Archives (page 80 of 467)

September 17, 2019 / 44 Comments

How To Be A Professional Author And Not Die Screaming And Starving In A Lightless Abyss

Your reading today comes in the form of this Medium article by Heather Demetrios: “How To Lose A Third Of A Million Dollars Without Even Trying.” It’s a good article. I feel deeply for the writer, because this shit we do comes with no real map. No creative map, no story map, no industry map, no money map. “HERE IS A BUNCH OF MONEY,” a sinister shadowy figure says in an alley. “IN SIX MONTHS, WE WILL EXTRACT FROM YOU A BOOK, AND THEN THE DEAL IS COMPLETE.” And then the shadowy figure is gone, and all you’re left with is the crisp smell of burning paper and a mysterious whisper in the well of your ear that says, “deckle edge.”

But, the good news is, there exist answers to a lot of these conundrums, and so I’m going to do some painting-with-shotguns here and try to broad-stroke some thoughts and answers about the challenges this writer faced in her Authorial Journey.

Your Agent Is There To Help You

You need an agent, and a good agent who will explain to you this stuff — an agent who answers questions you don’t know to ask and who also (obviously) answers the questions you do ask. Now, an agent isn’t psychic, and I’m gonna guess a lot of them default to expecting you know some of this stuff, or they’re so brined and pickled in the industry they’re like fish swimming in water who don’t know what “water” even is anymore. Which leads me to highlight the next point:

Definitely Ask Questions

Deeeefiniiiiitely totally utterly absoflogginlutely ask questions. All kinds of questions. No questions are foolish, especially when it regards your career, your finances, your future. Ask your agent. Ask your editor. Ask anybody you know in the industry. Ask other writers! I have found other writers to be a wonderful well of fresh, clean water when it comes to that sort of thing. Certainly I must acknowledge that I feel the SFF genre is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to industry folks willing to share their experiences and offer answers. Oh! Speakawhich, may I recommend Dongwon Song’s PUBLISHING IS HARD newsletter?

Definitely Ask Questions From Multiple Sources

Crowdsource better answers by getting multiple answers. That’s it, that’s the deal. One answer may not be comprehensive. Also, authors are not always right about how things work. Hell, I’m probably wrong about stuff in this very post. Also, if your agent isn’t clear on this stuff, or won’t answer questions, fire that agent out of a cannon, and into the mouth of a great white shark.

Publishing Money Is Fucking Weird

Publishing, particularly big publishing (sorry, Big Publishing, aka Big Book, or The Bibliodeities of Mannahattan) pays advances ahead of your royalties. Smaller advances mean you’re likelier to earn out, but a small advance also does little for you up front. Larger advances mean you’ve got a considerably larger “cost of life” cushion, but are less likely to earn out.

Your contract likely stipulates you get paid a certain amount up front — a third of the contract, let’s say — upon signing, and then you get paid the rest of your advance usually in chunks when you meet certain milestones. Turned in first draft, or final draft, or upon publication. I have found these milestones to be different at different publishers (and I’ve worked with a lotta publishers).

You owe 15% of that to your agent/agency.

Earning out is a theoretically straightforward affair — calculate how much you make per book based on the percentage royalty driven by format. Let’s say 10% per hardcover sale, or 25% of an e-book. But there, we enter into squirmy, less certain territory already. If Amazon discounts your book, do you make the 10% on the cover price, or the sale price? (My understanding here is, it depends on who initiates that sale. Amazon initiates, you get it on full. Publisher initiates, you get on the publisher’s choice of price.) So, every sale of a book is earning you a specific amount of money —

So, if my book Wanderers is a hardcover at $28.99, I theoretically make ~$2.90 per sale of that. And an e-book at $13.99 earns me ~$3.50, so from there I should easily be able to calculate what it would take in this round to “earn out,” but I’ve done that math on other books, and I’ve never found it particularly accurate. Why? Because it actually isn’t that simple. Between audio sales and library sales and less traditional sales channels and then book returns (yes, bookstores return unsold stock sometimes and that can ding you), it starts to become a bit of occult calculus that only sorcerers can understand. You can kinda eyeball it? You can make some educated guesses as to how many books you’ll have to sell to earn out, but even then, how many in what format? Some books sell 75% in e-book. Some sell only 25% in e-book. Wanderers, to my shock, has had a rough split of 33/33/33% across print, e-book, audio. Could I have foretold that? Nope.

If you know how many books you sold, that would help, but —

It’s Hard To Know How Many Books You’ve Sold

Publishers are starting to catch up to the fact that authors want to know how well they’re selling (weird, who knew?) — Penguin Random House has a pretty robust, snap-to-it site that has daily updates to your book’s sales. It’s nice to have, if not necessarily useful at every step. And it’s not always wholly accurate, either, which honestly isn’t their fault — we imagine an age where every strand of every industry is plucked with every sale, neatly and nicely updating the total, but as with every industry, it’s less an elegant web and more a clumsy knot. Retailers are independent and not plugged into one another. Each store is not lightning fast in how they respond to things. Even Amazon on the back-end is, from my understanding, kind of a hot mess.

