Archives (page 416 of 467)

December 27, 2011 / 17 Comments

Your Top Three Books Of The Year?

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.

Your top three reads this year?

Doesn’t have to be books published in 2011.

Go.

December 23, 2011 / 36 Comments

Flash Fiction Challenge: “Christmas In A Strange Place”

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.

Now get to writing, my little elves and reindeer.

December 22, 2011 / 26 Comments

December 22nd

Was four years ago today that my father passed away, and I wrote a little something about it in one of my e-books, Revenge of the Penmonkey. Thought I’d take a piece out of that introduction and pop it here, talk a little bit about my father’s death and what that meant for me as a writer. It’s still a weird day for me and I guess that’ll never change — my father died during the holidays and so did his father (a grandfather I never met) and I know that troubled him every time this season came sneaking up on us. Well, whatever the case, here’s that thing I wrote. Thanks for reading.

* * *

A lot of stories are, at the heart, Daddy Issue stories. Star Wars. Lost. Hell, remember that scene in Die Hard where John McClane finds out that Hans Gruber is his father? I’m pretty sure I have that right.

This one is no different.

It’s not unique to writers, this story. Everybody’s got someone in their hearts they’re trying to appease. Or live up to. Or blame for their troubles. Often a parent. Or a parental figure. Or even a child.

Even when I’d finally left the day job and concentrated on writing full-time, my Dad never really seemed all that interested in hearing about my work, though he had let go of that old harangue about writing not being a real job. I figured, okay, we’ve reached a peaceful stalemate, here. I’ll keep doing what I do, and he’ll pretend I do something else and never the twain shall meet.

Cut to a couple years later. I was by that point married and the wife and I took a trip to visit my Dad at his new house in Colorado. We fished and drank margaritas and drove ATVs and hit up every lunatic yard sale we could find in the desert and the mountains and all was well.

Then came the day I met George. George, my father’s closest friend out West, maybe all over. I’d met him once before but only briefly. The wife and I returned from an ATV trip out in the BLM lands that adjoined my father’s property and there stood George in the driveway, shootin’ the shit with Dad.

We went up and started talking to George and he jumped right into talking about my writing. Animatedly. About my script work in particular but also the novels and the freelancing. He knew about all of it. Details I wouldn’t have thought my father retained, much less shared with anybody else. Then George said, “Oh, your Dad always talks about all the great things you’re doing, he’s so proud of what you’ve accomplished.”

Blink, blink.

Awestruck.

Now, maybe you get this, maybe you don’t. But to me, a son hearing that his father is proud of him—especially a father who has never been particularly forthcoming with that information—is like trumpets and fireworks and parading elephants and a marching band going through your head oomphing out your favorite song. It’s equal parts epiphany and apotheosis as all the tumblers in your lock fall into place and a big door opens up and inside the frame of that door is your father and, gods and little fishes, he’s actually proud of you. Proud enough to tell his friends about you.

It was a big moment. It was, as alcoholics describe it, a moment of clarity.

Crystalline, clean, revitalizing.

I felt like I was no longer fighting to prove something, but rather, to live up to something.

From that point forward writing became more about the promise than the protest.

* * *

Dad died about a year later. Prostate cancer that was allowed to get out of control. Got into the lymph and then took off like a shot. They thought they had it under control but it had found its way into an unholy host of his organs and things weren’t looking so hot.

In the hospital, we revisited a lot of the old stories, but I got to hear new ones, too. Like how he was involved in a knife fight at a bar, or how he helped accidentally start a small riot at Veterans Stadium during a Phillies game (and was banned fruitlessly from Phillies games in the future). A theme found its way into those stories: all the fights my father had been in. Because this was another fight, this scrap with cancer, this tangle with Death. He’d won all his skirmishes in the past and, we all imagined he’d win this skirmish, too. Worse for wear, but alive just the same.

It was maybe a week later that they put him on hospice care. My wife, my sister and I went to see him and it was really quite strange because that day everybody and their mother showed up at his house—all uncoordinated, all unbeknownest to one another. Family and co-workers and old friends.

He looked like a ghost. Could barely speak. I don’t know what meds they had him on but they were serious. At a point he lurched upright and decided to go upstairs and my uncle went with him while I waited at the bottom of the stairs. My uncle called my name. I went up. Found my father sitting there in his room, just starting to slump over.

I went to one side of him, my uncle on the other. I held the old man. Touched his neck. Felt his pulse literally stop. And then he lurched up, took a great big heaving intake of breath, as if he were emerging from the bracing waters of a frozen pond—

And that was it. Last breath. He was gone. We lifted him up and carried him to his bed and… you could tell that he wasn’t in there anymore.

