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July 14, 2011 / 11 Comments

Stephen Blackmoore: The Terribleminds Interview

Like I tried to make clear last week — I know some awesome motherfuckers. Case in point? Stephen Blackmoore. Mister Blackmoore is a writer after my own heart. Wit like a lash. He’ll talk booze. He’ll talk games. Best of all, the guy’s an incredible writer. I’m lucky to call him a friend. I’m also lucky to have read both his upcoming DAW releases, CITY OF THE LOST, and DEAD THINGS. The former is going to knock your socks off. The latter is somehow, mysteriously, inexplicably even better — that book is going to knock your head off. And then, with your burbling throathole, you’re going to say, “Can I have some more?” Anyway. Blackmoore — whose blog, LA NOIR, is worth checking out as it details the grim and grimy side of Los Angeles — decided to submit for intellectual processing at the Terribleminds Enlightenment Center.

This is a blog about writing and storytelling, so before we do anything else, I’d like you to tell me – and, of course, the fine miscreants and deviants that read this site – a story. As short or long as you care to make it, as true or false as you see it.

I had this roommate one time. Squat, little homunculus of a guy from Boston. It was me, him and a mutual friend. So I move in and he’s the Mystery Roommate. He’s away for the first three months I live there. I never meet him. But the Mutual Friend tells me he’s cool, so, whatever.

So, he finally shows up. Nice enough guy. Kind of evasive. He’s been “away” the last few months. That’s all he’ll say. “Away.”

So I ask the Mutual Friend, “Hey, why’s he so weird about talking about where he’s been?” I mean, I don’t care one way or the other, but if somebody doesn’t want to tell me something really innocuous and simple, chances are it ain’t so innocuous and simple.

“Oh,” she says. “He’s been in jail.”

This being news of the sort I’d normally like to have BEFORE I move in with somebody, I ask, “For what?”

Turns out his girlfriend broke up with him about a year before and he shows up on her front lawn coked to the gills, crying and screaming her name.

And naked.

So picture this overweight, pasty white, Jewish guy running in a panic through Mar Vista with his junk flapping in the breeze and a couple LAPD officers on his ass flipping coins as to which one of them will have the unfortunate honor of having to take him down.

Now everybody has a bad turn every once in a while, right? It happens. You’re lonely, your heart’s broken, you’ve just done a couple monster rails of Peruvian flake.

You’re gonna go a little crazy.

As it turns out, though, this isn’t the first time, or even the second. Seems he’s got an issue with, shall we say, self expression.

Now I don’t really give a damn if he’s been in jail or has some issues. Everybody’s got issues. I got no problem with crazy as long as it doesn’t chuck furniture at my head or try to shank me in the middle of the night.

All things considered, though, he wasn’t that bad a roommate.

And the best part about it was that he was really paranoid.

No, really. Paranoid people are great, See, they overthink everything. Spend days figuring out what every little thing means. They’re constantly overanalyzing, trying to figure out all the angles.

That makes them very easy to fuck with.

Mystery Roommate and I had largely separate schedules. Weeks might go by before we saw each other. I’d leave before he got home and he’d leave before I got home.

He had this cheap, cardboard chess set with plastic pieces that he stuck in the living room with the idea that he was going to play with, fuck I dunno, the voices in his head or something.

So one morning as I’m walking out the door, I stop and I move a pawn.

When I get home that night I see that he’s moved a pawn.

So I move one of my pieces. Along the lines of, “I think a Knight on that square would really pull the room together.”

I hate chess. I know how to play it, sure, but it’s like watching golf. My idea of a great chess move is to scream “Checkmate”, kick my opponent in the nuts and light the board on fire. I’m not actually paying any attention to the game.

I won three times.

So one night when our schedules actually synced up he starts talking about chess. Gambits, openings, defenses and I don’t know what the fuck he’s going on about.

Turns out he’s been spending hours at a time analyzing my game. Trying to figure out what I’m doing. What my next move might be. And when he thinks he’s got me figured out, BAM! I change the game on him. One second I’m doing some weird Bobbie Fischer shit and the next I’m playing like a goddamn monkey.

He’s convinced I’m some sort of chess genius.

He asks me what my strategy is.

So I tell him.

Next day I find the torn up chess board in the trash. I don’t know what he did with the pieces, but the garbage disposal never worked very well after that.

The moral of the story? I’m kind of a bastard.

How would you describe your writing or storytelling style?

An unfortunate side effect of Tourettes.

I tend to underwrite. I think a perfectly good novel length is 60-70K words. Not that I don’t like longer novels, I love longer novels. I’m just not predisposed to write them. Comes from writing short stories, I think. And being lazy.

I’m also interested in voice over plot. On the one hand I’ve been accused of style over substance, which I’ll concede for some things I’ve done, but that’s not what I’m shooting for. Sometimes style is substance. A story is a complete thing, not just individual pieces. Voice is an important part of it. It just happens to be the part I’m most interested in.

Bear in mind, I didn’t say I was good at it.

Yeah! Fuck chess! Ahem. Got a favorite boardgame besides chess?

Ah. Games. Yeah.

This is where I let my geek flag fly, right? I used to play a lot. A long, long… long time ago.

Jesus, I’m old.

Anyway, I mostly played RPGs. D&D, Call of Cthulhu. A lot of old school Traveller. When they put the game out in those little booklets instead of one monster rulebook. My first D&D boxed set didn’t come with dice. It came with these little paper chits that you had to cut out and draw from a cup.

You kids and your “dice.” Back in my day we had to calculate range modifiers with astrolabes! And digging through entrails! Why I remember when we had to sacrifice a goat just to figure out our armor class!

But board games? Never really grabbed me much.

Although…

There was this one. It’s a little embarrassing because of the name, but I’ll say it, anyway. Black Morn Manor. I got a lot of shit when that one came out.

One player’s the evil monster holed up in a spoooooky mansion in the woods and the other players are trying to figure out what sort of monster it is. See, there’s an object, wooden stake, voodoo doll, whatever, that can kill the monster. Monster’s trying to destroy it, other players are trying to use it. It’s hidden somewhere on the board.

The challenge is that there’s no board.

Instead, everybody gets tiles for pieces of the manor grounds or rooms in the house that they lay down to build the board as they go. Only the monster player’s got tiles too. While you’re building a straight shot through the house to get to him and kill him he’s turning it into a maze and trying to kill you, too. And if you die you switch to his side.

