Holy crap, The Cormorant comes out tomorrow.

*vibrates*

Don’t worry, I’ll be jabbering about it plenty for the rest of the week.

(Though I remind: Blackbirds is still free. And Mockingbird is still like, just over a buck.)

For now, I thought I’d get ahead of a question folks ask me with some regularity:

“Where do you want me to buy your books?”

Or, the variant: “In what format do you want me to buy them?”

The genesis of this question is noble and charitable — the reader wants to support the writer with as much advantage going to the writer as possible. It’s a very wonderful thought.

But my answer is, as always:

I want you to buy the book in the way that you want to buy it.

Would I think it’s awesome if you bought the book from your local indie bookstore and kept the money in your local community? That’s always a win, sure. But I recognize that this isn’t always possible. And that books are sometimes cheaper at places like Amazon and who the hell am I to tell you how to spend your money? Maybe you’ll borrow the book from a friend. Or get it from a library. Or, heavens forfend, you’ll nab it off a piracy site.

And maybe you really want the paperback. Or maybe you really want the e-book.

Don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right. I love that you’re even thinking to ask this question. But I’m just geeked that you want to check out the book. And I make roughly the same amount per book no matter where you buy it or via what format. (This differs slightly with self-publishing; in that case, I make somewhat significantly more when I sell direct to the audience. Though there again, I encourage you to do what’s easiest and awesomest for you, not what’s best for me. It’s not your job as the reader to carry me. It’s my job as the writer to provide you with stories you find engaging and interesting and enlightening and hope that performing that act of story provision ultimately helps to feed me and my family and my raging porn-and-chocolate addiction.)

It’s a win for me if you check out my books and, equally awesome, tell others about them. Maybe that means face to face. Maybe that means writing a review at your chosen review receptacle.

So, very seriously, thank you for asking the question.

But please: follow your heart and your wallet on this one.

My novel, Blackbirds, is now free until December 31st.

Free. As in, costs you nothing.

EXCEPT YOUR UNDYING LOVE AND A WILLINGNESS TO KILL IN MY NAME.

Anyway.

You can nab the Kindle file here.

Or you can grab the ePub here.

You can find more information on the download from our Generous Clanking Masters at Angry Robot, whose Beneficent Programming is why this gift exists in the first place.

ALL HAIL THE ANGRY ROBOT.

You can also buy Mockingbird and Blue Blazes for ~$1.30 a pop (info here).

Finally, please consider pre-ordering the third in the Miriam Black series — The Cormorant! — where cantankerous psychic Miriam Black travels down to sunny Florida where she is paid to give a rich man a vision of his demise but instead discovers a message to her written backwards in time and scrawled in blood, a message that reads HELLO, MIRIAM…

Cross-posted from the Angry Robot Blog today, where a very special gift awaits.

We set up our Christmas tree the other day, and the way it worked was, my wife would hand me an ornament and me or the wolverine tornado (aka “toddler”) would place it on the tree, and she suddenly handed me an ornament that looked like a ring of antlers. And I said, “Didn’t Dad give this to us?” and she said, “No, we gave it to him the year that he died.” Oh, I thought, right, right.

My father died on December 22nd.

I don’t mean this year. Or even last year. This was six years back, so your condolences, while appreciated, are many moons beyond their required date.

Snow covered the ground. Ice in the trees. Blinky lights on all the houses and shiny bauble-hung trees in the windows.

And my father had prostate cancer. It had gone through him like raisins through a fruitcake and refused to be contained to the one place: the cancer had ambition, enough to kill him earlier than any of us expected, I think, even though we knew his life was suddenly on a short leash. We drove to see him on that day, the 22nd, just three days before Christmas, and while there on our visit his liver failed and his heart stopped and suddenly he was passing on to his happy hunting ground.

He died with my finger on his pulse. I felt it go. That’s a powerful and awful thing to feel—someone’s heartbeat suddenly slow, then stop.

A rum-pa-pum-pum, then—

Nothing.

I don’t bring this up to bring you down, but, you see, I think about death a lot. As a writer, death is part of my arsenal—it saturates my fiction the way the cancer got its claws in my father. I don’t know who said it, but someone far wiser than me said that all stories are about death and dying and I think that’s true, at least at the molecular level.

When Christmas rolls around, my death thoughts increase by at least an arbitrarily-made-up 46%.

This is, in part, because my father died around Christmas.

