Archives (page 431 of 457)

June 21, 2011 / 69 Comments

Chick-Fil-A Versus The Homosexuals

I don’t eat a lot of fast food.

Mostly because, well, it’s shit. Delicious shit, in many cases, but last time I checked, pets think antifreeze is delicious: doesn’t mean I’d recommend it as a fucking snack.

I’ll eat fast food (Wendy’s, McDonald’s, what-have-you) if I’m on the road for something because it’s often difficult to do otherwise. This is fairly rare.

I’ll eat “higher-end” fast food if it’s the only choice — Five Guys, Panera, Chipotle — but again, we’re talking a fairly rare event, here. (Actually, I take an annual pilgrimage to Five Guys. Because, c’mon.)

And, finally, I’ll eat Chick-Fil-A.

Why not? Tasty food. Always gets high marks in terms of quality ingredients and relative healthfulness. We’ve one close by, and the people there are incredibly friendly. Beaming smiles and bright eyes and the epitome of politeness. Plus they have a giant cow tottering to and fro, and sometimes that big fuzzy motherfucker will come right up to your table and clear it for you. They have family nights. Kids get their faces painted. A sense of community lingers.

Of course, while their food is delicious, it turns out, their politics are not.

They have a raging hate-boner for same-sex couples.

Well, goddamnit.

Way to go, Chick-Fil-A. Way to be a dick. (I’m sure given their almost sexual fascination with chickens there’s a “cock” joke in there somewhere. I’ll leave it for you, my intrepid readers, to discover.)

It’s one thing to know that, say, a CEO is a dick. That’s no good, but you could maybe justify not caring so much — after all, I haven’t vetted every employee of every corporation that produces every product I consume. I don’t know that Steve Jobs isn’t a fetus-munching Scientologist or the guy who made my frozen burrito isn’t some kind of violent Eskimo-hater. Further, I’ve heard some folks say, “Well, they are Christian,” as if every Christian human has a secret agenda against the LGBT community. But here, the real rub is that Chick-Fil-A is actively opposed to gay marriage and LGBT rights, which is another way of saying they oppose human love, rationality, and human rights.

Which means I have to oppose their delicious chicken sandwiches.

It’s stupid, but my initial thought was, “Well, I can sometimes still eat the sandwiches, right?” Having a new kid, I have no intention of plugging his growing body up with fast food but I thought, “Well, we can take him to Chick-Fil-A. He can see the big cow. He can get his face painted on Tuesdays. Delicious milkshakes!” Except, fuck, fuck, every dollar I spend there means it’s a dollar that can go toward them being dicks.

“Here,” I say. “Here’s five dollars for this delicious meal.”

“Thanks!” chirps the Chick-Fil-A smiley-bot girl. “We’re going to donate twenty-five cents of your order toward making sure gays remain at sub-human legal levels! Would you like waffle fries with that?”

Actually, their chirpy, uber-polite veneer now takes on a Village of the Damned-esque quality, doesn’t it? Like, out back behind the franchise you’ll find a bunch of smiley blonde white girls with promise rings whanging homosexuals in the head with shovels and throwing their bodies into barrel fires. “God loves you!” they cry. “It’s a nice day at Chick-Fil-A!” The big fuzzy cow will totter up and laugh — hurr hurr hurr hurr — before taking a big ol’ cowflop on the bill of rights.

Point being, of course I can’t eat the fucking sandwiches. Not if I want to ever pretend my convictions have substance greater than that of cotton candy in a warm mouth. Is that what I’m going to teach my son someday? “Son, you have to standup and do what’s right. Taking the righteous path isn’t about taking the easy path. Stand by your convictions. Unless, of course, the enemy of those convictions is selling you a delectable chicken sandwich. Because then? Yeah, fuck that noise. You compromise your ideals for a sandwich like that. I’d shoot an Eskimo right in his cold heart just to eat a trio of waffle fries, my boy.”

I mean, shit, if Hitler’s Third Reich had the Chicken Deluxe Sandwich, are we to believe everyone might’ve just looked the other way when it came to the concentration camps?

(“That Hitler sure knows his breaded chicken!”)

I dunno. Point being, if you believe in something, then you have to at least be willing to commit the bare minimum toward that conviction, and here the bare minimum is “not eating their food.” I ate there just a week or two ago, and to my regret, that will have to stop. At least until they learn to play nice with the human race. You chicken-fucking bastards. (That’s why they’re all smiling. They’re banging chickens by the box-load. Don’t buy their bullshit. They love cock.)

