Archives (page 450 of 456)

February 8, 2011 / 19 Comments

Little Chucky’s Screenwriting Bible

You may note that, in my bio, I sometimes refer to myself as a “screenwriter” in addition to “novelist,” or “game designer” or “freelance penmonkey.” (Also in addition to: “bee wrangler,” “canary in the coal mine,” and “fluffer.”) At this point I no longer consider the identifier a matter of wishful thinking: for years I’ve worked on scripts that remain unproduced, but by this point my writing partner and I have worked on scripts that have, in fact, seen the light of day: Collapsus and Pandemic, just to name two. Plus, we have a feature film in development and a television show up for pilot consideration.

And yet, you may notice that I don’t talk much about it.

Screenwriting, I mean, not the bee-wrangling or porn fluffing.

Reason being: I’ve only been doing this a few years. I can talk about being a fiction writer or game designer or the life of the slack-jawed freelancer because I’ve been living those roles for a long time. I’m no expert, but I can at least wade into such swampy waters without fear of being sucked under.

Still, I get a lot of requests to talk about screenwriting.

People say to me, “Talk about screenwriting! Do it now!”

And I try to reply to them and explain… but it’s difficult what with the dirty panties duct-taped into my mouth. I mostly just want to go back to the grocery store from whence I was abducted.

Good news is, I’ve managed to bite through my panty-gag, and now I will regale you with my ahem-cough-cough “rules” of screenwriting, which are really just “guidelines with all the firmness of gravy-soaked bread.” Again, I am no expert. Read this not with a grain of salt but rather an entire salt lick.

Ready? Let’s roll.

Brevity Is The Soul Of Wit, Anything Else Is A Bowl Of Shit

The screenplay is a bucking horse, a rammy stallion — the first time it sees the barn door open, that fucker is going to be off like a shot. Before you know what’s happening, you have a 300 page script in your hands. And, given that one page is equivalent to a minute of screen time, that’s bad juju.

So, you have to make a concerted effort to rein that beast in, always aiming for that sweet spot between 90 and 120 pages. This requires an almost religious devotion to brevity.

Conversations shouldn’t go on too long. Descriptions should be terse; this isn’t a novel. You’re not Lovecraft. Do not spend two pages discussing the insane non-Euclidean geometry of a lamp. Find and report on only those most critical of details. You’re not art directing the thing. Scenes shouldn’t go more than three, four, maaaaybe five pages. Keep it tight. Fast. Loose.

It’s like bad sex — get in, see the sights, pop your cookies, get out.

Think Of It Like A “Story Blueprint”

Don’t be married to the material. A novel is the end of the road. What you write is what ends up on the shelves (after edits, of course). Screenplays don’t work like that. The work is always in flux. It’s in flux up until the final director’s edit (at which point you’ve long been out of the equation). You are writing more a story blueprint than a story. It’s an architectural map. It’s not yet a constructed building.

And Yet, It Needs To Be A Compelling Read

By the same token, it still has to read like a kick-ass compelling story. Characters must leap off the page. Descriptions must be vivid. Dialogue should be sharp, pointed, purposeful. And you must do so with that aforementioned devotion to brevity. Which, yes, is like saying, “I need you to spit liquid gold into this thimble,” but fuck it, that’s your job.

I write my scripts in accordance to screenwriting rules, but I also try to make them interesting. I want them to read a little bit like novels or short stories without conforming to those particular conventions. (Oh, and for the record, I do not believe that novel = screenplay. I believe short story or novella = screenplay. Anybody who tries to adapt a novel into a screenplay will find the challenging task of determining what massive cuts the novel will require. Just my two cents.)

Write so it will be read at the same time you write so it will be filmed.

No Matter How Much Your Struggle, Structure Matters

I read blogs or screenwriting advice and you hear a lot of, “Adhering to the three-act structure is a myth, blah blah blah, don’t do it.” Except very rarely do they cite films that don’t adhere to this classic filmic structure. Most classic films do. Most modern films do. Seriously, you can check your watch during a film and predict the act turns.

For better or for worse, it is the accepted and expected structure in film-making. You can do differently, but you may be challenged. Just lie back and think of England, love.