But that’s not all of it.

No, Christmas, it seems, is positively pendulous with death energy.

My father lost his father during Christmas, too—and so during that season he became more pensive and troubled, and many of the holidays were punctuated with that grim act of visiting my grandfather’s grave (a man I never met, a man who my father didn’t seem to like very much, and I’d watch him there looking at the grave trying to negotiate the repair of a relationship that could no longer be repaired, a feeling I am well-aware of now that my Dad has slipped away).

That’s the personal side, but you look past that, you can start to see death everywhere. Sure, sure, I know, Christmas is about birth, about the life of that guy whose name is right there in the holiday, but shit, that’s a ruse, isn’t it?

Christmas comes just as the seasons are turning. Just as the last leaves of life are falling off trees. Just as the ground goes cold and food becomes scarce and animals starve. Just as the white stuff starts to fall from the sky like ash—

And here I am tempted to make a dramatic overture about how it looks like the ash of my cremated father but the reality is, one’s cremated remains look a great deal more ‘kitty litter’ than ‘mortal ash.’ When the time comes to “spread ones ashes” it feels more like “flinging kitty litter” and you wonder if passersby might ask why you’re tossing aquarium gravel into the lake, you weirdo.

But I digress.

Christmas is death-flavored.

Christmas is the birth of a guy whose ending we know is to die brutally.

Christmas is when we chop down a perfectly good tree and stand its corpse in our living room to decorate like a clown before its needles turn brown and fall.

Christmas is when we kiss underneath the mistletoe, the poison that Loki uses to tip the arrow that he shoots into Balder’s eye to kill him.

Christmas is all the color leeching out of the landscape until the dark earth is peppered in white and gray, the forest like bones, the sky the color of a headstone.

Christmas is a stone’s throw from the shortest day and the longest night.

Christmas is when we lose our fathers. Or our mothers. Or when we remember those who came before and will no longer share in the meal, or the gifts, or the warmth of the fire meant to ward off cold nights.

It’s a bit theatrical, of course, to suggest that Christmas is death. Or that its jolly façade hides grim and sinister trappings.

But again, I’m a writer. It’s how I do.

More to the point, this is a good – if entirely shameless – time to mention that I have a book perfectly well-suited for all these aforementioned grim and sinister trappings. Because my favorite cantankerous psychic, Miriam Black, is back—a character born out of my own frustrations and fears about death, a character who now, in The Cormorant, takes a little vacation away from all the wintry Christmastime doldrums to head down to the Florida Keys where she is drawn into a trap. A trap where she expects to be paid handsomely to tell a man about his death but instead finds a message written to her in the man’s blood, a message from an unknown enemy that reads, Hello, Miriam…

Read the book and you should follow the bouncing Santa Hat.

Because no book starring Miriam Black is complete without her killing Santa Claus, am I right?

I think I am.

Please to enjoy the book.

And Merry Christmas, or whatever holiday you find warms your dry thatch of a heart in this dark, lifeless, death-soaked time.

[EDIT: Comments are now turned off. I’m having to wade through a rather epic middenheap of awful comments and toss most of them into the spam oubliette.]

This meme is going around Facebook.

And hey, by the way? Fuck this meme.

Listen, I get it. We have a toddler and having a child is challenging — way more than you think. You buy into this myth that somehow the physical control you possess over an infant — MOVE KID HERE, PLOP THEM HERE, DROP THEM IN THE SLEEP CUBE, STICK THEM ON THE HAMSTER WHEEL — is infinite. You assume that you will retain physical control over that child.

But it’s not long before you realize this is total horseshit. You can’t physically control them any more than you can restrain a chimpanzee by arm-wrestling him. A toddler is 30-40 pounds of flailing, slack-limbed weight. Shifting weight. Disproportionate weight. And the toddler may hit. Or bite. Or shriek. And you can’t stop them physically from doing that.

And so, you think: I can spank this kid. That will teach him to stop.

It sure might.

Just like if I want a woman to shut up, I might smack her across the mouth.

Just like if I don’t like what some guy is saying to me, maybe I punch him in the throat.

You wanna teach somebody to shut up? Start slapping, kicking, throwing punches.

Maybe swing a knife, point a gun.

You spank a kid, you hit a kid. I know, this meme would seem to harken to a simpler time, a har har har I warmed my kid’s butt and now he knows not to talk back to me time, a time when caveman ideals hid behind the smiling face of a smug, pipe-smoking 1950s father.