What’s awesome about being a writer or storyteller?

There’s the “making shit up” bit, which is fun, but better is seeing someone else’s view of it. I think of a story as a collaboration between the writer and the reader with the reader doing most of the heavy lifting. So I try not to be heavy handed with description if I can help it.

I like seeing and hearing other people’s interpretations. I love the idea that someone might come away with something different than I thought of and put their own particular spin on it.

Case in point, my novel CITY OF THE LOST has a cover by the comic book artist Sean Phillips, which is cool. But what’s cooler is that he’s also doing some internal illustrations for some scenes and characters in it.

And seeing how he pictured these characters is incredible. He’s got details on them that I forgot I put in there and even then they’re not exactly how I pictured them. Seeing them through his eyes was both gratifying and a little humbling. Sure I wrote those characters, but in a lot of ways he made them his.

I wanted to do comics before but after seeing what he’s done with them now I REALLY want to do comics.

Conversely, what sucks about it?

Assholes and haters.

I don’t mind them so much when they come after me, but yeah it can sting. Most of the time, though, it can be downright entertaining.

Fun fact: Somebody once put together a blog titled something like “Stephen Blackmoore Is A Big Fat Idiot” because of some unfavorable things I said about her murderer cousin who gunned down two people in an income tax office and fucked off to Wisconsin. Sadly there was only one post IN ALL CAPS BADSPELLINGANDNO PUNCSHASHION beyond the obligatory !!! A few months later she took it down.

I think of that as my, “I have arrived,” moment.

I’m looking forward to my first 1 Star review. I’m taking bets on whether it’s going to be because I a) kill a dog, b) kill a hooker, c) got a gun or Los Angeles fact wrong or d) beat a guy to death with a midget.

You’re entitled to your opinion. I ain’t gonna argue that.

But I hate watching people, particularly creative types, get beat over the head for shit they have no control over or because they pushed someone’s buttons who doesn’t know how to handle having their buttons pushed.

I get pissed off and rant as much as the next guy, if not more, so I get I’m being a bit of a hypocrite here, but I still don’t like it. It takes bigger balls than most people have just to put yourself out there in the first place. Squashing someone like a bug because you got your panties in a twist is just you being an asshole.

Deliver unto us a single-serving dollop of writing or storytelling advice that you yourself follow as a critical tip without which you might starve and die atop a glacier somewhere:

Don’t take yourself too seriously. It ain’t worth it.

I’m a bit of a process monkey. You do anything special in terms of writing? Notebook, whiteboard, outlines carved into the flesh of a gimp you keep shackled to the desk? Always curious to see how other writers, ahem, “make the sausage.”

I stare at the wall a lot. Though I’m not sure that has anything to do with my writing.

I’ve tried index cards, mind-maps, Post-Its, a white board, note pads. None of them have ever really worked for me. They all just get in the way. Took a look at Scrivener once and my eyes glazed over.

Though outlining a book works really well for me, I can’t start with an outline. I have to start with a few scenes to help me establish the voice, the characters and give me an idea of what I’m trying to do. For me the outline’s just about plot and there’s a lot more to a story than the plot.

LA Noir is by and large a blog about the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles. It’s an awesome place to stop by and read some grisly little tidbits about the City of Angels, and is pretty unusual in terms of an author blog. Where’d the idea for that come from, and why?

I never actually intended L.A. Noir to be an author blog. It just sort of worked out that way.

A few years back I was writing for a community blog called LAVoice. Los Angeles politics, police, education, that sort of thing. It was a cool site, and won a couple awards, but it petered out.

While I was digging up things to write about for them I kept running into crime stories that I found myself wanting to talk about instead.

So I figured what the hell. As far as I’m concerned the best way to show contempt for something is to mock it and if I can’t go around being Batman beating the crap out of pedophiles and drug dealers the least I can do is point and laugh. And there’s a lot to point and laugh at.

Because otherwise it just really pisses me off.

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

Favorite word: “Defenestration” I love the fact that the act of flinging something out the window has happened often enough to require its own word.

Favorite curse word: “Jesus H Monkeyfucking Christ”

I have no idea what the H is for. Hubert, maybe? No clue.

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

Whatever you’re buying.

But if I’m buying I like single malt whisky. Oban, Dalwhinnie, Lagavulin, Macallan, Balvenie. If you can get it there’s this great Tasmanian whisky called Lark that’ll strip the rust off battleships. Until you put a drop of water in it and then goddamn is it smooth. Good stuff.

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

Jesus. Just one? Okay, uh… KISS ME JUDAS, by Will Christopher Baer.

That’s one of those novels I keep going back to. It’s insane, hallucinatory and has one of the best inconsistent and unreliable narrators ever.

Guy goes up to a hotel room with a prostitute and wakes up in the bathtub with a stitched up side and a note saying CALL 911. A pretty standard urban myth goes rapidly off the rails from there as he goes hunting for his possibly missing kidney. Or maybe it isn’t missing and this random prostitute who may or may not actually be a prostitute (or maybe she’s a surgeon, or a nurse, or a professional organ harvester, or a drug mule) is just fucking with him. Maybe she stuffed baggies full of heroin into the hole. Maybe she’s trying to kill him. Maybe she’s trying to get him to kill someone else. Maybe that someone else is her.

Oh, and he’s a cop. Or he used to be a cop before he had a mental breakdown. Now he’s very clearly insane, off his meds and fighting a rampant infection from the (expertly as it turns out) stitched up wound. He goes on for pages about how he’s going to kill her when he finds her and then when he does he decides no, actually he loves her. Or at least really enjoyed the sex. What he can remember of it.

But he still wants to kill her. And get his kidney back, which may or may not be in the cooler she has in her car.

He’s afraid to look.

Things kind of go downhill from there.

Where are my pants?

In the evidence locker. At least until the trial or the zookeeper at the monkey house drops the charges. But I don’t see that happening. I mean, really, in the eye? With his kids watching? That’s just cold, man.

Good aim, though.

Got anything to pimp? Now’s the time!

I gots me a book!

A dark urban fantasy titled CITY OF THE LOST coming out January 3rd, 2012 through DAW Books. It’s been described as “creatively violent.” I mean, how can you go wrong with that?

