Jay Stringer’s one of those guys who kicks ten kinds of ass with his simple, stripped-down crime fiction prose. He’s also a dangerous deviant and should be Tasered on sight. But you didn’t hear it from me. He’s a helluva guy and here he’d like to duct tape you to a chair and tell you about his new book:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

I’m a novelist. I write crime and social fiction and blog at Do Some Damage. I was also a founder member of seminal 80’s beat combo The Replacements. (I wasn’t.) (That is one of the biggest regrets of my life.)  I grew up in England and now live in Scotland, so I’m very good at frying things.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

Romani detective Eoin Miller is asked to find a rapist preying on young immigrants. He wanders into a web of racism, betrayal and violence.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

I want each project to be a tightrope walk. I need there to be the risk of failure. I also need to be angry about something, or to have a question that I need to spend 80-or-so thousand words exploring.

A few things came together to get me started on Runaway Town. I’m uncomfortable with the way violence against women is used in a lot of fiction. I think we see a lot of people declare that they want to write about how women are objectified, but then it just seems to become an excuse to write graphic scenes. They’re then also used to set up revenge scenes, as if that is the way to balance things out. And revenge in fiction is a slippery slope. For instance, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the “getting medieval” scene in Pulp Fiction, and the way the audience is primed to cheer for what’s about to happen. It feels like the joke is on us for laughing.

I set out to walk the tightrope myself and write about them. I wanted to try and tell a story that treated victims of violence (both woman and men) as more than a punch line or plot device.

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

Both this and Old Gold – my first book – are very personal. They’re both love and hate letters to my hometown. I come from the Midlands in the UK, which rarely gets a mention in the national news and almost never gets to be front and centre in a film, novel or television show. There are things to love about the region (hey, world, Shakespeare? Industrial Revolution? Alan Moore? You’re welcome.) But equally there are a lot of things worth challenging. I hope I do both.

I’m not the first person to set crime novels in the region (people should check out Charlie Williams) but I don’t think there are many who take on the social issues in the way I do. And I don’t think there are any who have a Romani protagonist. That’s a culture that is more often used as a cliché or the butt of jokes.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING RUNAWAY TOWN?

Fear. Also ‘getting over myself.’ I knew I was going to have to write openly and honestly about the issues in the story. That meant writing characters whose opinions I didn’t agree with, and try to be fair with them and walk in their shoes. I had to get into their heads and stay there for a while.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING RUNAWAY TOWN?

To embrace that fear. Yoda was wrong. Fear leads to good writing. It keeps us honest. I also learned to trust the reader; they’ll know the characters aren’t all speaking and acting for me. Once I got my head around that, I was sorted.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT RUNAWAY TOWN?

I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, and I don’t think I could have written it five years ago. Also, because I’m shallow, I love the cover. The publisher have done me proud.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

I’d sleep more often. Also drink coffee earlier in the day. Also, if I was writing this story without it being part of the Eoin Miller trilogy, I might have written it from the point of view of one of the immigrants, try to find the person whose story isn’t being told. I’m getting interested in exploring noir fiction from a young adult point of view; see what it looks like to them.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

Here’s where I cheat. I have a passage of dialogue that I like, and my Wife – much smarter than me – tells me each new line of dialogue is a new paragraph. So, hey, let’s pretend I’m not cheating, yeah?

“I caught Springsteen on the radio the other day, that Philadelphia song. Man, I was ready to slash my wrists. How’ve you not done yourself in?”

“They’re not all like that. I mean, I actually find ‘Streets of Philadelphia’ a hopeful song—redemption and rest, you know? But he’s written tons of upbeat songs that you’d like.”

“Like what? Name one.”

“‘Born to Run.’”

“But see, that’s exactly it. What’s he running from?”

“Zombies.”

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

I’ve turned the third Eoin Miller book into the publisher, and so I have a big decision to make. Write a stand-alone crime novel? Write the Young Adult novel I keep threatening my agent with? Write a fantasy epic about the dwarf who invented spaghetti? It’s a choice between consolidating what I’m already doing, or branching out into a new genre. It’s a big choice, and I think probably an important one for all authors in these crazy post-apocalyptic times.

