Archives (page 420 of 466)

November 24, 2011 / 21 Comments

The Day In Which We Give Thanks (And High-Five Diabetes)

Ahh, turkey day.

Day of excess. Day of family. Day of tryptophan. Day of carbs. Day of gratitude.

This year, the holidays are different for me. I don’t want to say I fell out of touch with the holidays, but the once bright and burnished edge had grown dull, its edge gone soft — there’s only so many times you can celebrate these holidays before it all starts to feel a little samey-samey, a little, “All right, I know how this is going to go, and it’s nice, and I’m not complaining, but maybe next year we could have some fireworks or hula dancers or some shit. Maybe? Anybody? No? Okay.”

This year, I have a son. And while he will not experience the full-bore joy-assault of these holidays given that he’s a wee six-months-old, I still get to vicariously place my eyeballs inside his eyeballs and witness the whole thing anew. The old dried skin of holidays past is flaking off like so much snow, like so much flaky pumpkin pie crust, and the skin beneath is bright and pink and soft and untouched by the calluses formed by so much reiterative experience.

Baby’s first Thanksgiving, then. That’s what I’m thankful for. Thankful for the whole baby experience, obviously. The boy’s a weird little wonder. He sings weird baby whale songs at night. He squeaks and laughs when you do unexpected things (a couple weeks ago, it was tearing celery, yesterday it was my mother-in-law tipping over a toy giraffe). He bounces. He tries to walk. He’s half-crawling now, dragging himself across the floor. He can sit up by himself for three seconds. Can stand up by himself if you give him something to hold onto. He grabs everything. He flings it to the floor or — in a true choose-your-own-adventure-mode — pops it in his mouth. He eats a bucketload of baby food now — he just keeps opening his mouth waiting for more to be delivered to his nom-nom unit. He’s cute. He’s weird. He’s our son. And I’m thankful for him and for my wife and the dog and my whole wonderful family unit.

Even through the crying jags and sleepless nights and diapers so laden and leaden you could use one to bludgeon a bear, even through all the madness and confusion and wibbly-wobbly schedules —

I’m thankful.

Of course, just as it’s important we give thanks, I think it’s also important we sometimes vent spleen. Because one cannot know light without first tasting darkness. Therefore, one cannot know gratitude unless he knows its opposite: face-melting incoherent rage.

No, seriously, I’m not all that spleen-venty this year, but here’s two things that are tickling my pink parts with a rusted wire brush: first, my goddamn glasses broke. Oh, no, not like, one of the important parts — not the lens, not the frame, not the part that hangs over my ear. No, one of the little nose guards. Not just the pad, though, but the whole little tiny micro-nubbin to which the pad connects. Snapped right off. And now my glasses sit lopsided. And constantly irritate that part of the bridge of my nose. First world problems, I recognize, but GNARRGGGHSSSRBLE it’s under my skin.

Number two: TV commercials. I avoid commercials whenever possible, but I’m amazed at how often commercials now focus on users-of-said-products who are just total dicks to one another. One assumes that I’m supposed to find that the people on the screen using the products advertised are meant to be proxies of me, the target of said advertising. And yet, so many of these potential proxies are awful humans. Mean to family, mean to friends, dicking each other over, basically execrable human beings. They steal each other’s candy bars and lie to one another and torment their children. So, there you go. I hate awful people in commercials who do not receive their comeuppance.

I also hate the new Old Navy commercial, which makes use of the term “Gobblepalooza.”

Which is really quite porny, if you ask me.

Well, whatever.

If you feel so inclined, do drop into the comments and tell us:

a) One thing for which you’re thankful

b) One thing which earns your ire and demands a right good spleen-venting!

DO IT DO IT NOW OR THE TURKEY GETS IT

Ohh. Ohh. Too late. Turkey got it.

Happy Thanksgiving, tmeeps.

November 23, 2011 / 61 Comments

That One Writer Who Changed Everything For You

Anne McCaffrey passed away at age 85, and it’s always sad when the world loses a great author. I’d only read one of her books (the first Pern) and liked it well enough, but it was a long time ago and for some reason I responded better to Dune at the time. But I know her work really inspired and affected a lot of readers and future writers, and that’s a powerful thing.

So, it seems a good time to devote some air time to those writers that really affected you, whose work still resonates with you, whose work maybe changed you in some fashion.

I say “one writer,” but that doesn’t really need to be the case. Can be one, can be several.

So: who?

What writers affected you deeply, straight through the heart and clean to the soul?

How? Why? What books? What was the effect of those books?

Honor them here if you are so inclined.

