When writers are tasked with creating characters, we are told to try these character exercises that entreat us to answer rather mad questions about them: hair color, eye color, toe length, nipple hue, former job, phone number of former job supervisor, what she had for lunch, if she were a piece of Ikea furniture what piece would she be (“Billy bookcase! NO WAIT, A SKJARNNGFLONG LINGONBERRY-FLAVORED COCKTAIL TRAY”). And so on and so forth.

Most of these are, of course, abject badger-shite.

They get you as close to creating a strong, well-realized and interesting character as jumping off your roof with a blankie on your back gets you to flying.

And yet, I am frequently emailed (or in the old English, ymailt) about how one creates good characters on the fly. The short answer to that is, mostly, you don’t. Characters are not a fast soup — they’re a long-bubbling broth developing flavors the longer you think about them and, more importantly, the more you write about them. (Which one assumes is the point of the inane questions asked by many character exercises, which would be a noble effort if those questions were not so frequently concerned with details and decisions that will never have anything to do with your character, your story, or your world.)

Just the same, I decided to slap on the ol’ thinking-cap (seriously, it’s really old and gross and I think a guy died in this hat) to come up a quick springboard that should get your head around a character quickly, efficiently and creatively. Note that this isn’t a system I generally use as yet — it’s me noodling on things. Just putting it out there for you all to fold, spindle, and mutilate. Especially what with NaNoWriMo right around the bend, right? Right.

Let’s do this.

The Character Logline:

Right up front, I want you to identify who the character is. And you’re going to do it in a very brief way, the same way you would conjure a logline (or “elevator pitch”) for your story at hand. You will identify this character in the same space allowed for a single tweet — so, 140 characters.

If you need help, try writing a few character loglines for pre-existing characters from other storyworlds — “Dexter Morgan is a serial killer with a code of honor hiding in plain sight among the officers of the Miami Police Department.” Or “Boba Fett is an inept bounty hunter in Mandalorian battle armor who sucks a lot at his job and gets eaten by a giant dusty desert sphincter.” Whatever. (Want practice? describe a few well-known characters in the comments.)

Problem:

Right up front, the character has a problem. A character’s problem is why the character exists in this storyworld, and this problem helps generate plot (plot, after all, is Soylent Green — it is made of people). Identify the problem. Shorter is again better (and note that you may have inadvertently identified the problem in the logline above, which is not only fine, but awesome).

Problems could be anything that defines the character’s journey: “Hunted by an unkillable star beast;” “Can’t get it up in bed;” “Trapped in an alternate dimension and unable to get home;” “Pursued by chimpanzee crime syndicate;” “Lost child in divorce;” “Life’s worth stolen by dirigible-dwelling pirate-folk;” “Can’t find gluten-free muffins in this goddamn city.”

If you take John McClane from Die Hard, his problem isn’t really the terrorists — not as a character problem. The terrorists are a plot problem, but we’ll get to that in a second. John’s actual problem is his separation from his wife. That’s his issue. That’s what drives him.

Buffy Summers is a character who wants to be a normal teen, but isn’t.

The problem is why we’re here. It’s why we’re watching this character, right now.

Solution:

The character will also have a proposed solution to that problem. I’m not talking about You The Storyteller solving the problem. I’m talking about what the character thinks is or should be the solution. A solution that, in fact, the character will pursue at the start of the story.

The character who is hunted by he unkillable star beast, well, she may decide that she has to escape to the fringes of the universe where her soul can be remade in the Nebula Forge, which she believes is the only way to throw off the scent.

The character who can’t find gluten-free muffins is going to try to bake her own. (THE FOOL!)

John McClane’s solution to his separation is to fly all the way out to LA from NY and reconnect with his wife at her office Christmas party.

If we are to assume that Dexter Morgan’s problem is: “Dexter is a secret serial killer,” his solution is to “hide in plain sight in Miami Metro PD.” (One might suggest that it his solution is to “cleave to a code of honor that forces him to kill only criminals,” but I think that’s something else — and I’ll get there in a minute, I promise, cool your testes-and-or-teats, Doctor Impatience.)

The Conflict Between:

In between a character’s problem and solution is a wonderful tract of jagged, dangerous landscape called HOLY SHIT, CONFLICT.

Or, if you’d prefer, it’s less a landscape and more a GIANT SPIKY WALL. Or a gauntless of FISTS AND KNIVES AND BLUDGEONING STICKS. Or whatever image gets you to grasp the perilous potential between points A (problem) and Z (solution).