* * *

Kind of fucked me up for a while, his death. It came on the heels of other deaths, too—both grandmothers, a beloved aunt. I channeled it into my writing, though not necessarily consciously. I just know that in my 20s I was only peripherally aware of death but suddenly it was something I was forced to deal with in a very big and very real way, and further, was forced to realize that I, too, was going to die some day.

I don’t want to create some kind of object lesson out of my father’s passing—it should be enough that he led and left this life, but just the same, I can’t help but find some kind of truth in there. Dad was a man who lived for his retirement. He always had his eye on that prize, always looking to the end game, and willing to endure whatever career miseries he had to endure because at the end of the tunnel was pension and social security and Colorado and hunting whenever he wanted to and the freedom to travel. And the real shame of it is, he only made it a couple-few years into that retirement, and that was that. Game over.

That’s a telling thing, a sad lesson not just for writers, but for anybody. And I recognize that it’s a lesson of some privelege, but the lesson remains true just the same: you can’t live for what’s coming, you have to live for what’s going on now. Because you don’t have any guarantees that tomorrow you won’t fall down a sinkhole or catch pneumonia or be crushed beneath a chunk of frozen shit falling off the underside of a 747 passing overhead. Life is sometimes long, but it’s also short at the same time. We only get one turn on the carousel. And so it behooves you to try to be the best person you can right now. It demands you try to go out and do the things that make you happy—not tomorrow, but today.

Because nobody knows what tomorrow may bring, or if it will come at all.

December 21, 2011 / 59 Comments

Don’t Get Burned By Branding

Been thinking a bit about “brand” recently in terms of being an author.

For illumination, we turn briefly toward Wikipedia, that cultivated encyclopedia of the commons, and there we discover that the American Marketing Association defines branding as:

“Name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers.”

Of course, you might look to an older definition —

As a verb, you might mean, “To be marked with a branding iron.”

You might further look toward one of the synonyms of the word: “stigmatize.”

Suddenly, I’m thinking less about Coca-Cola and more about a white-hot iron pressing into a beast’s flesh, the fur smoldering, the skin charring, blisters popping up like the bubbles in bubble wrap.

Not coincidentally, I now want a hamburger and a cold glass of Coke.

But that’s really neither here nor there. What I’m trying to suss out is, where does this leave an author in terms of branding himself or being branded? Is this more a symbol of what the author represents to customers, or is it instead an indelible mark scorched into the author’s metaphorical flesh?

I gotta be honest: I’m starting to lean toward the crispy char-mark than the marketing strategy. Because here’s what can happen: you write a handful of books of one type, and then you, as an author seeking to explore new territory, seeking to grow and change and spread your penmonkey ~~seed~~ wings in other genres and styles and biblio-realms, discover that, uh-oh, you’ve been branded. You’re suddenly That Guy — you’re the Guy Who Writes Splatterpunk Horror or the Girl Who Writes Scientologist Steampunk Space Erotica, and soon as you want to do differently, even once, nobody wants to hear it. More specifically, publishers don’t want to publish it — you’ve got your niche, you’ve built your fence, so now isn’t the time to stray, little pony. Don’t make us get out the shock-prods. Bzzt.

That’s not a rail against specialization, mind you — you want to forever write Hard Sci-Fi in Epistolary Format, hey, fuck it, find your bliss, little word-herder. But the moment you want to do differently, you’re going to find that brand starts to itch and burn and next thing you know you’ve got the loop of a catch-pole tightening around your neck and dragging you back to where you came from.

I mean, in 20 years do I want to be the DOUBLE DEAD guy? Fuck no. I don’t want to just write horror. Or urban fantasy. Or writing advice. I want to write it all. I want to write YA and pulp and maybe something more literary and some creative non-fiction and screenplays and TV shows and games and Martian manifestos and vile tweets and thoughtful reminiscence and — well, you get the point. I don’t want to be kept away from any story I want to tell. Put differently —

I want to write All The Words.

What’s a writer to do, then?

A few things, I think.

First: diversify early. Play the field. Write multiple things across multiple genres and establish yourself as an author who can write all kinds of awesome shit. Joe Lansdale did this early on: that guy wrote insane pulp and hard crime and funny books and short stories about Godzilla. No end to what Lansdale could do. (And I’ll note that such early diversification is easiest with short stories — you can write a lot of them quickly and get them out there in short order.)