Jay Stringer: Website / @jaystringer

Runaway Town: Amazon / Amazon UK

Adam Christopher’s a heckuva writer and an all-around nice dude — I’d talked to him online for a while but was fortunate enough to meet him at WorldCon this past year, where he, Stephen Blackmoore, Gwenda Bond, Laura Lam Kim Curran and I started an illegal gambling ring and incited a war between the fans of George R. R. Martin and an escalator. (Sorry, House Escalator.) It was good times. Anyway, Adam’s got a new book out — sequel to the much-loved Empire State — and here’s what I said about it: ““If you’re not careful, Adam Christopher will melt your face off with The Age Atomic: the heat of the prose pairs with searing action. This is fireball storytelling and a rare follow-up that’s better than its predecessor.” Now here’s what he is going to say about it in another interview here at the blog:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

My name is Adam Christopher, and I’m a novelist. I’m from New Zealand originally, but I now live in the North West of England (I came for the weather, clearly). I’m a comics geek and a New York City history junkie. I don’t like olives, but I do like tea. And pancakes. Especially pancakes. I’m a music fan and can (and do) bore the pants off everyone on Twitter with in-depth analysis of my favorite band, The Cure. My favorite film is Ghostbusters. My favorite novels are Veronica by Nicholas Christopher (no relation) and Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin and my favourite author is Stephen King. My favorite painting is Nighthawks by Edward Hopper.

My debut novel, Empire State, came out from Angry Robot in January 2012, followed by Seven Wonders in September the same year. My new novel, The Age Atomic, is a sequel to Empire State. It has a very green cover, and is out right now!

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

Private detective Rad Bradley must stop the quantum ghost of a Manhattan suicide destroying two universes with her army of atomic robots.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

Funnily enough, it came from that interview I did with you that was included as a bonus feature at the back of Empire State. You asked me about a sequel and I imagined what another book set in this world might be like… and realized I had an idea! I also realized that the world I had created was far larger than I had originally conceived, and I wanted to show a bit more of that in another book.

I love the history of New York City, and am constantly accumulating little facts and nuggets of strange information, purely because this is the kind of stuff that fascinates me – forgotten people and places, strange buildings and lost little bits of history. But with the backbone of the plot emerging in my head, like one of Stephen King’s story fossils, I knew I had a lot of real-life weirdness that would work brilliantly in the story. Empire State features on Judge Joseph Crater, who in our universe vanished from a Manhattan street in August 1930. He fitted the story I needed to tell in that book, and I wanted again to use real-life characters in The Age Atomic. Enter Evelyn McHale and the Cloud Club, a car called the Phantom Corsair, a cigarette-smoking robot called Elektro, and a tree stump in a theatre in Harlem which, in the Empire State, remains a still-living tree.

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

New York history. Alternate universes. A pulpy detective with a natty hat. Genre-mashing retro sci-fi (kinda) with a twisting plot and hidden agendas. I’d like to think that could only describe Empire State and The Age Atomic. I’d like to think that these books – like any I have written or will write – are a little slice of me.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING THE AGE ATOMIC?

The hardest thing was knowing how much of the backstory and setting to include from the first book, Empire State. This is the first time I’ve written a sequel, and I wanted to write it as a standalone novel so people could pick it up and enjoy it without necessarily having read the first book. That was a fine act to balance – you can’t just come in cold and expect everyone to know the setting and the returning characters, but at the opposite end of the spectrum is a book filled with “As you know, Bob…” exposition. It was something I had to keep constantly in mind, and was in itself a fascinating exercise in writing. Oddly enough – although I may be wrong here – it’s not something I’ve heard authors talk about much, so although it must be an experience common to many, I felt a little like I was in uncharted territory, for myself, anyway.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING THE AGE ATOMIC?

The nature of writing a sequel, as mentioned above, and what a sequel actually is, was the most important thing I learned, for sure.

But this was the sixth-and-a-half(th) novel I’d written, and over the course of those books I’ve found the development of the writing process and my own style fascinating. And I’m still learning – book one was different to book two as book two was different to book three and four and five. To see your own craft continue to evolve like that, hopefully getting better and better, is pretty satisfying. It’s a lifelong process for a writer, of course, but that’s why a life spent writing is a wonderful thing.

More specifically, I learned I could write a novel to a contract and a deadline (although see my answer below to your question about what I’d do differently next time!) – I’ve been in the rather handy position of being approximately two books ahead of contract, until The Age Atomic, which was the first novel I wrote from absolutely nothing to a finished manuscript within a specified timeframe. That sounds kinda clinical, but hey, writing is a job. And I’m sure that’s nothing special to a lot of seasoned novelists, there’s always a first time, and The Age Atomic was mine.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT THE AGE ATOMIC?

I love being about to mix science fiction, real New York history, and a big dollop of weird stuff. It has atomic robots in it. ATOMIC ROBOTS. Quite frankly, after that, there’s nothing left to write.

*drops mic, exits stage left*

But seriously, the universe of the Empire State is one I hope to return to a few more times, and writing in that world is a lot of fun. There is quite possibly nothing I can’t do in that universe, which is what I love about it and this book.

