Asking for blurbs is, for me anyway, a very uncomfortable thing. You’re often asking peers or even your own authorial heroes to carve out precious time to write you what amounts to marketing copy. I have to blacken my Shame Sensors with the heel of a heavy boot just to get up the gumption to ask another author for a blurb. (Further, I’ll be asking for blurbs very very soon on my YA book, which is already making me itchy because I always feel like such an ass.)

I am now in the weird position of having authors ask me for blurbs.

This is totally fine and further, a totally awesome problem to have.

I have blurbed books gleefully and will continue to do so because YAY BOOKS.

Just the same, here are a few tips. Ready? Here we go.

When you email someone, be polite.

Use words like, “please,” and “thank you.”

Do not write an email that sounds like it assumes the blurb is forthcoming.

Or, worse, like they owe it to you.

That’s not to say you have to slather up the potential blurber’s nether-anatomy.

Just be polite.

Understand it is a favor of time and effort and act accordingly.

Do not be a human spam-bot. Be a fountain, not a drain.

Mass mails are not a good way to ask. Neither are public social media channels.

Finally, when the potential blurber gets back to you and says, I can’t or won’t do that, sorry, good luck, your response shouldn’t be a two-word:

“Why not?”

Because when you ask that, you’re going to get a less-than-pleasant response.

I don’t mean to put anyone off of asking me or asking any author.

But a modicum of politeness and grace goes a long, long way in this industry.

PLEASE THANKS BYEBYE.

*runs off to psyche self up to send out mails that ask for blurbs aaaauuugh*

As noted, I heard about new Star Wars and I was originally a little bit “meh.” That is, until I realized that the new film is going to be coming into my son’s life at around the same time that the original film did for me. Suddenly I envisioned some kind of crazy father-son generational sharing thing where we can both high-five over our own respective trilogies and, I dunno, frown at that weird “prequel” trilogy that keeps hanging out in the corner and throwing up in a potted plant. Right? Right. HA HA HA STUPID JAR-JAR HIGH-FIVE, SON.

Anyway.

So. Disney has the films. Michael Arndt is writing.

And, until proven otherwise, J.J. Abrams is directing.

This is not a post about J.J. Abrams directing. (For the record, I think it’s a good fit. He appreciates the magic and mystery of storytelling, and to me any weakness he may have had has leaned toward the script side of things, and that shouldn’t a problem here.)

What I want to talk about is what you or I would do with the new Star Wars film. A pontification, if you will, of what direction to send the new films. This is always dangerous territory because you set up expectations and then when a thing doesn’t meet your needlessly elevated expectations, you get mad (“I bought this dog but I wanted a duck, ZERO STARS”).

Still, fuck it. I am geek, hear me yawp.

Here’s what I’d do with the new Star Wars films, should anybody let me near them.

• The films must continue the generational advancement of the Skywalker clan. Which means: Luke or Leia’s gotta have kids and this film has to be about one or several of them.

• Let’s see a female protagonist all up in here. A Skywalker daughter.

• Doubly interesting if it’s Leia’s daughter. Luke more in the background. Hey, why not?

• Since we’re getting all progressive up in here, I think it’s time to banish the racist miasma that hangs over the films (particularly from the prequels) and cut all the white-washing. White-washing is a big thing in film (“Hey, that character’s black but in the film we can make them white for no other reason except we’re all white and yay whiteys!”), and if Star Wars proudly does no such thing, maybe it’ll lead by example.

• Fuck politics. Listen, I give the prequels credit for actually being unusually on-point in terms of our own political situation here in the country, particularly post 9-11. Good job. Except, it was really, really boring. Listen, politics make for a great Extended Universe thing. I’ll read your Star Wars novel/comic/pamphlet about galactic politics (okay I won’t), but in the films? Cut it out.

• Let’s make it about adventure. The original trilogy has a great sense of adventure to it — dire, suspenseful adventure, but adventure. The same kind of adventure you feel in the Indiana Jones movies. The kind you don’t feel in the prequels. I want that back. Like, the first trilogy has the vibe of a D&D group coming together — cleric, rogue, paladin, whatever. MORE OF THIS PLEASE.

