Last week’s challenge: “Plot Scenario Generator.”

This week’s challenge is pretty straight-up simple:

I’m going to give you ten random items.

You must pick four and incorporate all four into a single piece of flash fiction (~1000 words).

Those items are:

An unopened envelope.

A dead man’s guitar.

A rocking chair.

A chess piece.

A road sign.

A child’s toy.

A leather mask.

An animal skull.

An iron horseshoe.

A police officer’s badge.

Your story is due by next Friday, August 2nd, noon EST.

Post at your online space and link back here. Whaddya waiting for? Get writing!

I dig this cover. I love the idea. Super-fun-sounding digital-only release. So it was an easy “yes” when it came time to decide whether or not to lend Gina and her book a slot here at the blog. Here she is talking up her Reaper trilogy: 

Tell Us About Yourself: Who The Hell Are You?

I was born very young… and I’ve been writing ever since.

Not true. (Why do author bios say they’ve been writing since they were kids? No other profession does this. If my gynecologist said he’d been… but I digress.)

Truth is, I’ve been writing since we accessed the internet via stone tablets, about 1999, beginning with fanfiction for a TV show called The Sentinel. Anybody even remember that show? At first my stories were pretty awful, but like the John Cleese character in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “I got better.” In 2009, my first full-length novel, a gay romance titled Gym Dandy, was published. But not before being contracted and uncontracted and contracted again… It was ever thus in publishing, eh?

Now I write funny urban fantasy under my (mostly) real name, Gina X. Grant.

My hobbies? I read, I write, I walk the dogs.

Give Us The 140-Character Story Pitch:

Death is what happens while you’re making other plans.

Where Does This Story Come From?

I cast about for a mythical creature that hadn’t been done to death (ha!) and hit upon a Grim Reaper. Naturally, I decided to take an ordinary gal and send her to Hell!

And if you’re going to set a book in Hell, then who better to be your hunka-hunka-burning love interest than 700-year-old Inferno poet, Dante Alighieri?  (Forget it, Dan Brown. I saw him first!)

How Is This A Story Only You Could’ve Written?

Because I’m funny. Life of the party even before they break out the alcohol. I craft and collect puns and other witty lines in a Word doc that’s now 27 pages long — single-spaced!

What Was The Hardest Thing About Writing The Reluctant Reaper?

The romance. I wanted it to stretch out until the fourth or fifth book in the series, but my agent asked me to bring Dante and Kirsty together in the first book. That was hard.

Then my editor at Simon & Schuster decided too much was happening for a single book and had me split the book in two. And still have Kirsty and Dante get together in that new first book. Yikes!

But I did it. They move quickly, oh, these Reapers of easy virtue, but it’s twoo wuv. The kind that lasts forever, literally. Till Death do us part? Would mean separate assignments from their boss.

What Did You Learn Writing The Reluctant Reaper?

That I can write. After doing the agent shop dance for several years, I was beginning to despair. Let’s do the math: roughly forty rejections per book, times three full-length novels, is, forty-two, carry the twelve… Yup. I am now repped by the same agent who represents Suzanne Collins of THE HUNGER GAMES fame.

That I can get an entire trilogy ready in six months. That’s three books, folks, split, re-written, new one written, edited, copy edited, line edited, and galleyed all in six months. I turned in the galleys on Book #3, Esprit de Corpse only days before the first book released. Wasn’t traditional publishing supposed to take 18 months a book?

What Do You Love About The Reluctant Reaper?

The characters, the plot, and the humor. Oh, and I thought the cover artist did an amazing job. These suckers are bright and shiny even when reduced to Amazon icon size.

What Would You Do Differently Next Time?

I’m not sure I would have added the romance. I seem to be getting different responses from male and female readers. Because of the level of humour, it’s just not your typical urban fantasy.

Give Us Your Favorite Paragraph From The Story:

The love scene, from the end of the book:

The Earth moved. So did Hell. And possibly some of the furniture. In fact, the sex was so good even the neighbors had a cigarette!

Oh, what the Hell, there’s so many good lines, it can’t hurt to give you a couple more:

From their trip down the slippery slope which is paved with good intentions:

Dead or alive or somewhere in between, I could still kick a guy in the brimstones. Dante dropped to the ground, clutching what was probably his crotch under that stupid Snuggie he’d no doubt bought from a late-night infomercial.

