I HAVE RETURNED.

I have returned, in fact, from that place. Well, not just there — I bee-bopped around the Pacific Northwest with the family. Portland to the coast, then the coast to Seattle, with even a brief stop in the San Juans. It was lovely. The food is amazing. The sights range from “ooh” to “whoa” to “that’s so breathtaking I peed myself, for all the muscles in my body have gone slack in the revelation of the sublime.” I’ll pop some more photos at the bottom of this post, and also you can find the PNW photoset here — not it’s not robust yet, as I’m slowly processing and adding photos as I go.

It’s important to note that the photo at the fore of this post was taken with an iPhone X. Only tweaking I did was to the colors, using Lightroom. I took the DSLR, and also brought the new 100-400 lens, and only had that attached at the time of this shot — so I used the iPhone in the hopes I’d get a good image, and, well, there you go. Digital camera phones are increasingly bridging the gap between them and high-test photo equipment.

An example of one not taken with the iPhone, but rather, the DSLR:

Anyway, you get the idea.

Portland and Seattle are two very different, and very same, cities — they’re like family members. Portland is the scrappy younger sibling, an alternative artist, is really into weed and fancy sandwiches, doesn’t like to hold one job for any long period of time. Seattle is the older sibling, has a good job, interested in pop culture more than weird fringe shit, has mostly shed its free-spirited chaos and traded it for a little humility and grown-upedness, still dabbles in weed, because c’mon, way more techie, likes finer cuisine, etc., etc.

I really love the area.

Back now, in rangy, rabid Pennsyltucky.

Where it’s very humid. It was hot out in the PNW, maybe unseasonably so, but it was never really humid. Here it’s like walking through a sticky toffee.

What else is going on?

Hey, Darth Vader Annual #2 released, by yours truly, with sublime pencils by Leonard Kirk, inks by Scott Hanna and Walden Wong, Nolan Woodard on colors — they really made the issue sing, and I’m in awe of what they managed to do with my dumb words. You can find a review round-up here — I’m so glad people dug it. I know some didn’t dig my TFA adaptation as much, because that was really less of an adaptation and more of a translation — the job there wasn’t to tweak and add and find cool marginalia, but to take that film script and put it into comic book form.

So, it’s nice to see this is being well-received. Thanks, folks.

What’s weird is, for me, this is my only release left in 2018. (Well, there may be one other thing, but it’s secret and I can’t talk about it yet.) 2019 will be a big year — Vultures in January, Wanderers in July, plus some other stuff (like a seeecret comics project). But it’s weird for me to slow down, it’s feels… antithetical to how I normally do things? But that’s okay, too, as in the meantime I’ve got this brand new book to write, The Book of Accidents.

More as I know it.

(I’ll be announcing the winner to the Awkward Author Photo contest later today.)

Here, have some more photos.

BYEEEEEE.

AHOY.

I’m outta here.

FOR GOOD.

Okay not really. I’m just traveling for the next mumble-mumble several days, so you won’t see me back with posts until sometime next week. In the meantime I will be cavorting around the Pacific Northwest, causing trouble and delivering shenanigans and doing a jig on your social norms and mores. Or something. Shut up.

In my stead, I have given you a flower.

That flower is a gayfeather. That is really its name.

At the bottom of the post is also a lovely, cuddly photo, in that it is a photo of a grass-carrying wasp cuddling a stung, paralyzed tree cricket as it levers the bug into a hole under a patio chair in order to feed the cricket to her WASP BABBIES.

Ain’t nature sweet?

Also, do not forget, this week is:

DARTH VADER, ANNUAL #2, by me and Leonard Kirk and with a Mike Deodato cover. It features Vader getting up to some REAL SHIT with Tarkin and Krennic and the nascent Death Star, y’all. You might get a little stardust in your eye if you’re not careful.

Have a great week, frandos.