• No Mara Jade. Actually, let’s ditch the Zahn prequels. I love them. I do. But, yeah, no.

• Fuck that green-screen. Okay, listen, I’m not an idiot: while I think the new Evil Dead film should be given big bloody high-fives for (apparently) filming without any CGI at all, I know in a film like Star Wars you’re can’t escape CGI. But what’s on film is nearly always more effective when the CGI compliments a real set with real objects and real people. No more “actor talking to a tennis ball on a stick that will eventually be replaced with some jabbering alien.”

• Plus, you’ve seen that “photos of impossible places” post, right? Pick three of these places, and film some awesome shit there. You don’t need to invent whole new places with CGI. The real world is full of alien landscapes. Tatooine = Tunisia, remember?

• Also, the style shouldn’t be all glitzy-shiny. Keep the trashed-junk motif of the first three. It felt more real. You can polish it up a little, but it’s been a generation — still okay to showcase a galaxy climbing out of the hole dug by an oppressive Empire.

• Minimal Jedi. The original trilogy highlights the power of the Jedi by minimizing their presence — hell, Anakin Skywalker really did “balance the Force,” because  he basically left the world with two light-side dudes and two dark-side dudes. Then the prequels come along and it’s like EEEE JEDIGASM but before too long it just looks like a bunch of cosplayers running around with glowy boners. Let’s not fast-forward to a time where suddenly it’s Jedi-palooza.

• Write it like a young adult story. Coming of age, whatever. Teens with teen problems.

• I don’t see how you can’t have the Sith as the enemy in some capacity — Sith and the Dark Side are inescapable. But what else? Is this about a resurgent Empire? I feel like we’ve been there, done that. They’re not going to be building a third goddamn Death Star, I mean, c’mon. So, who’s the enemy? What’s the conflict? Emperor’s dead. Vader’s dead. Death Star went kaflooey. The Empire felt pretty gone to me. But evil never dies. The Dark Side remains. So…

• To go back to the teens thing — value in a Jedi Academy story? In the Harry Potter mode? The drama of young Jedi soon compounded by a sinister conspiracy?

• If anyone in the film says “Midichlorians,” I’ll karate kick a theater usher. That poor guy.

• You need all the old actors and characters, but keep all but one to the sidelines. One of them can serve in an Obi-Wan like capacity — the old mentor, Gandalf coming into the world to help save it. The obvious choice is Luke, but damn if I don’t wanna see a cantankerous Han Solo fill that role, instead. But but but — if Luke is sidelined and this is about Leia’s kids then Luke can be the “crazy uncle,” ala Ben Kenobi. Hmm.

So, with all that said —

What would you want to see in the new films?

What would you do, if you were in charge?

I adore loving a book I shouldn’t have any business liking. On paper, The Explorer really isn’t a book for me. But it just proves that good story and strong writing transcend genre, so when the very-wise Kim Curran said, “Try it!” I recognized that she was smarter than I am and I did as she suggested. It’s a brilliant book — funny, desperate, desolate, sad, all in equal measure. Here’s Mister Smythe to tell you all about it — 

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

I’m James Smythe. I write books, the latest of which is an SF thing called The Explorer. I’ve also worked on video games (doing story, narrative design and level design) and I teach Creative Writing at a university in London.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

Cormac Easton is the first journalist to travel to space. The crew he’s with all die, and he’s left alone, slowly dying. Unless, of course, he can find out how to stop it…

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

A few things. One was me thinking about loneliness and quiet, and wanting to write something set in the loneliest place that I could contemplate. That place turned out to be space (though it could have been the bottom of the ocean – I’ll save that for another time.) The lonely-theme tied in with a life-long love of SF, and a desire to write something that felt like the books I read when I was a kid – or, at least, the way that I remember them.

And I’m getting older. I know it’s a cliché, but I think a lot about age, about what’s happening to my body. I became interested in how the body collapses, and how this thing we generally try to look after only becomes our worst enemy. There’s some of that in the book as well: the nature of time, and how it works with our body to betray us.

