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?

Writer’s Digest / Amazon / B&N / iBooks / Indiebound / Goodreads

The Kick-Ass Writer is now karate-chopping its way around the world in bookstores all over this great multidimensional omniverse.

I have a handful of physical copies of this book and I’d like to give them away.

I want to give a bunch of them away, in fact.

I want to give a bunch of them away all at one time.

And here’s how I’mma do it: I’m going to give them to your local writer’s group. (I don’t have any rigorous definition of “writer’s group” in mind, to be clear.)

I’ll give one book to each of the members of your writing group — up to ten, anyway. (And I’ll send them to one point person in the group, not to all of you individually. Because I’m hella lazy.)

How you get this bunch-a-books is simple:

Send me a group photo of your writing group to terribleminds at gmail dot com.

One photo per group.

The photo can be of you guys doing anything, though obviously your goal is to amuse and impress me as if I am a bloated, sleepy emperor on a throne made of dead writers clapping his clammy palms together and muttering ENTERTAIN ME TINY PENMONKEYS DANCE TO STAVE OFF MY GRAVE ENNUI. *clap clap snore drool*

You get the idea.

I’ll devalue the books with my signature if you so desire.

This contest is only open to those in the United States, because I can’t really afford to send a giant box of books overseas. (Sorry, folks. MURRICA.)

I’ll close this contest on Friday the 13th of December at noon EST. I’ll pick my favorite that day and announce the following week. If we get enough awesome entries, I may consider a second prize — but I’ll wait until the contest’s end to see if it’s warranted.

Good luck. And please spread word about the contest — and the book!

Questions can be dropped in the comments below.

Muy danke.

*jetpacks out*

I am geeked when someone I’ve been talking to on THE SOCIAL MEDIAS for a while suddenly up and has a book deal and then, holy crap, an actual book. Especially a book that maybe has origins from one of the terribleminds flash fiction challenges?! Holy crap! Such is the case here, and so I am very excited to have Jamie Wyman at terribleminds to talk about her new book, Wild Card:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

Who am I? I am the terror that flaps in the night. I am the Bee Girl. I am a college drop-out who bet it all on Blue Man Group. I am the mother-fucking Phoenix. Spinner of fire. Drummer of drums. The Pajamazon. Omnipotent despot to all things peachy. I am Jamie Wyman.

Ahem, sorry. Guess I got a little carried away. Anyway, I’m Jamie—aka Blue. I write stories. Some are scary. Some are twisted. Some are sweet or pensive. All of them have some element of humor to them. In my life I’ve been a waitress, teacher, fire spinner/eater, writer/director of a performance troupe, corporate shill, that girl who dances like a hippy at Dave Matthews Band concerts, and a stay-at-home mom. I prefer careers that mean I get to wear pajamas all day. I like chai and have an unholy crush on Tom Hiddleston.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

Trickster gods are playing poker to win Cat Sharp’s soul. Her only help in winning it back is a deliciously snarky satyr. Wackiness ensues.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

One thing you need to know about me is that I love Trickster gods. Maui, Puck, Loki, Coyote, Anansi… all of ‘em. I’ve always loved the mythology surrounding them. Their fingerprints are all over my life. Just when you think something’s going your way, they throw in a plot twist. You can either freak out about it, or laugh and move on.

Anyway, several years ago I had the idea that I wanted a typical black-velvet garage sale painting of the trickster gods of various pantheons playing a game of Hold ‘Em. Since I suck at the whole painting thing, I decided to try to make this read with my medium: words.  So in 2011 I wrote a piece called “Ante Up” (for one of your flash challenges, actually) as a sort of proof of concept. The idea had legs and so I let it simmer a bit.

Around the same time I was toying with a character named “Candice Sharp” and wanted to do an urban fantasy story with her. Mainly I wanted a character named C. Sharp so I could play with musical elements. Eventually the ideas collided and I changed Candice to Catherine because I couldn’t stand the thought of a main character being called “Candy” at any time. Yes, the name “Cat” is ubiquitous in urban fantasy right now, but other reasons for the name change made themselves clear as I outlined the series arc. I decided to throw Cat into the middle of the poker game and bam: the story was born.

HOW IS THIS A STORY ONLY YOU COULD’VE WRITTEN?

It took a special kind of insanity to cook this one up.

For starters, I truly love these characters. Cat is quiet compared to Marius, but the whole gang talks to me… okay, Marius won’t shut up. It’s a miracle I get anything done with him going on and on and on about how awesome he is. But they play in my head and it’s so damn fun! I like watching them interact with one another. Torturing them—especially Marius—gives me immense joy.