November 22, 2011 / 92 Comments

25 Reasons Readers Will Quit Reading Your Story

I’m a total prick when it comes to reading these days. Novels, comics, scripts, anything. Having a writing career and a six-month-old child and a burgeoning ~~heroin~~ er ~~pornography~~ er Skyrim habit leaves me with less time to read than I’d like — so, when I hunker down over a story, my first (and admittedly worst) inclination is to actively seek reasons to put it down. Seriously. Imagine you came to my door and were selling cookies or Bibles or weird rhino-based aphrodesiacs and you open the door and there I stand with a pistol in your face and I’m all like, “Make your pitch, but say one wrong thing — if you even blink in a way I find disagreeable — then I’m going to shoot your face through your head.”

I went to a Christopher Moore signing way back when and the man said something there that stuck with me, and I’m paraphrasing the exact details but the notion remains true just the same:

If you can get someone to finish the first page, they’ll finish the second. If they finish the second page, they’ll get to page ten. If they get to page ten they’ll get to page 30, if they get to page 30 they’ll get to the halfway point of the book, and so on and so forth. The idea is that with each page of strong writing and good storytelling you’re buying time from the reader on credit. And your credit line increases the further they get and the more completely you grab the reader’s attention.

Lose their attention and they’re going to put that book down. And go do something else, since we are creatures bombarded with entertainment choices, from games to Netflix to sports to coked-up monkey fights in the back alley behind the methadone clinic.

Last week I told you the reasons you’ll keep readers hooked, but now comes the time to look at the reasons you might lose your readers. These are, at least for me, the reasons I’ll close your book and not return.

1. At Best: First Chapter, At Worst: First Page

If I’m feeling gracious, I’ll give you the first chapter to lose me. If I’m in a bad mood, you’ve got one page. Maybe less. In fact, that’s often how I determine what new books I’ll pick up: I’ll read the first couple pages of a Kindle sample or of the book in the store. I’ll know then and there if this is a book I’m going to want to read or want to drop-kick into a barrel fire. A first page or chapter that doesn’t hook me — doesn’t introduce an engaging premise or a fascinating character or fails to wow me with its seductive prose — tells me the rest of the book isn’t going to be much better. Make those first pages count. It’d be like going out on a blind date dressed in your ugliest outfit. “I know. The Spongebob cardigan and my old dirty Cherokee moccassins do not a strong impression make, but if you just get to know me…” BZZT. Wrongo, mutant. I’m not going to take the time to get to know you. Please leave, you smell like sour cabbage.

2. Typos And Errors

Pay attention, self-publishers: if your work is riddled with typos or grammatical errors, you’ve gone and ruined it. Doesn’t matter how inventive your story is if you cannot communicate it using the essential tools a writer is given. You can have the coolest idea for a house in the world but if you hand in blueprints drawn in shaky crayon I’m not going to let you build it for me. Bad craft kills good stories.

3. Introducing: Mister Snoozeworthy And Missus Snorebucket

Ugh. Nothing worse than a character duller than pre-chewed cardboard. Characters without strong motivation? Characters who are passive rather than active (meaning they experience the story rather than drive the story)? Characters who are indistinguishable from one another (or worse, indistinguishable from a room swathed in beige paint)? Blech. Blargh. Fnuh. No. This, by the way, is the danger of the Everyman protagonist: go too generic and “common man experience” and you rob from the character all the things that make him interesting and unique.

4. Prose Limp And Lifeless As Driveway Earthworms

You know when it rains, all those sad earthworms come crawling out and then when the rains pass the asphalt is littered with the lifeless gray water-logged mush of worm carcasses? Yeah, don’t let your prose be that. Don’t let your prose be as interesting as gray worms on gray macadam on a gray day. Bring life to language. Look at the shape it takes on the page. Find variety. Take risks. Most important: be confident. Wishy-washy prose that refuses to assert itself and relies on junk language and passive constructions to convey a story is prose that might choke that very story.

5. Awk! Awk! Awk!

Awkward language: when the quality and clarity of your prose fails to meet the intention of the writer. Put differently, it’s when your writing is clunky, clumsy, and the greatest sin of all, unclear. If I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me, I will put a bullet in your book’s brain and bury it out by the marigolds.

6. A Web Spun By A Drunken Spider

Confusing and illogical plots stop me dead. Newsflash: I need to know what’s going on. And what’s going on needs to actually make some fucking sense. I don’t want to feel like I’m machete-chopping my way through your snarled and tangled pubic thatch just to get to the good stuff.

7. All Answers, No Questions

Certain things kill the mystery in a new relationship. It’s why on the first date you don’t leave the bathroom door open and let your potential new mate see you, erm, taking out the biological garbage. “I need to go change into something comfortable. And I also have to poop. Wanna watch?” The mystery is dead. The romance? Stabbed in the face by too much information. “TMI” applies to fiction, too — if I’m reading your book and you’re hellbound to give away all the secrets and answers right from word one, then I’m going to catch the whiff of narrative desperation and end the date early. Don’t let your book show me its poop-squat.

