Last week’s challenge: “Titular Titles.”

So, I’m going through last week’s almost-300 entries of titles (damn), and I’ve gone ahead and chosen favorites. I picked ten I really, really liked, and then I picked another three on top of those ten (for a total of 13), and these three (titles bolded in the list below) should email me at terribleminds at gmail dot com to WIN SOME KIND OF SOMETHING. It’s a surprise. Shhh.

Your goal is to take one of the following titles below and write a short piece of flash fiction (~1000 words) using the title chosen. Post it at your blog or online space, link back here and the comments. Due by May 3rd, noon EST. No contest this time. Just write to write (and to be read).

The top ten titles are, drum roll please —

1. Grave Deeds (S.T. Cameron)
2. Resurrected, by Wife (Oshvat)
3. The Death and Life of the Human Electrode (Albert Berg)
4. Those Shoes Are Not Apocalypse Friendly, Francine (Daphne Bee)
5. Always Have A Exit Strategy (Josh Loomis)
6. John Wayne and the Mystery at Medicine Hat (Wren Roberts)
7. Paved Meat: A Roadkill Romance (Bob Bois)
8. Three Miles Left to Regret (Jason Heitkamper)
9. The Ballad of Scrawny River Fawcett (Allen Morgan)
10. You Don’t Bring Me Dead Things Anymore (Chantal Nair)
11. Life in Snowglobia (Michelle Palmer)
12. Stand-Off On Memory Lane (Kai Kiriyama)
13. The Window-Washing Boy (Jenny R)

So, if you’re Jason, Michelle or Jenny, you should email me.

The rest of you ought to get writing.

It’s really exciting when I meet someone on this blog as a commenter and, a couple-few years later, they’re here with a book about to hit shelves. Josin McQuein is one such person, and here she’d like to drop by and give you the news about her newest, Arclight:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

I am me and you are you. Together we are we, which is far too close to being a “them” for my taste, which probably accounts for my anti-social tendencies and total lack of humor. 😉

I’m human, the last I checked. More specifically, one of the female variety, but for the purposes of your question, I’m a writer who did that thing people kept saying was impossible – I got someone to publish my stories.

I live in tiny Texas town you’ve never heard of, which is on the outside of a large city that you most likely can hum the theme song to. There are three dogs in my house that think I’m their boarder / chef, and I am hopelessly addicted to ellipses…

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

Arclight’s about playing God when you don’t have the credentials, and choosing if you will define yourself by your rules or someone else’s.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

Ants.

Army ants, to be exact.

The first kernel of what became the Fade started with an interview I saw as a kid. A group of hikers had been trekking through the rainforest and stopped at a hotel for the night. In the middle of the night, they woke to the sound of screams, but couldn’t see anything because the generators had to be shut off after a certain time to conserve fuel. The hiker said that in the moonlight, the wallpaper seemed to be “moving.” He grabbed a flashlight and discovered that army ants were marching down the walls of the rooms, devouring everything in their path – including the scorpions that started leaping from the ceiling beams onto the people below to get away from them.

That idea of something so small, yet unstoppable for its number, combined with a bit of pseudo-scientific theory and fermented in my brain. And the fear of the dark is fundamental.

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

Ha! That one’s easy. Only I could have written Arclight because before it was Arclight, it was “the Franken-novel,” with bits cut and pasted from other books, but mostly the screenplay I wrote when I was a teenager. Interestingly enough, not a single one of the component pieces was YA. They all had adult casts and heroes.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING ARCLIGHT?

Getting all of the pieces to line up.

It’s difficult getting a story to work under the best of conditions, but when you’re in the head of a girl whose memory only accounts for a few weeks, and then you’ve got another major character who’s non-verbal for several chapters, things get complicated.

It’s like someone being born full-grown. You’re working with instincts, rather than experiences, and the character’s having to learn to interpret movement, language and tone the way an infant would, in a way. How do you connect to someone who’s been severed from everything she’s ever known?

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING ARCLIGHT?

Fanfic habits die hard. Seriously.

