It’s funny — my post yesterday on how a writing career takes the time that it takes comes in part from a conversation I was having on Twitter with two amazing writers, Tobias Buckell and Kameron Hurley. Kameron then turned in a guest post for this very blog that seems to come from that same conversation, cut from that same cloth, and the result is a smart and personal post about what it takes to stay on this bucking bull known as a “writing career.”  This is an amazing read. (Oh, and by the way, her novel, God’s War, is completely awesome, too. I might suggest that if you likes Blackbirds, you may wanna check it out.) So, without further ado: 

“Persistence.”

It was the answer to a question posed to Kevin J. Anderson in an interview, about what he thought a writer required most in order to succeed in the profession.

I read that interview when I was 17, hungrily scouring the shelves of the local B. Dalton bookseller for advice on how to be a writer. I’d already sold a nonfiction essay to a local paper by that point, and a short fiction piece for $5 to an early online magazine.

I felt like I was on the up-and-up. By 24, I figured, I could make a living at this writing thing. By that point I’d been writing with the intent of being a writer since I was 12, and submitting fiction to magazines for two years. Two years feels like a long time, when you’re 17. The rejection letters were piling up. I needed some motivation.

So I wrote “Persistence” on a sticky note and pasted it to my chunky laptop.

I have it pasted above my computer monitor, still.

Persistence.

The question was, how long?

I’d soon realize persistence wasn’t an end game. It was the name of the road.

#

My first relationship was with a blustering, panic-stricken teen who soon became a violent, delusional young man. We shacked up together soon after I turned 18, and shared a two-bedroom apartment. Lacking a third bedroom, the second bedroom became our shared office. He would blast endless tracks from Rush as he dithered around online while I hunched over my desk, headphones on, trying to write.

It wasn’t long before my writing intensity began to wear on his self-esteem. Apparently, when he was home, and especially when we were in the same room, I needed to be paying more attention to him. I’d soon learn that this odd insistence was part of a larger pattern of seeking to cut me off from friends and family and control more and more aspects of my life – a classic abuser pattern that I wouldn’t be able to name as such until I started reading feminist theory in my early 20’s and found this behavior named for what it was.

All I knew at the time was that my focus on writing became a bone of contention. It elicited a lot of screaming fights and passive-aggressive behavior on his part. But as things slowly spiraled out of control in that little apartment, I found that the writing was the one thing I still owned. It helped me push through it. I might be barely scraping by as a hostess at a pizza restaurant, struggling to pay bills on time, but I could build whole worlds that I controlled totally. I could send out stories. I could survive.

But the deeper I spiraled into depression, the more all the rejection slips hurt. The more it felt like a long slog to nowhere. At my lowest point, I started to fantasize about different ways to off myself. I spent a lot of time crying in the bathroom.

And then, one day, while writing about a blasted northern landscape in one of my stories, I started to look at how much plane tickets to Alaska cost. I thought, “Well, which is crazier – booking a one-way plane ticket to Alaska or killing myself?”

My relationship eventually fell apart. I survived it, despite a lot of screaming and death threats.

A year later, I booked a one way ticket to Fairbanks, Alaska.

#

Samuel Delany once said that to succeed at writing, he had to give up everything else. He sacrificed his health, his relationships, in pursuit of becoming the best at what he did. The people who won worked harder than other people. They were willing to sacrifice more.

I didn’t date for five years after high school.

Maybe I was being pathological, I thought. But if I was a dude, who would question it? How many times did Hemingway shut the door and demand a room of his own?

If relationships meant giving up being a writer, fuck relationships.

When not rip-roaring drunk (and often, even then) I’d spend most nights in my dorm room in Alaska working on short fiction and collecting more rejection slips. My biggest win during my two years of clattering at the keyboard in college was getting accepted to the Clarion writing workshop when I was 20. This is it, I thought. In two years, for sure, I’ll make it. I just need to keep at this. I can do this.

I hunkered down for the long haul. I decided I’d return to this crazy dream I had as a kid, to live in a rustic cabin in the woods in Alaska with a couple of husky dogs and just write books. I’d just write books until my fingers bled.

Clearly, I’d never pissed in an outhouse at 30 below.

After doing that a few times, I figured it was time to move on.

#

Durban, South Africa. Cockroaches. Humidity. Nonsensical Celsius temperatures.  No air conditioning. Two bottles of wine. A pack of Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes. A Master’s thesis and a novel warring for my attention.