And the inevitable:

Oh, Dante. Is that a scythe in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?

What’s Next For You As A Storyteller?

Books 1 and 2 are available now, with Book 3 releasing August 15.

Book 1. THE RELUCTANT REAPER: Death is what happens while you’re making other plans.
Book 2. SCYTHE DOES MATTER: Be careful what you wish for, it just might get you!
Book 3. ESPRIT DE CORPSE: Hell is where the heart is.

I’ve written Book 4 of the Reaper trilogy. (Hey, it was good enough for Douglas Adams who had, what? Five? No, six books in his trilogy.) Tentatively titled ONE SCYTHE FITS ALL. In it Kirsty d’Arc must travel to Heller, the next Hell dimension over, to rescue Dante. (Why yes, my heroine does rescue my hero — sort of.)

I’m about to send my agent the first book of a new series.

And I’m poking away at a futuristic steampunk idea with lots of buckle in its swash. So keeping busy, yeah.

Thanks, Chuck, for letting me play in your sandbox today. I look forward to your upcoming speaking engagement here in my hometown of Toronto in May 2014. (Open to the general public, folks. Contact me if you want to participate in a full day workshop with Chuck!)

Gina X. Grant: Website

Reluctant Reaper: Amazon / B&N / Kobo Books

I want indie bookstores to survive.

Actually, fuck that. I want indie bookstores to thrive.

And I don’t think that’s impossible. Honestly.

Okay, yeah, the Internet has changed everything — it was a lightning strike that set the whole forest ablaze, and out of the fire and ash came the snorfling hell-beast known as Amazon and that monster tromped everything with its big hooves while also delivering packages crazy fast using Prime delivery (“RAAAR SMASH FIRE RAZE THE LANDSCAPE oh hey here’s your copy of The Cuckoo’s Calling, a weed-whacker, a bulk order of Lapsang Souchong tea sachets, seven smoke alarms, and an inflatable radio-controlled talking moon-buggy, all for 40% off and swift two-day delivery thanks for using Amazon RAAAAR STOMPY STOMPY STOMPY”).

Despite all that, I think indie bookstores are gonna rock the next century. I think we’re veering back away from Big Bulk One-Size-Fits-All services and we’re finding folks returning to The Niche — whether that’s a niche filled with artisanal gin, farm-fresh eggs, hand-painted clit-ticklers, whatever. I think as capitalists we have an unhealthy fear of the niche, as if it suggests marginalization of product. But hey, fuck that. I’m an author. The niche is my wheelhouse, whatever the hell a “wheelhouse” is. I live in the niche. This is where I lay my head at night.

Art grows stronger under the pressure of a niche.

Hell, if the Barnesandnoblepocalypse happens, I think indie bookstores will rise up — hot and shrieky like a fire-winged phoenix! — and fill the void with love and passion and probably lava.

Still. Still. That’s easier said that done. And it’s not going to be a guarantee that bookstores will automagically survive — the Internet has forced everybody to up their game, to evolve or die, to embrace the Jurassic Park ethos of life will find a way.

I’ve got some ideas for indie bookstores. These aren’t genius recommendations and, frankly, many great indie bookstores already do them. These are suggestions from an amateur hour pontificator — a guy whose job is writing shit down, not running bookstores.

Just the same, here I am, writing some shit down.

Some thoughts, then, on how indie bookstores survive, then thrive.

Can’t Be All About Selling Books

You’ll never really beat Amazon on price. Nobody will beat Amazon on price. Maybe, maybe you can match them. But you’re trying to beat the 800-lb mecha-gorilla at the game of being an 800-lb mecha-gorilla. Bookstores that try to exist solely on the basis of “just selling books” are the bookstores that I think you see quietly wither on the branch like a sun-crushed plum.

Be The Bridge Between Author And Audience

Blah blah blah, social media, Faceyspace and Twatter and AnonymousHumpFinder-dot-com, yes, I know, authors and their readers are able to interact all the time any time on the weird wide web of the Internet.

Still, meatspace has enormous value for authors — and not just because it’s a space filled with meat. Fostering real world connections — signing books, meeting fans, having drinks, hunting non-readers for sport — is way more memorable for both author and audience.

