Conventions and conferences are at their best when they’re safe spaces for those who attend — but sometimes those safe spaces are violated, and in cases of sexual harassment, it’s important to know how to report the situation. Here, then, is Elise Matthesen to talk about sexual harassment at conventions — and what steps you can take to report it after its occurrence. (Note: you’ll also find this cross-posted at the blogs of Seanan McGuire, Jim Hines, John Scalzi, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Brandon Sanderson.)

We’re geeks. We learn things and share, right? Well, this year at WisCon I learned firsthand how to report sexual harassment.  In case you ever need or want to know, here’s what I learned and how it went.

Two editors I knew were throwing a book release party on Friday night at the convention. I was there, standing around with a drink talking about Babylon 5, the work of China Mieville, and Marxist theories of labor (like you do) when an editor from a different house joined the conversation briefly and decided to do the thing that I reported. A minute or two after he left, one of the hosts came over to check on me. I was lucky: my host was alert and aware. On hearing what had happened, he gave me the name of a mandated reporter at the company the harasser was representing at the convention.

The mandated reporter was respectful and professional. Even though I knew them, reporting this stuff is scary, especially about someone who’s been with a company for a long time, so I was really glad to be listened to. Since the incident happened during Memorial Day weekend, I was told Human Resources would follow up with me on Tuesday.

There was most of a convention between then and Tuesday, and I didn’t like the thought of more of this nonsense (there’s a polite word for it!) happening, so I went and found a convention Safety staffer. He asked me right away whether I was okay and whether I wanted someone with me while we talked or would rather speak privately. A friend was nearby, a previous Guest of Honor at the convention, and I asked her to stay for the conversation. The Safety person asked whether I’d like to make a formal report.  I told him, “I’d just like to tell you what happened informally, I guess, while I figure out what I want to do.”

It may seem odd to hesitate to make a formal report to a convention when one has just called somebody’s employer and begun the process of formally reporting there, but that’s how it was. I think I was a little bit in shock. (I kept shaking my head and thinking, “Dude, seriously??”) So the Safety person closed his notebook and listened attentively. Partway through my account, I said, “Okay, open your notebook, because yeah, this should be official.” Thus began the formal report to the convention.  We listed what had happened, when and where, the names of other people who were there when it happened, and so forth. The Safety person told me he would be taking the report up to the next level, checked again to see whether I was okay, and then went.

I had been nervous about doing it, even though the Safety person and the friend sitting with us were people I have known for years. Sitting there, I tried to imagine how nervous I would have been if I were twenty-some years old and at my first convention. What if I were just starting out and had been hoping to show a manuscript to that editor?  Would I have thought this kind of behavior was business as usual? What if I were afraid that person would blacklist me if I didn’t make nice and go along with it? If I had been less experienced, less surrounded by people I could call on for strength and encouragement, would I have been able to report it at all?

Well, I actually know the answer to that one: I wouldn’t have. I know this because I did not report it when it happened to me in my twenties. I didn’t report it when it happened to me in my forties either. There are lots of reasons people might not report things, and I’m not going to tell someone they’re wrong for choosing not to report. What I intend to do by writing this is to give some kind of road map to someone who is considering reporting. We’re geeks, right? Learning something and sharing is what we do.

So I reported it to the convention. Somewhere in there they asked, “Shall we use your name?” I thought for a millisecond and said, “Oh, hell yes.”

This is an important thing. A formal report has a name attached. More about this later.

The Safety team kept checking in with me.  The coordinators of the convention were promptly involved. Someone told me that since it was the first report, the editor would not be asked to leave the convention. I was surprised it was the first report, but hey, if it was and if that’s the process, follow the process. They told me they had instructed him to keep away from me for the rest of the convention. I thanked them.

Starting on Tuesday, the HR department of his company got in touch with me. They too were respectful and took the incident very seriously.  Again I described what, where and when, and who had been present for the incident and aftermath. They asked me if I was making a formal report and wanted my name used. Again I said, “Hell, yes.”

Both HR and Legal were in touch with me over the following weeks.  HR called and emailed enough times that my husband started calling them “your good friends at HR.”  They also followed through on checking with the other people, and did so with a promptness that was good to see.

Although their behavior was professional and respectful, I was stunned when I found out that mine was the first formal report filed there as well. From various discussions in person and online, I knew for certain that I was not the only one to have reported inappropriate behavior by this person to his employer. It turned out that the previous reports had been made confidentially and not through HR and Legal. Therefore my report was the first one, because it was the first one that had ever been formally recorded.

Corporations (and conventions with formal procedures) live and die by the written word. “Records, or it didn’t happen” is how it works, at least as far as doing anything official about it. So here I was, and here we all were, with a situation where this had definitely happened before, but which we had to treat as if it were the first time — because for formal purposes, it was.

I asked whether people who had originally made confidential reports could go ahead and file formal ones now. There was a bit of confusion around an erroneous answer by someone in another department, but then the person at Legal clearly said that “the past is past” is not an accurate summation of company policy, and that she (and all the other people listed in the company’s publically-available code of conduct) would definitely accept formal reports regardless of whether the behavior took place last week or last year.

If you choose to report, I hope this writing is useful to you. If you’re new to the genre, please be assured that sexual harassment is NOT acceptable business-as-usual.  I have had numerous editors tell me that reporting harassment will NOT get you blacklisted, that they WANT the bad apples reported and dealt with, and that this is very important to them, because this kind of thing is bad for everyone and is not okay. The thing is, though, that I’m fifty-two years old, familiar with the field and the world of conventions, moderately well known to many professionals in the field, and relatively well-liked. I’ve got a lot of social credit. And yet even I was nervous and a little in shock when faced with deciding whether or not to report what happened. Even I was thinking, “Oh, God, do I have to? What if this gets really ugly?”

