1. The Story Is The Thing

“Publishing is on a collision course with the sun! Amazon has eaten all the books and shat them out as e-books! Development funds are drying up! Writers are shanking each other with Bic pens over a 1/4-cent-per-word!” Stop. Breathe. Refocus. Media companies will rise and fall. Technologies come and go. The story remains constant. More to the point, our need for stories remain constant. Storytellers and writers aren’t going anywhere. They may need to bend with the wind. They may need to find new ways to thrive. But they — we — will always have a place. The audience will be there. We just have to find them.

2. Old Stories, New Faces

As storytellers, we must adapt by adopting new ways of doing things — or, rather, new ways of telling stories. . The old roads may still work, but new paths through the jungle must be cut with our word-machetes. When you see a new piece of technology or social media, ask the question, “How can I use this to tell stories?” If you see a new publishing option (one that does not exploit the author), it’s wise to try it — if only to see if you can find new audience and a new vehicle by which to tell your tales.

3. Thrive, Don’t Survive

New models and new means open new ways for you to make a living by telling stories. That’s the goal, right? It’s certainly my goal. Yours might be, “Barely have enough to pay rent and buy myself a 9-pack of Ramen,” but I say, aim higher. Point is, if the old way isn’t giving you the living you need, you need to mix that shit up. Diversify. Feint right, then duck left — break free of the Conga line and do your own spasmodic seizure-dance on the Disco floor. You need to learn your own moves. Shake what your Momma gave you.

4. Embrace All Tools

In any career, it pays to learn all the tricks and tools of the trade. A carpenter doesn’t just know how to build chairs. A dominatrix doesn’t just know how to spank an upturned bottom or shove mascara brushes into pee-holes. A carpenter learns how to use the Laser-Nail 9009. A dominatrix learns how to build her own cat-of-nine-tails from the entrails of her gimp. (Okay, this is probably why I’m neither carpenter nor dominator.) Writers should learn tools old and new. Don’t just learn how to write a novel. Write short. Write long. Write scripts. Write games. Write blogs. Write creative non-fiction. Write psycho-vids for the HoloNet. Learn it all. Do it all. Stay relevant and diversify. The shark swims forward or he drowns. The monkey kills the monkey or the monkey doesn’t get the cupcake. Or something. Shut up.

5. The Myth Of The Perfect Path

Amazon is the savior! Amazon is a monster! The Big Six destroy authors! The Big Six will save publishing! Kickstarter! No, wait! Indiegogo! Love agents! Fuck agents! Hollywood rules! The studio system sucks balls! Brain! On fire! Fritzing out! Too many exclamation points! Too many opposing viewpoints! Can’t feel legs! Ahem. No perfect path exists. No one company or model is ideally suited to anybody and everybody. Amazon helps many. Amazon hurts others. Traditional publishing has fucked over some authors, and has unfucked just as many. No perfect path exists. We all choose which angels and devils to place upon our shoulders. Accept your nuanced and imperfect options.

6. Tribes Are Fucking Stupid

To build off that last point, tribes are fucking stupid. We create tribes to stroke our own egos, to confirm our choices to the world at large when we only need to confirm them to ourselves. Detonate your tribes. Destroy your cults. Tell your leaders you’re leaving for the secular life and if they fight you, bludgeon them with a femur and move along. Embrace a single inclusive tribe: the tribe of storyteller.

7. The Power In Clumsily Flailing About Like A Drunken Orangutan

Say “yes” more than you say “no.” Sometimes trying new things and learning new skills isn’t about a focused strategy or a well-meaning plus/minus pro/con list. You need to be savvy in business but you’re also a creative human being, goddamnit, and sometimes creativity is about wildly pirouetting and crashing into lamps and trying new things just because you got a bug up your ass to do it.

8. Your Work Has Value, So Claim Value For What You Do

Deny anybody who wants you to work for free. If you work for free, that’s something you do, not something someone asks of you — doubly true where they’re making money and you’re not. They might as well ask you to bend over and stick tennis balls up your poopchute for the pleasure of an audience without you getting even the benefit of a reach-around. Or health care. Or free tennis lessons! Stories have value. Storytellers have value. Anybody who says different should be thrown into a wood chipper and used for mulch.

