New project ideas are amazing. They’re addictive because there’s nothing there. It’s all light and smoke and doesn’t solidify until you take the time to make the idea into something real. Ass in seat, fingers to keys real. When you’ve got the creative juices flowing it can be really tempting to dash something off and call it good. Done, finished, ready for the world to see. It’s something I’m guilty of on a number of fronts and I’m gonna talk a little bit about how to (hopefully) counteract that.

So. Here’s a story.

Back in 2013 I came up with the seed of an idea. Ragnarok, yeah? But in the form of massive, metal dwarven destroyers rising out of the ground. The Viking-type folks in this setting, they don’t know how to fight back against that, so they cry out to the gods for help. Loki–yeah him–gives them the means to bond the spirits of their bravest warriors to the bones of dead giants. Nothing could go wrong there, could it?

That seed became Iron Edda. I wrote the first portion of this thing as a stretch goal for someone else’s tabletop RPG Kickstarter. 8,000 words, felt pretty good about it. The idea wouldn’t leave me alone, though, so I expanded it. Turned it into a mostly standalone game called War of Metal and Bone. Also wrote a novel in the setting called Sveidsdottir because why not make more work for myself?

This is where the part about pushing things out too early comes in. I’d never written a game of this scope before. (Same goes for the novel, so just assume the mistakes I’m about to outline apply to that, too). I wanted it done. Life around this project was tumultuous. I was recently divorced, in a fresh relationship, a new apartment, and damn it I was going to Kickstart this project. I did. It went well.

What followed was a series of missteps that saw me with 500+ copies of each of those two books sitting in my basement. Both projects had been through the hands of editors, had been playtested some, but (as I came to learn) weren’t really ready for primetime. Add to that I was trying to do the entire self-publishing thing with them. I was my own marketing department, my own shipping department, my own personal assistant, the whole gig.

(Oh, and during this period, I was also working to put out other projects. Suffice it to say, the center didn’t hold).

This whole time that I have an RPG and a novel not selling to much of anyone, I’m still running games of it at conventions. People are reacting well to it. More importantly, I can’t get the setting out of my mind. I know it’s not done yet. There was more there, and I wanted the world to have access to it.

Fast-forward to now. Right around the time this post goes up, a new Kickstarter is going for a new version of the game: Iron Edda Accelerated. About a year ago I approached a publisher with a pitch for a second chance at making this something commercially viable and they liked the idea. It’s the second chance I hoped for, dreamed of, and I’m thrilled to have it.

At the Origins Game Fair last month, I was talking to a fellow designer and they clued me in that all of their games–we’re talking TTRPGs, card, and board–have a five-year development cycle. I laughed and said I haven’t ever done that until I realized that with Iron Edda, I’d done exactly that. I just convinced myself that what should have been a polished first playtest was a final draft when I ran the first Kickstarter.

With Iron Edda Accelerated, I got very lucky. Someone else believed in the game enough to want to help me make it a reality. When I look at what we’re going to publish, I’m really proud of it. It’s the game it’s supposed to be. It’s the Iron Edda I’ve dreamed of. It took me five years, a ton of missteps, and a major second chance to make it happen.

So what are the takeaways? What actionable advice can you walk away from this post with? The only real thing I can give you–a lesson I’m struggling to re-learn every day– is this:

Slow down

There are a lot of places where you can hear someone tell you that time is fleeting, strike while the iron’s hot, YOL-fucking-O, etc. etc. And if you’re in a position where you’ve been dragging your feet on starting a creative project, by all mean get your ass in gear and begin.

But in finishing a project? Especially one where you’re beholden to no deadlines save those you set for yourself? Slow. The. Fuck. Down. It may not feel like it, but there’s no prescribed moment where your success can happen. There’s no magical window of opportunity which closes forever if you miss it. You may miss perceived opportunities like interviews, conventions, cross-promotion gigs, stuff like that. But different ones come along.

You need to release your project when it’s ready. When it’s actually done.

In school, I was a last-minute kind of person. My first draft was my final draft and I got enough confirmation that my work was good enough that I didn’t see much reason to change. Out here in the terror-stricken wilds of the world we live in now, my first drafts are definitely not good enough. I get great ideas, but most of them are just dust and they blow away quickly. The good ones get some words put towards them. Some of them I do just release after a first pass. Sometimes I need to get it out of my head. But the big projects? The Iron Eddas, the ones that won’t let me sleep because I can’t stop exploring the world or the mechanics? Those deserve time.