8. Too Many Questions, Not Enough Answers

On the other hand, too much mystery spoils the soup. “What’s in this stew?” “I’m not telling.” “It tastes weird. Is this a fingernail?” “Wouldn’t you like to know.” Yes. Yes, actually, I would like to know.” Look at a TV show like Lost, which for the first several seasons introduced a freaky new mystery every episode but failed to address, um, any of the prior mysteries. There comes a point when you as the reader become pretty sure the storyteller is just fucking with you, and while that’s the storyteller’s job, it’s also the storyteller’s job to mask that role. I don’t want to feel like the storyteller is behind me spitting in my hair.

9. My Character Will Now Infodump Into Your Mouth

Expositional dialogue. Where characters explain everything that’s going on, even to those inside the story that don’t need the update. AKA AYKB: “As You Know, Bob.” Heavy exposition is like stealing all the oxygen from the room. You stole all the air for yourself and left the reader none at all. Bonafide story killer.

10. Carpet Doesn’t Match The Curtains

Internal consistency means something for writers. All the parts have to play well together — if you’ve got tone running with scissors and plot running the other way with a bucket on his head, and the dialogue doesn’t match the characters and the theme feels like it’s been hastily staplegunned to the story’s head, readers feel that. They know that the stars are out of alignment. And if they’re like me, they’ll drop your book like it’s a soup can full of cranky bees.

11. The Broken Mirror Effect

I had this problem recently with a draft of a novel: all the plot pieces made sense, they just didn’t work together to carry the overall story forward. No throughline could be felt — each was a sad little boat bobbling independently of all the other boats, no lash nor chain connecting them, each drifting in separate directions. It felt, as my agent put it, episodic: and she’s right. Put differently, a story is best when it’s like a wolf-pack rather than a herd of cats. The wolf pack features separate wolves who move together. The cat-herd has no unity and each cat scatters. Because cats can be real dicks.

12. Rolling In The Same Muddy Wheel Ruts

If I feel like I’ve seen this before — that the story doesn’t even make a go at being original and is just another vampire tween romance or Bourne Identity rip-off or sexy equine cyborg erotica — then I’m done, I’m out, game over, goodbye. Bring something new to the table, even if what’s “new” is in the arrangement.

13. Strangled All The Fun With Dirty Lampcord

Every story needn’t be a laugh riot. It’s not even humor I’m looking for. But if your story fails to have even the tiniest glimmer of fun in it, I must politely eject. Even the darkest and most nihilistic tales need that little starburst of fun or humor — not only to break up the darkness but also to serve as contrast to the darkness. The darkness is meaningless if we don’t have any light for comparison.

14. It’s A Problem-Free Colostomy: Spoon-Up-My-Bottom

(Sung to the tune of, Hakuna Matata.) Just as yeast thrives on sugar and babies thrive on the sleepless frustration of their parents, a story and its readers thrive on conflict. Conflict is essential to a story, and yet it’s far too often I read stories that feel like the conflict has all the sturm und drang of a ball-less scrotum. “John wanted a robot pony and so he went and bought a robot pony” is a story, yes, but it’s a piss-poor one. Conflict is the fuel that drives the narrative engine. If your conflict is tepid and soft, the narrative will be, too. Which means: DELETED.

15. The Tiger Changes Its Stripes

Story pivots and narrative shifts are good. Usually. A story that defies what it’s been all along and becomes something entirely different can work and can be totally rock-awesome: but it can also betray the audience. (The book did well, so this is a clear example of how subjective this stuff is, but a book that did this to me was THE PASSAGE. No spoilers but mid-way through the tale experiences a dramatic shift, so much so it felt like an entirely different and possibly unrelated book. That horse bucked me into the mud.)

16. Death, The Thief Of Conflict

A character dies without meaning or purpose in the story? I’m jarred, jostled, shaken, speechless. And not always in a sexy, erotic asphyxiation kind of way. Listen, if one of the primary reasons I’m digging your story is a particular character and then you rob me of that character without warning or meaning, you might lose me. Yes, random and senseless death can have a purpose, but not easily, and not often. If we are to assume that the character is the vehicle by which the reader travels through the story, then a sudden death of such a character is akin to us wrecking our vehicle. A bad call, Ripley. A bad call.

17. Giant Paragraphs Smashing Into Other Giant Paragraphs

RAAAAR PARAGRAPH SMASH. Your prose is not a boulder to drop on somebody’s head. I’m not saying long paragraphs are by themselves a problem — sometimes, it’s what’s for dinner. But if every page is naught but a neverending series of cement blocks comprising turgid prose, then you haven’t written a novel: you’ve written the literary equivalent to a hot Ambien toddy. (Though with fewer hallucinogenic freak-outs, sadly.) Characters don’t need to speak in lectures. Describing a rocking chair or a cab driver should not take you half-a-chapter. The shape of the prose on the page matters; it should show variety, have erratic and inconsistent shape. Beware massive text blocks. Like boat anchors they drag the story’s momentum.

