*vibrates so hard my hands can cut concrete*

HEY HOLY CRAP I WROTE A COMIC BOOK

And now it’s available for you to purchase.

It’s called “Shackletoon’s Hooch,” and it’s based on my short, “I Don’t Drink Anymore.” Art by the incredible Gavin Mitchell. Six pages of Amanda Wynne, bad-ass otherworldly archaeologist trying (and failing) to return to the normal life she left behind. It’s in VS. Issue 9, and also features a story by fellow compatriot Adam Christopher.

The page above is a sample page from the comic!

Thanks to Mike Garley and James Moran for having me on board.

My first comics-writing experience.

But hopefully not my last!

Other Beefy-Flavored News Nuggets

New review of the third Miriam Black book, The Cormorant:

“The plot is strong and weird and fits Miriam like a black leather glove with the fingers cut off. It turns and twists and dives–I sat up all night reading this damn book on my cell phone, for Pete’s sake. It’s well put together, nuanced, and in the end, satisfying–with no easy outs.”

“The writing is a scary, wild, obscene crash of sound and yet there are elements and overtones of Shakespeare and  Rimbaud and Dante hidden deep inside. Miriam Black is a solid taut block of arrogance, anger, and screaming rage–except that when you look back at what she’s actually done, you see a very different person. Someone who wants others to be happy, hates the death that washes around her, and never, ever stops fighting.”

It’s really one of my favorite reviews — not just because it says a metric fuckton of really nice things, but it says them in an interesting way and really seems to get the book. Thanks to Terry Irving for the great review.

Tenacious Reader also offers a lovely Cormorant review right over here:

“I highly recommend this one, I think it may have taken seat as my favorite of Chuck Wendig’s books and put the fourth Miriam Black on my must read list (please tell me there will be a fourth!). So, yeah, go read it. Miriam once again kicks ass.”

The Cormorant has a page on Goodreads, now.

It’s also available for pre-order: Amazon / B&N / Indiebound.

What else?

The Kick-Ass Writer is now out, for those looking for my writing chatter in physical form.

The NaNoWriMo writing bundle is still on sale (six books, ten bucks) until end of the month.

I turned in Blightborn, the second Heartland book, and it’s a doozy.

Should be getting edits back for Bait Dog soon enough, and I’ll start on Frack You, the second Atlanta Burns novel, soon after that.

I’ve other news I can’t yet share, but I did get an interesting script in my inbox a week ago…

*mad cackle*

It’s that time, again.

You want to promote something story-based? A book? A comic? A movie? A game? Here’s where you do it. Drop into the comments below, and give a (preferably short) head’s up to the Awesome Work you did. Hey, include links, too, so we can check out whatever it is you want us to see.

But —

But.

Here’s the caveat.

You must also promote one other thing that is not by you.

That’s your ticket through the door.

Promote someone else.

Promote yourself in return.

Fail that, and I’ll delete your comment. Or worse, kick it into the SPAM OUBLIETTE.

Easy-peasy George-and-Weezy.

Last week’s challenge, I asked you to come up with an opening line for a story.

This week, you’re going to write a story based on one of those opening lines.

(Er, not your own, thanks.)

Look through them:

Choose one.

(Choose one that complies with the original mandate of keeping to 15 words or less.)

A lot of great options in there. (Though, to be fair, a surprising lot of not so great options in this batch. Lots of errors and over-the-limits. People: read your entries before you click SUBMIT. It’ll take you like, 30 extra seconds, I promise.)

Please identify in the comments below which opening line you’ll choose.

I’ll tally and, presuming there’s a winner, I’ll send that person The Kick-Ass Writer.

Then: you write 1000 words using your chosen line. Post at your online space and link back here.

I’ll choose one of the participants (by random) and toss you a copy of — well, I dunno what. I’ll grab something off my shelves and mail it to you. (Or, if you’re international, I’ll give you something digital.)

Due by noon EST on November 22nd.

Get your fingers tapping.

I received this email the other day. I get emails like this a lot, and I always try to respond (though sometimes my lack of time — or lack of a meaningful answer — get in the way of my best efforts), and usually my replies end up being just a few lines. This one, I don’t know why, got a more robust response that even I didn’t really expect, words just sort of tumbling out, and I thought it might be useful or challenging or at least an artifact of curiosity to post the email and its response:

Hello, Mr. Wendig,

My name’s [REDACTED], and I’m a second-year at [REDACTED]. I was going for an Economics major, found that it wasn’t for me (I hated it, and I wasn’t good at it). Now, I want to major in English.