*Maniacal laugh, maniacal laugh*

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

I’d definitely outline more! The first draft of The Age Atomic came in at nearly 160,000 words, when I was supposed to be writing a 100,000 word novel. The damn thing just kept going, and going, and going, and with the delivery date closing in I had to throw myself at the mercy of my agent, as the monster manuscript needed a fresh set of eyes. She really saved my life, cutting 50,000 words, four characters and two subplots out completely. From that, I was able to bring out the core story and develop it into the finished novel.

That experience changed the way I look at novel planning. I used to be a total obsessive about outlining, but the more I wrote, the more I found I didn’t need that level of detail, because if things work out, the characters come to life in your head and start doing things you didn’t plan them on doing. In which case it’s a bit of wasted effort constructing a detailed outline which is just going to go off the rails. My usual technique is therefore to have a loose outline consisting of a series of tent pole events and plots points that I know have to happen. From that I can link them together from A to B to C and I have a good idea of the plot. Then I let the characters and story take over.

That’s the theory, anyway, and it means I can get stuck into the actual writing quickly. But The Age Atomic kicked my ass, and from now on I’m going to put more detail in – not the huge 30-page breakdowns that I know some authors create, but certainly somewhere in between the skeleton and a full outline.

However, although 50,000 words – half a whole novel – were excised from The Age Atomic, it wasn’t wasted work. Most of that material is reusable in either a third Empire State novel, or in something new. And while it represents many, MANY hours of work, my writing process is not very linear anyway. So, in a way, those 50,000 words had to be written in order for me to figure out what the real story was and get the finished book carved out of the manuscript.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

Eighty-six floors and you can see all the way to Texas.

Seriously, that’s my favorite paragraph, just a single line from chapter 1. However, that’s a bit short, and it requires the rest of chapter 1 for context.

So… I’m fond of Chapter 2’s opener:

She was pretty and her name was Jennifer and she was going nowhere, not tied to the chair like she was. She had long brown hair with a wave in it and was wearing a blouse with ruffles down the front that Rad thought looked nice but which meant she must have been freezing.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

My fourth novel, Hang Wire, is out from Angry Robot in November 2013. It’s an urban fantasy set in San Francisco, where a serial killer has been stringing victims up with steel cable just as a circus arrives in town and a Chinese god is murdered in a back alley. It’s got ancient powers, something awful stirring beneath the San Andreas fault, a sentient, malevolent fairground, and an ordinary guy called Ted who finds himself the recipient of a rather unusual fortune cookie.

My first book from Tor, a space opera called The Burning Dark, comes out in March 2014. It’s about a war hero who finds himself sent to a distant space station, which is in the process of being demolished. With his own past disappearing along with the personnel of the station,  our hero finds himself allied with a dead cosmonaut and a celebrity starminer as something mythologically evil stirs behind the nearby star. It’s essentially a ghost story set onboard a haunted space station… or at least that’s how it begins…

I’ve also got my comic debut coming out as part of the new digital anthology series, VS Comics. It’s called The Sentinel, and it’s about a rookie cop in Prohibition-era New York who is killed and resurrected as an Egyptian god of vengeance to battle a bunch of crazed magicians who are using the New York subway system to summon something nasty from the ancient past.

Those projects aside, I’ve got a couple of other novels I’m starting to work up, including a crime/thriller and an urban fantasy. 2013 is a busy year!

Adam Christopher: Website / @ghostfinder

The Age Atomic: Amazon US / Amazon UK / B&N / Indiebound

COURTING CONTROVERSY AGAIN, MOTHERFUCKERS.

So, Monday I asked about soup.

And like, over 100 of you nutty people were apparently geeked enough about soup to answer the call. Which I think is awesome of you fine, upstanding soup-monkeys and to celebrate, I’m going to roll around on a tarp covered with soup. *roll roll roll* *eat eat eat* *nap*

Anyway, I didn’t want to be left out of the fun.

And so I deliver unto you in a beam of light two soup recipes. The beam will burn the scales from your eyes and you will have divine knowledge of Sausage-Kale Soup and Vegetable Soup.

Let us begin with:

Sausage-Kale Soup

Kale is a hearty sonofabitch. It’s a bitey, tough, angry green — it’s all Russian and hale and it’ll run through your colon like a wire brush. It’s also a cannonball of nutrients blasting through your whole body, so it’s a damn fine green to eat. But it’s not an easy beast to tame. Yeah, you can braise it or have it sauteed, or you can crisp it up and eat it as a chip. Some will even tell you to jack up a smoothie with some kale. I’ve done it. It made my smoothie taste like I was drinking fruit accentuated with liquid lawn clippings. File under, “DO NOT RECOMMEND.”

But soup. Soup tames the cantankerous kale.

And so I give you, sausage-kale soup. A soup so good, it killed your mother and took her identity and nurtured you for all your life AND YOU NEVER KNEW IT HA HA HA HA. Ahem.

