“Hey, Chuck,” you ask. “I’d like to ask, how do I hit on the ladies?”

SPOILER WARNING: DON’T.

Let’s rewind a bit.

I went to the grocery store as I am wont to do on a Tuesday. I go to the store, frequently when I am hungry which means I come home with 37 bags of marshmallows, an entire butchered kangaroo, a half-keg of chocolate syrup, a backpack full of Ranch dressing, and a mysterious out-of-date jar of pickled wolf gonads. It’s common now I go to the store and I see some of the same faces — people who are on the same weekly circuit that I am, I guess.

Well, one of these is a young woman… I dunno, early 20s?

So, she’s looking at cold drinks, juices, that sort of thing.

And there’s a tall reedy dude there in a tight-white t-shirt and he’s helping — “helping?” — her choose something from the case, and at first I think he’s a boyfriend but it becomes apparent that he’s not when I realize he’s hitting on her. Asking for her name, sidling up close, kind of using that soft smooth jazz voice that some dudes use, like, “Oh, I’m totally non-threatening, listen to the velvet tones of my buttery vocal pipes.”

The drink case isn’t super-huge so I’m not standing right there next to the two of them, but what I hear him say next is roughly this:

“I know you don’t get to look in the mirror but I want you to know you’re beautiful.”

Oh, maybe I buried the lede here?

SHE’S BLIND.

I don’t mean that euphemistically, like, “She’s blind to his attraction,” or, “She just doesn’t get it, man,” I mean, she’s actually blind. She’s got the tappy cane and everything. People help her in the store because, well, she’s blind. Employees help. Other shoppers help. It’s all very nice.

Until Doctor Douchebro comes along and hits on her.

And that’s what he’s doing. Hitting on her.

Hitting on a blind woman.

At a grocery store.

With his smarmy come-on line designed, clearly, to hit on blind women.

She was very nice. She dealt with him and politely shut him down (not that he deserved such tender handling, nor was she obligated to “be nice” to him, I’m just telling the story as I witnessed it) and she went her way and he went his. He didn’t stalk her or double-down on creep-town. It was a brief encounter and nothing particularly unsavory came from it.

Just the same —

Gents, don’t hit on women.

I know, now you’re saying, “BUT THAT’S HOW I GET MY PENIS TOUCHED,” and maybe you think that’s true. I realize there’s a certain mode of dating advice that suggests men must show confidence and be clear and forthright with their attraction. But “confidence” is a whole lot different than “aggression,” and hitting on someone is a whole lot more like the latter than the former. Note that verb: hitting — itself the language of violence, like you’re walking up and just bashing her about the head and neck with your sexual desire, like you’re clubbing a seal.

You can be confident. Hell, just going up and talking to a stranger is an act of confidence.

Which is what you should do to people to whom you are attracted.

Talk to them. Connect with them on a human level. They’re not a socket for your plug. You’re a person. They’re a person. Go form an emotional-social tether before you go clumsily trying to bed them. I’m not saying every encounter has to end in marriage. Hey, you wanna just hook-up and find other people who just wanna hook-up, well, dang, I hope you two crazy kids find a way to slap your parts together, whatever those parts might be. Just the same, the way we find those people is by connecting. And being human. And recognizing that they’re human too. And not just treating them like prey animals who owe you a pound of flesh for your hunting efforts.

“Hitting on them” is a thing you do when you see them as a target, a victim, a receptacle for your pleasure. It’s dismissive and unpleasant and often embarrassing for all parties.

Don’t be creepy. Don’t be an asshole.

Aggression is hitting on people.

Confidence is talking to them and knowing that’s enough.

YMMV, IMHO, etc. so forth.