18. Copypasta

If I feel like your characters are stereotypes — Hooker with a heart of gold! Tortured angsty good-guy vampire! Pantsless author who rants about booze and profanity! — then I’m out. I will wipe my hands of your trite and tepid tale and go, I dunno, drink tequila and curse at the skies. The way you elevate characters out of stereotype is to make them complex and layered. Defy convention!

19. A Hollow Emotional Core

We all need to relate to your story and the characters that populate it. We have various in-roads toward such identification but one key one is the tale’s emotional core. We’re emotional creatures and so it becomes easy to find a common thread — no, I may not understand what it’s like to be a mailman or a secret agent or a sapient moon-tree, but if those characters play off of common emotional hooks (jealousy, rage, triumph, bliss, etc.) then we’re good. The problem is when I can’t find that in a story: some tales are too guarded and refuse to let me in. They’re all action, with everything living on the surface. No, thank you.

20. All The Energy Of An Incontinent Basset Hound

If your story ambles about like an old man out on a Sunday walk (or worse, a Sunday drive), then your story has all the urgency of feeding pigeons. And feeding pigeons is not a particularly urgent activity, unless of course the pigeons are bloodthirsty and what you’re feeding them is bullets. (I’d totally read that.) Stories need to feel urgent: you’re capturing these moments for a reason.

21. Don’t Want To Shack Up With These Characters

Characters don’t need to be likable, but they must be livable — I’m hanging with them for 300 pages (or in a film, two hours) and so they must be someone I want to hang out with. Truly vile characters? Execrable fuckers? Boring dillholes? Characters who do things that completely turn me off? That’s how you lose me. My studio apartment with the clanging pipes and the tricky faucets goes from “charming and quaint” to “I’m packing my bags” soon as it’s infested with roaches. By the way, I don’t really live in a studio apartment. I live in a treehouse. With a goat-faced gentleman named Professor Hoofstomp Q. Whiskerchinny!

22. Busted-Ass Broke-Down POV

Who’s talking? Did we switch characters? Different POV? Did that just jump from first to third? Are we in someone’s head now? Wait, did Betty rescue John, or did John rescue Betty? Keep track of your goddamn POV, people. Like I said before, keeping a reader in the story is like keeping a fish on the line: you go cocking up the point-of-view and you’ll set me free. Giving me plenty of time to go gloomily play with myself.

23. A Pulled Punch Sandwich

I can feel when an author is pulling punches, when the story is the narrative equivalent of lobbing softballs. This isn’t about being edgy or hardcore, I only mean to suggest that I know when the author is treating his plot and his characters — and, by proxy, the audience — gingerly. He’s not taking any risks. No danger in plot, no conflict for the characters, no risk in the prose one writes. Go big or go the fuck home. Every book is in competition with every other book, movie, comic book, porn movie, and breakfast cereal in existence. Put your back and your heart into it, goddamnit. Stop phoning it in.

24. I’m Not Your Audience

Sometimes, the break-up is like a real life break-up: “It’s not you. It’s me.” I’m just not digging your story because it’s not mine to dig. And that’s okay. You can’t please everybody. I mean, I can. Because I have fingers like French ticklers and seven hundred tongues. You, however, are beholden to your mortal form.

25. It’s Just A Bad Book

On the other end, sometimes like a real life break-up it’s all your goddamn fault. Once again this is leveled more squarely at self-publishers, but it’s also (if with reduced frequency) true of some “traditionally” published novels — a bad book is a bad book. What I’m talking about is genuine dog-fuck writing, shit-basket characters, a spastic control of language, a fumbling numb-nutted grasp of grammar and spelling, and an overall muffin-headed window-licking approach to storytelling. Not subjectively bad, mind you, but objectively terrible. If I see a book like this, obviously, clearly, plainly I must escape it’s foul mire and put the book down. In fact, if any of you see a book like this, it should be killed with fire, and the ashes should be shoved in a hermetically-sealed tube and then launched into the heart of a volcano.

Your turn. Do me a favor: get down into the comments and tell the world what reasons you have for putting a book down. What have you encountered that’s stopped your reading enjoyment dead?

* * *

Want another booze-soaked, profanity-laden shotgun blast of dubious writing advice?

Try: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY

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Or its sequel: REVENGE OF THE PENMONKEY

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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

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November 21, 2011 / 22 Comments

When Life Gives You Dragons, Make Dragonade: Scenes From Skyrim

It’s night.

A light snow falls.