Here’s the ad copy:

Joe Sunday’s dead. He just hasn’t stopped moving yet.

Sunday’s a thug, an enforcer, a leg-breaker for hire. When his boss sends him to kill a mysterious new business partner, his target strikes back in ways Sunday could never have imagined. Murdered, brought back to a twisted half-life, Sunday finds himself stuck in the middle of a race to find an ancient stone with the power to grant immortality. With it, he might live forever. Without it, he’s just another rotting extra in a George Romero flick.

Everyone’s got a stake, from a psycho Nazi wizard and a razor-toothed midget, to a nympho-demon bartender, a too-powerful witch who just wants to help her homeless vampires, and the one woman who might have all the answers — if only Sunday can figure out what her angle is.

Before the week is out he’s going to find out just what lengths people will go to for immortality. And just how long somebody can hold a grudge.

I just turned in the second in the series, DEAD THINGS, which picks up with a different character in the same world. I have no idea when that will be coming out.

Anything you can tell us about DEAD THINGS?

DEAD THINGS is a follow-up to CITY OF THE LOST. I’m writing the series from the perspective of the world rather than a particular character, so DT has a different protagonist. I like the idea of showing different views of this world and seeing what sorts of stories I can tell in it.

DT is about a necromancer named Eric Carter. He can see the dead, talk to them, manipulate them. He’s on speaking terms with Voodoo loas, demons and the undead. He’s a rarity among mages, which are rare enough as it is. He’s not thrilled with it but he was born that way.

Fifteen years ago Carter’s parents were murdered by another mage and he went a little bugfuck. Took the guy out by feeding his soul to a bunch of hungry ghosts. Pissed off a lot of people when he did it. They gave him a choice to either get out of L.A. or they’d kill his younger sister. He hasn’t been back since.

But now his sister’s been murdered and when he returns to L.A. he finds out that her death was just bait to get him back home.

But who wants him that badly and why? There’s no shortage of possibilities. There’s the guy who drove him out of town, his best friend who he left to pick up the pieces, the mage he killed who might actually have come back from the dead.

And when he runs into Santa Muerte, the patron saint of murderers and criminals who used to be an Aztec death goddess, things get a lot more complicated.

What’s next after COTL and DT? Whatchoo working on now?

A lot of that staring at the wall thing I was talking about earlier.

I’ve got about half a dozen other ideas I’m playing with for the series, incuding ones that pick up with the characters from COTL and DT, though I’ll probably hold off on those. I’m hoping I can keep this going for a while. Really depends on whether enough people like it or not, I suppose.

I’m working on a story bible for the series. Maintaining consistency can be a real pain in the ass. I keep running into the same problem I have with index cards and Post-Its. Referring back to a bunch of dry notes just doesn’t work for me, so instead I’m writing short stories set in the world. So far it’s helped cement some things for me and I might use a few of them as jumping off points for future books.

I’ve also got a collection of short stories I’m toying with releasing on the Kindle, but I don’t know if I’m ready to do that just yet.

Other than that it’s just jotting down ideas here and there. I want to try my hand at a lot of different things. Science fiction, a western, a straight crime novel. Would really love to write for comics and games.

And while I’m at it I want a jetpack and a pony.

July 13, 2011 / 33 Comments

Transmissions From Baby-Town: “Turning Corners”

Let me be your birth control, those without kids: the first six weeks of raising a Tiny Human provide a lesson in small miseries. You have not slept. The pieces of your life — the schedule that holds your sanity together — has been hammered apart like so much peanut brittle and, for added measure, is then thrown into Cookie Monster’s crushing maw to finish the job. You feel like a tooth cracked apart, the raw nerve exposed. Everything feels like the blood test from THE THING: a hot wire stuck in a petri dish of blood, then pop, then monsters, then something has to die screeching in fire.

That thing that’s dying in a fire is your old life.

The old ways are gone.

The old roads are shut.

It is the dawn of a new day.

These are the poo-dimmed tides.

* * *

Raising a baby might as well qualify you for credits in a class called FECAL MANAGEMENT 101. That’s what you’re doing a lot of the time: just managing poop, both literally and figuratively. Very early the poo is nasty. You could shingle a roof or fill potholes with the black tarry meconium. Then it gets a little better. Poop from pure breast-milk is nutty, popcorny, not entirely unpleasant. (I won’t lie. It made me hungry.) But soon as a drop of formula touches that kid’s lips it’s like his gut flora turn into teenagers — the innocence of his bowels is lost, and now his intestinal bacteria are all a bunch of hooligans hanging out under lampposts, smoking noxious cigarettes.

Give the kid formula to supplement and his shit starts smelling like shit.

And the wee one blows ass like a champion. You could push a sailboat with the wind that comes out of his bediapered hindquarters. And kill flowers with the smell.

* * *

Everything was going fine down below, but then suddenly: the specter of constipation.

B-Dub hadn’t gone for… I think it was four days? I know how I feel if I don’t, ahem, take out the biological garbage once a day, so there we are, starting to worry. We think, ye gods, he’s probably swelling up with poop. One day he’ll be like Violet Beauregarde in the Wonka Factory, blowing up like a blimp — except instead of purple, he’ll be the color of caramel sauce. Then he’ll rupture. Pbbt.

So we call the doctor and the nurse says, “Give him an infant suppository,” except she doesn’t tell us that you don’t buy infant suppositories, you buy larger suppositories then cut them up into quarter sticks. And nobody else tells us this either, so we run around like assholes for the evening until finally we come upon the truth and my Mother-in-Law thankfully shows up with what we need.

Giving a suppository to a wiggly infant is like trying to punch a moon bounce — your intended attack always returns. It calls to mind giving a pill to our terrier: the medicine ever comes back into your hand.

Finally it worked. The child purged. And what came out was almost disappointing: no epic flush, no apocalyptic explosion, no crap tsunami. It was just… a normal baby bowel movement. And it wasn’t even constipation, technically. Not like he was pooping little ball bearings or anything.

* * *

Four more days, same problem.

No poop.

Moderate discomfort.

Awesome.

You look online — i.e. gaze into the doom-eye of the mad oracle — and you find that, as it turns out, Every Baby Is A Different Baby. Some kids poop five times a day. Some kids poop once every five days. Some are efficient little processors and don’t need to go all that often — after all, it’s not like they’re eating cheesesteaks and bran cereal every couple hours. They’re on a liquid diet. Most of that can be peed out.