But every time I got that scared feeling in my guts and the sensation of having a target between my shoulder blades, I thought, “How much worse would this be if I were inexperienced, if I were new to the field, if I were a lot younger?” A thousand times worse.  So I took a deep breath and squared my shoulders and said, “Hell, yes, use my name.”  And while it’s scary to write this now, and while various people are worried that parts of the Internet may fall on my head, I’m going to share the knowledge — because I’m a geek, and that’s what we do.

So if you need to report this stuff, the following things may make it easier to do so. Not easy, because I don’t think it’s gotten anywhere near easy, but they’ll probably help.

NOTES: As soon as you can, make notes on the following:

• – what happened
• – when it happened and where
• – who else was present (if anyone)
• – any other possibly useful information

And take notes as you go through the process of reporting: write down who you talk with in the organization to which you are reporting, and when.

ALLIES:  Line up your support team. When you report an incident of sexual harassment to a convention, it is fine to take a friend with you. A friend can keep you company while you make a report to a company by phone or in email. Some allies can help by hanging out with you at convention programming or parties or events, ready to be a buffer in case of unfortunate events — or by just reminding you to eat, if you’re too stressed to remember. If you’re in shock, please try to tell your allies this, and ask for help if you can.

NAVIGATION: If there are procedures in place, what are they?  Where do you start to make a report and how? (Finding out might be a job to outsource to allies.) Some companies have current codes of conduct posted on line with contact information for people to report harassment to. Jim Hines posted a list of contacts at various companies a while ago.  Conventions should have a safety team listed in the program book.  Know the difference between formal reports and informal reports. Ask what happens next with your report, and whether there will be a formal record of it, or whether it will result in a supervisor telling the person “Don’t do that,” but  will be confidential and will not be counted formally.

REPORTING FORMALLY: This is a particularly important point. Serial harassers can get any number of little talking-to’s and still have a clear record, which means HR and Legal can’t make any disciplinary action stick when formal reports do finally get made. This is the sort of thing that can get companies really bad reputations, and the ongoing behavior hurts everybody in the field. It is particularly poisonous if the inappropriate behavior is consistently directed toward people over whom the harasser has some kind of real or perceived power:  an aspiring writer may hesitate to report an editor, for instance, due to fear of economic harm or reprisal.

STAY SAFE:  You get to choose what to do, because you’re the only one who knows your situation and what risks you will and won’t take.  If not reporting is what you need to do, that’s what you get to do, and if anybody gives you trouble about making that choice to stay safe, you can sic me on them. Me, I’ve had a bunch of conversations with my husband, and I’ve had a bunch of conversations with other people, and I hate the fact that I’m scared that there might be legal wrangling (from the person I’d name, not the convention or his employer) if I name names. But after all those conversations, I’m not going to. Instead, I’m writing the most important part, about how to report this, and make it work, which is so much bigger than one person’s distasteful experience.

During the incident, the person I reported said,  “Gosh, you’re lovely when you’re angry.”  You know what?  I’ve been getting prettier and prettier.

Last week’s challenge: “Another Roll Of The Dice“

Given that earlier in the week we talked about tropes and in particular the infinitely-entertaining website known as “TV Tropes,” well…

Here’s your mission, should you choose to accept it.

Go to TVtropes.org.

In the top menu bar is a button called random.

I want you to click that button.

You’ll get a trope.

You will use this trope as the basis to write your flash fiction this week.

(Identify the trope for us so we can see your pick, please.)

Now, sometimes you’ll click it and you might get something specific to television or film, and okay, it’s totally fine to click a few times to get something that actually suits a ~1000-word piece of flash fiction. Nobody’s watching. Except me, in your ceiling.

You’ve got one week to write your story on your own online space and link back here — due by July 5th, at noon EST. Now to get tropey, willya?

In a perfect world, we would refer to Madeline Ashby as Mad Ashby, the cantankerous Cockney bomber — or maybe Mad-Ash, the hell-warrior who stalks the smoldering wasteland of Neo-Canada. For now, we have Madeline Ashby, the bad-ass writer who’s getting a lot of great attention for her first book, vN, and is here to talk about its follow-up, iD:

Tell Us About Yourself: Who The Hell Are You?

My name is Madeline Ashby, and I’m a science fiction writer and strategic foresight consultant. That means that sometimes, I write stories for Intel Labs and The Institute for the Future, about technologies being worked on at the moment. Other times, I design marketing strategies (and write copy) for Ideas in Flight, a marketing firm in Toronto. I live there with my partner, horror writer David Nickle. And sometimes, I write books.

Give Us The 140-Character Story Pitch:

Javier is a self-replicating humanoid robot on the hunt for redemption and revenge. His only problem? His failsafe. For now.

Where Does This Story Come From?

This is the sequel to my debut novel, vN: The First Machine Dynasty. vN was about Amy, a little girl robot who eats her grandmother at kindergarten graduation, and grows to adult size. With her granny on a partition in her mind, she has to go on the run. In a prison transport truck, she meets Javier — another vN, wanted for serial replication. Javier is the protagonist of iD, which takes place directly after vN. He’s proven himself a hero in the first book, but now his new ideals get put to the test. And that leads him to question who he is, and what his relationship to humanity is — if humans are really worthy of the love he’s programmed to feel for them.