9. Free Is Part Of A Strategy, Not The Whole Damn Strategy

That says it all but it bears unpacking: you can’t just give everything away and hope to thrive — or, frankly, even survive. You can give some stuff away. But don’t give it all away. Free is a zero sum, zero value game.

10. The Crass Reality Of “Monetization”

It’s an ugly word. “Monetization.” I gag a little when I say it. Whenever I hear it, a little trickle of blood oozes from my earholes. Just the same, storytellers need to eat, pay bills, support their deviant sexual habits, and that takes money, and that means you either work as a bag-boy and give your stories away for free or you find a way for your stories to help you make money. Sometimes that’s selling direct. Sometimes it’s a more circuitous path to the bill-paying and deviancy-having. Creativity without business sense will leave you starving. When you tell stories, ask the question (much as you may hate it): “How does this help me survive, and then thrive?”

11. The Internet Changed Everything

I’m not telling you something you don’t already know (and by the time you read this there will probably be something new, like, “THE MEMEGRID CHANGED EVERYTHING” or “THE NANO-BEES COLONIZED OUR STORY-PODS,” but fuck it, whaddya gonna do?), but I feel the need to remind storytellers that the Internet has made the tools of story creation and dissemination cheaper, easier, crazier, and farther-flung. Farther-flunger? Shut up. This is good in that it gives you and the audience greater connection, and troubling because it amps up competition and changes value. It is what it is. Take advantage.

12. Mother May I?

It’s time to stop asking for permission. Storytellers have been cast in a submissive role for a long time — “Please, Mistress, may I have another?” *WHACK* — and the worm is turning. Nobody’s doing you a favor by helping your story come to life. It’s not a treat placed on a dog’s nose while he waits patiently to chomp it down. This isn’t about killing gatekeepers so much as it is about redefining the gates. This isn’t about going DIY so much as it is about finding people — agents, editors, publishers, artists, other storytellers — who see you as a partner, not a peon. Symbiosis, not parasitism.

13. Bookstores Can Be Vital Places

This is not to say that new trumps old. That’s not the point. The point is, both exist, and both are likely to continue to exist. The real world — aka “meatspace,” aka “IRL,” aka “that place where I go to the grocery store and fondle overripe fruit” — is where people actually exist. And bookstores (and libraries, and movie theaters, and anywhere the audience gathers) still remain vital places. Reality trumps the digital space. Find ways to connect with the living, breathing audience. Leave room for those physical connections, which is not to say you should all be having some kind of author-audience orgy. I mean… y’know, unless you’re into that. *takes off pants, gently strokes mushy cantaloupe while moaning*

14. Speaking Of The Orgy

You can’t do this alone. Don’t think you can. Don’t think you can exist without some combination of partners, editors, artists, producers, agents, liaisons, lion-tamers, bee-wranglers, tweeters, whiskey procurement agents, sandwich-preparation-techs, and fluffers.

15. Other Writers Matter

Other writers are as crazy as you are, and trust me, I’ve seen what you do. (For the love of all that’s sacred, cover up those crotchless Naugahyde trousers. And put down the river otter.) Just the same, community in the writer’s world is key. Writers help writers. Storytellers help storytellers. They’re not competition. They’re partners. Cohorts. Drinking buddies. Folks who know how to properly dissolve a dead body.

16. The Audience Is More Active Than Ever

When fire touches water, the molecules go all batty and twitchy and that’s how water boils. The audience is the water, and they’re set to boil. The audience is an active element. They tweet, blog, post to Facebook, email the author, and create a generous (and alarmingly fast) feedback loop. And they’ll do you one better: prime movers in that space will create fan-fiction or involve themselves in the story in a big way. Open your door to the audience. Join the feedback loop. Get shut of notions of creative integrity and leave room for audience engagement, collaboration, and emergence.

17. Oh, And By The Way, You Need That Audience

Some creators treat their audience like an enemy. Do that and you’re dead. They’ll gut you like a fucking fish and stick a grenade where your heart used to be. The audience is the most important team member in any storyteller’s crew. Without the audience, you’re just a naked weirdo screaming at himself in the mirror.