I’m on a quest with — well, I forget his name. Farklas? Firkas? Whatever it is, we’ve just exited some skanky hoarfrost grotto after cleaning the place out of whatever assholes lurked within.

Then I hear it — thwip — the sound of an arrow narrowly missing my skull.

I see Farkleberry run off. Which means, of course, he’s running towards danger.

Next thing I know, we’re ascending some steps just as some bandits are descending and oh, it’s on, it’s on like Donkey Kong playing Ping Pong while eating Egg Foo Yong. I’m targeting shadows in the dark with my bow. Notch an arrow. Time slows. Pop. Bandit’s head snaps back with an arrow in the cheek. Eat a dick, bandit. Eat a big old arrow-shaped dick.

I’ve no idea where Tackleberry is.

But then I hear it — a shriek.

It’s familiar but I’ve little time to think about it. I’ve got some blue-glowing magic-slinging knob-gobbler all up in my grill, trying to chill my bones with his ice-doom magic.

Then: the shriek again.

The shriek is no longer distant — it is upon us.

FWOOSH.

The screen lights up with fire! What the fuck? I stagger backward out of the flame, see the wizardy knob-gobbler is being roasted right there on the spot by a whooshing plume of flame.

Flame coming from a dragon’s mouth. A dragon that landed, ohh, about ten feet away from me.

Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit.

I backpedal. Screaming like a little girl that just got peed on by a tiger at the zoo (and yes, I’ve seen that, and it is indeed a story for another time). I let fly with arrows, many as I can sling into the dragon’s skull.

The dragon takes flight once more. My arrows find no purchase as he soars into the sky.

And suddenly all is quiet: the bandits are gone or dead. Fucklas is gone, too — I’ve no idea where he is.

But one thing I know: I’m not letting this dragon get away. Because if I kill this dragon, I can eat his soul like it’s a big bowl of dragon-flavored ice cream. And from it, I can gain power: the power to breathe fucking fire. I want that. I need that. So, I spy the dragon in the sky, and I give chase.

The dragon lands in the distance. The beast illuminated by his own fiery breath, breath that blasts against some lone warrior standing against the draconian wretch —

Oh, holy shit. It’s Scott Farkus.

I bolt toward him in time to see him fall.

The dragon spies me. Takes flight. Circles. Again evading my arrows. Thwip thwip thwip.

Then — boom.

Beast behind me. I’m burning. On fire. All parts of me, going crispy.

I run. I’m not ready for this. I’m almost out of health potions. My life dwindles. But the dragon, ohhh, he’s quite persistent, and this motherfucker is up again and soaring above my head, and here I am stumbling around in the dark, panting and out of breath, and suddenly the dragon lands directly in front of me —

And then I see two shapes. One to my right. One to my left.

Huge shambling shadows.

I’ve stumbled into the middle of two massive wooly mammoths.

As an aside, it appears mammoths care little for dragons. I don’t know why this is, precisely. Perhaps because mammoths received swirlies from said dragon in elementary school? Maybe the dragon ate all the mammoth’s candy, or stole his keys, or pooped in the mammoth’s chafing dish. Maybe it’s just because mammoths are flammable as fuck and see dragons as a natural enemy.

Whatever the reason, the two mammoths — both high-powered Snuffalupaguses each — decide to get in on the action. Much to the chagrin of the dragon. The two mammoths tear the dragon a new asshole as I sit comfortably ensconced between my two shaggy impromptu bodyguards, flinging arrows into the hell-lizard. And my final arrow pierces the dragon’s head. The beast falls. His body catches fire and his essence is vacuumed into my body.

That, to me, is the essence of Skyrim.

The game does what I like games to do in terms of storytelling: it lets me assemble the story of my own telling. I don’t mind a game that has its own story to tell, but the games to which I really respond are the ones that give me all the pieces and let me put them together according to my own style of play. It cedes some narrative authority to me.

It’s in this way that the Elder Scrolls games have a lot in common with Minecraft, actually — both say, “Hey. Here’s a giant world. The map you have is incomplete. Feel free to wander around. Do the things we suggest. Or don’t. We don’t care. This is your world — we just put it here. Build. Craft. Fight. Run. Oh, and watch out — the monsters come out at night.” Hell, both games have dragons, now. Minecraft obviously takes the Elder Scrolls freedom and amps it up, but is also removes all external narrative elements. Skyrim has a story to tell; it just doesn’t care if you participate. Minecraft is rudderless, an entirely unregulated narrative experience.

If Minecraft is Skyrim’s spiritual cousin, then in a sense, Dragon Age I & II is Skyrim’s opposite — not in a bad way, mind, but in a way that’s worth noting. Where Skyrim puts before you an open world whose every physical and geographical component is a story-building element, Dragon Age (and other Bioware RPGs) offers a closed world with limited pathways whose game is in how you piece together the pre-defined story elements. In Dragon Age, the story is the game. (Which is its own kind of awesome.)