Man, that blog title is soulless, isn’t it? I tried coming up with something funny — something about word vomit? something-something faster pussycat, write, write? — and it just wasn’t happening. So, despite sounding like some kind of mid-90s infomercial, I figure it’s best to just say what the post is actually about so we’re all on the same page and nobody thinks I’m going to vomit on them or throw inky-pawed cats at their head. Right? Right. So —

A few months back I wrote up a zero-fuckery writing plan of 350 words per day that gets you a novel in a year. It is the slow-and-steady method — it’s you chipping away at your Magnum Opus (which is Latin for “Giant Penguin”) until one day a novel is staring up at you, goo-slick and trembling, a creative effort finally born into your world.

The other day, though, I had a short Twitter discussion (a “twitscussion”) with a few other authors based on a tweet by the smoldering, sardonic lothario, Andrew T. Shaffer — who, point of fact, shares the same middle name as Craig T. Nelson, which is “Tits.” Herr Doktor Shaffer is at Romantic Times, where he was listening to David Morrell speak. Shaffer reported:

“I know people who are doing a book or two a year.” – David Morrell on fast writers “Some writers here do six.” – audience member #RT13

— Andrew Shaffer (@andrewtshaffer) May 3, 2013

The discussion that ensued was about writing fast and how many books an author can cram into a given year. Most folks seem to write one, maybe two. Matt Forbeck writes like, I think 52 books a year? That guy must write on the toilet, in the car, in his sleep.

I think last year I wrote… four books? Plus some script work. And not to mention around 250,000 words here at the blog alone. By the end of May this year, I will have written three novels — one of them a 120,000-word Leviathan of YA cornpunk weirdness.

I generally write about 3,000 brand new shiny so-fresh-and-so-clean words per day.

Some of you may want to escalate your word count and punt that slow-and-steady approach right in the See You Next Tuesday. As such, if you want to write MORE FASTER NOW NOW NOW, well, shit, the best I can do is pretend I’m an expert and offer up some tips.

Hide your children. Let us begin.

Do Your Writing In The Morning

Writing in the morning has more potential than writing in the evening and here’s why: writing at the end of the day means the candle is burning down. The timer is ticking. You’re watching the horizon eat the sun and with it, the remaining hours before sweet, sweet slumber.

Ah, but write in the morning? You have the entire day ahead of you. The day is practically bloated with hours — fuck, a whole 24 of them, last I heard. (Unless you’re on some kind of distant interstellar colony reading this in the future, at which point I hope you’re enjoying your 30-hour-days and are also staying safe from the Slabbering Meteorsquid — they’re such assholes, those guys. I mean, really. Acid blood? HELLO, UNORIGINAL.)

Write at the end of the day, you’re racing the clock.

Write at the fore of the day, you own the clock.

Wake Up An Hour Earlier

Morning writing might mean waking up an hour earlier. Over time, as the septic infection called “adulthood” has seeped into my marrow, I’ve managed to get up earlier and earlier — 8AM to 7AM to 6:30 to 6 and now sometimes 5:30 or even 5 o’clock in the goddamn morning. I didn’t even know the morning had a five o’clock. I was like, WHAT CRASS HOUR IS THIS? DO I SEE A FIVE UPON MY WATCH? IS THIS DINNER TIME? IS THERE AN ECLIPSE? WHERE IS MY APERITIF?

Still, I have a toddler. The toddler is a voracious time-eater. He will wolf down your attention and productivity and time by dint of his cuteness. (And occasionally by dint of his wild, banshee-like howls of teething rage.) Getting up earlier is me trying to beat him to wakefulness.

And I get a lot more done when I get up earlier. By the time the tiny human wakes up, I usually have 1500 words already written and one cup of coffee already in the well of my belly.

Coffee

If I don’t drink coffee in the morning, I don’t write nearly as much. Coffee is the Earth’s blood. IT LUBRICATES THE GEARS. Without it, everything seizes up — a fly stuck in peanut butter. I don’t drink a ton of it — which means that when I really need a high-octane writing day with a lot of word count, I can drink an extra cup (or seven) and actually reap the rewards.