Structure is a beautiful thing. The challenge — really, the art — is how you subvert structure, how you brainwash it to make it your own. That is, at least, how I see it.

Do Not Write A Shooting Script

You’re a writer, not a director, so unless it’s demanded of you, leave all the camera voodoo out of there. That also gums up a clean and compelling read. So. Uh. Don’t do it.

In TV, Characters Are Static; In Film, Characters Are Dynamic

The nigh-universality of it sucks, but in television, we don’t like our characters to change. Yes, you can point to characters that have changed, but it’s not common. In film, however, we are granted the opportunity to see change in our characters, and in my ego-fed megalomaniac humble opinion, you don’t want to waste that opportunity.

Action Action Action Shit Be Happening Action Action Action

Novels offer the writer and reader a luxury that a script does not. In a novel, we are often treated to a sense of history, of thought, of internal monologues, of peeling away layers.

In scripts, you still have to think about all that stuff. But it just doesn’t end up on the page. Characters with rich character histories will not find those rich histories on display like in a museum.

Screenplays are about shit happening. I don’t mean “action” in the sense of “constant karate kicks and exploding F-14 Tomcats,” I just mean, things must be in perpetual motion.

You don’t have time to stop and wax poetic. That’s not to say pacing fails to matter or that you don’t get those same peaks and valleys — it’s just that pacing does not account for 10 pages of talking about your fantasy kingdom’s oh-so-fascinating history or five pages of a character’s internal process.

Shove it all beneath a layer of wordsmithy and bury it there. Text must become subtext.

Writing Is Rewriting

Be ready to rewrite.

I enjoy it. I love rewriting scripts way more than I do rewriting novels. I guess it’s because rewriting novels is like hauling stone. Editing a script is fast, light, loose — the tool is far more “scalpel” than “dumptruck.”

Table Reads Are The Cat’s Knees, The Bee’s Pajamas

It’s critical to read your novel aloud.

It’s also critical for someone else — preferably lots of someone elses — to read your script aloud. We’ve had table reads for all our feature scripts and it is incredibly valuable. Your ear will pick up things: inadequacies, inadvertent alliterations, repetitions, linguistic quirks, muddy phrasing. The actors will do things with your words that you never expected, both for the awesome and for the unpleasant.

You do not merely want this. You need this.

Oh, And Have Fun

I adore screenwriting. It’s like I’ve opened a gnome door, and all these little fun goblins are in there having a party, and I’m inviting them into my brain. Where they make a nest and drink goblin beer and have giddy goblin babies. I have a blast doing it, and in reading scripts, I can tell when fun (or excitement or engagement) is in the recipe. This is true of novels, too, but because a script is so spare, so bare, I personally think that it comes out more… distinctly?

So, rock out and have fun, will you?

And that’s it. That’s all she wrote.

But I want to hear from you. Anybody tinkering with scripts out there? Got any “golden rules” you care to share? Don’t make me get the dirty panty-gag.

February 7, 2011 / 61 Comments

Crowdsourcing Our Child’s Future

It has become increasingly clear to me that I am going to be an awful father.

(hold for applause)

I am only marginally capable as a human being. The very few things I am good at are simply not things that will help me raise a kid. Way I see it, I’ve got a 15-minute window daily where Daddy can kick a little ass — I’ll be top of the pops when it comes time for the wee one to lay down and be transfixed by the weird magic of storytime. I’ll probably be good at that. The rest of the time? Eeeesh.

In part, this is why I wanted a girl. Because then Daddy can just be Daddy — he doesn’t have to teach the girl how to be a girl. (I recognize that this is a little myopic and perhaps even mildly sexist. But the father-son and mother-daughter axes are still prevalent, for good or evil.) But a son? Oh. Oh. Oh, shit. Oh, no. One day my son is going to look into my eyes and seek answers. He’s going to want to know something about something, about anything, he’s going to ask me “Why?” or “How do I do this?” or “What do I do now?” and I am likely to stand there, jaw beslackened, my mouth forming words that have no sound.

What the hell am I going to tell him?

“Son, here’s how to write your way out of this problem. Bully at school? Punish him in your fiction!”

“My boy, to fix this problem, you must go, go be snarky on the Internet.”