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

One thing you’ll notice about the protagonist of this story, Javier, is that he does things and usually only women do, in stories. In genre stories, in mainstream stories, in stories. Because Javier still has an intact failsafe, he can’t fight back against the humans who want to exploit him. That seats him right in traditional heroine territory: reduced to scheming, to seducing, to begging, like the women of Hardy and Thackeray. And frankly, things happen to Javier that usually only happen to women in genre stories. As a humanoid, people tend to objectify him. (After all, he’s quite literally an object.) People feel like they can just buy him off the shelf, that his body is inherently available for consumption. As a feminist who once wrote a thesis on anime fandom and cyborg theory, I wanted to tell that story from a man’s perspective. Not because I hate men (I don’t) but because I feel that the dominant culture in general doesn’t give men a lot of room for vulnerability. I had just written a novel about an almost invulnerable woman, and I wanted to turn that around this time. Most stories about male robots are about how cold they are, how isolated, how they struggle with the desire to be human, to be “real.” In my opinion, “real” is bullshit. I’m comfortable in my post-modernity, and I can safely tell you that authenticity is crap. I wanted to write a story about a male robot who had perfected passive aggression, who used his sexuality as a weapon, an homme fatale.

What Was The Hardest Thing About Writing iD?

First, I had to prepare myself emotionally to do it. That was hard. It’s a hard book, and a lot of hard things happen in it. I’ve written a bit about that, below.

Second, I had to put aside my Sequel Syndrome. Sequel Syndrome is a strain of Impostor Syndrome, which is the fear that everyone around you will slowly realize that you’re not really a grown-up and abandon you in disgust. Sequels are hard. There’s a lot of pressure to live up to the first book, and there’s a lot of pressure to make lightning strike twice. That’s a Herculean task, and fairly unrealistic. Not just because it’s statistically unlikely, but because it’s not how life is lived. I spoke with my therapist about this anxiety, and he reminded me that sequels can and should do something different from the first episode in a story. After all, that’s how life works if you’re doing it right. You don’t spend your life doing the same thing over and over, making the same mistakes, thinking you’re learning the lesson but never really living it. You do something different, in the second act of life. Or you should, if you learned anything from the first one.

Once I understood that, I decided to make this book as different as I could. vN took place in the summer; iD takes place in the winter. vN made a lot of pop culture references; iD makes a lot of references to classic literature. (I did a classics programme at a Jesuit university. It was about time a little of that shone through.) vN is relentlessly paced; iD is paced more like a mainstream novel. vN is a young girl’s coming-of-age story; iD is about finding the strength to step up and be a real man — even when you’ve never been a real live boy.

What Did You Learn Writing iD?

I learned that sadness is hard to sustain. I don’t know how those grimdark guys do it. Seriously. They must drink like a fifth of Jack a night. This is a sad book with a happy ending, but it’s primarily sad, and that made me scared to write it. I knew exactly what I had to do, but that didn’t make it any easier. One night, I went to bed and just started to cry about the scene I had just written. My partner rolled over and held me, thinking I’d had a nightmare. But no. I’d written the nightmare.

But looking back, I realized that I’d gone through this with another story of mine, also about Javier. The Education of Junior Number 12 was a story I wrote before finishing vN, but it acted as a sort of prequel. It was told in much the same elegiac tone, and it was hard for me to maintain. I tried to sell it, and it never took. It was too long. It was too dark. Whatever. Over the years, I picked at that story like a wound. In a Korean coffee shop over a piece of sweet potato cake, I thought I had it. On a hidden beach on Toronto’s Centre Island, I thought I had it. But I didn’t have it, not really, until one night in my rat-infested basement apartment in Little Italy, I was so frustrated with my life and the various messes I’d made that I had to take control of something, so I sliced up that piece like a late-stage serial killer. Angry Robot took what survived that night as promotional material for the book. Then it wound up in Year’s Best.

So in reality, this is just the dance I’ve always done with Javier. Hijo de puta.

What Do You Love About iD?

Personally, I think the prose is better this time around. It’s more lyrical. It’s prettier. When I look at most of my prose, it seems rather workmanlike and plain. I’d like it to have a bit more flourish. So I tried to focus on that, this time. And I think it worked. Occasionally, I would read parts of the novel aloud to my partner, and he would say: “If the rest of the book sounds like what you just read, you’ve got nothing to worry about.” I loved those moments.

What Would You Do Differently Next Time?

I would start sooner. I procrastinated, and my work suffered, and I couldn’t workshop it the way I wanted to. I wasn’t emotionally prepared to do what I had to do with this book, so I delayed. It wasn’t until I spoke with my therapist about it that I could really gird my loins and get the job done. He’s counselled a lot of writers and artists, so he totally understood Sequel Syndrome and how to work through it. Also, I was working again. When I wrote vN, I wasn’t. So I had less time and less focus with which to complete this book. Then again, I had years to write my first book, and I still ended up scrapping fifteen thousand words from that manuscript — even after it was sold to Angry Robot, which happened in the midst of separating from my husband and writing my second Master’s. The chaos was good for it. So when iD needed re-writes, I shrugged my shoulders and poured more coffee. (And drank some green juice, and took up meditation, and hired a yoga trainer to teach me how to breathe after fighting two flus in two years. Writing is terrible for the body.)

Give Us Your Favorite Paragraph From The Story:

“Before him, the island was an inverted city. Her roots hung deep in the water, thick as skyscrapers. They glittered and gleamed like structures of glass and steel. At any time, he realized, Amy could have shot them up from below and made a paradise to rival any human construction. They dangled there, all the unfinished places, the filigreed towers and great crude blocks, the hanging bridges of sighs never breathed. She had held them in reserve. She had let the islanders build what they wanted, instead.”