Do yourself a favor: treat your projects–and by extension yourself–with the respect they/you deserve. Give them time to breathe and grow if that’s what they need. Yes, it feels like the world is burning down around us, and maybe it actually is. But if you want to bring beauty and joy into the world, it needs to be nurtured. Find the space in your life to do that if you can. It’s so hard to do, and so worth doing. I encourage you to try.

I’ll be over here, trying to do the same.

Click here to support the new Iron Edda Kickstarter!

Here, now, a post by an old friend and cohort in the RPG-writing industry: Howard David Ingham, who is one of those gents who is one of the smartest people in the room, no matter the room. He’s written a thing about folk horror, and you should check it out:

* * *

A couple of Octobers ago, I’d just managed to get a book off the ground. You know what it’s like, when you have a big project, just finished, and you’re briefly at a loss as to what to do next, the comedown from a modest success threatening to stop you dead in your tracks. And I thought, you know what, it’s been a while since had a I Halloween movie marathon.

Years ago, I’d just spend October binging horror movies, and occasionally writing about them, and having kids stopped that, but I was in a place where I could sit and watch a movie, and then bang out a couple thousand words on it. And I’d just become aware that a whole lot of people were doing work on folk horror, and that interested me because a lot of the things that people seemed to think were folk horror were movies I owned and loved already. I’m talking The Wicker Man. The BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas. The Stone Tape. The Witch. That episode of Doctor Who with the Morris Dancers.

Stories about people blundering into haunted, lonely places and waking abandoned spirits. Pagan village conspiracies. That weird juxtaposition of the prosaic and the uncanny that so particularly defined British TV and film in the 70s and 80s.

It is fair to say, with benefit of hindsight, that this got a little out of control.

From the Fields, Furrows, Forest and Dad’s Forbidden Bookshelf

I’m the child of an occultist and a spiritualist medium. I wasn’t supposed to know about that really as a kid. But dad’s Forbidden Shelf was so temptingly high, and my climbing skills at that pre teen peak that we all have, and so I knew more about Soviet telepathy and rune magic and biothythms and Lemuria than, it is fair to say, most kids my age, even in the 80s, when people were at their most scared of it.

That fear of witchcraft and Satanism and magic didn’t come from nowhere. We had a good twenty years where the Age of Aquarius was in full swing, and that was all tied up with divisive politics, and austerity, and a sense that Britain at least was a tiny bit rubbish. That history was in fact unresolved, and had business with us still. And so we haunted ourselves, with everyday hauntings, hauntings close to home.

And that’s folk horror in a nutshell.

We think of it as a British sort of genre, and we start with the so-called Unholy Trinity of Witchfinder General (1968), Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970) and The Wicker Man (1973), and then factor in a bunch of classic British TV plays and films. But you get different expressions of folk horror from all over the world. Folk horror classic Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) is Czech, and Viy (1967) is Russian. Australia gives us Wake in Fright (1971), Walkabout (1971) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). From Japan we have Onibaba (1964) and Ring (1998). And there are plenty of unique examples from the US, of course. If I were to name an American Unholy Trinity, I might name Carnival of Souls (1962), Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). You can’t leave out The Blair Witch Project (1999).

And in recent years, as our general culture has in a lot of ways regressed to the 70s (consider: racists on the TV, an American president beset by scandals, austerity and poverty, division over the EU, a new post tagged #witchesofinstagram literally every thirty seconds) we’ve seen a resurgence of new folk horror, especially in the UK and US, films like Kill List (2011) and The Witch (2015) and indie horrors such as Pyewacket (2017). And all of these movies are different, but all have that sense of ordinariness, of closeness. They happen to real people, not people who inhabit High Gothick castles, people in villages.

In the 1975 play Murrain a country vet discovers that the local farm labourers are persecuting an old woman who they believe is a witch. He confronts them, and they have this pivotal conversation where they laugh at him and his fancy science, and accuse him of making up stupid scientific rules, and he says no, the rules change all the time, and sometimes you have to make new rules, but we don’t go back.

And “We Don’t Go Back” is pretty much the central tension of folk horror: we don’t go back to the woods and the old ways, because it’s madness, except it’s also the only way to survive. We don’t go back, except when we do, and we lose both ways. And that’s why it’s the title of my book.

And fate finds us. Inevitability finds us with the inevitability of poverty, the inevitability of class. Sergeant Howie discovers that the people of Summerisle wanted him all along for their pagan rite; Sadako crawls out of her well and through the TV to claim her victims; the Blair Witch leads the lost documentarists into the cellar; everyone Sally Hardesty and her pals meet on their way to the old homestead is related to Leatherface; Thomasin has no choice but to sell her soul for a pretty dress and a knob of butter.