I’ve been hearing these nasty horror stories about writers going hungry, being unable to find jobs, and, recently, I read a blog post about how writers die off almost at the rate of artists in L.A., New York, and… Sedona, Arizona, was it?

I want to try to find a job in the editing or publishing industry because I love books, especially novels (I know, I know, “another one,” right?) and I believe that I have the personality to be successful as an editor or a publisher. That is, if I can get the job first and work my way up in the company.

Actually, my real dream is to become a novelist. Which is a lousy dream to have right now. I should know. I studied the economy for a year and a half (ex-Econ major, remember?).

I feel lost. I feel lost and scared. What I’ve been doing is collecting the life stories of English majors, poets, and novelists to try to figure out how they got where they are as professional writers that get to do what they love for a living. I want to be like them, but I don’t know how to get started on that path. They always tell me that everyone takes a different route, but I want to know some of the routes that I could take. I’ll have to carve out a fork in the road to get to the finish line eventually—I know that—but I want to see how much guidance I can get before I can decide the best route to carve. it’s kinda like an RPG. You go through the village following these routes, and you can follow what the villagers tell you, or you can ignore them, but in the end you gotta take your own path through the creepy, dangerous forest. So. I guess that makes you a villager. Maybe the friendly local village Wordsmithy?

What I’m asking for is your life story, and any advice you might have. I do take the advice that I receive to heart. Please respond; I will appreciate any advice that you have to offer.

Best wishes,

[REDACTED]

* * *

My response, which may or may not be helpful to the author of the e-mail and to you:

Hi, [REDACTED]!

I adore the RPG metaphor.

Don’t be scared.

I mean, you can be a little scared, but that should also come with a little exhilaration.

This is actually a pretty good economy for people who want to do their own thing.

So: after college, get a job. A day job. In publishing or out of it. Take the time when you’re not doing that to write a novel. And if that one sucks, fix it. And if it sucks so bad you can’t fix it, then write a different novel. Do this again and again until you maybe sorta semi-kinda know what you’re doing.

Make sure you have health insurance. When the day comes sooner or later that you won’t have a day job and you’ll be jumping out of a plane, building a parachute from your manuscript pages, we now have the ACA marketplace (which should be working by the time it matters for you) to help you obtain health insurance at a price that doesn’t kill you.

Write every opportunity you can.

But live every opportunity you can, too. We fill our creative coffers by experiencing the world around us. And we spend what’s in those coffers on the page.

Tell the stories you want to tell.

Bleed on the page.

Don’t chase trends — let trends chase you.

Be excited. Love writing. No reason to do this thing if you don’t love it. Don’t just love the result. Love the process. Even when you hate the process.

Learn why satisfaction is more important than happiness. Why long-term bliss means more than short-term dopamine release.

Tell stories about characters, not about plots.

Tell stories about you that nobody knows are really about you.

Write what you know except when that stops you from writing what you want to write — then use it as an excuse to know more and write more.

Worry more about writing good stories than getting published. The publishing industry is just the minotaur in the middle of the maze: the challenge at the end. You still have to get there. You still have to wander the maze in order to fight the monster.

Don’t feel like you have to write just one thing. Write the things that make you twitch and smile and scream and clamp your teeth. Write those things to which your heart and soul respond. Write to your loves. Write to your fears.

Say things with your work. Make the words about something. About more than just what’s on the page.

When you have a novel you love and trust: seek an agent. Or self-publish. Choose a path and then choose the other path later down the line to mix it up. Seek diversity. Aim for potential and possibility.

Hell with the doubters.

Down with the haters.

If this is something you really want to do, do it.

Embrace the fear.

And write.

Good luck.

— c.

Max Gladstone — besides being a bonafide member of Tiara Club — wrote the really crazy-amazing (cramazing) Three Parts Dead (which at present is ohhh, $2.99 for your Kindlemachine right now). He’s also the guy who wrote this bad-ass dissection of Star Wars, suggesting it’s, erm, about a hive-race instead of human beings. You should be reading Max, is what I’m saying. And here’s one shot among many, for here Herr Doktor Gladstone pops in to answer questions about his newest, Two Serpents Rise:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF. WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

24601!

Seriously, though.