I lived in a one and a half bedroom flat with a partial view of the Indian Ocean, with nothing more than a bed and some cardboard boxes as furniture. I spent most of my time tap-tapping away in the “half bedroom,” sitting on a rug on the floor, my laptop resting on a cardboard box draped with a sheet. I had books lined up all along the baseboards of the room – perfect hiding place for cockroaches.

I’d smoke cigarettes and muse that I’d finally achieved poor writer garret-style living. But like pissing in an outhouse in Alaska at 30 below, the realities weren’t as glamorous as advertised.

I submitted my first novel to publishers when I was 22, mailing the proposals and chapters out from the university mail room. It was time to be famous.

Every single house rejected it.

#

When I lived in Chicago in my mid-twenties, I’d sometimes go wander around downtown by myself. I had no real plans. No ambition. I’d just wander around this press of people and pretend my life was on the up and up like everybody else’s seemed to be. Chicago is a big, shiny city. Like Oz blooming out of flat Midwestern prairie.

One night I came home about ten o’clock at night after spending hours alone wandering downtown. Just… wandering. It was one of those aimless, “What the fuck am I doing with my life?” rambles that left me more confused than when I began.

I stumbled upstairs to my third floor walk-up and went through the mail. In it was a self-addressed stamped envelope: me, mailing a letter to myself. You’d include them with paper submissions, back in the day when hardly anybody took e-subs, so the editor could send you your acceptance or rejection without paying for postage.

I’d put the name of the magazine I’d submitted my story to on the back of the letter. It was one of the biggest magazines in the field at the time.

I opened the letter with that gloriously giddy half-hope, half-dread feeling building in the pit of my stomach.

It was a form rejection letter. The four or sixth or eighth or tenth or… however many, that month. I could barely keep track. All the stories, and all the rejections, just bled into each other.

I had no idea what I was doing with my life, except this. I knew I wanted this. Even if “this” was just some big magazine to say yes to something.

But “this” was just one long road of rejection and disappointment.

It’s strange, but I don’t remember the name of the actual magazine, because it has since closed up shop.

But I remember sitting on the kitchen floor, despondent, the rejection slip clutched in my hand.

#

At 26, I woke up in the ICU after two days in a coma and was diagnosed with a chronic illness. I received a bunch of rejections from agents for a new book not long after. One of them expressed outrage that I’d be so bold as to compare the book I was shopping to the work of Robert Jordan or George R.R. Martin, even though the query book I’d read said to compare your work to other marketable work. I filed away the rejections and wondered if I’d ever sell a book. Maybe I was crazy. Maybe I’d given up everything for nothing.

I lost my job at the Chicago architectural and engineering firm I worked for a few months later. And a few months after that, my relationship with my best friend, former girlfriend, and roommate imploded.

I found myself packing up everything I owned into the back of a rental truck with a couple of generous friends and driving my life to Dayton, Ohio.

It felt like I’d failed at everything. Life was a ruin.

I found myself living in a spare bedroom at a friend’s house, unemployed, deep in medical debt, and staring at yet another novel, three-quarters of the way finished.

When I opened my laptop, the sticky note still stared back at me: Persistence.

In all things. In writing. In life.

I finished the book.

I’d reached a point in my life where I didn’t know how to do anything else but finish the fucking book.

#

I got my first book deal when I was 28.

It came at a time when I’d hit rock bottom, professionally, financially, emotionally. It came just when I needed it. It wasn’t a million dollars. It was $10,000 a book, for three books. It was enough money for me to pay off three of my four credit cards and move out of my friend’s spare room.

Even when the contract was eventually cancelled, and the book never published at that house, I was still paid for the books. I still walked with the money. $30,000 for work I never did, for work that they wouldn’t publish.

I thought about all that work. About those screaming nights in that shared office with my ex, and the cold, drunk nights in Alaska, and shaking out my bug-infested sheets in South Africa, and thought… was this it? Was this what it was about?

That money saved my life. But when the bills were paid and my life was in order again, I asked myself what I was writing for besides money, because after writing with the intent of being a writer for fifteen years, now that I wasn’t dying in poverty, the money alone wasn’t satisfying. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t why I was writing.

Which made me wonder what the fuck I was doing, then.

