Those are the days you have to write.

Even if it’s nothing, even if it’s crap, you’ve got to carve the words onto the page. Even if it’s only a hundred words, even if you only get to move the mountain by a half-an-inch, you’re still nudging the needle, still keeping that story-heart beating, still proving to yourself and to the world that this is who you are and what you do.

They say you can’t get blood from a stone but squeeze a stone hard enough, you’ll get blood.

Blood wets the gears. Blood makes the grass grow.

Effort. Work. Movement. Motion.

The days you don’t want to run, you have to run.

The days you don’t want to get out of bed are the days you must get out of bed.

The days you don’t think you can fly are the ones you gotta jump off the cliff.

Writer means writing. Even if it’s just a moment in the narrative, even if it’s just one thought orchestrated and set gently on the page. An avalanche is snowflakes. An ocean is all droplets. Our life is measured in seconds, our work measured in words, and so you have to put the words down.

The act creates momentum. Writing begets writing begets writing.

The lack of act has its own momentum, too — don’t write today, and tomorrow you wonder if this is really who you are, if this is what you’re meant to do, and so the next day you think it’s just not happening, the Muse isn’t there, the inspiration hasn’t lit a fire under your ass yet, the rats don’t feel like they’re gnawing at you and oh, hey, other writers — well, they’re all talented and driven and they’d never think of sitting down and not writing and maybe that’s who you are, not a writer but rather, Not A Writer, and so the gap in your effort cracks and pops and widens like a broken jaw, a yawning mouth, and soon all you see is the broken teeth of your efforts, broken dreams there in the dark of the mind and the back of the throat, and what you Want to do is lost beneath the illusion of what you Didn’t — or what you Can’t — do.

We fight that inertia, we fight the fear and the doubt by writing.

The words you write right now are words you can fix later.

The words you don’t write today are a curse, a hex, a black hole painted white.

You think that forcing it is counterproductive, that it means nothing, that you’ll just spit mud and blood onto the paper — and you might be right, but you might be wrong. Might be gold in them thar hills, might be a cure for what ails you in those droplets of blood. You don’t know. You can’t know. You’re you — your own worst judge, your own enemy, your greatest hater.

If you’re dying in the snow, no matter how much it hurts, you’ve gotta get up and walk.

If you’re drowning in the deep, no matter how hard it is, you’ve gotta hold the air in your lungs until your chest feels like it’s on fire and you’ve gotta swim hard for the surface.

Writing is the act of doing. Surviving. Living. Being.

From nothing into something. The word of the gods spoken aloud and made real, signal in noise, order in chaos, Let There Be Words and then there were Words.

On the days it’s hard to write are the days it’s most important to write.

That’s how you know who you really are.

That’s how you know this is what you’re meant to do.

Wake up.

Get up.

Write.

Just a casual reminder that I’ll be at the Doylestown Bookshop this weekend (Doylestown, PA), doing an event in support of The Cormorant. Event starts on Saturday at 2PM and goes until the world ends. I mean, “goes probably for an hour or something.” I’ll be signing and talking and reading and doing a heretical undulation that will summon the dark worm-gods and god-worms from the deepest, rankest abyss. Those in the tri-state area (PA, NJ, DE), would love to see you there. Let us undulate together. Or something. Shut up.

Details here.

Boys love trucks.

It’s true. My son? If “toddler” was a marrying age, he’d probably marry a truck. I don’t know what kind of truck, exactly — he can be a little fickle on that front, but if I had to put money down, I’d say he’d wanna marry a tractor trailer. Maybe, maybe, a tow truck. Though he does have a new crane he’s pretty enamored with? Shit, I dunno. We’ve started him on Transformers: Rescue Bots, and they’re like a gateway drug to other toys — they’re trucks, you see, that turn into people. This is how we get him to Batman, I figure. Or Star Wars. Whatever.

Point is: boys love trucks.

And girls also love trucks, too.

Any time my son is near to a girl around his age, the girl wants to play with his trucks. And why wouldn’t she? Trucks are kinda bad-ass. Big wheels and they make noise and they do shit and you can push them and crash them into other trucks and trucks are a fucking blast, shut up.

Girls love dolls.

Boys also love dolls.

My son sees a doll, he wants to play with that shit. And not just in a traditionally boy way — it’s not like he’s picking up the doll and getting into an MMA fight with it. He talks to dolls and plays with them almost as if they’re other children. If it’s a baby doll, he wants to take care of it.

Girls love kitchen stuff.