Skyrim says, “We have this big story and all these little stories and you can weave in and out of them or avoid them all day long. The map is big. Your legs work. Go find adventure.”

Dragon Age says, “We have this big story and all these little stories and you cannot escape them but what you can do is fiddle with the pieces and put them together in the order and fashion you desire. The map is small and the path is limited but the story is rich, so wade in and we’ll give you adventure.”

Both approaches are brilliant.

But right now, I’m excited by the overall openness of Skyrim. As evidenced by my account above. The above example is by no means the only random thing that occurred. Every session, a new weird adventure I stumble into. Some guy runs up to me on the road and tells me he wants to give me something for safe-keeping, but then a bandit chief descends from a steep hill and cleaves the dude in the head with an axe, killing him in one blow. Or I’m trudging toward an icy mountain temple and there on the path is a howling, pissed off ice troll and he chases me down toward one of the mountain altars and there at the altar is a pilgrim praying and suddenly she’s up and chopping into the troll with an axe that crackles with electricity. (She dies, of course. And I pillage her zap-axe.)

So grows the wonder of an open world with seemingly endless corners of things to do, monsters to slay, stories to experience, and wooly mammoth gangstas who will help you fuck up a bad-ass dragon.

November 18, 2011 / 75 Comments

Flash Fiction Challenge: “Frog Powder Seagull Tower Scissors”

And here we are again.

It is time, my little scrunchies, to conjure for the world another dab, another dollop, of some flash fiction.

Once again, you have five words to play with:

Frog

Powder

Seagull

Tower

Scissors.

You need to choose only one of those five words.

Yes, that’s right. Only one.

That one word must feature prominently in your fiction, whether directly or as a clear and forthright inspiration. You do not have 1,000 words but rather, you have 100. A hundred words, no more. That way, nobody will be taken away from NaNoWriMo if they’re participating for more than a mere handful of words.

Any genre will do.

Post your entries into the comment section below.

You’ve got till Friday, Black Friday, to turn in your entries. By noon EST.

I’m going to pick my favorite out of the bunch. That person will get both SHOTGUN GRAVY and IRREGULAR CREATURES as e-books. I’ll pick the winner sometime that following weekend.

Get to writing, fictioneers.

November 17, 2011 / 15 Comments

Matt Forbeck: The Terribleminds Interview

Matt Forbeck is one crazy dude. Crazy like a fox. Crazy like a dude with a powerful brain parasite that serves him and provides him awesome creative powers in its symbiotic grip. What hasn’t Matt written? He’s written novels, games, comics, designed toys, penned whole encyclopedias. I don’t think he’s missing much on his resume except maybe “HVAC instructions” and “Communist manifesto.” Matt’s approach is not dissimilar from my own: write everything, and feed the family doing it. He’s a writer to whom you should be listening. You can find him at Forbeck.com, or @MForbeck on the Twitters. And, should you be so inclined to support his 12-for-12 endeavor, the Kickstarter is live and looking for funds.

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.

Hemingway famously wrote a complete short story in six words to win a bet. It goes, “For sale: baby shoes, never used.”

I came up with a version of my own that features zombies. It goes:

“Brains!”

BLAM!

Click.

Why do you tell stories?

I’m a full-time professional writer, so the easy answer is “Money.” That’s not the real reason, of course. If I only cared about money, I’d take up investment banking.

I tell stories because I love seeing patterns in the world and figuring out how to make them as entertaining as I can. Stories are all about winnowing down the information life throws at you, finding the elements that mean something, and then weaving them together into a narrative. Sometimes you get to use those to make up things from whole cloth, but the process is much the same, and I get such a kick out of doing it.

I don’t know if I’d write if I had to do it for free. It’s a lot of work, and it takes me away from other things, like my wife and kids, but there’s no way you could stop me from telling stories.

Give the audience one piece of writing or storytelling advice:

Have fun with it. If you can’t enjoy writing the story, how can you expect your reader to enjoy reading it? That doesn’t mean every story has to be a rollercoaster ride of laughs, but you have to find a reason to love it. If you do, then others can too.

Got any advice for those wanting to become professional writers?

Stick to it. The worst thing anyone can say to you is “No,” and that’s not all that bad in the end. You’ll get a lot of that at first, and it’ll slack off as you improve your craft and your understanding of what the market (i.e. readers) wants.

Lots of people will tell you not to quit your day job, and I understand that. I never started the day job in the first place, which meant the transition from starving student to struggling writer had not even a speed bump for me. If you’re going to take risks like that, I say do them when you’re young, too ignorant to know better, and have far less to lose. It gets harder later, I’m told.

