You will note that I have a few items of Merch for sale here on the site.

This Merch tends to be of the “mug” and “t-shirt” variety.

I sell them using Zazzle.

And, hey, lookie lookie.

Today Zazzle is running a sale on GASP mugs and t-shirts.

So, if you procure any of the terribleminds merch items, and use the following code:

BLKFRIDAY983

You will get 50% off.

Also, if you’d like to see any other kind of merch on this site, lemme know, yeah? Anything from the site you’d like to see on a mug, t-shirt or Other Customizable Product, please plop down into the comments and say the word. Say thankee-sai.

Me: Hey, whatcha doing? Doodling more dongs on all my books? Because that’s mature.

You: No. For your information, I’m planning my next steps with this novel, since the month is almost over and I will soon be scoring a bullseye on the ol’ 50,000 words target. Boom.

Me: Congratulations to you.

You: Thank you. I plan on celebrating.

Me: And what manner of celebration are you planning?

You: You know, I’m a writer, so, the yoozh — I’ll sit around in a dark room drinking hard liquor and laughing at all my jokes until I start crying.

Me: That’s a myth, by the way. One I admittedly persist in transmitting, but all writers are not drunks. Hell, some authors don’t even drink.

You: HA HA HA, SURE, GRANDPA.

Me: *stares hot iron pokers through your soul*

You: Fine, I’ll amend my celebration. I seem to recall Delilah Dawson said something about cupcake cannons, so I’ll head down to Party City and grab a couple of those badboys and fire off a 21-cupcake-salute. Red velvet. Right into my deserving belly. CHOOM CHOOM.

Me: So, liquor and cupcakes.

You: Breakfast of Champions, man. And then, soon as I shake off the hangover and the diabetes, it’s onto making this novel the bonafide motherfucking bestseller it is destined to be. That’s what I’m scribbling here — a list of agents and editors who —

Me: Whoa, whoa, whoa, Captain Howdy, let me stop you right there.

You: Wha? Wha’d I say?

Me: I — I just — whhh — vuhhh — muhhhh. MUHGRBLE NNNNGH no! No. No. Is your plan really to finish this book and then just start flinging your story-shaped poo-ball into the inbox of every agent and editor you have chosen to punish? As if they’re dung beetles awaiting your crap?

You: Well. Yeah?

Me: Oh, goddamnit.

You: Hey, now. That’s the whole point of this NaNoWriMo adventure, isn’t it? To write a book, then to get that book published. I mean, holy shit, I’m sure whatever I wrote is better than what Snooki wrote. I figure whatever she turned in was just a ream of papers coated in smeary bronze tanner Snooki-prints. Grumpy Cat gets a book deal. Guy Fieri is still allowed to put words inside of things and sell them to us. You know what I heard? The giant wrecking ball from the Miley Cyrus video has a book deal. I’m not kidding. It’s called, LIFE WITH CHLAMYDIA.

Me: That’s mean. You’re saying Miley Cyrus has chlamydia.

You: No, the wrecking ball caught it from unprotected sex with other wrecking balls. God, you’re very insensitive, you know that? Check your privilege, son. No, Miley Cyrus does not have chlamydia. She has, however, had her tongue replaced with an angry eel. Which is very sad that kids these days feel they need to have these procedures to feel cool and to fit in at —

Me: Just shut up. Shut your sugar hole. No more talky. We need to get back to this poison pill of a plan you’re trying to get me to swallow. Sending off your NaNoWriMo manuscript on December 1st is — to quote Chris Traeger, literally the worst idea you have ever had. Ever. Ever! Ever.

You: Even worse than the time I —

Me: This is not Family Guy. Stop that.

You: Ugh, blech, blergh, whatever. I wrote this fancy book and now I’m not supposed to do anything with it? Just sit on it like it’s a chair? You’re not my Dad. (Wait, or are you?) Whatever. Point is: I did the hard part. Now I need to reap sweet reward.