(It’s funny, I’ve met with Amazon multiple times under the auspices of, “Tell us how to help authors more.” Arguably because they want to help more than publishers do, making friends of authors directly, beyond publisher relationships — which, ennnh, okay. Still, I always tell them one thing: GIVE AUTHORS MORE DATA. Tell us our sales! Tell us our Kindle sales in particular! Tell us when people quit reading our books! And they say OOH YES GOOD POINT and then it never happens and hahaha good times.)

Treat Your Publishing Money Like A Demonic Bargain

You should always be fairly dubious of that money. Not that it’ll disappear — it’s just, it’s wildly inconsistent, as I hope I’ve made clear. It’s inconsistent in its timing, in its amount, in everything. It’s constantly shifting ground, and that unsteadiness of the financial earth should leave you particularly touchy. The ground can crack and fall out at any point, which is why you need to budget. Planning is key for a writer’s life, and that’s hard, because we’re a sack of cats, mentally. But you gotta know how to portion it out, and you have to see down the road to where the money is coming from. (As a sidenote, it’s why it’s vital not to give up too many rights — foreign, film/TV, other licensing opportunities — to the publisher. Those random drops of money, while totally not-count-on-able, can be helpful just the same.)

Oh also ha ha ha the taxes are killer.

You’re gonna pay taxes on that.

And they’re not fun.

Budget, budget, budget. At any meaningful levels of money coming in, GET THEE AN ACCOUNTANT, and possibly even hie thee hence to forming an LLC, which can, at high enough income levels, drop your tax burden a little bit. Others will sell LLCs as also being able to defer liability but most lawyers and accountants I’ve asked about this suggest it’s a bit of a myth.

It’s hard to get a mortgage as a writer, if you’re the only income.

Trust me when I tell you that. Doesn’t matter what you earn, you don’t fit into a box that they can neatly check on the application, so you’re a strange animal to the mortgage broker, like a Zebra who fucked a Dolphin and who is also from the future? We’ll talk more about DAY JORBS in a minute.

Cost Of Living Is A Real Thing

The cost of living is tied to where you live. And so, your Publishing Dollar goes a lot farther in places where the cost of living is lower. In other words, if you’re going to choose to live in The City (that city being NYC, SF, whatever), you are almost certainly fucking yourself in every uncomfortable position.

Now, the opposite of that is, sometimes you get advice that amounts to demanding you live in some unpleasant nowheresville — and that’s fine, if you’re fine with it. I’m not. My publishing money could go much farther if I lived, say, 100 miles to the west, but instead, I live where I live. It’s not a profoundly expensive place, especially compared to, say, NYC, but it’s also not as cheap as, say, Ohio. But (nothing personal) I do not want to live in Ohio, I want to live where I live, because of culture, because of education, because of access to places like NYC or Philly or the Lehigh Valley, and so here I dwell, even if my Publishing Dollar would go farther in Nebraska or even in the middle of my own state. As writers, I find we do thrive a little bit based a little on the place we live — and so, live where you want to live, just be aware that there are concessions to be made if you do, and costs for that choice. But also, probably don’t live in NYC or SF. Live near them, ok. In them, not so much.

Back To Those Pesky Advances

I have been fortunate enough to have a somewhat gentle arc to my career — a nice hill of slowly advancing advances. I started small, with four figures, and have added zeroes as time went on. It’s been a slow boil but I prefer that, because it demonstrates what I hope is an increasing audience and quality of books. The worry is when you jump through the gate and someone hands you a fat sack of six figures and it’s like — boy howdy, you’ve probably got nowhere to go but down. Debuts tend to get an almost weird amount of attention (same as how the first book in a series nearly always gets 1000% more publishing attention than the second or third), but even with that, it’s hard to see how a New Author is going to just Rocket to the Moon on a first, big book. It can happen! It has and will again. But just know that opening big is a trickier gambit. It’s like, you wrote some songs and have a guitar and OOPS now you’re headlining Coachella ha ha good luck I’m sure you’ll be fine.

Wait I Didn’t Even Talk About Bucket, Or Joint, Accounting

Back to the tricky calculus of “earning out” — it gets trickier when you realize that some deals don’t just demand you earn out one book, but rather, all the books in your contract. The advances-per-book are put in a bucket, and so you must out-earn the bucket amount, not the per-book amount, before you start seeing royalties beyond your advances. This can be tricky with a series, let’s say, where the first book does well, and where no subsequent book is likely to do better than that first book — it robs you a chance of earning out with one book even if you don’t on the next two, let’s say.