I was the kind of fanfic writer who liked to give backstories or alternate histories to the less featured characters. It’s now translated into me wanting to give elaborate histories to every character, no matter how integral the details are to the plot. I could probably write five novels based on different characters at this point.

Also, I cannot do hard copy edits. I just can’t, and I think I may have driven my poor editor nearly insane figuring that out. I’ve got some sort of perceptual glitch that refuses to acknowledge that words struck through on paper have been deleted; I can’t read it that way because I can still see the words. I have to see my edits in Track Changes so that I can “delete” sections and then put them back if I don’t actually want to cut them.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT ARCLIGHT?

Can I say the fact that it got picked up for a movie option? Because that’s right up with my favorite things. No? Okay, fine, I’ll give you a serious answer –

The ambiguity of everything.

I *hate* stories where things are so rigid in the idea of “good” and “evil” that the characters should come into each scene wearing white hats and black hats. No one makes hard choices. No one gets their hands dirty. In fact, no one does much of anything other than swoon.

On the surface, ARCLIGHT looks like it’s set up that way, with the world clearly divided between light and dark. But I wanted to write the exact opposite, so that maybe you end up in a situation where there are no absolutes. Good guys can be jerks and villains can have moments of compassion because in their minds they aren’t the villains.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

I probably wouldn’t write in 1^st present. It gives you an inside look at what’s going on with the main character, but you miss some of the background action because she’s not there to see it, and I refuse to have scene after scene of her being told what happened when she left the room, or some such nonsense.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

The amorphous swath of no-man’s land called the Dark is literally the stuff of nightmares. When the Arclight’s citizens put heads to pillows at dawn and close their eyes, it’s the Dark that lays behind them. Phantoms and ghosts of fears which have compounded on top of each other for generations churn in a new primordial soup that gives birth to the worst. It creeps like the misty fog beyond our boundaries, and it’s into that void I’ve now traveled.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

Edits for Arclight 2 – things are going to get a lot darker, both literally and figuratively.

October 8th, I’ve got another novel coming out from Delacorte – PREMEDITATED – which is another YA, but contemporary.

I’m polishing up a dark Red Riding Hood retelling/fantasy – most likely to self-publish. (No werewolves, though. I’m not sure when the wolf in RRH became synonymous with werewolf, but people make the assumption.)

I’ve got a slightly steampunkish YA fantasy series about to make the rounds, along with a MG ghost story in-progress. Ideas are not something I lack in any capacity.

Josin McQuein: Blog / Twitter

Arclight: Amazon / B&N / Indiebound

1. What They Mean When They Say, “Write What You Know”

Note the lack of the word only in the old writerly chestnut, write what you know. It is not meant to be a limitation. It’s not meant to be a restriction. It is meant to be an option. A way to bring ourselves to the work. This is why travel matters: we go places, we absorb new details, we have new experiences, we meet strange people, and then we bring all those funky little details back and screw them into the story-slots where they belong. They do not form the only layer within our stories, but real details — and real places — provide a crucial and compelling backbone.

2. Travel Pours New Stuff Into Our Heads

Writers make shit up. It’s part of our resume. We’re basically a gaggle of liars and daydreamers. We crack open our heads every day and all kinds of candy-floss nightmares and unicorn lies come tumbling out of the fissure. Still, though, we aren’t pulling things out of some imaginary asscrack; these things we invent aren’t delivered to us by huffing cave vapors or handed to us by the gods themselves. We make up things using the information we already have. We can imagine what a thing is like through context and comparison. Travel gives us new information. It hammers new details irretrievably into our fool heads. So when it comes time to write about, well, anything at all, our travel experiences offer us one more vein of story-gold to mine.

3. Sometimes You Just Had To Be There

It can be hard to write fairly and completely about some places if you just haven’t been there. Some experiences are fundamental that way. If you’ve never been to the beach or the desert, if you’ve never really seen or dealt with snow, anything you write about those things may ring a little hollow. It’s like writing about sex without ever having had sex — there’s likely going to be some part of the description or the storytelling that feels a little off. (“I don’t think the penis goes inside the belly button like that. And one most certainly does not ejaculate marshmallow and confetti.”) You can use as your basis other books, or film, or television, but it isn’t always the same thing. Sometimes, you just have to go to a place to get a place.