Even still, everybody wants to make you feel like a shitheel because your baby isn’t pooping. Like it’s our fault. “Oh, am I not supposed to store my wine cork collection in his butthole? Oops! Mea culpa.”

The other problem is, apparently you can, Pavlov-style, train your child to poop only with suppositories accidentally. Instead of a dinner bell ringing meaning food, it’s the rectal plunging of a glycerin tab to signal unconsciously that, hey, it’s totally time to take a crap now, thanks.

It’s times like this you suddenly realize, oh my god, this is our lives. We can barely make the time to go to the bathroom ourselves but here we are, obsessing over the effluence of our child.

* * *

For the record, it was just the formula. We cut back and moved him from Enfamil Gentlease to Similac and, ta-da, no more constipation. Stupid razzafrazza formula. Oh, and thank you, doctor, for not recommending this course of action and making sure we figured it out all by our lonesome.

Did I mention we need a new doctor?

* * *

I was eating cottage cheese the other day, holding B-Dub, when he spit up. And I looked at what came out of his mouth, and I looked down at the cottage cheese I was eating, and I was struck by the notion that the cottage cheese companies (aka “Big Dairy”) were probably just repackaging Baby Puke and selling it to us as a snack. I mean, I kept eating it. Whaddya gonna do?

* * *

Our standards for cleanliness have dropped. We’re basically something out of a National Geographic special these days, like, we’re people from one of those tribes only recently discovered. The constant nursing. The origami boulders of spit-up paper towels everywhere. The fact that when I put on a shirt, I examine it not to see if there are any stains but rather, how bad the stains happen to be before I throw it on.

And I inevitably wear it. Because, who’s got time for laundry?

We’ve gone back to some primal state.

* * *

I wear earplugs now when we bathe him. His cries don’t really bother me, but there’s this special horrific alignment when we get him in the echo chamber of the bathroom — his shrieks of horror turn into this pandemonious cacophony, a sound not unlike all of the souls of the damned being thrust into a cauldron of bubbling pitch. For some reason, this sound doesn’t bother my wife as much.

But me? It raises my blood pressure, makes my ears ring, tenses my shoulders into hard bundles.

Only then. Only during bathing.

You’d think he’d like it.

“Oh, hey, I’m being dipped in a gently warm bath and being softly sponged by a beautiful woman whose boobs I see frequently. I think I’ll take a special moment to scream as if I’m being covered by a thousand papercuts and washed in a tub full of Sea Breeze and rattlesnake venom. Everybody good with that? Super.”

* * *

The other day, two fawns played on our lawn while the mother stood off to the side, chewing on some leaves. I wanted to ask her, “Do your babies explosively poop up their backs?”

Nobody talks about that milestone, do they?

First smile.

First word.

First breach of the fecal containment unit.

I almost wish I could attain the “up the back blow-out.” Just to see if I could.

* * *

He won’t sleep in his bassinet anymore. Only sleeps on his mother. Which means she has to rig up this whole thing so he stays laying across the Boppy at night. Which means she basically is developing some kind of Mommy-fed scoliosis, some joint-cracking arthritis at a young age, some mad calcification of her bones. All to support the Little Pink Dictator that rules our life.

Once, I was ruled by an entirely different Little Pink Dictator.

But he’s staying quiet these days. As well he should be. I won’t tolerate any nonsense from him because it’s his fault we’re in this mess. Don’t think I’m not savvy to your games, you little cock-waffle.

* * *

You start to have serious conversations. Conversations that can only happen when you haven’t slept and the baby is inconsolable and the air smells of baby powder and burned nerves.

You start to say, “Maybe we just run away. Hawaii, right? Still in the country. No need for a passport. We live on the beach. Leave the baby here with a note. Our parents will handle it. Or the neighbors. Or whatever homeless person moves into our domicile when we vacate. Is there a rescue shelter for babies? Maybe we can just take him there. I mean, pssh, pfft, we’ll leave some money. For… toys and… baby things. It’ll be fine. Let’s just go. It’s the dark of night. We can just go. We can just leave. Hurry before he notices!”

But he always notices. Because he’s good like that.

* * *

Thing is, it all sounds horrible.

And anybody gazing in from the outside as you are now, anybody who doesn’t have kids, probably thinks, man, that sounds awful. And at times, it is. Even still, you get your moments.

Better yet, around the six week mark we turned a corner. He stopped being Herr Doktor Pissypants all day. He’s alert, now. He smiles when we smile. He babbles at us. He says A-Goo and Ook and he yips like a coyote and howls like a wolf and he laughs when you mess with him. Moreover, not only is he changing, but we’re changing, too. We’re figuring stuff out. We know about gripe water. I know about the Magical Daddy Football Hold. I know that if you take him outside he becomes rapt by all that he sees.

We know to just listen.

The other night we had him laying (not sleeping) next to the bed and he was just… yammering away at whatever ghosts and bugs live in our house. Laughing and yelling and oohing and aahing. And it’s sweet.

We think he’s advanced, of course. Every parent thinks their kid is advanced. They’re like, “OMG LOOK AT THE WAY HE SPIT UP ARE THOSE THE FIBONACCI NUMBERS.” But the way he tracks objects and smiles and says consonants and kicks his legs and tries to push off and stand up and memorizes the stories of Mark Twain (okay, I might be lying about that last part) makes us sure he’s going to be a smart kid. Which is probably more trouble than we’re prepared for, but oh well, so it goes.

We think he’s cute, too. Every parent thinks they’re kid is cute.

But look at that face.

Look at it.

I SAID LOOK AT IT GODDAMNIT — see this gun? Yeah.

Like I said. Cute. Objectively. Shut up.

Point being —

There it goes, that corner we just turned.

We smile and he smiles. I ask him to tell me a story and he burbles and coos. And it all starts to make a weird kind of sense. It all comes together and says, this is why you’re here, this is why you do things, this is why I write and why my wife gets scoliosis and why we work and love and live, and it’s all for him, all for the ever-adorable and totally-advanced Wriggly Napoleon who governs our lives.

Every day, it seems, is a new corner to turn.

Which is terrifying and beautiful in one weird bundle.

* * *

(Required continued reading: “Sailing Over A Year,” and “Dinosaur Vs. Parents,” both by Lauren Beukes, both about her experiences as a parent during the first two years. In short: awesome.)