18. Your Work Won’t Be For Everyone

The audience isn’t total. The audience is more and more fractured these days, like a hunk of hard toffee broken into pieces. But that’s okay. Smaller audiences are often more invested ones, creating a more vibrant ecosystem for creators. The age of the rockstar is fading, and that’s true across most of the artistic spectrum. But the death of the icon doesn’t mean the whole thing is going to collapse. When the big fish dies, the little fish can fill the space. You may not get to be Stephen King, but you can be a storyteller who makes a living — a good living — doing what he loves to do, and there is perhaps no more perfect thing than that.

19. It Puts The Word In The Mouth Or It Gets The Hose Again

Word of mouth is still the best driver for stories — it is the infection vector we all use and desire. But it’s changed. The Internet has widened the mouth so it can accommodate more words — our “circle of trust” has grown significantly bigger with the advent of social media. It’s no longer just the 10 people we hang out with at work or the bar. It’s the 100 people on Twitter, the 1000 on Facebook, the blogs and reviews we read.

20. Piracy Is Not Theft

A controversial point, but I want to put it out there: piracy, good or bad, is not theft. It is perhaps a kind of parasitism? Combat it where you can, find value in it where you can’t. Which leads me to…

21. You Can’t Control The Tides

Some forces lay outside an author’s control. You may be able to change some small things here and there, and you can certainly find new paths — but just the same, elements of this life will always be outside your control. Whether we’re talking e-book pricing or piracy or audience interest or Amazon or publishers or whether or not there are viral YouTube videos of me randily humping fruit at your local grocery store, some things are outside your control. When that’s the case, you can either go with the waves or walk away from the beach, but standing there and yelling at the tides will do you little good.

22. Be Generative

Do. Don’t just talk about it. Or think about it. Or play pretend. Put yourself out there. Tell stories. Lots of them. Learn the skill. Harness your talent. To be creative is to create. It’s all on you, motherfucker.

23. Storytelling And Writing Are Two Different Skills

I’ve said it before but I like it so much I plan on keep shoehorning it into your brain-hole: writing and storytelling are two different skills that feed off one another — a Yin and Yang, a pair of snakes biting each other’s tail. You must know the art of the story and the craft of communicating that story. One without the other is like a two-legged pony, dragging himself around all sad-ass, the most griefstruck pony in the world. Also, “Griefstruck Pony” was my nickname in the Crips. Or was it the Bloods? Whatever.

24. Maybe Time To Call Yourself A Storyteller?

I’m wondering if “storyteller” is more versatile than “writer?” Of course, it’s also probably worth even less respect on the open respect market. Try telling someone you’re a “storyteller” and they probably think you dress up like a goof and tell stories to wandering children for mere tuppence. Just the same, it’s a good way to differentiate between “I write technical VCR repair manuals” and “I write stories for an engaged audience.” And it also doesn’t pin you to any one format, platform, or medium. Shit, I don’t know. By the time I get to item #24 on these lists I’m usually drunk and dizzy. My nude body covered in fruit guts. So. Y’know. Enjoy that visual. *high-five*

25. A Good Story Is Your Best Defense

Your best defense against changing conditions and an uncertain environment is a good story. Book, comic, movie, game, cartoon, cave-based pictographs, whatever. By being capable and crafty, by being generative and progressive, by knowing how to do that thing you do, you insulate yourself from the chaos of the industry. The audience will always be there. The story matters to them, and they matter to you.

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The day has come.

Blackbirds hits shelves — online and off — today.

I feel like a great big hand has reached into my chest and pulled something out of me. In a good way. Like, “Oh, hey, those chest pains you were feeling? Your keys were lodged in your aorta.” *jingle jingle*

So, let’s get this out of the way up front: I hope you’ll consider nabbing a copy today. This book is my baby. I mean, okay, my baby is my baby, but this is my book baby. A seriously disturbed, very fucked-up, hopefully hilarious and also sweet (in its own sick way) book baby. Your procurement options are as follows:

Amazon (US)

Amazon (UK)

Barnes & Noble

Indiebound

Hopefully you’ll take a chance on the book. Hopefully you’ll see that all the writing-related gobbledygook I talk about here ideally — ideally — stacks up and comes from and went into writing this story and character.

