(Related: The Zero-Fuckery Guide To Kick-Ass Characters)

1. A Personality

This seems rather obvious, sure — in a way it’s like saying, “What makes a really good tree is that it has an essential treeness” — but just the same, it bears mentioning. Because some characters read like cardboard. They’re like white crayon on white paper. Sure, the characters run around and they do shit and say shit but none of it has anything to do with character and has everything to do with plot — as if the characters are just another mechanism to get to the next action sequence, the next plot point, the next frazza wazza wuzza buzza whatever. Point is: your character needs a personality, and the rest of this list should help you get there.

2. Agency

The character should run an advertising agency. *is handed a note* Oh! Oh. I mean, The character should belong to the FBI and– *gets another note* JESUS CHRIST WITH THE NOTES, PEOPLE. But fine, yes, okay, I get it now. Agency means that the character is active, not passive. The character makes decisions and is attempting to control her own destiny as an independent operator within the story. She is not a leaf in the stream but rather the rock that breaks the river. *receives one more note* Oh, thank you, what a wonderful note! I do agree my beard is sexy, yes. I know! So rich! So full! So shiny. I oil it with secretions from squeezed ermine scent glands which also lends it that musky zing that sort of… crawls up your nose. *flicks beard sweat at you*

3. Motivation

Characters want things. They need things. They are motivated by these desires and requirements and they spend an entire story trying to fulfill them. That’s one of the base level components of a story: a character acts in service to his motivations but obstacles (frequently other characters) stand in his way. We need to know what impels a character. What are her motives? If we don’t know or cannot parse those motivations, her role in the story is alien to us.

4. Fear

Everybody’s afraid of something. Death. Taxes. Bees. Dogs. Love. Carnival workers. Ocelots. (I am afraid of the number 34 and the color “puce.”) Characters \ suffer from their own personal fears relevant to the story at hand. Characters without fear are basically robots who use their pneumatic doom-claws to puncture any sense of engagement and belief we have in the story you’ve created. The great thing about being a storyteller isn’t just giving characters fear — it’s ensuring that that their fears will arise and be present in the tale at hand. You shall be cruel. This cruelty shall be great fun and a veritable giggle-fest because storytellers are dicks.

5. Internal Conflict

“I am in love with Steve, but I also love my job as a diplomat to the Raccoon People of the Hollow Earth. But Steve is allergic to raccoons! But I may be the only person who can stop the Raccoon People from invading Canada! BY THE GODS WHAT SHALL I DO?” Great characters suffer from internal conflict. They don’t know what they want. Or how to get all the things they want. Position your characters between the Scylla and Charybdis of hard choices: choices that compete with one another. Giving characters these emotional, intellectual, soul-testing conundrums is sweet meat for the audience — the meat of conflict, the meat of drama. Further, it allows us to relate to these characters (as we all have to make hard choices) and gives us a reason to keep reading (because we want to know the character’s choices in the face of these inner conflicts).

6. External Conflict

Hey, external conflict is pretty cool, too. If the character is plagued by an old war wound, a damaged spaceship, a mysterious old villain who shows up to perform surgical karate on the character, all good. Doubly good if the external conflict matches or speaks to the internal conflict in some way. Say, for instance, an author who is addicted to slathering his beard with illicit ermine scent glands is also pursued by a very angry ermine scent gland dealer named Vito who would apparently like his money. Just an example. With no basis in reality. *runs*

7. Connections To Other Characters

That “lone-wolf ronin-without-clan” shit gets tiresome pretty quick. Characters need connections to other characters. These don’t need to be desired connections. They can be connections that the character is actively trying to deny. But they need to be there. They help make the character who she is and continue to push and pull on her as the story unfolds. Friends. Family. Acquaintances. Work buddies. Foes. Neighbors. Drug dealers. Enslaved Pokemon. Sentient snowglobes. Sex androids. Microscopic beard civilizations. You know. The usual.

8. Connections To Us, The Audience

We respond well to those characters who contain a little bit of us. We want to relate to them. The best characters are a broken mirror: we want to see ourselves reflected back, if in a distorted, unexpected way. We want to connect with them using that weird empathic psychic tendon where we tie together our shared traits or universal life experiences like we’re those humanoid blue goat-cat motherfuckers from Avatar. Young adult fiction is written with teenage protagonists experiencing teenage protagonist problems because it’s written for that audience. (And it’s why adults still can read those books comfortably — because adults remember being a teenager.) The reader wants a new story, but she wants an old story, too: her own.