How Marketing Is Tied To Advance

In general (and nothing is ever universal in this industry), the higher the advance, the more money the publisher has in their budget to support the book, particularly in terms of marketing, advertising, and publicity. On the one hand, this makes sense, right? Your book is an investment, and so they don’t wanna invest a bunch of money and then just have it fail — so they contribute more money and infrastructure toward paying off that investment. But it also means that lower advances can mark you in the “uhhh let’s throw it at the wall and see what sticks!” category, which is tough. It puts a lot of burden on you. And that burden is often unfairly thought of as being high effective buuuuut

You Are Never As Effective As A Publishing Budget

Trust me when I say, you can do a lot as an author to encourage people to read your books. But also trust me when I say, a publisher’s efforts in this realm is multiplicative compared to what you can achieve. Stay in this industry long enough — and so much of this industry is exactly that, just staying in the goddamn game — and you will reliably detect when a publisher is spending money on a book. You can tell because it’ll have buzz, it’ll get media placement, you’ll have appearances, and so on. You can also tell when they haven’t done shit for your book. Even if you yourself have done a lot!

Do you need a website? Probably. Doesn’t need to be fancy, but shouldn’t look like a half-ass botch-job, either. Should work on mobile and all that.

Do you need swag? I’m of a mind that it moves zero needles, and I’ve never seen data that it moves needles, and it just seems to be a thing authors have internalized that they need?

Do you need a tour? I mean, I dunno. At a debut level, I’d say no. As with crowdfunding anything, you need an audience already in place to make that make sense. Better to do cons and conferences, I think, at earlier levels, though other authors may disagree.

This is part of the trick, by the way: advice for a debut author, and for a mid-list author, and for a mid-career author, and for a hugely successful author, are very, very different. It can in fact be as individual as writing process. It’s all broad strokes, so take everything even here with many many grains of salt.

A whole salt lick, even.

Your Day Job? Don’t Quit It

This will be the 1000th time I’ve said this and I’ll say it a million more: don’t quit your day job. When do you quit your day job? When the work is at such a level that you either have to quit writing, or quit the day job. That’s it. When you’re up against the wall and you see, “I can’t write these books and also still go to work every day,” that’s a signal. (And ideally it’s a decision made easily because you’re making enough money at writing that it makes both financial sense and is a financial necessity.)

But otherwise? Hang tight. You’ll have no health care. As I said, mortgages will be harder to get. Everything is a little harder when you’re a ROGUE AUTHOR FREELANCE MERC out there in the PUBLISHING WASTELAND. Bonus: have a spouse who has health care and a steady job.

Note, again, I’m fortunate enough to be the sole income for our household as a writer. And I’m doing okay, and am comfortable. But I also still have these difficulties, and the erratic payment schedules can be brutal. All of it adds up to:

Have Plans On Top Of Plans

It’s like, if you live in the PNW, you probably have an Earthquake Preparedness Kit? You need that as an author. (Er, metaphorically speaking. Authors are not subject to actual earthquakes in particular.) Squirrel away money. Have plans on top of plans. What if your genre collapses? What if your agent quits? What if your next advance is way too low to survive upon? What if the economy shits the bed? Have a plan for next year, for five years, for ten. Envision how you remain in this game. A writing career is, as I’ve noted before, a CLIFF MITIGATION EXERCISE. You are eternally speeding toward the cliff’s edge. You might careen off that edge and into a ravine and crash in a spectacular fashion at the end of every contract. And so you need to imagine how — before it happens! — you’re gonna build a ramp or a bridge or some rocket boosters or shit. You gotta Evel Knievel that cliff somehow — but how? New genre? New age range? Break into comics? Some self-publishing on the side? Have plans inside plans inside plans. Especially if shit goes sideways. My day to day is spent thinking 50% about what stories I want to write and 50% what I’m going to do to keep my career going. Which leaves me little time for like, BASIC LIFE-BRAIN FUNCTIONS, so uhhh oops?

To Add In, And To Sum Up

– Publishing is fucking nuts, and trying to understand it is like trying to win a staring contest with the Eye of Sauron, but you gotta try, or you’ll die

– JESUS CHRIST ask some questions, seriously

– Publishing is not a lottery, and you need to treat it like a serious business venture where you’re given the squalling baby of a writing career and your job is to keep that thing alive and somehow get it to college, and if someone wants to put that writing career baby in college before it’s learned to walk, you should be very very wary of that

– Drink the fancy cocktails when you visit NYC, but don’t live there, for Christ’s sake

– Not every publisher is the same, some are fucking amateur hour karaoke, and some are well-trained machine assassins who never miss their shot

– You don’t control what a publisher does; get me drunk and I’ll tell you STORIES

– You should definitely know when your book is coming out and not via Google Alert, like, just ask, just ask your editor or ask your agent to ask your editor (your agent can be a very good “bad cop” if you need them to be, and they should be eager to fill that position, because a good agent is working for YOU, not for their relationship with the publisher), AHHH ASK QUESTIONS

– Art and Commerce are fiddly, uncomfortable fuck-buddies, they’re always fucking, but they’re always fighting too — but that doesn’t absolve you from cleaving only to the art and failing to learn about the commerce side of things

– You’re never dead in this industry until you stay dead, otherwise, get up, claw your way out of the grave, write the next book, change your name if you have to, change an agent, change genre, whatever; you do it because you love this thing and being undead is cooler than being regular dead

ANYWAY

There is probably shit I’m missing.

