Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

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Tag: writing (page 32 of 33)

Stuff About Writing

January 20, 2011 / 130 Comments

No, Seriously, I’m Not Fucking Around, You Really Don’t Want To Be A Writer

Danger Do Not Enter!

You don’t want to be a writer.

No, no, I know. You think it’s all kittens and rainbows. It’s one big wordgasm, an ejaculation of unbridled creativity. It’s nougat-filled. It’s pillows, marshmallows, parades. It’s a unicorn in a jaunty hat.

Oh, how sweet the illusion. My job, though, is to put my foot through your dreams with a high karate kick.

Consider this your reality check. You’ll note that I do this periodically: I’m here, standing at the edge of the broken bridge in the pouring rain, waving you off — it’s too late for me. My car’s already gone over the edge. I’ve already bought the magic beans. I’ve already bought into the fairy’s lie. I tried to pet the unicorn in its jaunty hat and it ran me through with its corkscrew horn, and now I am impaled.

See my hands? They’re shaking. They won’t stop. I’m like Tom Hanks in Shaving Ryan’s Privates.

I am too far gone.

You, on the other hand, may yet be saved. I see a lot of you out there. An army of writers. Glistening eyes. Lips dewy with the froth of hope. You’re all so fresh. So innocent. Unmolested by the truth.

And so it is time for my annual “Holy Crap The New Year Is Here And Now You Should Reevaluate Your Shit And Realize You’d Be Much Happier As An Accountant Or Botanist Or Some Fucking Thing” post.

More reasons you do not — awooga, awooga, caution, cuidado, verboten — want to be a writer:

It’s The Goddamned Publipocalypse And Now We’re All Doomed

The meteors are coming. Tides of fire are washing up on beaches. Writers are running scared. The publishing industry has heard the seven trumpets and it wails and gibbers.

It’s bad out there.

You know how many books you have to sell to get on the New York Times Bestseller List? Four. You sell four print copies of a book, whoo, dang, you’re like the next Stephen King. Heck, some authors are selling negative numbers. “How many books did you sell this week?” “Negative seven.” “I don’t understand.” “My books are like gremlins. You spill water on them and they multiply. And then pirates steal them and give them away for free. Hey, do you have a gun, because I’d like to eat it.”

Borders pissed the bed. Editors are out of work. Fewer authors are being signed and for less money up front. Jesus, you have a better shot of getting eaten by a bear and a shark at the same time.

And e-books. Pshhh. Don’t even get me started on e-books. Did you know that they eat real books? They eat them right up. That’s what the “e” stands for. “Eat Books.” I’m not messing with you, I have seen it happen. Plus, every time an e-book is born, a literary agent gets a tapeworm. True fact.

I’m cold and frightened. The rest of us writers, we’re going to build a bunker and hole up in it. Maybe form some kind of self-publishing cult and wait out the Pubpocalypse in our vault. We’ll all break down into weird little genre-specific tribes. Horror slashers, elf-fuckers, steampunk iron men, and space whores. But it’ll be the poets who will win. The poets with their brevity and their stanzas. And their bloody claws.

Eventually Editors And Agents Are All Going To Snap (And It’ll Be Our Fault)

It’s easier now than ever to submit to an agent or an editor. Used to be you had to jump through some hoops, maybe print some shit out, pay some cash to ship your big ol’ book out into the world. Now any diaper-rash with a copy of Wordperfect, an e-mail address and a dream can send his 10-book fantasy epic to a thousand agents with the push of a button.

Click! “Here, please consume this sewage as if it were a meal!”

This is your competition. Sure, you might be a real gem, a right jolly ol’ corker of a writer with skills and art and craft and a sexy smug author photo. But these wild-eyed crazy-heads are your competition.

Don’t think so? Peep this scenario:

Your manuscript arrives in the inbox of an agent with 450 unread messages just from that morning. At least 445 of those unread mails comprise a festering heap of word-dung, and that agent has to get through these and write some kind of “No, I don’t want to rep your book about a chosen one Messiah space pilot hermaphrodite ring-bearer wombat-trainer blacksmith” rejection letter. And she has to do it again and again. And again. And again. Times 400. Let’s be honest, by Piece Of Crap #225, that agent has basically lost her mind. Her brain is a treacly, yogurt-like substance that smells faintly of coffee and disappointment.

So, when she gets to your manuscript (#451), it’s late in the day. Sure, she might read it and be cowed by your brilliance — “Holy crap, it’s not crap!” — but realistically, she can’t even see straight. She hates everything. She wants to punch the life out of baby animals. Her madness and anger have been honed. It is a machete one could use to strike down God and prune his limbs.

That agent’s on a hair trigger.

Once she gets to yours, she reads that first sentence and doesn’t like that one comma and blammo, she’s firing off a rejection letter. And before too long she’ll be out on the ledge firing off a high-powered rifle.

You don’t want that kind of guilt on your head, do you?