My son — drum roll please — also plays with kitchen stuff. He has a little kitchen area at his Mom-Mom’s house where he cooks up fake food and serves it. Just yesterday he made me some kind of invisible plate of mac-and-cheese which, tantalizingly, was too hot to eat for a long while until B-Dub cooled it down (by spluttering on it). Then for some reason he ate his like a dog? I dunno. Toddlers are basically tiny drunken chimpanzee robots trying to figure out how to be people.

See, that’s a joke, but it’s also got a deeply-embedded nail of truth in it:

Kids are trying to figure out how to be people.

Because they don’t know. All they know is that they’re barfed up into this world and they start out as these little pink-cheeked cocktails of cognitive development and physical swelling — their lurch forward from squalling poop-flavored soft-serve machine to actual human being with actual human emotions and opinions is not a slow one. In this, the accelerator is stomped to the floor.

One of things we think we know about people is gender. Boys do boy stuff! Girls do girl stuff! Ha ha ha it’s just true, people say, it’s just biology, they’ll claim, and even early on, kids are given acute signals regarding gender: flashing lights, warbling sirens, waving flags indicating societal norms.

BOYS LIKE BLUE.

GIRLS LIKE PINK.

IF I DON’T KNOW WHAT FIDDLY BITS THE CHILD HAS, GODDAMNIT, I DUNNO, DRESS THEM IN SOMETHING THE COLOR OF OLD MUSTARD AND CALL IT A DAY BLAH WHATEVER UGH.

Dress a boy in pink, every person you meet will tell you how cute she is.

Tell them “she” is a “he” and they’ll look at you like you just set fire to the kid. They’ll call Child Protective Services so fast, your kid will be on a boat to some Island of Orphans before you get to change another diaper. A boy? In pink? Abuse! Abuse!

It’s easy to fall into that trap, to think that all of this is just normal. That’s this is biology’s expression — it’s not us! It’s just the program, man. As basic as eating food and drinking water.

It’s a firehose spraying bullshit.

My wife, growing up, liked boy toys. Action figures and such.

And she bought those toys in secret. And played with them in secret. (Her mother would stealthily ask her, “What toys do you think your brother would like?” and then buy those for my wife.) This ruse was because the act of buying boy toys for a young girl just wasn’t “normal.” Because other kids already had assumptions — rules! — hammered into their tender little brain meats.

Kids aren’t programmed biologically.

They’re programmed psychologically.

By us. By their parents. By society. Not at birth. But in all the years after.

And though I think I’m burying the lede here, this societal programing is wholly on display at the local toy aisles at your nearest store. This aisle is pink, they say, winking and elbowing. This aisle is not all blue, but it’s mostly blue, and here is where you’ll find Batman, they add. The girls have the dolls. The kitchen stuff. The baby carriages. Girls are homemakers. Keepers of the domestic delights. Make me cupcakes! Curry a pony. Hug a stuffed animal. Boys are doers. Action! Aggression! Drive here! Punch that. Build this thing.

The job of the girl is compassion and support.

The job of the boy is action and violence.

Girls are princesses. Boys are kings.

Like I said: a firehose spraying bullshit.

Women can be aggressive. Men can be supporters.

Women can be scientists and builders and leaders.

Men can be homemakers and nurses and secretaries.

Gender isn’t a rigid two-party system. Gender is a spectrum.

But that’s not easy thinking. And we seem to like easy thinking.

And so you go to your toy aisle and it’s all set up in binary. It becomes clear that while women can be construction workers and men can be nurses, society doesn’t jolly well want them to be. These toxic signals, this venomous frequency, starts when they’re this young. When they’re toddlers. When they’re told about pink and blue. When they’re shown what roles are best suited for them based what they have in their diapers, not what they have in their hearts and minds.

Let’s talk for a moment about Transformers: Rescue Bots.

It’s a fun show. It’s the Playskool pre-school Transformers show. It’s not violent and you don’t have any Decepticons. The robots mostly do rescue stuff and when they do “fight” they fight like, volcanos or escaped zoo lions or out-of-control lawnmower robots. Plus, a show like this forms a tiny but significant bridge between what I liked as a kid and what my son likes now (which is why, I assume, the toy aisles are full of the same toy lines I saw as a kid — nostalgia).

The show has four robots. (Well, six if you count the occasional Optimus and Bumblebee.)

These robots are all dudes.

The robots are “piloted” by members of one family: the Burns family. One dad. Three brothers. One sister. The youngest boy, Cody, has a friend — Frankie, who is a young black girl. Daughter to Doc Greene, played by Levar Burton. The show has two female characters, then (and two African-American characters).

It’s not ideal. But, okay, let’s at least admit that Dani is a capable character — as capable as her brothers — and further, Frankie is frequently the smartest person in the room. She’s science-minded, and not-like, pink and girly science-minded (“I’m trying to science up the perfect cupcake for my dollies!”) but she knows real science. It’s pretty all right.