Feel free to ask questions — I may not get to them quickly, as I am dealing with lots of LIFE STUFF right now. (I wrote this post in a bit of much-needed down-time.)

If you like this post, and find it helpful, don’t buy me a cup of coffee.

Buy WANDERERS. Or tell your friends. Or leave a review.

Lest I die starving and screaming in a lightless abyss.

September 3, 2019 / 11 Comments

Macro Monday Brings The Magnificent Mantises

OH, HELLO THERE. I promised I’d be back on Monday with some photos, so you can see right there at the top, a big ol’ portrait of a beautiful mantis. She’s ready for her closeup. Also she’s ready to eat the head off your neck.

More mantis photos at the bottom of the post.

Let’s see. What’s up?

October 7th, Super Awesome Rad-as-Hell Authors Kevin Hearne and Delilah S. Dawson will be at the Doylestown Bookshop at 7pm, and who will be joining them? ABRAHAM LINCohh wait no that’s not right. *checks notes* It’s me! I’ll be there! All three of us! Shenanigans will ensue! You will buy The Princess Beard from them!

October 11-12th, I’ll be at the Morristown Book Festival in NJ — not sure of my schedule there but I think I have a couple panels and a signing? You should go!

October 13th, I’ll be at the Bucks County Book Festival, doing a SFF panel at 3pm. Signing after!

Wanderers has been doing… really well? Like, better than all my other books, easily, in terms of sales and reviews. (The SW books here are a bit of an outlier, of course.) But it’s hard not to be happy with the overall response. Every day I get tweets and emails commenting on how people really fell into the book and enjoyed it, and that’s honestly pretty dang heartwarming. It’s nice to see a book you wrote — especially one that’s huge, that’s been living in your head for years, that demanded you take a lot of risks — connecting with people. Because you just never know.

(And I remind you that if you read the book and dug it — or any book! — we authors appreciate the hell out of reviews on places like Goodreads and Amazon. If you hated the book, that’s okay too! You can shriek your bad reviews into the nearest tree stump and the mutated cookie elves who live there will definitely deliver them to me in a timely fashion.)

Of the book, Broad Street Review said:

“Wendig isn’t so much holding up a mirror to society as he is opening the window. The apocalypse is not set 20 minutes in the future, and the story is concerned not with its aftermath but with the fact of its occurrence.”

You can read an interview with me at the Amazon Book Blog.

Enterprise News said of the book (note, review contains spoilers):

“The world of Wanderers is as rich as it is fragile. It clocks in at 800 pages, but, reminiscent of the Harry Potter books, it goes fast and you won’t want it to end. One gets the uncomfortable sensation of looking into a mirror of our America, but with the frightening and the awful comes the astoundingly selfless and truly heartening reminder that, no matter how tough times get, there are always those who will stand up and be shepherds.”

Librarian Misha Stone appeared on King 5 News in Seattle to recommend it, along with some other stellar reads (like Annalee Newitz’s newest).

So, again, thanks to all who have recommended it to others and responded to it.

YAY YOU.

Now, more photos. (Or visit my Flickr.)

Have a great day, frandos.

August 30, 2019 / 14 Comments

Did You Know That Writing Books Is Hard?

“HEY, CHUCK, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?” you might ask me, out loud, in all caps for some reason. And I would say, “Well, fellow human, human fellow, I’ve been digging deep into the word mines, deeper than I’ve ever gone before, lost in the dark, following a rich and mysterious vein of story ore to its conclusion.” And you might say, still in all caps, “I DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS,” and there I’d roll my eyes, and I’d sigh, and I’d answer more accurately, “I’ve been editing a really big book, and it was hard.”

Because writing books, and editing books, and re-writing books, and re-re-writing books, is hard. It’s curious that I haven’t found it gets any easier. In fact, it’s maybe gotten harder? On the one hand, that makes me feel like a dipshit, because if writing is getting harder, it seems to suggest I’m somehow getting worse. But the reality, I suspect — and I hope — is that it’s because as I write more books, as I get older, I’m reaching out and writing bigger, sprawlier, stranger things. Things that are attempting to reckon with larger, crunchier ideas while still also ideally being first and foremost a damn entertaining read.

The book in question is The Book of Accidents, which as noted is a book I haven’t figured out how to talk about yet. (And reminder: you do need to learn how to talk about your book, meaning, figuring out what the story is, and what the story about the story is.) It’s about a family: a boy who can see other people’s pain, a mother whose artwork begins to come alive, and a father who has begun to see his own dead, abusive father in strange places. But that’s just the start of it. There’s a serial killer. And a bad friend. And cycles of abuse, and anxiety, and radicalization, and a demon in a coal mine, and — well, I don’t want to spoil too much.