I write books. TWO SERPENTS RISE, which came out this week, and my first novel THREE PARTS DEAD, are set in the fantasy world of late-millennial capitalism: gods with shareholder’s meetings and necromancers in pinstriped suits. When I’m not writing, I fence, read, cook, play board games (tabletop RPGs when I can corral enough friends into the same enclosed space), and develop my immunity to iocane powder.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH FOR TWO SERPENTS RISE.

“Forget it, Jake, it’s Fantasyland.”

Or:

A risk manager for a lich king-turned-water baron must stop fallen gods’ followers from poisoning the water of his desert city. With demons.

Or:

Congratulations! You’ve killed the tyrannical storm god! Only… who will make it rain now?

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

Back in college I worked summers cleaning houses after the renters moved out—scouring all memory of a person from their place with toxic chemicals. We had a white Jeep and rigged up Hulk Hands on the ladder rack up top so whenever we went over a speed bump the hands would say “HULK SMASH!”  One day, Hey Jealousy came on the radio, this Gin Blossoms song about a guy falling apart at his ex’s door, and something about that song clicked in with other ideas I was spinning about fantasy worlds and the downfall of old orders and the rise of new. I had this vision of a guy in his 20s who once would have been a knight or king or Jedi or something like that, but the world’s turned and left him unsure about who he is. Kind of metaphysically stuck outside his ex’s door. And then I piled a whole bunch of soil over that idea and left it to germinate.

The next autumn I met the woman who would become my wife. She’s from Los Angeles, and on my first trip out there to visit her folks I was struck by how different that city looked and felt from anywhere I’d seen before in America. Broad, relatively flat—and thirsty. I grew up in Ohio near Lake Eerie and in middle Tennessee. Droughts were rare. Yet my wife’s always mindful of dripping faucets and running taps and yellowing grass. The more time I spent in L.A. the more its water, and its problems, interested me. The closest city I know of in terms of size and topology and water trouble is Beijing—also big, flat, and thirsty.

When I sat down to write the second book in the Craft Sequence, I wanted to paint a city very different from the vaguely Northeastern metropolis of Alt Coulumb that was the focus of my first book, THREE PARTS DEAD. So I thought of the sort of LA / Beijing metaconstruct. And since the Craft Sequence is about a world stabilizing in the aftermath of global revolution—a world where people overthrew the gods and kicked them out—my Hey Jealousy kid was a good fit for the main character.

So it all goes back to toxic chemical exposure really. Thanks, summer job!

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

It draws off a weird and eclectic set of influences—ecological and political ideas coming off of my time in China, social network and evolutionary biology from scientist friends, comparative myth, activism, a bunch of book research and chats with people all along the socioeconomic and political spectrum, plus too much time getting smashed in Beijing. The odds of anyone, even me, having exactly that set of experiences are pretty small. You could say that about a ton of books, though!

At the same time, I think most readers will see where I’m coming from in this story: the world’s big and complicated, there are no easy answers, no clear bad guys, and we’re all left trying to figure out how to live, and love, and support one another. Also, demon infestations are bad news.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING TWO SERPENTS RISE?

Probably the part where I was working a day job and planning my wedding at the same time. Max, meet fifteen minutes of writing time each day. I wrote the whole thing on an Alphasmart Neo during my commute, and between the hours of eleven and midnight.

At the end of the first draft I had a 160,000 manuscript written in barely-coherent fifteen minute chunks. Which then I had to edit.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING TWO SERPENTS RISE?

Before TWO SERPENTS RISE, I edited my books sentence-by-sentence. THREE PARTS DEAD needed very little structural work—just a lot of language polishing. The disconnected way I wrote 2SR left me with a lot more structural work before I felt comfortable showing it to anyone. I added about 20,000 words to the original manuscript—and ended up right around 100,000 words total, which means I cut about half of the original wordcount.

Half.

So, yes. I learned to edit sentence-by-sentence while writing THREE PARTS DEAD. TWO SERPENTS RISE forced me to get good and comfy with highlighting ten chapters a time and hitting the ol’ delete key. Then, when I started to write the next book, I decided to try an outline. Messed that up, too, but I keep learning!

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT TWO SERPENTS RISE?

I love the city. Dresediel Lex is sprawling low houses and adobe and neon and a skyline broken by giant pyramids left over from the God Wars—temples turned to offices and shopping malls. Faceless police patrol the city from overhead on feathered serpents. Poker players mingle their souls along with their chips. Also, it’s a sports town.

I’m really excited about the characters in this book, too. I loved writing all of them.

I love the sly Giambattista Vico reference I slid in there.