A crew of outcasts race across the galaxy in order to prevent the genocide of magical creatures. Part-unicorn Gary Cobalt is sick of captivity at the hands of human beings. On the day of his release from prison, he attempts to win back his faster-than-light stoneship in a game of skill. But Gary’s longtime nemesis, Jenny Perata, rigs the game and steals the ship out from under him to make an urgent delivery.

With a mysterious time-locked cargo in their hold and the authoritarian Reason regime on their tail, Gary and Jenny are forced to cooperate despite the fact that she once held him hostage and he was imprisoned for the murder of her best friend. What could possibly go right?

Take care of yourself

No matter what you’re creating, caring for yourself should always come first. Don’t believe people who say that artists should suffer to make good art, or that being comfortable will somehow diminish the final product. Folks, I wrote a 2,300-word butt joke while sitting in bed, eating a cupcake, and watching Marvel’s Avengers on repeat. Live your best life and the words will be there.

The last nineteen months have been unrelenting. Terrible things unfold before our eyes every day. Our hearts pound when another fundamental right is stripped away, but there’s nothing to run from and no one to fight; no zombies to hit with shovels or alien ships to infect with viruses. Instead, our apocalypse is moving in slow motion, drawn out over torturous weeks and months. Between the daily horror show, we still have to slap on a smile and pull a shot of espresso for a customer, or give yet another PowerPoint presentation on sales figures. We’re living in a terrible juxtaposition of the horrific and the mundane and it takes a toll on creativity.

It’s okay… nay, it’s vital, to find little pockets full of wonderful things and marinate yourself in them. There’s a distinct possibility we may be in some kind of nuclear winter by this time next year, so aim to absorb as much joy as possible before we’re roasting squirrels over a campfire made from back issues of Asimov’s.

I’ve joked to friends that it’s a steak and Legos kind of year, but I’m really kidding on the square. We all need to find something that gives us a moment of respite from the onslaught. Find your own steak and Legos. Read romance novels from the library with a cup of your favorite tea. Take a quiet hike in the woods and photograph native fungi. Make a Wendigo and share it on Twitter with other sandwich aficionados. Collect fountain pens and inks. Find your thing and steep yourself in it, let it infuse you with power, then come back to your work with a reinvigorated mind. Be healthy and happy and write lots of butt jokes.

Find Your Tribe

Your tribe is your ride-or-die posse and your supportive cheerleading team. They know when to push you to work harder and when to offer comfort and a listening ear. You have to find your own tribe. No one can tell you where to find yours and no, you can’t have someone else’s.

Four years ago, I was poking around writer twitter as a total newbie, asking everyone I followed how to find my tribe. All of the best writers had a critique group or beta readers who helped them craft their stories into sellable gems. The closest I had in my little town was a man who spent the last forty years working on his novel about a dog on a road trip. Listen, there’s nothing wrong with a dog road trip, but if you’ve been working on the same book for forty years, you’re not writing a book, you have a typing hobby.

I found my tribe when I attended Clarion West–a six-week workshop for writers of science fiction and fantasy also known (to me, at least) as Sci-Fi Summer Camp. We bonded over board games and a shared love of storytelling. We laughed every day and thankfully cried only intermittently. They’re the people I turn to when I need to untangle a story or commiserate over never-ending edits.

And I’ve found other tribes since then. There’s the group that gathers on a message board to practice epic feats of rejectomancy. We can tell what an editor has eaten for breakfast by the punctuation in her personal rejections. And another group that likes to meet in person for a few hours of writing followed by a board game chaser. And a group that likes to have intricate and pedantic discussions of craft that are excruciating… until you’re the one with the plot problem.

If you’re a newbie, it can feel like you’re an outsider to all of these established tribes. But you need to find your own people. And you will.

Find your motivation

Three years ago, I taped a picture of a Tesla Model X near my writing desk, thinking that the dream of owning an electric car would motivate me to write. I’m sad to report that not one extra word was written out of the desire to sell enough books to buy an $80,000 car. (Also, Elon has turned out to be a lot less cool than he seemed at the time.)