What’s great about being a writer, and conversely, what sucks about it?

Besides the fact I get to do what I love for a living — which is hard to beat — I adore the flexibility it gives me. I have a lot of kids at home (five, including a 9-year-old set of quadruplets), and being able to work out of my home gives me the kind of flexibility I need to be the best father I can to them. I can’t imagine how I’d hold down a regular job and manage it.

I could tell you all sorts of things that suck about it, but that would be whining about a job I love. I don’t think I could stomach it any more than your readers. It’s a challenge in many ways, sure, but I enjoy the challenges. That’s part of what makes it worth doing.

I have to ask, then: you’ve got quads, for Crom’s sake, so if anybody’s going to have some interesting parenting advice, it’s you. So, cough it up. Don’t keep the secrets to yourself.

I could write a book on this (and maybe someday will), but I’ll hit a few highlights.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help. We had 30–35 people signing up on a schedule and coming in every week to lend a hand with feeding, diapering, cleaning. People are often thrilled to help out, especially when infants are involved. Most of our helpers were either grandmothers or women who wished they were, and we were happy to have our kids be surrogate grandkids for them all.

Don’t poke the bear. Or in this case, the kids. If they’re sleeping, let them lie if you can help it. Take advantage of it and grab a few winks for yourself. You’ll need every one of them.

Don’t forget to take care of your own basic needs first. You know how when the air masks drop down in an airplane, they tell you to take care of yourself before helping out your kids? Just like that. You’re no good to your kids if you’re passed out and they can’t wake you.

Don’t be afraid to use whatever tools you have at hand. When the quads started ripping their diapers off — something all kids learn to do — we turned to that most trusted fastener: duck tape. For the ones who were just fooling around, we just reinforced the diaper tabs with a couple strips of tape. For our more determined messers, we wrapped the roll right around their waistbands. Then we put them in a sleeper and fastened the zipper with a safety pin.

Whatever works.

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

I could go on about “defenestrate” all day, but it’s not a word that comes up often in daily use. I like “brilliant” for its many meanings, and I probably say “cool” far too often.

For cursing, I usually stick with the classic “fuck.” Sometimes it’s “fucking hell” or “holy fuck” for emphasis. Shane Hensley once told me I use “fuck” like it’s a comma.

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

I mostly stick with beer — I am from Wisconsin, after all — and I love trying new microbrews. My fallback is always Guinness. When I stray from beer, I enjoy tequila and scotch in many varieties.

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

Try John Layman’s Chew from Image Comics. It’s about an investigator for the FDA in a world in which the bird flu has made eating any fowl illegal, and he had to root out illegal chicken operations. To top it off, he has this odd psychic power that gives him visions of the history of anything he eats. It gets weirder and more wonderful from there.

What skills do you bring to help the humans win the inevitable zombie war?

Handling a large family has given me a strong command of supply and logistics. If we can hook a shotgunning robot up to an Xbox controller, too, I’d be happy to apply my hard-earned hours of video game skills to the slaughter.

You’ve committed crimes against humanity. They caught you. You get one last meal.

Something laced with a drug that induces a deathlike paralysis. Assuming they obey my last wishes and bury me without embalming, I’ll crawl from the grave days later to exact my revenge on the bastards who framed me.

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

I just launched a Kickstarter drive for a mad scheme I call 12 for ’12, in which I plan to write a 50,000-word novel every month in 2012. The first trilogy of these is set in the same world as the Brave New World RPG I wrote back in 1999, featuring a dystopian world filled with superheroes who have been outlawed due to the collateral damage their powers create. It’s a blast, and we’ve already hit our first goal, so I get to start writing in January. There’s still time for other folks to jump in on the fun though.

In addition to that, my next original novel from Angry Robot comes out in March. It’s called Carpathia, after the ship that picked up the survivors of the Titanic. Carpathia also happens to be the name of the mountains in which Castle Dracula sits, and this is not — in my novel, at least — any sort of coincidence.

I’m also writing the Magic: The Gathering comic book for IDW, based on the bestselling collectible card game from Wizards of the Coast. I’m a game designer too, so this is a dream project for me, and I’m having a tremendous amount of fun with it. The first issue ships in December, which is coming up fast.

Add in a few other novels and world-building and game-design gigs, and 2012 may be my busiest year yet.

Okay, you opened the can of worms, now: 12 novels in 12 months? First question is, do you have a brain parasite? Second question is, where can I get that parasite for myself? Third and final question: what’s the motive behind this kamikaze attack on your own bibliography?

I don’t think so (although perhaps my kids qualify). If I do, I’ll have to figure out a way to weaponize it. But not the kids. They’re already dangerous enough.

As for why, I have a number of reasons. First, I like the idea of the challenge. It’s bound to keep me focused on task, much in the same way as a revolver to my temple.