What I know is this: you spank your kid, you’re demonstrating that you’re a lazy, impatient, frustrated bully. You’re a brute who can’t handle his own child, who can’t actually teach anything or help your child understand the vagaries of life. Your intelligence level is equal only to the smacks you give, whether they’re to a kid’s ass or across his face or with a belt or a paint stirrer or a wooden spoon or whatever your weapon — because, that’s right, it’s a weapon.

My grandfather used to apparently beat the piss out of my father, and my father reportedly beat the piss out of my grandfather as a result. My Dad used the spanking thing once — one time, when I lied about putting a cat in the dryer when I was five (no, I wasn’t trying to kill the cat, it was winter and the dryer was warm and I thought the cat would like it, shut up). He spanked my ass and I never forgot it. I mean — I never forgot it. I don’t know that I remember much from being five-years-old, but I sure as hell remember that. Not in the good way. I don’t remember it in the, “Now I understand why lying is bad” way. But in the “I should be afraid of this guy” way. In the “I gotta get better at lying so I can avoid the paint stirrer,” a device that sat forever on our counter and was referenced time and time again as a reason for me to “behave.” I acted up and him reaching for that paint stirrer was all it took to cause me to settle the hell down.

It worked.

It worked to scare me. It worked to keep the peace. Damn right I behaved.

But it didn’t teach me anything. It didn’t make me a better person. It just made me scared.

And it made me real angry.

I’m not saying my father was a bad Dad. Frankly, I’m surprised he wasn’t meaner sometimes given the stories I heard of how my grandfather treated him. Abuse begets abuse. It’s kicked dogs all the way down. I loved my father and am still sad as hell that he passed just as we were becoming friends again. But we had a big gulf between us for a number of years and I can tell you at the very bottom of one of those deep dark chasms that separated us lurked that singular moment of him beating my ass — and then threatening to hit me again and again over the years.

Don’t hit your kids.

Don’t pass around a meme that encourages people to hit your kids.

Kids are smaller than you. They’re weaker. They’re a little cocktail shaker of emotions and hormones and unformed lessons. You’re supposed to be the rock they hold onto in tough times, not the rock you hit them with when they’re acting like all children do because they’re children.

People always say they can’t imagine hitting their own kids. I can imagine it. I can imagine hitting my son. What that’ll do to him. I can imagine the little mote of hate inside of him, that little ember of anger, the little seed of resentment planted — because here I am, a father supposed to offer him a hand up and instead I bring that hand against him.

It’s horrible. It gives me nausea just thinking about it.

So —

Cut that fucking meme out. Stop passing it around.

It isn’t funny.

It isn’t twee haw haw haw oh-what-a-simpler-time.

It’s called hitting children. And it ain’t cute. So cut that shit out.

I was standing out back of my father’s — well, I don’t know what the fuck it was, but it was a building of indeterminate function. A big building in which you could stack a couple tractors on top of one another. Big brown metal walls. Concrete floor. One end open, the others closed. He did sandblasting there. Painting. Some engine work and some reloading and gunsmithing. (About ten yards south of the building was a shooting bench and about 200 yards off, a backstop.)

We were standing out there one day for whatever reason or another and I was about 12 at the time and I let slip with a so-called “bad word.” I said this word by way of an accident — not that I let this vulgarity slip out but rather I meant to say one word and I said this word instead.

That word was “piss.”

Not exactly a bunker-buster of a bad word, but bad enough for a 12-year-old at that time and I was afraid as soon as the word fell out of my mouth that with such an utterance I would earn his rather significant ire, but the opposite happened:

He laughed, and was proud of me.

That was the day, I think, that I learned to truly love me some profanity.

It’s part of my schtick, here, but it’s also part of who I am and how I really talk. (Though people are often surprised I don’t ladle heaping helpings of shit and fuck on every conversation, podcast or interview I have — hey, I do try to maintain a level of politeness, particularly with people who may not be super-comfortable with me spraying that kind of naughty-juice all over them.) I responded strongly to George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Denis Leary. (I did not respond strongly to Andrew Dice Clay, curiously — I always thought his profanity was in service of being dirty, not in service of being funny or making a point.)