It’s possible that this space is practically auto-generated, that the conflict writes itself as a product of the problem -> solution dichotomy. With Dexter, his problem is being a serial killer, and his solution is to embed himself in Miami PD. That conjures an immediate and easy-to-imagine conflict. Serial killer? Working for the police? Easy to see the conflict there. (I haven’t seen the last two seasons, but my understanding is they failed to capitalize on this great conflict.)

John McClane’s problem and solution auto-generate conflicts that don’t really fit in the context of an action movie. And so the writers created a kick-ass external conflict — in this case, THE INEPTITUDE OF THE LOCAL POLICE AND FBI. Oh, and also, some dude named Hans Gruber?

But even external conflicts are key to the character — the conflict born in the gulf between McClane’s problem and his solution is still one that demands the best efforts of his cop nature. The writers didn’t give him a love triangle, or a cantankerous mother-in-law, or a stuck pickle jar. He’s a bad-ass dude with a gun and a badge and no shoes and so they gave him a gaggle of terrorists. (More on his unfixable undeterred cop nature in a few.)

Ultimately, try to mine the rich, loamy, ruby-laden earth between what the character wants and what the character cannot have.

Limitations:

A limitation is generally internal — meaning, it’s something within the character that exists as part of their nature. This limitation hobbles them in some way, altering their problem/solution dichotomy (which we could ostensibly call “the mission”).

Remember how I was talking about Dexter’s “code of honor?” I consider this a limitation to his character — we the audience would perceive that as a strength but to Dexter, it’s also a limitation. It puts a limit on his role as a serial killer and thus creates not only a deeper character, but also offers new plot angles and opportunities for tension.

Limitations are traits of the character’s that get in her way — they might be flaws or frailties but they can just as easily be positive traits that make trouble for the character and the plot. You might say that Buffy’s limitations were her age, her immaturity, and her emotional entanglements with problematic boyfriends (seriously, Buffy, what’s with the choice in dudes?).

Complications:

Complications tend to be external — they are entanglements outside the character that complicate their lives. These can be more character-based or more plot-based depending on which aspect of the story you’re working. John McClane’s job is a character complication — he’s married more to the job than he is to his wife, which is what leads to the problem, which demands a solution, which opens the door for conflict. And the conflict is further complicated by his intensely cop-flavored demeanor, because he just can’t let this thing go. He throws himself into danger again and again not just because his wife is in the building, but because this is who he is. Shoeless and largely alone, all he is is pure, unmitigated yippie-kay-ay cowboy copper.

(And of course the rub is, a character’s limitations and complications are also the things that may help them succeed in their mission even while still causing them grave disorder.)

Greatest Fear:

Short but sweet: what does the character fear most? Death. Love. Disease. Losing one’s best friend. Bees. Toddlers. Chimpanzees with clown makeup. Lady Gaga. Whatever. It’s useful to identify the character’s fear — meaning, the thing they most don’t want to encounter or see happen — because you’re the storyteller, and you’re cruel, and now you have this Awful Thing in your pocket. And whenever you want, you can bring the Awful Thing out of its demon-box and harangue the character with it to see which way she jumps.

Description:

Description for characters is overrated — again, a lot of these character exercises seem hell-bent to have you figure out their eyebrow color and genital measurements and other useless metrics. That said, I do think a little description is good, and here’s what you’re going to do:

Write a description. Keep it to 100 words. Less if you can manage (once again consider the 140-character limitation). Do not hit all the bases. Do not try to stat them up like a fucking baseball player. Listen, when you look at someone, you take away a visual thumbprint of that person — it’s pushed hard into the clay of your memory. You don’t remember every little detail or aspect. Rather, you remember them as, that gangly Lurch motherfucker with the flat-top hair-do and the lips like grave-worms, or, that woman shaped like a butternut squash with the frock that smelled like cigarettes and old terriers. 

A short, sharp shock of character description. And a tip on description: writers are best describing things that break the status quo, that violate our expectations. In other words, find the things that make the character visually unique, interesting, odd, curious — different. Cleave to those.