9. Nuance And Complexity

Shitty one-note characters are a Taco Bell product: manufactured unfrozen gray-meat red-sauce in a proportioned somewhat-maybe-kinda-tortilla. They’re good for a quick bite and a hard purge (remember: you do not buy Taco Bell, you rent Taco Bell and then return it to its ecosystem with a couple flushes). Great characters are a nuanced meal: from an aperitif to the amuse-bouche to the first and second course, all the way through to the monkey course and the molecular gastronomy course, to coffee, dessert, and then ritual suicide. Each bite has complexity. Like sipping a fine wine or a great cup of coffee, you taste things that aren’t expected, that go beyond that word coffee or wine. (“I taste figs and fireplace ash, and a little after-hint of the tears from a griefstruck slow loris.”) A good character is complex because that means they are like — gasp! — real people. Real people who are not easily summed up or predicted. Real people with layers and surprises and who are a little bit good and a little bit bad and a whole lotta interesting.

10. Strengths: To Be Good At Something

Characters who have absolutely zero MAD SKILLZ are dull as a sack of frozen poached hippo meat. We like to read about characters who are good at something. “I’m the best damn werewolf veterinarian you ever did see.” “You need a speech pathologist for velociraptors, then you need me.” “I’m a cop who is also a robot and they call me OFFICERBOT wait that doesn’t sound cool.” You want characters who are capable or even exceptional: Sherlock isn’t a mediocre detective. Buffy isn’t just some half-ass vampire-puncher — she’s the goddamn Slayer. RANGER RICK ISN’T JUST SOME FUCKING RACCOON, MAN. This doesn’t have to be limited to actual skills or talents, mind — a character’s strength can be internal. It can be intellectual or emotional. Or it can be that she can knock a dude’s head off his shoulders with one fast punch.

11. Flaws: To Be Bad At Something

Sherlock is an amazing detective, and a terrible human. Buffy’s a bonafide bad-ass, but she’s also a glib, impulsive teenage girl. Ranger Rick the raccoon can ranger like a motherfucker, but he’s also got a bad addiction to Meow-Meow and a penchant for losing all his ranger paycheck at the Indian casino. Characters can be good at things but they can’t be too good — you need balance. If they’re the best at something, they should also be the worst at something. Conflict lives here; the space between Sherlock being the best detective and the worst human is so taut with tension the potential story might snap and take out someone’s eye. Plus, on a practical level, someone who is good at everything, bad at nothing is boring and unbelievable.

12. A Voice

I don’t mean this in a literal sense — “NO DEAF-MUTES ALLOWED” — I mean that, your character has to sound like your character. A unique voice, a combination of how she speaks and what she says when she does. When you write her dialogue, we should have no doubt who is speaking, even if the dialogue tags were eaten by some kind of bibliovore creature. What kinds of things does she say? Why does she say them? What does she sound like? Does her way of speaking reflect where she grew up or reflect her trying to get away from where she grew up? Is her mother’s voice in there somewhere? Her father’s? Is she brash and bold — or hesitant, reserved? How do all these things reflect who she actually is?

13. A Look

Put me in the camp where characters should look like someone or something. Some writing advice suggests that an author let her characters act as physical ciphers — zero description so that, jeez, I dunno, we can all imprint upon them or imagine them as whoever we want them to be. Fuck that shit, George. I’m not saying we need to hear about every chipped fingernail, eyelash, or skin tag — but pick a few stark details and make the character stand out. And let those details reveal to us something about the character, too. The perfect suit but the dirty shoes. The hair buzzed so flat you could land a chopper on top of it. The rime of blood under his nails. Whatever. What’s the character’s look, and what can it tell us about him?

14. Emotions

A character without emotion is a soulless automaton. They don’t need to reveal those emotions to the world around them, but they should reveal them to you as author and to the reader, as well. Characters feel things! They feel sorrow. And shame. And bliss. They feel itchy and hungry and confused and so angry they could crumple a vending machine like it’s a can of soda. They run the gamut like, oh, I dunno, real people. And the thing is, you can use these emotional responses to highlight for us who the characters are. They encounter something that should make them happy but it makes them sad instead — that’s a telling moment for the character. Why does this thing that would make everyone else happy make him want to cry and punch a cabinet instead?