“Problems at school? Uhhhh. Here’s how to make an omelet. Did that fix anything?”

I don’t have any of my own answers. In fact, as I get older, I am increasingly bewildered. My once rock-solid certainty in things is turning to liver mush.

I’m clumsy. My practical skills are minimal. I’m an idiot. I’m lucky I don’t piss myself in public. I should wear a bucket on my head so I don’t damage the soft fontanelle of my skull.

I don’t expect the child to realize it right away. I mean, I can fake it for a number of years. It’s not like my son is going to be playing with his toy du jour at the age of five and realize Daddy put that shit together wrong. But over time, the reality of my overall incompetence is going to seep into his daily life and there will one day come a kind of illumination for him, a critical moment of revelation where a flashlight clicks suddenly on and highlights a spot on the wall that had before been cloaked in shadow, and on the wall will be written the words: “Daddy is a dipshit. Adults are suspect. Trust nothing.”

You know what I did yesterday? I painted the nursery. It is, quite literally, the color of Winnie the Pooh. The end result? Whoo. Yeah. We should’ve just hired a chimp to paint it. I came out of that room looking like a paint bomb went off. No telling how much paint I actually ingested. (Answer: at least 8 ounces.)

This isn’t going to go well.

Daily the boy shows deeper signs of his existence. He’s punching and kicking like you wouldn’t believe. Weeks back, I’d feel my wife’s belly and the wee one’s movements would be minimal — not more than a muscle twitch here, a nudge-nudge there. But now he’s developing. He’s got room to move. He’s breaking bricks with karate chops in there. He’s an action hero. I put my hand there, it’s like that scene in Jurassic Park where [insert dinosaur here] tries to break through [insert object here] and [dents it, damages it, breaks it]. You can see the flesh move as he pivot-kicks off my wife’s bladder and Ki-yaaaa!

So, we are now receiving daily reminders that this is real.

This is happening.

I’m going to be a Daddy, and I am woefully unprepared.

I figure that, in order to fill in the gaps of my striking lack of knowledge, I’d better turn to you, the brain trust, the hive-mind, the group-think, to figure some shit out.

Today is fairly light, but it’s really time to start hunkering down and procuring the mountain of objects reportedly necessary to have a baby. We have a crib, but we don’t have much else. No high chair, no car seat, no play pen, no nothing. Dipping our toes into the waters, we are learning alarming truths: did you know, for instance, that car seats have expiration dates? As if the car seat were a jug of milk? True fact.

So, what I’d like to know is whether or not you have any advice — anything at all — to share regarding our preparations for the baby’s upcoming existence. It’s a daunting task just trying to buy the objects that the baby will use for like, 10 minutes (“This high-chair is good for ages 3 months to 3 months and 7 days”). It’s just as daunting trying to figure out the items the baby won’t need. You go to a place like Babies R’ Us and it is truly overwhelming. I don’t need that many objects to survive. They have like, 50,000 strollers available. It is awesome, and not in the “Dude, Bro, Awesome” way, but rather in the, “I have seen great Cthulhu rise from the ocean’s depths to consume us all and lo it is awesome.”

Any help is appreciated because, well, as noted earlier, I am doe-eyed and confused. But the truck is coming, and no matter how hypnotized I am by the pretty lights, I have to get cracking.

February 6, 2011 / 16 Comments

On This Day Of The Foot And The Ball, We Will Instead Speak Of Puppies

Yep. I’m one of those guys who watches the Puppy Bowl, not the Super Bowl.

That may put my masculinity in question, I dunno. Here, let me fix that: I also like Sarah McLachlan and one of my favorite TV shows of all time is Gilmore Girls.

Wait, that probably didn’t fix anything. Shit.

Uhhh.

I like guns?

My favorite movie is Die Hard?

I have a mighty beard that destroys my enemies in its tangle of choking vines?

I dunno. It may be too late for me.

Well, whatever. The Super Bowl hasn’t really ever been a thing in any incarnation of Der Wendighaus. We were a baseball family, which is not to say we were a family made of anthropomorphic baseballs but rather, we watched a lot of baseball. I still dig the World Series. And I also love the Oscars. The Oscars are my own Nerd Super Bowl.

