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Since I’m kinda on a bit of a schedule here (or in the UK, a SHED-YOU-ULL), I’ll make this brief with some quick news dips and dots, plus some photos, and then I’m outtie like belly button. Do the kids say that? The kids don’t say that? Well, shit.

News bits, beginning now:

• I did an interview on Tim Clare’s Death of a Thousand Cuts podcast, and it was a really great time and a fun interview and hopefully you’ll like it. *straps you down to a chair, stapleguns headphones to your ears* Oh how nice that you’ve chosen to listen.

• Speaking of the UK, Waterstones is offering signed copies of Wanderers.

• And yes you can order signed copies in the US, too, from various places — including my local stores, Doylestown Bookshop and Let’s Play Books.

• And holy craaaap the book is out in two weeks?! How did that happen? Here I remind you, poke poke poke, of the pre-order Shepherd pin you can nab…

• Plus, Wanderers is listed as a top ten book for July from LibraryReads…

• PLUS, best summer reading lists from Amazon, Bookish, Bookbub…

• FINALLY, another starred review from BookPage! “It’s not easy to write the end of the world. With Wanderers, Chuck Wendig has mastered it.” (That brings the total to four starred reviews! Maybe this book doesn’t suck?)

• I remind you that I’ll be in NYC tonight at the KGB Bar at 7pm doing a reading — plus DFWCon this weekend! Updated appearances listed right here.

All right, news-blobs dropped.

Onward to photography:

A long time ago, I read an interview from David Foster Wallace, and in it he talked about how writers are told to write what they know and what that means. He’d been taking a little bit of flak, apparently, for his reliance on modern/pop culture and its ephemera in his opus novel, Infinite Jest. Long story short, but Wallace said that his hyper-referential writing style was a product of his experiences. Like most of us, Wallace grew up on TV and video games and paperback novels. That’s the tapestry of our lives, just like the tapestry of Emerson’s life, or Thoreau’s life, was the naturalistic world. Atari and Saturday matinees, Wallace said, were his Walden Pond, and his writing couldn’t be anything other than a reflection of his experiences.

The thing is, we’re living in a weird time, creatively. Our world isn’t Emerson’s world; we’re smothered in information and art—through social media, through nonstop streaming options, wildly accessible entertainment, so on and so forth. In a sense, we’re influenced by influence. Let me give you an example:

I’ve written two novels—Black Star Renegades and its sequel, We Are Mayhem—and I like to sometimes joke that they’re just Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off. Now, like any joke, there’s some truth to this: The story is very, very much inspired by Star Wars. I’m a Star Wars fanatic. Thinking in Wallace’s terms, if you look at the tapestry of my life, it’s Star Wars, Stephen King, John Carpenter, and a whole bunch of comic books. And I was lucky to grow up in a house that supplied me with all these things, and from a very young age. My parents were not only supportive of my weird interests, but they were also liberal about my entertainment intake. I watched Halloween when I was five years old; I saw A New Hope when I was four. And my mom, bless her, used what little extra money she had to get me comic books and paperback novels from garage sales whenever she could. I was never short on supply when it came to absorbing pop culture, and that absorption was (and still is) a big part of my life.

Getting back to Black Star Renegades, there’s no way I could deny that it wasn’t influenced by Star Wars (Lucasfilm, in fact, has hired me since, and I’m currently writing many of the all-ages Star Wars Adventures comic stories). I embrace that fact, fully—Black Star Renegades wouldn’t exist without Star Wars. But, there’s two things to say about this.

First, like I said before, we’re influenced by influence. Yes, you can jab at me for being so apparent with my influences, but Star Wars is also a sum of its influences. From classic sci-fi pulps to Kurosawa movies to silent films and a whole bunch of other stuff in-between, George Lucas’s space opera opus was the sum of many parts—all the things that influenced him. And all those things can then be traced back to various influences as well. This isn’t a groundbreaking revelation, of course; what’s important, though, is allowing your creative self to be okay carrying forth the DNA of other works. I’ve seen so many stories from talented writers wither on the vine because they were concerned with how much their work echoed things that have already been made. Solomon said there’s nothing new under the sun, and in my opinion that’s true (to a degree—if you dropped Solomon into our world, I’m sure he’d say “Holy shit! Look at all these new things under the sun!”). It’s so remarkably rare—like one in a million—to create something that’s nothing like anything else. We know it when we see it, and these rare instances are cherished, as they should be. And while striving for that is a noble pursuit, it’s also—and I’ve seen this with my own two eyes—the path to creative madness.

Of course, though, we can’t just go ripping off the things we love. That’s why I’m comfortable saying Black Star Renegades is a Star Wars knock-off—I know, in reality, it’s not. Here’s where the important trick comes in, a trick I’ve learned writing not only these two novels, but many, many licensed comic books.