July 12, 2011 / 3 Comments

Penmonkey Incitement: Postcard, Unlocked

And, a week after we started, the stars aligned, the ancient gods awoke, the Druids once more rose and fell as a people, the seas did churn blood, and COAFPM scored 50 sales.

Which means, the first incentive is unlocked.

Time to send out a postcard.

Except, whoa-hoa-hoa, I’m feeling generous. I’m going to send out two postcards. Because, dang, I just ordered these shiny new PENMONKEY cards, and I want to show them off to people.

Way this works is, I take the emails of everybody who bought the book on PDF and who e-mailed me to show me a receipt from their Kindle or Nook purchase. I line ’em up in a spreadsheet. I use RANDOM.ORG to generate a random number. And that number corresponds to a numbered line on the spreadsheet. Easy-peasy, buttocks-squeezy.

I generated two numbers because, again, I want to send out some motherfucking postcards.

Numbers generated: 25, 102.

Those numbers correspond to:

Gareth Hanrahan (aka “Mytholder!”)

and

Theresa Fisher!

I’ll be contacting you crazy kids over email. Thereafter, the Doom-Bots will usher you toward your “final reward” in the whirring “pleasure saws” and “laser baths” here at the Penmonkey Spa Camp.

Now, yesterday saw a big jump in Those Who Possess The Penmonkey, so we’re already up 62 sales — which means we only have 38 more to go before I start doling out t-shirts. And let me tell you, I got my own CERTIFIED PENMONKEY t-shirt in the mail yesterday? And it’s actually a pretty snazzy shirt. (Ordered from ZAZZLE.)

Do recall how the incitement works:

For every 50 sales, I send out a postcard.

For every 100 sales, I send out a t-shirt.

For every 200 sales, I offer an editorial look at 5,000 words of your writing.

For every 500 sales, I will procure for someone a Kindle.

All for a period of 1000 sales, or one year.

That’s (in theory) 20 postcards, 10 t-shirts, five edits, and two Kindles.

Right? Right. Now, worth noting: this first pick came from a batch of only 126 people, because that’s the number of people who have let me know they procured the book. Those are pretty sweet odds in terms of nabbing the next reward, a t-shirt, but again, remember that it only works if you email me at terribleminds [at] gmail [dot] com and throw for me proof that you procured a copy of COAFPM for your Kindle or Nook (again, if you bought on PDF, I already have you counted).

Now, I’m revising my International policy a leetle teeny bit.

For the postcard, I will send internationally.

For the t-shirt, I will send internationally only if the procurer pays the international shipping. Sorry for that, but I just can’t afford the second mortgage to send a shirt to Marquesas or something.

For the edit, I’ll look at anybody’s work no matter where they live, but I will edit to US standards.

For the Kindle, sorry, international folks are SOL. Er, blame Amazon?

In other news, I’m slowly readying my next e-book release, a book based on my 25 Things series found here at the ol’ bloggery-hut.

And I finished the first draft of Shotgun Gravy, my teen-noirish Veronica Mars YA-esque thing starring the “Get-Shit-Done Girl,” Atlanta Burns. So, keep your grapes peeled for that, too.

In the meantime, if I sell more copies of PENMONKEY, somebody gets another postcard and a t-shirt.

To procure PENMONKEY:

Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), Nok, or PDF.

July 12, 2011 / 36 Comments

The Trials And Tribulations Of The Modern Day Writer

I’m not here to predict the future for you penmonkeys.

Were I to predict such a future, I would suggest that in the next 10 years, we will all be hunted down by self-aware Verbo-Bots and Publispiders, crass automatons who seek to harvest our brains for the words they contain. The Publispiders pin us to the wall while the Verbo-Bots stomp up and trepan our skulls with a whirring drill. We smell our hair and bone burning. When the hole is complete, the robot penetrates our brain-space with some surgical tubing, then milks our minds of our delicate fictions. Then, just to be an asshole, the Publispider plants its robot babies in our colons.

You can see why I’m not allowed to predict the future.

What I can do, however, is ruminate frothily on the rigors of the present, which is exactly what I’ll do now. See, things are different for the writer these days. It’s a brave new world full of great reward and buzzsaw peril — step correctly and you’ll have laurels heaped upon your head, but step poorly and you’ll find your balls cut off with a garden trowel.

Let us then examine the state of affairs for the Penmonkeys Of Today.

Write More, Word Slave

*crack of lash*

Gone are the days when the writer could focus on her novel career and put out one book every year — at least, gone are those days for writers who want to accept “writer” as the day job.

Advances are down. Per-words on freelance and short story markets have dipped. Some markets are outright gone. Takes a while to get published, too. Point being, it’s getting tougher to “earn out” as a full-time writer — or, rather, tougher for those only focusing on a single path through the jungley word-tangle.

Sure, you’ve got self-publishing (and we’ll talk about that 800-lb mecha-gorilla in the room in just one sec), but to really succeed at self-publishing it seems right now that your best bet is to paint with a shotgun: you’re not served by posting one book and walking away but posting a book or project (or product, if you can stand that word) every couple months.

This makes the writer both honeybee and Great White Shark. First, you gotta be the worker bee and dance for your dinner — you want the honey, you’d better shake that buzzer of yours, buddy. Second, in what is becoming a probably overused metaphor, sharks must swim forward or drown, and so too must the writer be ever moving onto the next thing lest he sink into a fetid morass of bankruptcy.

Actually, let’s just hybridize that and say that it makes the writer the Great White Honeyshark.

Agreed? Agreed.

(Mmm. Honeyshark. Sounds like a delicious breakfast cereal. The fin stays crunchy in milk!)

Writers must produce. And produce. And produce. ABW: “Always Be Writing.” (PICK. THAT COFFEE. UP. Coffee is for writers only.) One book a year? Psssh. No. Focus only on novels? Not likely. Writers are no longer as free to work in a single sphere of writerly existence. Get used to writing short, long, script, game, non-fiction, etc. Be many-headed. Like the hydra. (The Great White Honey-Hydra?)

Now, this is a double-headed ~~dildo~~ axe. It ~~fucks~~ cuts both ways.

On the one hand, I kinda like it. I like that the writer is a worker. It means the craftsmen, the producers, the truly capable, will survive. Do work. Live to fight another day.