Evidently, Society Still Requires “Money” To Procure Goods And Services

Few writers make enough money to earn a so-called “living wage.”

What is a living wage, you ask? It’s an annual wage that allows you to not perish. It allows you to not freeze to death, or not live in a dumpster where your extremities are eaten by opossum, or not die of starvation under an underpass. I mean, let’s be clear: most writers earn less than your average hobo. A hobo, he might earn ten bucks an hour. Sure, it goes toward booze or toward his raging Magic: The Gathering habit, but still, it’s more than you get paid to be a wordmonkey.

Okay, yeah, I earn a living wage, but you know how hard I have to work? I have to write like, 10,000 words per day. Backwards. While I provide sexual favors to industry insiders with my left hand (the sinister hand is the only hand appropriate for the tasks I give it to perform, be assured).

Since society still demands that we pay it money — and not, say, wampum or words or sexy dances — then trust me, it is not worth it being a writer. A writer, you’re basically just a homeless troglodyte.

Your Soul Remains Uncrushed, Your Mind Is Intact, And Your Orifices Unviolated

First comes the ceaseless parade of rejection. (Probably because you’re just not that good, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t sting, right?) You’re punched in the pink parts over and over again. It’d be comical if it were happening to anybody else, but it’s not. It’s happening to you.

Then, should you have the good fortune of getting published, you are now going to be dragged through a house of possible horrors. Seriously, you should hear the horror stories.

“My contract requires me to tithe a cup of blood every Tuesday morning. A man in a dark hat and a wine-colored cardigan shows up at my door, gives me a plastic cup, and then I have to blood-let into the cup. I don’t know what this has to do with my book, but I think it has something to do with my soul.”

“I found a stipulation in my contract that, should they be able to prove that I used a Barnes & Noble restroom, they could force me to pay back my advance. Also, they stole my shoes.”

“I did not get to approve my own cover art, and for some reason the cover of my paranormal thriller features an orangutan peeing into his own mouth. At least he’s wearing a monocle.”

“I must’ve mis-read. Here I thought they owed me 17% royalty on every e-book sold. Actually, I owe them a 17% royalty on every e-book sold. Mea culpa. Time to pay the piper. Literally. They sent a piper to my house and his pan-pipes play a discordant tune that drives cats mad.”

“Someone spent my marketing budget on cake and whores.”

After all that’s said and done, you have to go through it again with your second book. Which probably nobody will publish. Because they hate you.

Because The Fucking Snooki Book, That’s Why

At first I was like, “Eh, so what, Snooki got a book. Blah blah blah. We’ve seen trash celebrity books for years. Publisher’s gotta eat. Who cares? It’s not the end of the world.”

No, no, it’s definitely the end of the world.

Snooki shouldn’t even be allowed outside and amongst the public without a handler. She’s like a shapeshifting gonorrhea monster. That girl has more brain in her hair than she does in her actual head. And yet I know talented writers who are struggling, but Snooki — some kind of orange monkey-goblin — gets paid enough money to buy a house full of solid gold tanning beds. And, her book is apparently tanking. And, the Today Show chose to put her on instead of a literary icon like Jane Yolen.

That’s what it is to be a writer these days.

Snooki, who is by all reports the equivalent to a drunken, self-aware slime mold, is way, way higher up on the food chain than Jane Yolen. And Jane Yolen is way, way higher up on the food chain than you. Think about that. Think about just how screwed that makes you. It’s like a crazy house. It’s like an asylum where they let that guy who paints leprechaun porn in his own waste run the joint. And there are you and Jane Yolen, holed up in Room 313, the only sane ones in the whole zip code while an army of Snooki Zombies (their book deals flailing in their rotten, epileptic grip) tries to kill you. Or have sex with you.

*shudder*

You don’t want to be a writer.

Turn back now. Save yourself.

While you still can.

January 19, 2011 / 58 Comments

What Makes For A Good Story?

Air Travel Is For Assholes

Next month, I’m thinking I might use this space to take the 40,000 feet view and leave the “writing” discussion behind for February — writing, after all, is really just a delivery system for storytelling. The pen scratching and the fingers tippity-tapping across the keyboard are merely a conveyance. We’re making the unreal real. Writing is a means to that end. The thing that’s bigger than writing is storytelling. (And the thing that’s bigger than storytelling is creating, but for me that enters “too vague” territory. I do not consider myself a “creator.” Unless maybe you mean in the godly sense, because on the page, I’m making mountains, I’m killing millions, I’m turning this chick into a swan and that dude into a spider. I am the Zeus of my own reclusive little story-worlds. It’s all thunderbolts and incest, baby.)

The reason storytelling is interesting is because it transcends medium. A good story is a good story no matter how you tell you it — whether you tell it in moving images, across comic panels, across emails or blog posts or tweets or even across the pages of an old-school novel, story is story. Writing isn’t writing in these cases: the actual writing of each mode is a whole different animal. The mechanism is separate.