I’ve tried watching the Super Bowl. Ehhh? Muh? I just don’t get it. I get bored. Is that weird? I watch it, I get bored. It seems like the game is mostly about not playing the game. Dang, a football game is 60 minutes, split into four 15-minute quarters, right? So, why then does the game start at 6PM and end at 10:30PM (provided it doesn’t run over)? It takes four-and-a-half hours to play an hour-long game? The rest of it is commercials and time-outs and replays and analysis and more commercials and then there’s a flurry of activity for 30 seconds where someone kicks over the bee-hive and then it’s back to commercials and time-outs and guys punching each other in the balls or whatever. Plus, that doesn’t even account for the two hour “pre-game.” Which is not, as the term suggests, the game before the game.

The Wall Street Journal estimates that in every football game, the ball is actually only in play for 11 minutes. Counter that with hockey, where it’s action action action at every turn.

When I watch the Super Bowl, I mostly want to take a nap. I’d rather watch a game of Monopoly.

Played by old people and children.

But again, everybody’s got their thing. Hell, I like the Oscars. The last Oscar telecast was, I think, 17 hours long. And they estimated that at least 21% of the audience committed suicide during the show. I mean, goddamn, getting through the Oscars is like watching snot dry on a little kid’s face. And the World Series next year is supposed to be “Best Out Of 31.” God forbid they play one game to settle anything.

Really, what I’m saying is, fuck yeah, puppies.

Man, if I’m having a bad day, the only thing I need to do is look at puppies. Puppies are a panacea. If I ever get cancer — and, given my family history, that day is coming — I plan on engaging in my own personal form of puppy therapy, which is to say I will be watching an endless loop of puppy videos. Hell, I might even buy a bunch of puppies and live with them as their pack mentor. I wonder: if you rub puppies on cancer tumors, do the cancer tumors go “Awwww!” and then slowly deflate?

Science is slow to pick up on the “puppy panacea” theory, which is why I say, screw you, science. America doesn’t need you. We only need puppies, baseball, and Jesus. And Democracy. But mostly Jesus.

Man, I’m rambling this morning.

Really, what I’m saying is, fuck yeah, puppies.

Take a moment out of your day, if you care, and deposit into the comments below something — anything, really — about puppies. What’s the cutest puppy? Got a puppy picture with a high-larious caption? Puppy video? Anything at all. Let’s engage in a little puppy therapy.

Here, let me get the ball rolling.

First: courtesy of Stacia Decker and Matthew Funk, the cutest designer puppy ever: the Pomeranian Husky mix, also known as the “Pomsky.”

Second: Lab puppies in slow motion.

Third: Iso, the dachshund puppy, playing in the snow (also in slow motion).

Fourth: “Puppy Can’t Get Up.”

Fifth and finally: Puppy Wakes Up.

There. A little puppy therapy.

Now, your turn. Then go shoot some guns and grow beards and watch Gilmore Girls.

I mean, uhhh, enjoy the Super Bowl.

February 5, 2011 / 2 Comments

No Happy Endings: Choose Your Doom (Zombie Apocalypse!) Review

Books are not usually much fun to read.

“Bullsnot,” you proclaim. “Books are totally fun. You’re an asshole.”

Shh, no, you’re not understanding this literally — stories are fun, yes, but once you leave childhood the physical act of reading a book (whether it’s an ancient hardbound tome like they used to make way back in the 21st century or on one of them fancy Kindlemachines) becomes a fairly rote endeavor. Pick it up. Read left to right, top to bottom, get to the end, have a snack, go to bed.

I am here to report that the fun has once more been returned to the act of reading a book.

Remember CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE books? Of course you do. Unless you’re some kind of moon dweller, you probably had at least one. Or, if you were me, you had damn near all of them. Those books offered branching stories — “Want to kick down the door? Turn to pg 72. Feel like pouring the witches’ brew into the sewer grate? Turn to page 89.” Then you’d make your choice, turn to a page, and you’d be eaten by rats or stuck in quicksand or turned into a flying monkey.

It was easy to die in those books. Every turn, a new inventive death. Only a few ways out “alive.”

Well, those books are back.

Um. Sort of.