Me: The hard part. The hard part? The hard part?! Hey, hold on, I’m gonna laugh for 17 minutes.

*18 minutes passes*

Me: There we go. *wipes eyes, blows nose*

You: That was eighteen minutes.

Me: Well, turns out what you said was extra stupid. The hard part is not writing a book. That is actually the easiest part. Writing a book is the Play-Doh phase. It’s just you smooshing words together and screaming out ideas and making your action figure characters do shit and say shit. It’s a drunken clumsy race to the finish line. It’s inelegant. It’s the braying of a donkey. What comes next is not fill up this super-soaker with my word-vomit and hose down the publishing industry with it. What comes next is edit this thing into something resembling a great novel.

You: No, nope, mm-mm, I know what’s happening here. You’re just trying to keep me from competing with you. I know that agents and editors have a job and that job is to take my word-barf and delicately shape it into the flower it’s yearning to become.

Me: December 1st, do you know what agents and editors do?

You: Uh, celebrate all the sweet reads they’re about to get?

Me: They have an underground bunker in Greenbriar, West Virginia. They leave Manhattan in these shadowy buses and drive there. They don’t get to spend Christmas with family or friends, because they go to the bunker for the whole month. The bunker has concrete walls thick enough to withstand a howitzer shelling. They have a supply of food and water. They bring lots of books. Good books. Real books. But the most important thing they don’t bring is a goddamn internet connection because as soon as they jump onto the Information Superhighway they’re gonna get pulped into bloody asphalt treacle by the 18-wheeler mega-truck carrying a flat-bed stacked high with a million shitty NaNoWriMo manuscripts. It’s crazytown up in there. I hear last year they ran out of coffee and Hot Pockets and had to eat a few junior editors and agent interns.

You: So, this bunker — it has a mailing address? I can put together a SASE, which is technically a thing I don’t know, uh, what it is, but I assume it’s an artifact from the forgotten “VCR Epoch” of man that I still see on submission guidelines sometimes, so I’ll just whip one of those together and send it off as soon as you give me the —

Me: I’m not giving you the address. What I will give you is a kick to the face. I will kick you so hard, your face will mold around my foot and become a comfortable flesh-slipper. As I will not have a second slipper, I will then proceed to do the same to some other part of your body. Kidneys. Solar plexus. Ass. Genitals. Whatever. I will wear you as slippers, is what I’m saying, because increasingly, that’s all you’re good for.

You: You know what? The publishing industry doesn’t want my genius, fuck ’em. Gatekeepers! That’s what they’re called, right? They’re like flying babies with flaming swords keeping the riff-raff out of Eden — oh, ho, ho, but we have built our own Eden called self-publishing. Boom. Done. Just click publish! *rips shirt off, starts to tattoo that phrase on chest*

Me: Sure, because that’s what the audience needs. Just piles and piles of garbage floating around their book-shopping experience. You know why I go to a store? To buy products curated by that store. I go to Target because I want to buy a loaf of bread from approved bread-providers, not because I want to look through a thousand different breads from a thousand different amateur hour bread-makers that range from, “Okay, this could be good” to “Oh, someone poured a half-pound of all-purpose-flour in a dirty gym sock and hit it with a flamethrower.” You don’t see a shitpile and go and shit on it in order to make it bigger, do you?

You: What if I do?

Me: Weirdo.

You: Well, somebody doesn’t like self-publishing.

Me: Hey, shut up. I love self-publishing. It’s a fantastic option. It’s changed everything. I just happen to like author-publishers who treat this thing as if they’re goddamn professionals. I like self-publishers who want to compete with traditional publishing instead of competing with rats in an alleyway fighting over a spent condom. And being professional means taking it through all the steps to make your book the best book it can become.