My edits on this book were somewhat profound. I don’t know that it’s the most work I’ve done editing a book — that might fall to Under the Empyrean Sky — but the first draft of this book definitely nailed the structure, while not the particulars. And so much of what I’d written — and what was off about what I’d written — was like well-marbled fat. I couldn’t just cut off a cancerous limb and be like THERE I FUCKING FIXED IT. I had to go in with tweezers and pluck and pull and layer in new threads of meat. I cut maybe a third of the draft and rewrote probably the same.

I think it worked. I’m at least temporarily happy with it.

And credit goes to my editor, Tricia Narwani, who is so very good at seeing what a story is trying to do while also identifying those places where it’s failing to earn that promise. (Give her all the awards. All of them. If she’s not nominated for a Hugo next year, I’ll kick and spit.)

Whatever the case, with this book and with Wanderers, it has been proven resoundingly that I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m actually quite happy about that. It makes each book its own peculiar journey, and it also releases me from a certain kind of pressure. If I enter every book feeling like I need to have everything locked down, if it needs to be a well-trod path, it’ll be frustrating. There’s a level of performance anxiety there. But if every book is a portal into a whole new place with all new rules, I can be forgiven for having to stumble around blindly for a while.

(It’s amazing the things to do inside our minds to make this process feel better, to absolve ourselves of certain stresses and sins. We do what we must because we can, as GlaDOS said. Also, but there’s no sense crying over every mistake, you just keep on trying till you run out of cake.)

So, that’s where I’ve been. Deep in the word mines. (Plus I had some other personal life things going on, from good to bad. I might talk more about those later, when we know more of what’s up.)

I’ll be back on Monday to pop up some photos, talk Wanderers, and all that good stuff. And I might have a book sale, soon, too, as my comp copy pile is getting a little too goddamn heavy.

Have a good weekend, frandos.

Meanwhile:

August 20, 2019 / 3 Comments

Christopher Brown: Five Things I Learned Writing Rule of Capture

Defeated in a devastating war with China and ravaged by climate change, America is on the brink of a bloody civil war. Seizing power after a controversial election, the ruling regime has begun cracking down on dissidents fighting the nation’s slide toward dictatorship. For Donny Kimoe, chaos is good for business. He’s a lawyer who makes his living defending enemies of the state.

His newest client, young filmmaker Xelina Rocafuerte, witnessed the murder of an opposition leader and is now accused of terrorism. To save her from the only sentence worse than death, Donny has to extract justice from a system that has abandoned the rule of law. That means breaking the rules—and risking the same fate as his clients.

When Donny bungles Xelina’s initial hearing, he has only days to save the young woman from being transferred to a detention camp from which no one returns. His only chance of winning is to find the truth—a search that begins with the opposition leader’s death and leads to a dark conspiracy reaching the highest echelons of power.

Now, Donny isn’t just fighting for his client’s life—he’s battling for his own. But as the trial in the top secret court begins, Xelina’s friends set into motion a revolutionary response that could destroy the case. And when another case unexpectedly collides with Xelina’s, Donny uncovers even more devastating secrets, knowledge that will force him to choose between saving one client . . . or the future of the entire country.

Perry Mason is cool.

I never paid much attention to lawyer stories until I decided to write one—in my case, about the lawyers you call when you get arrested in dystopia. Courtroom scenes are so pervasive in our popular culture and newsfeeds that we learn their basic rules almost by osmosis, but I wanted to dig deeper. The mediascape of my youth was full of black and white lawyers in suits, from Raymond Burr’s darkly impish portrayal of Erle Stanley Gardner’s model defense attorney to Sam Driver, the two-fisted legal aid lawyer who was the real star of the Judge Parker comic strip. For research I read a lot of smarter lawyer stories, real and fictional—including transcripts of William Kunstler’s defense of the Chicago Seven, oral histories of the pro bono defenders of the Guantánamo detainees, the sharply observed Boston lawyers and preppy crooks of George Higgins’s Kennedy for the Defense novels, and the morally compromised defense lawyer who drives David Peace’s stylistically innovative 1983. But it was Perry Mason and his lookalikes who really nailed the archetype when given a fresh look—not noir, but noir-adjacent, the grey flannel tricksters who mediate the ambiguous territory between the moral complexity of real life and the false binaries embodied in the rules we are supposed to live by. These pinstriped anti-paladins usually protect their clients from the system by breaking those rules themselves—tricking people into giving them information that will change the case, and tricking the judges and prosecutors into letting them get that information in front of the jury. Revealing the secret code of lawyer stories: they aren’t really about getting justice for the innocent, but about protecting people from an unjust system, by helping people get away with it.

Science fiction is full of law, but devoid of lawyers.