Okay.

So, it’s like this:

Big stock pot. Get it. Empty all your sex toys out of it because of course that’s where you’ve been storing them. (Makes for fast and easy boiling when you need to disinfect.) Pop it on the stove over medium-high heat with a little olive oil in there. No, no, not Astroglide. You monster.

Olive oil gets hot, time to put into there two types of sausage.

The first type: country sausage, ground.

Country sausage is a breakfasty sausage. It drives a pickup. It knows its way around a shotgun.

The other type of sausage?

Well, let’s say it’s a Choose Your Own Adventure type of sausage.

Pick a sausage you like, use it. I’ve gone with Italian, and it was… okay. I did kielbasa and it was better. Just tonight I made it with banger sausages (HA HA HA BANGER) and man if that wasn’t top of the pops, baby. I took the colonic casings off and went with the ground stuff inside, but if you like that skin-pop between your teeth, keep the casings on.

Brown the meat. Or you get the hose again.

Then, atop the meat: half an onion, diced.

Then: white beans.

Sure, you could do potatoes, but seriously, beans are another superfood. The sausage will try to hang out in your colon like a gang of loitering teenagers, but the kale and the beans will run the sirens and drive those miscreants out of Bowel-Town. This isn’t appetizing, is it? Discussing bowel health? I’m sorry. Let’s just move on and assume that we all poop vanilla-scented rainbows. What was I saying? Right. Beans. I put in two types of white bean: navy and cannelloni. Canned, unless you feel like soaking dry beans for seven weeks AND I DO NOT.

Next, sprinkle on some salt, some red pepper (cayenne or flake), some sage, some Italian seasonings (think: basil, marjoram, thyme, oregano, rosemary). A dash or three of your enemies’ tears. Curiously: no garlic. I just don’t think this recipe needs garlic.

And I think most recipes need garlic.

Into the mix goes: two cups of chicken stock.

Then three cups of whole milk.

One cup of heavy cream.

Let that simmer. Forty-five minutes.

While it waits, it is time to behold the…

KALE.

There exists a mighty panoply of kale types — Russian, Siberian, curly kale, dinosaur kale (no, really), Thai stick, Bolivian white, red dragon. Okay, I think those last three might be types of drugs. Whatever. Point is: lots of kale types to choose from. Curly kale is what you’ll find in your grocery store, most likely, and it’s the mildest and sweetest kale around. It won’t push you around the playground. It’ll play nice with your pets. EAT THIS KALE.

Oh, but first, chop it up.

Inch-long pieces or so.

Wash it, too. Give it a good scrub with soap and water.

EW NO DON’T USE SOAP WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU

Anyway, clean it, then when your heady sausagey broth (also the slang term for the hot tub water after a bunch of frat boys have just been marinating and peeing in it together for hours — okay, that’s probably also not appetizing I should really shut up) is done, time to add the kale.

So. Uh. Add the kale.

Sorry, kind of anticlimactic there.

Let it simmer and wilt for another 20 minutes.

When it comes out, you can, if you so choose, sprinkle a little of your Most Favoritest Cheese on there. A little Parmesan would be nice. A little Pecorino. Definitely not Fomunda cheese.

THEN EAT IT AND MMM FATTY UNCTUOUS HEALTHY GREEN MILKY GOODNESS.

That still doesn’t sound appetizing.

Just the same: you’ll thank me because this soup kicks ten kinds of ass.

Including dinosaur ass.

RAAAAR.

Vegetable Soup

This is a soup so simple you could make it drunk. On peyote. With one hand lopped off. Locked in the trunk of a Columbian drug lord’s Volvo. Man, what happened to you last night?

Anyway. Seriously, this is stupid easy.

Big pot. Again, remove all your underpants and rat skulls from it.

In the bottom of the pan, time to sweat some onions and garlic the way you’d sweat a perp. With a Taser and pictures of his mother. If you don’t have those, some heat and olive oil will do, with a little sprinkling of water and salt, cooked until the onions could best be described as “glassy,” or “opaque,” or “lustrous and enigmatic.” It’ll smell lovely to boot, because: aromatics.

Then dump in there some chopped carrot and celery. Let’s say, four of each.

This is referred to sometimes as a “mirepoix,” which is French for “sexy vegetable threesome.”

Cook that for five, ten minutes. Until you feel like not doing it anymore. I dunno. Whatever.

Into the mix goes:

Four cups of chicken stock.

A big-ass can of crushed tomatoes. Not the little-ass can. The big-ass can. I don’t know what this measures out to be. Somewhere around 47 jiga-ounces. Whatever. BIG-ASS CAN.

At this point, put in whatever spices you like. Some salt. Some pepper. A whisper of cayenne. Probably some oregano. Definitely some marjoram, thyme, rosemary, maybe some savory.

