Category Archives: Personal

Do you entertain?

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Had a long phone call with a friend and fellow writer yesterday. Such things tend to ramble, and that’s good. We’re both writers, so mostly we talk craft and business. And music, because she’s a musician. And other things. (The wife accuses this redneck of being a renaissance man.)

Not entirely random, but getting there.

From a literary interest standpoint, we’re just about as far apart as two people can get. She makes it a point to read all of the Hugo and Nebula nominees. Is currently in a book club where that’s what they do. I honestly couldn’t tell you any such titles except when they capture the cultural zeitgeist and end up redefining some genre.

For example, William Gibson didn’t invent cyberpunk (and he’ll point you at the folks who did). JK Rowling didn’t invent Magic Academies. However, both of them pretty must established those two genres for everyone else coming along.

At the same time, one of the reasons I don’t follow those things is that I’ve seen the sausage being made. Hugos in the past were awarded as a result of about 1000-1200 voters who had signed up for that year’s WorldCon. Half a decade ago, a group of fascists figured out how they could stuff the ballots and other shenanigans. It blew up in their faces spectacularly, and I’m happy.

At the same time, it just shows that such awards are popularity contests within a small cluster of self-described experts. Nothing at all to do with the quality of the books themselves.

In the broader realm of science fiction, I run into the same problem. More than once I’ve sat down and tried to read one of the “Best of XXXX Year” or “Year’s Best…” etc short story collections put out by THOSE PEOPLE. Honestly, the Silmarillion is an easier read. And usually makes more sense.

Science fiction (and maybe other genres, but I’m not sure) has had a problem in the past of wanting to explore really cool ideas. And rewarding those really cool ideas. And hardly ever once stopping to actually ask “yes, but is the story any good?”.

Many of them are a cute idea. Fun character concept. Maybe an amazing setting. Possibly a problem that needs to be addressed. Many of those “grand important literary stories” we’re supposed to be impressed by manage one of the three. But only one. Those Best Of collections are just one right after another.

As a writer, I work the seven point plot structure most of the time. Character, Setting, AND Problem. My story fails in my eyes if I miss on even one of those. Which is probably why I’ll never win one of those big awards.

I’m here to entertain you. She and I compared my stuff to some of what she was reading. Those all had socio-political statements to make. And only maybe actually tell a story. Right now, they were wading through a whole swamp of Neo-Confederate anti-colonial slave/rape/pain stories, told from the standpoint of the people being abused.

Good. Science fiction is all about the “What If?” element of story telling. Those topics should be explored, especially by folks at the short end of the stick vis-a-vis Modern American Culture. I’m about as upper-middle-class, pasty white, cis-presenting, not-currently-bearded, science fiction writer as you can get. I can talk about those kinds of characters, but I haven’t ever lived that.

I’ve never been pulled over or stopped on the sidewalk by a cop because of my color, race, gender, or anything else. And SF lets you thinly veil such things in a way that you can talk about them and explore them. And talk about normative results.

What should be, rather than what is.

However—and this is a big however—they still need to be interesting. Entertaining. She talked about plodding through them, because the writers had a fantastically detailed and interesting setting to explore. But maybe cardboard cutout archetypes chewing scenery. And the problem was the exact same one that she’d just waded through in the previous half-dozen stories.

So I offered her some of my approaches. (Masterminding, but she’s more of a young writer taking all her amazing expertise in other art-as-profession lives and turning them to the written word now than a true peer. Today. That will change.)

My wife, the Fabulous Publisher Babe™ didn’t really understand my writing style until I made her watch The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension. There is a scene were aliens have attacked. Two minor characters go down to the lab to look around. One is an old salt. The other is the new kid who is our pseudo-narrator, named New Jersey. (Just watch it if you haven’t seen it.)

New Jersey asks why is there a watermelon in an industrial press. Reno starts to explain, thinks about it for a second, waves it off. “I’ll explain later.”

And never does. For decades, that has been a thread that you can tug at and never solve. (The director had his reasons, and they make perfect sense, but it has nothing to do with the film.)

I write complex characters who are good/excellent at one thing that tends to define them at the top of book one. At the same time, they have flaws that come up later. Holes that can be exploited. Gaps where they need a friend to step in and handle things.

Valentinian is a card sharp who’s pretty good with a blaster. (Modeled loosely on Han Solo.) But over the course of the series, he realized just how much more dangerous the rest of his newly acquired crew/family is, and how he doesn’t have to be the heavy anymore. And he smiles, because Kyriaki and Dave are just deadly. Let them handle it.