Can you name a single lawyer from the vast oeuvre of science fiction? There are plenty of laws, from Asimov’s Laws of Robotics to the Prime Directive, but almost no lawyers. Trust me, I looked. And when they do show up, they feel like anachronisms, because they ape the advocates from our contemporary adversarial justice system, which is a very peculiar product of our own culture, and a very old one at that. As a consequence, the lawyers who do show up in sci-fi futures feel like Perry Mason in space. Consider Samuel T. Cogley, Esq., the scenery-chewing suit who defends Captain Kirk from charges of dereliction of duty in the Season One episode “Court Martial”—a character so out of place in the futuristic utopia of the Federation that he first appears literally buried in a pile of actual 20th century law books. The reason is that the creators never seem to ask the predicate question: what does justice look like in the society of the future?

Legal thrillers are never about the law.

Courtroom dramas are all about the legal system, but they take the law for granted. They focus entirely on the process of determining whether someone is innocent or guilty, and meting out punishment. Just the facts. The archetypal client is someone who has been wrongfully accused of a horrible crime, and the defense lawyer’s job is to prove it. What those stories never do is interrogate whether the law itself might be unfair—as is often the case in real life. By remixing a lawyer story with science fiction—the self-proclaimed “literature of ideas”—I found a way to remedy that. In Rule of Capture, the clients are guilty—it’s the laws that are unjust (and the punishment is straight out of Dante). Which makes the lawyer’s job that much harder.

Dystopia is real.

I try to ground my science fictions in the material of the observed world. So when I set out to invent the imagined legal system of my dystopian mirror America, I went to the law library and researched it from real precedents. Martial law? I found a whole section of dusty tomes on how to administer it, whether in a recently conquered foreign territory or an American state that’s getting too rowdy (which usually meant workers acting up and asserting their rights to strike). Getting locked up without even being told the charges? That’s right there in the federal constitution, the power to suspend habeas corpus in times of insurrection or emergency. And we know how easy it is to declare an emergency in this country. Just ask the detainees awaiting their trial date before the Kafkaesque tribunals at Guantánamo—which I used as the principal basis of my dystopian courtroom.

Property really is theft.

The main client my lawyer protagonist Donny Kimoe represents in Rule of Capture is a young documentary filmmaker and ecological activist who witnesses a political assassination and is accused of terrorism to silence her. Because the normal justice system has been suspended a fair trial is impossible, Donny must come up with a counterintuitive strategy—by attacking the system from a totally different angle, but one that is supported by his client’s work. Theirs is a society ravaged by climate change, in which land (and the resources it contains) is the most precious commodity. Donny sets out to hack the operating system of power by chipping away at the property law regimes at its foundation. Researching those doctrines to help Donny make his case, I rediscovered the early Supreme Court cases that openly acknowledged most of the land in the USA had belonged to the sovereign tribal nations that had lived there for generations, and that the only “legal” justification for the transfer of title to the United States government was the law of the conqueror. When you learn that even the lawyers who invented American law admit that it is founded on theft, it puts the system of justice in a different like. It gave a deeper charge to the idea of writing a legal thriller that puts a mirror up to the dystopia we already have, and the bigger project of imagining what a more just future would really look like.

* * *

Christopher Brown is the Campbell and World Fantasy Award-nominated author of Tropic of Kansas. His new novel Rule of Capture is now available from Harper Voyager.

Christopher Brown: Website

Rule of Capture: Print | eBook | Audio

August 20, 2019 / 5 Comments

Rob Hart: Five Things I Learned Writing The Warehouse

Cloud isn’t just a place to work. It’s a place to live. And when you’re here, you’ll never want to leave.

Paxton never thought he’d be working for Cloud, the giant tech company that’s eaten much of the American economy. Much less that he’d be moving into one of the company’s sprawling live-work facilities.

But compared to what’s left outside, Cloud’s bland chainstore life of gleaming entertainment halls, open-plan offices, and vast warehouses…well, it doesn’t seem so bad. It’s more than anyone else is offering.

Zinnia never thought she’d be infiltrating Cloud. But now she’s undercover, inside the walls, risking it all to ferret out the company’s darkest secrets. And Paxton, with his ordinary little hopes and fears? He just might make the perfect pawn. If she can bear to sacrifice him.

As the truth about Cloud unfolds, Zinnia must gamble everything on a desperate scheme—one that risks both their lives, even as it forces Paxton to question everything about the world he’s so carefully assembled here.

Together, they’ll learn just how far the company will go…to make the world a better place.

Set in the confines of a corporate panopticon that’s at once brilliantly imagined and terrifyingly real, The Warehouse is a near-future thriller about what happens when Big Brother meets Big Business–and who will pay the ultimate price.

Dream a Little Bigger, Darling

You know that scene in Inception, where Tom Hardy tells Joseph Gordon-Levitt, “You musn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.” And then he dreams up a grenade launcher to blow the shit out of a bad guy? I think about that scene a lot, and not just because Tom Hardy is a snack. It’s because that has become my mantra.

My first five books, which followed amateur private detective Ash McKenna, was small—one POV hardboiled first-person… intimate, almost, in large part because it was me working out some of my own shit related to growing up.