Let’s Scare Howard to Death

So now I’ve got a book out, and I’ve been doing interviews and delivering talks about folk horror, and introducing screenings, and this is nuts because what I am not is an expert. I just started writing about films and TV because it seemed like it was a good idea at the time and it took off, and now boom, here I am.

Years ago, it was Chuck who described my basic methodology as “Who gives a fuck, it’s time to kick down my brain doors and see what tumbles out,” and it’s true, I suppose that’s how I’ve always done it, just written what I feel like and seen if anyone cares (and carried on whether they do or not). So. I’m not going to pretend that this is how you write about film all the time. But this is how I write about film.

I Have an Imagination Like Everyone Else

Once upon a time, if you wanted to find out who directed a movie, or how good it was, or what the critics said, you bought a book. But all of this stuff is now a matter of thirty seconds time spent on the IMDB. So, if you’re going to write about film or TV in a book, it has to be on different grounds. There’s definitely a place for going into the details of shooting, casting, visual direction, photography, and such, and there are some properly fascinating books out there that deal with it, but simple reference doesn’t really have a point these days. So writing about film needs to be about something more than just telling you stuff. It has to be a response.

Be Personal (also Secret, Strange, Dark, Impure and Dissonant)

The best film book I’ve ever come across is Kier-La Janisse’s House of Psychotic Women. Seriously. Buy it. Buy it before you buy mine (but still buy mine, OK). I adore this book. It’s about horror and exploitation movies featuring neurotic women, and Kier-La attacks the subject by delving into her own painful life history. And she interweaves the autobiography with critiques of loads of movies – movies that she makes you want to see, dearly – and her honest, raw and sometimes funny recollections of her own life make for a book that is fully as raw as the movies she’s writing about. It’s great writing and it’s great film writing.

And a lot of the time, that’s what I’m aiming for.

We’re in a climate now where talking about media is a discussion. If any schmuck with a blog and a few thousand readers can be a cultural critic, it’s only fair that we approach this with a bit of humility. We’re adding to the conversation, and we’re inviting other people to react to that. No one needs to pretend to be authoritative – in fact, I’d more or less say that you should never try to be authoritative. React. Respond. Converse.

Spoilers are for wimps

Sometimes if you’re going to be in-depth about what a film is about, you have to give away the ending. If you really want to tackle what’s up with Get Out, for example, that twist needs breaking. Don’t be afraid of this. People who care will come back later when they’ve seen it and a surprising number of people don’t actually care at all and will go watch the films anyway. Write what you write. By all means warn your readers (warnings are important – they are the opposite of censorship, in fact), but don’t be afraid of giving things away if you have to.

Hatewatching Never Helped Anyone

I don’t think there’s such a thing as “so bad it’s good”. I either like a film or I don’t, and with some very few exceptions (the stinky reputations of The Wicker Tree (2011) and The Village (2004) preceded them and I couldn’t help that, and also, they were quite stinky) I’ve worked on the “brilliant until proven rubbish” principle. I just assume I’m going to like a film, and find something to say about it. It probably helps that I have a slightly different standard with regards what sort of thing I am going to like here: I mean, OK, I reckon that you won’t have any trouble making the case that Rogue One (2016) is objectively a better film on every conceivable level than Psychomania (1973). But one of those is a really good Star Wars movie, and one of them is an unhinged tale of a psychic whose toad-worshipping butler might in fact be Satan and whose son leads a gang of undead bikers, terrorising suburban Surrey, and to be honest I know which of those I’d rather be watching.

But even bad films, even films made by assholes, even – take a breath before saying it – problematic films can have something to share with us. They are artefacts of our culture, and as products of our culture, they have things to tell us. They have a value.

The world is rubbish right now and writing about film and TV seems trivial, pointless. And people do occasionally ask me, “Why do you write about this crap? Why don’t you write about something important?” But cinema and TV tell us stories about the world we are in. They are voices. And it’s valuable, and I even think it’s moral to keep tackling this stuff, and I think genre cinema is absolutely the best ground to stand on here, because genre film hides things, it sneaks stuff by you, it holds up that mirror. It really matters to do this. Because we understand ourselves through it. Culture keeps us alive.