4. The Veneer Of Authority And Authenticity

Part of this is about the reader, part of this is about you-as-the-writer. For the reader, you’re giving them a sense of authenticity and authority, right? You’re making yourself sound credible and honest, even though what we do as writers is lie, cheat, steal. We’re magicians and con-artists but the power of the magic trick or the confidence game is, of course, seeming authentic. And in that term, “confidence game,” is the key for the writer, too — traveling to a place gives you the confidence to write about that place more easily and completely. You won’t slow your writing by trying to figure out how to write about something you’ve never seen — all the stuff will come pouring our of your fingertips. Ejaculating, if you will. Like marshmallow and confetti.

5. Interpreting The Real As The Unreal

Writing is not always an act of transcription. It is frequently one of translation. We take the colors we have on our palette and we mix them into new colors (“Blue and orange make BLORANGE!”). People always get hung up on write what you know when it applies to truly fantastical fiction: “Well, I’ve never made love to a randy satyr on the red sand beaches of Blood Island, so I guess that story is totally fucking dead.” We bring our current slate of experiences and translate them to fictional contexts, infusing even the most fantastical of tales with the breath of the real. Example: in my new novel The Blue Blazes, I write about the Sandhog tunnels beneath Manhattan. I’ve never been there. But I have been in silver mines and limestone caverns and I took those memories and translated them in part to another place and time. Just because you’ve never fornicated with a satyr doesn’t mean you haven’t banged a goat. … wait, forget I said that last part. Uhh. Totally don’t have sex with goats. *runs away*

6. Is This Place Very Similar To Another Place?

I would love to tell you that every place is a glittering snowflake demonstrating each its own unique fractal fingerprint, but yeah, no, not so much. If you’ve been to one Pennsylvania suburb, you’ve been to a lot of them. Hell, that means you’ve also been to a lot of suburbs in Ohio, New York, Maryland, and on and on. Specific suburbs might carry specific feelings or vibes — and the farther you physically go, the further apart those details grow, too. A suburb of Santa Fe is not the same as a suburb of Philadelphia. Still, we can’t always get to the places we want to go in terms of travel, so we do as best as we can. Maybe you can’t get to the Himalayas but you can get to the Rockies and, fuck it, it’s just gonna have to do.

7. Focus First On The Physical

Physical details matter: how sand feels between your toes, how the wind whistles through the trees, how that stretch of Interstate-80 always smells like someone rubbed chickenshit all over your face. You go to Hawaii, you notice how profoundly the air smells of flowers. You go to Philadelphia, you notice how profoundly the air smells of angry sewage and cheesesteaks.

8. But Really, It’s Made Of People

People and culture are what really matter about a place. Who they are. What they do. The stories they tell. Part of the reason I’m even writing this list is that I recently traveled to the Florida Keys to do some research for the third Miriam Black book (The Cormorant) and lemme tell you, the people of the Keys are their own breed. The Keys seceded from the United States for like, ten minutes in 1982, calling themselves the Conch Republic, and this independent fuck you vibe still goes on there. (You can tell it when a cashier at a Publix grocery store starts yammering at you unbidden about the unfairness of “mainland taxes.”) And again, the farther you go, the further you get from known cultural traditions — while we’re all pink on the inside, Afghani warlords and New Jersey housewives are going to have different attitudes and traditions. (Though I’m sure they’ll have shared traits, too, because, hey, that’s how humanity rolls.)

9. That Means You Do Need To Talk To Some Other Humans

If you live in a place, you’ll eventually absorb stuff by dint of being there. If you’re traveling — particularly as an act of research — you’re going to have to hit the ground and ask some questions. Even though we’re scaredy-cat writers who’d prefer to talk to perfectly made-up imaginary motherfuckers (or our cats), we gotta put boots on asphalt and open our mouths and talk to bartenders or bankers or hookers or whoever it is we dare to meet.