Second: embrace self-publishing to some extent — I’m not a fan of putting all your eggs in one basket because next thing you know, those eggs are hatching and now you’re holding a basket of angry pterodactyls. See? Don’t you wish you left some eggs back at the fucking henhouse? (I think that’s the point of that old saying.) Self-publishing gives you strong authorial control over your content. You want to write a horror novel, a teen drama, and a sci-fi satire? You can. You can write all three and give them to readers and say, “Ta-da! Look what I can do!” You needn’t be contained or constrained as a self-published author.

Third: ensure that any branding you do is less about what you write and more about how you write. Your strongest marker as an author is your voice. (In fact, I’d argue we need to stop talking about Brand and start talking about Voice.) Your name and your voice should be all that matter in terms of your fiction — you find a writer you love, you should be willing to read whatever that writer writes. To bring Lansdale back into it, I’d read anything that guy writes. He could write a poem about the goddamn phonebook and I’d buy three copies. Lansdale is Lansdale — anything he writes is his and his alone. His sound, his style, his skill, it creeps into everything he does, soaking it through like a sponge. That’s what I want from an author: not genre, not a reiterative protagonist, not a ditch in which they seem forever trapped.

Am I glad Robert McCammon no longer writes strictly horror?

You betcher penmonkey ass, I am.

Don’t be burned by branding — especially branding you don’t control. Nobody puts Baby in the corner. Baby puts herself in the corner, and then when she’s done with the corner, she karate-kicks her way out of it and goes on a crazy Roadhouse adventure with the ghost of Patrick Swayze.

…uhh.

I may have lost the thread there a little bit.

All I’m saying is —

Own your voice. Live up to your name.

That’s what matters to readers.

(Related: Joelle Charbonneau talks about writing what you want to write. She also notes that our agent, Stacia Decker, encourages us to write what we want to write, which is exactly what you want in an agent.)

December 20, 2011 / 43 Comments

25 Ways For Writers To Help Other Writers

“Aww, gee shucks, mister, but you said December was the month of no mercy! Gosh and golly, talkin’ about how writers help other writers doesn’t sound too merciless, now does it?”

Oh, shut up, Beaver. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. This is the month of my boot shattering your penmonkey jaw and then I dance on your body and crush your chest with the weight of my blowhard advice.

But c’mon, son. It’s Christmas week. It’s time to spread a little holly jolly cheer.

Time to soak ourselves in Egg Nog and dance on tables, urinating nutmeggy love into one another’s eyes.

Um. … yeah. Let’s just move onto the list.

Here, then, are ways for writers to help other writers. Please to enjoy.

(And add your own in the comments!)

1. Buy Books

Writers don’t have to work very hard to get free books. It’s almost eerie — sometimes you swivel your office chair and there, on the floor behind you, is a book you never bought, a book not-yet-released, and the book whispers to you. Read me, it hisses. So, it’s important to make sure you spend some coin on books. Books by authors you know. Books by authors you don’t. Support individuals and support the ecosystem. I don’t need to tell you this — I don’t know a single writer who doesn’t buy a small freighter-load of new books every year — but, it’s worth mentioning just the same. Books, like puppies and wayward elves, need homes.

2. Tell Others To Buy The Books

For some fucking goofy-ass reason, people listen to writers. They think we know shit. (Uhh, and we totally do, heh-heh! Um. Yeah. *distracts you with a shiny tree ornament*) The assumption is that writers write books and so, writers are authorities on things like, say, books. So, when you read a good book, share the love. Doesn’t need to be #fridayreads, either — spread the gospel however you can, whenever you can.

3. Give Away Their Books

Someone not convinced that your authorial recommendations are made of gold? BOOM. FACE. Give them a book. Maybe that means giving them a book off your shelf by a writer you know and love. Maybe it means gifting them the book (and these days, gifting e-books is getting hella easy, so why not?). Sometimes it’s not about the book sale but the gentle pivoting of new readers toward favorite writers. Best way to do that is to lead by example: “Here is a book. You will read it. I have a gun.”

4. Offer To Read

We all have scripts and books and poetry and all manner of the written word that exists without reflection — we write it and we’ve no idea how it really is. It helps to have others take a look at it, see if we’re crazy, or geniuses, or crazy geniuses, or whether we’re just, y’know, pudding-brained dipshits. Sometimes it helps to have a fellow writer with all her writerly skills at the fore to come take a look inside the monster and see if and how the beast purrs — or if it’s just coughing up a mucusy hairball. *kack*