But the goal is the same: to tell a good story.

And, to reiterate, a good story is a good story, no matter how it is told.

In fact, I hereby demand someone make me a t-shirt:

“I Give Good Story.”

Mmm. Sexy. Yeah. Nnnngh. Give me that story. Tell it to me, you little story slut.

Whoa, sorry, went a weird place there for a wee moment.

Anyway, my point is, if you understand story (and the telling of stories), then the only thing standing in your way is the method of conveyance. As writers and storytellers are increasingly called upon to shapeshift and don the skin-cloak of other media, it seems like it would behoove us to really get to the center of it. Break apart the breastbone and get right to the beating heart. This is especially true of those who are transmedia designers: I think the raw power of transmedia, where good storytelling nimbly leaps from rooftop to rooftop, isn’t put on display as often as I’d prefer. A lot of that gets lost and buried underneath the many-headed media approach, or it gets shouldered out by the “cool factor,” or watered down because it’s a lot of work and not all the moving parts are so clearly understood.

So for me, to get to the truth of that, we need to take a long hard look at story. Or Story, if you prefer to make things more important by capitalizing them. Huzzah, Capitalization.

Now, to you, I ask the question posited in the post title.

It’s a vague question.

Totally open-ended.

And I want it that way.

Throw open you brain doors and see what answer lurks in response to the question:

“What Makes For A Good Story?”

Brainstorm. Discuss. Talk to each other.

January 18, 2011 / 19 Comments

Hey, Writerface: Don’t Be A Dick (But Still Have Opinions)

Retirwepyt!

I have occasionally seen sentiment that suggests writers should be little church mice.

They should become little peeping cheeping baby birds who shouldn’t ruffle any feathers with talk of politics or religion or publishing or any of that for fear of losing a publishing deal or scaring off an agent or what-have-you. It becomes a game of tiptoe here, tiptoe there.

Don’t shake the bushes. Don’t stand up on the boat.

I call shenanigans on that.

Because that makes you boring. A boring writer is not a writer with a big audience.

Further, I think it makes you bored, as well. And a bored writer is… well, I dunno. Probably an alcoholic. Or a World of Warcraft addict.

Here, then, is a line in the sand. I have drawn it with my big toe.

Over here, this is where adults talk about adult subjects like (wait for it… waaaaait for it)… adults.

Over there, that’s where adults devolve into foul-breathed trolls and Internet douche-swabs.

Live on this side of the line, and you’re okay.

Cross over that side, and that’s where you turn into a raging dick-brain.

We are living in an increasingly connected world thanks to this sticky spider’s web called The Internet. I pluck my dewy thread over here, and you can feel it over there. That is — mostly — a good thing.

We are further living in a world where the audience is becoming as interested in the creator as they are the creator’s creations. This has always been true to a small extent: once you start reading an entire author’s catalog or going through a director’s stable of films, you start to grow curious about the man or woman behind the curtain. But now it’s becoming that new authors are working from their so-called buzzwordy bullshit “platforms,” and the audience is starting out interested in the author as much as the author’s works.

This is in a sense a little ridiculous: we want to be judged by our novels and films and placemats and vanity license plates, not by our online personas. And yet, we are. Reality is reality. No ignoring that.

This leads to that very simple Internet truism: don’t be a dick.

But, the fear of violating that law has lead some people to become fearful of being who they are, and fearful of having interesting or unusual opinions. I think it’s caused some degree of turtling in terms of worrying that what we say will somehow violate our chances of getting published or that it will decimate (in the truest sense of the word) our audience with one ill-made statement or sentiment.

And I think to some degree you have to get shut of that. You should be mindful of the shit you say, obviously. You, like every other adult out there, should have a pair of bouncers at your brain door ready to escort any unruly thoughts before they stumble drunkenly toward your mouth or fingers.

But don’t be afraid to have opinions.

Just offer them with respect and tact. And an interjection of humor and self-deprecation just to confirm that you’re not being some super-serious self-righteous blowhard.

And, when (not if) you inevitably cross the line in the sand from “The adults are talking” to “The dickwipes are howling and keening their gibbering dickery,” then back up, throw up your hands, and offer a fast mea culpa — just like you would do off-line.

Don’t hide from your own personality. Be who you are. Be the most awesome and interesting version of who you are. You are more than the sum total of your likes and dislikes of books and whiskey. You have controversial thoughts, hey, share them — provided you share them with tact, respect, and some ground given to the other side.

Do you have to be careful? Sure, of course. I’ve seen creators (be they writers, game designers, journalists, whoever) spout off and show the world their blow-hardy cranky-pants, and it turns me off. Most of the time I come back from the brink because I know I’ve done the same thing. Others, though, keep on keepin’ on, and they won’t stop beating their audience over the head with their opinions.

See, that’s the trick. It’s not the opinions that bothered me. It was the delivery of that opinion.

Remember: respect, tact, humor, self-deprecation.