10. Stories Live Inside Other Stories

Little stories slot into bigger stories. The stories that people will tell you? Use them. The stories that you experience while traveling? Use them. These personal — and real — accounts will turn a rote plot into a complicated and potentially nuanced story.

11. Avoid The Tourist Shit

Er, I don’t mean the places the tourists pooped, though one supposes you should avoid those spots, too. No, I mean, the standard, “All the tourists go to this spot to watch the harbor seals ride the trolley and then right after buy sticky caramel-covered chocolate lighthouses because the lighthouse is where Abraham Lincoln first invented the credit card. Everybody does it.” Sometimes as a writer you gotta say, well, if everybody does it, I gotta do different.

12. Hop The Guardrails

Escape the gravity of the highway. Flee the known ways. Find the narrow paths, the hidden roads. AND THERE YOU WILL BE SWEPT AWAY ON A FANTASY ADVENTURE WITH ELVES. Okay, maybe that one just happened to me? Whatever. You’ll find compelling things, places and people away from and off of the standard paths. Dive bars. Restaurants where only locals eat. A part of the island where nobody really goes. Long as it’s safe to you (“They don’t go to that part of the island because of the feral man-eating pandas”), look for stories in stranger places.

13. It’s The Little Things

They say the Devil is in the details, but that sounds terrible. It’s like, every time you start writing down the little things, the Devil pops out and eats your face or tempts you into gulping down a fistful of synthetic heroin and going on a kitten-punching spree. Hell with that. The details are what matter when you travel for writing: the big, sweeping facts you can get from a book, a website, a buddy. But it’s the little details, the ones that speak to the place you traveled, that matter. Be observant. Note the way the wind moves through the trees or the fact they eat some food here you’ve never even heard of or how once a year they capture a traveling writer and trap him inside a giant wicker typewriter and burn him alive to appease “the Muse.”

14. Hey, Whatever, At Least It’s Blog Fodder, Man

Worse comes to worse, traveling somewhere can always make for good blog fodder while you wait to see how you’re going to use it in your fiction. Case in point, this is a blog post about traveling. THIS IS METABLOG. Which is also the Lithuanian god of horse meat. Mmm. Horse meat.

15. Travel Ain’t Cheap

The downside of traveling for writing is that it isn’t cheap. I mean, writing for travel tends to be cheaper than vacation travel — on a vacation you’re trying to stay at the nicest places you can afford, you’re eating out every night, you’re buying snowglobe souvenirs, you’re securing the finest sea-salt-sprinkled liquor-filled chocolate-covered prostitutes… I mean, desserts that you can find. A writer likely travels on a shoestring budget: staying at hotels where the carpets are marred with Macbeth-style bloodstains, eating at roadside taco stands (or worse, stoning local crows to eat them over a barrel fire with the other hobos).  Just the same, flying can be pricy. Renting a car can be a killer. Expect it to not be nearly as cheap as you’d prefer.

16. But, It Is Tax Deductible

If you’re a professional writer, hey, you can deduct the trip from your taxes. It’s a small but potent boon, so you might as well enjoy it. If it’s research or in the service to research, you can deduct food, gasoline, coffee, liquor, tacos, jet ski rentals, trips to BDSM clubs, trapeze classes, gladiator monkey fighting, chapstick, whatever.

17. Even Short Trips Outside Your Smelly Writer Cave Can Help

A whole world awaits those willing to take a short day trip. Caverns and canyons and mountains and beaches and little towns and big cities and gladiator monkey arenas. These can be affordable and time-sensitive and can still grant you narrative mileage in terms of research.

18. The Purposeful Penmonkey Versus The Wandering Word-Hurler

You can take a trip with focus: meaning, you can say, “I’m going to set this story in the bowels of a blue whale and so I will endeavor to be ingested by a blue whale in the name of narrative authenticity,” but you can get just as much value out of a trip that has no specific focus at the outset. You may say, “A hundred miles north of here is an abandoned tuberculosis hospital haunted by the noisily coughing specters of the consumptive dead and so I’m going to drive there in the hopes of maybe being inspired today or even five years from now.”