Then, add in whatever vegetables you jolly well fucking want. Frozen. Fresh. Whatever, lady, this is your soup. Own it. Live the life you’ve wanted to live and grab the bull by his bovine pendulums and — ahem. Green beans? Sure. Corn? Why the fuck not? Peas? If you like that sort of thing, follow your bliss. Some more chopped tomato? GO WILD, YOU CRAZY CHIMP.

Let it simmer.

Say, mmm, a half-hour. Enough time to watch some porn, do some laundry.

When it’s done, you have one of two options:

First, you can add a splash of cream. It’ll lighten the soup and round the edges.

Or, you can choose to squirt a little lemon juice in there right before serving. This brightens the soup and sharpens the edges. By my mileage, in fall/winter: cream. Spring/summer: lemon.

If it’s an equinox or solstice: add lamb’s gall and vampire menses.

ANYWAY THERE YOU GO SOUP RECIPES OKAY THANK YOU BYE BYE

*disappears in a hot scalding spray of soup*

In today’s post about being a happy writer I put an admittedly provocative header on #16: “Fuck Money.” Now, I like to think the post explains itself okay, but maybe it doesn’t — and further, the graphic that accompanies the blog post is in some cases going around separate from the text of the blog post, so I figure I understand some folks balking at the notion that a writer shouldn’t care about money.

Which, to be clear, is not at all what I’m suggesting

I care about money.

I care about it. I like it. I’d lick it for the coke residue if it didn’t make me look weird.

I care about it both because it feeds my kid and because I can buy stupid shit like video games and good bourbon and because it puts the paint on the walls of our home and — well, dang, I don’t need to tell you that money is how we pay for stuff. And I pay for stuff via my writing. Full-time. My wife was full-time and now works part-time, so the lion’s share of earning is on yours truly. And, to be honest, I make a very comfortable living right now with the inkslinging.

Money is a lovely reward for a day’s writing and I have no intention of dismissing that. In fact, there’s little better than putting food on a table with the imaginary made-up seed-stuff that pours out of my ruptured head-pumpkin on the daily. Now, that being said —

I still think the point of the post still stands, which is, you’re likelier to be happier writing first because you like what you do rather than because you like filling up your piggy bank. And it’s true for things beyond writing: the things we do in this life will make us happier overall if we bring our interest and our passion to the table. Now, hell, if your interest and passion is purely in accumulating dollar signs, so be it. Go forth and dance a happy dance with your pockets jingling and cash floating out of your shirt like it’s a money blizzard. The point wasn’t about being an effective writer, nor was it a suggestion that anybody should be a starving artist or should feel bad for earning out with their creative endeavors —

It was just about cultivating happiness. And in my experience focusing only on money is done to the detriment to your own personal mirth meter. Your mileage, as always, may vary.

Nothing wrong with getting paid or being a writer who wants to be paid.

Hopefully anybody who reads this blog knows that by now, but for you newer readers, there it is.

I read this article — “22 Things Happy People Do Differently.” And I was like, yeah, you know, I like some of these. They’re a little simple, a little direct, but still, I liked the point — we have to choose to be happy instead of letting the universe ladle happiness upon us.

Further, I thought, well, writers are a traditionally unhappy lot, always moping around and crying into their manuscripts — the tears streaking the title page and soaking through the first few chapters. And so it seemed a good time to look at how writers can choose to be happy, too.

And thus, another list was born struggling and screaming from my quivering blog-womb.

1. Write

Writers write. If we were little simulated characters in a video game, we’d have various meters to fill up (liquor, pee, self-esteem, tweets) and one of them would be labeled with two tags: HAPPINESS and WORD COUNT. The happy writer is a writing writer.

2. Care Less

We come to the page with too many expectations. Each poor little story is like a trembling donkey upon which we heap tons of weight. We don’t just want a good book, we want a bestseller. If it isn’t perfect, we hate it. If it isn’t 100% right, it’s 1000% wrong. Problem: we care too damn much. It’s all or nothing with us and that’s the kind of dichotomy that shanks our happiness right in the kidneys. So: care less. Ease off the stress stick. Have more fun with what you’re doing. When your kids and dogs play in the mud, you can either freak out that they’re too dirty, or you can laugh and jump in the mud, too. So, fuck it: jump in the damn mud already.

3. Write What You Want To Write

A career spent writing things you don’t want to write is a career spent trying to birth a VCR through your pee-hole. It’s awkward. It’s painful. It won’t fit and it’ll damn sure tear you apart. Writing as a career isn’t so financially fruitful that there’s much value in coming to this thing without the purity of your love and desire on display. Writing what you want to write, on your terms, is a powerful kind of bliss. And the trick with bliss is, it’s up to you to find it.