And here, at terribleminds: a fuckbucket full of sweet, sweet profanity.

Have opinions.

Just don’t be a dick about it.

January 17, 2011 / 16 Comments

From Bile To Buttercream: How A Writer Makes Use Of Rejection

Writing Advice

You wanna be a writer? Then failure is not optional.

You know what? That feels like it needs some profanity.

Revision: “You wanna be a goddamn writer? Then failure is not fucking optional. Shitstain!”

Hm. I think the “shitstain” maybe went over the line. Cut it, and move on.

What I’m saying is —

If you are of the belief that everything you write is going to be a home run, that every ball you hit is going to pop the stadium lights and shower down magical sparks like in that Robert Redford baseball movie, then you are at best deluded, and at worst a dangerous psychotic who believes the cat is telling him to strangle the mailman.

You will write. You will submit. And you will be rejected.

Not once. But resoundingly over and over again. You’ll start to feel like you’re on a carousel ride, and on every go-around someone is punching you in the face instead of giving you cotton candy. The calliope music will be dizzying. The scent of funnel cake, cloying.

Rejection is a default state for the writer.

And so it falls to you to make use from it. Make hay from your failures. Build sculptures from your wreckage. Compost your garbage and let it grow new things.

In the past, I told you How Not To Deal With Rejection.

Now, it’s time to find truth in rejection. Time to find a way to make it useful, energizing, empowering.

Or, as the title says, time to churn bile into buttercream, baby.

“See This? This Is My Battle Scar. It’s In The Shape Of A Rejection Letter.”

See this table full of little green plastic Army men? Right. Let’s pretend a tactical nuclear missile tumbles out of the sky, belched forth from a North Korean rocket tube, and it takes out a good 3/4 of these toys.

*swipes them off the table with an angry arm*

We have now separated the Real Writers from the dilletantes.

I know, I know, it’s not popular to talk about “real” writers. But I’m going to do it anyway, because I’m just that kind of blue meanie. I’m not talking about hobbyists. I’m talking about the talkers. The dilettantes. The people you meet at a party and they tell you, “Oh, I’m a writer, too,” except no they are fucking not a writer, too, because they don’t know shit about shit and they write shit (if they write at all) and they wouldn’t know what being a writer is like if it snuck up behind them and shoved a typewriter up their ass.

Writers write. And writers submit.

And writers get rejected.

It is your battle scar.

Pull a sword from its scabbard and you can see if it’s the weapon of a well-coiffed, soft-handed officer type because the metal is unmarred. No nicks in that edge. No flecks of blood still nesting in the nooks and crannies. A real soldier — the dude out there getting muddy and bloody — his sword looks like hell. Like it’s cleaved skulls and pierced guts.

When you get rejected, it’s like I said in the past — that’s some Viking shit, right there. Sure, you got your ass handed to you, but you still stepped into the ring. You’re no coward. You’re no dilettante.

“Wait, So I’m Not Supposed To Submit My Manuscript On A Roll Of Previously-Used Toilet Paper? Are You Sure?”

I think a lot of writers do not possess the proper cognitive separation of The Manuscript and the Submission Of Said Manuscript. I know I felt that way once when I was a young buck, wet behind the ears and with a full-up diaper and other metaphors of youth and inexperience. I thought, “Well, my manuscript should sell itself. That, after all, is why I wrote it.”

Yes, but you’re ignoring reality just as I once did. The book in the bookstore doesn’t let the manuscript sell itself. It has back cover copy. It has lovely cover art. It has quotes from other writers. None of these things are contained within your manuscript but rather, outside of it. And so you must embrace that.

The submission process is beholden to rules. It is, as the name suggests, a process.

You must follow those rules or otherwise be outed as a special snowflake (translation: jerkoff). You may think it’s unfair. Sure, okay, but you did pass puberty, right? You’re an adult human being? Then by now you’ve surely shed any illusions that life operates by the playground laws of Fair and Unfair.

You’ve been rejected over and over again, it is maybe time to reexamine your method of submission. Does your query letter snap-crackle-pop? Have you selected the correct five pages or chapter to submit alongside of it (if that’s what they asked for)? Are you submitting to the wrong agents and editors?

Sometimes rejection is not a failure of your manuscript but rather, a failure of delivery.

“They Don’t Actually Hate Me Personally, Do They?”

Rejection demands a shift in perspective. When you go up to a woman at a bar and you say, “Hey, can I buy you a drink?” and she’s like, “Ew,” and then stabs you in the hand with a cocktail fork, you can be pretty sure that her rejection is a little bit personal. She doesn’t like your face, your shoes, your sour milk odor. Something about you personally made her all stabby-stabby.

This is not likely true of your submission’s rejection, however.

Understand that this is a purely subjective industry. It’s nothing personal. You maybe just haven’t found the right editor or agent yet. When I was submitting to agents, I found that some really loved what I was showing them, but I also had rejections like, “I’m just not feeling it.”