19. It Can Protect You From Rookie Move Amateur Hour Karaoke

You’re writing a book about Seattle but you’ve never been to Seattle and so you’re forced to make up some details here or there and next thing you know, all your Seattle readers are saying, “The space needle is not an actual needle in space, and people in Seattle do not all have humpbacks, nor is ‘grilled parrot’ the  city’s favorite dish. I HAVE CAUGHT YOU AND EXPOSED YOUR FOOLISHNESS, SILLY WRITER.” Nobody wants that. Do your research. Take a trip there if you can, or set the story in another location. Or at least use a disclaimer at the fore of the book: “I have never been to Seattle and I’m just inventing fresh shit so SHUT UPPA YOU FACE.”

20. Travel Writing > Guidebooks

Most guidebooks suck. Or, rather, they suck for this purpose. Finding Zagat-rated restaurants or well-rated burro-rides is not really useful for your purposes. However, many interesting locations are described in books of travel writing, where the authors tend to interject non-fiction content (essays, even) focusing on the location at hand. Traveling to the Keys recently I found a great book that seems like a guidebook — “The Florida Keys, A History And Guide,” by Joy Williams — that is anything but. Funny, wise, with lots of commentary and quirky wisdom on where to really go and see, these types of books are essentialy to understanding a place. Frankly, they’re useful even if you can’t travel somewhere.

21. Take Notes Or Die

If you’re anything like me (may the gods help you), you have a brain like a spaghetti strainer. Which means you’d better, whilst traveling, take copious notes or you’ll return and two weeks later wonder where you even went or how you got those bloodstains in your wetsuit. Notes will help you transmogrify the travel experience to the wordsmithy desired.

22. Ask: “How Would I Write This?”

Here’s a tip that works when traveling but also applies to your day-to-day existence: when you see something, particularly something new or as-yet-unexperienced, imagine how you’d write it out. How would you describe it? What value does it have in a story, to a character, as a motif, or bound up with a theme? Imaginary exercise can be quite fruitful.

23. Sometimes You Can’t Travel

Even when you want to. Costs too much. Time won’t allow it. They won’t let you back into Myanmar after you got that tiger addicted to high-test trucker meth. So many reasons. You do have other options for when travel isn’t an option: Google Street View, local blogs, local newspapers, travel writing, guidebooks (in a pinch), social media (poll the hive-mind).

24. Travel With A Mission In Mind

Go with a goal. It pays to travel with some sense of what you hope to accomplish. It’s fine to wander amok, but if you can travel and know what you’re looking for, you can plan accordingly and hit all the right spots and talk to all the right people and seduce all the right goats I MEAN WHAT NOTHING ABOUT GOATS YOU STOP PUTTING WORDS IN MY MOUTH.

25. Travel Is Good For The Soul

At the end of the day, travel opens us up. It reveals the world to us (and one might argue, helps reveal us to the world through our fiction). One of the many jobs of The Writer is to reveal what we know to the rest of the world, to transport people to the places inside our head and out of it, too. Travel is good for us. Seeing other places and people and cultures makes us more complete as human beings. The fact that it is useful to our word-herding is almost secondary to how useful it is to us as people, not just as people who sling stories for a living. So go! Get up! Move your sluggardly nether-cheeks. Escape the chair. Flee the desk. Get out into the world. See things. Explore. Talk. Absorb. And for fuck’s sake, report back. Because you are still a writer, after all.

Want another hot tasty dose of dubious writing advice aimed at your facemeats?

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CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY:

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REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY:

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Writer and writing teacher J. Robert Lennon wrote a post recently, “The Ass-In-Chair Canard,” which takes aim at that oft-uttered snidbit of writing advice, a piece of advice seemingly universal across all those writers who dare to give advice on the subject of writing:

Put your ass in the chair and write.