4. Put Differently: Bring Yourself To The Page

I’m sympathetic that writers sometimes take assignments or write stories to fit parameters they did not themselves design. The same rule applies as above with a slight modification: even in writing something outside your purview you can still put yourself on the page and make it your own without hammering that square peg through that circle hole (or, for a more grotesque version, “hammering that Rubik’s Cube into that pigeon’s cloaca”). If I’m gonna write an article about trout fishing, grout lines, tulip farming, or a brand comparison of monkey diapers, by gosh and by golly I’m going to write that article the way I want and in a way that pleases me before it pleases you. If I’m not doing that then I might as well be digging ditches.

5. Stop Comparing Yourself To Others

You will never be at the tippy-top of the writer pyramid because there is no fucking writer pyramid. No ladder, no mountain, no March Madness-style ranking. You will always find other writers who have more awards, more sales, more books, better covers, sexier author photos, more Twitter followers, bigger advances, more powerful beards (GODDAMN YOU ROTHFUSS), and on and on. One author with a butt full of awards can still end up jealous of another author who has more awards. Or no awards but a bigger audience. Or better hair, or a cooler agent, or the ability to hold one’s liquor. Strive to be better, yes, but don’t strive to be someone else. You are your own person with your own stories to tell. You’re stuck with you. You can’t comparison shop to be a different person, and trying to do so will only drown you in a washtub of misery.

6. Open Yourself

The happy writer is an open writer: open to experiences, emotions, words, ideas, books, authors, tastes, smells, films, travel, unusual liquors, fancy cupcakes, sexual positions, exotic lubricants, animal costumes, and so on, and so forth. All happy thought-grist for our word-mill.

7. Set Realistic Goals

“I’m going to write this book. It’s going to earn me a seven-figure advance. It’s going to climb all the bestseller charts like that giant ape climbing whatever that really tall building is, and I’m going to win all the awards and then I’ll sell the film rights for another seven figures and the protagonist will be played by Baby Goose himself, THE RYAN GOSLING.” Unrealistically high goals just mean a long fall when you miss a ledge or a foothold crumbles beneath you.

8. Recognize The Lengths Of Your Control

And that leads me to this: Happiness lies in knowing the difference between control and influence. You control the quality of your work. The quality of your work influences factors outside your control like, say, whether you get an agent or sell a lot of books or get to make sweet sweet on-screen love to Ryan Gosling. Happiness is controlling what you can control to the best of your ability while letting the rest fall to the misty vagaries of your influence.

9. Gaze Not Into Publishing’s Demon Eye

You should know how the publishing industry works, but you don’t need to know it biblically. Pretend that you’re in a Lovecraft novel, right? In the world of a Lovecraft novel it’s enough to know that the Great Old Ones are out there beyond time and space in an astronomical mind-destroying fuck-tangle. You have your knowledge, yay, great, now go home. Don’t study it. Don’t stare. Don’t go fucking around with the Necronomicon or ululating foul entreaties of Azathoth the Blind Idiot God because that’s how you lose your sanity. Same thing with publishing. Know it’s there. Know how it works. Then go home and write your books. Because you start picking off those cosmic, spiritual scabs and you’ll start shedding sanity faster than a Collie blows his coat.

10. Don’t Give Haters Real Estate In Your Brain

Creative folks put themselves out there further than many by the nature of the work: you create a thing whose value is reflected only when it is held and beheld by the community that receives it. But that also means you’re a kind of antenna receiving both good vibes and venomous ones, too. Fuck the haters. Piss on any negativity that comes flinging your way. Letting haters have real estate in your head is like letting a strange dog shit in your kitchen.

11. Stop Looking At Your Amazon Ranking (Or Other Internet Numbers)

I don’t even think that number means anything. I suspect one day Amazon will reveal that the entire Amazon ranking calculation is the invention of an insane spam-bot staring into a snowglobe. And now authors are ranked separately from books? Oh boy. Pinning your self worth to an Amazon rank is no better than measuring your value by the pH balance of your front lawn. For that matter, stop obsessing about blog hits, Twitter followers, Facebook likes, Myspace wongles, OkCupid tickles, or any other pokes, peeks, clicks, views, twists, tweaks, or other agglomerated purple nurples. Those numbers will never add up to your happiness.