#

Another book deal, this time a keeper, a year after my former deal imploded. Books on shelves. Elation. Joy. End of a long road, right?

No. Just beginning.

Arguments with my publisher over white-washed book covers. Late checks. Money that stops flowing. Then the publisher implodes, sells off its assets – including you and your books.

Take it over leave it. Fight the bullshit. Rage.

Sheer, unadulterated rage, that the work I spent a lifetime to see in print is now an “asset” a “property” a casualty of shitty business practices.

I fight the situation. I persist.

I sign a new contract.

The spice flows again.

But I’ve lost my joy for fiction.

#

I’m at the bar at a science fiction convention. I made $7,000 in fiction income the year before. I’m ordering an overpriced drink that I’ll be writing off as a business expense, because I’ll likely lose 30% of that $7,000 to taxes in a few months.

While I wait, I overhear a successful self-published author talking to a group of folks about how self-publishing can make everyone big money, and how traditional publishing is fucked. I’ve heard this a thousand times. Kickstarter is the key, he says. You can pre-fund all that work ahead of time, and generate income. He boasts about how he gave this advice to many under-advanced authors, folks paid, “These $7,000, $10,000 advances,” who were obviously small, silly fish. He sounds like a self-help guru. He makes writing books sound like a get-rich-quick scheme.

I take my drink. I don’t pour it on his head.

I remember this is a long game. I remember that both self-published authors and trad-published authors have the same small handful of breakouts and the same massive, slushy mire of “everyone else” clamoring for signal on the long tail.

I think I’ve been on the long tail a long time, but the more I talk to other writers the more I realize that that whole slog – the shitty apartment with the shitty boyfriend, the frigid outhouses in Alaska, the cockroach wrangling in South Africa – weren’t actually the start of it. That wasn’t the part where things got really interesting.

It was getting the first book. It was after the first book. It was being confronted with the fact that writing is a business, and expectations are very often crushed, and your chances for breaking out are pretty grim.

It’s persisting in the game after you know what it’s really all about. After the shine wears off. It’s persisting after all your hopes and aspirations bang head first into reality.

That’s when it starts. The rest of your life was just a warm-up.

Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.

#

Last night I rolled in from a convention in Detroit at 6:00 p.m. and stayed up until 1:00 a.m. catching up on business emails and preparing blog posts. I still have a day job. I also do a lot of freelance copywriting. Putting all that income together, I’m making close to $90,000 a year. But I’ve only been at that number for two years. Six months ago, half my department was laid off at the day job. I expect the hammer to come down at any time.

I expect that sometime soon, everything will burn down, and I’ll have to start over.

I’m working on another trilogy. Two of them, actually. I try not to squint too much at my prior sales numbers. It might affect my game.

I’m working all the time.

In the book I’m best known for, God’s War, my protagonist has a final showdown with the book’s antagonist, who tells her, “There are no happy endings, Nyxnissa.” And Nyx says, “I know. Life keeps going.”

I know.

#

I’m packing up my stuff after a panel where I’ve spoken about all sorts of things to other writers, aspiring writers, and fans alike. I’m feeling drained and exhausted. An audience member comes up to me and thanks me for talking about my day job. “You just seem so successful,” he says, “you’ve got multiple books published and you go to cons.” Later, somebody at the bar tells me it seems that every time he clicked on a link these days it linked back to one of my blog posts.

I don’t feel successful.

But it got me to thinking again – what’s my measure of success? Is it money? Copies sold? Or is it the act of persistence itself, the act of continuing to write when everybody tells you it’s a bad deal, and you should just suck it up and stop?

Persistence, I realized, was not the end goal. It was the actual game.

I had all the chances in the world to quit this game. Any rational person probably would have. Poverty, unemployment, crazy relationships, chronic illness, an imploding publisher… I could have quit. I could have said, “Fuck this noise.”

But after raging around on the internet or drinking a bottle of wine or taking a long bike ride, I came back to the keyboard. Always. I always came back.

Most people don’t.

I don’t blame them.

So when people ask me now – at panels, online, at the bar – “What does it take to be a successful writer?” I know the answer, now. Now, more than ever, because I know what it actually means. I know it’s not just a word. It’s a way of life. I know what success looks like.

“Persistence,” I say.

And take another drink.