Newsflash: one of the best places for this to happen is at bookstores. Indie bookstores in particular! An indie bookstore feels like a comfortable neighborhood bar where the drug of choice is words on pages instead of boozes in glasses.

True fact: not all bookstores grok this. I’ve spoken with a few indie bookstores that treated me like I was, I dunno, bugging them. Like, “Oh, you’re… an author? Ew.” As if authors were not the people who helped fill that bookstore with crazy wonder. I assume it was because I wasn’t a bestselling author? They acted like I was a grungy raccoon begging at the back door for food scraps. And other bookstores don’t prefer to have anything to do with authors at all. Which, you know, is their prerogative. I’m just saying:

Help authors be awesome, and authors will help bookstores be the same.

Symbiosis, baby.

Cover Charge

Charge for events. I know, this is controversial — how much will you charge? Do authors get a cut? If someone runs a book club there, do they get a cut? I’m not saying you need to make readers break the bank just to get into an author signing, and I’m not saying every author signing needs to be a pay-to-get-in dealy-o.

But here’s the thing: I pay money for something, it has value to me. More than if I don’t. And I think you deserve something for putting on a great event and, ostensibly, money paid into an event will be paid back out to make events double-awesomer.

And the cover charge is easy and perfectly palatable when you frame it like this:

One book minimum.

Like, if I go to a comedy club, there’s a drink minimum. I gotta buy a fucking drink to stay inside the club. Well, same goes for the bookstore except here it’s, if you’re at the event, you better buy a book. Just one. The author’s book? Maybe, sure, that’d be nice, but if not — really, seriously, any book. That’s your cover charge. You know what I’d think about that price? I’d think, fuck yeah. I’d think, excuse to buy a new book! Then I’d vibrate quietly, because I love the idea of being forced to buy new books. IT GIVES ME A SEXUAL THRILL SHUT UP.

Safe Space For Readers Of All Genres

Don’t be a bookstore that looks down on readers of any book (I mean, unless it’s a book by Adolf Hitler or something, then I guess you can put on your judgey face). In having a chat with the fine feathered folks of Word Bookstore in Brooklyn, it was refreshing to see people open to books and authors of any stripe. It’s not literary folks looking down on genre. It’s not genre writers looking down on romance. Everybody gets to play in the pool. Books on shelves. Events in-house. Lots of authors. Lots of genres and age ranges. Very refreshing.

More to the point, indie bookstores are already niche. Don’t decrease the size of your capitalist cubbyhole by focusing purely on, say, hoity-toity lit-fic, because first: dick move. And second: can you actually afford to restrict your market so completely?

Value-Add: Physical Product

No reason that an author/publisher and a bookstore cannot partner together to offer unique swag: this could be anything, really. Bookmarks. Postcards. A Lulu-produced short story. A variant-cover limited edition book (think what Forbidden Planet does with Angry Robot’s Adam Christopher novels). A life-size RealDoll of the author? (Okay, ew, maybe not. Nobody wants to see a rubber version of me with my bearded mouth open in a hungry, seductive ‘O.’ … OR DO THEY? Gimme a call, bookstores. We can make this happen.)

Value-Add: Digital Product

Same thing as above, except this time, the added value happens to be digital product. I’m not just talking about offering a Kobo version (though, hey, that’s good, too). I mean, if you buy my book from XYZ indie store, you get an additional short story e-mailed to you. Or you can buy my new novella only through indie bookstores, and they’ll hand your ass a USB key shaped like my beard. Or buying my book through one particular store earns you a seat in a cool Google Hangout where I answer questions about the book or do a reading from the unpublished sequel or do a slovenly striptease while eating a drippy cheesesteak. *licks fingers*

Make Friends With Indie Authors

I don’t know how this works. I really don’t. But indie authors and indie bookstores are a match made in theoretical heaven. Maybe this is a thing that really takes off with like, Espresso book printing machines, I dunno. Maybe it comes through the Kobo connection. But bookstores will be served well by making room for strong indie authors (and in this sense bookstores could be the new gatekeepers amongst a seething mass of new self-published authors whose audience is increasingly in need of a few kept gates now and again). But it also comes from indie authors, too, who have to stop hitching their wagons to Amazon. (Seriously, if I see one more self-published author go on a rant against Big Corporate Publishing while also singing the holy praises of giant kaiju Amazon, I will kill a pony on YouTube.)