I use profanity here at this site pretty frequently, and most folks seem happy about that or at least cautiously comfortable. The bad words are in my books, too — even in my young adult books because I probably cursed more when I was a teenager than I do now, and while I recognize that not all teens are foul-mouthed little shit-birds, a good number of them are or they’ve at least heard the words used by peers. (My cornpunk YA, Under the Empyrean Sky, uses more made-up profanity than real-world stuff, though.) Some of the negative reviews of my books will call out this penchant for linguistic naughtiness, which is fine and fair and that’s where bad reviews do good work: they let others who might be offended by such things know what they’re going to get, and so they might want to avoid. Like warning you a bridge is out ahead, or that a product contains peanuts. My Miriam Black books in particular are soggy with dirty words. Some folks have suggested that women don’t speak that way, but they haven’t met many of the wonderfully foul-mouthed women in my life. (My own mother dropped an f-bomb when meeting my in-laws.)

Because of this, my books or blog posts sometimes offend, and that’s okay.

(It’s worth noting here my thoughts on offending people, which is to say, I don’t much care. I don’t mind offending you. I very much mind if something I say hurts you directly or indirectly.)

I hear sometimes that profanity is a sign of reduced intelligence or limited vocabulary — to which I say, bad words are still words, after all, which means they are vocabulary. Profanity is a circus of language. Trapeze stunts! Lions eating lion-tamers! Motorcycles on fire jumping through hoops!

Some folks say, “You don’t need to use profanity,” which is true, and I agree, and sometimes I don’t. Actually, George Carlin said a pretty smart thing on this subject…

Yeah, that “You don’t need to; you’re a funny man, you don’t need that stuff” thing. Well, my argument is that you don’t need paprika or oregano or a few other things to make a stew, technically, either — but you make a better stew. If you’re inclined to make a stew of that type, “seasoning” helps.

I know from Bill Cosby’s work, he clearly feels that way, and I’ve always felt that by taking that stand and developing a body of work that didn’t include it, Cosby can never now choose to use that language. I, however, can choose either.

I can do six minutes on The Tonight Show with none of that in it — I can use other parts of my tool kit that work for me; I’m good at them, too, and can do that no problem — but I can also be more of my street-corner self elsewhere, with language of the street if I want to do that, too.

Why should I deprive myself of a small but important part of language that my fellow humans have developed? Why not use all of what we’ve developed to communicate with?

Sometimes I overdo it intentionally, because it has an effect of its own. I think there are a lot of sentences where the adjective “fucking — I guess it’s a gerund, isn’t it? — sometimes just makes the joke work better. And not because they’re laughing at the word “fuck” but because including that word may make the language of a sentence more powerful, and it just gets in there better. It just gets in that channel you’ve got open with a harder punch, you know? That’s why people use it in life — because it makes something they’re trying to say stronger; it gives a particular effect.

I think the folks who choose to deny that part of our language have limited themselves. And that’s fine; that’s good. Good choice over there…but I’m just fine over here.

Anyway, all this is a precursor to:

Hey! Have a random compound-vulgarity generator!

The way this works is simple:

a) Begin with one of the Ten Base Vulgarities.

b) Couple that with a Random Noun or use one of the twenty I’ve provided.

c) Frontload with as many Vulgar Modifiers as you so choose.

d) Get on your roof and yell your glorious new profanity to passing cars.

Step One: The Ten Base Vulgarities

1. Shit
2. Fuck
3. Ass
4. Tit (or Tits)
5. Jizz
6. Dildo
7. Cock
8. Douche
9. Piss
10. Turd

Roll a d10 or use a random number generator to get your word.

* Now, a couple notes on what constitutes vulgarity. The ten naughty words I’ve chosen are not meant to indicate judgment against these words — I don’t consider these words bad in the sense that they shouldn’t be used. I think it’s a bit absurd that any of these are considered vulgar, really — “shit” is bad, but “poop” is mostly okay? Whatever. I also don’t think dildo is a bad word — it just happens to sound funny when paired with random nouns.

Some will note that “douche” is not strictly vulgar and has sexist connotations, though others will argue that the actual practice of douching is not recommended or healthy for most people. I’ve included it here because its pairing in compound vulgarities is, quite frankly, classic.

I have not included the nuclear-bomb profanity of “cunt.” An argument for its inclusion might be that a) I’ve included “cock” and I feel like “cunt” is its natural pairing and b) because I’ve heard British and Aussie folk use it with great gusto and delight. PLUS JAMES JOYCE USED IT.