***

Kameron Hurley is the award-winning author of the books God’s War, Infidel, and Rapture. Her short fiction has appeared in magazines such as Lightspeed, EscapePod, and Strange Horizons, and anthologies such as The Lowest Heaven and Year’s Best SF. 

Visit kameronhurley.com for upcoming projects.

Writing. Finishing. Editing. Publishing. Selling.

We want everything fast but sometimes it’s slow because it needs to be slow.

I write fast. I can churn out a book that doesn’t suck in a month or two. I also write a lot. In just over two years I’ve published ten books — one of which was self-published. Some of these books seem well-regarded, though I can’t speak to their actual quality, only to their quantity. I had a short film show at Sundance. I had a script go through the Sundance Labs. Worked on games and transmedia stuff and now comics and somewhere north of 115,000 tweets. I’ll probably write diner menus and the product description on the back of a bag of donkey chow next.

It’s a strong quantity of words. Quality, I dunno. But definitely quantity.

And to that quantity I have been referred to at times as an overnight success, which is true as long as you define “overnight” as “a pube’s width shy of 20 years.”

Because that’s how long I’ve been writing.

Twenty years.

Here are some other numbers for you:

I’m about to turn 38.

I sold my first short story when I was 18.

I made nine bucks.

I started working freelance when I was 21 — writing for the roleplaying game industry, for White Wolf Game Studios. First book I worked on was, I think, the Hunter Storytellers Guide, and then Hunter Book: Wayward after that.

I made, I think, $0.025 cents per word to start. Two-and-a-half cents per word.

Over time and with work I ended up making $0.05 per word, except when I was doing developing and editing work, which was $0.02 per word.

I contributed to around 100 books in the game industry, either as writer or developer.

In those books I wrote around two million words.

I worked various other jobs in the middle of this writing career: I was a “reporter” for the ICRDA (the Independent Cash Register Dealer’s Association, which is about as soul-killing an organization as you can imagine) and what that means was they hired me as a reporter but used me as a mule. (I crashed a tour van and got it stuck in a parking garage and that was my last day working for those assholes.) I worked one day shredding EPA documents for a pigment company. I worked a day in an advertising agency where for some reason they had sex toys everywhere and the ad execs looked like porn stars (to this day I still don’t know what was really going on there). I was a coffee-monkey for Caribou (one week), Borders (one week), and a cool little coffeehouse called Dillworth (one year). I worked behind the counter of one bargain bookstore. I worked as a manager for another bargain bookstore along with Pete, an old man who showed me scars from a time he got two bullets to the chest (at a bookstore). I did time at Gateway Computers as a help desk dude and a sales guy. I worked at a fashion merchandising company as a systems manager. I updated a website for an almost-kinda-sorta payola-based online music magazine meant to stir up radio plays when radio still mattered. I worked for the library in marketing.

But I was always a writer even when I was doing other things.

(Don’t tell my employers, but I used a whole lotta company time to write.)

I wrote six novels before I published my seventh, Blackbirds. And I wrote God-Only-Knows how many unfinished novels before that — leaving behind me a trail of broken story-corpses like furniture that fell off a truck because somebody forgot to tie all the shit down.

Those six novels were somewhere between bad to really bad with the occasional punctuation of oh that’s pretty good. It’s a good thing self-publishing did not exist back then because I’d have been shellacking the walls of the Kindle Marketplace with my stenchy word-grease.

The novel right before Blackbirds — a book called Dog Days — took me maybe a year to finish. It wasn’t really me or my voice, it was me trying to think I knew what I should write to get published, and I almost did. A few agents nibbled. I’m glad they didn’t. We can say what we want about gatekeepers, but truth is, I’m glad the bouncers kept me out of the club that night, because holy shit were my dance moves so not ready. All that flailing. Very inelegance. Such clumsy. Wow.

Blackbirds took me four or five years to write.

A month or two to get an agent.

A year or more to get published.

The sequel, Mockingbird, took me 30 days.

The third book, Cormorant, 45 days. Each with equal time to edit them, too.

Under the Empyrean Sky took a month for the first draft, but a year to get right through various successive drafts — and by the end over half the book was gone twice over. Then: more editing once the publisher picked it up — editing for content, for copy, for style, whatever.

Lots of books. Each a different hunk of time carved out of my life.

My point in telling you this is that I get a lot of emails or tweets or folks talking to me at conferences and they want to know how long this takes or why it doesn’t go faster and should they just self-publish. And I don’t have any good answers for that.

