Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

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January 7, 2013 / 8 Comments

A Loose Proclamation About Terribleminds

Gonna shake things up just a teeny-tiny-titty bit here at terribleminds.

I’m going to put the blog on a loose “schedule.”

That way, you know what you’re getting on any given day.

And I know what I’m writing for the week ahead.

This is not going to be carved in the obsidian walls of Satan’s palace or anything — if I get a wild laser beam up my ass, I may decide to shift the order one week to sate my demonic urges.

But, here, then, is the schedule going forward:

  • MONDAY: Baboon Pornography
  • TUESDAY: Some Stupid Shit About Writing
  • WEDNESDAY: A Microsoft Paint Drawing Of Genitals
  • THURSDAY: Full House Fan Fiction
  • FRIDAY: Baboon Pornography

Right? Sound good?

*receives a sudden flurry of emails*

Oh. Okay. Some of you are on board with the baboon porn, but most, not so much. Whatever. Some of you clearly hate change. And monkeys. And porn. And that means we can’t be friends.

Fine. Fine. Chrissakes. The things I do for you people. Let’s try this again.

The new-new schedule:

  • MONDAY: A Question Posed To You, The Terribleminds Audience, For Discussion Purposes
  • TUESDAY: Some Totally Insightful Shit About Writing
  • WEDNESDAY: Wild Card Anything-Goes Day (Rant! Recipe! Monkey Porn!)
  • THURSDAY: A Terribleminds Storyteller Interview
  • FRIDAY: Flash Fiction Challenge

Good? Yes? Are we in accord?

SEXCELLENT.

January 4, 2013 / 118 Comments

Flash Fiction Challenge: Spin The Wheel

First up, a little administrative work:

I picked the random winner from the last challenge, “The War On Christmas.”

BLUE LYNX is that winner.

Blue Lynx, contact me at terribleminds at gmail dot com. Kay? Kay.

With that outta the way, it’s time to BEGIN ANEW.

*dun dun dun*

Here’re the rules. I’m going to give you three categories. You will pick randomly from each category, maybe with a d10 or using a random number generator. From your choices, you’ll have 1000 words to write some flash fiction. Post this fiction at your online space. Link back here. Due by Friday, January 11th, at noon EST.

Here, then, are your categories:

Subgenre

  1. Fairytale Fantasy
  2. Post-Apocalyptic Horror
  3. Superhero
  4. Police Procedural
  5. Military Sci-Fi
  6. Kaiju
  7. Dieselpunk
  8. Conspiracy Fiction
  9. Splatterpunk
  10. Southern Gothic

Setting

  1. An abandoned Wal-Mart
  2. An underwater alien ship
  3. The tropics
  4. Limbo
  5. A meth lab
  6. The Golden Gate Bridge
  7. On the surface of a comet
  8. A Nevada brothel
  9. Inside a virtual reality world
  10. A nightclub in Hell

Must Feature

  1. Talking animals
  2. Magical foodstuff
  3. A straight razor that never needs sharpening
  4. One or several time-travelers
  5. Mummies
  6. Nanotechnology
  7. A vigilante
  8. A dead body
  9. A blizzard
  10. A mystery box

 

January 3, 2013 / 8 Comments

Eric Beetner: The Terribleminds Interview

I met Eric Beetner recently when he and Monsignor Blackmoore were kind enough to have me read some Miriam Black at the LA Noir at the Bar, and Eric read a slam-bang piece of grimy, gritty crime fiction that assured me he’d be a natural fit to talk about his work here at the site. I’ve hooked the car batteries up to his manly components — let’s see what he says when we turn up the juice, yeah? (You can find Eric at his site, or on Twitter @ericbeetner.)

This is a blog about writing and storytelling. So, tell us a story. As short or long as you care to make it. As true or false as you see it.

I’ve been thinking about this true story since my recent birthday. See, when I was born, I nearly died. I had a fairly common disorder where both my parent’s blood types got into my system, despite being different types. Basically this means my blood is passing by what it sees as a foreign substance as it flows through my veins and it attacks. Red cell vs. red cell. It can be fatal, especially in a tiny baby. There is no telling blood to just get along.