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

I think there’s a lot of me in Cormac. A lot of his dreams and hopes and fears, they were things that I felt when I was younger; and a lot of how he looks back on his life feels true to my own considerations of who I am and what I have done with my life. I know it’s not the be-all and end-all, but he makes up a lot of who this novel is, and I think that maybe only I could have written him the way that he is.

Also: his obsession with teeth. I have good teeth. All of them, nice a straight, blah blah. I am absolutely fucking terrified of them, and dentist, and of anybody touching my teeth. Or looking at them, even. If I’ve written this book right, there’s teeth-related stuff in there that should make anybody with a similarly odontophobic nature (the fancy word justifies my stupid fear) feel exactly the same. Honestly, I shuddered when I was writing those bits.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING THE EXPLORER?

Getting inside Cormac’s head. He goes to some much darker places than I do, and he contemplates things that – touch wood – I hope I never have to contemplate. Trying to see my way into his situation was tough at times, especially because I did feel a sense of empathy with him. He’s an asshole at times (as we can all be, I think) but he wants to be better. He wants to do what’s right. And when you throw nasty stuff at a person like that, sometimes it’s hard to see how they’ll react. And sometimes, their reactions are the hardest part of all.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING THE EXPLORER?

A lot about space and physics and science that I subsequently ignored. I wanted to write something where the science wasn’t necessarily real science. Instead, it had to serve the narrative. That’s what I remember pre-Space Race SF novels doing: they went to Mars in ships with gravity, and they bounced around on the planet and then they jumped over a mountain. The Explorer never gets to those extremes, but every decision made was informed by a) the reality of the situation and then b) whether that worked with what I wanted to put Cormac through in service to the story.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT THE EXPLORER?

I love the rest of the crew. I tried to make them so that it didn’t matter who they were, where they came from, what they did: everybody is equal, and everybody (unfortunately) meets the same fate. How they deal with it is different, of course. We’re all broken, and what I put them through breaks them all further and in different ways. I hope that The Explorer is like novels I love to read most, regardless of genre: a story about people, about humanity, just dressed up on a spaceship to nowhere.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

Well, the nature of the story means that I can sort of explore that in another book. Short answer: everything. (And nothing.)

Process-wise? I would almost definitely make the science correct, or at least explained my decision better through the narrative. A few readers haven’t liked what I did with it – or have thought I just got it wrong – so maybe I didn’t make that clear enough. For most readers, they’ve gone with it. Somebody has described the book as science-fantasy (as Star Trek is) and that’s a label that I absolutely embrace.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

“I always said that the thing I was saddest about, when they had pretty much stopped printing paper books, was that I couldn’t tell how long was left until the end. I could find out, but that feel, that sensation of always knowing was gone. I used to love the way that the cluster of pages grew thinner in my hand, how I could squeeze it and guess the time it would take until it ended. I loved endings, when they were done well: I loved knowing that it was finished, because that was how it was meant to be. An ending is a completion: it’s a satisfaction all in itself. “

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

My next novel is a very different beast: called The Machine, it’s about a woman whose husband has his mind wiped by the titular Machine, and how she tries to rebuild who he is. The Explorer taught me a valuable lesson when writing it: if you embrace the darkness in your story, it hopefully never feels overwhelming. When I began writing it, I was almost afraid of it, tentative in how I dealt with the darker aspects of the story. But the darkness can be used, and it can enhance, and hopefully I’ve used that lesson in The Machine.

And then, after that, the sequel to The Explorer, this time next year. I love it when a sequel subverts what you expect from a story and takes it to a different place entirely. Hopefully this will do exactly that.

The Explorer: Amazon/ B&N / Indiebound

james-smythe.com

@jpsmythe

Four years ago, we bought a mattress.

We did as everyone suggests: we went to the store, camped out on it for a little while.

The saleslady of course just hovered like a hummingbird, staring at us while we tried out the new bed. I don’t know if she thought were going to try to do the rumpy-pumpy or something, but she just stood there. Staring and frittering. Still, the test totally worked.