June 20, 2011 / 139 Comments

25 Things You Should Know About Writing A Novel

I figured, okay, I just finished the first draft of a new novel. Just got a book deal for another one. Got DOUBLE DEAD coming out in November. Maybe a list of “25 Things” to do with writing a novel. Specifically. The other lists apply, of course — plot, character, storytelling — but this one about the mechanical act of smacking your face again and again into the meaty thighs of a novel. Only problem: I had a list that went well-beyond 25 things. So, I had to trim and trim and trim, and this is the list I came up with. It’s incomplete, of course. They all are. So, if you’re so inclined: get into the comments, add your own.

Previous iterations of the “25 Things” series:

25 Things Every Writer Should Know

25 Things You Should Know About Storytelling

25 Things You Should Know About Character

25 Things You Should Know About Plot

1. Your First And Most Important Goal Is To Finish The Shit That You Started

Let’s get this out of the way right now: if you start a fucking novel, then plan to fucking finish that fucking novel. Your hard drive is not a novel burial ground. It’s like building your own Frankenstein monster — robbing a grave, stealing a brain, chopping up the body — and then giving up before you let lightning tickle that sonofabitch to life. The true author finishes what he begins. That’s what separates you from the dead-beats, from the talkers, from the dilettantes. Don’t let dead metaphysical weight slow you down.

2. That Means Momentum Is Key

Say it five times fast: momentum-momentum-momentum-momentum-momentum. Actually, don’t say it five times fast. I just tried and burst a blood vessel on the inside of my sinuses. The point remains: writing a novel is about gaining steam, about acceleration, about momentum. You lose it every time you stop to revise a scene in the middle, to look up a word, to ponder or change the plot. It’s like a long road-trip: don’t stop for hitchhikers, don’t stop to piss, don’t stop for a Arby’s Big Beef and Cheddar. Just drive. Leave notes in your draft. Highlight empty spaces. Fill text with XXX and know you’ll come back later.

3. The First Draft Is The Beach-Storming Draft

It’s you and hundreds of other soldier-penmonkeys clawing their way up the enemy beach of the People’s Republic Of Novelsvainya. Most of those other poor sots are going to take a stitching of bullets to the chest and neck and drop dead in the sand, flopping around like a fish, their bowels evacuating. Your only goal is to get up that beach. Crawl through mud, blood, sand, shit, corpses. It doesn’t matter if you get up that beach all pretty-like. Or in record time. Nobody cares how your hair looks. Your first draft can and should look like a fucking warzone. That’s okay. Don’t sweat it, because you survived. Put differently, that first draft of yours has permission to suck. Go forth and care not.

4. Be Like The Dog Who Cloaks Himself In Stink

Find joy and liberation in writing a first draft without caring, without giving one whittled whit. It’s like pouring paint on the floor or taking a sledgehammer to some kitchen counters. Get messy. Let it all hang out. Suck wantonly and without regard to others. Let that free you. Have fun. Don’t give a rat’s roasted rectum. You’ll think that all you’re doing is upending a garbage can on the page, but later, trust in the fact you’ll find pearls secreted away in the heaps of trash and piles of junk.

5. The First Draft Is Born In The Laboratory

Take risks on that first draft. Veer left. Drive the story over a cliff. Try new things. Play with language. Kill an important character. Now’s the time to experiment, to go moonbat apeshit all over this story. You’ll pull back on it in subsequent drafts. You’ll have to clean up your mess: all the beer bottles, bong water, blood and broken glass. But some of it will stay. And the stuff that does will feel priceless.

6. Writing Is Rewriting Is Rewriting Is Rewriting Is

Said before but bears repeating: writing is when you make the words, editing is when you make them not shitty. The novel is born on that first go-around but you gotta let that little bastard grow up. Do this through rewriting. And rewriting. And rewriting. As many times as it takes till it stands up and dances on its own.

7. You Have As Many Chances At-Bat As You So Choose —

A Marine sniper doesn’t get infinite shots at his target. A batter only gets three strikes. A knife-thrower only has to fuck up once before he’s got a body to hide. The novelist has it easy. You can keep rewriting. Adding. Fixing. Changing. Endlessly anon until you’re satisfied.