So I was plucked out of utero early. My dad loves to recall the day. This was 1969 (yeah, I’m old. What of it?) right after it became commonplace for dad’s to be in delivery. On the day it so happened that a half dozen med students were there as well to see the possibly tragic birth. Apparently when I emerged all the students collectively leaned forward with their notepads to gawk at the freak.

There was a wall chart for the new-to-the-process dads. It ranked your baby on a scale of 1 to 10. I was a 1. I had my fingers and toes – that was it. I didn’t cry, didn’t respond to stimulus, which at the time was still a hearty smack on the rump. I was discolored, limp, and generally sad to look at. So sad, in fact, the good folks at the hospital chose to dispense with routine and not take a photo of me for the records since they thought there would be no way I’d survive.

Little did they know my Nana was a nurse for an OB/GYN. She enlisted the help of Dr. Frost and they set about swapping my blood through transfusions. In my 20s I found a clipping my dad saved from the local paper in Iowa City where the hospital put out a call for blood donations. Kinda like a pre-internet Craigslist ad. So my blood was replaced with donations from family friends and some total strangers.

It ends with my favorite thing that has ever been said about me. After many transfusions, but no guarantee I would come out of this anything more than a vegetable if I lived at all, my parents met with Dr. Frost. Keep in mind she was a family friend.

They asked what the prognosis was. Dr. Frost said, and I quote, “Well, at this point, Eric is salvageable.”

I life my life in a daily struggle to justify the hard work and sacrifice of total strangers and the feeling I’ve let them all down by not becoming president or a doctor or astronaut. They all banded together to save a floppy little fetus so I could go on to make up stories and make TV shows. I’m grateful and guilty in equal measure every day.

Why do you tell stories?

I spent a lot of time alone as a kid. My parents divorced when I was 3 or 4. I went with my Dad and he worked full time. My sister and I were the classic “latch key” kids, with hours alone at home after school to fill with some sort of self-created entertainment. In a pre-internet, pre-cable TV world I had to invent my own escape. I’ve always seen storytelling as a way to take myself to other places and other times. I guess that notion has stuck with me. I’m never bored. I know how to entertain my brain if nothing else in my environment is doing it for me. That leads to storytelling, at least it did for me. I subscribe to the notion that if you’re bored then you’re boring.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

I hate giving advice on writing. I know you love it, Chuck, and I know a lot of people have benefitted from your advice. The thing I like about what you tell people is that it is all practical. You don’t tell people how to come up with stories, because you can’t teach that.

That said, I think any advice I’d give is along those same lines. If you want to write – write. Don’t fucking talk about writing. Write. Don’t talk about what you’re planning on doing or what you’re in the middle of doing. My rule is you’re only allowed to speak of it when it’s done. Nothing in the world is more tedious to me than someone talking about a project they’ve been “working on” for years.

And when you finish that thing you’ve been toiling over, start again. Keep writing. Don’t stop and wait for people to discover what you’ve already written. Try to take the stance that the best thing you’ve ever written is the next thing you will write.

What’s the worst piece of writing/storytelling advice you’ve ever received?

Write what you know. That story up top there is about the most interesting thing that has happened in my real life and that all transpired before I was a week old. If I only wrote what I knew I’d be fucked.

What do you like writing more, short fiction or novel-length? And, the obligatory: why?

If I had to pick I’d probably end up somewhere in the middle, like novella length. I’m an impatient person. Not like, prescription for Ritalin impatient, but I like my stories to move along. I blame TV and movies. I work in TV as an editor so my whole job is to sit and watch images moving quickly all day, and to make them move even more quickly. To trim the fat. And with movies, it is possible to see how a fully fleshed story can be told so economically. So most of my books are on the shorter side, relatively speaking. I doubt I’ll ever write anything at 100,000 words or above. On a solo novel I’ve only ever gotten to just over 70K, and I like it that way.

I’ve written a few novellas like Dig Two Graves and my Fightcard books around 25-27 thousand words and those feel right to me in many ways. Not that I could have done The Devil Doesn’t Want Me in that amount of time.

Shorts are fun, but the novel is a more engrossing experience to read and to write. I do like being able to take a character through many paces and develop the changes characters go through. Ultimately I’ll fall back on the idea that a story is the length it “should” be in order to get the idea across. I’ve read flash fiction that does that and many people seem to think George R.R. Martin needs all those pages to tell his story. Both are valid. My preference is to go a little shorter though.