15. Mysteries

Questions drive narrative. We continue reading sometimes just to answer questions. Who killed Mrs. Pennytickle? Who stole the Shih-Tzu of Darkness and for what nefarious purpose? What happens next? The audience is driven in part by the need to answer mysteries. Thing is, the audience and the characters have a kind of narrative quantum entanglement; the same things that draw us through a story are the same things that urge a character forward, too. We want to solve the murder same as the cantankerous detective does. Give the character questions that are unanswered — variables in her equation that she is driven to complete.

16. Secrets

It goes the other way, too. Just as a character has questions, he also has answers — answers that he never wants to share with anyone, answers that would be otherwise known as secrets. Heroic secrets. Dark secrets. Sexy secrets. Weird secrets. Underpants secrets. The character knows things that he doesn’t want revealed (creating complexity for the character and tension for the reader).

17. Humongous Genitals

The character’s vagina should be large enough to wolf down a small motorcycle. The character’s penis should be large enough to fell ancient trees with one hefty hip pivot. Characters must possess both sets of enormous genitals OKAY JUST SEEING IF YOU’RE PAYING ATTENTION.

17. The Ability To Surprise

The moment a character loses the ability to surprise us, they might as well be a dead body floating down a slow moving river. That’s not to say a character should be unpredictable on every page — “I killed a man! Now I’m starting a churro shop! Now I own a parrot! Now I’m gonna eat the parrot and jump into this howling chasm and die! EEEEeeeeeeeee.” But a character should always be able to still do something that makes us double-take and pump our fists in triumph or drop our jaws in shock. And it’s not just about action, either: it’s about showing surprising depths of emotion, or cleverness, or capability. It’s about the character being so much more than what we expect: a secret forest hidden beneath the cloud cover.

18. Consistency

And yet at the same time, those surprises shouldn’t also come out of left-field, either. Think of it like the reveal of a murderer in a murder-mystery story. You want that murderer to be revealed in a way where the story outsmarted you and yet, it still makes sense, right? You don’t want it to be, “Oh, and the murderer was actually Doctor Piotr Dongwick, the pharmacologist who you’ve never met or heard of and are just meeting now and this is basically the narrative equivalent of ROCKS FALL EVERYBODY DIES.” Characters are that way, too. When they reveal something about themselves or surprise us, it should be a thing that has us nodding our head — not scratching it like a confused chimp. We should be saying “wow!” now “wut?”

19. Small Quirks

I’m not saying every character needs to be a variant of Zooey Deschanel — besides, she is the quirkiest little quirk that ever did quirk and you cannot beat her at her own game. SHE EATS TOMATO SOUP IN THE RAIN WITH FOUR BABY GOATS ALL NAMED “OLIVER.” Whatever. Quirks can be an amateurish way of giving your character depth — in part because it’s artifice that doesn’t create any depth at all. Still, while quirks are no substitute for actual character traits, they are useful in small doses when a) letting the character stand out in our mind and b) lending some depth of character through a seemingly shallow expression. A character who always fidgets with, say, a coin or a pen or a pair of dice may seem like a one-off blah-blah detail, but later it can be revealed that this single, simple act is bound up to some tragic event in the character’s life (“MY MOTHER WAS KILLED BY A PAIR OF DICE” okay maybe not that, but you get the idea).

20. History

Your character didn’t just come karate-punching her way out of some storytelling womb. She wasn’t born pale and featureless like a grub only to grow her wings and limbs halfway through the tale. The character’s been around. Whether she’s 17 or 70, she has history. She has life. Stories. Things that happened to her and things that she did. First kiss! First breakup! First sexual experience! First drunk, first hangover, first AA meeting, first BDSM orgy, first spaceflight. That time Billy Grosbeak tried to grab her boob and she broke his nose. The other time she got fired from her coffeehouse counter-monkey job for spitting in some chode’s caramel macchiato. That time she did the thing with the girl at that place. What we see of a character in a story is just the tippy-top of the iceberg, just a nipple poking out of the water while the rest of the body remains submerged. Don’t let your characters be tabula rasa — some blank slate devoid of history.