It was the most comfortable bed on which I’d ever draped my torpid form.

My wife and I both looked at each other and were like, “Yes. Yes. This is our new bed.”

The bed was a Sealy latex mattress. A “Tranquil Sea” mattress. Which is a silly name, because the last thing I want to do is sleep on the ocean, tranquil or no. The sea moves. It hungers. It has sharks and giant squid and Dagon’s babies hiding down in the watery dark. Sleeping on the ocean will not give me comfort, but that’s how these product names are. (We’re also shopping now for paint colors, and paint colors are named even more hilariously. “Hobo Bindle.” “Regrettable Mist.” “Bedbug Ordure.” “Griefstruck Juniper.” “Peacock Cloaca.”)

We took the mattress home.

It was wonderful.

For a while.

But it wasn’t long before we noticed a slight… give to the material. We were slowly sinking into the mattress. At first, that was kinda nice. “It fits me like a glove!” I said, laughing as I shimmied my body down into the warm embrace of our new bed.

Eventually, however, those slight depressions turned into a pair of inescapable ditches. Which then turns the middle of the bed into a giant hill, like it’s some kind of Anglo-Saxon burial mound. (I’m fairly certain that Oswald killed Kennedy not from within a building but rather from the berm rising up from the center of our shitty mattress.)

Of course, when you’re up off the mattress, the deep furrows are not so plain to see — and despite being only four years into a 10-year-warranty, we’re pretty much fucked because when the Mattress Bastards come to measure the depth of our uncomfortable rifts, they will discover that each trench is odd but not dramatically odd and so, sorry, fuck you, stick a mattress coil up your no-no-hole, please enjoy your latex slumber-condom, nerds.

Point is, now we’re back to shopping for a new mattress.

Which, as you know if you’ve ever done it, is a descent into a realm of lies and madness. Memory foam! Innerspring! Flippable! Not flippable! Latex! Sleep Number! Futon! Koalafur! Foetal leather! Soft! Medium-soft! Medium-firm! Firm! Super-firm! Mild! Medium! Habenero Spice!

One mattress at one store — “This is our Endless Whisperer Pillow-Top model” — is actually different from the same-named mattress at another store. So it’s not like you can price compare on most of these, unless you want to buy a Tempurpedic, which are apparently wonderful but also cost as much as a used car.

Plus, they ask you all those questions. “Are you a back sleeper? Side sleeper? Butt sleeper? Do you have sciatica problems? Spinal disorder? Will you be having ‘the sex’ on this bed? Doggy-style? Missionary? Cincinnati Tugboat-style? Do you sleep eight hours? Nine? Four? Do you like to be stung by bees while you sleep, or not stung by bees? Do you eat in bed? Smoke in bed? Have you ever killed a man? Can you help me dispose of this body?”

Eventually, you answer all the questions and they direct you to what is the most expensive mattress in the store, some Astronaut Bed stuffed with the lavender-scented hair of orphaned children, and you tell them, “But I don’t want to pay $6700 for a new mattress,” and they’re like, “But there’s a 700,000-year warranty,” which sounds great until you realize that the warranty basically only covers incidents where the mattress turns into an actual monster from Hell and tries to eat you. (Our mattress has only turned into a metaphorical monster.)

So they direct you to the cheapest mattress just to be a dick, and it’s basically a pallet of bricks draped in a musty tablecloth, and they’re like, “That’s called our ‘Spinal Shame’ model and it’s $300. It has a 17-minute warranty,” which again, who cares, because the warranties are dogshit.

Then there’s all the upselling — pillows and frame and boxspring and dust ruffle and bondage saddle. Then you have to work on the price to get it down because of course the all-important mattress industry is like the car industry (because surely a mattress is as complex an object as an automobile!) and you’re suddenly haggling over price because this mattress has coils 2mm smaller than that other mattress and blah blah blah.