Most underrated crime author nobody’s reading?

Hey, I’m perfect for this since I was voted Most Criminally Underrated Author in this years Stalker Awards. So, the real answer is probably someone even I don’t know about. I’d love more people to discover Jake Hinkson, but that’s only a matter of time. He just announced a new novella which had me so excited I squealed like a little girl. There are several writers on the cusp who don’t have novels out yet, but will, like Keith Rawson, Matt Funk, Jimmy Callaway. [I second that emotion. — c.]

I’m always amazed Steve Brewer isn’t a best seller. He writes so much I haven’t been able to keep up, but I’m such a fan of his standalones like Bullets, Boost, Bank Job. It seems like every writer at some point gets compared to Elmore Leonard, but Brewer should be on anyone’s shelf if they like Leonard.

Of course I still wish there was more of an appetite for classic pulp writers beyond the big three of Cain, Chandler and Hammett. Guys like Harry Whittington, William Ard, Fredric Brown, Day Keene. Even writers still with us who started in that era, or the tail end of it anyway, like Robert Randisi, Ed Gorman, the early Lawrence Block novels.  

Your protagonists are, as they should be, troubled folks — what’s the trick to making an unlikable protagonist work?

It is tricky. In one of my early novels, One Too Many Blows To The Head (cowritten with JB Kohl) I had a guy who did some very morally questionable things and I got worried that people would be turned off by him. But everyone who read it (all six of them) really rooted for Ray and were on his side. I think if you give readers enough of a real life emotional hook to latch on to, they will adapt to the character’s particular moral code pretty quickly. Lars in Devil kills people for a living, but no one has ever told me they think he’s a sadist or a psychopath. His actions in rescuing a young girl and using his skills to protect her give the reader a reason to be on his side. Plus, if the person is funny, charming and fun to be around you can get away with a lot. I can write the head of a charity for blind monkeys and orphans and make him an unsympathetic asshole as much as I can write a criminal who you’d want to sit down and have a beer with.

The master right now of this is Johnny Shaw. His novel Dove Season literally made me teary with the father/son relationship he built with what could otherwise be a potentially jerky character who makes bad choices. I’m reading his second novel Big Maria now and he’s doing the same damn thing, making me feel so unbelievably deeply for some of these characters that I’ll follow them anywhere down whatever criminal path they take and still be rooting for them to make it out on top. He’s like a magician. I’d say he underrated too, but he selling like hotcakes filled with crack.

Where does The Devil Doesn’t Want Me come from? Why is it a book only you could’ve written?

I think it does come down to that notion of writing about a guy with a big moral deficit, in that he’s a killer, and making him sympathetic, relatable, human. I like to think its one thing I’m good at. I had so much fun in the book with the other hitman, Trent, who is a douchebag. He’s the opposite of Lars as a person and he gets punished for it in the course of the story. I just abuse this kid to humiliating levels, and it was a blast. And the readers, I’ve been happy to learn, are loving his humiliation. Does that make the readers evil people who want to see a guy get his nose ring torn out? No. They just know who they like better (Lars) and who deserves to get a kick in the balls (Trent).

Could it only have been me? I like to think my voice comes through. I don’t know that I’m 100% unique in any way, really, but in the same way that I’m average height, average weight, brown hair, brown eyes, I get mistaken for other people a lot, I’m not unique in any way. But to people who know me, I’m one of a kind. I’d like to think if people read my work, they find something unique about it.

What goes into writing a great character? Bonus round: give an example.

Relatability maybe? Every character has to have something a reader can latch onto. It doesn’t mean they have to like your character, they just have to recognize some sign of real human life in that person.

As an example I’d go with Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. You don’t like at all the things that Lou does in that story, but his actions are explained and justified enough in the twisted logic of his own brain, that you relate to his sick world view.

Likewise people from another era like Old Red and Big Red from Steve Hockensmith’s Holmes on the Range series. Here is a narrator from a time and lifestyle that I have no relationship with, but the voice in those books is so wonderfully rendered that I end up completely relating to them.