What’s Next For You As A Storyteller?

Angry Robot and I are deciding if we want to move forward with the story of the vN, into a third (or even fourth) book. I think I’d like to do one more, set in Japan. It looks like I’ll be going there next spring, so maybe I could do research while there. And maybe a collection about Javier’s iterations. He’s got so many of them, and they’ve all gone on their own adventures, so it would be interesting to see what they were up to while he was busy fucking his way up one coast and down the other.

Beyond that, I’m on Project Hieroglyph, which is an initiative put together by Arizona State University and the Center for Science and the Imagination, inspired by a Neal Stephenson talk on the need for bigger, brighter ideas in science fiction. I’m applying my previous work on the future of border security to a story about how to build new border towns that actually act as prototype spaces for employable immigrants and visa-granting companies, while remaining secure and cutting down on the pollero traffic through the Sonora desert.

Madeline Ashby: Website /@MadelineAshby

iD: Amazon / B&N / Indiebound

The best compliment I can pay to Paul Kemp’s first Egil & Nix book is, for me, that it gave me the sudden urge to go out and play a shitload of D&D. It’s a deeply awesome, super-fun book and I’m comfortable assuming the next in the series in just as rad. Speakawhich — here’s Paul now to talk about that very book:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

Well, I’m a proud geek, proud dad, whisky drinker, beer drinker, wine drinker (an alarming theme is beginning to emerge here), dude-who-quit-smoking-cigars-but-sometimes-still-longs-for-one (it’s only a cigar, people! Jeebus!).  I’m a RPG player, ASL fan, FPS fan, and such other nerdy acronyms as may give me credibility with the reading audience.

On the writing front, I’m somehow a multiple New York Times bestseller. You believe that shit? I write Star Wars novels, Forgotten Realms novels featuring my signature character, Erevis Cale, and I write sword and sorcery novels in my own fictional world for Angry Robot Books.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH.

A pair of rogues take a run at the Thieves’ Guild. Wit and action comes at you in a blizzard. It’s sword and sorcery, but now with 25% more sorcery! 25% more! But you must call now!

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

This book, and the Egil and Nix books generally, comes from my sweet, sweet sticky love of classic sword and sorcery and adventure fiction.  It comes from a desire to write something that might, for some reader somewhere, make them feel the same wonder and joy that I did the first time I read about Fafhrd and the Mouser, about Doc Savage, about Conan or Elric.  It comes from a desire to write something that feels like a throwback, that reads in most respects like the throwback, but that nevertheless has ‘modern’ sensibilities.  When I first read those books (and I re-read most of them once every year or so), I felt like the story was just grabbing me by the shirt, giving me a shake, and saying, “Come the fuck on, man!  There’s adventure afoot!”  Love that.

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

Er, uh, because it’s the product my particular brand of whiskey-soaked, unholy manlove of Fritz Leiber’s work (give me a call from beyond, Fritzy!)? No? Then, uh, I guess I’m not sure it is, you know? Well, maybe this:

I’ve been writing a long time, sold a fair amount of books, and I’m basically at the point in my career that I truly do not care what anyone thinks of what I write.  So I can tell what I think is a gloriously fun, unabashed adventure story, and tell it without a hint of hipster irony, without so much as a knowing nod.  And I can do that because i don’t care if Locus likes it (maybe they won’t because adventure fiction, I think, is not their cup of tea), or if it gets Hugo or Nebula nominated (it probably won’t for the same reason!).  I just care about telling a story that recalls for me the sensawunda I felt when reading Leiber/Burroughs/Howard/Brackett/Younameit for the first time. There’s something pure about the storytelling in those books, something unselfconscious.  There’s a verve to it.  It elicits the same kind of feeling I had when I first saw an Imperial Star Destroyer start to fill the screen from the bottom up, chasing a tiny Tantive IV, the same kind of feeling Spielberg recaptured in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s fun storytelling, really fun. And it’s not fun with a knowing wink, or an arched eyebrow.  It’s just fucking fun.  Still has something to say, sure, but it is, first and foremost and always, a ripping tale. I’m not the only one who could do it, but I can damn sure do it and do it pretty well.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING a discourse in steel?

Oddly, none of it was hard and I don’t say that lightly. Essentially every other book i’ve written has had that bit (or bits) where it felt like getting words on the page was less fun than getting my teeth drilled, where frustration caused me to bob for apples in a vat of scotch, but not the Egil and Nix stories. Writing about these two and their adventures is nothing but an unadulterated blast and it comes easy (and now, by saying that, i’m sure the writing gods have just looked down, realized that I’m writing the third Egil and Nix book, and have decreed, “AFFLICT THAT FUCKER WITH DIFFICULTIES!”

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING a discourse in steel?

Man, that’s a good question.  How about this: If you build darkness into a character, it will come out even if you didn’t intend for it to come out when conceptualizing the story.

Also, swearing begets more swearing, until pretty much the entire book is one big expletive (albeit made-up fantasy expletives, in this case).

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT a discourse in steel?

I love Nix’s voice, of course. I like to think he’s witty and insightful and a lot of fun to read, and he and Egil play off one another very, very well.

But I really love some of the small, evocative bits that aren’t hugely important to the plot but which suggest so much about the wonder of the world – the talking, sassy magical key, the sexless flesh automaton that wanders the Low Bazaar hawking magical gewgaws for Kerfallen the Grey Mage, the magical tattoos on members of the Thieves’ Guild.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

WHAT!  THIS NOVEL IS PERFECT, SIR!  DO YOU GAINSAY THIS?