It’s Always a Work in Progress

Further down the line, I’m committed to On a Thousand Walls, a book about urban weirdness; Cult Cinema, which is about bad religion in films; The Question in Bodies, a collection on what I like to call identity horror and Your Move, Darwin, a survey of the Planet of the Apes movies. I’ve got a hell of a lot of momentum right now, and the fact that the We Don’t Go Back book seems to be doing OK is just an added bonus. If you’d asked me three years ago where I’d find my biggest success yet as a writer, I wouldn’t have said “film criticism”. But then, that’s part of the fun of this game. When you kick open the brain doors, there’s no way of knowing what’s going to tumble out.

Howard David Ingham: Website

We Don’t Go Back: Amazon

Once upon a time, in a faraway kingdom, a hero, the Chosen One, was born . . . and so begins every fairy tale ever told.
            
This is not that fairy tale.
            
There is a Chosen One, but he is unlike any One who has ever been Chosened.
            
And there is a faraway kingdom, but you have never been to a magical world quite like the land of Pell.
            
There, a plucky farm boy will find more than he’s bargained for on his quest to awaken the sleeping princess in her cursed tower. First there’s the Dark Lord, who wishes for the boy’s untimely death . . . and also very fine cheese. Then there’s a bard without a song in her heart but with a very adorable and fuzzy tail, an assassin who fears not the night but is terrified of chickens, and a mighty fighter more frightened of her sword than of her chain-mail bikini. This journey will lead to sinister umlauts, a trash-talking goat, the Dread Necromancer Steve, and a strange and wondrous journey to the most peculiar “happily ever after” that ever once-upon-a-timed. 

“Ranks among the best of Christopher Moore and Terry Pratchett.”—Chuck Wendig

“When you put two authors of this high caliber together, expect fireworks. Or at least laughs. What a hoot!”—New York Times bestselling author Terry Brooks

If writing alone is a soliloquy, writing with a co-author is more like improv.

Kevin: Collaborating is turbo fun. We trade off drafting chapters and it feels a bit like an improvisational game, because while I might have a vague idea of what Delilah is going to do in a chapter plot-wise, thanks to our rough outline, I never know exactly what’s going to happen or what kind of cliffhanger she’s going to throw me at the end of it. And the jokes slay me too. I quickly wondered why I waited so long to try it.

Delilah: So true. Getting a chapter from Kevin feels a little like seeing my Easter basket for the first time as a kid. When I write a book by myself, I always leave plenty of room for organic plotting, but in order to write a book with a co-writer, it’s important to have a solid road map so someone doesn’t veer off into a sticky swamp. But there’s still plenty of room for creativity within that outline, and I love looking at each chapter’s objective and trying to figure out how to delight and amuse the reader—and Kevin—by doing something unexpected or flipping a trope.

You’ve got to pick the right writing partner—and make it legal.

Kevin: Trusting your partner is key, especially in the writing and editing bits, but also: Have your agents work out a collaboration agreement. Because I hate worrying about business stuff, and once the agreement is worked out, you have no worries. It’s something your agents will be able to whip up amongst themselves pretty easily and it mostly involves contingency plans for unlikely scenarios.

Delilah: There’s an interesting push and pull in the co-writing relationship as each person discovers what’s a deal breaker for them and what they can feel free to let the other person handle. That trust is key to knowing when to let go—and to trusting that when something is important to you, whether a legal issue or a character arc or just a joke, that the other person will respect that. I feel so fortunate to work with Kevin because he’s a master of his craft, a canny businessman, and a great friend. If either partner has too much ego or if the power or skill differential is too broad, I feel like it would be really hard to keep that balance of professional respect and individual artistic license. You want to pick someone you genuinely like, whose writing you like, and whose business practices are in line with yours, and it helps if they’re on the same level as you are so it’s an equal partnership.

You’ll get the best synergy in person—preferably with fine cocktails and Spam™.

Kevin: If you can, get the initial breakdown done in person. And by that I mean just jotting down the characters, what they want, and what’s in their way—that’s a plot breakdown. The brainstorming back and forth is going to be more vibrant if you’re in person instead of skyping. And where you do it can make a huge difference. We were breaking down No Country for Old Gnomes in New Orleans while we were there for a convention. The convention hotel had a griffin on their room key cards and we looked at it and said, “We should have a griffin in this book.” I honestly don’t think it would have occurred to us otherwise and now we have a gryphon on the cover. And then we went for a walk in the city, soaking up this amazing atmosphere and maybe a liter of rum drinks, and we wound up on Frenchman Street, enjoying live music in bar after bar and taking notes on ideas the whole time.