The Test Drive:

The character’s voice and behavior is still a bit alien to you at this point — conjuring all these details and entanglements still doesn’t let you zip into their skin and grab their vocal chords like a flight stick in order to pilot them around (suddenly I’m getting a really weird narrative Pacific Rim metaphor and I must like it a lot because I think I have a boner — what shut up it’s a metaphorical boner jeez you people you’re so Puritanical with your “ew he’s talking about boners again”). So, my advice is:

Take ’em for a test drive. Said it before, will say it again: write a thousand-word piece of flash fiction with Your Brand New Shiny Character in the starring role. Drive him around. Ding him up. Challenge him! Force him to talk to other characters: an obstinate cab driver, a belligerent cop, a drunken orangutan. Give him a new problem or one related to the character explicitly.

Let ’em speak. Let ’em act. See what they do when you get behind the wheel.

Inhabit the character.

And you may come away with new material you want to use in a longer work.

Rewrite The Logline:

All that’s said and done?

Rewrite the original logline.

Sharpen it like a fucking stake you’re gonna stick into a vampire’s chesty bits.

The reason you’re rewriting is:

a) Because your idea of the character may have changed a little or a lot through this whole process so, best to revisit and revamp accordingly.

and

b) Because you better get used to revision and tweaking things — plots, characters, sentences — to hone them into molecule-splitting story-razors.

And That’s That

That’s it. A quick path through character creation in what hopefully distills that character down to his or her bare quintessence. More importantly, it’s a process that in a perfect world gets you into their headspace and the plotspace that surrounds them, thus allowing you to drop-kick them right into the story without any hitches or hiccups. Thoughts, comments, questions, complaints, prayer requests, death threats, proposals of marriage —

Drop ’em in the comments.

You’re saying:

“Chuck, I don’t need a recipe for applesauce. I just throw a bunch of apples into the mouth of an angry dog and let him chew them up and spit them out into a Tupperware bowl and then I dig in with my favorite Spongebob spoon why do you try to force recipes on us, you recipe fascist.”

And sure, you’re right. You could just let an angry dog chew your raw apples into sauce.

But I’m a guy who doesn’t like easy answers. I’m a guy who sees a grizzly bear and who decides to ride it. A guy who goes to the moon and asks, “Why aren’t we going to Mars?” Who eats chocolate and says “WHY CAN’T I EAT ALL THE CHOCOLATE RIGHT NOW?” and then proceeds to eat all the chocolate right now. On the back of a grizzly. On the moon.

So, I’m going to give you a recipe for applesauce.

And you will never make applesauce any other way ever again because if you try, angry praying mantids will eat your fingertips off. It’s true. I’ve seen this shit happen.

Okay, here’s the recipe. Are you ready?

Take seven grapefruits.

Yeah, no, okay, you were right to pause there. This recipe doesn’t feature any fucking grapefruits. You caught me. You were tested and you passed, if only by the skin of your delicate pink genitals. This recipe contains zero grapefruit because that means this applesauce would make your mouth pucker like an ugly butthole. Good. Now we can move to the real recipe.

Take a bunch of apples.

I’m gonna say 6-8 apples, but really, this recipe works regardless of how many apples you choose to use. That’s on you. This decision is in your hands.

Now you ask: “What varietal of apple am I using?”

Again, I don’t much care, but choose two from the following list:

Red Randy, Pink Gingy, McReedy, Jumbaloo, Mojo, Slim Shady, Freya, Honeyshine, Fapplecrisp, Spangdiddler, Obvious Dolly, Yellow Mediocre, Gorgon, Franka Potente, Monkeyplum, Reynolds Black, Tito Dubious, Wormseed, Cratchett, Blue Fenmoore, or Steve.

BOOM you failed that test. None of those are real apples. Not a one of them. Those are all nicknames for penises and vaginas and you didn’t even know that. Those aren’t apples. Why did you think those were apples? Did you think only like, special fancy fucking farmers markets have these? That’s not true at all. See? You just don’t know things. This is why you need me. You need me to trick you out of your own ignorance.

Whatever. I like to put two different types of apple into my sauce.

I use one sweet, and one tart apple variety.

Mostly sweet.

Sweet, I like Jonathan, Honeycrisp, Pink Lady, Fuji, Gala.

Then I add in one or two tart apples. Granny Smith, maybe.

Or, if you don’t want to mix: there exists a new apple out there I’d not seen before (so, new to me, maybe) called Sweetango? It’s the bomb. Literally. It’s an apple bomb THE TERRORISTS HAVE WON okay no it’s just metaphorically the bomb. It is both sweet and tart and makes for a nice all-around apple, including existing as an apple that deserves to go inside your applesauce.