Seriously, man, that’s a tough question, since we’re our own harshest critics. How about this: I would definitely make the sucky parts less sucky!  Yeah, yeah, that’s it.  And I’d make the mediocre parts great instead!

More seriously, I’d slow down. The Egil and Nix books come at me faster than any of my other novels. I’m sure I could make small improvements throughout if I slowed the pace some.

That’s all I got, bro.  And that’s a shitty answer.  But the book’s brand new and I can’t quite bring myself to crucify it just yet.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

This bit occurs while Egil and Nix are in the midst of an assault on the fortified guild house of Dur Follin’s Thieves’ Guild. They’re there to grab a man named Channis, the Upright Man (the guildmaster). I think this captures their dynamic pretty well.

Nix shrugged. “Of course if he’s not in there, we’re fakked. We may be fakked anyway. Bit off a big piece of meat here, my friend. Makes for a hard chew. But it’s now or not. We have minutes at best, before those slubbers from the rooms below get word up here. We move fast enough, we may yet take them by surprise.

“They feel safe here,” Egil said.

“They should,” Nix said, thinking of the reinforced doors and locks.

Egil nodded. “Take the two stupidest slubbers in Dur Follin to attack the guild house.”

“Ballsiest is what you mean,” Nix said. “I can barely walk I’m swinging so low.”

Egil grinned and they hustled through empty rooms and corridors, making their way to the grand room. Presently Egil put up a hand to stop them.

“Right around this corner,” he said softly.

Nix peeked around the corner and saw two guards. They looked more bored than alert. Word of the attack hadn’t yet reached them. Nix pulled back.

“Two men, as you said,” he said to Egil.

Egil pointed. “This hallway goes around to the other side, to the doors near Channis.”

“Channis?”

“The Upright Man’s name. The boy said it.”

“Right. Aye,” Nix said, then, “I’ll take these two then get inside the room and draw eyes. You go around to the other doors, kill the guards there quick, and stand ready. When you hear the commotion inside, you get in and grab this Channis. I’ll meet you over there.”

“Good,” Egil said. “Then what?”

“What do you mean, ‘then what?’”

“We get him,” Egil said. “We tell him why he’s dying and do it. Then, how do we get clear?”

“Why’re you asking me?”

“I thought you’d have a plan.”

“Why would you think that? I’m making this up as we go. You’re the one with the map of the place in your head.”

Egil shrugged. “Hmm. I guess we’ll figure something out.”

Nix looked at him a long moment. “Shite, man. I guess we will. Here I go.”

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

Oh, I plan to stress over sales and my career while sitting on the couch in my underwear with a whiskey.

Oh, maybe you mean something less depressing?  In October, my next Forgotten Realms novel, THE GODBORN, book II of the Sundering, will be released. Meanwhile, I’ll be working on A CONVERSATION IN BLOOD, which is the next Egil and Nix novel (scheduled for a June 2014 release, I believe). After that, I’ll be working on another two Forgotten Realms novels and a fourth Egil and Nix book, so – busy!  And that’s a good thing.

Chuck, thanks for having me, man.  I really appreciate it.

Paul S. Kemp: Website / Facebook / @paulskemp

A Discourse In Steel: Purchase

I think writing and storytelling is a kind of magic.

Maybe literally, if you believe in that sort of thing. Like, okay, when I sit down to craft a story I’m suddenly stringing together letters based on utterances which form words which form sentences which form ideas and then I mash a lot of those ideas together and they begin to create a narrative — a narrative that didn’t exist before, a lightning struck the gassy heavens and lit the skies aflame and now it’s raining Frankensteins and unicorns moment.

It’s profound, powerful, weird-ass stuff.

But I used to also feel that this magic was inviolable. Or worse, fragile. Like, this sense that it’s a nervous horse quick to spook. Or that it’s a little bridge made of glass and if you put too much weight on it you’ll hear the crinkly crackle-snap and tumble into an abyss of dead magic.

It’s sometimes used as one of the reasons that people don’t outline — or worse, the reason they don’t like to edit their work. In fact, it’s used as a reason for a lot of things, this magic: the magic of the muse, the curse of writer’s block, the fickle fates of a day’s writing (sorry, just can’t make the words today, for the magic breath of the gods has not been breathed up my nethers and so my pallid flesh will not be animated to action).

I think when magic fuels you: that’s awesome.

But I think when magic hampers you: that’s really sad.

Because the magic isn’t supposed to hamstring you.

It’s supposed to fuel the work, not fuel your excuses.

If you don’t like to outline or do any kind of plotting or planning — more power to you*. But let that be because that’s how your process works, not because the magic spell is so frangible, so untenable, that to merely gaze upon it will cause it to shatter. If your story is so delicate, you’re probably in deep fucking trouble, friend. It’s not a baby rabbit. You can’t scare it to death.

But I think I have a solution for what feels to me like troublesome thinking, and it involves looking at your story as a different kind of magic altogether:

Look at it like a magic trick.

A magic trick isn’t an impromptu thing: you don’t merely get on stage and let the Muse barf inspiration for the trick into your brain-bucket. You conceive of it in a fit of inspiration, like with anything — but then you practice. You know the trick intimately before it’s ever performed on stage: you’re the magician, goddamnit. Of course you know how the trick is performed.

But that doesn’t remove the fun of the trick.

Because the fun of the trick is seeing the audience react.

The fun is in the awe they feel. Their “wow” is more important than your “wow.”

Just because you know the trick doesn’t mean the magic is dead.

(* More seriously, I again want to make it clear that none of this is a condemnation of your process. Some folks outline. Some don’t. Some scry stories in pigeon guts. Whatever makes your grapefruit squirt. The point is wesometimes  rely on this kind of supernatural thinking as an excuse rather than as an empowerment. Which is no good.)