Second, I’ve been wanting to get back to publishing for a while. I co-founded a game publisher called Pinnacle Entertainment Group in the ’90s, and we had a string of hits, including Deadlands (a horror western RPG). I have all these publishing skills I’ve left unused for years, and it feels good to stretch them again. I plan to publish each of the 12 for ’12 novels as an ebook, although my Kickstarter backers have the option of grabbing the books early and even getting them in exclusive paperback and hardcover editions.

I want to pause and say how much I love my current publisher, Angry Robot. Marco and Lee have set up something wonderful there, and I truly enjoy working with them. When I have the right projects for them, they are the first people I turn to. As you’ve mentioned several times yourself, you don’t have to stand up and jam a flag in one camp or the other. It’s not a war. It’s an evolution.

Third, I didn’t want to just dip my toe into the ebook self-publishing waters. Just tossing up a single novel and hoping it sells seems like a recipe for failure. If people love your book, what else do you have to sell them? Some of the most successful ebook self-publishers are authors who bring a stable of out-of-print books back out.

Since most of my novels have been work-for-hire tie-ins, I don’t have a backlist like that to call on, but I didn’t want to wait the years it might take to build up a viable inventory of titles for people to enjoy. Writing 12 novels in a year gives me that wider selection in as close to instant as I can manage.

Will you put aside other work for all twelve novels?

I’m sure that I will, although I can’t say what it might be. As a freelancer, I often only book my time a few months out, and I have no idea what opportunities might come my way while I’m in the middle of the 12 for ’12 project. Honestly, it was one of the worries that gave me the most pause, but I’ll solve that problem if and when it comes up.

At the moment, I’m planning to write the Magic: The Gathering comic and help out on a massive world-building gig next year. We’ll have to see what else might come my way.

Care to give us a hint as to what the other novels will be? Will they all be Kickstarted?

At the moment, I’m planning to Kickstarter them all, but it depends on how this first drive goes. The second trilogy is set in a fantasy noir world I call Shotguns & Sorcery. I’ve already written two stories set in it, the first of which came out in Carnage & Consequences, an anthology the Gen Con Writers Symposium put together for last summer. The second story (which I wrote first) is slated for The New Hero 2, a Robin Laws-edited anthology due out in 2012.

I have many ideas for the third trilogy, but I’m going to wait a bit before I nail down what it will be. One of those ideas might become the fourth trilogy instead, but I’m also considering writing a three-pack of singletons for that, including perhaps some sequels to my earlier work.

That also begs the question: any advice for anybody looking to crowdfund on Kickstarter or IndieGoGo?

Pay attention to what other people are doing and how they go about it. Have a video that connects you personally with your audience. Concoct a reward ladder that people can understand easily. And have a plan for stretch goals if you manage to beat your initial goal right away.

Carpathia is, for the record, bonkers in the best way. I’m going to ask that most sinful of questions but I am compelled as if by vampiric hypnosis: where’d the idea come from?

Carpathia is the name of the ship that rescued the survivors of the Titanic. It’s also the name of the Transylvanian mountain range in which Castle Dracula sits. Once you make that connection, it’s not a long leap to mixing vampires and the greatest maritime disaster in history.

The novel winds up being much bigger than that simple description of course, but that’s why you sit down and write the book. If a high concept like “30 Days of Night meets Titanic” was only worth a chuckle, I’d stop there.

Did writing games help inform how you write your fiction? Or are they entirely separate disciplines?

They are separate but related disciplines, like half-brothers who live in the same house over summers and holidays. Games — especially roleplaying games — require you to create settings and characters rife with possibilities for all sorts of action and intrigue. You need to come up with every sort of element to allow and even encourage the players to concoct brilliant stories of their own, but when you’re done showing how to set up the dominoes, you walk away.

With fiction, you get to make your own set of dominoes, line them all up, and then tip them into motion and hope they all fall the way you think they will. Instead of coming up with a world of possible stories, though, you have to winnow all of those away until you come up with the one best story that resonates with you in the strongest way. It’s a whole different kind of challenge, but just as rewarding, maybe more so.

Finally: what’s the toughest thing about writing for the comic book page?

Writing a comic is the most technically challenging kind of writing around because you have to consider the page and format as a rigid framework. For most monthly comics, you have a set 22 pages in which to tell your story, which leaves you with zero wiggle room. In stories, novels, games — even film and TV — you can fudge things around a bit, but comics don’t have the same give.

On top of that, you have to think not only visually but in terms of two-page spreads. You build tension starting at the top left of the spread and work your way up to a climax in the bottom right. Then the reader turns the page for the reveal, and you start it all over again. Compressing everything you want to say and show into those pages can be a real challenge, but watching it all come to life in the hands of a talented art team is a true thrill.