And OH! a perfect example is Megan Abbot’s The End of Everything. I have not been a thirteen year old girl ever in my life, but by the end of that book I felt like I knew what it was like to be that girl. A blend of perfect little details and universal truths made that a great example of making me, the reader, relate to someone completely different from myself.

Recommend a book, comic book, film, or game: something with great story. Go!

I’ve worn out my recommendations of Hell On Church Street by Jake Hinkson, so I’ll avoid that. (whoops) I’ll give another shout out to Sunset & Sawdust by Joe R. Lansdale

Why didn’t more people get into Carnivale on HBO? I loved that show. More people need to discover that one.

I love a good documentary and I was completely blown away by Life In A Day. And you might not expect it from me, but I think the Dixie Chicks documentary Shut Up and Sing is brilliant.

Favorite word? And then, the follow up: Favorite curse word?

I love words for their sound as much as meaning. Discombobulate. Reticent. Curmudgeon spring to mind.

I blame Samuel L. Jackson (or maybe Tarantino) for Motherfucker completely eclipsing the more simple and refined “Fucker”. Try that some day, pull out a plain old “fucker” and see if it doesn’t get much more of a reaction than motherfucker.

Favorite alcoholic beverage? (If cocktail: provide recipe. If you don’t drink alcohol, fine, fine, a non-alcoholic beverage will do.)

I am, sadly, one of those jerks who doesn’t drink the booze. I am a serious hot chocolate snob though. I make my own at home and it’ll put hair on your chest as fast as any bathtub hooch you’ve ever had. I use good chocolate (Valrhona, Green & Blacks, Vosages) and I use a lot of it. It’s more like a melted cup of chocolate mousse. I also like to add extras like a few butterscotch chips, a crushed graham cracker for thickness, sometimes a shot of hazelnut syrup. Seriously. I’ll make you one. It’ll change your life. You’ll never touch that Swiss Miss crap again. Oh, and I use half and half. Not water. Not simple milk. I’m in it to win it. I drink a lot of this when I write late at night.

What skills do you bring to help the us win the inevitable war against the robots?

In many ways I am as cold and calculating as our robot overlords. I don’t get overly emotional or sentimental so I’m good in a crisis. I’ll do what needs to be done and not lose my head, even if the right thing to do is leave your ass behind while the rest of us go for higher ground.

What’s next for you as a storyteller? What does the future hold?

Just tonight before I started this I finished another novel. That makes five that are as of now unpublished. So I got the goods to go on for a long while. I get annoyed at the glacial pace of publishing so I need to relax. My new novel The Devil Doesn’t Want Me needs to live a life out there without another book stealing its thunder. But soon . . . very soon . . .

I do have more stories coming out in anthologies. I’ll be in the Atomic Noir collection they are giving out at Noircon this year (and selling on Amazon) I’ll be in a new antho called Hoods, Hot Rods and Hellcats that is coming soon as well as Beat To A Pulp: Hardboiled Vol 2 and the upcoming Crimefactory anthology Lee, which is all stories about Lee Marvin.

(Check out Eric’s books here.)

January 1, 2013 / 24 Comments

On The Subject Of Time And Self And Cynicism: Or, How I View Resolutions

This is of course the time of the year when frowny-faced naysayers tell you your resolutions are stupid and why are you waiting till today to make them and keep them, as if your today must conform to their today, as if your decision to evolve or change or Do Something is somehow offensive to them. It’s the same cynical thing you hear at Valentine’s Day — “I don’t need a day to buy flowers for my wife,” they say, which is true, but of course they probably don’t buy flowers for their wives on any other day anyway.

People are resistant to the idea that we should change, that we can better ourselves, whether it’s on the first day of the year or the third or the 51st or the 345th. They will tell you your resolutions are stupid, but of course they’ll continue on making no changes for themselves and wearing their cynicism like an ugly hat proudly displayed.

Yes, of course, January 1st is an artificial construct, an imaginary knife-slash in time. But it’s your day just as it is theirs. If you want to use this day to make a change, do so. The cynicism of others needn’t be a big dead bird hanging around your neck, too.

Go forth. Change if you want. Try if you must. High-five your own optimistic instincts.

Even in failure we learn.