So, as a comic book writer, I’m oftentimes asked to write stories for existing characters. I’ve written Superman, The Shadow, Cassie Hack, Adam West Batman, Nightwing, and more. And the thing I’ve learned in telling these stories successfully is this: You have to embrace the stories and their traditions for what they are. Nightwing is a sexy, fun version of Batman. That’s it. Therefore, when writing a Nightwing story, it wouldn’t really work to make him dark and tortured like Bruce Wayne—that’s not who he is. The job in writing for Nightwing is to write a story about a young, sexy dude who fights crime. But that’s only part of the puzzle. The other part, the most important part, is finding a way to embrace the core thing and make it your own. That’s the key. At the end of the day, the Nightwing story has to be a story that only I can tell—it’s my voice, it’s my point of view that the story is filtered through. Yes, I am embrace Nightwing completely—but I balance that with filtering everything he is through my own POV.

The thing is, the same goes for original creations. It’s the same balance of embracing your influences while maintaining your own voice. If you want to tell an epic fantasy but feel like it’s too much like Robert Jordan, remember that it’s you telling the story in your unique way. And the more you write, and the more your story takes shape, I’m confident that it’ll sounds less and less like Wheel of Time and more like your own thing. The same thing exists in Black Star Renegades. The Star Wars DNA is all over that book, but so is my DNA. There’s a lot of love for the galaxy far, far away in those pages, but there’s also a deconstruction of the messiah complex, and that dominant aspect of the book is all me. That’s my voice coming through, and it’s what makes that story what it is, and not just a Star Wars rip-off.

Now, this isn’t an endorsement of plagiarism—that would be bad. But we live in a world of influence that’s been influenced from other influence. There’s nothing wrong, in my opinion, owning it and making it your own.

Michael Moreci: Website

We Are Mayhem: Print | eBook

Tracy Townsend is back at terribleminds, this time talking about one of the more curious difficulties an author will have — writing the second book in a series! 

* * *

Friends, I come fresh from the battlefield of my second novel, The Fall. Now that it’s out in the world where you, too, can see it, I can tell the tales of how it was wrought. I would be a very poor guide, indeed, if I did not want you to learn from my mistakes.

So you’ve decided to hunt down a sequel to your first book! Brave, industrious soul. Perhaps you thought this journey would be just like the last one? A long, winding road, full of switchbacks and mysterious, distracting dream-peddlers, maybe a treasure hoard at the end, guarded by some hulking reptilian being?

Oh, poor dear. You did think that.

Well.

Here. Come closer. In the words of an old friend of mine, “It’s not safe to go alone. Take this.”

Take some notes about your last book, because whatever map you think you’re going to use to get to the end of this one, its legend and key are based off that first, big brother book. You’ll forget how far apart the oceans are, or which roads run north, or even whether the hedges that grew up against the side of the cathedral were boxwoods or junipers. I know I did. (Thank god for copy editors. Thank god for fifty thousand words of story bible. Never throw away anything, my friends. The devil truly is in the details.)

Take a plugin and install it on your web browsers. Go ahead. Do it. Tell it you get some wickedly paltry allotment of minutes to dip out of your writing and into the digital sandbox beyond. Tell it all your worst habit sites and draw crosses over them in blood. (If you are like me, this will also significantly decrease the influx of impulse-purchased graphic tees in your home.)

Take some friends – the sort you can text or email at any hour of the night, howling unspeakable oaths, knowing they will stroke your fur flat until the full-moon madness of I-can’t-do-this passes. (My friends are too many to list. If I chant their names together, they rise up like a great writing Patronus and remind me that chocolate consumption alone does not write books, however much I want it to.)

Take a digital backup. And a hard drive backup. And an emailed copy of your work. Take a pile of parchment penned a nearsighted monk, but please, take every chance to duplicate your work. (This comes from someone who did – or thought she did – and still had to rewrite the last twenty thousand words of The Fall in a single weekend when her backup done backed out on her. Save. Every. Thing. Save it everywhere.)

Take family. Take the people who loved you before you ever wrote a single word of fiction, and who will love if you never do it again. Let them remind you that you’re more than your output. (My son, for example, has helpfully observed that my real superpower is “making breakfast.” All shall love me and have high blood sugar.)

Take a willingness to tear up the map. Your sense of what you needed to write to bridge two books into an ongoing story will change, as surely as a flooded river might wash out a road or submerge a bridge. There are other ways to get there. Some of them might even tell better stories. (Ask me about the time an incidental news article on contract law changed a key plot point, and how I would build toward it. “Debt management and property law” wasn’t on the map when I started, but. . . *shrug*)

Take the courage to break up the band. You haven’t really been traveling alone, even before you came to this list. You had your characters, good people or villains or rapscallions though they may be. You’ve learned to live with them. You might even love them. But new journeys call for  new maps and new roads. There may not be space for everyone to walk abreast anymore. Be ready to break up the party and send them off on their own quests.

This one will hurt.

Take a deep breath.

Maybe they’ll come together again. Maybe not. Maybe you’ll need another book to show them the way home together.