Snatch Time From Life’s Thieving Jaws And Use It To Write

When life gives you no time, MAKE TIME TRAVELING LEMONADE.

That can’t be right. But it’ll have to do.

What I mean is, life is a low place that fills up quickly with whatever comes its way — water, sand, mud, elk scat, the tears of all the world’s children, whatever. Your time will swiftly fall prey to the nibbles and pecks of the Things-To-Do-Bird: you gotta go to work, go to the store, take out the trash, artificially inseminate that baboon HEY I SAID ARTIFICIALLY PUT YOUR PANTS BACK ON. Time fills up fast. Life is greedy and eager to exploit.

If you’re going to write a lot, you’re going to need to feint and duck, stick and move, and reach in to grab fistfuls of time-flesh and use it for your own sinister purposes: in this case, writing. Got a lunch break? Write. Sitting at a long stop light? Take a few quick voice notes on your phone. Lounging around in post-coital baboon afterglow? Put some words to paper, goddamnit.

I used to work a job where I started out as customer service and ended up as a “systems manager,” whatever that means, and during my several years at the company I would constantly be hiding the windows of the work I was supposed to be doing for the company and opening a word processor window and typing out a quick 250 words here and there. A dick move against the company, though they were known for their own dick moves against employees.

Hey, whatever. WRITER GONNA WRITE.

Schedules And Deadlines

Plan, Prep, Plot, Scheme

I outline not because I like it but because I must. I am a pantser by heart, a plotter by necessity. I have to know at least a little bit where my story is going — and here’s the mileage that it gets you: when you come to the page clueless in the morning, you spend some of your time just dicking around. Thinking. Starting. Stopping. More thinking. Drinking vodka (aka “Daddy’s Magic Muse Water”). Napping. A lot of “not actually writing, yet” activities.

Ah, but if you start the day with a mission statement already in play thanks to an outline, you can jump in, eschew any planning the day might require, and just start writing. The goal is to give as much of your time to actually telling the story as you can.

Politely Ask For The Time You Need

You will not get the time you need to write unless you ask for it.

It’s that simple.

Nobody’s psychic. You want to write, you need to tell your wife, husband, children, pets, live-in love-slave, robot butler — “Hey, I really need an hour today to do this because it’s important to me.” Part of it’s because everyone assumes it’s a hobby. They assume you’ll fill your copious free time (HA HA HA FREE TIME GOOD ONE, ME *self-five*) with writing as you would if you were building model airplanes or doing Nude Sunbathing Full-Contact Sudoku.

If it’s important to you, you need to gesticulate wildly and ask for the time.

And if they don’t give it to you, well, then that becomes a whole different conversation.

Write With Your Internal Editor Gagged And Shoved In A Box

Editing as you go is a perfectly viable way to write.

It is not a perfectly viable way to write quickly and to maximize your word count.

Editing as you go is recursive — write a thing, go back over that same thing once, twice, as many times as your obsessive nature demands. You’re treading the same ground. Walking in the same footprints. Like I say: totally viable in terms of process if that’s what works. But it doesn’t move you forward very quickly and that’s the goal, here, at least in terms of this post —

To write a lot, and to do it with some speed.

Which means you need to shut your internal editor up. Elbow him in the throat and shove him in a duffel bag. Remind him his time will come. The editor always gets the last laugh.

Silence Self-Doubt With Hollowpoint Bullets Packed With Your Indifference

Worse than your internal editor is that spiritual goblin that nests over your creative and intellectual impulse centers, using his greasy ovipositor to plant quivering eggs of sulfurous self-doubt all over your well-being. You sit there and write and hate everything about what you’re doing and want to punch your characters, your paragraphs, your whole story, yourself.

Self-doubt is a sticky mud, indeed.

It will slow you down.

And, tut-tut-tut, we cannot have that. No we cannot.

You need to shut that shit up. Stopper your self-doubt up. Brick the demon into a dark grotto, Cask of Amontillado-style. And you say, well, great, but how do I do that? And here I don’t have any great advice. The secret, actually, isn’t in the silencing of your self-doubt.