In the meantime, I figured I’d cobble together a “list of 25” orbiting the book and talking about what I learned through writing it, submitting it, and publishing it. Please to enjoy.

1. Bleed On The Page

Give it your all and put it out there. This is your book. This matters. Story matters. And it has to matter to you first before it matters to anybody else. Don’t be milquetoast about it. Don’t just spit and piss on the page. Blow a hole in your chest with a booger-glob of C4 and grab your heart from within the bone-splinter wreckage and squeeze it like a sponge over the tale you’re telling. Blackbirds is me in many ways — it’s about my fear of death, my need for control, my love of profanity, my frailties and foibles and weirdnesses. It features places I’ve been, things I’ve seen, and dreams I’ve had. It made it easier to write. It made it so that it mattered to me.

2. Your First Novel Usually Ain’t

My backyard is a cemetery of muddy dirt mounts and unlabeled stone graves, in each a novel I never finished or a novel I did finish which likely sucked a big bucket of pickled undead monkey balls. They were all practice drills leading up to the big fight, baby. Lessons learned, pitfalls identified, characters and ideas stolen from myself. Blackbirds is my debut original novel, but it damn sure isn’t the first one I wrote. It’s just the first one that mattered. It’s the first one that deserved to live.

3. The Flywheel Of Story, The Gearwidget Of Writing

I wrote Blackbirds a buncha times. And it never quite worked and I didn’t know why. I know why now: storytelling and writing are two different skills. When I first wrote Blackbirds (and all the dead forgotten books before it), I knew I could write. The writing was fine. Capable. Occasionally even good. But the story was — nyyeaah, bleargh, barf noise, gag sound. It didn’t hang together. It didn’t have shape — it was like a bunch of wilted half-erect man-wangs lashed together with fraying bungee cord and left to float (and then sink) in a rusted wash-tub. I learned soon the obvious truth to which I was oblivious was that the mechanics of story and the mechanics of writing are two separate machines. They fit together. So learn both.

4. Completo El Poopo, Motherfucker

The first many iterations of Blackbirds lay unfinished. (Back then, the book didn’t even have a title, though I sometimes called it Vultures.) The book isn’t real until it’s done. It’s perhaps the most important lesson: before you can do anything else, before you rewrite, edit, query, publish, whatever, you have to finish your shit. Nobody wants to shake hands with your wrist-stump of a story. *spurt spurt spurt*

5. You Gotta Write For The Movies, Kid

Novelists can learn from screenwriters. I would not have finished Blackbirds if it was not for workshopping the pre-existing mess of a story as a screenplay through a year-long mentorship. It comes back to that thing I was talking about earlier, how writing and storytelling are two separate skills? Well, screenwriting focuses more strongly on storytelling than writing — and in writing a screenplay, you start to see the bones of the story and how they can be arranged to form whatever skeleton you want. I don’t mean that novels are equal to screenplays: each is a format deserving of its own features and bugs. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a bucket of stuff to learn from each format.

6. Language Holds Hands With Action And They Traipse Along La-La-La

Writing and storytelling may be two separate skills, but they still are two funky-toothed gears that fit together and spin one another. Language should reflect the story you’re telling. As the story moves into a languid space, so does the language stretch out, fill the sails with oxygen. As the story tightens into a fight scene or a scene or some tension, the language can tighten, too — sentences that are short and sharp and simple: a prison shiv of story delivery. *stab stab stab*

7. The Power Of Present Tense

Blackbirds is the first time I thought of tense as a meaningful choice. Everything I’d written before that defaulted to the past — in fact, the earliest drafts of Blackbirds were that way. But screenwriting is present tense and in writing Miriam Black’s story in that mode, I found that tense gave me two things. First, present tense makes a story feel more urgent, more present not just in the sense of time but in the sense of place. Second, and building from that, that was appropriate to Miriam’s story: Miriam is an agent of free will in a world of fate. Tense here for me was able to do double-duty and reflect the themes at hand — past tense would be an assumption of fate (“it has already been written”) while present tense reflected Miriam’s free will (“it has not been written and, in fact, is being written right now as you watch”).