I get a lot of emails. And questions at conferences. And psychic missives sent through the galactic nebula from various superior alien species. And they ask me questions about writing and so I thought I’d drop a big ol’ compilation of writing advice — answers to many of the questions I get — here in this whopper of a post. A list of fifty. My first. (Likely my last, though I’ll also note: this list of 50 is as long as many of my lists of 25, word-wise.)

Go forth. Read. Absorb. Yell at me. Share if you like.

Oh, and —

I want you to read all of this in the sexy voice of Benedict Cumberbatch. AKA, Benderspink Umberhulk. AKA, Benneton Umbrellahat. AKA, Kennebunkport Slumberparty. AKA, Bob Benson.

Or, just read it like it’s being screamed by Animal from The Muppets.

Your call.

Let us begin.

1. Snap Your Trap And Write Some Shit

Stop talking about writing. Stop reading about writing. Stop dreaming about writing. Stop doing things that don’t qualify as writing. The thing that defines a writer is that the writer writes.

2. No, Seriously, Quit What You’re Doing Right Now And Go Write

I wasn’t fucking joking. Stop reading this post. Get out now. Go! Go. I will Taser you in the face, nipples, butthole and genitals if I see you hanging around here when you could be banging out perfectly good word count. Go right now and write. Come back here when you’re done. This entire blog will be waiting for you. Like a stalker in your shrubbery.

3. Nobody Has Any Goddamn Answers

I don’t have answers. Neil Gaiman doesn’t have answers. Jane Austen didn’t have them. Nobody has answers. We have ideas. Suggestions. Possibilities. The only writer who has answers about your writing is you. Advice is just advice. It is not an equation. It is not the instruction manual for Ikea furniture (which are admittedly super-fucking-vague anyway). You are your own Muse.

4. Think About Writing More Than You Think About Publishing

Writing and storytelling is not a means to an end. The story is the end. Publishing is just a delivery system. It isn’t that fucking exciting. It’s not a carousel. You should ask more questions about wordsmithy and story architecture than you do about query letters or e-book formatting.

5. Learn How To Put Together A Proper Fucking Sentence

If you can’t put together a cogent sentence, you’re fucked.

6. You’ve Gotta Wade Through Your Own Waste

You want to be Hercules, Boudicca, Annie Oakley, and Einstein right out of the gate. You want a perfect novel to pop out of your head fully formed like an adult-grown chicken right from the egg. Won’t happen. You’re gonna suck first. You’re gonna suck for a while. Even when you’re awesome you’re still gonna suck a little bit. This is how you get better. Wade through your own word-waste. I wrote a bunch of assy novels before I wrote one that wasn’t assy. The less you write, the more you suck. You write a lot so you can suck only a little.

7. What Other Writers Do Doesn’t Fucking Matter

It’s like kids in a classroom. Stop paying attention to Billy flicking boogers on Betty. Stop looking at Cindy’s grades. So what if Earl, Jr. keeps fondling himself and smells like weird cheese? What other writers do don’t matter. What matters is what you do. You have to write your story. They aren’t sitting at your desk, with your computer, with your coffee, with your chimpanzee manservant. You are. Own it. Fuck you. Be your own writer. Tell your own tales.

8. Any Rule Can Be Broken If You Break It Like A Fucking Boss

For every writer, a billion writing rules. Snidbits of wisdom. Chestnuts of truth. You can break all the rules. You can roast all the chestnuts. But first, you have to learn the rules. First, you gotta get good. Otherwise you’re a toddler driving a car, shooting a pistol out the window.

9. For Some Reason The Blank Page Is Scary As Hell

The first empty page always makes you want to shit your pants. It’s normal. We’re all scared.

10. Write Brave And Bold And Bloody

Fuck it. Don’t do what everyone else is doing. Stop dicking around. Be brave! Be powerful! Take risks. Base-jump off Godzilla’s nut-sack. Hang-glide into the fire-vagina of Mordor. Bleed on the page. You don’t get up on stage and do a mumbly little rendition of I’m A Little Teapot. You get up there in a glittered sarong with dragon-wings on your back, with bottle-rockets taped to your inner-thighs, with the loudest, meanest, baddest-assest version of the song that fills your fucking heart. Write big. Write without fear. Write with blood, guts, madness and majesty!

11. People Will Always Be There To Tell You You Can’t Do Something

You will run a gauntlet of naysayers. Everyone has a reason why you shouldn’t even try to be a writer. You gotta run this gauntlet. Fly as a writer. Or die as something else.

12. Learn To Say “Yes” More Than You Say “No”

Early on, say yes. Take chances. Try things. All doors are open. All windows. All eyes. Take it all in. Embrace potential. You don’t know if you don’t like a food, a TV show, a bizarre sexual position, until you try it. Try it all. Learn the power of fuck yes, motherfucker.

13. But Eventually Transition To Saying “No” More Than You Say “Yes”

Eventually, though, you learn the power of “no.” As soon as you can start confidently saying “no” — and knowing why you have to say no to a job, to a book, to a style, to a POV or a genre or a format — you see your confidence as a creator begin to manifest.

14. You’re Your Own Worst Enemy

If you’re not writing, that’s your fault. It’s not anybody else’s. It’s not your wife’s fault. Not your Mom’s fault. Not your kid’s fault. It isn’t because of a job, or Big Six publishing, or Amazon, or a Muse, or Writer’s Block. You might as well blame a Yeti (who acted in collusion with a cabal of randy leprechauns). It’s all on you. Accept responsibility. Stop complaining. Fix your shit.

