Last week’s challenge — “Christmas In A Strange Place” — is live and deserving of your eyeballs. So, make with the clicky-clicky.
Someone the other day cited the sub-genre mash-up challenges — where I offer up a short list of weird sub-genres and you must choose two and force them to have sweet sweet story babies that result in the birth of your flash fiction response — and I thought, yes, yes, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?
And so here we are, again.
From this list of six sub-genres, choose two. Then mash them together into a single piece of flash fiction, no more than 1000-words long. Here, then, is the list:
Dystopian Sci-Fi!
Cozy Mysteries!
Slasher or Serial Killer!
Lost World!
Spy Fiction!
Bodice Ripper!
Not sure what one or some of these mean?
Demand answers from the Lords of Google.
You have one week. Till Friday, January 6th. 2012, baby.
Go forth, rock it big, and I’ll see you kids next year. Have a killer rest of 2011, penmonkeys.
So, the new year looms and I start to slowly, groggily come out of my holiday coma (just before I tackle New Year’s Eve and guzzle liquor with friends) to start prepping the terribleminds Kickstarter for the New Year. The Kickstarter, as noted, will in part go toward making this site financially viable, but it will also have a concrete goal of updating this site somewhat (a terribleminds 2.0, if you will).
What I’m asking is, what do you want to see here in the new year?
Both in terms of content and in terms of changes to the actual site itself.
I do plan on putting up an e-store with merch. Though I’d love to know what kind of merch you’d be interested in seeing? Any suggestions would be appreciated and high-fived and sloppily-tongue-kissed.
But really, I’m talking about anything: what would make your terribleminds reading experience a better one? Give a shout. I’ll see if it goes on the list.
Looking back, staring forward. Standing on this head-of-the-pin moment between two years — an arbitrary distinction, perhaps, from when one calendar becomes useless and a new one must be hung, but a distinction just the same and a fine enough moment to pause and reflect.
Personally, it’s been a good year. Nah, fuck that, it’s been a great year.
Double Dead hit shelves. And is, I’m told, selling well. Well enough where — well, I won’t spoil any of that news right now, but oh, there shall be news. Blackbirds and its protagonist, Miriam Black, found a home after a small but confidence-boosting bidding war, and now sits comfortably nestled in the arms of an Angry Robot. Further, it has a jaw-dropping cover that still geeks me out to this day. (You can totally read the first chapter of that book at the Angry Robot site, by the by.) The transmedia project I co-wrote with Lance Weiler, Collapsus, got nominated for an International Digital Emmy. Our short film, Pandemic (watch here!) was at Sundance and continues to get lots of attention.
I also self-published this year — six books starting last January. Sales have, on the whole, been excellent. Curiously, they’re weakest for my fictional offerings. Shotgun Gravy sold well in the beginning but has since tapered off — I’ve got Bait Dog waiting in the wings to receive a good clean polish, but I want to see if I can get some more readers on board with Atlanta Burns #1 first. We’ll see.
I read some fucking awesome books, too. I’m a picky finicky dickhead of a reader, but this year has been a bounty of great books –Robert McCammon’s The Five and Hunter In The Woods; Christa Faust’s Money Shot and Choke Hold and Hoodtown; Adam Christopher’s Empire State; Anthony Neil Smith’s Choke On Your Lies; Duane Swierzcynski’s Fun and Games; Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City; Matthew McBride’s Frank Sinatra In A Blender; Matt Forbeck’s Carpathia; John Hornor’s Southern Gods; Stephen Blackmoore’s City of the Lost and Dead Things (the bad-ass sequel, and it’s a toss up as to whether it or Zoo City were my year’s favorite reads). Certainly some I’m missing.
Of course, the biggest and craziest and most wonderful thing was the birth of this little dude:
The boy is a constant source of amusement and adoration, and even when he’s not sleeping or karate kicking me in the trachea or accidentally drooling into my open mouth (seriously, that just happened the other day), he’s an endless delight and so cute he’ll turn even the hardest charcoal hearts into a big gooey wad of marshmallow fluff. We love him very much. I mean, duh.
Of course, a month before my son was born and a few days after my birthday, my dog of 13 years, Yaga, passed away. That was hard on us and sometimes, still is (I had a dream the other night I was playing with him in the snow — both a wonderful dream to have, and sad to wake up from and realize that it wasn’t quite true), and it was strange that in the span of a single month my dog died and my son was born. Parity and opposition: life and death in all its finery.
Not everything worked out perfectly. The television pilot officially fell through with TNT, and our film project has momentum, but it’s the momentum of a slowly-rolling kickball rather than the pinball’s swiftness we’d hope for. Almost had an LA agent; that didn’t quite click. Some friendships were made stronger this year. Some were decidedly not. Life progresses just the same.