8. — But You Also Have To Know When To Leave Well Enough Alone

Seriously, you have to stop sometime. You whip mashed potatoes too long they get gluey. Comes a time when you need to stop fucking with a novel the same way you stop tonguing a chipped tooth. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Write till it’s good, not till it’s perfect. Because you don’t know shit about perfect. Aim squarely for a B+, and then it’s time to let others have a shot in getting the novel to that A/A+ range.

9. Know When To Bring In The Motherfucking A-Team

You’re not Lone Wolf. You are not Ronin-Ninja-Without-Clan. A novel is a team effort. You need readers. One or several editors. Potentially an agent. True story: writers are often the worst judges of their own work. You spend so long in the trenches, it’s all a hazy, gauzy blur: a swarm of flies. It’s like being on acid. Sometimes you need a trip buddy. Someone to tell you, this is real, this is illusion. “The pink unicorn is just a hallucination. But the dead body in the middle of the floor, dude, that’s real, WE GOTTA FUCKING GO.”

10. Escape The Gravity Of The Hate Spiral

Every 10,000 words is a new peak or valley on this crazy-ass roller coaster ride. You loved the novel last week. This week you want to punch its teeth down its throat. That’s normal. Write through it. The hate spiral will kill you in if you let it. It’s one of the reasons we abandon novels. It’s also nonsense. Sometimes your best work is your worst, your worst is your best. Everything is ass-end up. Fuck worry. Just write.

11. QFT

The other day on Twitter, the author J. Robert King said something that rang true: “No balanced person writes a novel.” You sit down at the desk, shackle your mind to the project, wade into an imaginary swamp with made-up people. For days. Weeks. Sometimes even years. That’s fucking batty.

12. Gotta Abandon Your Baby? Butcher Him For Spare Parts

Don’t abandon your novel. Don’t do it. Don’t make me kick you in the nuts. There. I did it. I kicked your nuts. Taste that? In your mouth? Them’s your nuts. Still. Sometimes it’s going to happen. Hopefully not often, but it does: a novel just isn’t working. Fine. Fine. But don’t let it go without a fight. Chop it apart. Break it into its constituent parts. You put work into that. Take what works and apply it elsewhere. Build another robot using parts you stole from yourself. Eat your body to sustain your body.

13. You Can Write A Novel Pretty Fucking Fast

It’s hard but not impossible to write, say, 5,000 words a day. A novel is roughly 80k. At 5k/day, you can finish a novel in about 16 days. Just know that it won’t be good. Not yet. Can’t write and rewrite that fast.

14. For Fuck’s Sake, Say Something

A reader is going to spend those 80,000 words with you. Hours of his life, given to you. Make them count. Say something about anything. Have your novel mean something to you so it can mean something to them. Bring your guts and brains and passion and heart and for the sake of sweet Sid and Marty Krofft, a message to the table. Don’t just write. Write about something. Do more than entertain. You’re not a dancing monkey. You’re a storyteller, motherfucker. Embrace that responsibility.

15. The Shape Of The Page Matters

A novel page shouldn’t look like a giant wall of text. Nor should it look like an e.e. cummings poem. The shape of the page matters. Balance. Equal parts emptiness and text. Void meets substance.

16. A Novel By The Numbers

The ideal novel is 48% action, 48% dialogue, and 4% exposition and description. I just made that up. Probably totally inaccurate. Possibly I might could maybe sorta be drunk right now. Drunk on words, or on Tito’s Vodka? You decide. Point is, a novel gets bogged by boggy bullshit like heavy description and blathering exposition. A novel is best when it lives in the moment, when its primary mode of communication is action and dialogue linking arms and dancing all over the reader’s face.

17. I Just Lied To You Back There, And For That, I’m Sorry

Dialogue is action. It’s not separate from it. It is it. Action is doing something. Dialogue is talking, and talking is doing something. Even better when dialogue manifests while characters do shit: drive a car, execute some baddies, make an omelette, build a sinister dancing robot whose mad mechanical choromania will reduce the world to cinders. Characters don’t just stand in one place in space and talk. They’re not puppets in community theater. Find language with movement and motion.

18. Description Is About Signal To Noise

Description is best when subtle. Too much description is static. Paint in short strokes. A pinch of spice here. A delicate garnish there. Description is not a hammer with which to bludgeon the mooing herd. Pick one, two, or three details and stop there. I’ve heard this said about large breasts and we’ll reiterate it here for description: anything more than a mouthful is a waste.