December 31, 2012 / 54 Comments

25 Writer Resolutions For 2013 (And Beyond)

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Tis that time of the year when the year’s just born — pushed from its temporal womb, squalling and wriggling. That means it’s also time to put forward a list of upgraded attitudes and mission statements for the year ahead. Some of these are for me. Maybe some of them are for you.

I don’t buy that we should rely on a single day to cleave to shame and fix mistakes — but I think the first of the year is a nice temporal marker to push ourselves to re-examine, to evolve, and to keep asserting our ability to kick as much ass as we are able and allowed.

With that said, let’s get to it.

1. Level Up, Ding

Up your game. Always. With every paragraph, every chapter, every script scene and blog post, we should be looking to level up our work and ourselves.  We level up, we gain new weapons in our fight against Shitty Writing (“I HAVE THE ANCIENT SWORD OF THE HAIKU MASTERS, IT IS +1 AGAINST RUN-ON-SENTENCES”) and we face new challenges in the road ahead (“NOW I MUST DEFEAT THE LITERARY AGENT IN BATTLE USING NOTHING BUT A QUERY LETTER AND SOME BAD-ASS DANCE MOVES”). We must never sit on our hands. We must pull our boots out of the mud. We must move forward and improve ourselves and our work. We must better our shit.

2. Let Art And Entertainment Have A Little Creative Love Baby

Once upon a time I thought, my goal as a writer is first to entertain. And that remains true, to a point — but the more I think about it, the more I realize “entertainment” is a lowest common denominator. If my only true goal was to entertain, I could achieve that by uploading a series of YouTube videos where various things hit me in the dick (Frisbee! Coconut! Bowling ball! Charging goat! A goat driving a lawnmower!). A good story connects beyond mere amusement; its tendrils sink into deeper earth, winding around the human heart. Let’s aspire to do more than merely entertain. Let us reach for meaning, for connection, let us present stories with purpose and power. (Or, at the very least, we could write porn. HEY PORN COUNTS SHUT UP.)

3. Cleave To The Human Condition

It’s oh-so-easy to get lost in all the fiddly bits of storytelling. All the plotty twists, all the crafty and conjurous worldbuilding, all the clever turns of phrase, all the wonderful ways to describe a person’s naughty bits (dangle rod love canal wizard’s wand swamp grotto turgid shillelagh lusty sex-pond). Thing is, we write stories for one reason: to talk about people. And we read stories because we want to read about people. Every story is a Rosetta Stone attempting to translate the human condition to the humans gazing upon it with knitted-brow and quizzical sneer. When we as writers drift away from that, we lose what’s powerful about stories: we lose the character. Stories are written by people, for people, about people. I mean, at least until the day comes when they’re written by robots, for robots, about murdering all the meatbags.

4. Face The Fear, Best The Beast

(Man, if those aren’t some of the lyrics to You’re The Best Around, then the 1980s has failed me.) Let every tale be a cage match between you and something that scares you. Death, life, rats, clowns, disease, lost love, parasites, credit ratings, God, Satan, the apocalypse, being awake during surgery, Kentucky, the dark, wizards, tiny children with straight razors in their jam-smeared hands, otters — find a thing that frightens you and write about it. Mine that struggle. Writing with that measure of genuine of emotion behind it creates a palpable effect: the prose grows stronger, the story becomes richer. Think of it as upgrading the story’s megapixels. Every page contains so much more when you write with passion and authenticity.

5. Have A Fucking Point

Every story is an argument. Have the argument on the page. Give it to the audience. Make the case for why love conquers all — or why love can suck a big quivering tube of elf dick. It’s not about being preachy; it’s about threading your fiction with theme and meaning.

6. Embrace The Unanswerable

On the other hand, just as sometimes we go into fiction with an answer already in mind, other times we approach the page with an unanswered question hanging over our heads like a reaper’s sickle. The ending of the tale, uncertain — its conclusion both in terms of event and theme existing as a Schroedinger’s Cat inside the narrative box, the outcome ever in flux. Can love save the day? What is love? Will human monstrousness win out over selflessness? How do I remove this skin tag? Do bears really shit in the woods or do they share a series of secret bear toilets?