You: Ugh, god, fine. I won’t send it off to agents and editors. I won’t just stick it up on Amazon with this really cool MS Paint cover I did of a velociraptor making love to a helicopter. (Spoiler: it’s called RAPTORCOPTER.) I will wait. And I guess you’re going to tell me I need to blah blah blah edit my book so flippity floppity floo it doesn’t suck or something.

Me: Yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to tell you. Repeat after me: writing is when we make the words, editing is when we make the words not shitty.

You: CHUCK WENDIG IS A GIANT POOP SOCK

Me: *kicks face, wears it like a slipper*

You: *whimper*

Me: Tomorrow, we talk about editing. Good day. I SAID GOOD DAY.

I’ve come around to digging what NaNoWriMo does for the penmonkey breed, particularly having seen so many writers who have officially or unofficially ended up with published work based on their efforts during this most scribbly of months.

That being said, and this is something I talked about a bit on Twitter today: National Novel Writing Month takes the art of storytelling and the craft of writing and ladles across it a heavy shellacking of gamification. Which can work, to be clear — folks have found a great deal of value in applying a kind of social game code with attendant rules and conditions to everything from running to cooking to beer drinking.

When it works, it works.

The problem is, writing is a very peculiar, personal, persnickety endeavor — we all have our ways to do it and we further sometimes bind our hearts and minds up so deeply in the briar-tangle of wordsmithy that it becomes difficult to unsnarl our emotions from the whole thing. Which doesn’t lend itself well to to the game language that pervades the whole thing.

And thus enters one of my sole remaining concerns with NaNoWriMo, which is reliance on language like “winning” and “losing” as regards the month long novel-writing adventure. This isn’t a game of Monopoly, after all. It’s not a race in which one competes.

It’s writing a book.

As we round the bend, I’m starting to see people talk about how they’re going to “lose” — and that’s absurdist horseshit. Keep writing. NaNoWriMo is what got you started doing this thing, but it doesn’t have to be — and maybe shouldn’t be — why you finish it.

And so, it’s worth remembering:

If you finish your book on December 1st, or January 3rd or May 15th, you still won. Because HOLY SHIT YOU FINISHED A NOVEL. So few manage this epic feat that it’s worth a freeze-frame fist-bump no matter when you manage to actually stick the landing. The goal is to write a book whether it takes you one month or one year — failing to complete 50,000 words in a month that contains Thanksgiving and the ramp up to Christmas should never be regarded as a loser move.

Don’t worry about winning or losing. If it’s hurting your mindset, reject the gamification aspect. Hell, I could write my name 25,000 times and “win” the event. Or I could write 45,987 words of amazing prose that will one day be part of a bestselling novel and I’d still “lose.”

So, hang tight.

The calendar is not your prison.

NaNoWriMo is good when it helps you.

And when it hurts you, it should be curb-stomped and left for dead.

Your words matter. Whether you wrote 10,000 or 50,000 or 115,000.

Keep writing.

Finish your shit.

Completo el Poopo.

Last week of NaNoWriMo, writerly humans.

And so, I’m here to ask:

How’s it going? How’d the whole month go? Was this your first time? Will this be your last? Comments, questions, complaints? Anything me or any other writers can offer by way of dubious and uncertain guidance? It’s a tough row for folks who haven’t done it before and who don’t necessarily write at this pace all year around, and November can be a pretty wonky month in terms of time — so, honest appraisals and serious questions, fling ’em into the comment section.

Last Week’s Challenge: Find Your Favorite Opening Line

Administrative head’s up — still tallying which of the opening lines were used the most in the last challenge (unless, ahem, anyone feels like taking that bullet for me).

This week is going to be the start of a five-part challenge that should take us up to and through Christmas. This is a bit of an experiment, so, who the hell knows if it’s going to work? But it is what it is and hey, I wanna try this out, see what happens.

I want you to write the first 200 words of a story.

This will not be a complete story.

Again: this is just the start of a story.

This is, in fact, 1/5th of a story.

You will finish this by noon EST on the following Friday, which is the 29th of November.