19. The Reader Is Your Mule

Up to you whether the reader is a mule carrying your prospector gear up a canyon path or a mule carrying doody-balloons of hard drugs in his butt-pocket; the point remains the same. The reader wants to work. The reader doesn’t know this, of course, so don’t tell him. SHHH. But the reader wants to fill in the details. He wants to be invested in the novel and to make his own decisions and reach his own conclusions. You don’t need to write everything. You can leave pieces (of plot, description, dialogue) out. The reader will get in the game. His imagination matters as much as yours. Make that fucker dance for his dinner.

20. Too Many Dicks On The Dance Floor

A novel can have too many characters. It’s not a set number or anything. The number of characters you can have is limited by your ability to make them fully-realized, wholly-inhabited people. If you don’t have the time or the room to give them a soul, to lend them wants and needs and fears and foibles, then fuck it, chop their heads off and wipe their blood from the page.

21. Genre Matters, Except When It Doesn’t

A good story is a good story, and that translates to novels: a good book is a good book. You write the novel you gotta write regardless of genre. But eventually you have to think about it. Agents, publishers, bookstores, Amazon — they care about genre. Your book has to fit somewhere. The secret is, it doesn’t have to be a perfect fit. Close enough for horseshoes, hand grenades and hobo handjobs. Maybe not that last one.

22. Beware The Saggy Mushy Middle

The beginning’s easy because it’s like — BOOM, some shit just happened. The ending’s easy because — POW, all the shit that happened just lead to this. The middle is where it gets all gooshy, like wet bread or a sloppy pile of viscera. Combat this in a few ways. First, new beginnings and early endings — the peaks and valleys of narrative. Second, keep the pressure on the story and, by proxy, yourself. Third, treat the second act like it’s two or three acts in and of itsownself.

23. Like I Said: Imagine A Long-Ass Road Trip

Variation. In scene. In character. In mood. In setting. In everything. A novel can’t just be one thing. Mix it up. It’s like a long car ride. Take an eight-hour trip down a bland mega-highway and you pretty much want to suck on the tailpipe. Take an eight-hour trip through scenic mountains and pretty burgs and ghost towns, you no longer want to eat gravel and die. Put differently: don’t be boring. If the story buys a house and gets a job in Dullsville, you need to burn Dullsville to the ground and push the story down the road a ways.

24. No One Way Through The Labyrinthine Mire

Plotter. Pantser. Five-k a day. Two-k a day. In sequence or out. Nobody writes a novel the same way, all the way down to which font folks like. Individual novels have their own unique demands. You write it however it needs to be written. Nobody can tell you how. Only that it needs to get done. We each cut our own way through the dark forest. In the deepest shadows, look for your voice. Your voice is what will get you through.

25. Writing A Novel Is Easy, But Writing A Publishable Novel Is Hard

Writing a novel isn’t hard. You throw words on a page, one atop another, until you’ve got a teetering Jenga tower of around 80,000 of the damn things. Same way that building a chair isn’t hard: I can duct tape a bunch of beer cans and chopsticks together and make a chair. It won’t look pretty. And it’s an insurance liability. (“I’m suing you because I smell like beer, I have cuts on my legs and I’ve got two chopsticks up my ass, perforating my colonic wall.”) But writing a good novel, an original novel that’s all your own and nobody else’s, well, there’s the rub, innit? The way you do it is you tell the story like you want to tell it. You learn to write well and write clearly and put a pint of blood on every page until you’ve got nothing left but spit and eye boogers. Learn your craft. Learn your voice. Write it until it’s done, then write it again.

* * *

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.

June 19, 2011 / 19 Comments

Wait, What? Who Let Me Be A Father?

And like that — poof — I’m a father.

Didn’t have to fill out a form. Didn’t have to get a license. Didn’t have to kill a wild boar with my spear and eat its still-beating heart. No test. No spirit quest. No nothing.

Just a paroxysm of delight — a darling dalliance with my beautiful wife — and now we’ve a little drunken homeless man in our life that we call “Baby Ben.”

Holy shit.

In italics, this time: holy shit.

The strange thing is, for the last several years now, Father’s Day has been something of a maudlin day for me. My father passed a few years ago, as you may know, and so when this day rolls around it’s about a day of conspicuous absence, a day where the void of exclusion is felt most keenly. Hey! Not going to send him a card. Not going to call him. Not going out to dinner with him. Not sharing a glass of blackberry brandy.