21. The Right Name

This may seem a shallow point, but boy does a character’s name matter. You don’t just pick it out of a hat — it has to be the right name, in the same way that you want the right name for a child, or a dog, or that mole on your inner thigh (mine is “Benedict Arnold”). Like, “Bob Stevens” is not the name of a steampunk secret agent. “Miss Permelia Graceyfeather” is not the name of a motel maid from Tucson. You’ve got to find the right name. And, also of importance, a name that doesn’t sound like the name of another character in your book. You don’t want readers confused, nor do you want them conjuring a character from a whole other book or movie when reading yours.

22. Room to Grow

Characters grow and change. Okay, fine — not all of them do, an in certain modes of storytelling a stagnant flatlining character arc is sadly a feature and not a bug. But just the same, the most interesting characters are the ones who at least have the capability of change, who are part of an unfulfilled arc that is unseen but keenly felt. Readers want to go on that journey with a character. They want to go along for the ride: breakups and marriages and babies and revenge and redemption and resurrection. Some animals grow only as big as their cages — so give your character room to move around, yeah? Give them scope! Envision for them an (incomplete) arc!

23. Livability

I am fond of saying that what matters about a character isn’t that we like them but that we can live with them — meaning, if we’re gonna be hunkering down with that character for 400 pages of a book, or two hours of a movie, or a year’s worth of comic books, that character has to be someone we are willing and able to spend time with. They don’t have to be our pal. We’re not asking them for a ride to the airport or help moving into our new apartment. They have to be someone we can — and want! — to spend our time with in the narrative sense. How do you accomplish this? Well…

24. Gravity

You do this by giving them gravity. Making them as big and as interesting as can be so they draw us to them — like moths to a flame, like meteors to the earth, like cat hair to a new sweater. The greatest crime you can commit against your character and your reader is making them boring.

25. You

A good character needs you. You’re the champion, here. You’re the motherfucking engine of creation that will bring this character to life with the eye-watering boozy muse-breath of your drunken imagination. You are a very special ingredient indeed, young captain. See, the idea goes that no story is original, and maybe that translates to character, too. But you are an original. And the way you do things — the way you arrange old elements of story and character — is something wholly your own, provided you let yourself off the leash, provided you’re willing to smear your guts all over the page. You can bring something fucking amazing to every character you write: yourself. The character doesn’t exist without you. You are the puppeteer. You are parent and deity. So go, create. Give them life. Give them soul. Give them character. And then kick their ass.

* * *

Out now:

If you don’t know the name Brenna Aubrey, you will soon.

Brenna turned down a $120,000 three-book deal with one of the Big Five and instead chose to self-publish her newest, the ironically-named At Any Price. She has reportedly made ~$19,000 in the first month of release, which — well, I don’t know that she’ll earn out at the top of the contract offered, but I know that’s the kind of money that likely has her quietly trembling with a kind of caffeinated, eye-popping excitement.

It’s an exciting time, and one that shows that authors have options they didn’t have ten years ago.

(And further, this might serve as something of a message to publishers — like it or not, I suspect we’re going to see more stories like this over time unless publishers inject a little flexibility into their contracts. Some have already gone to this, to be clear, but others seem bent on keeping things locked down long past necessity. They may pay for that inflexibility in the long run.)

The narrative here, however, will again be how you can make more money as an author-publisher than you can through traditional publishing — it certainly feels that way, doesn’t it?

Here’s my (anecdotal) mileage:

My self-published writing books do pretty well for me. The last one was published about a year-and-a-half ago, and they’re still generating strong steady income. Moreso than my Writer’s Digest release (The Kick-Ass Writer), at least at the front end — sure, that book appears to be selling well, but I won’t see any royalties off that book immediately. Not like I would or could off of self-publishing (which are immediate and robust)

So, right there, that would seem to earn the conclusion, yeah?

Not so fast.

Consider, if you will, my novel, Bait Dog, the second Atlanta Burns story and first Atlanta Burns novel, which I Kickstarted as a two-book deal for $6,857, or roughly $3,400 per book. Bait Dog released and now, in total, has conjured about six grand worth of sales. Which is good money! I’m not complaining — you’re looking at about ten cents per word, which is life-sustaining income if you can keep up the pace and have the time to devote toward publishing your own work.