Bio:

Tracy Townsend is the author of The Nine and The Fall (books 1 and 2 in the Thieves of Fate series), a monthly columnist for the feminist sf magazine Luna Station Quarterly, and an essayist for Uncanny Magazine. She holds a master’s degree in writing and rhetoric from DePaul University and a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from DePauw University, a source of regular consternation when proofreading her credentials. She is the former chair of the English department at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, an elite public boarding school, where she teaches creative writing and science fiction and fantasy literature. She has been a martial arts instructor, a stage combat and accent coach, and a short-order cook for houses full of tired gamers. Now she lives in Bolingbrook, Illinois with two bumptious hounds, two remarkable children, and one very patient husband. You can find her at Twitter @TracyATownsend, and online at www.tracytownsend.net.

The Fall: Indiebound / Barnes & Noble / Powells / Amazon / Audible

Dazzling space battles, intergalactic politics, and rogue AI collide in Velocity Weapon, the first book in this epic space opera by award-winning author Megan O’Keefe.

Sanda and Biran Greeve were siblings destined for greatness. A high-flying sergeant, Sanda has the skills to take down any enemy combatant. Biran is a savvy politician who aims to use his new political position to prevent conflict from escalating to total destruction.

However, on a routine maneuver, Sanda looses consciousness when her gunship is blown out of the sky. Instead of finding herself in friendly hands, she awakens 230 years later on a deserted enemy warship controlled by an AI who calls himself Bero. The war is lost. The star system is dead. Ada Prime and its rival Icarion have wiped each other from the universe.

Now, separated by time and space, Sanda and Biran must fight to put things right.

* * *

I Like Big Books (And I Cannot Lie)

When I sat down to write Velocity Weapon, I really thought it would have a single point of view. I plotted it as such, pitched it to my agent that way, and even sold the thing to Orbit with just Sanda on the page. My brilliant and gracious editor (hi Brit!) saw through my nonsense, however.

She pointed out that, lurking beneath the surface of Sanda’s story, was a massive world and political tug-of-war that would be better explored if I leaned into the space opera element and brought in multiple points of view. She was, naturally, concerned that I’d balk at being asked to add so much. I loved it.

Expanding the novel let me nerd out not only on the worldbuilding and the characters involved, but also on plot structure. Maintaining the balance between Big Book and fast-paced was a fun endeavor, and I enjoyed layering elements of the original plot structure (the outline became almost fractal) to get the feel I was going for.

The original draft of Velocity Weapon clocked in at around 70k words. The final version runs closer to 170k, and that’s what it should have been from draft zero.

Sentience Is Weird And No One Understands It

Look, I can yammer on about the three projected stages of AI development, qualia, and the hard problem of consciousness until we’re both blue in the face. But, at the end of the day, the only answer to any of these questions regarding what it means to be a thinking, feeling being is a big fat shrug emoji.

The good news is that, because these things are so nebulous, it allows writers a lot of freedom to play with possibilities in fiction. Of course, even if we knew for sure what the answers were spec fic writers would continue to play with what-if scenarios. But hey, at least this way if one of our speculative theories turns out to be right (probably not, let’s be honest) we can pretend to be smug and say, “I told you so.”

I Subconsciously Act Out Facial Expressions and Body Language…

… and people, did you know that you can see me? I am, in fact, not inhabiting my own little writer-bubble where all that exists is the world in my head, the music in my ears, and the clicky clack of the keyboard.

I am, however, not going to stop. My local baristas may think I’m absolutely bonkers but they’re probably right, so I might as well own it.

People Want to See Healthy Relationships

The central protagonists of the story are a brother and sister. There’s no dark back story there, no history of one sibling picking on the other and desperately trying to make up for it now that things have gotten dire. They just love each other, and their parents, and are doing their best to keep their family members safe and happy while respecting their boundaries. Just as it’s important to model dysfunction in fiction so that we can better understand it, I believe it’s important to model healthy relationships, too.

Tense family stories are valid stories to tell, and many of us can probably relate to them easily, but this once I wanted a break from inheritable drama. The book has enough tension without family conflict, and so far readers have reacted positively to the Greeve family.

Subtlety and Complexity Make Strange Bedfellows

One of the most common notes I receive from editors is that I can “bring up” certain elements more – make Chekhov’s proverbial gun on the mantel less of a peashooter and more of a bazooka, so to speak. This is valuable feedback for me, especially as I’m one of those writers who likes to keep all my cards up my sleeve and only show you a little peek on occasion.

That’s a lot of metaphors. Anyway, this kind of writing (e.g., I used that word instead of this word which totally sets up everything I swear) is all fine and dandy when your plots aren’t a tangle of overgrown roots and hey, would you look at that, mine usually are. I blame growing up on Final Fantasy games for this (mine do come together in the end though, I promise).

This is where I’m supposed to say something like, “Writing Velocity Weapon helped me learn to strike a balance between the two styles.” That’s mostly true, but the hard fact is that writing Velocity Weapon helped me to be more aware of those proclivities. Writing is art and craft, and if we’re not actively learning, we’re not growing, and to hell with that. There’s always something each new story can teach us.

* * *

Megan E. O’Keefe was raised amongst journalists, and as soon as she was able joined them by crafting a newsletter which chronicled the daily adventures of the local cat population. She has worked in both arts management and graphic design, and has won Writers of the Future and the Gemmell Morningstar Award.

Megan O’Keefe: Website

Velocity Weapon: print | eBook