Now, let’s talk about the toys.

Again, four (to six) robots.

The robots are paired with their pilots.

Except for Blades, the helicopter. Blades’ pilot — Dani, the sister — is nowhere to be found as a toy. And neither is Frankie, the other girl. Which means the toy line has absolutely zero representation of women. Which, uhhh, sucks. It sucks for the girls who want to play with Rescue Bots. It sucks for my son, who should be able to enter the world seeing it as it is — where 51% of his fellow humans are women, equal and visible and capable.

Used to be you could see ads like the one at the front of this post.

But now you get ads and packaging like:

And man, that’s sad.

It’s not sad because girls shouldn’t like pink. It’s not sad because they shouldn’t be allowed to like clothes and fashion and other preconceived “girly” stuff. It’s sad because that’s all we think they should like. It’s sad not because a girl might want a pink microscope but because it’s the worst one in the bunch in terms of actual magnification. It’s sad because we assume that boys are the ones who play with bulldozers and soldiers and science, and girls aren’t shown on the boxes because they don’t like those things — or maybe it’s that we don’t want them to like those things, just as we don’t want our boys to learn to cook or raise a kid. It’s sad because we assume these gender boundaries mean so much when they only mean a little, and it’s sad because when our kids don’t stay inside the fence (the fence we basically made up), you get a little boy who likes My Little Pony so much that he gets bullied so much that he tries to kill himself.

All the awful things we believe about our genders, all the terrible expectations we place on our kids — it starts here. It starts in the toy aisle. Sure, it begins in the hearts of adults, adults who have fallen prey to this themselves, or adults who want to reinforce the norms and types that keep them in power, but for our kids, all of begins here. It begins in the pink versus blue. They see it on toy packages, in the representations of the toys themselves, in movies, cartoons, marketing.

This is where gay-bashing begins. This is where misogyny starts.

This is where a host of cruel inclinations toward folks who are different arise. A nasty, gnarly little seed — seemingly innocuous — embedded in the dirt of our children’s subconscious minds.

No great call to action, here. But if this starts in the toy aisle, it’s up to us to counterbalance the bullshit in our own homes. By trying to let our kids be who they’re going to be on the gender spectrum, and by doing our level best to protect them from a world that isn’t quite ready for that. The alternative is trying to stop them from being who they really are…

…which most would tell you, I think, is no life at all.

HEY. AUTHOR-TYPES.

How do you sell books?

Like, how do you spread the word? How do you let people know about the book without being an irritating mote of sand in the elastic of one’s underpants? How do you do it when a book is first out? How do you keep the energy going — stretching out that long tail you hear so much about? We know word-of-mouth works, but how do you orchestrate that?

What, anecdotally, have you done that you thought was successful?

Do you have data that tells you something you’ve done was definitely successful?

Anything you know doesn’t work — besides, of course, being a spam-crusted spam-bot from the spam-flung spampocalypse?

Noodle it. Let’s talk. Indie authors and trad-pub writers alike.

What works, what doesn’t, wuzza wooza who what when where how.

This week’s challenge is a guest challenge, by which I mean while I’m hosting it, it’s not actually my challenge. This one comes to you courtesy of Sara Thacher and Ken Eklund, two of the fine folks behind Futurecoast.org. In fact, this challenge is related to that —

Well, I’ll just let them tell you, those damn time traveling magpies.

* * *

You be the lookout. Mkay?

*pulls out slim jim*

*strips back ignition wires*

Ahem. Now that I’ve stolen the Wendig Flash Fiction DeLorean, let’s take this baby out for a spin.

Here’s the set-up:

There’s a glitch in the voicemail system in the near future – what sort? How should I know, it’s in the future. Jeez. The important part is that this glitch sends voicemails back to our time. Really, I should say the near futures. There’s a cone of possibilities, you see, and that becomes dead obvious when you listen to these voicemails. They’re all over the possibilities map.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it:

Script a voicemail from one of these futures.

Your voicemail is created by someone in the future trying to reach somebody else in the future and leaving a message instead. The call was never intended for us to hear. We’re eavesdroppers.

Setting: Think near future – 2020 to 2065.

People: Let’s cast this voicemail, shall we. Who is your caller? Who are they playing phone tag with? What’s their relationship?

The authentic future: What are the clues that let me know this is taking place in the future? What’s different? Climate-changed, maybe? (more on this later)

Authentic voicemail. Remember, this is a voicemail – one person calling another – so getting all exposition-y doesn’t really make sense. (Unless your caller is a reporter for – uhoh, now I’m giving you ideas dammit!) But you get the gist. Conversational. True to the spoken word.