On the other hand, if we assume a slippery slope (and I always do, one lubricated with Astroglide and the tears of my enemies), then we can see where the profession of “writer” is becoming more and more watered down so much so that, in a few years, it’s going to earn less respect and fewer shekels than before. And trust me, the last thing we need is less respect. Last week, a homeless guy peed on me.

The Writing Life: Now With Actual Choice!

I don’t need to expound too much on this point, but know that the last year has seen an alarmingly fast shift in terms of self-publishing. That shift has been almost uniformly positive — the rise of e-readers and the market dominance of Amazon (who, like its namesake, is now the tallest meanest warrior-queen in the room) has really changed the game. The fact that capable, talented, and serious writers are going in that direction is a telling sign. It’s no longer the realm of Pure Uncut Slush (though I assure you, that’s still in there) and is now a viable choice for writers.

Writers didn’t actually have much of a choice before, after all. Self-publishing before usually meant getting fleeced by some vanity pub. Now you’ve got real — and awesome — options.

A Septic Tide Of Zealots

Some would have you believe that this choice is a false one. And this is true on all sides of the fence. Over there, you have the Defenders of the Realm, those who carry the flag for the “legacy” publishers, who say that the only legitimate way forth is to stomp that rag-tag army of barbarians into the mud from whence they came — it’s get your book with the Big Six or suck a pipe, pal.

On the other side of the fence are the self-publishing zealots, a froth-mouthed cult of author anarchists who believe that the One True Way is to publish yourself — after all, it’s easy! You’ll get rich! You have control! Damn the man! Burn the gates and their keepers! Anybody else is a chump.

Be not swayed by such false dichotomies. My advice to you is taken straight from my own approach: do both. Traditional publishing and self-publishing (sometimes called “indie” publishing, but damn does that term get people into a froth) each have their own ups and downs. Do both. One for you, one for you. Legacy publishing opens you to getting your book in stores, it gives you a path toward greater visibility and other publishing rights and awards and reviews. Self-publishing puts you in the hands of readers faster, and also lets you earn money (sometimes good money) more quickly.

Don’t let anybody tell you your brand new kick-ass choice is not a choice at all.

You smell the sweat-stink of a zealot, call him what he is and shut him down.

The Men Of Many Hats

You’re no longer going to survive as “just” a writer. Won’t happen. The responsibility falls to you to edit, to find markets, to pimp and promo your work, to know what sells and what doesn’t, to network, to do all the sexy dances. This is doubly true of the self-publisher who now takes on all the responsibilities of a micro-pub: design a cover, put the book together, hire anybody who needs to help the book come staggering to life like some rough-shod Frankenstein made only of stitched together nouns and verbs, and so forth.

As a sidenote, I like that term. “Micro-pub.” Better than indie, which carries its own debate. Better than self-published, which is a term that sounds about as dismissive and masturbatory as a term can get. (“I just ‘self-published’ my seed into this Kleenex!”) Ahh, but micro-pub! One man publishing. Like micro-brew.

Yeah. I like it.

I will hereby refer to myself as a “micro-pub.”

At least until I forget I came up with that term, which is in about — *checks watch* — ten minutes.

The Diminishing Value Of Books

Price versus value is almost like plot versus story, in my mind. The former is the hard definition — price is the cost set by seller, plot is the sequence of events set by the writer. The latter is a softer, hazier thing with ill-defined margins — value is the estimation of the product, story is the overall narrative. Price contributes to value just as plot contributes to story: the lesser a part of the greater.

As writers, we’d better get used to the fact that the value of books — novels in particular — is dropping. Part of this is driven by price: some micro-publishers and even some legacy publishers have significantly reduced the cost of books and e-books. Many haven’t — but that’s why value is not equal to price. The other part is an assumption — however correct or incorrect — that digital content is cheaper to produce than printed content. (For my opinion: hell yes it’s cheaper to produce.) It’s why you see so many folks (like me) irritated when an e-book costs the same or more than it’s print counterpart. I see that, I get sand up in my swim-trunks. My balls get gritty with rage. Overtime, a pearl of pure anger forms beneath my manly plums.

It’s why I applaud the efforts of my publisher, Angry Robot, who has their e-books offered for around five bucks a pop. That gets me to buy those books. But when I see an e-book that goes higher than eight, it better damn well be an author whose children I would bear and push out of my urethra. See, but even here, a degradation of value: last year, I didn’t feel the same way.

For the most part, I’m all for the reduction in value — and, subsequently, the reduction in price. I think books should be cheaper. I want books to be accessible. If books are precious (and as a result, expensive), then publishers win, readers lose, and by proxy, writers lose, too. Further, I want books to compete with other media. (I’m waiting for the day a Netflix-esque online “library card” hits the ‘Net — that day will awesome in the truest sense of the word.)

Of course, once again it’s not hard to see the slippery slope slick with guts and lube: go too low with our prices consistently and that value dips. I’ve said in the past (to some scorn) that the ninety-nine cent price point (for novels in particular) helps winnow down the value of books, and I still feel that’s true — that said, it’s worth mentioning first that any price point below standard publisher price has this effect and further, and second, this reduction in value is healthy (up to a point).

Ultimately, what it means for the modern writer of 2011 is: best get used to being better business people as well as better writers.

The Death And Rebirth Of The Short Story

I see the short story market as if it were Schroedinger’s Cat: both dead and alive at the same time.

On the one hand, the short story market — as in, I send in a story, you publish it — is maybe not doing so well, at least in terms of writers getting paid. I’ve seen in the last ten years what markets will pay for short stories either flatline or go down — meanwhile, the cost of living (especially for a writer without a steady day-job) has gone (duh) up. Not the ideal financial direction.

You send a story out there, you open yourself to readership and in some cases awards, but a lot of times it’s not financially sustainable to do all your short fiction like that.

Where the short story is gaining life, however, is in the self-publishing arena. Collections and individual shorts for sale seem to be gaining traction, and that’s pretty great. This is where that dollar price point maybe has more traction. A buck for a short story is a price I’ll pay and a value I like.

(Again, the advice of “do both” rings true here — take some stories to market, take others to Amazon.)

Lawrence Block has a number of short stories out there for a dollar, and they’re all worth it. So too with the short fiction of Tobias Buckell. Know others? Tell us about ’em.