Delilah: Gotta admit it: Storybreaking a pun book with Kevin is one of life’s greatest joys, and not just because of the rum drinks. The key to hammering out a plot for us appears to be good food, great cocktails, a novel environment, and being as open and supportive as possible. Most of our plotting is just us taking turns, saying, “That’s a great idea! And what if also this? And that? And some more drinks? And spam musubi?” And then the other person says, “Hey, that’s great!” And then we giggle a lot. I can’t imagine our books would have the same vibrancy and creativity if we were soberly skyping at 2 in the afternoon like it was a business meeting. As it is, we’re maximizing our creativity through sensory enrichment and the application of flaming tiki drinks. We want to write fun books, and we want to have fun doing it.

Yes, Virginia, it’s still going to be hard sometimes.

Delilah: Sounds pretty dreamy, doesn’t it? Write a book with one of your best friends and get that sweet book cash for just half the work? But it’s still a book, and it still requires time on task, just with an extra helping of diplomacy and courtesy. Kevin and I each have our own individual publishing and event commitments, and we don’t want to let one another down on our co-written book, which means there are all-nighters and frantic weeks of 6,000 word days to catch up after a con. Sometimes—although rarely—we disagree on something in the book, and it becomes a super polite dance of trying to decide how to move forward in a way that feels right for both of us. Is it worth it? 100% yes! But you shouldn’t go into a co-writing experience expecting nothing but roses.

Kevin: Yeah! Roses can be cloying anyway, and the whole point of co-authoring is to combine powers. Syncing up to maximize our strengths not only takes hard work but the expectation that the mesh will require such work. If everything was perfect with a chapter I sent over, honestly, that’s when I’d start to doubt. If I didn’t see Delilah tweaking and refining my stuff and inserting delightful jokes I’d wonder if she read it. And because our writing processes in addition to our schedules are different, allowances obviously have to be made for workflow. The fact that Delilah is even capable of 6K-word days still boggles my mind when I write at a more plodding pace of 1-2K per day and constantly believe I’m running behind.

You’ve got to learn to say, “Why not?”

Delilah: So much of writing is about being open to possibility and not letting your brain say, “No, that would never work.” Kevin first pitched Kill the Farm Boy to me at an airport barbecue joint in the Dallas airport after a great signing. Three years later, here we are. At any point, we could’ve let conventional wisdom kill the project. Is the title too silly? Do people want a funny book? Will co-writing be too weird or difficult? Can we really do this in Fantasy? Can we really make that many jokes about elf boners? Instead of asking if we were allowed to do it or if it would sell, we just let ourselves have as much fun as possible. Any time I think a chapter might be too out there or wacky, I write it anyway and send it to Kevin, and most of the time, he digs it. That’s how books get made—you pick an idea that’s too crazy to work and just write the hell out of it in exactly the way that makes you feel the most alive.

Kevin: Yes. And because of the collaboration, we both feel safe writing some wacky stuff because we trust the other one to tell us if it works. And when it does—which is most of the time—it pushes us to take more creative risks. Delilah recently wrote a chapter for book three that was an extended punny riff on a particular body function that folks usually don’t discuss and I had never seen anything like it before. I sat there flabbergasted and giggling after reading it and wondered if I could do something like that. Why hadn’t I tried? I made my next chapter an extended riff on something else and Delilah loved it and couldn’t believe I went there. Well, normally—if I’d been writing solo—I wouldn’t have! So the collaboration has challenged me and forced me to grow as a writer while remaining incredibly fun. 14/10, would recommend doing that thing you’ve always wanted to do.

Find out more about Kill the Farm Boy or order the book at the Tales of Pell website.

And if you want to find out who you would be in the world of Pell, take the easy and non-data-grabby name generator quiz!

Kevin Hearne: Website | Twitter

Delilah S. Dawson: Website | Twitter

Kill The Farm Boy: Signed Copies from Worldbuilder | Indiebound | Amazon

And we have our You-Chosen Winner.

A reminder that this is the winner I picked — and this is the winner you picked.

That one is #10, and it gained an early, insurmountable lead in the voting that wouldn’t relent. And truly awkward, it is. It did, however, face some stuff competition between #18 and #9 (in second and third place, respectively).

Congrats to all.

Our two winners — please ping me at terribleminds at gmail so I can get you some SWEET SWEET PRIZES. Thanks all for participating, let’s get together and do this again sometimes. You bringing your A-Game — meaning, your Awkward-Game — with some awesomely uncomfortable authorial photos. You’re all super-weird. It’s wonderful. *applause*