Regarding that piece of advice, Lennon says at the fore of the post:

It goes without saying this is an incredibly vapid cliché, and one that should never be repeated, if only for fear of boring one’s listeners to death. “How to write: write.” Uh huh. But its implications run deeper than that: the phrase is in fact an insult to almost everyone who has ever struggled with the creative process, and as a teaching tool is liable to do more harm than good. It embraces several dangerous lies: that writer’s block is the result, first and foremost, of laziness; that writing (indeed, any creative pursuit) is like any other form of labor; and that how hard you work on something is directly correlated with how good it is.

He is both very right and terribly wrong all at the same time.

How is that possible? Is he like the Schroedinger’s Cat of writing teachers? Trapped in the infinite uncertainty of his classroom, caught between both being totally right and terribly wrong all in the flux of the same quantum moment? Sadly, it’s less exciting than all that.

He’s right in that this is not a particularly stunning piece of writing advice in the sense that it fails to teach you how to write. It offers us nothing about craft or technique, nothing about theme or motif. It doesn’t help us conjure a character or set a scene or deal with unruly exposition. It gives us a big empty bag of fuck-all regarding adverb use or first-person-narrative or dialogue attributions. It is, in fact, saying that to write, you must write.

And yet, while it’s not a particularly nuanced piece of advice, that’s still true, isn’t it? To write, you must write? And here he (and perhaps you) say, “Well, that’s obvious, though. Nobody’s particularly confused about that point, are they?”

To which I’d say: aren’t they?

I’m not suggesting laziness. I’m not suggesting indolence or stupidity or any of that. What I’m saying is, the creative process is alarmingly internal. A great deal of it goes on up in our — *taps forehead* — brain-gourds, stirring around in a great bubbly froth. It’s imaginary. It’s intellectual. It’s ephemeral, if we let it be. It’s fairy dross and pegasus dreams, man. The only way to take what is imaginary and make it a reality is to put your ass in the chair and write.

And this isn’t just a piece of advice for newbie writers. It may seem to be — and certainly when I was a young wide-eyed writer fresh around the gills I spent more time thinking and talking about being a writer than actually, urp, being a writer. Hearing writers like Joe Lansdale say I had to actually sit the fuck down and shove a bunch of words out of my head and onto the page was honestly helpful. But this is advice for the seasoned writer, too — because we live in an age of great distractions, from Twitter to Facebook to Netflix to deviant Tumblr pornography to bath salts. We live in an age where it feels productive to write blog posts (like this one) or to tweet about writing or to read writing advice. It seems like we’re doing something when at the end of the day we’re just spinning our creative tires in invisible mud.

It’s work. It’s not always pleasant work. Sometimes it invokes a deep, almost psychic pain — an anxiety that blooms into an acid-spitting flower corrosive to confidence and craft. And yet, the words are the words. They only matter when they manifest. And you’re the magician that summons them into existence — their manifestation is on you and you alone. Nobody said it would be easy. Nobody’s saying you have to write thousands of words per day. You write what you can write. But that verb is still in place: write. Whether you write ten words or ten-thousand, they still involve you taking off your pants, setting your coffee onto its coaster, petting your spirit animal, then sitting your ass into the chair and squeezing words from your fingertips until you collapse, unable to do any more. It doesn’t matter if it’s good. Not now.

It only matters that it’s done.

Put your ass in the chair.

No, that doesn’t tell you how to write.

But it does tell you where it begins and where it ends: with you. You are a character with agency. You are a god in this world. Creativity is a worthless state of being without the verb that triggers it: to create. Creativity is the match. You still need to strike it and light the fire.

You can’t just always bully your way through a story, true. A great deal of writing remains in the head. And it comes with patience. And craft. And with your burgeoning intuition. Just the same, the end result of writing is the written word.

And the words only get written when you fucking write them.

“Hybrid author.”