I’ve said in the past and I’ll say again: I don’t truck with regret. Regret is perhaps one of the most worthless emotions we have as humans — we are who we are and all the moments and choices and happenstance has formed the equation that adds up to the sum of us. For good or bad, for better or for worse. Like who you are? Keep on keeping on. Don’t like it? Change something. But don’t get mired in regret. Your boots will get stuck there and you soon start to realize that it has no value, offers no function. Regret doesn’t let you rewrite anything. You don’t get a mulligan. It’s one thing to find a lesson and to learn from it, but regret is something altogether more insidious and, at the same time, worthless.
So, fuck regret in the ear with a meerschaum pipe. Mostly because I wanted to say “meerschaum.”
Onward, then, to 2012.
What will that bring?
Well, I can’t know for sure.
Blackbirds and its sequel, Mockingbird, will land.
I’ll continue to self-publish. I’ve got a novel — a creepy li’l something called The Altar — that begs to have the DIY treatment, I think. The outline is done, I just need to write it. (I make it sound so easy! Yeah. No.)
I’m almost halfway through Dinocalypse Now, the Spirit of the Century novel for Evil Hat. It features love triangles and professorial apes and psychic dinosaur goodness. It’s a challenge to write, honestly — a good challenge, but a challenge just the same.
Speaking of Evil Hat, I’ve got a wealth of stories in from the Don’t Rest Your Head anthology, called Don’t Read This Book. Got some great authors on that one, so keep your grapes peeled.
I’ve got more plans for the website (Kickstarter, quite possibly) and for some other writing books that both do and do not come out of posts here on the blog.
More to come, more to come.
Thanks all for coming here and making for a great 2011.
This blog has seen its readership swell like a shoulder suffering from bursitis, like a river-sunk corpse, like me at Christmastime. (MMM COOKIES THEN BOURBON THEN COOKIES WHY PANTS NO FIT NOW FALL ASLEEP UNDER TREE ZZZZ) I mean, for real — in 2011, readership here almost quadrupled. I’m not sure if you’re here because you think the site is funny or offers wisdom or simply because you like when I make poop jokes and say “motherfucker,” but whatever the reason, I’m happy you’re here.
It’s always interesting to see which posts strike a chord and which don’t — which ones catch fire and go “viral” via sites like Stumbleupon or what-have-you. Most of these top posts of the year come from this year, which is cool. A few standbys from 2010 show up again (dang, that Beware of Writer post keeps popping up here and there), but most of these are from the last 12 months. Plainly, the “Lists of 25” posts are popular — I know some folks don’t like “list” blog posts, and to them I apologize. It’s just, lists are easily digestible online reading. You can read and skip and easily break a single post down into digestible snidbits. It also, for me, forces me to put more content in a given post. Each item needs to be packed with potent writer-flavored antioxidants, so (as with Twitter) it demands a certain brevity.
Anyway. Here, then, are the top 25 posts of the year here at jolly old terribleminds.
Thanks for coming by here, you silly little marmosets, you. I should ask:
Let’s assume that now that the holidays have largely come and gone, folks have received e-readers aplenty. I don’t have data on this, but I’m guessing it’s true — I bet the Kindles were flying out of the Amazon warehouses like the whirring death-blades of Krull. (That’s right. A Krull reference. Suck on that, Internet.)
So. Seems like a good time to, before the new year rises out of the desert sands and opens its jagged maw to swallow us and digest us in a belly thick with temporal juices, revisit the books you read this year.
First up, last week’s challenge — “The Unexplainable Photo” — is live and worth checking out. Killer stories there. If you’re looking for the next Blackbloom challenge this week — there shan’t be one at present. The last challenge received only tepid response (I think eight total entries), which isn’t enough to sustain the challenge. My hope (assumption?) is that the holidays maybe cut into the Blackbloom stuff, so I’ll try again with the worldbuilding challenge in the new year. Check back in another two weeks. (Which means, the Create-Your-Own-Myth challenge is still open.)
For now, then, it’s all flash fiction challenges, all the way down —
Today’s challenge is simple enough.
The challenge is the phrase, “Christmas in a strange place.”
What does that mean? I dunno. Prison? A distant moon? An underwater base? A WWII submarine? Your call. That’s why it’s a challenge, after all. Oh, except the challenge is heightened:
You’ve got till tomorrow, Christmas Eve, by noon EST, to write.
Not a week, then.
Merely one day.
You have up to 1000 words, as usual. Any genre. Post at your blog, make sure we have a link. By now I expect you know the drill, but there it is, just the same.
One random participant will receive… well, I don’t know what. A holiday gift of sorts.