In that canyon, a swirling stinging sirocco of never-gonna-happen-agains.

Ah, but.

Here, I am, in a different role. Now I’ve got a child — even moreso, a son — of my own. On the one hand, therein lies further cause for sadness here today: Ben has one grandfather now, an awesome guy, a guy who will handily own the job and embrace it the way a bear embraces a falling tree full of honey, but he’s down one grandfather. He’ll never meet my Dad. And damn, my Dad would’ve been a bitchin’ grandfather. He was a good father, but we didn’t always have the best relationship — but he’d have been a great grand-dad (or Pop-Pop or Grampa or whatever the hell he would’ve been called). That’s even sadder, right? Here’s my son and he’ll never have my Dad to show him how to fish or shoot cans off a fence-rail or look for deer or find weird rusted treasures at creepy flea markets nationwide. In that way, the void just yawned wider: the canyon walls crumbling and stretching to accommodate a deeper oblivion.

But then, on the other side, there I am. The kid has a father. (Uh, me, in case you haven’t been paying attention. Or the mailman, if I haven’t been paying attention.) And my Dad’s not here to show him how to fish or shoot cans or any of that, but I am. And through me, those things flip and switch from never-gonna-happen-again to gonna-happen-again-someday. My father’s ghost, his callused hands (and missing pinky finger), maybe getting a second life through me. It won’t be the same, of course — like I’ve said before, we’re all just blurry, blotchy fascimiles of those who came before us, each generation thinner and cut with more water than the last — but it’s something. And I’ll bring new things to the table, too, and in that the weird goofy DNA of fatherhood keeps on going.

Point is, I miss my Dad, but I’ll bring him back through the stories I can tell to my son and through the things I can teach and the adventures we can have.

It’s not everything, but it’s something, and something is better than nothing.

Miss you, Dad. Love you, Dad. Hope you can pause in your wild romp across the Happy Hunting Grounds and look down upon your grand-son and maybe give him a wink and a waggle of your ruined pinky.

Happy Father’s Day, everybody else.

(Sidenote: that photo above is from an early pheasant hunting trip when I was a kid. That’s my gawky, beardless self there second in from the left, and my father the one with the NRA hat. I may be a bespectacled intellectual moderate, but you can be damn sure my son’s going to have a fishing rod, a knife, and a rifle if he wants it. And he’ll learn to use and respect each of those in kind, just as I had done. I won’t make him hunt, but if he wants to, we can do that. Hell, you’ll note that I went just last year to bag more pheasants in honor of the old man. Though, I just can’t hunt deer.)

(Second sidenote: some folks think that B-Dub looks like me, and that might be true. Heck, he even does my one cocked eyebrow look — a dubious, incredulous face. But a lot of the time I see my father’s face in there, too. Which is at times spooky, but at all times, heartening.)

June 17, 2011 / 41 Comments

Flash Fiction Challenge: Must Love Robots

Last week’s challenge — “Dirty-Ass Sex Moves” — is live, live, live.

Given yesterday’s big news regarding BLACKBIRDS, I figured that doing a flash fiction challenge slightly in-theme wasn’t such a bad idea.

With that in mind, and given that the news is about Angry Robot Books, I figure:

Hey, let’s see some flash fiction featuring one or several robots.

In any capacity. In any genre. Get creative.

Here’s the tweak, though: I’m again going to give away copies of CONFESSIONS OF A FREELANCE PENMONKEY and IRREGULAR CREATURES. This time, however, I’m not giving them to my favorites but rather, those who get here and write their fiction first. The first ~~ten~~ (EDIT:) fifteen entrants in the flash fiction challenge (as posted chronologically in the comments below after all comments are approved) can have their choice of either e-book in whatever format they so choose (PDF, Kindle, Nook). If you already possess both e-books, you can either let the next person down the list have your copy or pass it along instead to someone you know will want a copy.

You once again have 1000 words.

You have until next Friday (June 24th) at noon EST, but again, to qualify for the e-book, you gotta get into this challenge early and write some flash fiction featuring a robot in some capacity.

That’s it. That’s the deal.

Robots: it’s what’s for dinner.

Go forth and write, ink-slingers.