15. Figure Out What You Love About Stories

Realize what you love about stories, and bring that love to bear on the page. Let the audience in on that love. Your love should be viral, like cat videos or the norovirus.

16. Quit Chasing Your Voice

You will never find your voice. It isn’t a car and you aren’t a dog chasing it. It’s not a pearl in an oyster or an elk in the forest. Your voice is who you are. The way you think. The way you speak when you’re not thinking about how you speak. You are your voice. If anything it’s like a lost key. It’ll turn up just when you stop hunting for it.

17. Imagine That You’re On A First Date

I’m dating your story. It’s the first date. You have, five, ten pages to make me want that second date. Don’t waste time. After those ten pages, it’s fuck or walk. Then you’ve got the rest of the book to make me want to put a ring on it. I wanna fall in lust, then love, with your story. I want to be heartbroken when its over. I want to need it like I need a drug.

18. Get To The Fucking Point

More to the point: get to the fucking point. Your story should move like a wolf chasing a cheetah chasing a vicious line of gossip. Don’t sink us in narrative mud. Exposition murders mystery. Backstory is a boggy mire. Don’t write to waste time or fill space. Run, fuck, leap and fly.

19. Less Is Nearly Always More

Use as few words as you can. Use as little plot as you are able.

20. Stop Fucking Describing Everything

Pages of description make me want to go back in time and punch you as a baby. Except I can’t because you’ve bored me so much I fell asleep. Description is key. You need it. But you only need so much of it. Let the audience do some work. I know what a chair, a tree, a dude, a dildo all look like. I’ve got memory and imagination. The noun is enough. Describe those things that break the status quo. Describe only those things the audience can’t already know.

21. The Truth About Those Motherfucking Adverbs

Adverbs are not your enemy. Examples of adverbs include: “Quickly,” “There,” “Upstairs,” “Too,” “Yesterday,” “Only,” “Abruptly.” That list goes on and on: adverbs of time, place, manner, extent. The goal, as with all words, is to use them correctly and to not bludgeon your reader about the head and neck with them. An adverb, like an adjective, is a spice. It can highlight a meal. Or it can kill it with too much flavor.

22. Note The Shape Of Question Marks

It’s not a coincidence that question marks are shaped like fish-hooks. We are pulled through fiction by mystery. We want to solve for X. We want to fill in the variables. (Weirdest come-on line ever: “Hey, baby, I wanna fill in your variables. Let’s solve for X, sexypants.”)

23. Your First Job Is To Entertain But It Is Not Your Last Job

Entertainment is job number one. The enemy of entertainment is boredom and the moment your story bores me I’m off like a toddler looking for a loaded revolver and the keys to Daddy’s minivan. But entertainment is just the start. A guy who can fart the alphabet is ‘entertaining.’ You should aspire to do more. Like, say, for instance…

24. Make Me Feel, Make Me Think

The best two things your story can do is to stir my emotions and to challenge my assumptions. Make me feel something (rage! lust! love! grief!). Make me think something (what is the nature of evil? what is the enemy of empathy? what happens if I sneeze while I’m ejaculating?).

25. Assume Your Reader Is Smart

The audience knows when you’re talking down to them. Even kids are smarter than you think.

26. Play Harder

The story is your sandbox. Play. Build. Have fun. If you’re not having any fun, we won’t either. Just don’t eat the cat turds. Every sandbox has cat turds. It’s science fact.

27. Work Harder

Not to say every day is going to be a fucking fun-a-palooza filled where it rains cookies and you construct your own magical dance-ponies. Some days it’s just about working your fingers to bony, bloody nubs — about chewing words, spitting them out, smashing them together. When play fails, you gotta pull the magic from the story like pulling nails from boards with your teeth.

28. Art Harder

Think about your story. Think about your art. Go elbow deep. Get into the guts like you’re trying to birth a humpback whale. Art is a kind of madness. Story is messy, weird, gory, greasy, hard to grasp. But always try. We’re all flying blind. We’re all feeling around in the wet-slick dark for the baby whale. Reach further. Think more. Art harder, motherfuckers.

29. Slow Your Roll, Speedy McGee

Embody patience. The worst thing you can do for your story is pull it out of the oven before it’s done cooking. Don’t quit early. Don’t publish thirty seconds after you typed the last word. Don’t query a stinker. Stories — like wine, brisket, romance and bondage games — need time.

30. Edit Till It’s Right

People ask how many edits or rewrites you need to do, as if there’s a magical number requirement — you edit three times and ding! The E-Z Bake oven pops open and a hot fresh story pops out. You edit and rewrite and edit and rewrite until it’s done. Until it’s right.

31. But Quit Before It’s Perfect

Fuck perfect. You’re a terrible judge of your own work. You’re all wrapped up in it like a sausage in a pancake. Perfect isn’t just the enemy of the good; it’s an impossible predictor, a meaningless pinnacle desired by the divinely-obsessed. Aiming for perfection is just another way to make sure you never finish what you begin. Choose a time and a place to stop. Then stop.

32. Write What You Know

Your life is a tally of experiences. Traumas. True loves. Hallucinations. Opinions. You once ate a spider. You once broke your femur. You once had sex with a dude and/or lady dressed up like a panda bear. You’d be a fucking dipshit not to mine your own life for the authenticity it provides.

33. But Don’t Write Only What You Know

Your life is a tally of your experiences but your fiction needn’t be. ‘Write what you know’ is not a proclamation to write only what you know. You are capable of writing beyond the walls of your own Plexiglas enclosure. Writing and storytelling is a good excuse to try to know more.