By contrast, Space Unicorn Blues was written in an epic twenty-day writing sprint motivated solely by spite. I remember the day clearly. I was tearfully complaining about my eighteenth rejection for a bizarre short story about a woman who has a portal between her grandmother’s attic and her uterus. My husband tried to console me by gently and kindly suggesting that I try writing more “normal” stories.

I was so angry at his suggestion (basically, this is the default state of our 21-year marriage) that I opened my laptop and started writing the most bizarre story I could put to paper. There are temperate rainforest starships carved into the bellies of asteroids and faster-than-light engines powered by unicorn horns. Magic and technology collide in grating and painful ways in order to sow conflict between characters. Turns out, when properly motivated, the words will flow like water.

You don’t know what you don’t know

I populated my book with humans from, you know, actual places around the globe besides America. They are people who come from different backgrounds and who have experiences that don’t mirror my own. This meant a lot of research went into making their lives as accurate as possible. Half-unicorn Gary Cobalt is descended from aerospace engineers from Bangalore. Captain Jenny Perata is a Māori woman who uses a wheelchair. Game hostess Ricky Tang is an Chinese-Australian transgender woman.

Some of the best memories of making this book were sitting down with people who are not like me and having discussions about how to portray these characters as realistically as possible. I got it wrong… many times. For example, my friends from Bangalore asked, “Why is your main character speaking Hindi? I always speak Kannada at home.” I had been treating India as a monolith. Just like every other place on the planet, India is populated by diverse people who have distinct cultures and languages. If I hadn’t spoken to an actual Bangalorean, I would have missed that detail entirely.

It’s also critical to pay your experts. Sensitivity reading is difficult work; wading through incorrect and sometimes harmful language, then taking the time to explain how the writer has erred. Pay readers the going rate or agree on a mutually beneficial arrangement like critique trades or a barter. Just make sure you’re compensating people fairly for their time and labor.

Finish your stuff

I’m going to tell you a never-before-revealed secret about Space Unicorn Blues in the hope that I can spare you the agony that I inflicted upon myself. (I am also fervently hoping that my publisher does not read down this far.) When I submitted the manuscript for consideration, the book wasn’t finished. Oh there definitely were a hundred thousand words in the file, but only the first few chapters had gone through the four drafts needed to be ready for public view. The rest was a terrible mess of scenes that didn’t really add up to a novel. I figured that if Angry Robot was interested, it would take them weeks to request the full manuscript. Plenty of time to spruce up the ending!

Readers, they wrote back in four days. You have never in your life experienced a more conflicted career moment than having a publisher request your full manuscript… and it isn’t ready. I spent the next week scrambling to rewrite twelve thousand words a day. Please, do not do what I did. Finish your work and don’t send it out until it’s ready. LET ME BE YOUR CAUTIONARY TALE.

* * *

TJ Berry grew up between Repulse Bay, Hong Kong and the Jersey shore. She has been a political blogger, bakery owner, and spent a disastrous two weeks working in a razor blade factory. She now writes science fiction from Seattle with considerably fewer on-the-job injuries. TJ co-hosts the Warp Drives Podcast with her husband, in which they explore science fiction, fantasy, and horror via pop culture and literary lenses. It’s smart, snarky, and just a little bit saucy… just like TJ.

TJ Berry: Website / Twitter

Space Unicorn Blues: Indiebound / Amazon / B&N

(No, that cat isn’t the cat we’re saving. This battleworn death metal cat is a cat that skulks around the woods around my writing shed. I don’t run it off, as I hope it has better luck catching the mice, moles and voles instead of the songbirds it sometimes stalks. Stop chasing pretty birds, cat!)

This is about the book by the late Blake Snyder: Save the Cat.

It’s a fine book. You should read it [indiebound / amazon].

Here’s why I like it: it breaks story down into very recognizable blockbustery beats. Like, oh, here’s the part of the movie where there’s a FALSE VICTORY and here’s the part where ALL IS LOST and oh now it’s the time of the movie when the HERO has to say some COOL GLIB SHIT and GLISTEN SWEATILY. Or something. Whatever. There’s a worksheet. It’s great.