Now, at the same time, that’s inferior to the money I’ve made with advances from traditional releases. A book like Blackbirds has gone on to sell in various other countries (France, Turkey, Poland, Germany) and has had, erm, other licensing success that I can’t talk about here yet — *shakes fist* — which puts it in very comfortable financial territory for a book most publishers seemed to love but believed they could not sell. (Publishers can be risk averse.)

I was able to leverage the reasonable success and excitement over a book like Bait Dog to a more traditional deal, too — Skyscape Children’s bought the book and will release Shotgun Gravy and Bait Dog as a single volume (with new content and robust edits) called, simply, Atlanta Burns. That and they’ll produce the follow-up, too.

So, again, does self-publishing pay more than traditional publishing?

Are you financially better off becoming an author-publisher?

*shakes the Magic 8-Ball*

ANSWER UNCLEAR, ASK AGAIN LATER.

Translation: who the fuck knows? Maybe, maybe not.

What about doing both? The so-called “hybrid” approach?

If you believe the numbers put out by Writer’s Digest, hybrid authors — meaning, authors who publish multiple ways to some extent or another — tend to be the ones making the most money. Phil Sexton talks about the results of that survey (sourced from Publisher’s Weekly):

“Hybrid authors are more aggressive and successful,” Sexton said, quoting from the survey results, “and they are more sophisticated and strategic about publishing.” Not surprisingly, hybrid authors were overwhelmingly more involved with social media — not to mention being better paid. They also report an average income from writing of $38,540, while traditionally published authors report $27,758 and the solely self-published report $7,630. Hybrid authors expect to get higher advances than traditionally published authors and expect to get a higher royalty. While 92% of traditionally published authors say they want their next book published that way, 71% of hybrid authors say they are interested in publishing their next book with a conventional house. And finally, asked why they self-published, 41.3% of hybrid authors say “creative control,” and 33% say “ease of the publishing process.” Money (28.9%) and distribution (25.6%) place third and fourth in the responses.

(Confession: I’m in the February 2014 issue of Writer’s Digest talking about the value of a hybridized publishing approach. I have snake oil to sell and as always you should take a long sniff of the potion I’m swirling in front of your nose to see if it’s really for you.)

Hybrid authors get to leverage the relationship of one form of publishing against another — they get to enjoy the advantages of both which in turn mitigates the disadvantages on each side. They also get sports cars and an orangutan butler and the best high-grade designer pharmaceuticals.

What? That’s just me? Whatever.

So, back to it. What pays better?

Self-publishing definitely pays faster than traditional. You will earn money immediately. The question is — how much? Could be from, ohhhh, two bucks to two million. The range is nigh-infinite — whereupon with traditional, you tend to start at five grand at the low-end.

The Brenna Aubrey situation is an interesting one because at one level, it’s a strong thumbs-up for acting as your own publisher. And yet, it’s also a strong case for at least trying the traditional path first — she was willing to take the time to put a book out on submission and was therefore able to get a deal on the table and actually see the numbers they were offering (plus clauses and timeline) before turning it down. And hey, turning down a six-figure book-deal is a good way to generate press and energy for your own self-published release; I don’t say that cynically, I mean, very seriously, it’s a savvy move. A powerful way to distinguish herself amongst the glut of self-published releases (and that glut is woefully real).

All this is a conversation that focused very strongly on money, of course.

And here’s the Shyamalan Twist, because I think that muddles your decision as An Author With A Finished Book. Not to say money isn’t a consideration — publishing is very much a business decision, and undertaking that decision with money in mind is not only smart, but to ignore the financials might actually be considered positively lunkheaded.

I’m just saying — other considerations are afoot, here.

If you’re going to self-publish, do it because:

You like the freedom.

You like the control.

You think you can do this better and faster than traditional publishing.

You want to be a publisher as much as you want to be an author.

You have the time to dedicate to it.

You dig risks.

See, even in financial decisions, personal preference matters. If you were to put together an investment portfolio, one person might tell you that you’re young, so this is a good time for higher-risk, higher-return investment. Another might say to play it safe because slow and steady wins the race. particularly in an economy that just got rocked by a face-punch recession. A third might say, put a little risk here, a little safety there, and get a more diverse portfolio together for a good mix. It’s all about your comfort level.

Publishing’s that way, too.

Both forms of publishing — and the various derivations of each — offer a host of pluses and minuses that go well-beyond the two-dimensional thinking of how This Way is better than That Way and My Publishing can beat up Your Publishing.