Skin these apples as you would flay those who would insult your hair or your shoes.

Cut up these apples into coarse hunks, chunks, bricks and boulders.

Set your HELLBOX (aka, oven) to 350 degrees.

Place all your apple chunks on foil atop a cookie sheet.

Dust these apples with:

A freckling of nutmeg.

A dusting of cinnamon.

A crumbling of brown sugar.

A speckling of vanilla bean.

An alternative to the brown sugar + vanilla bean is to make your very own vanilla sugar, which means shoving a vanilla bean hull into a container of sugar and standing there and staring at it in judgment for seven days whereupon the sugar will absorb the vanilla essence — AKA the vanilla’s soul — and then the sugar tastes both like motherfucking sugar and like motherfucking vanilla at the same time. Which is basically magic, we can all just admit that.

If you do that, sprinkle your vanilla sugar atop the apple chunks.

(“Apple Chunks” was my nickname in the Marines, by the way.)

(THE SPACE MARINES.)

Now, take those apples, and shove them in the oven for 15-20 minutes.

They are done when you spear them with a fork and the fork finds no resistance — it’s like stabbing a cloud with an ice pick because fuck clouds that’s why, fuck them for raining on our wedding day like Alanis warned us all about whatever shut up.

Take the apples out of the oven. Their punishment is complete.

By the way, your house at this point should smell pretty much the best it’s ever smelled. So good it’ll cover up that wet dog + toddler pee + dead body + ennui smell you got going on. It’ll smell like Thanksgiving and Christmas had a baby in your kitchen. And not in that fake-ass shitty way like you find at some stores around this time of the year (seriously, you walk into a crafts store in October it’s like someone punches you in the sinuses with a fist made of chemical potpourri and yeah, that’s right, I go to craft stores because this motherfucker right here likes using wicker and yarn to make his various effigies, go on, make fun of me, see who gets an effigy made of them and burned on my front lawn in a Satanic rite, huh).

Anyway, when I said that the punishment of the apples was complete, obviously I was lying because now you take those apple chunks and you pick up the foil beneath them and slide them into a blender. Or into a pot where you will use an immersion blender (or just use your forehead or your feet, I seriously don’t care, I’m not eating your applesauce, I already made my own).

Then, you will squirt onto them some fresh-squozen lemon juice.

A quarter-to-a-half of a lemon will do. Watch the lemon seeds because those slippery little dicks will try to get into everything. It’s like they want to you to choke on them.

You will also add a half-cup of apple cider. Not apple juice because what are you, a loser? Cider. I said cider. Not cider vinegar because uhhh, ew. Why are you trying to fuck around this late in the game? Are you trying to ruin things? YOU ALWAYS RUIN THINGS.

Anyway.

We are at the point where you could also add other things.

You could add:

a) A dollop of good honey.

b) Another fruit or fruit juice of your choosing.

c) A splash of rum.

d) A pipette (or seven) of bourbon.

Yes, I am advocating boozy applesauce, WHAT OF IT?

All of it is in the blender, yes?

You will now blend them into a desirable consistency.

You like ’em chunky? Leave ’em chunky.

You like ’em aerated into puffy light hillocks of apple foam? THEN DO THAT.

Now it’s done. You can eat it warm or you can send it to the frozen gulag that is your refrigerator for it to develop added flavor overnight.

Then, in the morning, BATHE IN IT.

I mean, EAT IT, I totally didn’t say “bathe.”

The end.

…

Okay, now it’s your turn. This is a recipe exchange whether you knew that or not. Head to the comments, drop a recipe or a link to a recipe or I will find your favorite person in the whole wide world and I will eat them. These are my terms.

Last week’s challenge: Random Song Title.

First, a bit of housekeeping — I still gotta go through the rest of the 300+ entries on “horror in three sentences” contest. So many good options there it’s actually hurting me internally to try to choose. Goal is to have the winners chosen by the end of the weekend!

Now, onto the challenge.

This week, I wrote a thing about how I fucking love me some genre fiction.

So, you know, it seems appropriate that we enter into this next flash fiction challenge by enacting my favorite challenge: the subgenre mash-up.

Gander upon the list of 20 subgenres below. Roll a d20 or fiddle with your favorite random number generator and choose two subgenres.