Nothing personal. They don’t hate you. Let that lessen the sting.

“Hand Me Some Duct Tape, A Hammer, And That Lemur! There’s Work To Do!”

A single rejection is not particularly useful. Whether it’s a form letter or a detailed analysis, you shouldn’t take it as anything indicative of your manuscript.

But get a bunch of those motherfuckers together and you start to see a picture emerge.

That picture might very well be: “Needs more work.”

And so that’s what you’ll do. This is a good sign. It means you need to slap on some to-the-elbow rubber gloves and get deep in the guts and the junk and the radioactive materials and the rhinoceros uterus and start rearranging parts and wiping away the crap and delivering a squealing rhino baby. Rhino baby? No, I don’t know. I think my metaphor got away from me there. Like a squirrelly gazelle, it leapt from my grip.

What I’m saying is, look at the big picture and decide: do I need to take this back to the drawing board?

Then do that. You have the power to make it more awesome. Especially if someone hands you specific criticisms. Criticism is a blessing in disguise, like a diamond ring in a pile of horse crap. Rescue the diamond. Use the criticism. Huzzah.

“Once More Into The Breach, Dear Friends!”

Rejection knocks you down.

So get your ass back up again. In fact, don’t just get up. Grab that adrenalin rush from the pain two-handed like you’re catching hold of a goddamn screaming bald eagle and let it launch you upward with a mighty shriek and as you land on your feet, start swinging.

Let rejection energize you, not enervate you.

As one project is out there drawing fire, take each rejection on the chin and as you get jacked up, keep writing. Write more. It’s not only a good way to use that energy, but it’s also a good way to remain distracted from the rejections. (This can backfire, too — as you get rejected, you might start feeling like you’re not worth more than a sippy cup full of gopher diarrhea. Man, my dog once rolled around in gopher diarrhea — it was greasy and shot through with half-digested berries. That took a long time to wash out of his shepherd’s coat, so trust me, you do not want to have to clean yourself of that feeling.)

In fact, it’s not just about writing more. It’s about submitting more. Fine. Editor X and Agent Z said “no.” Your ten submissions came back as “Sorry, nuh-uh.” Submit more. You’re not done. You’ve got other avenues. Keep on keeping on. It’s like that Tai Chi move where you redirect your opponent’s attack, using his energy against him. Or something. What the fuck do I look like, a Tai Chi master? Please. I have a writer’s body. I don’t flow like water, move like air. I flow like Nutella and move like a pregnant narwhal.

“Oh Yeah? Ohhh Yeeeaah? I’ll Write Something Even Better, And Then You Can Suck On That Lollipop, Publishing Industry! Boo-yah!”

Alternate version of the above lesson is, your rejections may teach you that this book just isn’t The One. It’s not going to be a bestseller. It’s not going to even make it to the bargain bin.

That’s a sad realization, but an important one.

And once more, it’s time to redirect that energy. It’s time to write a better book. It’s that easy. This one didn’t work, fine. Write a better one. All those successful authors on the shelves? That’s exactly what they did. “Oh, this one sort of sucks, so the next one must suck less.” And on and on until they don’t suck at all.

You have to know when to give up on the book and focus energy on the next one.

“Turns Out, I’m Not A Writer After All. Who Knew?”

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: not everybody who wants to be a writer can be a writer. The numbers aren’t just against you. They’re really, holy shit what the fuck was I thinking? against you.

There may come a point when you have a stack of rejections from multiple projects and they are all uniformly non-glimmering, non-shimmering, not happy rejections. Nobody has hinted at your potential, no letter says that it wants to see more from you in the future, no one offered any notes at all. The majority of your rejections say “FUCK NO” and are written in pigeon’s blood on a postcard.

You’ve had nothing published after repeated attempts across multiple projects.

Just as there comes a time to give up on one book to make way for a better one, there comes a time to give up on one career path to make way for a better one. This is not popular wisdom, of course. Popular wisdom dictates that we all follow our dreams endlessly — except, sometimes, our dreams are callous elves leading us down a path that dead-ends in a pocket of quicksand or a dragon’s crushing maw.

I’m not saying that’s you. I’m not saying to give up easily or even to give up at all. But I am saying that there comes a moment when you have to check your gut and say, “This really isn’t me.”

On the other hand, if you’re saying, “I don’t want that to be me,” then fine. Don’t let it be you. Writing is about failure. It’s about perseverance. But it’s also about improvement. It’s about learning your craft and using the corpses of your failed manuscripts as a stairway to publication. You want to give up on being a writer, I wouldn’t blame you. But if you don’t want to give up, if you want to get published, then you need to take the rejections you’ve earned and use them. Use them to give you energy. Use them to get better.

This is the writer’s thorny path.

January 12, 2011 / 25 Comments

Irregular Creatures: The Prognosis

In case you missed it (which, given my self-prostitution, means you must’ve been buried under a tornado-smacked barn), I went ahead and “officially” released my short story collection, IRREGULAR CREATURES, to the Amazon Kindle marketplace.