5. Sweet, Sweet Blurbage

I’ve recently gone out asking for blurbs, re: BLACKBIRDS, and boy howdy is it a shameless booty-shake — you’re saying, “Here, please carve time out of your life to read my novel of dubious distinction and then provide me with not just your thoughts but your thoughts distilled down into market-savvy nuggets of book-selling goodness.” Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t necessarily bad for the blurber — hell, I’ve had the chance to blurb three novels recently (Forbeck’s CARPATHIA, Blackmoore’s CITY OF THE LOST, Christopher’s EMPIRE STATE) that reminded me why I love books in the first place. So, as a writer, be nice and offer blurbs where possible. I mean, don’t blurb a novel you don’t like (or, worse, haven’t read), but if you’re into it — blurb it. And man, “blurb” is a strange word. I AM EMPEROR BLURB OF PLANET BLURB BEWARE MY BLURB ARMY! … no, I dunno. I really shouldn’t be allowed to write blog posts at 6:00AM on Sunday morning. Someone out there better send me some coffee. And fast.

6. Recommend Them To An Agent

Sure, some authors get agents the old-fashioned way — you write the book, you query, they want the manuscript, they read the manuscript, you send them cookies and bacon and a cigar box full of money and/or embarrassing pictures, and voila, you have an agent. But some agents only work on referrals, and so it behooves some authors — when they find a book-and-author combo they believe in — to recommend that author to an agent. Help forge those relationships.

7. Recommend Them To An Editor

Some writers work with (and require the services of) independent editors — once you find just such an editor, it’s like gold in your pocket. Share the wealth, then: tell fellow authors that if they need a good editor, then as it turns out you know just the one. The editor will thank you, too. With a puppy. It’s in all the editor-author contracts: each referral gets the author a new puppy. I’m sure I didn’t just dream that.

8. Get Them Work

We’ve all seen them camped out on bridges and beneath underpasses: a grungy rag-worn army of lost penmonkeys holding up signs, “WILL MAKE UP SHIT FOR FOOD,” or “I FOUGHT IN THE SELF-PUBLISHING WARS OF 2012 AND LOST BOTH EYES.” Here, then, is a “teach a man to fish” situation — if you have work to offer or work you’re passing on, it’s always nice to recommend another writer for that work.

9. Point Them Toward Opportunity

A variant of the above, if you know of a cool opportunity — a nifty anthology, a new lit-blog, a script contest, a chance to write the next Denny’s menu — then point them toward it. Share the wealth of possibility.

10. Buy Them A Drink

Whether we’re talking a cup of tea, coffee, Tito’s vodka or the tears of a grieving unicorn, writers will always always always appreciate a drink procured by a fellow penmonkey.

11. Buy Them A Meal

We’ve seen the commercials. The Sarah McLachlan music cues up. Aaaarrrms ooooof an Angel… and then we get a parade of images: hungry writers gnawing on manuscripts, caged, wild-eyed and apparently starving. And then you’re like, “Man, for a bunch of hungry guys they sure look a little fat.” Never mind that. We’ll appreciate a meal from time to time. If you’re having a good year, buy a meal. Cosmically and karmically, this should pass its way down: next time you’re having a bad year, a writer should appear and procure for you a free meal, too. That’s Penmonkey Law. That’s Holy Writ. Goddamnit.

12. Buy Them An Annual Health Care Plan

We writers probably have like, scoliosis or scurvy or syphilis and could really use a bestselling author to be our patron saint and buy us a yearly health care plan. I kid, I kid — but here’s where I don’t kid. Sometimes writers do fall into bad times, and that means they do genuinely need a leg up with medical bills. It’s helpful when other writers come to their aid, maybe organizing a fund (small or large) to help cover some costs.

13. Be A Sounding Board

Sometimes writers just want to talk shit out — does this plot work? Is this a good move? Will you listen to my pitch? Do you know anything about this publisher or this studio? Have you seen my pants? Have you seen my shame? Did I leave my shame in the pocket of my pants? Writers uniquely understand other writers, and so it behooves writers to listen to other writers.

14. Advise Them (When They Want Advice)

Sometimes it isn’t about listening but actually about offering advice. Writers are uniquely placed to understand the troubles of other writers, so it makes sense to not, you know, ask advice from a plumber or that toothless homeless lady who keeps dead mice in a mason jar. Just the same, unsolicited advice usually isn’t appreciated. From anybody. For anybody. Ever. Trust me on this one.

15. Fuck It, Just Talk To Them

It’s not always about being a sounding board. Writers are lonely little penmonkeys — we do not travel in packs or tribes or swing from tree to tree with our hooting brethren. Our day-to-day necessitates we operate in relative isolation, and so sometimes we just want to talk. To someone. About anything. Writers talking to other writers means both writers get to emerge from solitary confinement for a little while. That’s referred to as a “win-win.” Or maybe an “ook-ook.” I dunno. Don’t look at me. I’m not wearing pants.