Got it all scripted? Good! Pens down. And now, here’s the Stolen Flash Fiction DeLorean Twist: record your voicemail! You heard me correctly. There’s a hotline just for you to record voicemails from the futures. How cool is that. Ready for it?

+1 (321) 732-6278  or, if it’s easier, 321-7-FCOAST

[note from Chuck: feel free to still give us links to your voicemail scripts if you so desire]

Wha? But what happens after you call up and record your voicemail? Oh, I am SO glad you asked. This whole thing is part of a collaborative storytelling project called FutureCoast. It’s funded by the National Science Foundation (thanks guys!) because maybe writing fiction about climate change is a good way to get people engaged with the issue. We think that concentrating on voicemails – one-sided mini conversations – helps to make a huge-big-abstract issue a little more human-sized.

After you call and record your voicemail, it gets published on FutureCoast.org (which is kid-friendly BTW so no bad words (oh sure like NOW we tell you)). Operators are standing by, as they say, so publishing should go pretty quick.

But wait, you say, how will I be able find my voicemail to share with all things TerribleMinded after I call it in? Well, those FutureCoasters, they think ahead (ha ha). After you record your message, opt in to get a text message with a link to your voicemail when it goes live on FutureCoast.org.

And for those of you who go all-in, there’s a storybuilder on the site called Timestream. You use it to make “mixtapes of the future,” using voicemails – your own or other people’s. Bonus T-Minded Points for the best remix story told in voicemails (remember, you can make as many voicemails as you like… collaborate with others…).

Due date. Sunday, February 23.

Prize. Top contributor gets a secret futurismic mission and the props to complete it – wherever you may be. dun dun dun

Tips and inspiration. To be found on the ‘behind the curtain’ site: FutureVoices.net

rrr-rrr-rrRR- vROOM. You ready to take the Flash Fiction DeLorean for a spin? Watch out, it gets a little unstable at 88 mph…

The sky comes down in a crushing sheet of whiteness. Two sisters and four strangers are saved from apocalypse by mysterious beings. They suddenly find themselves elsewhere, a parallel Earth where restaurants move through the air like flying saucers and household appliances bend the fabric of time.

Confronted by enemies they never knew they had and afflicted with temporal abilities they never wanted, the six survivors band together on a desperate journey across an alien America. Their goal: to find the one man who can help them before time runs out.

* * *

You can be forgiven if the above synopsis makes you leery. My novel is firmly entrenched in the genres of alt-Earth fiction and superpower sci-fi, two fields that are overwhelmingly littered with cow piles. It won’t ease your mind to know that The Flight of the Silvers is my first stab at science fiction. It’s the first book of a series. Oh, and it’s six hundred pages long.

Yeah, that’s right. Run away, cowards.

If you haven’t fled yet, it’s for one reason: because you know that stories like this, when done right, are really goddamn good. They take all the things you love about X-Men, Star Trek, Doctor Who and Watchmen, and wrap them up in a literary tortilla. When they’re done really well, they shed new light on human nature and the crazy world we’ve built for ourselves.

I can’t promise you’ll go cuckoo-gaga for my story. After all, one man’s diamond is another man’s turd. All I can say is that The Flight of the Silvers was a four-year labor of love. I cherished every moment writing it. And I learned a whole bunch of things along the way. Here are five…

1. Worldbuilding is easy. Worldsplaining is hard.

If I wasn’t the kind of freak who keeps all his notes in his head, I would have a Tolkien-sized attic filled with trunks and trunks of scribblings about this parallel Earth I created, a world where history took a dramatic turn after a cataclysmic event in 1912. I’m crazy obsessed with my Altamerica. Like Robert Hays in Airplane!, I can ramble on in ways that provoke violent and increasingly hilarious suicides.

Unfortunately, that passion got the better of me while I was writing. The early drafts of Silvers were front-loaded with info dumps, enough to bring the story to a screeching halt. Thanks to the feedback of some very honest alpha readers (another must), I made sweeping cuts to the opening chapters and introduced the world at a much more measured pace. Not only did it give the plot and characters room to breathe, it created a cryptic sense of tension that was missing before. Now readers learn about this strange new world just as the main characters do.

In short, being a worldbuilder is like being the parent of a new child. Your baby has to be handled gently. And there are limits to what other people want to know about the bugger.