Sounds like we were made in a lab. A squirmy worm-mote in a test tube. Growing at an alarming rate. Genetics forged from a hundred different authors — Joyce, Woolf, Dickens, Rowling, King, a dash of Lee Child, a squirt of Neil Gaiman, an injection of Danielle Steel. A thousand books in our blood spinning, whirling, forming a helix-pudding of raw literary puissance. We swell. We burst from our enclosures. We run amok. We form tribes.

We create, and then we destroy.

Okay, maybe not.

The “hybrid” author is not so exciting as all that, I’m afraid.

The hybrid author merely looks at all the publishing options available to her. She is told she is supposed to check one box and move on — “Stay within the clearly-marked margins,” they warn. “Check your box, choose your path, then shut the door gently behind you.” But the hybrid author checks many, even all the boxes. The hybrid author refuses to walk one path, instead leaping gaily from path to path, gamboling about like some kind of jester-imp. She says no to coloring within the lines of a traditionally-published or a self-published drawing.

She opens all the doors. She closes none of them.

“Do one thing?” she scoffs. “Do all the things!”

Then she mutters something about “fucking the system” and she takes a poop square in the eye of The Man, whose expectations for her were far too restrictive. His poop-eye is deserved.

The term “hybrid author” is getting lots of traction these days (though I’ve been using it for over a year at this point — and, if I may toot my own boobies, I’ve been suggesting authors “do both” since 2010), and I think as a term and an idea it’s going to only grow. Diversity is good in biology, in the people with which we surround ourselves, in investment portfolios, in pretty much everything. And so it is with writing and publishing: diversity is a winner. When one door closes we’ve already pried open five others and maybe a window and some fucking duct-work, too. The hybrid author is squirrely. Flexible. Better. Faster. Stronger. ROBOT.

Okay, not a robot. (And not “better,” either, before you get your nipples in a twist.)

Still, here’s the thing: for all the talk of how awesome it is to apparently be a hybrid author, a lot of authors still lean one way or the other. And that’s totally normal, by the way, because it’s not like you can perfectly bisect the publishing world into equal portions. Just the same, it’s a thing to be aware of, because you’ll still find proponents on both sides of the fence who give lip service to a hybrid approach but at the end of the day wear biases on their sleeves.

(A recent post by Barry Eisler based on a conference keynote makes a strong case for the hybrid author while also noting the complexities of how publishers handle digital distribution. Though I’d argue he muddies the waters and shows his biases by removing nuance and simplifying publishing as being nothing more than a paper distribution system, ultimately kind of hand-waving away editing and cover design and marketing as non-essential functions. It’s this kind of dismissive attitude that fires up the self-publishing base but still does a lot to suggest traditional avenues are in some way inferior. That said, I choose to focus on Eisler’s point that this is no longer an either/or world, which I totally dig.)

Hell, I’ve been accused of “pouring cold water” on self-publishing at the same time I endorse it. Which I’ll agree to, though I pour I think just as much cold water on traditional publishing too because I’d much rather splash you in the face with a shock of ice cubes than gently warm your nethers with hot stones and lure you into a state of false comfort.

So, in the interest of making sure the cold water gets splashed on all of you for all the reasons, let’s take a look at the strengths and weaknesses of the various publishing approaches. This is not an endorsement of any one path but only an endorsement that you should examine all paths and attempt to discover which one suits you and your books THE MOST BESTEST.

Let us begin. (And if I miss stuff, shout it out in comments.)

Traditional Publishing

+1: Money up front! Maybe really good money!

-1: Could be shit money, too!

+1: Gatekeepers ensure that material of relative quality gets through the door.

-1: Gatekeepers are also notoriously risk-averse. (And occasionally: dicks.)

+1: Access to pro-grade editors, cover artists and kick-ass marketing systems.

-1: Sometimes the marketing is left to you, poor author, because fuck you, that’s why.

+1: Likelier access to: film rights, foreign rights, reviews, actual bookshelves

-1: Holy shit, it’s fucking slow!

+1: Entrenched systems have value (i.e. “not building parachute on way out of the plane”)

-1: System does not respond well to change.

+1: Better discoverability of books published this way, so far.

-1: If your publisher shits the bed, you might be fucked.