7. Stop Letting Passion Ferment Into Poison

Passion can be a paintbrush — or it can be a gun. It can be a warm cup of go-go juice or an icy syringe jacked up with blowfish toxin. Passion is a horse that either carries you racing across the sunlit plains or stomps you bloody into the mud. Creators are passionate people; they have to be. Passion drives us to do what we do. But that passion easily goes septic and next thing you know, instead of pointing it toward our work and our desires, we’re instead letting it fuel some bullshit argument or be the rope that binds us into some crass emotional tangle. Writing the next great story from the deep of your heart is so much more valuable than EGADS SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERTUBES I WILL EXPEND MY CREATIVE ENERGON CUBES ASSERTING MY SUPERIORITY.

8. Lock The Bastards In A Box

We will forever meet those who don’t believe in us, whose apparent goal is to hold our heads underwater rather than teach us to swim. Those are our bastards, and fuck every last one of those human speedbumps. Don’t engage. Shut them out. Close the door and lock it. Let this be the year we populate our lives with people who challenge us and help us be better, not punch us in the balls (or lady-parts) and leave us groaning and gasping in a pile of canine excrement.

9. Read Widely

Our reading habits are creatures of comfort: we know what we like (urban fantasy novels where bad-ass were-dolphin girls wage war against a parliament of sexy demon-priests) and so we hew to those books we know will please us. But again, look beyond the boundaries of entertainment. As we challenge ourselves with our writing, so too should we seek similar challenge in our reading. Read that which you would not normally read. Seek new input. Don’t let your mind grow indolent and complacent, a sluggy psychic blob covered in mental Dorito dust.

10. Know More Shit, You Clod-Headed Ignorasaurus

If we are to assume that write what you know has any value at all (it does, in a sense, and more on that in a moment), then we can also assume that it is our mission as official penmonkeys to know more shit. Your mission: learn more, read more, do more.

11. Dig Into The Dirt Of Your Own Experience

Let’s talk a little about that last one: “do more.” When we write, we tend to write more effectively when we milk the udders of our own experience rather than come to the page cold and unaware. That’s not to say we must literally write what we know — otherwise, every story would be a biographical transcript. Rather, our experiences are filtered through the various sieves and strainers of fiction: we translate and teleport the events of our lives, finding those sensory moments, those essential elements (or elemental essentials), those core authentic “truths.” What that means is: strive to bring yourself to the page. And further, it means to do more. Have more experiences. Travel. Eat new foods. Try new things. Apply it to your fiction. (“Hey, honey, I went to a gangbang last night with a bunch of strangers. Don’t worry, it’s just me bringing authenticity to my novel. Yes, I smell like lube: a detail for my fictions.”)

12. Find Comfort In Discomfort

Fuck safety. Jump, then stitch the parachute on the way down. Comfort is the enemy of good fiction. As an author, seek some measure of discomfort — put it into your work, try new things, challenge yourself to take the difficult path because that is the path that will yield greater reward. Hell, break a drinking glass and pepper your office chair with the shards so that you’re experiencing constant enlightening buttock pain. *receives note from the official terribleminds lawyer* Oh, umm, wait, yeah, don’t do that last part. Just do the other things.

13. Find Opportunity In Change

The winds have shifted. The earth trembles beneath our feet. Genres warp and mash together. Age ranges for reading spawn hydra heads (Middle Grade! Young Adult! New Adult! Adult Zero! Pre-Adult! Post-Toddler! Geriatric Erotica!). The shift to digital is a change. The fact that big publishers are glomming onto big publishers and creating some kind of drug-resistant super-mecha publisher-kaiju is a change. The rise of self-publishing is — drum roll please — a big-ass change. And more unseen changes are surely on the way in the coming year. Each change is bad for those who cannot adapt, and great for those who can. So, adapt. Find opportunity and challenge instead of difficulty and misery. Surf the turning tide.

14. Find Signal In Noise

We can either fill our lives with meaning, or bog it down with distraction. The latter is easier, frankly: it’s so much simpler to lose ourselves to the Internet or video games or stupid arguments or Russian elk porn. But a life of writing requires focus. It demands that we tune out the noise and zero in on the signal. Signal will save us. Noise will drown us.

15. Stop Pooping In The Temple

They say the body is a temple; mine is probably a back alley pawn shop. (“Want to buy a cassette player and an off-brand Samurai sword?”) Just the same, I shouldn’t be savaging the architecture of my flesh with gross indolence and needless diet. The mind and the body are inextricably linked — it’s time to stop dragging down the mind with the negligence of the body.