Those books came out from a small press, and they sold pretty well for small press books, but I knew when I was done with the series, I wanted to level up. That’s the goal, right? Yes, I wanted a bigger publisher and, potentially, a bigger payday, but I also wanted to push myself and do something that scared me. I wanted to grow as a writer. Which meant looking for a bigger sandbox to play in.

It paid off—foreign sales in more than 20 countries and a film option with Ron Howard. Yes, that’s a flex. And all I had to do was write a book I wasn’t sure I was capable of even writing. Which brings me to my next point…

Trust Your Guts

Your guts are smart. They will often tell you what you should be doing. I like to pretend mine sound like Gilbert Gottfried, which brings a great deal of urgency to the proceedings. Unfortunately, I am not always smart enough to listen to them.

I’d been laying down notes for The Warehouse since 2012. My first novel, New Yorked, didn’t even come out until 2015! And then I wrote four more books. This thing has been percolating for a loooong time.

So when I finished out the Ash books, instead of writing The Warehouse, I wrote an entirely different novel! It was a shiny-thing idea, a horror novel with an insane meta narrative that, looking back, I’m not even sure makes sense? I did it because I was afraid to write The Warehouse. Despite what my guts were telling me—Warehouse is the book, do this one—I thought I wasn’t smart enough or a good enough writer.

Eventually I realized that if I didn’t write this book, someone else would. And hey, maybe I needed that 70,000-word detour. I was scared, but it’s always scary to start a new book, because you’re staring down the barrel of months of work that may or may not pay off.

But sometimes you need to use that fear to push you forward, rather than hold you back.

The Value of Bestsellers

Before I wrote The Warehouse, I spent about a year reading bestselling fiction. Like, a lot of it. Because it’s not usually what I skewed toward, and I felt like there was a gap in my writing education—that elusive skill of readability. The thing that keeps a reader hurtling through a story. I read a whole bunch of James Patterson—hell, I even wrote a novella with him—and let me tell you, I am out of runway with people who bash the dude.

Here’s the thing: if he’s not your jam, fine, don’t read him. This is America, where you are free to do anything! *checks earpiece* …you are free to do most things! *checks earpiece again* …um, well, shit.

Seriously though, Patterson clearly understood something about the writing process I did not, because he has sold more books than I had. Millions of them! (He also makes a ton of money for his publisher, which allows them to take risks on debut/midlist authors, and he donates a ton of money to bookstores and libraries, so maybe chill just a bit…)

Here’s the distinction, though: I didn’t want to write like him. I don’t want to write like any other writer. I want to write like me. But other books are an opportunity to learn. It’s why the advice I always give younger writers is to put down the pen for a bit and read like a lunatic.

Reading a lot of bestselling books was a chance to see the mechanics of how successful authors constructed their plots and build their worlds. And after a little while, you do see the Matrix code behind it. Not to call it formula. But, for example, short chapters with hooks at the end are popular for a reason—they give the reader a sense of accomplishment and compel them to read just one more…

Point/Counterpoint

I knew The Warehouse was going to have two narrators—Paxton, the company man, and Zinnia, a corporate spy who saw through the bullshit. And as I was chipping away at the story, it just was not clicking for me. It felt like there was something missing.

I needed a third voice. I needed someone to make the argument that the kinda-shitty world they were living in was actually good. So I created Gibson Wells, a messianic, Steve Jobs-like figure, and the owner of Cloud. And I had him announce to the world he is dying (which is like the first line, so it’s not a spoiler). And I had him write a series of blog posts, recapping his life, but also litigating the company’s history.

Which is exactly what the story needed. Paxton and Zinnia are caught up in the system, and even though Zinnia is a touch sharper, they’ve both been gaslighted into believing that sometimes you should consider yourself lucky just to have a job. They’re not freedom fighters. They’re not trying to destroy the machine. They’re cogs stuck inside. Which is fine—but it limits the view into this world.

Introducing Gibson allowed me to fuck with the reader a bit—because even though he’s a corporate overlord who is worth more than $300 billion and has single-handedly taken over the American retail economy, you can kinda sorta see where he’s coming from. Not all of his points are bad, and it helped underscore what I think ultimately made the book effective—calling out large corporations, sure, but also calling out us, for buying into and perpetuating that system. Without him, you don’t get that.

Draw a map!

The hardest part of the worldbuilding process was constructing a Cloud facility. Because I was literally creating a city from the ground up. How the hell do you even do that? I struggled a lot, and would sometimes sit down and work on the draft and realize… I don’t know where my characters are standing, or what they should be walking to, because all I could picture was this gigantic, formless facility… and that was it.

So I drew a map. I got a big piece of poster board and, first, I made a list. What’s supposed to be in a city. Hospital, transit, police, fire, Starbucks, etc. Then I roughed out the major components that made up the facility, starting with the main one, and then adding dorms—three sounded good!—and then the energy processing facility, which I made further away from the rest of the compound, for plot reasons…

I realized, wow, this place is so vast, I should have a regular transit system, but also, one that was dedicated to ambulances, so they could all get to the health care facility, which I called Care, which felt creepy.