12. Give Yourself Permission To Suck

You ever get the opportunity to play with an artistic medium in which you have no experience? Photography? Fingerpaints? Erotic botany? When you do that, there exists this level of freedom where you’re like, “I have no stake in this, I’m just going to spackle some paint on my fingers and — I don’t know, fuck it, I’m going to draw a turkey on a jet-ski.” And then you’re there dicking around and fingerpainting like a boss and suddenly you realize: this is fun. And it sucks, but yet, there’s something real in there. Something of value. (“I WILL BE A CHAMPION FINGERPAINTER.”) It’s a cool moment where by creating art with no limits or no pressure and with jizz-buckets of fun you still managed to do something interesting. Something different. Carry that into your writing. Leap into the beyond. Fingerpaint like a boss. Remove the pressure of quality and give yourself permission to suck. Remember: with writing, you can always fix it in post. Why do you think Word Jesus invented the Editing Process? PRAISE WORD JESUS.

13. Deal With Your Shit

Happiness is active, not passive; it’s a decision, not an award someone gives you. Happiness takes adjustment. When something is broken, you adjust that thing with a wrench, a screwdriver, maybe a flamethrower. Writers, as it turns out, bring a lot of shit to the table. Other people have baggage. Writers have cargo. (By the goddamn tonnage.) This burden will stand in the way of your happiness as a writer because, worst of all, it will stop you from writing. Whatever it is that blocks you, it’s up to you to unblock. Deal with it on the page. Deal with it in therapy. Deal with it with medically-approved happy pills, whatever. Hard as it may be, it remains your choice to atomize the obstacles in your mind and on your path.

14. When Something Isn’t Working, Change It

We can usually tell when something is off. We know when our process is wrong. When we’re writing the wrong thing. When a behavior we’re committed to isn’t yielding the results we expected. You can only try to pick a lock with your dick so many times before you realize it just isn’t gonna work. (Or, for the lady version, “You can only try to open a stuck pickle jar with your vagina so many times…”) We often repeat mistakes out of some combination of stubbornness and laziness, but all that does is sink our boots deeper into the mire of dissatisfaction. Change your game. Mix it up. Approach your problems from a new direction.

15. Take Care Of Your Body

Move your body. Don’t fill it with a ton of crap. Your brain is the thing responsible for your writing but that brain is just a passenger in a car that needs to be working in tippy-top shape. Fill it with the right fuel. Take it out driving. Keep it maintained. Your body isn’t some unmufflered explodable rust-fucked jalopy. Give your brain the best ride you can give it.

16. Fuck Money

When the time comes to send my son to college in 16 years, it will cost about as much as it does now to send him to Alpha Centauri. So, I’m no enemy of cash. I like money. I need it. To eat. To live. To whiskey. (Is “whiskey” a verb? It should be. CALL OXFORD, CAMBRIDGE and tell MERRIAM to stop playing grab-ass with WEBSTER, stat!) I’m not saying you shouldn’t write with money in mind — but writing with only money in mind is a tram ride into Disappointment City, population: you. You gotta find a reason to write that isn’t just a pouch of imaginary chits and ducats. You gotta write because you want to write, because the story is about to pop out of you like a chestburster. You must love the writing more than you love the money from writing.

17. Recognize The Limits Of Shame

Shame sure seems like a powerful motivator, doesn’t it? I once thought it served me well. “Ah, if I don’t write X,000 words a day I’ll be ashamed of myself and that shame will be a burr in my hiney-hole to get me working!” And it does motivate, to a point. But you have to realize that shame is only half a ladder. It only gets us part of the way and it does so for the wrong reasons. We should try to be better writers because it makes us feel good to do so not because it makes us feel bad to do otherwise. Become addicted to the positive feelings, not the negative ones. Give shame its due — which is to say, flick it away like an errant booger.

18. Treat Your Audience Well

There exists what I consider to be a positive feedback loop, which is to say, giving positivity into the world returns it like a boomerang and uhh, hello, BOOMERANGS ARE FUCKING RAD-GRAVY (“rad-gravy” is superior to “awesomesauce,” by the way). Treat your audience well and they will treat you well in kind. And it will magnify and multiply.

19. Help Nurture Other Writers (And Be Nurtured In Return)

We seem like a big community, a formless and faceless blob — but the writing community is actually a lot smaller than you think. Be a part of it. Nurture relationships. Help other writers find opportunity and they will help you in turn. Hell, just make friends with other writers. (I mean, not all of them — some of us are quite scary with our pantsless whiskey rages and our bone-woven beards.) Like with one’s audience, feeding into it feeds back upon you — that’s true of positivity and true of negativity as well. More to the point, imagine there’s a communal fountain: you can either poop in it or fill it with vodka and Kool-Aid. CHOOSE WISELY.

20. See Failure As An Instruction Manual

Failure is illuminating. It reveals every broken board beneath our feet, every crack in the wall, every pothole in the road. Do not shun failure. High-five it. Hug it. Engage in lusty pawing with it. Failure means you’re doing. Everybody fails before they succeed. Failure is how we learn. Failure is part of the grand tradition of figuring out how to be awesome.