CHOOSE YOUR DOOM: ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE — penned by fellow penmonkeys DeAnna Knippling and Dante Savelli — is just like those early iterations except for the fact that the book has no happy endings. It has awesome endings. But none of them are particularly happy. The book even advertises this on the cover.

Each page, in addition to generally offering you a choice, also offers a sketch of the action on that page. The PDF version allows you to click links to get to the next choice, which feels keenly interactive.

Gist of the book is this: you’re a guy at a bar when the zombie apocalypse hits town. After a few pages of basic exposition, you’re thrown into a series of choices. What to do when the bartender Marty starts to turn into a zombie? What to do when survivors come to the door, when zombies come crashing through the window, when you see an ambulance outside full of medical supplies (and also an orgy of zombies)?

You will navigate the town and find your friends Bob and Bennie, your girlfriend Addie, and your father. You might visit the zoo. You might find yourself at Cheyenne Mountain. You might even become a zombie.

It’s a fun story, cleverly written, with doses of humor throughout. If I had any complaints, they’d be minor — it’d be nice to have some of the side characters get a little more “character juice” and become more fully realized (before you perhaps dispatch them or they dispatch you), and also, some of the sketches, while fun, didn’t always match up with the action as it was described.

Even still, it comes together as a quick, engaging, humorous read.

Chiggity-check it.

Doompress-dot-com.

February 4, 2011 / 74 Comments

Once More Into The Breach: Further Response To The Self-Publishing Hoo-Ha

Some quick reading material, should you feel like following the bouncing ball and singing along:

My original post (“Why Your Self-Published Book May Suck A Bag Of Dicks“). Peruse comments.

The Kindle Boards topic (scroll down a few messages). Thanks to Lee Goldberg for mentioning me there and also at his own site — in fact, Lee has his own post (“Knee-Jerk Defensiveness“) worth looking at.

I was also interviewed yesterday about self-publishing. Spinetingler Magazine has the juice.

And here is a video of a puppy taking a bath in slow motion.

We all caught up?

Good.

I figure instead of hopping around the forums and comment threads and pollinating them with my opinion-dust, I’d just hunker down here and rattle off some further thoughts and responses. The blog post is generating a lot of discussion — some interesting, some curious, some downright mystifying. Seems then that the blog is a good place to hash it out. Plus, I need a blog post for today. The blog, it hungers. It hungers. If I don’t feed it fresh content daily, it gets bitey. I already lost a ring-finger when I missed a day of posting. I shall not sacrifice any more of my digits — with this beast, it’s a total policy of appeasement.

Let’s slap on some hip waders and ease into the swamp.

Your Rabid Badger Hate Will Not Be Televised

An up-front warning: I am Fonzie cool with you disagreeing with me on any point. I am not cool, however, with anybody leaving hateful (and occasionally violent) “fuck you” comments on this blog. Those will be deleted. You can’t bring anything valuable to the table, then I flush you. Whoosh. I will not “die in a fire.” I will not choke on a bag of dicks and die. Your comment will die in a fire as I delete your madman ravings.

I’m sure someone out there is thinking that I shouldn’t delete stuff like that and should respond to it. Well, that is my response: deletion. As the movie says, this is not a Cheerocracy. If you’re a raging froth-mouthed dick-for-brains that brings nothing to the table, then I have zero interest in letting your comments lurk.

I Am Not Whizzing In The Mouth And Eyes Of “Indie Publishing”

If you seriously believe I oppose indie DIY self-publishing endeavors, you either a) have poor reading comprehension, b) have possibly been kicked by a mule and as a result are hemorrhaging in your brain or c) are just a jerk who thinks what he wants no matter the evidence to the contrary.

Newsflash: See the banner? I self-published a short story collection, IRREGULAR CREATURES. (For the record, I’m pleased with its sales. It’s doing nicely and I enjoy the experiment.)

Newsflash: I have colleagues who have self-published. They seem to be doing nicely. Their work is also exemplary. Have you seen 8 POUNDS by Chris Holm? Gaze upon its wondrous cover. Then crack it open like a nut and feast on its sweet meats.

Newsflash: I also have colleagues who represent independent film, independent game design, independent music. I do not believe “independent” is a dirty word.

Newsflash: If you continue to claim that I am somehow against all of self-publishing, you are woefully ignorant and willfully misrepresenting my position.

