I read and adored The Monstrumologist, so when given a chance to interview Rick Yancey about his newest book, The 5th Wave,  I was geeked. For the record? The book is awesome. You want it. It is, I think, one of my favorite depictions of an alien invasion ever — it’s brutal stuff. Anyway, here’s Rick to answer the Terribleminds Ten.

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

I was ripped from my mother’s arms when I was 72 hours old and spent the next eighteen years under the care of two very kind people who are now dead through no real fault of their own. They raised me to be polite, caring and fully cognizant of the fact that I was special but no better than anyone else. They also tried to steer me away from the arts, which they believed to be a soul-crushing, wretched existence (they were wrong) and not something most people would consider real work (they were right). When the time came, I took a real job, got married, raised a family, and began writing books in earnest. I soon realized the more I said, the more I had to say, and saying it in the context of books that people might actually be interested in reading encouraged me to keep saying it. One day I decided to tell a story about a middle-aged guy who stumbles into an Arthurian adventure and ended up writing a novel for young-adults by accident. Since that day, I’ve written seven more books for youth, including The Monstrumologist and The 5^th Wave, which is about an alien apocalypse that . . .

Oh, wait, I just looked at the next question.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

A teenaged girl searches for her little brother after an alien apocalypse. People die. Things explode. Oh, and somebody finds true love. Maybe.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

I asked my wife one day, “What’s your biggest fear?” And she answered straight away: “An alien abducting me.” And I said, “I’m not sure that’s even in my top fifty.” And she said, “Think about it. Not only would there be the sheer terror of an alien abducting you, but afterwards no one would believe you.” Then I read this interview with the physicist Stephen Hawking, who pointed out that an alien visitation probably wouldn’t work out so well for us, the indigenous species. It’s not like we’d be equals. By the very nature of the event, we’d be more like cockroaches to them than fellow travelers.

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

Oh no, I write quickly because I’m painfully aware I’m not the only one who could write it, and I have to beat that hypothetical person to the punch. It’s all a race. There’s only so many really cool ideas floating around out there. There’s a quote from Emerson about this that I remember reading back in college, but that was a long time ago and I’m too lazy to look it up.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING THE 5TH WAVE?

Maintaining psychological distance from the overwhelmingly unthinkable things that were happening to my characters. If I slipped and started to dwell too long on what it would mean to have everything you cherish, rely on, and believe in ripped away in an instant . . . paralysis, existential dread, and a sense of hopelessness – which is exactly what my characters do experience.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING THE 5TH WAVE?

That no matter how far you take something – alien invasions, young love, the definition of humanity – there’s always a spot you could take it farther. And you have to learn when you’ve taken it far enough and when you need to go still farther. I also learned that 2:00 a.m. writing can be so much better than 2:00 p.m. writing, because you’re too tired to judge yourself.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT THE 5TH WAVE?

Cassie! She’s vulnerable and funny and fierce. She’s silly, too, and sentimental as hell and she’s very, very afraid and lost and somehow she clings to hope and life. You know, like all of us do. For lack of a better word, she’s pure. Pure in her fear, pure in her sorrow, pure in her hate, pure in her love. She also kicks ass. What’s not to love?

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

Have a little more faith in myself. The 5^th Wave is a book that takes this shit seriously – not how we’d like an alien invasion to be, but how it would really be. I wasted too much time thinking like a human.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

Just one? Okay. Here’s one of the first paragraphs I wrote and never had to change it (much). It’s Cassie talking:

I may be the last one, but I am the one still standing.  I am the one turning to face the faceless hunter in the woods on an abandoned highway.  I am the one not running, not staying, but facing. Because if I am the last one, then I am humanity. And if this is humanity’s last war, then I am the battlefield.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

The final installment of my Monstrumologist series will be published this fall. It’s called The Final Descent.  I have a short-story called “When First We Were Gods” that will appear in Rags & Bones, an anthology edited by Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt.

Most exciting of all, I’m currently working on Book 2 of The 5^th Wave!

Rick Yancey: Website / Twitter

The 5th Wave: Amazon / B&N / Indiebound

BEA, Book Expo America, is some kind of Book Disneyland. Press and publishers and then the public descend upon New York in search of — well, I don’t know what, exactly. Literary genius? The pelts of abducted authors? PRECIOUS ADVANCE READER COPIES?

Regardless, I am in the unique position of having books out around that time from four different publishers and three of those publishers are having me sign books there.

Further, Friday the 31st of May will be the BLUE BLAZES launch party at Singularity & Co., an old-school sci-fi revivalist bookstore. The party will be from 7-9pm.

Anywho! My BEA schedule is as follows:

Thursday (5/30):

• I arrive in town and run amok with minimal planning.

Friday (5/31): 

• 7-9PM: BLUE BLAZES launch party, Singularity & Co (Brooklyn)

Saturday (6/1):

• 11AM-noon: UNDER THE EMPYREAN SKY at Skyscape / Amazon booth!
• 1PM-2pm: BLUE BLAZES signing at Angry Robot booth!
• 3PM-4PM: GODS & MONSTERS signing at Abaddon booth!

That’s the schedule so far, folks.

Hope to see you there!

Once in a while I like to fuck around with Photoshop to keep my Mad Graphixx Skillz mos fresh, which is to say I have middling skills and don’t want them to descend back into a primitive state, and one of the ways I do this is by grabbing quotes or thoughts from This Very Blog and turning them into wallpapers or what-not for your share-around or desktop-image purposes.

Like, say, the one above.

I’m also planning on maybe another round of merch to sell, since some folks really seem to dig the coffee mugs and t-shirts so far. And so I come to you.

If you have any quotes or notions you’ve found here at the site and you’d like to see them done up in this kind of format, drop them into the comments below. I might pick a few and give them this treatment. (Alternately, I may fall asleep covered in Nutella and pornography.)

Or, if you’re a capable graphics person and want to do similar wallpapery things, please do so with my blessing. I trust in your infinite graphic design wisdom.

Thanks, folks!

“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.