I meet a lot of book authors who really love this book and who swear by it. And I go to writing conferences and conventions and inevitably I see someone doing a talk or a workshop and they lean on the book — sometimes a little, sometimes a whole lot.

And that’s okay.

But it’s really worth noting:

Save the Cat is a book about screenwriting.

It is not a book about… well, writing books.

And that’s a vital distinction, because Snyder’s book isn’t here to tell you about the bones of story in general, it’s here to give you a very specific framework you may apply to any screenplay you care to write, and more specifically, with the goal of writing a sellable, blockbustery film.

And here you might say, “But what if I want to write a big, sellable, blockbustery book? Isn’t that the same thing, Mister Chuck?”

Nnnggh.

Whhhh.

*winces*

No.

Not really?

Not really.

A book is not a movie. A movie is not a comic book. No one format is another format. Each carries with it a series of advantages and limitations (and some limitations are also advantages, assuming you don’t buy a duck hoping it’ll be a dog). A film tends to be a thing that follows a clearer, more illustrative pattern. It doesn’t have to be! Many times, it’s not, specifically when we look to smaller, niche, more “indie” films. But bigger films tend to follow more typical patterns and tropes. A book, though? A book is bigger. Sprawlier. Stranger. Books can be exciting and cinematic but even then, if you write them exactly like you’d write a film, you’d potentially end up with something too lean, too shallow — because films do not explore an internal dimension. Yes, there’s subtext! Yes, actors and direction reflect an internal world of the characters. But books don’t reflect that — they rip open the exterior wall to show what goes on inside character’s heads and hearts and histories.

A film is a lean 90-120 minutes.

A book is…

*whistles*

Not?

Further, a screenplay isn’t even a film. It’s the blueprint of a film. A screenplay is a very robust outline. So: Save the Cat is preparing you to write a very robust outline, the goal of which is to outline a future film made by a whole team of people.

A book is just you.

I mean, yes, there’s input from an editor.

But the book is the book. It is the alpha and omega of its own narrative.

It’s not meant to become something else (and if it does, that’s rarely on you, and when it does, it’ll be squished and made malleable to fit into whatever additional format, be it TV or film or an STD pamphlet or an injectable nightmare invented by Elon Musk).

The final problem with Save the Cat is that it is totally formulaic.

That is its purpose.

To give you a formula.

Now, that’s not all bad. A formula is a really great jumping off point to understand certain story-beats — and to recognize those beats in popular storytelling media. Of course, the danger of that too is the predictability of those beats. Storytellers, and inevitably audiences, begin to unconsciously (and later, quite consciously) internalize those rigorous beats. It means that stories become safe because we can detect the pattern. We know what happens after an ALL IS LOST moment. We know, “oh hey here’s the part where the VILLAINS REGROUP and MEGATRON fights CAPTAIN AMERICA.”

That can be good.

It can be comfortable to watch stories and to know how they’re going to go.

It can also get really, really boring.

Which leads me to this:

Save the Cat is like an Applebee’s meal —

It’s rigorously tested and reliably reconstructed and, at the end of the day, safe.

And by safe, I do also mean “boring.”

That’s not so much the fault of the book, which again, I like just fine — but it is one result of relying on it like it’s a fucking LEGO instruction manual instead of just another way to break apart and utilize the fiddly constituent bits of storytelling.

There’s definite value in taking Save the Cat and mining it for a deeper understanding of how stories are constructed — the rise and fall and twists of certain beats is useful to see. It’s a neat peek behind the narrative curtain. Because at the end of the day, the bones of story are common between formats, despite their differences. It’s like in nature: a dolphin, a dog, and a human being don’t look much alike, and don’t act much alike, either. But rip off all their skin (metaphorically, put down the skinning knife) and you find that the bones are similar. I mean, seriously, it’s fucked up, a dolphin has hands, you guys, a dolphin has motherfucking hands inside those flipper mitts. Which leads me to believe that, at any point, a dolphin can take off its gloves and like, undo knots, or hack a computer or some shit.