2. Too much sci can ruin your fi.

Xenu bless the hard science fiction writers. I love them but I am not one of them. From the beginning, I knew I wanted Silvers to be accessible to sci-curious genre newbs, the ones who don’t know their ass from their Rainbow’s End. On the other hand, my story takes place on a very heady Earth, one where man and machine can manipulate the flow of time. Medical revivers reverse wounded bodies back to full health. Restaurants offer special acceleration booths where a diner can enjoy a one-hour lunch in six minutes. Speedsuits allow people to slow down the clock and move through the world in a streaking blur. I didn’t want to pull these timebending shenanigans without any explanation.

Once again, I did way too much info dumping in early drafts, clogging the story with unnecessary details. For most of my test readers, the burning question wasn’t “how does this stuff work?” It was “how does it affect people?”

That question not only freed me up to advance the plot, it got me thinking about my world in wonderful new ways. Would a person healed by medical revivers lose their recent memory? (Yes.) Would that technology be abused by some? (Yes!) Would the kinetic momentum of speedsuits make the wearer more brittle, to the point where a simple love tap could break bones? Oh hell, yes.

3. Flawed protagonists are great, but they do come with headaches

Perfect heroes suck. I want to take all the Mary Sues and Gary Stus of fiction and send them off to Westeros, where George R.R. Martin can Red-Wedding their asses. They’re boring to read and even more boring to write. Seriously. Fuck them.

Though Silvers is an ensemble story, the two main characters are Hannah and Amanda Given, a pair of twentysomething sisters in San Diego. One’s a volatile actress with a history of bad life decisions. The other’s a high-strung nurse with an insufferable excess of virtue. They’re not always brave or wise in the face of danger, and Lord knows they’re not always nice to each other. But in a book with flying cars and force fields, it’s more important than ever to have characters act in realistic human ways.

The problem, I learned, is that not all readers react well to flawed protagonists. Go to almost any Amazon or Goodreads page and you’ll find at least one reviewer who knocks off stars because the main character is too weak or whiny or foolish in the beginning. Of course they are, you chucklefuck. That’s the whole point. No one likes the Tattooine-era Luke Skywalker who whines about power converters. But everyone loves the badass Luke who offers Jabba one last chance while walking the plank over the Sarlacc. Like Luke, Hannah and Amanda will grow over the course of their story. By the time they become harmonious asskickers, you’ll feel their progression.

Still, some readers will gripe. I know I shouldn’t let it bother me. What can I say? I’m a flawed character.

4. Editors. Fucking. Matter.

By the time my manuscript was acquired by Penguin, it had been through forty hard months of plotting, proofing, primping and polishing, not to mention a whole lot of focus-grouping. I thought it was as finished and ready as a book could be. It was not.

Silvers passed through the rigid hands of two Penguin editors, one for content and one for copy. Though I didn’t always see eye-to-eye with the content editor, she helped me fix critical problems of structure and pacing, things I wouldn’t have noticed in a million readthroughs. The copy editor, meanwhile, opened my eyes to gaffes I’d been making my whole damn life. I repeatedly confused “further” with “farther,” and wildly overused the verb “crack.” Perhaps my crack habit stems from my farther issues. I’m no psychologist. I just know that if I had self-published Silvers during my premature congratulation phase, I would have served a half-cooked fish to my readers, which would have served no one.

This isn’t an argument against self-publishing. I’m just saying that I ever give in to my inner Hugh Howey (as we all will someday), I’ll go deep out of pocket to hire a professional content and copy editor. Anyone who doesn’t is screwing their audience, themselves, and their fellow self-publishers.

5. Smart people doubt themselves. Dumb people paralyze.

Chuck has ably covered the topic of perseverance on this blog, and Kameron Hurley recently wrote a guest post on the subject that should be required reading for every writer out there. Not only can I attest to the virtues of sticking to your dream, I can personally illustrate the perils of giving up on it.

My first novel, Slick, came out in 2004 to great reviews and shitty sales. It was a meticulously-researched novel set in the world of public relations, a serious comedy. When it tanked, I fell into a pit of lily-livered skittishness that kept me from developing any new idea, much less one about superpowered people on an alternate Earth.

I dawdled helplessly for years, the worst indecision of my life. It took a five-month bout with cancer to light a fire under my ass and get me writing again.

The good news: I’m all healthy these days. The better news: my manuscript of Silvers, which I wasn’t sure would sell anywhere, netted me a two-book deal and enough money to support my food, clothing and shelter habit for many, many moons. I have no reason to complain about anything, except all those stupid years I squandered in self-paralysis.

Don’t be as dumb as I was. Just shut up and write.

* * *

Daniel Price is a novelist living in Los Angeles. He’s currently scrambling to finish the sequel to The Flight of the Silvers before his advance runs out.

Daniel Price: Website | Twitter

The Flight of the Silvers: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound | Add on Goodreads