Consult your gods, check your gut, and do what feels right.

Well, goddamnit. This should’ve gone up last week, but I had to rebuild my schedule of posts due to file corruption and when I saw Laura’s release date in her original email I mistook it for the 17th instead of the 7th so — mea culpa, I’m a jackass. Whatever the case, Laura is here to talk about her new young adult book — which is itself the sequel to the mighty Pantomime — and I’ll politely ask that you not give into your jealous because Laura is a 25-year-old with immense talent and two books already under her belt oh and a Robin Hobb quote, too?

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

I’m Laura. I’m 25. I write books and stuff. I used to live in California then for some stupid reason (love) I moved to the cold, frozen land of Scotland.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

Sequel to PANTOMIME. Contains: mystery glass domes, creepy doctors, a clockwork hand, an AI ghost, romance, séances & an illusionist duel.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

PANTOMIME focuses on the circus, but [SPOILERY STUFF] happens at the end of that book and the main characters shift to become stage magicians, hiding from the authorities after them in plain sight, weaving illusions over themselves as well as for the audience. I always though circuses were cool, but I also thought magicians were super cool. The first book’s been compared to The Night Circus, the sequel’s getting comparisons to The Prestige, and I’m okay with that.

SHADOWPLAY has a different focus from the first book, too. The first book was a coming of age story for the protagonist, a character born intersex and raised as a girl who runs away to the circus as a boy, Micah Grey. Micah was very much settling into his new scene. Now, instead of finding himself, he’s finding his voice and really discovering who he’s going to be.

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

Because it’s a sequel to another book I wrote.

Less flippantly, it’s a difficult question to answer. No one else would have taken these various elements and put them in a blender the same way I would have, with my tone and my voice. My books are a mishmash: this book has echoes of The Prestige, X-men, Battlestar Galactica, The Illusionist, Robin Hobb (because I’ve read her more than any other ever and love her and oh look, she read my book and gave me a quote and I fan-squeed a lot), and probably other influences I haven’t figured out yet.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING SHADOWPLAY?

Writing with added expectations. The first book was just my own little project, my hobby and escape. I had to write SHADOWPLAY knowing that people were going to read it, and that now they’d have all these expectations. If they picked up PANTOMIME because they liked circuses, they could be pretty disappointed in the sequel: there’s no circuses. In the end I had to pretend it was just for me again, because otherwise I freaked out and rocked back and forth and ate too much chocolate.

Also, writing while working full-time, studying part-time for a masters, and launching your first book: NOT RECOMMENDED. I ended up quitting the masters at a postgraduate certificate for my sanity. Sleep is good.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING SHADOWPLAY?

Plotting. The first book, I didn’t outline that closely. PANTOMIME is very introspective and it’s not fast-paced. SHADOWPLAY very much takes all the things I introduced very carefully in the first book and kicks things up to the next level. I left a lot of mysteries deliberately because breaking them open a little at a time is a lot of fun.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT SHADOWPLAY?

I’m a huge sap and I love my characters. I actually miss these characters if I don’t write about them for a few months, to the point where I’ve started writing short stories with them just so I don’t have to say goodbye. That sounds a little crazy, I know.

I love the atmosphere of the creepy, run-down theatre it’s set in, and all the bits with Anisa, a character you only have a brief hint of in the first book. Cyan’s a new character and she came to life, turning out totally different than I thought she would. I’m a big geek – SHADOWPLAY just has a lot for me to love. I’m proud of it, even if I know it’s not perfect because no book ever is.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

Stress eat less chocolate while drafting. Pretty sure I gave myself cavities.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

This paragraph in chapter 2, during a séance, lays down so many hints for the story of SHADOWPLAY. I loved putting so much at the beginning, but the reader has to unravel it throughout the book:

“Your future is murky,” the magician continued. He frowned into the crystal ball, as if surprised by what he saw there, his voice shifting into a deep, resonating timber. “But the spirits show me visions. I see a girl, no, a woman, in a wine-red dress. Her child is ill, eaten from the inside. I see figures on a stage, playing their parts, the audience applauding as magic surrounds them. I see great feathered wings flapping against the night sky. A demon with green skin drips blood onto a white floor. A man checks his pocket watch, and I hear a clock ticking, counting the time.”

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

To be honest, I have no freaking idea. I thought on the other side of the publishing curtain, things would be easier. And, in many ways, they are. But there are still challenges and they’ve morphed.