The secret is in ignoring it.

We’re not particularly smart about our own authorial worth while in the midst of writing something. We love what sucks and hate what works and at least for me, during writing a project my headspace starts to look like the back of my television: a thousand wires braided together, no idea which one is to the cable box and the Xbox and that’s the optical audio and the HEY IS THAT LICORICE ew black licorice ptoo ptoo ptoo. Point is, you start to lose the sense of what feeling is moored to what part of your story. It’s all just a tangle of wires.

Your self-doubt just ain’t that goddamn effective. Or accurate.

It’s like the weatherman. It’s rarely right and yet we listen anyway.

Plus, even when it is right, trying to address it in the middle of the draft is a waste of time. You have time to examine your work and see what holds water and what doesn’t, and that time is called “after you finished the first draft of that thing that you’re writing.”

So, ignore it. It’s going to be there. Pretend you don’t hear it. Tune it out. It is rarely meaningful or efficient. It’s damn sure not helpful. So: pay that fucking asshole no mind at all.

That’s maybe the biggest secret to writing a lot of words really, really fast: you need to blacken your self-doubt sensors with a boot and — say it with me —

JUST. KEEP. WRITING.

Hopefully, these tips will get you writing a little more per day — even carving out an additional 500 words in a day is a good start. Again, that’s not to say this is for everyone: but sometimes deadlines or aspirations demand you hit the accelerator. And these tips may help you do it.

Gods & Monsters: Unclean Spirits now exists in your universe. It has crossed all known boundaries. It has penetrated your reality membrane.

Let’s get this part out of the way right now:

You can buy it at:

Amazon!

B&N!

From your local bookseller using Indiebound!

And quite likely other Word-Merchants around meatspace and within the Internet.

You can read the first chapter here. (io9)

You can read another separate excerpt here. (Tor.com)

The Book

Abaddon said to me, “We’d like you to shepherd a brand new shared world series into existence.”

I said, of course, fuck yeah.

They had that name — Gods & Monsters. The world hit me like a Zeusian thunderbolt out of the ether: I am a sucker for mythology, and thought everyone would get a helluva lot of mileage out of a world where the gods and goddesses, where the monsters and heroes, had all been booted out of their respective spiritual homes and were forced to fuck around here on Earth, their power cut to sub-divine levels but their hunger for power magnified tenfold.

The potential of the series would be, of course, that mythology offers us a wealth of origin material to take and tweak, and future writers in the series wouldn’t be beholden to some 400-page story bible written by me — why invent a whole new pantheon when we can get a lot of common mileage out of the deities and entities that already exist in the world’s stories?

Still, I thought, that’s great for a series but I still need a book out of it — and here I was like, I don’t want it to be about some boring-ass “Everyman.” Some folks can handle that tabula rasa character template well, but for my mileage, I want a character who can do things and who really, really wants something. And so was born the character of Cason Cole, a gone-to-pot MMA fighter whose life and family have been ripped apart by the manipulations of the gods — and now he wants revenge. But is he still being manipulated?

Who is the scarred-face man called the Cicatrix?

Will he fall prey to the Narcissistic adorations of the goddess Aphrodite?

Who is his real father?

Will his wife and son ever be free from the curse that causes them to despise him?

Where is Coyote’s penis?

Is that a unicorn? (Answer: yes, it is a unicorn.)

And the most important question of all:

HOW DO YOU KILL A GOD?

Warning: Contains God-Wangs And Divine Vaginas

It’s not a sexy book, but for reals, I talk a lot about god wangs and goddess hoo-hah.