From there, write ~1000 word short story that mashes up both.

Post at your online space. Link back here so we can read!

Due by next Friday, November 1st. Noon EST.

Given that Halloween is coming up, you’ll note more of these are horror than usual.

To the subgenremobile!

1. Slasher Horror
2. Space Opera
3. Lovecraftian
4. Erotic Fantasy
5. Post-Apocalyptic Horror
6. Mythology
7. Haunted House
8. Fairy Tale
9. Occult Horror
10. Alien Invasion
11. Vampires
12. Hardboiled
13. Psychological Horror
14. Technothriller
15. Southern Gothic
16. Dieselpunk
17. Zombies
18. Superhero
19. Bizarro
20. Artificial Intelligence

Dear People Who Have Written Books:

I don’t want to be advertised to.

Or, put differently: I don’t want to be strapped down while you advertise all over me in some acrid, splashy golden shower version of “marketing.”

I awake daily now to find that someone has posted a photo of their book to Facebook and tagged me in the photo. Not because I had anything to do with the book. Not because I even know this person, but just because they want me to see it. I am frequently tagged with other writers as if to say, “Hey, guys, look! I wrote a book!” And the book is frequently some dubiously-covered author-published book which may be awesome, or may be a total cube of wombat poop.

(Yes, wombats poop in cubes. THE MORE YOU KNOW.)

Listen, I get it. I understand. It’s hard out there for a penmonkey. You gotta scrap and struggle and kick and scrape to get noticed, lest your book — released with a publisher or released on your own — land softly and unseen, as if it had never been written at all. And you think, I have these social media tools available to me, so I must use them to their fullest.

I’m sympathetic. As I noted yesterday, I’m an inky-fingered dude trying to make it, too.

The problem is, the social media tools you’re using?

They’re hammers. And I don’t want you to hit me with a fucking hammer.

Now, I get it, someone out there will say that familiar refrain of first world problems, and yes, this is very much a first world problem — and is in fact a small subsection of the first world problem, an artist’s first world problem. People are starving and economies are stumbling drunkenly through gauntlets of paddling politicians and people keep writing open letters to Miley Cyrus, I know. Just the same, niche as it may be, it’s a problem, and here’s why:

Your little advertisement isn’t the only one I’m getting today.

I’ll get more of the same on Facebook throughout the day.

Someone will “invite me” to their book launch on FB.

Or they’ll “invite me” to the same on Google-Plus (sometimes both).

And inevitably someone will DM me on Twitter about his book.

Or spam me on Twitter along with 1000 other writers HEY @CHUCKWENDIG HAVE YOU SEEN THIS COOL SPACE OPERA BOOK CALLED STARWRATH OF THE STARWRAITH WOW I TOTALLY DIDN’T WRITE IT WINK WINK.

Or they’ll email me at one or two or even three of my email addresses.

(All from people I don’t even know.)

So, your one little piece of advertising detritus gloms onto all the other rancid bits.

And by the end of the day I have a vertiable fatberg of your spammy spamness clogging up my social media feeds and, worse, filling my brain with rage.

Admittedly, this practice seems to come up more often with author-publishers than it does with traditionally-published authors, but the trad-pubbers do the same shit, too, sometimes. And worse is when actual publishers or publicists choose to try this same dubious bullshit which is just, ugh. (A new favorite is writing me as if I’d be blessed by some divine librarian’s hand to review a book or host a guest blog by an author or write a guest blog for an author — no free book, no it’s not a favor, it’s just my good fortune to be receiving this request.)

To reiterate: I get it. I do!

This realm of social media is relatively new and we’re all just trying to find a way to peddle our creative wares and, you know, not starve to death. I genuinely understand that.

The trick is, stop being a sentient spam-bot.

Start being a cool author person.

I’m not saying you can’t or shouldn’t talk about your book. You can! And should!

You have an audience and whether it’s 300 or 300,000, and presumably the people in that audience follow you with some understanding and expectation that you talk about your work and occasionally — not always, certainly not every fifteen minutes — drop a link or ask them to buy or review a book. I do it. Other authors far more impressive than I do it. There you’re talking to the audience that has gathered around your soapbox. Instead of, say, running out into a city park and bludgeoning random passersby with your book.

Your book is not a fist, a hammer, a Taser, a stream of hot urine.