21. Make No Excuses

We tell excuses to other people as if they’re reasons, but we know the truth: it’s just some nonsense we say to absolve ourselves of the sin of Not Doing The Shit We Were Supposed To Do. Every excuse uttered is another squirrel nibble out of our happiness. Soon your excuses amount to a whole swarm of squirrels. They’ll make short bitey work of your self-worth.

22. Long-Term Satisfaction Over Short-Term Happiness

The happy writer knows that not every day is spent as happy writer. Every day isn’t, “Open Word processor, giggle as a rain of puppies and panda babies fall upon you, proceed to breathe brilliance onto screen, go take a nap.” Some days are hard. As intellectually grueling as back-breaking labor. Some days feel like you’re pulling out a wolf’s teeth by going through his asshole. What you need to realize is that even a bad day of writing contributes to a sense of long-term satisfaction which is far more valuable than the short sharp cookie-pop of temporary happiness (though that’s good too, and needn’t be avoided).

23. Let Your Voice Find You

An author doesn’t find her voice. An author’s voice is what’s on the page when she writes without trying or pretension. You are your voice. Trying to find it is often an act of digging a deep hole to discover what was standing next to you all along.

24. Love Some Part Of What You Do

Sometimes we get an idea in our heads to do a thing (go to the moon, climb Everest, learn bondage knots, cross-breed a panther and a pony into an adorable predator known as the PANTHY), but it turns out we try it and don’t actually like the process it takes to get there. Love of the end-game isn’t enough to keep you happy. It might be enough to get the job done, but happy-making, it isn’t. You have to love some part of the process. The writing. The editing. The rewriting. If the only thing the act of writing earns you is a mouthful of ash and a pair of rage-throttled fists, fuck it. Writing ain’t worth doing if it fails to tickle your inner monkey.

25. Finish Your Shit

Every time you fail to finish your work, a little girl loses another kitten. A unicorn loses his horn and becomes a regular stupid old horse. A sweet old lady chokes on her dentures. But worst of all, every time you fail to finish your work it wears another small hole in your soul. You can feel it there — that ragged tear in your cloth, wind whistling through the gap. Because you know what it means. You’re giving up. Giving in. Handing over the keys. Letting the terrorists that are your Doubt and Fear and Uncertainty win. You know what all the books published and movies made and comics inked have in common? Someone finished what they started. And finishing will give you a bliss-boost. All your happiness circuits will fire like a 21-synapse-salute. Even if it’s not the best thing you’ve written. Even if it’s the worst.

Because the best thing you never finished is always less than the worst thing you did.

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So, in case you missed the news, Simon & Schuster are having a very public secret snit with Barnes & Noble over — well, best as I can tell, B&N sees itself as the only big dog left in bookstores and wants better support from publishers, and S&S claims it cannot afford said support and probably also sees itself as one of the only big dogs left in publishing, and blah blah blah, genitals-a-waving, slappy slappy, flappy flappy.

I don’t know who’s right or who’s wrong. I know I like Barnes & Noble as a bookstore and I know I like a lot of the books Simon & Schuster puts out. I also know that Barnes & Noble is increasingly focused on things other than books despite still being labeled a “bookstore,” and I also know that Simon & Schuster is occasionally responsible for some pretty scary contract clauses and is also responsible for one of the new vanguard of vanity presses (which in my mind you should avoid like it’s a bitey gonorrhea monkey coming for your wiggly bits).

Point is, they’re both businesses who do awesome things and shitty things.

Because businesses are like that.

I have seen on the sidelines, however, some cheering of this situation.

It is cheering by some — hell, relatively few — self-published authors.

Just the same, I thought I’d take a moment to remind you, as Delilah Dawson does here, that the people who get hurt in all this are, well, people. Authors get hurt because you can’t find their books. Readers get hurt because they can’t find the books they want. Even workers at B&N and S&S are hurt because they’re not a part of this cruel and clumsy tango. They didn’t sanction it. Most of those folks love books and love authors.

Let me say right now that schadenfreude by any author — self-published or otherwise — is an ugly thing. Put it down. Walk away from it. Don’t cheer damage done to other authors. Don’t cheer the erosion of the publishing industry. And further, don’t suspect for one second that something like that couldn’t happen to you. This could happen between any distributor and any publisher (and has, actually). This could happen when Amazon or some other e-tailer changes the rules on self-published work. Nobody is safe in this big corporate scraps.

Whenever Godzilla and Mechagodzilla fight, shits gets broken.

People get stomped.

Nobody wins.

So: no more cheerleading the misery of others, please.

And, if you’re so inclined, feel free to support your favorite Simon & Schuster authors by finding their work wherever you can find it — even if that’s somewhere other than a Barnes & Noble store. (Hey, aren’t indie bookstores cool? Indiebound is your friend.)