EDIT:

Here are the folks who get themselves an e-book:

1. Oldestgenxer

2. Sparky

3. Lesann

4. Alan

5. CY Reid

6. Lindsay Mawson

7. Tribid

8. Tara Tyler

9. Karen Taveres

10. Eric Archibald

11. Amber J. Gardner

12. David Earle

13. Puddin

14. Travis Cole

15. Darlene Underdahl

Folks: hit me up either via the contact form or at chuckwendig [at] terribleminds [dot] com to collect. Be sure to let me know what you want: PDF, Kindle, or Nook format!

June 16, 2011 / 67 Comments

I Am The Monkey On The Back Of An Angry Robot

*whistles innocently*

Angry Robot Books is going to publish my novel, BLACKBIRDS.

I’ll let that sink in.

They’re also going to publish its followup, the tentatively titled: MOCKINGBIRD.

I’ll let that sink in, too.

That sound? The one you hear? Not just in your ear, but in the deep squishy pockets of your mind?

Yeah. That’s me. Screaming with mirth. Cackling like mad. Singing some forbidden hymn to whatever ancient gods decorated my brow with their blessed seed and let fortune favor a wee bearded penmonkey such as myself. I’m dancing. I’m grinning.

I’m lacquering my lederhosen.

BLACKBIRDS has been Out There for a good while now. It’s been ping-ponging from editor to editor. It’s been collecting lovely rejection after lovely rejection, all of them hinting that it deserves to find a home and will some day, but over time, with every month falling off the calendar you start to feel like, “Oh, ohhh, fuck, it’s not going to happen, is it? I’m either going to have to drop it in a box somewhere or self-pub it.”

So, to be picked up by Angry Robot — publisher of some, I mean, c’mon, truly astounding writers? Lauren Beukes? Matt Forbeck? Mike Shevdon? And they’ve also picked up fellow DMLA-ers Adam Christopher and Chris F. Holm? I’m over the moon to be lumped in with that level of talent. My goal is simply not to poop up the place. Here’s a clue how much I love Angry Robot: every since they were made manifest in this plane of existence and began showing up in bookstores, I would constantly go over, pick up their books and say to whomever was standing nearby (my wife, a stranger, a pet goat): “Holy shit, this looks awesome.” Every time. Great authors. Killer concepts. Incredible covers that look like nothing else on the shelves. Plus, they’re incredibly author-friendly, and how can you not love an ecosystem like that?

BLACKBIRDS features a character near and dear to my heart. A character whose struggles are fundamental and human but are reflected in a paranormal condition that exemplifies some far bigger, far weirder shit: fate versus free will, life versus death, what hair dye to choose, and so forth. Miriam Black — the protagonist of these books — is deeply troubled, very angry, and a total pill. But she’s funny, too, and foul-mouthed as anything. It’s great, because I actually care about her. One of my earliest note files when I was conceiving this character was titled, quite simply, “Poor Miriam.” Because I felt awful for the cross I’d strapped to her back and forced her to bear. I had nothing but sympathy and guilt for what I was going to do to her.

(That cross, for the record, is the ability to see how and when someone will die just by touching them. Fate and death, ever-present with naught but the contact of skin on skin.)

Good times.

So, not only does Miriam get one book, but she gets what I hoped she always would: the chance to carry her misanthropic “spit-in-the-eye-of-fate” attitude into other adventures.

Thanks to those who have supported the book all this time. Thanks to Jason Blair and Matt Forbeck for suggesting Angry Robot as a home to begin with. Thanks to Stephen Susco, my screenwriting mentor, who helped me hammer the shit out of this story way back when. Thanks to my wife, who for some reason always seemed to believe in me. And thanks to my kick-ass rock-star of an agent, Stacia Decker, who rocket-launched this through the ionosphere.

And thanks to Angry Robot. Marc Gascoigne, Lee Harris. Gentlemen. Scholars. Biblionauts.

Look for BLACKBIRDS in April/May 2012.

And MOCKINGBIRD not long after.

In Other News…

COAFPM continues to sell very well. Been out for not-quite-one-month now, and it’s sold ~260 copies. Because of the slightly higher price point, it means I’m fast approaching what I’ve earned over four-to-five months with IRREGULAR CREATURES (but that collection has seen a boost since COAFPM‘s release, which is nice). Together the two have paid a couple mortgage payments, so I can’t say boo to that.

IRREGULAR CREATURES has 36 four- and five-star reviews at Amazon, which is incredible. Fills me with giddy bubbles. Or maybe that’s just gas. Even still, thanks all to have bought and loved the collection. Means a lot to me. I hope that more Cat-Bird will show up in the future.