Because it takes as long as it takes.

And generally, I suspect it takes a lot longer than you want. Like most things in life, you want it now but now is often how you get it wrong, not how you get it right. A pot roast sits a long time in the oven. Brisket takes a long time for the smoke to get into the meat, for all the connective tissue to break down. You don’t paint a masterpiece the first time you pick up a brush. It took me 20 years to figure out how to brew my favorite cup of coffee. A sapling takes a long time to become a tree. A human takes a long time to become a person.

And a writer takes a long time to become a writer.

It’s easy to see these last couple years of my career as a flurry of activity out of nowhere. But you’re seeing the trunk of the elephant poking out of the tent (IT’S A TRUNK SHUT UP GET YOUR MINDS OUT OF THE GUTTER); you’re not seeing the whole beast. But those books I wrote — the ones that were bad? — mattered. You’ll never see them; they’re part of the foundation of this metaphorical house. It’s all under the earth, just rocks and packed dirt, but part of what holds the structure up. The freelance writing, too, that put me out there with editors and developers who helped me learn the craft — their input like hard stones whetting a blade.

Some books are fast, and some books are slow. Some books suck — though the suck can be fixed. Some books are good but can be made great. And some rare books are great the moment they land, as if they were handed down to the readers by one of the gods. (Though one should never be so presumptive to assume it’s his book that’s great — an ego that big and that brash could mean a book that’s very small, very broken.) You don’t just self-publish something because you’re tired of looking at it. You don’t just send things off to an agent or an editor because you need it now. As I am wont to say to the toddler: “Patience, little monkey.”

This shit takes time. It takes input. It takes other people. It takes self-evaluation. It takes knowing when a book is wrong and when to dust off your hands because it’s right. It’s about not worrying about getting to perfect because no such thing exists.

Your writing career will be long. Lots of peaks and valleys. Lots of digging in dirt, lots of learning “wax-on, wax-off,” not sure how waxing a fucking car will teach you goddamn karate. Lots of living to do, lots of reading to do. A world of of thinking, what feels like literal tons of doubt pushing down on your neck and shoulders. And, obvious to some but not obvious to all:

It’ll take a lot of writing.

Every writer is her own creature, and every book a monster child different from the last.

A writing career isn’t a short game — it’s a long con.

You should always be writing, but never be hurrying.

It takes the time that it takes.

I don’t dream about writing. I don’t dream about my books, my career, about storytelling.

I dream about stories but not storytelling, I guess you’d say — frequently really weird stories, to boot. My wife has those awkward-but-normal dreams that express anxiety or excitement over mundane life (“I was at the bank and someone said something about me and…”) whereas my dreams are like David Lynch-directed video games (“And then I jumped out of the helicopter and the helicopter was also a god? And then I took the ham sandwich and…”).

This was last night’s dream, though:

I was walking. New York City street. Manhattan. Very busy. Bright. Summer.

(Summer? Wishful thinking, I guess.)

I was going from — well, I don’t know where. I had intention. Walking from one building, going to another across town. I was walking with some purpose as one does in the city and as I passed by a doorway, Amy Sherman-Palladino stepped out. Black dress. Dark sunglasses.

She is the creator of Gilmore Girls and Bunheads.

(Have you seriously not watched Gilmore Girls? You are dead to me. One of my top ten favorite shows. Smart, snappy, sweet. Like Buffy but without all the vampire-slaying. Like Veronica Mars without all the… detecting? Whatever, shut up, just go watch it.)

I have not thought of Amy Sherman-Palladino in a long time and I do not know what possessed me to dream of her, but there she was, looking like herself but taller, and occasionally transforming into Lauren Graham. She was hurrying somewhere.

I hurried after, hoping to catch up.

(It was like that scene in The Matrix where Neo and Morpheus walk against the crowd.)

I finally caught up and said, “Can I ask you some writing questions?”

And she said, “I walk fast so you’ll have to talk fast.”

I said, “Do you have any advice for me?”

“Write from the rails,” she said. As if I was supposed to understand that.

Then suddenly she was outpacing me again and I had to struggle against the crowd — finally I matched her speedy pace and said, “I don’t know what that means.”

She answered as she walked, and said, “Write like you’re up high and going fast. The story is a ride for you as much as it is for them.” And I tried to ask her more but she interrupted me, sounding irritated: “Write like you’re hanging from a rail.”