And then the ending, where [REDACTED]. That part’s so cool.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

In my first draft, I tried for a nice, atmospheric start. I wanted more room for the city and characters to breathe than the plot of THREE PARTS DEAD left me.

That’s fine—character development and worldbuilding are both important. But writing TWO SERPENTS RISE taught me that these things work best after I give readers a reason to care.

And then I had to learn a whole bunch of other stuff for the third book, but we’ll talk about that next summer!

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY.

I have somewhere on the order of a thousand children, and you’ve just asked me to choose between them. Curse you, Wendig! Here’s a nice bit:

Three distinct, sharp taps trespassed upon the hush, then three more, then the thud of a bronze-shod staff on stone. The noises repeated. A heavy robe swept over the stone floor.

Caleb held his breath.

The King in Red moved among the cubicles, wreathed in power. The taps were his triple footsteps: the bones of his heel, the ball of his foot, the twiglike toes striking in sequence. “As you were,” he said. No one stirred. Sixty years ago, the King in Red had shattered the sky over Dresediel Lex, and impaled gods on thorns of starlight. The last of his flesh had melted away decades past, leaving smooth bone and a constant grin.

He was a good boss. But who could forget what he had been, and what remained?

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

In the short term, I have an awesome interactive fiction project set in the world of the Craft Sequence. That should debut in December of this year. The fourth Craft Sequence book needs revision, and I have a comics project and another novel (unconnected with the Craft Sequence, though I will return!) on the burner. And the third Craft Sequence book, FULL FATHOM FIVE, comes out in July 2014—watch for it.

Max Gladstone: Website / Twitter

Two Serpents Rise: Amazon / B&N / Indiebound

You: People are kinda mean.

Me: That is too true. I remember when I was in elementary school, this one kid used to make fun of me just because of the way I chewed, which I didn’t and don’t think was really all that weird, but it made me self-conscious about my chewing and so —

You: Hey, hey, focus up, blabbermonkey. This post is about me.

Me: Whoa, well, sorry. Who is being mean to you, little muffin?

You: Some people are really dismissive of NaNoWriMo.

Me: Some people are really dismissive of charity, health care, cats, ponies, creme brulee, gin, asparagus, Twitter, you, me, the kitchen sink. Collectively, as a whole, I think people are pretty cool. But you get some big-ass radar blobs of judgey-faced shit-snorkeling fuck-garglers, too. You have to decide if you’re going to listen to those poisonous crowds or, instead, ignore them entirely.

You: I’d like to ignore them, but it kinda harshes my mellow. It bludgeons my buzz.

Me: Then NaNoWriMo is indeed excellent training for being a writer, because nobody will respect you in the long term, either. Seriously: a career in any artistic medium can be a fine way to make money, but it is almost uniformly terrible at ensuring total respect from the world around you. I’ve been a professional writer for the last 16 years, and over half of them have been me operating in a full-time capacity. And not like, “Well, we’re eating ramen again this week,” but, you know, actual money. And just the same, I still have family members who do not approve of my choice to me a writer. I have family members who don’t even acknowledge the fact I’m a writer because, shit, I dunno. I’d probably do better in the respect department if I had chlamydia. On my face.

You: This is really not helping.

Me: Good. Welcome to reality. You need to harden the fuck up, Care Bear. You’re going to face down rejections. Editorial notes. Bad reviews. If you’re letting some NaNoWriMo critics knock you down a peg, you’re in trouble.

You: I just would very much like the respect of others.

Me: And people in Hell want Haagen-Daaz. Hey, I feel you. It pains me when people don’t dig on what I do or they use that to dismiss me in some way. Sometimes I think I’d earn more respect if I were a janitor or a sewage worker or a freelance hog inseminator. But it is what it is and at the end of the day I write for me — and, obviously, for the audience who wants to read the stories I slather onto the page.

You: All right, fine, so that’s for writing overall — but some jerks are particularly crappy about NaNoWriMo in particular. Like, they have these criticisms —

Me: Go on.

You: What are you, my therapist?

Me: I dunno, Captain Howdy, you tell me.

You: Like, there’s this one article on Salon — “Better Yet, Don’t Write That Novel.”

Me: That one’s a few years old. I’ve read it, sure. That article kinda sucks, actually.

You: Does it? Because it’s freaking me out.

Me: Why? What parts?

You: Well, I don’t want to “write a lot of crap.”