At the moment I’m working on three books. Obviously, I hope at some point they all find homes, but at the moment, I have no idea if they will, and if so, which will come out first. I know that I never want to stop pushing myself, so I have more Micah Grey books, another young adult fantasy, and an adult sci-fi thriller on the go.

And there’s a growing line of stories lined up in my head, some missing plots or characters, like dolls missing body parts, but all really wanting to be told.

Laura Lam: Website / Twitter

Shadowplay: Amazon / B&N / Indiebound

One of my 2014 wishes has come true —

I will be on Sword and Laser, season two.

(You can find Adam Christopher’s appearance here, for an example of the show.)

They are soliciting questions to ask YOURS TRULY for the show.

You can go here and tell them questions to ask me.

DO IT DO IT NOW

*stares*

*stares harder*

*eyes dry out*

Smell that?

*takes long sniff*

It is the first flash fiction challenge of the year.

I’VE THAT SCENT OF SHEER STORY POTENTIAL CLINGING TO THE INSIDE OF MY NOSE.

And it is wonderfully sweet.

I’d actually like to take a little moment to say I’m so happy that these challenges seem to get people writing and I’ve seen more than a few folks sell-through stories based on these challenges, which makes the brittle broken snow-globe that I call my heart twitch and shine for one second.

Anyway, let’s get to it.

All you need to do this week is to use a d20 or a random number generator to consult the table at the bottom of the document to roll for a story’s title. It’s a two-part title (meaning, two random numbers 1-20) and whatever title you get must fit the story you write for it.

You’ll have 1000 words, par usual. Post at your blog, link back here. Due in one week — January 17th, Friday — by noon EST. Easy-peasy story-squeezy.

(Example of an earlier, similar challenge here.)

The title tables are (and you’re free to put the word “The” in front of your title):

Column One

1. Snowbound
2. Devil’s
3. Accursed
4. Whispering
5. Amethyst
6. Griefstruck
7. Lovestruck
8. Red
9. Cartographer’s
10. Chaos
11. Orbital
12. Jackdaw’s
13. Minotaur
14. Invisible
15. Dog Star
16. Helical
17. Flight of the
18. Cerulean
19. Seamstress’
20. Ten-Year

 Column Two

1. Murders
2. Kid’s Club
3. Angel
4. Vault
5. Bookshop
6. Champion
7. Palace
8. Fear
9. Skull
10. Potion
11. Birdhouse
12. Encyclopedia
13. Peacock
14. Prison
15. Wire
16. Rider
17. Story
18. God
19. Parasite
20. Earth

Paul S. Kemp wrote a thing the other day — “Why I Write Masculine Stories” — and it’s been kind of a fingernail clipping stuck in the bottom of my foot.

For the record, I think Paul is a fine writer and the best compliment I can pay to Hammer and the Blade is that it made me want to play D&D like, right then and there. And Paul is a progressive guy, so I don’t mean this as some sort of takedown or effigy-burning.

He says he writes masculine stories which to him means for his character:

“As a rule they’re men. They drink a lot. They sometimes womanize. They answer violence with violence. They’re courageous in the face of danger. They’re stoic in the face of challenges/pain. They have their emotions mostly in check. And they act in accordance with a code of honor of some kind. Thematic elements in a lot of my work that square with this involve the obligations of fatherhood, the depths of friendship between men who’ve faced death together, the bonds of brotherhood (figuratively). Hell, there are even damsels in distress sometimes (though I like to play with that notion and things aren’t always what they seem; see, e.g., The Hammer and the Blade). The price of faith and the difficulties of redemption appear in a lot of my work, too, but that’s neither here nor there…”

(For a variant on this: Neil Gaiman’s “All Books Have Genders.”)

I’m a guy who writes a lot of female characters (sometimes called “strong” female characters though I’d rather they just be characters who are both strong and weak who are also women because once you say “strong female character” if you find you have a frail or flawed one it becomes a point of contention instead of a point of character). Two of my favorite characters of all time are Miriam Black (everybody’s favorite “psychotic psychic,” to quote Jenn Northington of WORD Bookstore) and Atlanta Burns, my Veronica-Mars-on-Adderall character.