-1: If another major bookstore chain shits the bed, you might be fucked.

+1: You will learn a lot about writing/publishing via this path; it will improve you.

+1: You will earn more respect and prestige, if that’s a thing you care about.

-1: Occasionally punishing contract clauses and low-ass royalties. Which leads to:

+1/-1: You need a good agent. Hard to get, but worth it to have.

Self-Publishing

+1: You have a lot of control over how the book exists in the world. Editing, marketing, cover design, e-book design, promo, and on and on.

-1: Money investment up front means more financially risky (may spend money, gain none). Anticipate spending anywhere from $500 to $5000 to get that book “out there.”

+1: Great percentage of the money earned stays with you (~50-70%).

-1: Significantly reduced access to film rights, foreign rights, reviews, bookshelves, etc

+1: Strong self-publishing community full of resources!

-1: Gets a little cultish sometimes, brimming with motivations based on bitter rejection.

+1: Allows you to offer riskier materials in format (short fiction, novellas, serials) or content (edgier work, genre mash-up material, weird stuff) that publishers might not touch.

-1: Some genres don’t do well self-published, yet.

+1: Some genres do fucking gangbusters!

-1: A lot harder than it looks because it means being a publishing company as well as an author.

+1: New options every day (crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, direct sales, etc).

-1: Based overly so in digital; trad-pub is still the strongest way to print.

+1: It’s as fast as you want it to be! (Just click “publish.”)

-1: It’s as fast as your impatient twitchy self wants it to be! (Don’t be so fast to click “publish.”)

+1: You retain all rights to your work!

-1: A rising tide of turd-froth in terms of self-published bilge; must rise above or die. (The often poor discoverability of new self-pub authors can be murderous.)

+1: You get to bypass a potentially archaic and outmoded system for publication.

-1: Easier to self-publish when you already have earned your audience, however small.

+1: Digital shelf-life is largely eternal, or at least until SkyNet nukes us from The Cloud.

-1: Amazon is the 800-lb gorilla here; if Amazon shits the bed, so do you; if Amazon changes the percentage split, not much self-publishers will be able to do about it.

+1/-1: No agent required, but honestly, one is recommended anyway.

At The End Of The Day…

All of this only matters if you write the best book you can and give it the right amount of time and love and nether-massage it needs to flourish both on the screen and in the marketplace. This is simplified, of course: lots of bad books have done very, very well, but really, fuck that. We also eat lots of shitty foods and drive lots of shitty cars and do lots of shitty things and “shitty but successful anyway” is a pretty piss-poor hoop to aim for, don’t you think?

If you have written what you believe to be The Best Damn Thing You Were Able To Write and you want to know what to do with it, well, hopefully  that list above will at least get you started considering how both paths are separate-but-equal and how the modern author is best-served by placing books in both “chutes,” so to speak. You do that, you gain the advantages of both (while still admittedly wrestling with the downsides, too). Further, when one ocean dries up (as it inevitably will), you are not left upon a rotting raft moored on a dead coral reef somewhere, baking to death in the sun with all the other bloated whales.

Some folks will espouse a particular magical order to this process — “Self-publish first,” they might say, even though plenty of authors published traditionally first and then used the audience built there to self-publish, even though an author like me did both paths at almost the exact same time. Blah blah blah. Point is, as always, we have many ways up the mountain. Walk as many of them as gives you comfort and confidence.

NOW PLEASE REPORT TO THE LAB FOR HYBRIDIZATION AND EAT THESE BOOKS

*scans you with ticklish gene-warping laser*

If I have studied the entrails of this pelican correctly, and if scholars are correct in that the Seal of Baal-Ashtoreth has finally split in twain, that means it is my birthday. I am, by all reports, “no longer young,” but also, “not quite old,” which means I’m “middle-aged.”

I’ll buy my sports car next year.

For this year, I’ll buy myself a book.

Because books and birthdays go together like chocolate and more chocolate.

So: recommend to me a book you liked that you read recently.

Please do not recommend your own books because this is not that time.