Then — and I’ll remind you of this next Friday — you’ll take someone else’s 200 words and continue that story for 200 more (for a total of 400 words). The goal being to end up with a 1000-word story after five total challenges. Each time around you’ll grab someone else’s story and add 200 words to it. We’ll play this weird narrative whisper-down-the-lane variant until roughly the end of the year. So, for right now…

Post your 200 words at your blog.

Link back here. (That part is critical, obviously.)

You’ve got a week.

Go write!

Got another email that spurned a response from me that I thought I might share, both because maybe it’s useful thought-meat for my fellow wordivores, but also because maybe you have a differing or more nuanced opinion you might share. The email below, and my response after:

Hey Chuck,

So a buddy and I have this ongoing debate with a group of our author friends.

The gist of it is: If you’re going to be a writer, what’s better? To write what you love and make money eventually… or to write what sells and support your dream right now.

So I thought I would ask an expert. 😉

Your name came up because your work is pretty diverse, so in theory you would know a fair bit about how to earn a living from your writing. 

At any rate, I would love to get your opinion on the matter, and hopefully settle things once and for all.

Thanks very much.

And my YMMV IMHO response:

The truth is, every writer is going to come at this differently.

And no wrong way really exists.

A writer who cares first about money — not just in a “I want to buy a jetboat made of unicorn horn” greed-hungry way, but in a “I’d like to pay my mortgage regularly and occasionally afford things like meals and new shoes” — may choose to examine the market and see that certain things seem to sell well and other things don’t and then try to aim his arrow for the bullseye scrawled with dollar signs.

Another writer who cares about money in a secondary fashion — or even not at all — might instead choose to say, “Fuck that, this is my craft and my art and I’m going to write exactly what I want to write.”

Again: you’ve no wrong way forward. Famous artists like Da Vinci and Michelangelo worked on commission to create work for other people, but they brought themselves into the art whether that was what they wanted to create or not, leaving behind a legacy no matter the origin.

Other artists and authors have succeeded financially by acting without financial interest.

For my mileage, I think finding the way to do both of these things is the real magic trick. The shared space in the Venn diagram between STORY I WANT TO WRITE and STORY EVERYONE WANTS TO READ is the real miracle mile.

And I think the way you get into the space is by writing first what you want to write. When you write the thing that truly speaks to you — where you rip out your own heart and squeeze its blood on the page, where you smear your mind across the story in order to leave a slug’s trail of memories and arguments and ideas — you’re likelier to plant a more fertile garden, narratively-speaking. Write what you want, and you’ve a greater chance, I suspect, of putting passion and power into the characters and into the story. If you like what you’re writing, and you’re affected by it, you stand a greater chance to affect the audience in the same way. Surprise yourself. Make yourself feel something. Tell the story you want to tell.

That’s not to say you can’t engineer it a little the other way, too. Writers rarely have one idea, or one story, they want to tell. They often have hundreds, or thousands. I often say that the question you should ask an author isn’t “how do you get your ideas?” but rather, “how do you make them stop?” And so, from that overgrown garden of possibility you may choose to pluck the flowers that you think your readers will find most attractive. If young adult appears to be selling very well and one of your ideas is a young adult idea — well, there you go.

Further, you can take a genre or an idea or even a work-for-hire assignment that didn’t originate from you and still put yourself into it. You can still love what you write even if it’s something meant to support your dream right now.

At the end of the day, writing can be a way to make money. And pretty good money, too. But if money was your only concern I’d say — go be an accountant, a lawyer, a doctor, an assassin. Writing is an uncertain enough career that even trying to write for a market or chase trends is tricksy business and still offers you no guarantee. And so I lean more toward it being better to commit your desire to the page in order to write what you want to write first and foremost. Even if that means writing one thing that’s commercial, then writing another thing that’s more personal.

Don’t bend to the market. Make the market bend to you. Fuck chasing trends. Why not be the trend everyone else is chasing?