Miriam: drinks, sexualizes men and women, answers violence with violence, is courageous, faces issues of motherhood, and faces issues of bonding with other people. She is also bound up with issues of redemption (what her power has made her versus who she really is).

Atlanta: drinks (and takes pharmaceuticals), answers violence with violence, is courageous, is stoic, has her emotions in check (unlike Miriam, whose emotional state is described in her books as being a “garage full of cats, on fire”), deals with issues around her own mother, etc.

It’s interesting, because with Miriam in particular I’ve heard charges that she’s just a girl with a dick — meaning, she’s a man with the serial numbers filed off, written by a man, not at all resembling a woman. (Aka, “masculine,” I guess you’d say?) Those reviews always worried me because first that loose assertion that men cannot write women but moreover the fact I’ve known women like Miriam. Hell, they come to my book signings. Women who respond to Miriam, who sound like her, who curse like her.

Now, on the other hand, I’ve written Mookie Pearl, a thug enforcer who’s been a bad dude, a bad dad, and is again wrestling with that notion of redemption — and for him all those presumed “masculine” traits have been more than a little bit negative in his life. They’ve led him to the starting point of The Blue Blazes where he’s a guy whose own daughter wants to kill him, who set family aside for work, who has gone so far down the anti-hero hole he’s a pube’s width from being a straight-up antagonist. Masculinity has gotten him to this place, to some degree, and part of the third act of the book — okay, in addition to all that fighty violent apocalyptic supernatural-throwdown underneath the streets of Manhattan — is about him coming to terms with the wreckage of his life and actually acknowledging all of it. It’s about opening up and seeing his daughter and realizing what he’s made of her life and his. Is that thereby “feminine?”

If the traits that Paul lists are “masculine,” do we list their opposite as “feminine?”

Femininity: doesn’t drink, no sexualizations, no violence, cowardly in the face of danger, soft versus challenges and pain, emotions out of check, no code of honor, etc. –?

Again, I don’t think Paul is actually saying these things. But, this is why I get weird about trying to define masculinity, particularly as it relates to characters in a narrative.

Once you say: “THIS is masculine,” it’s hard not to say, “THAT is feminine.”

That can get toxic pretty quick. Particularly for those folks — a lot of us, really — who don’t fit really nicely into one slot or the other. Fiction can teach us things and if it teaches us that masculinity is XYZ and we’re a man who fits X but maybe not Y and Z, where does that leave us?

How should we feel?

No surprise then to learn that masculinity is a loaded word in my own life. My father very strongly subscribed to ideas about masculinity — which was troublesome when he had a son who didn’t fit that mode quite as cleanly as everyone maybe would’ve liked. (“Be a man!”) I still liked guns and I liked girls and all that but I also liked poetry and writing stories and tinkering with computers and I had male friends who sometimes showed up wearing skirts because, you know, that’s just how they rolled. I still got sad when sad things happened (and sometimes when sad things didn’t happen because yay teenagers), but my father came from a time and a place where men didn’t get sad. Men got angry! Men were stoic. They gritted their teeth and dealt with it.

Which also made my Dad kind of a stoppered-up bottle sometimes.

It was always weird to see my father get emotional. Our one dog died and he was sad about it. It was like watching the weather do something you’ve never seen before (“That tornado just went from vertical to horizontal CALL THE NEWS”). He would get sad at Christmas when we visited the grave of his own father. (Not that we talked about it much because he’d kinda stand there and try not to cry.) And it’s easy to be kinda mad about that until you wind that empathic thread from your heart to his and see that his ideas about masculinity weren’t something he just invented. His own father passed them down. Society gave them over to him. And it made him a harder man because of it. (His later years, before his death, this softened somewhat considerably, thankfully. Though he might not approve of that word — “softened.” Maybe let’s say he “eased off the throttle a little bit.” Or in his own parlance, “took his finger off the trigger.”)

So, obviously, I’ve got thoughts and feelings on this subject. Which is why for me masculinity may exist as a thing a character believes about himself but it isn’t a thing I believe about a character, if that makes sense (and that’s probably where Paul and I differ on that point). I don’t consider those traits — in fiction or out of it — particularly masculine. I’m more interested in getting to know a character from beyond gender-based assertions — not to say it’s not interesting to have a character dealing with those assertions inside the storyworld…

…but it just doesn’t have to be something I believe about them.

(For another look, see Sam Syke’s post — “What Is A Man?“)