16. Stop Defining Yourself By What Other People Think

Everybody wants you to be something. Some people want you to be nothing. None of that matters. The tiger in the cage doesn’t think, “The zookeeper wants me to wear this jaunty hat.” He just eats the zookeeper and then pees on that hat. Be the Most Awesomest You-Version that you want to be, and let everyone fall in line behind your ideals. Don’t fall in line behind theirs.

17. Love What You Write, Write What You Love

The thing about writing is, it’s easy to get caught up in work that isn’t “for” us — rocking out some freelance word count, or maybe in a pitch meeting you pitched something on a lark and under pressure (“Uhh, something-something astronaut family sitcom in a future world owned by robots who have not yet learned to love”) and you really don’t like the thing you pitched but now, here you are, writing it for money. You find it miserable and that misery translates. It always translates. The miserable threads wind around each word like a choking vine or a pubic hair caught in your teeth. Here’s how to fix this: first, make sure to save projects Just For You. Write projects that speak to you. But you can also reverse that: you can bring your love to the project at hand even if that project is not one you enjoy. There’s always a way “in.” Always an angle. Always a way forward that you don’t hate. Find that path through. You’ll feel better for it.

18. Be Inspired By All The Crazy Penmonkey Motherfuckers Out There

Jealousy is an ugly thing: it’s bitey like a plague monkey, empty like a mummy’s scrotum. The way we see other writers is sometimes through lenses smeared with the greasy unguent of envy, or worse, we think, “They did it, but I can’t, and now I’m just going to lay down and take a thousand-year-nap on this pillow soggy with my tears.”  Going forward, let your proper response to other writers be awe. Let it be inspiration. Let the collective efforts of a thousand penmonkeys be the fist of wind that punches your sails.

19. Forge Partnerships In The Raw Metals Of Awesome

Time to get shut of the notion that we do this thing alone. The author is always the tip of the iceberg: beneath the hoarfrost waters is forever an unseen pyramid of supporters. Editors! Agents! Book designers! Artists! Other writers! This year, go out. Find one other person in your creative ecosystem. Press your two magic artist rings together — bwing! — and form a partnership. Use that creative energy — and yes, sometimes, creative agitation — to be the fist of wind that… what? I already used that metaphor? Fine. Use that energy to get shit done.

20. Create Before You Consume

We often gain our desire to tell stories from consuming the stories told by others. This often becomes our default mode: we read! We watch! We play! The problem is when it remains our default mode and we never switch tracks from consumer to creator. That’s not to say we shouldn’t still hungrily stuff our mind-mouths with the narrative meals cooked by others — but there comes a time to give our own work that priority. Both in terms of time and in terms of regurgitating staid, tired tale-telling. Your story comes first. All other tales trail after.

21. Write Fiction Red In Tooth And Claw

Punch. Kick. Grab. Bite. Fuck passivity. We don’t get to be paid penmonkeys and crackerjack creators by lying on the ocean floor like a bloated sea cucumber letting food glom onto his turd-blob body. You’re not a morbidly obese shut-in who can order opportunity and creativity from Amazon (delivered with Prime Shipping to your double-wide trailer!). You are shark. You are wolf. You are shark-wolf hybrid with machete-flippers and fire-eyes and a deep and unabiding creative hunger. Creators must take aim at their goals. They must sniff out opportunity and stab it with their steely knives. You want that pound of flesh? You want your novel on shelves, your script on a screen? Move, motherfucker. Or get out the way.

22. Realize: Yesterday’s Gone And Tomorrow’s Too Late

Today is what you have, so use it. Don’t even think about what you didn’t do yesterday. And fuck putting aside things for tomorrow. It’s today. It’s Right Goddamn Now — a sharp dagger stuck in the pages and maps of this very moment. Grab the knife. Start cutting words off the block. Start arranging them into sentences, and start shoving those sentences together to make a story. Don’t look back. Don’t wait. Now is the only time you are promised. Now is the time to create.