16. Give Them Space To Crash… At Your Blog

Just as some writers do book tours, they also do blog tours — hopping from blog to blog, exposing themselves (er, not like that, you filthy little scum-badger) to different audiences in order to hopefully gain some new fans and friends and thump their drum without spending tons of bank in the process. Offer up your blog for that purpose to writers you dig and respect if need be. Share the digital space when possible.

17. Give Them Space To Crash… On Your Couch

Like I said: some writers do book tours. Or maybe they need to visit a place to do research or meet with publishers or escape extradition for their crimes against humanity. Either way, it helps from time to time to offer up your couch or a dog-bed or a spider-infested root cellar. I’m not suggesting you run a halfway house or something: your home needn’t be an Author Hotel for Wayward Writers. But for friends and colleagues, you’ll help them save a little money and likely earn crash-space on their couch if ever needed.

18. Defend Them From Trolls

Writers are sometimes Internet magnets for those Human Canker Sores known as “trolls,” and it helps to have other writers rise to the defense (though, of course, one should always be careful not to feed the trolls, too). Mostly it’s just, stand tall for your penmonkey brethren. You feel me?

19. Help Them Hide The Bodies

Sometimes an Internet flame war gets out of control and next thing you know, you’ve gone and killed a couple guys. We writers are inventive folks, and so it behooves us to bring the full creative weight of our critical thinking skills to bear on the task of helping our author buddies bury some motherfucking bodies. Uhh. I mean, this is all totally metaphorical. Totally. … Unrelated: anybody have a pickup truck?

20. If You Don’t Have Anything Nice To Say…

Hey, we all come across books we don’t like or writers we don’t respect. I’ve seen writers slag on Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown — and, trust me, I’m not a fan of either writer. But you get little value out of bagging on other authors, even if they appear to be easy targets. If writers are accepted curators of literary culture, then it pays to point people toward the Good Stuff and instead happily ignore all the Crap Stuff. Do we even need to talk about Dan Brown or Stephenie Meyer? No, we probably don’t. Instead use your time to point readers toward awesome writers, instead. Be a fountain, not a drain.

21. Eschew Public Arguments

It’s best not to get on hot, sweaty writer-on-writer arguments. Nobody wins when writers fight. Except cats. I don’t comprehend the correlation, but whenever writers argue, cats gain more lives. True story!

22. Assist With Technological Challenges

It’s like that line from Ferris Bueller: “The Internet moves fast. If you don’t stop and learn about the newest coolest thing, you’ll be advertising your books on a Myspace page or a Geocities blog while you sink deep into the tar pits with all the other mighty reptiles.” I think that’s the quote. Point being, the ground is changing beneath the author’s feet these days — from social media to self-publishing, from HTML5 to transmedia, we’ve things we need to learn and those things will pile up into a wibbly-wobbly heap if it goes unattended. Other writers are equipped to share and teach about this heretical realm.

23. Share Your Penmonkey Experiences

At blogs like this I try to lay down the tracks of my penmonkey experiences — a trail of ink-soaked breadcrumbs not meant to demonstrate the One True Way but rather, to demonstrate one way through the dark forest of the authorial existence. I think it behooves writers to share that kind of information — to entertain, enlighten, and maybe to bring a little data to this otherwise rudderless life.

24. Kill In Their Name

Um. What? I didn’t say anything. I’m definitely not, uhh, asking you guys to kill in my name and drape the corpses upon altars made of my books. Totally don’t do that. That’d be aweso… awful.

25. Be A Pal, Pal

The world is a tough old bird. It’s not that writers have it uniquely terrible — hell, if you believe Forbes magazine, we’re some of the happiest job-having folks out there. Just the same, sometimes life throws an extra punch or two and leaves us with a bad review or a dead publishing deal or the other slings and arrows of everyday living. As such, it pays for writers to throw other writers a kind note — in short, just be a pal, pal. This writer thing we do benefits from the loose and uncertain bonds of community, but it’s on us to create and confirm that community — we must be self-driven to exit our caves and put on some pants (metaphorically, because, c’mon, fuck pants) and form bonds with other penmonkeys in the name of fellowship. If we want this thing we do to survive and thrive, we do it together, not separate.

* * *

Did you know that Chuck has a small army of writing-related e-books available? Each brined in a salty spice mix of profanity, inchoate rage, and liquor? Check ’em out, won’t you?

Try: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY

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

Or its sequel: REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY

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

And: 250 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WRITING

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

Or the newest: 500 WAYS TO BE A BETTER WRITER

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