8. The Outline Is The Thing

I hate outlining. Hate, hate, hate it. I hate it with a syphilitic burning, I hate it like I hate eggplant or pageant moms or really big potholes. And for a very long time I refused to do it. I was an artist, thank you. My story was a living, liquid thing. It could not be contained by an outline. The outline was a prison: lock my story away in a preliminary outline and it would go on hunger strike until it was a withered, quivering thing sitting in its own mess. All this I proudly proclaimed upon my throne of shitty incomplete manuscripts. Eventually, my screenwriting mentor said: “You need to outline because you need to outline so just shut up and outline.” And I groused and grumbled and fought my captors and then finally rolled over and outlined. And the plot presented itself like a beautiful vagina made of gold-leaf and pegasus dreams. Or something. Point being, it solved the problem I was having. Blackbirds would fail to exist if not for this lesson. I am a pantser by heart. A plotter by necessity.

9. To Fix It, You Must First Break It

I had several incomplete versions of Blackbirds. What it took to fix it was — after all that outlining, after all that screenwriting — to blow up everything I had and start over. The versions that existed were kludgy and clogged with old panties and eyeless teddy bears. Sometimes to fix a broken pipe, duct tape won’t do. You gotta rip that shit out. You gotta put in new pipe. I destroyed Blackbirds to save Blackbirds.

10. The Characters Carry The Book On Their Backs

This is a lesson I’ll repeat until I am dead in the ground (or until I change my mind, I guess) — Plot is like Soylent Green: it’s made of people. Miriam Black and the characters who surround her shape the story and the plot. The story and plot do not shape the characters. A plot is, at the end of the day, the motivations of many characters pushing on one another, birthing a conflict that forms a gauntlet for the audience to walk. Miriam Black, as an agent of fate, of chaos, of warring selfishness and selflessness, pushes on the story.

11. The Key To Unlikable Characters

You can make the most unlikable character in the world as long as she’s fun or compelling to watch. I’ve heard from many that one of the most vile characters in the book — the assassin Harriet — really grabbed them by the lapels and, in some cases, actually aroused sympathy despite being a total fucking monster. I hated her, but loved to write her, loved to watch her work.

12. The Empathetic Psychomemetic Soul Bridge

HERE HAVE SOME MORE ACID DUDE. Okay, not so much with the acid? Fine. I tried to find in all the characters a connection to myself — not always a part reflective of me but an empathy. Not a sympathy, but a thing where I can look at that character and, as the Devil’s own advocate say, “I get this character, I grok their voodoo, I see why they are the way they are for better or for worse.” I have strong feelings for some of these characters; they’re not just mechanical exercises, not just ink on a page. Me loving to write these characters ideally translates into you loving to read them. I hope.

13. Write What You Want To Read

Life’s too short and novels are too long to waste time writing stuff for other people. Write the story you want to write. Not least of all because your passion for what’s on the page will bleed sticky onto the reader’s hands. It’s just one more reason to not chase trends — write what gets you geeked.

14. The Pitch Is A Bitch (But You Gotta Do It)

Remember how I said I hate writing outlines? I hate writing queries more. It’s like, “I just spent years of my life writing this goddamn novel and now you want me to take the whole thing and condense 300 pages down to one? MY BRAIN IS BURNING.” But fuck it, you gotta do it. Even self-publishers have to write an Amazon description, and trust me, the vibe is the same. In fact, there’s my query secret: don’t think about writing a query, pretend you’re writing the back jacket marketing copy for the book. It works.

15. Some Agents Are Kinda Douchey

Many — perhaps most — agents are really cool humans. Some are not and have earned the reputation that agents have, as prickly gatekeepers guarding the gates of Eden with a flaming book stamp that says FUCK NO. I received some very nice rejections and some very cool interest from different agents. I also received a helluva lot of No Responses At All (and several that came to me six months or more after the fact), and I received a few agents that straight-up jerked my chain. They were cagey, hard to get responses from, made me feel like a cat chasing a laser pointer. They ask for professionalism, then don’t offer it in return.