I say “officially” because it had been up there since Saturday.

And between Saturday and yesterday, I had zero sales. Not surprising, one supposes, but contained within is a critical lesson: your audience isn’t likely to stumble blindly upon your book. That is true whether it’s in a bookstore or on Amazon — yes, there exists the chance someone will trip on a rock and fall face-down upon it, but you sure can’t count on it. Bookstores are filled with thousands of books. Amazon multiplies that by a factor of… well, let’s just go with one of those imaginary numbers like Snarbgang or Fronk. (Coincidentally, also the name of my favorite Vaudeville comedy duo!) You want people to read it, you gotta lead them to it. Put up signs. And fireworks. And a Tijuana donkey show.

It wasn’t until I released the truth of the book’s existence into the wild that I netted the first sale — and the next, and the next after that.

Because you came calling. A stampede of awesome people.

First Up: My Thanks

So many of you rose to the call of “Please pimp my book” that I literally cannot thank each of you because if I tried to thank you individually, I would eventually die of some random old person disease.

At last count, I saw about 250 tweets of you fine feathered peeps shaking the reeds and shock-prodding other folks in the butt-pucker so they head on out and nab a copy of the e-book.

That is insane. Like, in the good way.

Never mind the many folks who pimped it on Facebook — Rick Carroll, Shawn Gaston, Keith Rawson, uber-agent Stacia Decker, and others. David Hill was the first reviewer on Amazon. James Melzer wrote a far-too-kind blog post exhorting people to go snatch up the collection. (Get it? Snatch? Because there’s a whole story about Thai pussy shows? Shut up. Don’t judge me.)

And again, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The blog post announcement, too, was heartily attended. I’m writing this post ahead of time, and even now that post has 1000+ looky-loos all by itself.

You kick ass, everyone of you.

(And hey, the shepherd-slash-prophet of self-publishing — Konrath His Own Self — swung by the site.)

Second Up: The Numbers

By middle of the day, the collection achieved profitability. My only cost going in was the cover art — I won’t tell you how much it cost because, well, I dunno. That’s not your business. *points to crotch*

But I will share with you the total numbers.

As of 9PM:

Amazon US sales: 86

Amazon UK sales: 7

PDF sales through this website: 15

Total sales: 108.

I make $2.07 per sale from Amazon, and $2.60 when purchased here (Paypal fees).

So, a genuinely profitable day, and this is only the first day.

Oh — Amazon sales pushed us up to #824.

Fact: Amazon’s sales ranking is determined by a parliament of insane robots. I began the day at #117,000, then one sale rocketed me up to #75,000 then another sale bumped me to #11,000. After that, I spent the day pinballing between #7,000-ish and #1,000-ish. It would sometimes do this even when I had not earned any new sales. Once, I earned sales, then dropped sales rank so fast, you’d think somebody kicked it out of a plane. Amazon sales rank is a cipher wrapped in a mystery enveloped in a slice of honey-glazed ham.

Mmmm. Ham.

Third Up: My Feelings On The Subject

I feel like a princess.

*pinches nipples, flings tiara skyward, does a pirouette*

Wait, no, that’s a whole different post for a whole different website.

I am cautiously optimistic. I mean, you can really look at this three ways:

Optimistic: Hey, holy shit, awesome. Better than expected. It’s just a dumb short story collection and I’m just some dipshit squawking and spitting into the void, so even if I never got a single other sale, I made enough money to go out and eat a kick-ass dinner. My writing is feeding me. Nobody owns my soul (except all those other people who own my soul — oh, and the Devil). Fucking-A. I rule. Everybody else drools. To celebrate, I will conquer some bacon with my gastrointestinal fluids.

Realistic: It was a good day. It remains to be seen if there’s really going to be a long tail, though. Those who bought today were likely the faithful, so how will the book find an audience otherwise? The author can only do so much. If word of mouth doesn’t carry it, the spark doesn’t catch anything aflame and — sizzle, fizzle, hiss. This is a 45,000 word product. Were I to have earned even a meager per-word on getting those stories published (say, two cents a word), I’d be up $900. And as yet, I’m not really close to that. But the long tail might be there. If I work it good and work it hard (nnngh), I might see that return yet. One lesson to learn: blog views are free, retweets are free, clicks are easy-peasy, but all those things do not automatically translate into a purchase — and that’s a-okay. It isn’t all about the immediate sale.

Pessimistic: Fuck off, fuck-badger. Loser. Loo-hoo-hooo-oooooooser. That old-ass knight from the end of that Indiana Jones movie is saying, right now, “He chose… poorly.” And he’s saying it about you, douchewipe. That thing was 45,000 words. You usually get a pretty good per-word, so realistically, that thing is worth at least $1800. You really think it’s going to make you almost two grand? Mm-humm. Sure. Sure. And my mother was Batman. See what I did there? Because my mother is not Batman. Herp. And derp. Dummy. Now those stories can’t win awards, they won’t be in print, and nobody cares because they’re self-published namby-pamby poo-poo pee-pee wee-wee nonsense.