My God, It’s Full Of Distractions

Sad fact: one of the perils of modern life is that we are deeply distracted. We are bombarded by options. And that’s true of readers as it is of writers. That means as writers are are in danger from distractions on two fronts: on the first front, our audience has an unholy host of entertainment avenues, and so we’re competing less with other writers and more with Every Goddamn Cat Video On The Internet. It also means that our own time can easily be flushed down the ol’ terlet if we spend our time, ohhh, say, watching Goddamn Cat Videos instead of writing.

I’ve also seen comments that suggest that self-publishing has not generated a Tsunami of Crap and that quality work floats. Which is a poo-poo stinky-faced lie. Self-publishing has generated a lot of crap just as it has generated a lot of awesome work, and I assure you that, having downloaded a number of self-published titles, I’ve seen a lot of shit work do well and a lot of brilliant work do poorly. You’re naive if you think that quality is a magical unicorn who will carry your wonderful work aloft in a saddle made of adorable, squirming human babies. Shit floats, folks. The trick is, this is true outside self-publishing, too. Again, you’re competing with Snooki’s book. You’re competing with Goddamn Cat Videos. You’re competing with this blog that you’re reading right now, which is a sure sign that poop is woefully buoyant.

Amiright?

Your Turn

As always, everything I say here is just the opinion of one penmonkey ook-ooking into the grave abyss that is the Internet. I’m only half-convinced of my own opinions on any given day, so I’m always happy to hear dissenting ones. Further, feel free to jump in with your own opinions on The State Of The Union as it relates to writers. What new opportunities and new dangers await in 2011?

* * *

If you dig on the apeshit crazy-face no-holds-barred profanity-soaked writing advice found here at terribleminds, then you may want to take a wee bitty gander-peek at: CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY, which is available now! Buy for Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), Nook, or PDF.

July 11, 2011 / 121 Comments

Of Google-Plus And Circle Jerks

I remember Myspace.

We speak of it now like it died in a war, but it’s actually still out there if you care to gaze upon it. It was and remains the social media equivalent of a GeoCities website: everything is blink tags and glitter fonts, tropical vomit and chrome skulls. Like Metallica rode in on a pack of My Little Ponies and got thrown into a wood chipper, and the chipper sprayed the guts up onto our screens.

Then? Facebook came around. Facebook was all clean lines and blue cubicles. Though it came from the realm of the collegiate, it appeared as the buttoned-up office worker of the social media work, tsk-tsk-tsking on all the blown-out margins and half-naked goblins of Myspace.

And for a while, Facebook held it all together. But before long, chaos crept in at the edges. Eroded those clean blue margins. Pissed on the cubicle walls. Next thing you knew, it was all HELP ME KILL THIS FILIPINO BOOKIE IN MAFIA WARS and DALE NEEDS HELP INSEMINATING DONKEYS IN FARMVILLE and people were tagging you with photos you weren’t even in (“Is that a cat throwing up on a parakeet?”) and people could add you to groups you didn’t sign up for (“Why am I suddenly getting email from “The Sparkly Bieberwhores?”). It never fell into the Las Vegas ayahuasca dream-vomit of Myspace, but the madness remained, endemic to a once-clean system.

And now, Google+ (or Google-Plus or G+ or GP or GooPloo or Guh-Pluh or whatever it is we’ll eventually call it) is here, once more stepping into the arena as the master of order, as the scion of sanity, clean and white and elegant as an Apple store.

I am here to say: Lo, I am underwhelmed.

And more than a little confused.

Both fairly default states for me, to tell the truth, so this isn’t all that new. Even still, my experiences with The Googlecrucians has been surprisingly gutless and without mirth. I figure, hell, let’s talk about it.

Though, quick caveats: first, this is not a review. I’ve seriously hardly used this thing. Don’t trust me to tell you what to think about it — go splash around in the Googley Waters thine ownself.

Second, if you like it? Then I am happy for you. I may like it too one day. Soon, even. In fact, if you would be so kind as to drop into the comments and say why you like it and how you use it, I would reward you mightily. And by “reward you,” I mean, I’ll give you a wink and a thumbs-up and a high-five and that shall be your glorious prize. Get excited.

It’s Like Facebook, Only Less So!

When “new” social media hits, to me it should feel like something new. Not merely an improvement but rather, a whole muhfuckin’ redesign. Facebook wasn’t like Myspace. It had that sense that I was dipping my toes in the lifestreams of others rather than actively hopping over to your “page” where you, I dunno, talked about how much you love the goddamn Thundercats or auto-play music that sets fire to my ears. Then Twitter came out of left-field and it dialed down complexity and dialed up that frequency to the point where it became this constant signal of conversation ever burbling in the background, and all you had to do was tune the knob to make it louder, or clearer, or more meaningful.

Twitter encouraged brevity. It embraced simplicity.

Now, Google-Double-Plus-Good has hit and it’s less a redesign and more a re-skin. In the MMO-gaming space you’d say, “it’s not a World-of-Warcraft killer so much as it is a clone.” The feeling I get from people is that “It’s like Facebook, but without all that… Facebook all up in your face!” Which is fine. Certainly Facebook has earned the ire of many for its constant application messages and its privacy settings. And Gee+ has thrown in one of the great things from Twitter: the loss of enforced reciprocality. I follow you. You don’t need to follow me. Huzzah. It’s a nice touch.

Even still, this horse is still a horse. When Twitter came around, the Internet didn’t show me a horse. It showed me a chimera shooting lasers from its eyes and pooping Faberge eggs. It was like, “Whoa, I have never seen this before.” When I logged onto Googolplex, I just saw another horse. Painted white, admittedly, and maybe given a nice currying, but still a horse.

This isn’t a home run. It’s a bunt. That can’t be enough, can it? To get millions to switch?

As Intuitive As Putting Together Ikea Furniture

Goddamn Allen wrenches.

To Hell with your Sknarng coffee table or your Fnorbsbjar S&M spinfuck chair, Ikea.

Anyway. What was I saying? Right.