The only thing in the crosshairs of my Crap Cannon are those who self-publish their little dumpster babies.

Which leads me to…

If You Feel Defensive, Then I’m Probably Talking About You

As Lee puts it, there exists a degree of “knee-jerk defensiveness” going on about self-publishing. Now, to be clear, I do not equate disagreement with defensiveness. You’re obviously free to disagree. I am not the arbiter of the self-publishing community. Hell, I agree that I picked an easy target.

But that’s what amuses me. My initial feeling was, “Well, I’ve picked so easy a target that surely it won’t have any supporters. Who could possibly defend self-publishing badly?”

Oops.

You find this with willful teenagers. I remember because I was one of them.

Your mother might say, “Someone broke the toilet when someone flushed someone’s old underpants down the pipes. Do you happen to know who that someone might be?”

And you, as Willful Teenager, stammer and gesticulate and feign persecution. “God. It’s like, whatever. It’s like, I can’t not get blamed for stuff. God. God!“

Except, of course, you were still the one who flushed your underpants down the toilet on a dare made by your friend, Bad Influence Buddy. But that doesn’t stop your loud protestations.

This is like that.

Thou doth protest too much, methinks.

Badges And Sirens: What “Self-Policing” Means

I see some took issue with my notion that the community should self-police. You’re right, to a point. While a cruel little part of my heart would be eminently satisfied if we dragged all the rot-suck self-publishers into the light of scrutiny where they all burst into flames, their ashes caught in whorls on the wind, I do agree that such a thing is probably too mean and ultimately not that helpful.

It was, in part, a joke, but a joke born of some seriousness. Like most of my “bag of dicks” post, actually.

Here’s what I really mean by self-policing: you should stop acting like some entrenched fundamentalist community. Fundamentalists are never useful, never helpful. Stop being rabid cheerleaders for one another when it isn’t deserved. You claim that cream rises to the top? Alternate theory: shit floats. If you think the good stuff will eventually be recognized for its quality, then laud it, sing its praises — but don’t do the same for the sub-par low-quality nonsense. You don’t have to drag them kicking and screaming into the city square where we all pelt them with ice balls. But you also don’t have to pretend that you’re comrades. You don’t have to link arms. Youi don’t have to pretend that bad is actually good.

Don’t be the noisy minority that loudly cheers for any self-published tripe just because it’s self-published. “Indie” is not an adjective for “quality.” Neither, for the record, is “traditional.” The only trick to traditional is, those gatekeepers you love to hate so much are at the very least ensuring that what goes out into the world isn’t the artistic equivalent of a dead seagull duct taped to a brick and heaved through your living room window. Self-publishing may not utilize or even require gatekeepers, but it could damn sure use some taste-makers, some prime-movers, some exemplars.

Be that. Elevate good works, not crap. Be part of the reason why cream rises. Don’t let the shit float.

Do You Hate Books?

You have chosen to self-publish. Good for you. That’s a choice you have made. It may not be a choice others have made. Just as you are not an idiot or an asshole for self-publishing, others are not idiots or assholes for going the other way. Don’t hate the player. Hate the game.

Why all the anger toward traditional publishing? If you’re not choosing that path, then what’s with the pissing and moaning? Did traditional publishing come and spit in your Cheerios? Are you stung because of a rejection? Tough titty. Even the best writers have received tough rejections. Some deserved, some not. Get shut of it. Harden up. Stop casting aspersions at those who have nothing to do with your failure or your success. Learn a lesson and move on.

I mean, how did you come to love reading, exactly? At bedtime did your mother go and download an independent children’s book onto her Kindle to read to you? Was your mother a time traveler?

No. She read you a book. From a bookshelf. Found in a library or a bookstore. And that book was traditionally published by a traditional author and a traditional publishing company.

That system still produces a metric butt-ton of truly excellent reading material. Sure, it also is the system that pooped out a Snooki book. And yes, the Snooki book creates other Snooki books when you splash self-tanner on it, and when the Snooki book drinks vodka-and-Red-Bull after midnight it releases Snooki — like the Krampus! — into the world. But holding up examples of authors you don’t like doesn’t mean the entire traditional system is somehow corrupt or devoid of quality in much the same way that holding up examples of shitty self-publishing was not my way of saying that all indie publishing is bereft of value.