Ahem

Very quick shout-outs to some indie bookstores I love and I know others love, too:

Mysterious Galaxy

Word Bookstore

Riverrun Bookstore

Doylestown Bookshop

Moravian Bookshop

High-five to all of them.

Feel free to shout out your own favorite bookstores in the comments — and also to suggest how you think indie bookstores are rocking or could rock harder.

If you think of yourself as “aspiring,” you might be doing it wrong.

If you’re more interested in a book’s metadata than its theme, you might be doing it wrong.

If you’re more concerned about publishing the book than writing it, you might be doing it wrong.

If you talk, tweet, think or write about writing more than you actually write: doin’ it wrong.

If you always find an excuse why you’re not writing, then UR DOIN’ IT RONG.

If your writing life is filled with the blubbery carcasses of unfinished manuscripts lying about like dynamite-exploded whales and you’ve never finished a story, you’re doing it wrong, hoss.

If you keep cheating on your current manuscript by porking other, momentarily-sexier manuscripts behind the barn, yep, that’s some wrong-flavored wrongness with hot wrong sauce.

If you’d rather play video games or watch movies or masturbate to at twerking videos on Tumblr — in other words, if you’d rather be doing anything else but writing — you’re doing it wrong.

If you think that there’s one way up the mountain — and that you or someone else is the magical sherpa who will guide you up that mountain — oh yeah, you’re doing it wrong.

If you self-publish because you’re bitter at the traditional publishing establishment and not because of the very many valid reasons for self-publishing, you’re doing it wrong.

If you think any kind of publishing is a get-rich-quick-scheme lottery-ticket: YOU WRONG.

If you think writers or other artists shouldn’t get paid: YOU DOUBLE WRONG.

If you think you don’t need an editor: you are Mister Wrongyfaced Wrongypants, Esquire.

If you’ve inhaled the aerosolized horseshit and buy into the divide between literary and genre fiction, BZZT, that’s some wrong-ass shit, chief.

If you believe in any of the tribal breakdowns in writing and publishing (trad-pub versus self-pub, Amazon is god or Amazon is the devil, women don’t write as well as men), then let me spell it out with these Scrabble tiles, here… D O I N I T W R O N G

If you can’t make us care about your characters… drum roll please, doin’ it wrong.

If you’re not willing to try new things in writing — new characters, new POVs, new plotting or planning styles, new something, new anything — then you sure ain’t right.

If you rely on magical thinking and it hurts you more than it helps you: du machst es falsch!

If you let writer’s block win, you got it all wrong.

If you’re a writer who doesn’t read, ooh, holy shitkittens, you’re super-mega-ultra-wrong.

If you’re a writer who only reads for pleasure, who never reads non-fiction, who refuses to read outside a single beloved genre or medium, yeah, you’re probably pretty wrong over there.

If you hate bookstores, you’re Mayor Wrongdong of Wronglesburg, Population: YOU.

If you’re an asshole to your audience, you’re BIG SUPER CRAZY FACE WRONG.

If you spend a lot of your time getting into fights on the Internet, you’re a big bucket of wrong.

If you don’t like writing and yet you persist at being a writer: wrong, wrong, wrong.

If you’re not writing, then you’re motherfucking wrong.

So get right — and go write.

(Last week was paranormal romance.)

Space opera.

Like with all the subgenres, the definition floats a little bit, but for now we’ll cleave to the Wikipedia definition, which is: “a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes romantic, often melodramatic adventure, set mainly or entirely in outer space, usually involving conflict between opponents possessing advanced technologies and abilities.”

Time to ask you:

What are your three essential space opera reads?

Drop ’em in the comments!

Last week’s challenge: Last Lines First.

This random plot scenario generator cracks me up.

And it also comes up with some pretty good narrative seedlings, to my surprise.

So! This week, we’re using it.

Go click the link.

Conjure a random plot scenario.

Use said plot scenario as the basis for your flash fiction challenge this week. You have, as always, up to 1000 words. Post on your space, link back here. Due by Friday, July 26th. (And as a note: please do not post entire stories in the comment sections. I delete those.)

Now click, think, and write.