Then I put that map up in my office. I even screenshotted it and made it the background on my laptop, so when I was working on the road and wanted to reference something, all I had to do was minimize a window. Turns out, I’m a visual thinker. And this was like having the Marauder’s Map. Once it was in front of me, I could see the paths the characters were tracing.

* * *

Rob Hart is the author of the Ash McKenna series and the short story collection Take-Out. He also co-wrote Scott Free with James Patterson. His latest novel, The Warehouse, sold in more than 20 countries and has been optioned for film by Ron Howard. He is a former journalist, political aide, and book publisher. He lives in Staten Island, NY, with his wife and daughter.

Rob Hart: Website, Twitter, Instagram

The Warehouse: Print | Kindle | Apple Books | B&N | Kobo

August 15, 2019 / 0 Comments

Kia Abdullah: Five Things I Learned Writing Take It Back

A gripping courtroom drama, perfect for fans of Anatomy of a Scandal, He Said/She Said and Apple Tree Yard.

The victim: A sixteen-year-old girl with facial deformities who accuses four classmates of something unthinkable.

The defendants: Four handsome teenage boys from hard-working immigrant families, all with corroborating stories.

Whose side will you take?

Former barrister Zara Kaleel, one of London’s brightest young legal minds, takes up Jodie Wolfe’s case; she believes her, even if those close to Jodie do not. Together they enter the most explosive criminal trial of the year in which ugly divisions within British society are exposed. As everything around Zara begins to unravel, she grows even more determined to get justice for Jodie. But at what cost?

* * *

Even I default to white

Take It Back includes several characters from a South-Asian background, a fact made clear by their traditional names and the context of the novel.

About two thirds into the book, there is a scene on a football field which initially included ‘Stephen, a black boy who was light on his feet’. A draft or two later, I realised that I hadn’t described any of the Caucasion players as ‘white’ – so why single out Stephen?

This gave rise to a dilemma: do I comb through the novel and clumsily add ‘white’ to every Caucasion character, or do I take out the ‘black’ attached to Stephen? I opted for the latter – but does that now mean there are no black characters in my book, or just that they’re not described as such?

I’m a woman of colour from a working-class background so you would think I’d have this worked out by now, but even I default to white.

Experts are incredibly generous

I don’t have a legal background so I knew that writing a courtroom drama would involve some intense research. I started (rather misguidedly) on Reddit and posted a question on the ‘LegalAdviceUK’ subreddit asking if anyone knew a barrister who might consult on the novel.

I received a dozen snide comments (“you clearly have no idea how much barristers charge”) and I soon deleted the post. I approached some lawyers separately (via Googling) and was stunned by their generosity. One barrister invited me to chambers and a solicitor read the whole novel to root out faux pas. Between them, they answered a hundred of my questions. Five other lawyers gave me specialist advice, as well as two sexual assault counsellors and an ex-police officer. Experts can be incredibly generous if you ask nicely and respect their time.

Freedom.to is a lifesaver

Freedom is a productivity app that has been a complete lifesaver for me. In the age of social media, distractions are relentless; always at the fringe of the page, calling you away. I use Freedom to block out all social media while I write. I’ve created custom blocklists and can set the length of individual sessions.

The app isn’t free, but if you have trouble staying off Twitter, it’s completely worth the price tag. (They’re not paying me to say this!)

No one owes you anything

Here’s the thing: no one owes you anything. You are not owed an agent. You are not owed a book deal. You are not owed a big advance. And you are not owed your partner’s time.

Your book is your dream so don’t expect others to prioritise it.

My boyfriend and I have a deal whereby he does all the cooking and I do all the cleaning. In the darkest depths of deadline, I found myself feeling tetchy that he wasn’t offering to do the dishes after cooking a meal. But here’s the thing: writing a book is my dream, not his and after he’s spent the day working at our co-owned business, doing a grocery shop, getting our car fixed and cooking a meal, the least I can do is the damn dishes. Writing a book is my dream and I’m not owed anything.

I do crave validation

I recently listened to a podcast in which a popular influencer and artist spent a long time extolling the democratising powers of social media and the fact that we can all become publishers and bypass the gatekeepers.

Later in the podcast, he spoke about his desire to be taken seriously as an artist and explained that he had published a book with Penguin Random House. “The biggest publisher in the world!” he exclaimed – twice.

It was an interesting illustration of how artists crave external validation even when they say they don’t. I thought I’d be happy in doing good work, but if I’m to speak honestly, I crave validation too. Getting a book deal with HarperCollins and reading positive feedback feels good, and while it’s dangerous to peg your happiness to external forces, I’ve learned that I’m not immune.

Kia Abdullah: Website | Twitter

Take It Back: Amazon CA | Amazon UK | Goodreads