It in fact contains the following passage, to whet your, erm, appetite:

“I was tamed by it. I was tamed like a temple dog, for it was glorious. Soft and deep. Infinite folds. And when it needed to, it would breathe fire. It could strip flesh from bone with its bitter secretions. Serpents would crawl from her inner channel, serpents with many heads and venom so potent that even a drop of it could slay the Mighty Humbaba.” His voice gets small, speaks with love, lust, reverence: “Her womanhood was beautiful. I bowed before it. I worshiped at it as if it was a fount of sacred water. My tongue, my mouth, my teeth, my fingers, I would sometimes crawl deep within that charnel space and let her give birth—I would be born upon the cold floor of her palace, wet and squalling, and she would pick me up and kiss me and I would be… complete.”

So, there you go.

Speaking Of Wangs…

Pat Kelleher also wrote a sort-of-pseudo-sequel e-novella to Unclean Spirits —

It’s called “Drag Hunt.”

In it, Coyote searches for his lost penis.

Which makes more sense if you read Unclean Spirits.

Kelleher is a helluva writer.

And Finally, The Last And Most Curious Disclaimer

I get some folks who tell me that they like this blog and so they support it by buying my books — which is lovely, thank you! — but here I’d make a note that you buying this book will not necessarily put more money in my pocket. This book was work-for-hire, which is not to say I did not love writing it (I did!) nor to say I don’t want you reading it (I do!), but just in terms of the business arrangement I do not get anything “per sale,” so to speak. Further, I’ve had some folks ask me why I was concentrating more of my marketing fire on the Star Destroyer that is The Blue Blazes (May 28th!) and it is for that very reason — a mercenary capitalist swine decision based on the fact that I cannot devote too much time toward self-promotion lest I get noisy, and so I must choose instead to focus it on the book that puts more actual money in my actual pockets. This is a bit crass, but I figure it’d better to say it instead of giving the impression that I’m not somehow proud of Unclean Spirits, which I am.

And hopefully you urban fantasy / horror / crime fans will find something to love in both books.

Actually, there’s probably some interesting mileage to be had in comparing the two books…

Hm.

Anyway!

Just wanted that said. Hope you dig the book. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Check-up time.

TURN YOUR HEAD AND COUGH.

Maybe that’s a different kind of check-up.

Still, I like these gowns.

ASSLESS.

Which is really a misnomer, isn’t it? Because they’re not ass-less. They’re ass-ful. By revealing the buttocks, you have wildly increased the assfulness quotient, yeah?

Whatever.

What I’m trying to say is, hey! Writer-types!

How’s it going?

What are you writing?

What kinds of things are you finding hard in your writing?

What’s easy?

What’s surprising?

What have you learned?

What do you need?

How is the whole writer’s existence?

Let’s hear ’em. Shout up from the trenches: how goes the penmonkey thing?

“The monsters of the Abyss. Offspring of the Void. The children of the Hungry Ones, of the Deep Shadows, of Those Who Eat. Birthed from the Maw-Womb, given life down in the dark – – wriggling, screaming, baying for blood and singing lamentations to the lack of light. The gobbos, or goblins, those most common denizens of the Great Below, half-mindless, willing to eat their own young, a tribe or hive of peons and pawns, Hell’s own foot-soldiers. The Trogbodies or troglodytes, blind golems of stone and clay and silt. The Snakefaces, or Nagas and Naginis, those hidden seducers, those worms in the rock…”

The Blue Blazes

Coming May 27th, 2013.

Pre-order:

Amazon

B&N

Indiebound

(text by Chuck Wendig; art artifacts by Joey Hi-Fi)

I offer t-shirts through the Merch link here at the site, and there you’ll find:

The ART HARDER, MOTHERFUCKER t-shirt…

And —

The CERTIFIED PENMONKEY t-shirt.

I sell these t-shirts through Zazzle. (Any style or size or color you choose.)

Today, for some reason, Zazzle has a 50% off sale.

So, if you want to buy a shirt…

Use code CINCOTSHIRTS to get that discount.

I have no idea what Cinco de Mayo has to do with a shirt discount, but fuck it.

Half-off is half-off.

Please to enjoy.