and I try to be a human being engaging with other human beings as much as my time allows, and then sometimes I will say, “Hello, I have this book, and you might like this book because XYZ,” and then once in a while I’ll try to do some kind of other shameless gallumphing about where I give books away or do a nude cam show or something. The best way forward is to get other people to market your books because we’d all much rather be sold something based on love than shameless self-promotion. If I say BUY MY BOOK you’re going to nod and hmm and, “Well, of course he’d say that, its his book.” But if someone within your circle of trust says to buy my book, suddenly you’re a lot more motivated because that person’s only motivation is to share love.

How Do I Build My Brand?

You — you just — please, don’t. Blech. Blargh. Myeaaaaargh. And other pukey-poopy noises. I have a whole schtick about brands that you’ve heard before but I’ll schtick it up again which is this: a brand is what you put on a cow to represent ownership. A brand is about keeping the herd in a fence. A brand is artifice: a thing levied by a corporate entity onto a product so that we all think a specific thing and get a particular feeling about that product even if that is a lie. A brand burns you. A brand marks you. It is a vulnerability because if you brand yourself one way and then find that doesn’t work or need to re-brand, you’re going to have a hard time. Many authors have found themselves trapped by their own brands. Who wants to read a book by a brand? Who wants to interface with a carefully-orchestrated persona? Be a person. Find your voice. Let your voice be the thing that identifies you. Resist branding. Resist other corporate, businessy labels. Again: be the best version of yourself. And write the best book you can fucking write.

How Do I Build My Audience?

You do not build an audience. They’re not a set of shelves. You earn your audience. By — drum roll please! — being a cool person who writes good books. Ta-da!

How Do I Build My Platform?

Every time I turn around I receive divergent definitions of platform. Is it the technical apparatus by which you reach an audience? Is it the audience itself, or the immeasurable reach you have with that audience? Is it your social media account, or the stats that come with that account? Is it your expertise in a given field, or the audience you already possess in that given field? Is it a blog? Is it a box you stand on, a bullhorn you scream through? Fuck platforms. Platforms sound like you’re up on high, talking down. Wade into the crowd. Be amongst the readers and the writers and shake hands and kiss babies and — whew, I dunno how many times I can say this but here it is, write the best book you can and be the best version of yourself.

Should I Blog / Tweet / Facebook / Slather Myself In Social Media?

Your publisher said you should, maybe, or you read that in a book of advice that writers need to blog. You don’t need to blog. You don’t need to do anything except a) best book b) best version of yourself. How you convey those two things to the world via the Internet is up to you. But for fuck’s sake, don’t blog if you don’t want to. Don’t tweet if it doesn’t make you happy. Writing can be lucrative but it’s not so lucrative a career you should tromp around in ugly spaces just because someone said you should. I’ve seen no confirmed correlation between Blogging and Book Sales. Every tweet doesn’t move copies. Especially if the only reason you’re doing that is just as some kind of social media obligation, some ham-fisted marketing strategy. If your publisher demands you blog because of marketing, tell them that’s their job, and they can write the blog themselves.

What Trends Are Hot Right Now?

I don’t know because I don’t care and you shouldn’t really care either. Again: this is probably bad business advice but it’s great creative advice. Fuck trends. Trying to write to trends is like trying to thread a needle whilst riding the back of a bucking bull. Don’t be the dog chasing the car. Be the car driving away from the dog. You know what’s great? A trend-setting book. You know what’s less great? The ten weaker reiterations that come down the line from authors and publishers hoping to chase that trend.

How Do I —

I don’t know. The more and more I go, the more I know that I don’t know. The more I realize that a lot of this thing we do is very random and very uncertain and is given over to two notable forces, two forces that I have repeatedly screamed in your poor ear this whole post: Be the best version of yourself and Write the best book you can. Do these things as often as you are able. More shots at the goal, y’know? Everything else is uncertain. Nothing else is confirmed. The ground is moving beneath our feet but those two things are the constants amidst the chaos. And even then, you’ll find jerk-ass authors succeeding with awful books and that’s just life, and it’s not worth getting upset about. Beyond that? The facts aren’t facts. Everything is theory. I can’t tell you how to do things. I can only tell you how I have done them and am doing them now and if you take something away from this that helps you, then I’m happy. If it doesn’t help you, then at least I’ve hopefully entertained you. Writers have no one way forward. We have so many ways through this wild land. And every one of us — accidentally or on purpose — burns the map after.

Best book you can write.

Best version of yourself you can be.

Demonstrate these things.

Go and write.