The first thing that happens when I get into Googley-Poo is that it tells me that people have added me to circles even though I’d never before been on the service (leading me to believe that the site is a psychic social media version of SkyNet), and yet when I look at my list of who had me in circles, some of those people weren’t there. Further, I’m then asked to delineate people into circles of my own. Friends or acquaintances, which seems arbitrary, cruel, and actually not all that meaningful. (It’s not until later that I realize I can do whatever the fuck I want with circles, but initially, that’s not all that clear.) Why not just force me to pick enemies? My initial plan was to separate people into Byzantine Masonic Circles (“You have taken the trials and can join the 35th Echelon Of The Grandmaster Of Fez-Wearing Hula-Hoopery“) but I eventually discover that nobody can actually see the awesome circle names you’ve used to classify them.

Then I’m supposed to figure out exactly how circles work in terms of both broadcasting signal and receiving it from others. I grok the reception: I can say, “I only want to see posts from people in my Those Marked For Eradication By Doom-Bots circle.” But the broadcasting portion is a little weirder. A circle indicates a group — like, if I create a circle and we’re all in it, we should all be, I dunno, talking to one another. A circle of jerks, if you will. (And I do wonder how long it’ll be before “Circle Jerk” enters the G+ parlance.) But that’s not quite the case. This dude’s blog post takes a look at How Circles Work, but what I read in his blog is not necessarily how I understood it upon entering the circle. Even still, I’m not sure who I’m even talking to. Or yelling at. Or who can talk to me.

Or where my pants went.

Speaking Of Pantslessness

No, I do not want to hangout with you on a webcam. Or, more specifically, you don’t want to hang out with me on webcam. Listen, in the great Venn diagram of my computing life, the circle of “Am Using The Internet” and the circle of “Am Shirtless And Covered In Baby Puke And Dorito Pollen” have a near perfect overlap. I’m also afraid that if I somehow turn on my webcam, the first thing I’m going to see is someone masturbating at me. Which is why I am prepared instead to masturbate at somebody. Fight fire with fire. Fight Onanism with Onanism. I have a very clear “first strike” policy on webcam jerkoffery. Once again, the need for “Circle Jerk” to enter the Goo-Plus parlance is dire. Dire.

What The Who Now Is A Spark?

Then there’s something called a spark? Which is really just an chosen topic that accumulates random links about my chosen topic? This feels a little “stapled on.” Like, does this relate at all to my friends? Er? Circles? Er, what’s the term? Circlemates? Google-Pals? Plus-Buddies? (Again: Circle Jerks. I’m just saying. Let us all adopt this new lingo.) Who filters Sparks? Isn’t the power of social media the ability to have word-of-mouth fuel your filtering abilities? Has Google hired a guy just to figure out what Sparks I should like? What’s happening? What are all these flashing lights? Why am I being anally probed?

The Department Of Redundancy Department

I already have Twitter and Facebook. The former, I’m very happy with. The latter, I could mostly give a shit about but I’ve got tons of family and classmates there. So, I do an update to Twitter and/or Facebook, I now have, what, a third social media axis to choose from? And I’m going to do what? Say the same thing there that I said everywhere else? That’s fine, I guess, but the thought of having to track posts and replies across three axes (not to mention the blog or Goodreads or Tumblr or other blogs or reality) just makes me want to take a goddamn nap.

Even worse, Googly-Eyes over there wants me to get all handsy with organizing my social existence. You know what sounds excruciating? Organizing my social existence. Putting everybody in little boxes. Arranging people like pewter figurines in their little drawers and cubby-holes. Are you a friend? Or a worker? What if you’re a worker-friend? What if you’re part of my Beekeeping Club but you might also inadvertently find interest in my posts about Coffee Beans Run Through The Intestinal Tract Of Sugar Gliders? I already have enough busy-work in my life — balancing checkbooks, washing dishes, obsessively going over my “locks of hair stolen from all the red-headed hookers I’ve murdered.” Do I really want to micro-manage my online cohorts? Is micro-managing stuff ever fun (except for obsessives)?

As a writer, is this just another place for writer wankery? Don’t I do that enough? (Answer: duh, yes.)

I’m reaching a state of social media ennui. Tedium with such pablum.

The whole thing feels a little bit redundant.

A Mote Of Promise In SkyNet’s Eye

That’s not to say you won’t enjoy ~~Fraggle Rock~~ Google Plus. You very well might. As a Facebook replacement, it’s aces, I suppose. (Though I’m a bit puzzled by those who are apeshit gonzo about OMG GEE PLUS IS A BILLION TIMES BETTER THAN FACEBOOK, which to me is like saying, OMG FRUITY PEBBLES IS A BILLION TIMES BETTER THAN FROOT LOOPS.) Further, when the digital winds blow right I occasionally catch the briny scent of sheer potential in the service, a potential that maybe harkens back to what Google wanted with services like Buzz and Wave.

For now, I can’t see myself hanging out too much at the Gee-Willikers Gee-Whiz Gee-Plus Zero-G G-Unit G-Love G Money — I occasionally pull back the tent flap and see if anything good is going on, but so far, it’s mostly just a bunch of carnies sitting around smoking cigarettes and looking a little bored. That said, if you can find me on there, feel free. Entrap me in one of your jerking circles.

Otherwise I shall remain firmly ensconced in the Twitters, where I am allowed to stand on a soapbox, yell all kinds of crap into the air, and you can decide if it’s worth hearing.

As always: YMMV, IMHO, etc.

In other news: get off my lawn, you damn kids. With your Google+. And your hair. And your clothes.

July 8, 2011 / 40 Comments

Flash Fiction Challenge: “The Lady And The Swordsman”

Last week’s challenge — “The Fourth Of July” — demands your reading eyes.

It’s another photo-based flash fiction challenge.

Look at that photo above.

Write 1000 words based off whatever that picture calls to mind inside the crazy teacup that is your skull.

Any genre will do.

As always: you’ve one week to complete this. Friday, 7/15, by noon EST.

Post at your blog.

Drop a link below.

Link back here if you’re so inclined.

And that’s that.

Get to writing.

Oh — wait.

One more thing.

Everybody still enjoying these challenges? Want to make sure that you’re all into them. Further, if you’ve any requests or suggestions, you know my ears are peeled back, the earholes ready to receive your wisdom.

(Further, I’ll add that above, “Swordsman” may be inaccurate — that masked individual looks to be wearing a woman’s blouse, so excuse any sexism implicit in the title. I just thought it had a nice flow. You don’t even need to cling to either of those ideas — just use the picture as your springboard toward awesome fiction.)

Go write, gods-damnit.