You do not make me want to read your book by clumsily thumping me about the head and neck with it. FUMP FUMP FUMP READ IT IT’S A BOOK LOOK AT IT NO SERIOUSLY LOOK IT HAS WORDS YOU LIKE WORDS FUMP FUMP FUMP. Ow! No. Not cool, author-person. Not cool at all.

Instead:

Be cool.

Write more books.

Write fewer invasive advertisements.

Thank you, and good night. Er, good morning.

WHATEVER SHUT UP I STILL HAVE JET LAG

I love hearing about authors and books that never before pinged my RADAR, and Nick Kaufmann is one of them: I got an earlier copy of Dying Is My Business a few weeks before, and turning the first page found me grabbed immediately by the story, my treachea firmly gripped. So, here’s Nick to answer some questions about that very book…

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

I’m a forty-something author from Brooklyn, NY with a background in the book business. I was Publicity Manager for a small literary press, a pitchman for a widely respected PR firm specializing in TV and radio author appearances, a bookstore clerk, an independent bookstore owner, a manager for Barnes & Noble, and a development associate for a top literary and film agent. I was also manager of a small indie video store for a time. I’ve been nominated for a few literary awards: the Bram Stoker Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the International Thriller Writers Award. I haven’t won any, though. Clearly I’m a charlatan.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

DYING IS MY BUSINESS is a hardboiled urban fantasy-noir about a thief for a Brooklyn crime syndicate who can’t stay dead. Also, monsters.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

This novel is such a burrito of pop culture influences that it’s hard for me to pinpoint just one. Basically, I knew I wanted to write a chase novel set in New York City. I also knew I wanted the impetus to be something different from the usual thriller MacGuffin of a stolen thumb drive or microchip. I’ve always loved supernatural stories, so I went in that direction instead. Now the MacGuffin is a ancient, mysterious box that our hero, Trent, must retrieve and protect without knowing what’s inside. Of course, what’s inside turns out to be something awful that puts all of New York City in jeopardy.

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

I think I bring a few things to the table. First and foremost is my sense of humor. DYING IS MY BUSINESS is a dark and gritty novel at heart, but it’s also got its fair share of humor. There’s a lot of snark. But there’s joy, too. There are so many stories out there that don’t have any joy in them. I wanted to change that and lighten the darkness of this story with actual moments of joy. Another thing I bring along is a background in horror rather than fantasy. Most of my published work has been in the horror genre. So I called on that to instill the world in this novel with a certain darkness, a certain creepiness. Here, magic is dark and dangerous and has the potential to drive you insane. It can also mutate you physically into something monstrous. Many of the supernatural entities Trent encounters are truly alien and unknowable. This isn’t the kind of urban fantasy where magicians drive tour buses in their off hours (I love you, Egg Shen!). This is an urban fantasy where magicians risk madness or worse whenever they cast a spell.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING DYING IS MY BUSINESS?

I spent two long, grueling years writing and rewriting and rewriting again until I was satisfied with the novel. The work was hard, no doubt about it. Sometimes I felt like I was going nuts. But the hardest thing of all was not knowing if the work would pay off. I didn’t have an agent at the time. I certainly didn’t have a publisher waiting for me. The novel was written on spec, with no guarantee that I wasn’t wasting two years of my life where I could have been earning money instead with a “normal” job. Luckily, I have a very patient and gainfully employed wife who refused to let me quit. Believe me, I know how lucky I am. Not every writer has that luxury. But the gamble paid off, thank goodness. The novel landed me a great agent, and he, in turn, got me a deal with a great publisher.

 WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING DYING IS MY BUSINESS?

I learned some hefty lessons about plotting. I love great characters and I love emotional arcs, but I’ve always been a plot-heavy writer. So I thought writing a chase novel would be a breeze. Cue the loud buzzer and the giant red X from Family Feud. Turned out I had a lot to learn about plot and pacing. My initial draft was crazy front-loaded with exposition. I guess I thought I needed to get it all out of the way so I could get on with the action. My mistake. I eventually learned through trial and error that doling out information over time made it far more readable. It also made the mystery at the heart of the novel that much more compelling. Another thing I learned was how important choosing the right POV is. At first, the novel was written in third person, but it kept fighting me. I could only progress in fits and starts. It was only after I switched to first person that the chain caught and the novel took off.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT DYING IS MY BUSINESS?