Regardless, it is the lightning rod of dirty words. You are free to add it into the list as you see fit.

You are of course encouraged to add your own vulgarities to the list as you see fit, expanding the base vulgarities beyond these ten. (These words alone possess a wide variety of variations: crap, cum, anus, dick, nuts, prick, snatch, hell, dong, wang, and on and on. I think some vulgarities are too jerky to be included, and that includes any word that tends to be explicitly racist or sexist or otherwise bigoted.)

Step Two: Random Noun Selection

You will find a most excellent random noun generator right here.

In fact, using step one and step two already, I have gotten:

Fuck-Missile!

Dildo-Brother!

Cock-Giant!

Jizz-Archer!

And more.

Or you can also roll a d10 or use the random number generator on this list of 20 nouns:

1. Circus
2. Magnet
3. Donkey
4. Turnip
5. Wombat
6. Blizzard
7. Bucket
8. Tornado
9. Pumpkin
10. Wizard
11. Syrup
12. Tractor
13. Cookie
14. Farmer
15. Dumpling
16. Fruit
17. Squirrel
18. Hamper
19. Shovel
20. Tube

Fucktube? Douche Blizzard! TURD-MAGNET. (Or Turd Magnate?) Jizz-Donkey.

And so on, and so forth.

Step Three: Add 0-100 Vulgar Modifiers

Choose another semi-vulgar or vaguely-insulting random noun:

1. Scum
2. Barf
3. Vulture
4. Monkey
5. Pube
6. Nipple
7. Goblin
8. Porn
9. Elf
10. Gourd
11. Testicle
12. Butt
13. Jelly
14. Poop
15. Biscuit
16. Meat
17. Booger
18. Widget
19. Velociraptor
20. Underpants

Then add a verb from this list:

1. Juggling
2. Jiggling
3. Gargling
4. Tickling
5. Humping
6. Denying
7. Thumping
8. Chomping
9. Punching
10. Sucking
11. Poking
12. Sipping
13. Squeezing
14. Spasming
15. Whistling
16. Massaging
17. Trumpeting
18. Snorkeling
19. Nibbling
20. Roasting

Or a verb from this list:

1. Shellacked
2. Buried
3. Tossed
4. Kicked
5. Tumbled
6. Dongled
7. Tweeted
8. Smacked
9. Guzzled
10. Whipped
11. Spackled
12. Wrangled
13. Pecked
14. Squirted
15. Napped
16. Snogged
17. Hustled
18. Mutilated
19. Ogled
20. Pinched

Which could lead to such indelicate phrases as:

“Butt-Dongled, Elf-Pecked Jizz-Wizard!”

Or: “Pube-Shellacked, Jelly-Sucking Fuck-Turnip!”

Good times. Good times.

Step Four: Yell It At Passersby

Just don’t tell them I told you to do that.

Step Five: Have A Merry Motherfucking Christmas!

You biscuit-whistling, nipple-nibbling, goblin-hustled, gourd-whipped douche-tubes, you!

As a quick administrative note:

You will find me here tomorrow and at the Angry Robot site talking about Christmas and Death (no, really). Then I won’t be back until next week when I’ll talk about that most foul-mouthed of cantankerous psychics, Miriam Black, who returns in her third adventure, The Cormorant.

First round is right here.

Second round is right here.

Third round: boom, right here.

And the fourth round is now within clicking range.

The end is here.

It has been a wonderfully weird experiment and I think, actually, pretty successful.

Time to bring this badboy home.

The rules are simple:

Look through the 800-word entries from last week (round four, linked above).

Pick one.

Add another 200 words to the story. The final 200 words, actually.

(Easiest way forward is to copy the chosen 800 words to your own blog, then add the next 200. Don’t forget to link to the now-finished tale in the comments.)

You do not need to have participated in the earlier rounds to participate in this one.

This time around, as noted, you will finish the story. And! And you are free to work on a story to which you have previously contributed, preferably one whose initial 200 words were yours to begin with. (Meaning, while not necessary, it’ll be interesting for you to finish the story that you began but whose middle is penned by three other writers.)

This is a collaborative game. It is Whisper Down the Lane. It is Telephone.

And now it’s time to finish up.

You’ve got one week.

Due by Friday, December 27th, noon EST.

Add the final link to the narrative chain, won’t you?