I tried tell her again that I didn’t know what she meant.

Riding from rails? Hanging from rails? What?

Finally, we were crossing the middle of an intersection. Cars screeching brakes. Honking at us. She stopped, and whirled me around and lifted her sunglasses and said:

“You gotta write stuff that scares the shit out of you.”

And then she was gone, moving faster than I could.

And here we are.

All the entries for the Miriam “Drink It Black” Photo Contest are now in.

We had eleven total entries.

Each of them containing at least a little bit of amazing.

You can click here to find the whole set.

So, to refresh you, here’s how this works:

I pick a winner.

And then you pick a winner.

The first winner gets to pick from the two prizes available (coffee bundle or book bundle) — second prize goes to the reader-chosen winner. Easy-peasy let’s-get-beezy.

My winner?

Karina Cooper’s entry:

It was a tough choice, because some of the other photos were equally kick-ass. This one wins because it looks like a Joey Hi-Fi Miriam Black book cover. I half-expect to have to search through the image to find plots about the fourth book secretly hidden within.

I mean, whoa. The Tarot. The hair. The bruises. Jinkies!

Well done, Karina. (Karina is an author in her own right, if you didn’t know.)

That said, you’ve still got your job to do.

So, go look at the set of pics.

Pick your favorite, and drop your vote in the comments below.

You must include the number of the photo (1 through 10) for that vote to count.

Choose one only.

And, actually, I’m going to up the stakes a little bit here. I’m going to offer another prize onto the table, now — the person with the second number of votes will get a coffee mug. Either the Certified Penmonkey or Art Harder mug, from the terribleminds merch.

So, get to voting.

Voting ends at the close of Monday: 11:59PM, EST.

Last week’s challenge: “Roll For Title!”

Yoinks.

Last week’s flash fiction challenge was easily the most visited challenge I’ve ever run — also with the most participation. That’s bad-ass, and it’s amazing to see such energy and talent on display. Pat yourselves on the back. Eat some ice cream. MAKE OUT WITH YOURSELF IN A MIRROR.

Or something.

Anyway, this week, we’re back with another randomized challenge —

And, this week, I’m letting you have 2000 words instead of 1000.

The way forward is simple: pick (randomly or by hand) one element from each column below (Who, Where, Uh-oh) and smoosh those three together to concoct a single story. For bonus points, you can actually randomize the Who column twice — either to make a combination protagonist (PSYCHIC CELEBRITY! ASSASSIN ACCOUNTANT!) or to choose a second character to go into your tale, either as a supporting character or as an antagonist.

Post this story at your online space.

Link back here.

Due by Friday, the 24th, noon EST.

And the categories are…

The Who (Protagonist)

1. Detective
2. Ghost
3. Bartender
4. Dirty Cop
5. Psychic
6. Assassin
7. Accountant
8. Celebrity
9. Android
10. Waiter/Waitress

The Where (Setting)

1. Nuclear Wasteland
2. Amusement Park
3. Chinatown
4. Far-Flung Space Station
5. Mad Botanist’s Greenhouse
6. Virtual Reality
7. The Underworld
8. Trailer Park
9. Pirate Ship
10. Casino

The Uh-Oh (Problem)

1. Betrayal by best friend!
2. Left for dead, out for revenge!
3. Encounter with a nemesis!
4. Trapped!
5. Something precious, stolen!
6. Lovers, separated!
7. Warring against nature!
8. An unsolved murder!
9. A conspiracy, revealed!
10. Besieged by supernatural enemies!

He sat on my lap. “I’m writing a story!” he said. “I’m typing!”

And then he wrote:

 Nhdjyrttythjkj,./N

Qw23343dfgfghrtfghjbghnmhyjkrtyjg hmm,zAMNAMNB RTFGHBNKND FXGH JHGNMAZZVFGA

G  t aqthywqhg ab bv b

zTdxcdvxccv dcvcvvvcTQ nnz asm mz A

z tyj ybnhqdf3g3cvbv

And I assume he meant to finish with:

THEN THEY WERE ALL EATEN BY ZOMBIE CROCODILES

THE END.

Thought I’d preserve the boy’s first foray into fiction writing here on the blog. Now to spend the next 16 years convincing him that being a writer is a really, really horrible idea.