34. The Three C’s (creativity, clarity, confidence)

Creativity: Watch me pull a Pegasus out of thin air. Clarity: I will convey the Pegasus clearly and completely so that I am understood. Confidence: I am the god of this place and the Pegasus does whatever the fuck I want it to do. These are your Three C’s. Write with these in mind and nothing will stop you. Except maybe a bear. Because bears are dicks.

35. So Fucking Awkward

A lack of clarity in your writing leads to you not being understood. It can lead to your phrasing sounding awkward — meaning, your prose is clumsy and confusing, stumbling about like a wine-sodden orangutan dressed like Queen Elizabeth. (You may choose which version of Elizabeth inhabits the canvas resting upon your mental easel.)

36. All Things Serve The Character

Character is everything. Character choices create the plot. Characters build the architecture of the story. Characters have and transmit ideas. Characters shape and reflect the thematic argument. The characters form the bloody beating heart of your work.

37. What The Fuck Does Your Character Want?

If I don’t know what the character wants — love! revenge! liquor! cats! — within the first ten pages, then my investment in them is going to be as strong as piss-soaked toilet paper.

38. Whip Me Beat Me Love Me Hate Me

You must punish and reward the characters in your story — which by proxy punishes and rewards the audience reading or watching your story. Err toward more punishment than reward. Which, let’s be honest, is more fun for you anyway. (Looking at you, George R. R. Martin.)

39. The Audience Is Always Wrong

The audience thinks it knows what it wants but it’s wrong. The audience thinks it wants the protagonist to lead a charmed life. To get the girl, the money, the boat, the goat. But such ceaseless pleasure and la-dee-da-dee bullshit is boring as tacos made from cardboard and styrofoam. The audience thinks it wants a jelly donut but it really wants a smack in the mouth. The audience wants pleasure but what they really need is the struggle to find pleasure.

40. Conflict Diamonds

Conflict is the engine of your fiction. Without conflict, a story is just a flatline. And a flatline means your story is fucking DOA. Cold on the slab, toe tag, time of death.

41. Formless Fucking Blob

Another danger is a story has no shape at all: more a formless paramecium blob rather than a flat-line. The story doesn’t hang together. It’s mushy. Gushy. Poopy. If you can’t conceive of how story has shape, has architecture, has bones that connect at joints that pull with muscles and tendons while sealed in a tight swaddling of skin, then what the fuck? Think about it. Find the shape. Sculpt the story to it.

42. Brake And Accelerate

Know what speeds your story up and what slows it down. Dialogue is lubricant: frictionless. Description is grit: friction-filled. Action is a coked-up jackrabbit; exposition is a tired sloth. Short chapters are a bottle rocket; long chapters are a big boat. A story is the slowness of alcohol with the swiftness of meth; sometimes a story needs oxygen to breathe. Sometimes a story needs oxygen to light things on fire. Tension/recoil. Momentum/restriction. Green light. Red light.

43. Goddamnit, Pick A POV And Stick With It

First person, fine. Third person, whatever. Second person — well, you’ve got big balls and/or meaty labia to be trying that one, but whatever. Pick a POV and stick to it.

44. See Also: Pick Your Fucking Tense Already

Stop drifting in and out of narrative tense. It makes Story Jesus shoot puppies with lightning.

45. The Secret

The secret to writing is so simple it tickles: Write as much as you can. As fast as you can. Finish your shit. Hit your deadlines. Try very hard not to suck. That’s it.  That’s my secret. Don’t tell anyone or I’ll charge you with espionage and shit in your fish tank.

46. Read Your Work Aloud

We read with our eyes but words are for the ears. We sound them out in our heads. Reading your work aloud lets you catch the bumps and divots and puffy bits of scar tissue. It lets you hear awkwardness, the uncertainty, the fractured confidence, the fuzzy confusion.

47. You Are Not Alone

Writing seems solitary. It isn’t. Hire editors. Gather readers. Bring audience. Learn from other writers. We all go through the same shit: so commiserate. Gather around the social media water cooler. You’re not a spider starving in its web. You’re part of an ecosystem.

48. Your Laziness Angers Me

Lazy cliches. Lazy constructions. Cheap stereotypes. Tawdry narrative crutches. You don’t edit. You find excuses not to write. Fuck that. Fuck you! You have no excuses. You can always do better. Why be satisfied with easy? Why answer your own indolence with reward? Grit those teeth. Get mad. Fuck passive. Be active. Kick your own ass up and down the block like an empty soup can. Didn’t I tell you to finish your shit? FINISH YOUR SHIT.

49. No, Really, You Have No Excuses

Other people have done what you’re claiming you can’t do. People who have it worse. Or who have more kids. Or another job. You want to ask me how you do it: you just do. You extract words like teeth. You spill them on the table like dice from a Yahtzee cup. You carve a path through the words, through the story, through the industry with a machete made from your own desire and doubt, carved from your femur and scented with your blood. You write even a little bit a day, you’ll get there. You can’t manage that, then don’t even talk to me. Whaddya want me to do? Shove my hand up your ass, work you like a puppet? You wanna write, write. Otherwise: shoo.

50. The Only Way Out Is Through, Motherfuckers

Write or die. Run or fall. Swim or drown. The best thing you can do for all the problems and all the questions is to write your way through it. And when you’re not writing your way through it, read other books, find out how they did it. Then go back to the page and write some more. I know, I know: I said this already. But it bears repeating — hell, it bears you tattooing backwards on your forehead so you can read it in the mirror: SHUT UP AND WRITE. That is the prime motherfucking directive. Do you accept the mission? Then embark. Explore. Attempt. Create.

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