COAFPM — well, I wouldn’t complain if it got some more reviews over there. It’s standing at three reviews at present, and would love to see more added if you’ve read it, enjoyed it, and have the time.

DOUBLE DEAD is back from a first pass edit, and — holy shit! — it doesn’t suck. Looking forward to getting a second major copy-edit through. Jon Oliver and Jenni Hill at Solaris/Abaddon are incredible folks to work with, and I am very pleased that DD is in such excellent hands.

I’m nabbing some secret hush-hush work at my old stomping ground, White Wolf Game Studios. Developing something pretty cool for them which is all about [REDACTED].

Still bouncing my wibbly-wobbly baby-schedule in terms of writing. Some days the word count trickles. Other days, it floods. I was able to finish a new novel — codename: POPCORN — by churning through a 9,000 word writing day last Friday, so that was exciting.

Also planning a series of novellas to release over the course of the summer. Kind of crimey, I guess? High school? Not-quite-noir? Veronica Mars, but more violent? Something like that. Interested?

And that’s all she wrote, folks.

Thanks for reading.

EDIT: Today, Abaddon is also posting the first chapter of DOUBLE DEAD for those who care to read it.

#coburniscoming

June 15, 2011 / 51 Comments

The Official Terribleminds Writer’s Guide To Blogging About Blogging

Blogging cannot get more useless when a blog blogs about blogging, and even worse, here I’m going to blog about some blogs that have in fact already blogged about blogging, and that’s so much blogging it hurts.

Did you follow that? Me neither.

Point is, Kristen Lamb wrote that writers should not blog about writing.

Then Austin Wulf said, writers should too blog about writing.

Then Albert Berg said, good points all around but Kristen might be right, now let’s everybody have a tickle.

And now, here I am.

Blogging about bloggers who have blogged about blogging.

Which is why you’ll notice a trickle of treacly blood exiting my ears.

Obviously, I am a writer (duh) who frequently blogs about writing (duh) though one might not refer to this specifically as a writing blog. Thus, I feel compelled by my deranged mind to talk a little on this subject. I figure, I’ll grab the snake and force him to bite his own tail and yammer about my blogging style here at Jolly Olde Terribleminds, and you can take this information and make love to it…

…or shove it instead up a donkey’s corn-chute.

Your call. Please to enjoy.

First: This Blog, Right Here

I started this site over ten years ago. Probably 12, by now. Before it was WordPress it was a straight-up HTML site designed by a friend and it looked pretty cool at the time, but as new browsers hit the ground, the site refused to play well with them. So, to read the site on, say, Firefox, you had to highlight invisible text and pray to dark gods and mist the screen with bergamot oil just to read what I was saying.

It only worked on Internet Explorer, which is like saying, it only worked on a computer powered by coal.

Two years ago I switched to WordPress. I opened the site up to comments. I began tracking views and page hits and what-not. I also started blogging every damn day, seven days a week.

I don’t say this to brag, only to show the growth of the blog and its readership, but: in June 2009, all month I had 922 unique guests here at the site. That number began doubling until it reached what the site had in June of 2010, which was 15,000 visitors. On June 9th of this year, the blog had 18,490 looky-loos just on that one day. Now, that was a bit extreme, admittedly, and unusual here, but even still, I’ve been getting 70-90k per month, and this month already I’m on track to see the biggest flock of readers yet.

So, am I doing something right? Well, that’s debatable. Quantity is not quality, after all, though I should note I’m quite happy with the quality of readership here. You all seem lovely. Except that one guy in the corner fondling himself. *is handed a piece of paper* Oh. Oh. That’s a mirror? Huh. Awkward.

I’m happy with the blog and its contents.

Rule One: Blog About Whatever The Fuck You’d Like

I agree with the spirit of Lamb’s law, but not the letter — I do not think that blogging about writing is a bad move for writers. The spirit of her law is more that a writer should blog about all kinds of things, not just writing, and further that a writer should not feel compelled to blog about writing by dint of being a writer, and to all that, I agree. But I’m not comfortable saying a writer shouldn’t blog about writing — whether just a little or all the time — if that’s what what makes you happy. Because that’s my ultimate law of bloggery-do: blog what you want because you want to.