Then maybe while you’re standing there you Google some reviews and half the reviews talk about how the mattress killed their mother and half of them say it’s the best thing since angel nipples and next thing you know, you’ve panicked and fled the store and continue to sleep on your own crapgasmic mattress until it dissolves beneath you and you buy a fucking sleeping bag because fuck it, that’s why, just fucking fuck it.

So, what I’m saying is:

Hey, what mattress do you have? Do you like it?

We’re thinking about Ikea beds because some folks recommended them. Sleep Number sounds interesting, but I’ve read so many bad reviews (“The air pump stopped working and it filled our bed up with air and we floated off to a magical sky kingdom where giants made us into sex toys”). Tempurpedic is a possibility, but now of course you have a hundred different models of varying costs and questionable difference. HELP ME, INTERNET.

Myke Cole is a writer you should be reading. He’s a damn nice guy. He’s intense as anything. He’s built like an M1 Abrams but he won’t use his might against you. He’s also a helluva writer, and his new book, Shadow Ops: Fortress Frontier, is out on January 29th. (Amazon / BN / Indiebound). Follow him on Twitter @MykeCole.

One of my first guest blog posts as a professional writer was on why Reality TV was worth watching. My point was that we humans aren’t all that far removed from our monkey ancestors. There’s still a chord in us that wants to sniff our neighbor’s butt, eat the bugs out of their hair and fling a handful of poop when we get pissed. Which is why Reality TV is so popular – it taps that monkey gene. We’re fascinated by ourselves.

The more I read in genre, the more I think about that. In the blog post, I talk about Darth Vader. I talk about Gollum. I talk about Amman Jardir and Jaime Lannister. Since I wrote that post, the hits keep on coming. I met Caul Shivers in Joe Abercrombie’s BEST SERVED COLD and RED COUNTRY. I met the Warden, lord of the seedy underbelly of Daniel Polansky’s LOW TOWN. I met Jorg, the cruel child monarch of Mark Lawrence’s KING OF THORNS.

These are some bad dudes. We’re not talking about a little temptation or some harsh language. One is a drug-addicted crime lord, whose scheming put innocent people under the dirt. Another is a true butcher, who delights in torturing his victims. Another is a murderer, plunderer and ravager.

But I love them and I root for them in a way I never did for the good guys of my youth. When I wrote that guest post I thought it was just simple interest in the flaws of others, the literary equivalent of Reality TV Schadenfreude, but now I think it’s more than that. When I was a kid, it was Frodo and Bink and Allanon (really, Terry Brooks? Seriously? You named your leading Druid after a 12-step program?) The biggest problem with these guys was an excess of earnestness. They were, to quote Motzart in Milos Forman’s Amadeus, “so lofty they shit marble.” That was enough for a kid as yet untested by the world. I hadn’t really failed at anything, not in the soul-deep ways that adults do. I could identify with the saints of the fantasy canon.

But I can’t anymore. Here’s the thing: Deep down, everyone has that special failure, the one time in your life when you truly blew it: zigged when you should have zagged, let fear take the wheel and drive, done the crime but not done the time. Sure, it’s usually not as extreme as Jamie Lannister pushing Bran out a window, but it feels that way to us. We carry it like an oyster carries a grain of sand. It rubs at us, digs grooves in us. It wears us down. It makes us feel unworthy of the childlike resolution of Samwise Gamgee.

We need real heroes. We need protagonists who are as broken as we are. Because nastiness is only one thing these leading roles have in common. Effort is the other. They’re all striving, reaching, pushing to be better people, to make right what they’ve done wrong. They want to put their mistakes behind them, scratch some good out of the landscape they’ve scarred with their passage. And sometimes they succeed, maybe not always, maybe not in big ways. They build their legacy by inches. It’s not just about Schadenfreude. It’s about redemption. Because. Drama accentuates everything. Good stories raise the stakes. The flaws of the Jorgs and Jaimes and Wardens and Caul Shivers of the world far eclipse my own. But they’re trying, and sometimes, succeeding. Every so often, that grain of sand inside the oyster’s shell turns into a shining pearl.

And if they can, well, then maybe so can I.

Maybe we all can.