23. Just Keep Swimming

Regret is for assholes. Hell, regret is an asshole — a giant flappy asshole that works opposite as it should, vacuuming up instead of purging out, suctioning up optimism and motivation and light and also, the cat. (Poor cat.) It’s easy to get caught in this mode, to have the thought running laps in your head that says, I fucked up, I did something wrong, that thing will haunt me. A query letter with a typo, some pissing match with another author, a book that nobody bought, a self-published tale with a cover so ugly it should be on trial for war crimes. Forget regret. Aim to repair. Seek to reclaim. (And other re- words!) Very little you do will mark you as a Permanent Dickhole or Forever Dumbshit provided you are earnest about moving forward and upping your game. Stop getting caught on the carousel of remorse. Stop turning in circles.

24. Fuck Good. Go Great.

Perfection is the enemy of the good. But does that mean we shouldn’t aspire to be better? Hell no. It doesn’t mean we can’t push ourselves and reach a little further. It damn sure doesn’t mean that we cannot seek to elevate that thing we do beyond the realm of merely “good” and — one hopes — into the stratosphere of “great.” (“THIS MONKEY NEEDS A PROPELLOR. THIS ICE CREAM NEEDS BACON! THIS BACON NEEDS CHOCOLATE! THIS TOASTER NEEDS A PINK FLOYD LASER LIGHT SHOW AND A BELT PUNCH AND THE INTERNET.”) I don’t know what makes something great. More of this? Less of that? A stronger flourish? A simpler elegance? Nobody knows. But that’s no reason not to try, is it?

25. Know Thyself

The biggest and bestest resolution going forward? Know who you are as a writer. This is, I find, the curse-iest curse that plagues us — and it doesn’t just plague us at the beginning of our journey. Oh, if only. It’s a nettling, nibbling, nattering imp riding on our shoulders years into the great egress from our old, uncreative lives. Find your process. Uncover what works for you. Find your voice. Find what you like. Discover why you tell stories. Discover your desires. Find your frailties. Find yourself in your fiction and find your fiction in you. The faster we can start to figure out who we are, how we work, and what we want, the faster we can move forward telling the kinds of stories we want to tell — and the more confident we become in doing it. So ring in the new year by… if not answering these questions then at least asking them, having them staple-gunned to the front of your cerebral cortex. Let your work and career be less of a question mark, and more of an exclamation point. And now for…

26. Shh, The Not-So-Secret Secret Resolution

Write till your fingers bleed.

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

500 WAYS TO TELL A BETTER STORY:

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER:

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

500 MORE WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER:

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING:

$0.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY:

$4.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY:

$2.99 at Amazon (US), Amazon (UK), B&N, PDF

December 28, 2012 / 11 Comments

The Final Battle

 

Blackbirds is in the Ranting Dragon Cover Battle 2012! Round after round it fought —

And now?

It has reached the final round.

*crash of thunder*

*timpani boom*

*a distant wolf howls*

It is up against the mighty cover of Seanan McGuire’s equally mighty Discount Armageddon — Seanan is, of course, my spirit animal and the profane yin to my vulgar yang, and she is a damn fine writer (sweet Sid and Marty Krofft, have you read her Feed series under the name Mira Grant? Do yourself the favor and read, read, read).

So, were Blackbirds to lose this battle — it would be a glorious loss.

BUT WE AIN’T GOING DOWN WITHOUT A LOT OF KICKING AND FLAILING.

When I saw Joey Hi-Fi‘s cover for Blackbirds (and the follow-up, Mockingbird), I about fell over, dizzy. I’d won the cover lottery. It is a truly incredible cover, a cover that sells the book far better than my own writing ever could — I cannot tell you how many people told me they picked the book up to check it out by dint of that cover. It is a single image that contains myriad images: dozens of little scenes and snippets from the book.

So, I beseech you here today — pleading eyes searching, sweaty palms turned heavenward, manly tears streaking my gore-caked beard. I ask you to go and place your vote for your favorite cover of the year. If that cover is Blackbirds, then I shall high-five you when we both arrive in Valhalla. If it’s not, then so be it. I mean, I might drive over you with my car if I see you crossing the road, but that’s the way it goes. No harm no foul, right?

The vote is close! Split down the middle! Hurry! Hurry!

Congrats, of course, to Seanan and her cover artist, Aly Fell!

(The contest is open until December 30th.)

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