But again, I’m somewhere in the middle. Closer to optimistic. I’m happy about the day’s sales.

And it’s not like it’s gone. You can still buy it.

No, really: You Can Still Buy It.

Fourth: What Now?

Well, in part, I shut up about it. I have other things to work on and other stuff to talk about. And the last thing I want to do is become a shill for my own book, a constantly-jabbering parrot: “Buy my crap! Buy my crap! KRAAAWWK! Buy my crap! Flying cats! Bangkok vagina! Buy my crap!”

Some of it will fall to you. You like it? Then please: spread the love. I’m hearing some good reports from people who have read the first story (“Dog-Man And Cat-Bird, A Flying Cat Story”), and that’s awesome. Tell others. Leave reviews on Amazon (even if you bought only the PDF). Don’t need to go overboard or out of your way, but if you’d be so kind as to occasionally pimp it, I would love you forever.

But some of it falls to me, too. If anybody needs a review copy, let me know. I can help make that happen. I’ll also be soliciting some interviews and what-not about the process, but feel free to ping me if you’d be into hearing a bit about this whole process.

Plus, if you have any other ideas for getting it “out there,” my ears are open. They’re full of wax and earwigs, sure, but by golly, they are open.

And that’s it for now, peeps.

Thanks again.

Keep them cats a-flying.

January 11, 2011 / 46 Comments

I Give Thee: “Irregular Creatures”

Irregular Creatures: Kindle Short Story Collection, Chuck Wendig

And so it is done.

Up on Amazon’s Kindle marketplace: my first short story collection, IRREGULAR CREATURES.

Click here to purchase.

And, in fact, if you’d be so kind, I’d love it if you purchased it today. Just to see if I can’t get a rush of sales. A caffeine-sugar spike of greedy eyes hungry to gander at my gibberish.

Still, you might be on the fence. You might be saying, “Ehhhh, ennnnh, nnnmmmgh, I just don’t know.”

Could be that you need a little convincing.

I can do that. Here, then, are five reasons to buy my short story collection, IRREGULAR CREATURES. Choose one or several reasons. Collect ’em, trade ’em with your friends.

1. Because Hey, Look, That Chuck Wendig Guy Is Writing Crazy Shit Again

Contained within this short story collection you will find:

Flying cats, Bigfoot, mermaids, demons, zombies, a giant chicken, a vaginally-capable Thai dancer, candy bar aliens, an incarcerated mentalist, and one mystic hobo hermaphrodite.

These are all irregular creatures. Just as I, the writer, am an irregular creature. In fact, I’d say all writers are sort of that — we’re a little goofed-up at the margins, us author-types. I dig that.

These irregular creatures are bound up in nine short stories totaling about 45,000 words. Hell, one of those stories — Dog-Man and Cat-Bird (A Flying Cat Story) — is a big ol’ 14,000 word fun-fest.

The collection is equal parts horror and humor, equal parts fantasy and sci-fi, equal parts sadness, weirdness, absurdity, and hilarity. Some of it is family friendly. Some of it is soaked in blood. You”ll find tales of Bangkok pussy shows, bizarre auctions in the middle of Amish country, soul-switching, and wars between heaven and hell (as fought by cats).

It contains many bad words.

It contains lots of weird ideas.

It contains a host of (I hope) engaging characters.

Click here to purchase.

2. Because This Is The Last Five Years Of My Writing Life

I’m a sucker for authorial point-of-view; I love the “auteur” theory of writing and writers. I like that certain writers carry — often unconsciously — certain themes and motifs through their work. It’s a little bit obsessive, a whole lot unconscious, and maybe a tiny bit batshit crazy. Looking back over these short stories (which comprise the writing years of 2005-2009), I did not realize how these all pieced together. They do. They’re clearly my work — while I think I’ve definitely developed as a storyteller since then, I still see a lot in these stories I like. They are bound together by common ideas and shared themes.

Hopefully that’s the same for you. But you’ll need to buy it to see what I’m saying.

Click here to purchase.

3. Because, I Mean, Pshhh, Three Bucks, C’mon

You can’t buy jack shit for three bucks. Fast food meal? Hardly. Action figure? Nope. Handjob from a hobo with callused hands? Not the last time I checked, no. (And I check often.)

I’m offering you hours of entertainment for three bucks. You go buy Chinese food from the mall, it’s going to cost you twice that and it’ll be gone in a half-hour. Of course, it’ll come back about three hours later (remember, you don’t own food court food, you just rent it for a little while and then you return it back to the water supply like that kid with that killer whale in that movie with the kid and the killer whale).

Irregular Creatures will last a lot longer than that.

Plus: no diarrhea.