Preaching To The Choir

I’ll cop to the fact that, by and large, I was preaching to the choir. Again, I picked an easy target.

Still. I have a tiny glimmer of hope that someone out there felt the scales fall from their eyes and they were able to realize, “Hey, you know what? Maybe I shouldn’t just foist this unedited story into the world. Maybe it wouldn’t be the best idea if I designed the cover myself in MS Paint. Maybe I should actually take myself and my craft seriously and see that my story has potential but that to achieve that potential actually takes work and thought and effort — and that the best way of me proving myself and proving that self-publishing is viable is not by sloppily belching my undigested meal into the marketplace but rather by exhibiting a little bit of patience and care.”

Further, maybe if you spent less time railing against the establishment and took more time becoming a better writer (and a better publisher), you wouldn’t feel so blindly defensive.

Standards And Best Practices

You want everybody to take self-publishing seriously.

They do not. Not yet.

Self-publishing and its proponents and practitioners will never get the respect it reportedly deserves while the vocal fundamentalist who-gives-a-shit-about-quality community is there championing the half-rotting deer carcass work of Scoots McCoy with the same triumphant horn-blows that they use to tout the works of Konrath or Goldberg (or Insert Your Favorite Self-Published Author Here).

Stop treating the Kindle marketplace or any other distribution system like it’s your own personal White Elephant sale. You want self-publishing to work, it needs to look like a bookstore, not a flea market.

Stop high-fiving shitty authors for being shitty.

Stop assuming that any critique is there to tear you down. Make hay of it. If you cover sucks, get a better cover. If your description reads like ass, write a better description. And for God’s sakes, always improve your craft. You want to be a pro, then act like a pro. Not like a mewling kitten who didn’t get a taste of milk.

Get better. Be better. Prove your way works or be saddled with the stigma.

Good authors and good books are out there no matter how they got published. Why wouldn’t you want to be among them? Why would you want to be the enemy of quality work?

Why would you want your book to suck a bag of dicks?

February 3, 2011 / 56 Comments

Been A While Since I Rolled Them Bones

In tonight’s episode of Community, I am reliably informed (by their commercials — and my prophetic dreams) that the gang will be playing a little D&D.

That’s fun. But it makes me a little itchy.

It makes me itchy because I haven’t rolled the bones — meaning, I have not gamed — in quite a long time. Too long. In fact, it’s been at least eight or nine months.

By and large, it’s difficult for adult life to accommodate any kind of regular gaming. This isn’t unusual, mind — I can’t tell you how many dudes in their mid-30s who say, with a faint ember still in their eye (and the clatter of a 20-sider echoing in their brain chamber), “Oh, man! I used to game.”

And I know it’s not going to get a damn sight easier once the Tiny Monkey comes into our life, heaving everything upside-down. Frankly, I’m probably going to have to hide my dice just because they’re a choking hazard.

Kids, man. Kids. They try to eat everything. I almost choked to death on a penny when I was a tot. I can only imagine how many d10s my nascent heir will be able to jam down his windpipe.

On the one hand, I miss it. On the other hand, part of me thinks: man, I’ve got things to do. Like, I want to play video games more often, but when I do, I tend to find myself wanting to do other stuff. Sometimes, I even have these absurd moments where I think, “I’d rather be doing the dishes because the dishes need doing.” Is this adulthood? It feels like a brain parasite. Get me a coat hanger and some anti-fungal paste.

Stat!

Anyway.

This brings me to you, trusty game-heads.

First, I ask you: what are you playing these days? Anything really. I’m mostly asking about pen-and-paper stuff, but hey, unload your game-flavored goodness upon my head. Board games, video games, whatever.

Second, I beseech you: anybody found a way to play without actually sitting across the table from folks? Anybody game over Skype? Is there an iPad solution of which I’m not yet aware? Help a brother out.

Two more tiny things:

I think I might do a free PDF writing up some of my “irregular creatures” as statted-up World of Darkness monsters. Because, hey, why the fuck not? Could be fun. Shits and giggles. You know. For the kids.

Also, why the hell aren’t you watching Community again? Sheesh.