Me: Of course you don’t. Who does? If you were going to go build a chair — like, the first chair you have ever built — do you think it’d be the kind of chair you could immediately go out and sell? Ikea will buy it and call it SJNARGN and it’ll make you a million dollars? Do you think King Joffrey will sit on that motherfucker and not then ask to have your head cut off so he can kick it around like a soccer ball? No. That chair will be the ugliest goddamn chair you ever did see. It’ll probably be a safety hazard to you and everyone you love. But nobody says to the carpenter’s apprentice: “You shouldn’t build a lot of worthless chairs.” You have to build a lot of worthless chairs!

You: Worthless Chairs is the name of Scalzi’s new band.

Me: Are… you Scalzi?

You: No.

Me: Are you Rothfuss? Real or imagined Rothfuss?

You: No.

Me: … nnnokay, fine, whatever, moving on. Like I said before, you gotta write through the suck.

You: But aren’t I just committing more crap to the world? That’s what that Salon lady said. She said — hold on, lemme find it, ah, yeah, here we go:

“NaNoWriMo is an event geared entirely toward writers, which means it’s largely unnecessary. When I recently stumbled across a list of promotional ideas for bookstores seeking to jump on the bandwagon, true dismay set in. “Write Your Novel Here” was the suggested motto for an in-store NaNoWriMo event. It was yet another depressing sign that the cultural spaces once dedicated to the selfless art of reading are being taken over by the narcissistic commerce of writing.”

Me: Oh, right, because writers are never ever readers. If you can’t see me over here, my eyes are rolling so hard they just popped out of my head and the dog ate them. She also said this:

“Yet while there’s no shortage of good novels out there, there is a shortage of readers for these books. Even authors who achieve what probably seems like Nirvana to the average NaNoWriMo participant — publication by a major house — will, for the most part, soon learn this dispiriting truth: Hardly anyone will read their books and next to no one will buy them.”

Me: Again committing the idea that writers and readers are not the same people. Yeah, newsflash: in my experience, the Venn diagram featuring WRITERS and READERS has like, a 95.7% overlap. Moreover, I hate that bullshit about oh blah blah even if you do get published no one will ever read it so just stop now. Because what chimp-shit justification. First: she has no actual evidence that no one is reading books or even your books. Second: here, I can play that game with anything you might ever want to do: “Even if you do graduate from culinary school, you’ll never be hired by a real restaurant.” “Even if you do manage to learn accounting you’ll find that most companies won’t hire you because you smell. “Even if you do manage to learn how to sculpt or paint or write comic books or write novels or whatever you will soon learn the dispiriting truth that we all FUCKING DIE AND LIFE IS A FRUITLESS ENDEAVOR WHICH MEANS THERE’S NO FRUIT NOT EVER IT’S JUST A DEAD TREE LIKE A SKELETON’S HAND THAT WANTS TO PULL YOU INTO THE MUCK AND SMOTHER YOU IN ITS DREARY DEPRESSING MUD.”

You: I think you’re more upset about this than I am.

Me: Well, seriously, it’s just silly. Besides, it focuses on the wrong thing: publication. Like, yes, you can write to be published. You can write in the hopes of having an audience. But to get there, to connect with a publisher or to speak to an audience you still have to finish a book.

You: I just figured, hey, that article was written by a writer so, maybe I should pay attention. And feel bad about myself because, hey, another writer would know.

Me: But see, there’s another grim and ugly little secret: often writers will be the ones who criticize first. Hey, you know, I get it. I used to be kinda hard on NaNoWriMo. And I still recognize that it is one writing plan among many and it has lots of weird little “rules” and I’m not necessarily fond of the “win/lose” condition — but, you know, none of that takes anything away from me. Or my work. None of it removes the power from writing or storytelling. None of it harms the publishing industry. No, of course you shouldn’t be submitting your rough-hewn draft to publishers or agents on December 1st, and if you do that, someone should fire a howitzer at your genitals so that you may never breed. The actions of idiots should not be used to punish everyone else.

You: So, I should just keep writing.

Me: You should just keep writing. Haters gonna hate. I’ve said it before and will say it again: letting the haters occupy real estate inside your head is like asking a strange dog to shit in your kitchen. We’re hard enough on ourselves we don’t need to let other people stick us with knives.

You: When haters give you lemons… make haterade?

Me: No. Shove the lemons up the haters’ netherholes. THEN SQUEEZE THEM UNTIL LEMON JUICE FOUNTAINS OUT OF THEIR EARHOLES.

You: Whoa.

Me: Yeah.