Blog about: writing, editing, books, films, games, child-rearing, whisky, snake-breeding, illicit botany, wicker furniture, hookers, microphone fetishes, or the Many Ways To Murder Your Mailman.

Blog about what interests you. About things that rouse your passion, that tickle your saucer nips, that make you do a little ants-in-your-pants prancey dance. That interest and passion will translate to the blog and carry over to the readers. Don’t blog about stuff because someone tells you to blog about it. Further, don’t not blog about something because someone tells you not to.

(And can we just pause for a moment and talk about what a wretched turd-yawn of a word “blog” is? Why has nobody come up with a better word yet? Seriously? Internet, come together in this. Get down in the comments and come up with new words for “blogging,” yeah?)

You might be saying, “But that won’t garner me audience. If I’m a writer of science-fiction who blogs about knitting, that doesn’t build my platform. I should be blogging about science-fiction!”

No, you should be writing science-fiction. Blog about if only if you get jazzed about doing so. See, here’s the thing. A blog audience is not automatically your creative audience. Some crossover exists, but consider: 70,000 people visited this blog last month, but I did not sell 70,000 copies of any of my books. Did I sell 10%, or 7,000 copies, then? Mmmmnope. More like “less than one percent.”

And I’m happy with that, for the record.

All blogging is just squawking into the void. It’s free. It’s a soapbox on which you stand and bark your brain-think into the world. Be yourself. Talk about what you want to talk about. Authenticity and interest will garner readers well beyond plopping out rote, formulaic posts because they are somehow “expected.”

Truth is, since most people have multiple things that enflame their mental loins, you don’t have to worry about having One Kind Of Blog. “This is my blog devoted to knitting vagina cozies” is far less interesting to me than, “this is my blog devoted to the shit that comes out of my head which you may or may not appreciate because as it turns out I’m a complete and complicated human.”

(That again gets to the heart of Lamb’s post.)

Blog in a way that appeases you first. Otherwise, the blog is just a daily lump of stress.

Rule Two: Don’t Be A Dick

When you blog, don’t be a dick. See also:

Don’t be: an asshole, an ass-hat, a shithead, a fuckface, a scum-gargling cock-waffle, a jerk, a jerkoff, a jerk-faced jerkopolis, a douche, a douche-swab, douche-nozzle, double-douche, a doucheologist, a crap-faced stinky-butt, a bully, a prick, a sonofabitch, a bastard, a sonofabastard, a brat, a big ol’ meanie, a pig, a racist, a sexist, any anything-ist, a Nazi, a homophobe, a homophone, a homonym, a homo sapiens…

… ooh, I think I got off the rails there.

Point is, don’t be a dick.

Be tactful about things. Try to be nice. You don’t need to be funny — just don’t be dour and mean. Approach your audience with respect by not flinging boiling urine in their eyes when they come to read your work.

A slight tweak on this: you can be a bit of an asshole (Sweet Sally Struthers, I sure am) provided you do so with self-deprecation and humor in equal measure. I think. Then again, I might be wrong about that. There might exist a secret room of Wendig Haters out there plotting my demise. I’ll just don my tinfoil hat here to block out their hateful frequency, and we’re all good.

Rule Three: No Rule Three Exists, Please Turn Around And Go Home

You’re saying, that’s it?

Two goddamn rules?

Yes, that’s what I’m telling you.

And you’re saying, “But, this is about blogging for writers. Surely you have some specific information that will help them be better writer-blogger hybrid creatures?”

Ehhh. Well, sure. I have some caveats and corollaries. I try to avoid negativity. I don’t recommend writers be reviewers all that often. Blog as part of a community, not separate from it. You can use your blog as a self-promo tool provided that’s only a fraction of your content. Blog often to establish readership routine. Make a blog that’s appealing to the eyes. Own your blog and your domain (remember when Blogger shit the bed a month or two back? Yeah, seriously, own your stuff).

I don’t consider these hard-and-fast rules so much as they are suggestions, though. The only rules are the two noted above: blog how you want to blog, as long as you’re not a big honking dickhead about it.

Q&FuckinA

I don’t know why you’d have any specific questions about terribleminds, but I’m happy to answer them if you do. Same goes for suggestions you may have — the site can and should be improved from time to time (and soon as I have some, HAHAHAHA, time, I plan on attacking a laundry list of challenges here at the Ol’ Bloggery-Hut). Got something to say or ask about the site or its content? Do so with my blessing.