I genuinely love the world I created for this novel. Dark magic, monsters lurking under the streets or around alley corners, even a theological hierarchy of sorts with entities like the Guardians and the Ancients. On top of that, I got to base it all in my hometown of New York City! Everyone who lives here has a love/hate relationship with the city. I’m no exception. I got to show my love for the city through the eyes of my characters, but also show my frustration with it by, well, destroying parts of it.

 WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

I would trust myself more. I think a lot of what made this novel such a long journey (and by “long journey” I mean “stultifying shit show”) to write was that I wasn’t trusting my instincts as a storyteller. I second-guessed myself a lot. I wondered whether certain choices would limit my readership. At times I over-explained things because I didn’t trust the reader to get it. I see now how all of that existed only to trip me up. They were distractions at best, and pitfalls at worst. Once I trusted myself, things went a lot better.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

I think my favorite paragraph may be the opening lines of the novel. Which is really two paragraphs. I’m totally cheating.

“It’s not as easy as it looks to come back from the dead.

It’s a shock to the system, even more than dying is. The first new breath burns like fire. The first new heartbeat is like a sharp, urgent pain. Emerging from the darkness like that, the sudden light is blinding, confusing. Coming back from the dead feels less like a miracle than like waking up with the world’s most debilitating hangover.”

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

The sequel, currently titled DIE AND STAY DEAD, is set to come out from St. Martin’s in the fall of 2014. I also have a story coming out later this month in PS Publishing’s new anthology, DARK FUSIONS, which is edited by New York Times bestselling author Lois Gresh. In the near future, I plan to start work on the third book, tentatively titled ONLY THE DEAD SLEEP, as well as another urban fantasy that’s completely unrelated.

Nicholas Kaufmann: Website / Twitter

Dying Is My Business: Amazon / B&N / Indiebound / Powells

It has begun.

What has begun?

The period of time whereupon my wife has left her job and will be a stay-at-home mother to our darling little wolverine tornado, B-Dub, and where I am the sole provider for the family.

This is awesome.

I do not say that snarkily. I say that with great oomphing trumpets. My chest is puffed out. My victorious plumage is on colorful display. My cloaca is flush with turgid triumph.

This is awesome.

It is awesome in the colloquial sense, as in, “This is great.”

It is also awesome in the proper sense of the word: awesome like a tsunami, like one’s imagined God, like a meteor made of flaming lions and electric guitars.

And in that proper sense, it is also terrifying.

Writing’s been good to me. But it’s not a job with a steady paycheck. It’s not universally considered to be a reliable, easy career. Again: it’s been good to me. I’ve little cause to worry at this stage in the game. But writers, as the saying goes, must be sharks. We gotta swim forward —

Or we drown.

As such, this is where I turn to you and I ask for your help.

I’m not looking for charity. We’re financially comfortable — “comfortable” in the sense we can pay all our bills without complaint, but also “comfortable” in the sense that one small tragedy could cut our legs out from under us — but really, we’re solid. Just the same, I need to keep doing this to survive, and keeping on keeping as a writer-type means having an audience there willing to catch me when I, well, make jumps like this one.

And catching me means a couple different things.

It means buying my books, for one. I just put up a bundle yesterday where you can get all my six author-published writing books for a mere ten bucks until the end of November.

Maybe you’d dig a woman who can see how you’re going to die just by touching them.

Or maybe you got a hankering for a corn-swept dystopian future full of adventure and turmoil and teenage tragedy.

Could be you’d like to read a story about a dude punching his way through the Secret Hell beneath the streets of Manhattan in search of his traitorous daughter.

Might be instead that you’d like to read about a teen girl going up against the institutionalized bullies of her town and trying to take down a dog-fighting ring.

Plus, you know, all those other writing books.

Point is: hey, options.

Now, I recognize that not everybody is flush with the kind of disposable cash that makes procuring entertainment easy or palatable, and that’s okay, too. In that case, I’d simply appreciate it if you told some folks about my books. Spread the word, as it were. Maybe write a review if you’ve read something of mine in the past. Anything to lubricate that whole “word-of-mouth” thing a little bit.

All this goes to helping keep me solvent as a writer. It helps pay bills and put food in the mouth of the toddler. And it helps keep this website around — as the site has grown, its hosting bills have grown with it, and these days it costs a pretty penny to keep her running.

I appreciate it.

Thanks for helping me stitch together the parachute as I plummet.

*shrieks in victory as I fall through someone’s barn*