{"id":23735,"date":"2014-06-18T20:46:48","date_gmt":"2014-06-19T00:46:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=23735"},"modified":"2014-06-18T20:46:48","modified_gmt":"2014-06-19T00:46:48","slug":"kieran-shea-five-things-i-learned-writing-koko-takes-a-holiday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2014\/06\/18\/kieran-shea-five-things-i-learned-writing-koko-takes-a-holiday\/","title":{"rendered":"Kieran Shea: Five Things I Learned Writing Koko Takes A Holiday"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Five hundred years from now, ex-corporate mercenary Koko Martstellar is swaggering through an early retirement as a brothel owner on The Sixty Islands, a manufactured tropical resort archipelago known for hedonistic indulgences and simulated violence. Surrounded by slang-drooling boywhores and synthetic komodo dragons, the most challenging part of Koko\u2019s day is deciding on her next drink. That is, until her old comrade Portia Delacompte sends a squad of security personnel to murder her.<\/em><\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

1. Save<\/h2>\n

Save. Save everything<\/em>. Your notes, the sauce-stained napkins on which you wrote down dialogue at 2 in the morning in the back of a cab, your early drafts, and so on until the ARC or the final published book is in your sweaty, blissed-out hands. Trust me, you do not want to know what twenty-seven thousand words obliterated by a crashed hard drive feels like so get organized. Lock it down, back it up, and be a grownup for Pete\u2019s sake. Don\u2019t wait until you\u2019re at 2,500 feet in 115 mph free fall to check your chute.<\/p>\n

2. Enjoy Yourself<\/h2>\n

There are vast, the-end-of-Raisers-of-the-Lost-Ark<\/em> warehouses crammed with books that will never see the light of day. Despite whatever honors you\u2019ve achieved or whatever others may think of your talents, your novel might end up being one of those books. To paraphrase Saint Ben and Saint Jerry\u2026if you\u2019re not having any fun writing then why write it at all? Writing is lonely, isolated work with long-odd payoffs. Get comfortable with masochism and learn to enjoy it.<\/p>\n

3. Please Say Something Impressive<\/h2>\n

Remember that book you dragged your eyeballs through several years back? Yeah, the one that didn\u2019t say sweet jack-all about anything relative to the human experience? Don\u2019t do that.<\/p>\n

You have a bone to pick? Pick it. You can\u2019t stand a particular injustice or bigotry? Get it off your chest. Wrap up your issues in metaphor and verbal pyrotechnics and take those bastards to the woodshed. You might only get one shot at this, so don\u2019t forget to go for the kill shot. Drive your message straight through their still beating hearts.<\/p>\n

4. Trust Your Reader<\/h2>\n

Reading requires some level of functional intelligence so have faith in your reader. If the story makes sense to you then guess what? In all likelihood it should make sense to them.<\/p>\n

Unless, of course, you\u2019re insane and then all bets are off.<\/p>\n

5. Fear Is Your Friend<\/h2>\n

Don\u2019t take the easy way out. Be brave and write in ways you think are beyond you. Push yourself until the words break and then push yourself some more. <\/strong><\/p>\n

To put it another way, the dancehall is on fire and the doors are locked. You can either die screaming in a full-on panic or you can grab the pretty girl by the hand and kick out the door.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Bricoleur, ex-professional chef, and former ad man, Kieran Shea\u2019s fiction has appeared in dozens of venues including Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Dogmatika, Word Riot, Plots with Guns…as well as in several notable anthologies. He\u2019s been nominated for the Story South\u2019s Million Writers Award twice and divides his time between Annapolis, Maryland and Cape May County, New Jersey.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Kieran Shea: Website<\/span><\/a> | Twitter<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Koko Takes A Holiday: Amazon<\/span><\/a> | B&N<\/span><\/a> | Indiebound<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Five hundred years from now, ex-corporate mercenary Koko Martstellar is swaggering through an early retirement as a brothel owner on The Sixty Islands, a manufactured tropical resort archipelago known for hedonistic indulgences and simulated violence. Surrounded by slang-drooling boywhores and synthetic komodo dragons, the most challenging part of Koko\u2019s day is deciding on her next […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-23735","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-theramble","8":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-6aP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23735"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23735\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23741,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23735\/revisions\/23741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}