Ultimately, though, this book comes from my reverence of myth and demented love of trickster deities. Pairing those figures with technomancy, Las Vegas and music came very naturally for me—I used to work for an agency heavily pimping vacations to the Strip. My tribe is mostly comprised of tech and gamer geeks, and I spent more than half of my life studying/playing/writing music.

This is a cocktail that comes from my own special brew of crazy. Sure, other people in the loony bin could probably put these things together to knit a potholder or something during arts-and-crafts time, but ultimately, my special sauce is my passion for all of the above. What you get out of that mixture of love, passion, knowledge and childlike schizophrenia is my voice. Accept no substitutes.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING WILD CARD?

Trusting myself to let go and just tell the damn story. That’s my biggest stumbling block when drafting a story…just diving in and swimming around, letting it happen. My brain is often my worst enemy. Once it starts shouting at me, the avalanche begins and confidence slides down to the seabed. It didn’t help that a few months prior to writing the rough draft my confidence had taken a pretty swift kick in the pink parts with a snafu with my previous agent suddenly leaving the biz without telling a soul. GOOD TIMES! With WILD CARD, getting back on the horse, trusting the process and letting the story happen was damn hard.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING WILD CARD?

This wasn’t the first novel I wrote, but WILD CARD is my publishing debut, so the things I’ve learned about making a word file into an actual factual book are legion.

From a writing standpoint, I’ve learned a lot with this book in terms of crafting a series. This is the opening act in a 5-story arc I call “Etudes in C#”. I’ve seen other authors succeed at their long game. I’m a huge fan of Babylon 5 (which is a master class in series writing). But, this was the first time I went into a project knowing not just where I wanted this story to go, but the others that spawn from it. There are many nuances to telling a fuller story over time and not giving away major reveals that this book helped me understand. Managing to keep the pacing of this story while juggling the events yet to come… yeah, that’s been a big thing. And that knowledge will continue to shift as I get deeper into the series.

I think the most important take-away for me, though, has been confidence. In the 2+ years I’ve been working on this book, my fraud complex has greatly diminished. That fear of being found out for the talentless, ass-dragging sea creature that I really am is no longer a daily—or even monthly—thing. I’ve grown to a place where I trust that I “belong” here. That I have written something worth reading.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT WILD CARD?

I fucking love these characters. Seriously, they are so much fun to have in my head. Catherine is a smart, flawed woman who loves her bacon and takes no bullshit. And she’s an unrepentant geek. She’s someone I’d hang with. Marius is, frankly, one of my favorite characters I’ve ever worked with. He’s snarky as hell, his Charisma modifier is through the roof and he’s got one hell of a monkey on his back. He makes Cat’s life difficult and in turn I give him no end of shit. Then there’s the pantheon of gods I get to play with. And a ginger technomancer with his own secrets. Everyone in this book is so colorful and loaded with their own backstories, mythologies and foibles that they make writing them a true joy.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

Take Frankie’s advice and relax. Even with another novel and more stories under my belt since I wrote WILD CARD, I still need to chill the fuck out and just be in the drafting moment. I’m an editing fiend and I *do* enjoy story creation, but I can tell a difference between the results of when I’m writing tense (always looking for what’s wrong or questioning it) vs when I’ve written loose and fearless. Gotta be more like the Dude.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

 “And all I have to do is push,” he said.

I felt the sting of something pricking my belly and looked down to see that Marius had drawn his sword. Its point puckered the fabric of my T-shirt, blade gleaming wickedly in the moonlight. Gulping down a ball of fear and sucking in my stomach, I pulled my eyes back up to meet his. His expression didn’t waver.

“Do I have your attention?” he said with a simmer.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

Well, within the C# universe, I’ve got some work to do. Book 2 is done and ready to be pitched to the publisher. Book 3 is at about the 50% mark. Books 4 & 5 are sketched. There are some shorts in that playground, too. One is finished, another is still cooking in brain juice.

Outside of that, I’ve got a few short projects that I’m shuffling around. Also working on my first comic—a collaboration with artist Emma Lysyk (www.emacartoon.com). Other stories begging me to write them include a Steampunk Wizard of Oz book, a piece centered on a hospice chaplain, and another that takes place at Porn Star Fantasy Camp. I’m a busy girl.

Jamie Wyman: Website / Twitter

Wild Card (out 11/25): Amazon / B&N