16. Your Agent Needs To Dig Your Vibe, Wordomancer

I knew I had my agent — Uber-Ultra-Super-Agent-Queen Stacia Decker — because she got it. She totally understood Blackbirds. Loved the character. Had the right ideas for it. And she was fast with her interest and professional in her communication and she loves bacon and has dogs and has a twisted sense about her. Done and done. I occasionally hear horror stories from other authors where their agent doesn’t really talk to them or seems to represent only the book but not the author (or worse the publisher over the author), and I’m hella glad I don’t have any of those problems.

17. The Value Of Trodding The Old Roads

I believe authors thrive on a hybrid approach to publishing. Blackbirds walks the “traditional” path, and I’m glad for it. It’s not always about straight-up cash (though I’m happy there, too) — it’s also about the opportunities afforded to trad-pub authors. Would I have that kick-ass cover by Joey Hi-Fi? I would not. Would I have gotten the passel of great early reviews? Mmmnope. Would I have a shot at awards or foreign rights or be able to talk to agents and film companies in Los Angeles about the story? Not likely.

18. The Old Roads Are Long, Though

From the time of procuring an agent to the time of publication, you’re looking at a very long road. A year would be a fairly short margin. With Blackbirds, we’re looking at… two-and-a-half years? Something like that. It’s a slow, long line to the front. Now, a few things: in that time, the book was refined, made better. But I also didn’t sit on my asscheeks, eating Cheetos and watching marathons of 16 and Pregnant. I wrote other stuff. And some of that I self-published, and that stuff created energy for Blackbirds, and Blackbirds in turn creates energy for those things.

19. Surf The Tsunami Of Rejection

Rejection is a temporary state. Blackbirds went through a helluva lot of it, from agents, from publishers. I’m not saying that with persistence, every book will find a home. Some books are dead dogs — they won’t ever roll over. But as an author, persistence and practice will eventually carry you beyond the margins of rejection. It’ll drive you to the brink of madness. Just don’t let it push you over.

20. A Team Of Robot Ninjas Is Better Than An Army Of Tanks

Angry Robot Books are the fine metal lords and ladies publishing Blackbirds. Couldn’t be happier. They’re small. Versatile. Author-friendly. And willing to take risks. It’s that last one that matters most for me: Blackbirds played host to an unholy number of rejections, many of them orbiting the same theme: “I love it,” the editor would write, “but I can’t get it past our marketing board, as they think it’ll never sell.”

21. Genre Is A Moving Target

What genre is Blackbirds? Fuck, I dunno. It’s got crime in it. It’s paranormal — or is it supernatural? A dollop of romance. Lot of blood. Buckets of mystery. Thrills and chills, I like to think. Angry Robot calls it urban fantasy. Some reviews call it horror, or noir (though I’m disappointed no one has mashed that up into “noirror,” as yet). The one genre I know it ain’t is science-fiction, I guess.

22. People Will Judge The Book By Its Cover

I won the cover lottery. And I hear from folks the cover is hooking them left and right. Now I have to hope that what’s inside the book measures up to the raw bad-assery on the cover. Uh-oh.

23. Pebbles Thrown In A Pond

Little things add up. I’ve heard from folks who came to the book via this blog, or Twitter, or Goodreads, or even the experimental death-themed Tumblr, “This Is How You Die.” You have to try something. Every attempt is a pebble in a pond — you never know how far the ripples might go.

24. The Sequel Is Harder And Easier All At The Same Time

It took me years to write Blackbirds. It took me 30 days to write the sequel, Mockingbird. Slipping back into Miriam is like wearing an old coat (whose goosedown feathers frequently stab you through the fabric), but you also grow paranoid: “Am I writing this one like the last one? I need to be similar, but different, but not so different that I lose people, but not so similar that it feels like the sequel to a different book and NURSE GET ME MY XANAX LOLLIPOP.”

25. I Can’t Feel My Legs

Writing — and querying, and publishing, and marketing, and loving, and hating — a book takes a lot out of you. It feels in some ways like a great gym workout, in other ways like a weird (not bad, not good) breakup. You’re left flapping in the wind, your little book-baby all-groweds-up, out in the world doing things without you. You can only hope the book doesn’t embarrass you.

Fly, little book. Fly.

And bring me money if you find any.