Still, at the end of the day, stories are not computer programs, they’re not math equations, they’re not cookie recipes. They’re much wigglier and weirder than that. They follow patterns, but they are also best when the patterns are made to serve the story, rather than the story made to serve the pattern. Stories can be best when they are not tourists on a tour bus following a prescribed, predefined path. Sometimes a story is at its most interesting when the tour bus gains sentience, jumps the fence, and fucks off into the woods, rumbling toward a cliff as the tourists inside its metal body scream and bleat. It’s not about confidently striding along well-lit paths; it’s about a trepidatious journey through a dark forest where the only light you get is a flashlight whose batteries are dying.

So, what I’d ask of you, Dear Authors of Books — and, arguably, storytellers of all stripes — is to use Save the Cat sparingly, and without any kind of dogmatic devotion. Do not study it (or worse, teach it) as if it is true, but rather, as a book full of formulaic beats that any good storyteller should feel free to smash apart. You should be comfortable rearranging those beats, reversing them, fucking with them ten ways from Tuesday. And you should also concentrate less on any kind of prescriptivist, plot-focused storytelling methodology. It has value as food to feed the story, but not as a formula by which the story must rigidly adhere.

Save the Cat? Read it. Enjoy it.

Just don’t put a ring on it.

THIS HAS BEEN A PSA FROM CHNURK MANDOG

*rainbow and star cascade across the screen*

*star explodes*

*rainbow melts*

*centipedes descend*

* * *

DAMN FINE STORY: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

What do Luke Skywalker, John McClane, and a lonely dog on Ho’okipa Beach have in common? Simply put, we care about them.

Great storytelling is making readers care about your characters, the choices they make, and what happens to them. It’s making your audience feel the tension and emotion of a situation right alongside your protagonist. And to tell a damn fine story, you need to understand why and how that caring happens.

Whether you’re writing a novel, screenplay, video game, or comic, this funny and informative guide is chock-full of examples about the art and craft of storytelling–and how to write a damn fine story of your own.

Indiebound / Amazon / B&N

It is another Monday.

Though, hopefully we can all agree that Mondays are fundamentally stupid, so we should collectively all agree to call them Pre-Tuesdays instead. And you can welcome this particular Pre-Tuesday with the open arms of GARY THE CRAB SPIDER, who has claimed that particular day-lily as his domain. (Sorry for folks who might be arachnophobic; I like to think that the photo is funny and goofy enough that you can barely tell he’s even a spider.)

GOOD MORNING, FELLOW WORD-NERDS.

A real quick buncha information to stuff into your brainholes:

First, hey, my Darth Vader annual — drawn by the impeccable Leonard Kirk — comes out July 18th, or next Weds, so hopefully you’ll grab it at your local comic book grotto. Note that some very fun people claim they want to boycott the issue — or “soycott” it, I guess, since they seem to love the “soy” insult with great dipshit gusto? — so feel free to read their very sound logic on why you should boycott my issue of a comic book.

Second, some folks have been asking about The Raptor & Wren (Miriam Black book five!) in audio — well, the day has come, and it is here. Narrated once again by Emily Beresford. Check it out.

Third, the audio for Damn Fine Story will be coming soon.

Fourth, soon I’ll have some cool news in the form of [redacted].

Fifth, note that the Awkward Author Photo Contest runs till this Wednesday, so you’re on your last chance to get in a photo. Don’t miss out. Prizes! Glory! Awkwardness!

And I think that’s it for now.

Here is another cool macro photo that I’m really happy with, this one of a blue dasher dragonfly — up close and personal.

Note too that the dragonfly’s head, if you ignore the eyes, looks like the face of a weirdly bearded man —

Or perhaps the King from Katamari Damacy —