In this day and age, that has to be a selling point. Especially given the quality of some of the stuff you might buy on the Kindle marketplace. Am I right? Am I right? I’m totally right.

Click here to purchase.

4. Because You Believe Self-Publishing Is The Future

Forget that shit Whitney Houston sang about — you mayhaps believe that self-publishing is the future. Hell with the children. Are children going to provide you with cheap and easy literary entertainment? Can you download children to a hand-held device? Can you turn children off and on? I think not.

See, I’m on the fence about self-pub. This is an experiment for me to test its viability. You want to confirm that it’s viable? You want to see more self-published work, not less? I’m going to be publishing my results, after all — if the results are good, I’ll say so. Do you want me to proselytize the power of self-pubbing?

Then pony up, wordmonkeys! Money where your mouth is. Boom. Yeah. Nnngggh.

Click here to purchase.

5. Because You Really Love Terribleminds

(Warning: Guilt alert! Guilt alert! Awooga! Awoooga!)

You’ll note that I blog here every day. I do so for free despite it costing me for the theme, for hosting, for the domain, for the hookers, for the meth lab, for all of that. It takes me a lot of time.

And I do it all for you. (It has nothing to do with my ego. Shut up! Shush!)

I’ve had folks contact me and tell me they wanted to donate. I tell them, “Nope.” Some writers ask for donations. I’m not one of them. No harm no foul on those that do, but I figure — hey, this blog is here to keep me disciplined and to put myself out there for you crazy cats and kittens. I say “No donations, but once I have something to sell, please support me and this website by buying it.”

And thus, the guilt. Here I am, offering you a product. And I have big wide doe eyes blinking at you — blink, blink — and at the bottom of those doe eyes is a shimmering pool where my tears are starting to form. You like this site? Been enjoying its free content for ten years? Want to help throw a little money my way to help support the child that is one day soon going to spring forth into this household? Want to help support my “chocolate milkshake and Burmese heroin” diet? Here’s your chance, superstar.

Two words: IRREGULAR CREATURES.

Click here to purchase.

Only On The Kindle Machine?

You may be asking, “Is this only available on Das Kindlemaschine?”

To which I respond, yes, for the foreseeable future. I’m interested in keeping this experiment fairly well contained. Besides, Amazon offers a pretty robust marketplace, distribution network, and chunk of the pie.

What If I Do Not Possess A Magic Kindle Device?

You did know that Kindle offers a mighty host of Free Kindle-Reading Apps, right?

But that’s okay. Maybe you have a Nook or something.

So, I’ll offer you this:

I will send you a PDF if you give me the $2.99 via PayPal.

Contact me through this site, and I’ll get you squared away with the PDF.

The PDF should work in iBooks, on the Nook, or across various other apps or devices. Plus, if you’re morally Amazon-averse, hey, here’s your way to get the collection.

But Wait! I Want To Do More!

That’s awesome, because as it turns out, I need you to do more.

If this experiment is going to succeed, I could use your help in other ways.

First, spread the word. Get on the Twittertubes, the Faceyjournals, the Clown Sex Forums, and spread the love far and wide. “Hey,” you might say, “I found this really awesome collection of stories called IRREGULAR CREATURES and it gave me a word-boner. And I’m a lady! It gave me a lady word-boner. You should go buy it, or I will hate you forever.”

You may need to compress that into 140 characters, to which I offer:

Hy I fnd ths rlly awe coll of stor IRRGLR CRTRS gve me wrd-bner Im lady gve me ldy wrd-bnr u shld buy or I h8 you 4eva http://amzn.to/e6JeQy

Also, I would love it if you went to Amazon and gave it a review.

Now, you might be asking, “But what if I hated it?”

Uhhh. Well. On the one hand, I encourage honesty, on the other, I’ll merely remind you what your mother told you: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

And then she whipped you with a metal coat hanger. Just a reminder of that.

Alternately, if you don’t want to do these things, then I’m just happy that you bought the book.

In A Perfect World, You’ll Buy This Today

I’d love to see a crazy spike of sales today. Hell, wouldn’t it be cool to get into the Top 100 Kindle books for just one shimmering moment? No, it probably won’t happen, but my father always said to “aim high.” I mean, sure, he was just exhorting me to account for distance and wind speed when I was to shoot a zombie in the melon, but I like to think of the advice as one big metaphor for my hopes and dreams.

I Will Report Back From The Wilderness

As promised, I will periodically send missives back from the Self-Publishing Front with my data rolled into a leather tube and staple-gunned to the back of a donkey. A donkey with firecrackers in its ass to ensure it picks up the pace and is not eaten by a lazy puma.

I don’t know how often I’ll report data — I guess as often as necessary.

Bee Tee Dubs: “Thank You”

If you purchase it, thank you.

If you write a nice review or spread the word, thank you.

If you love terribleminds, thank you for that, as well.

If you don’t buy my short story collection, I’ll kill a unicorn in front of a little girl.

Thanks again, tmeeps.

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