Are your characters interesting? Are they the sort of person you might have over for a beer or coffee, and just chat? Or are they two-dimensional cutouts? What are their hobbies when they aren’t doing? What keeps them up at night?

In a similar vein, how different is your setting? How many other people have done the exact same thing in the last year or so. What makes yours unique? What makes it interesting?

If you haven’t gone that extra step, likely it won’t be anything more than ‘Oh, I’ve seen this story a hundred times before’ when the reader hits it. And then their eyes kind of glaze over and they maybe just skip on to the end of the story and agree that they guessed how it would turn out.

Have you made them think? Have you entertained them?

Or have you just filled a few pages with an interesting idea that maybe gets nominated for some award and forgotten after that? Those nominations can be useful, but I hate to tell you how many writers I know who turn out the pretty words and interesting concept stories, then go back to their day job at the call center or the mall.

If you haven’t impressed and entertained the reader, they won’t end your story and flip over to see what else you have written that they might buy.

The WHOLE POINT of being in anthologies with your short stories is to hook someone, so that they go buy the rest of your catalog. That is, if you want to make writing your profession. (See “Do you want to be Famous or Rich?”)

Famous writers win awards. A few get book deals. A fewer of those get movie/tv deals. Most of them make less than $10,000USD/year. And generally WAY less. Not enough to live on in this country by a country mile.

You either have a job and write in your spare time, or have a supportive spouse who pays all the bills so that you can write.

Circling back, my friend reads those award-nominated stories, but finds her ass dragging after a while. Especially when they hit the same Problem or same Setting several times in a row, none of which took the extra step to entertain.

And I can hear a few folks explaining to me that I don’t understand literature. No, I do. But my stories are entertaining first and foremost. The political, moral, and ethical questions are buried down a layer and you absorb them in the process of racing to the end of the book because you can’t put it down.

And you can’t. I’ll hook you. My craft is good enough. Because first and foremost, I want your money. After I get that cash, then I will make you think. You might not even realize it, because my characters talk about these problems, and deal with them, without my heavy-handed moralizing like a dead, lead hand on your bum, shoving you into the sausage maker.

Put simply (as noted above): Do you entertain?

Are your stories such that readers will put this anthology down when they finish your story and go look up EVERYTHING ELSE YOU’VE EVER DONE with credit card in hand?

We call that Walking the Catalog when you see book one followed by two, three, four, etc, over a course of a few days. Means I’ve hooked a new reader. I have several hundred titles that they can buy. And I put out more every month, so that they can come back time and again.

Because I entertain my readers. And challenge their legal, moral, and ethical  standpoints with my characters. You may disagree with me, but you will have to think. I’m going to challenge you, but first, I’m going to grab you by the lapels and drag your ass to the bottom of the lake and hold you there with my story.

Are you doing that to your readers?

The Secret Handshake

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I get asked certain questions by young writers occasionally. They take different forms, but all come back down to a shorthand Fabulous Publisher Babe™ and I call “The Secret Handshake.”

That’s where someone is just simply convinced that there is some mystical bit of knowledge about the craft of writing that they can learn, that will suddenly make them successful and rich. I dunno about the rich part, but I’ve been successful enough that writing and publishing is my full time job these days. I don’t have an income from teaching. Nor editing. The stuff I publish for others (Blaze Ward Presents or Boundary Shock Quarterly) don’t make me much money, but both are labors of love anyway.

But they have gotten it in their heads that there is a Secret Handshake. That once they learn said handshake, they will be in the big time. I suppose that they generally get the idea from the grifters who want to sell you on some gimmick. There are a lot of those, if you pay attention and have been around long enough.

Usually, they take the form of some expensive workshop you can take, wherein some self-proclaimed guru will teach you the secret that he exploited to become famous. However, if you pay attention, you’ll note that he’s not exploiting it anymore. Usually because it doesn’t work as well as it once did. Might not work at all.

But he’ll still offer to teach you for a few hundred (or thousand) bucks. Sound familiar?

Fads come and go, and the grifters that rise with them vanish with them a few years later. All of them rely on the belief that there is some magic Secret Handshake™ that can make you rich. And then about four years later, you ask “Whatever happened to…?”

These young writers don’t ever want to hear it from my lips, when I tell them what the real Secret Handshake is.

You ready?

Persistence. Dedication. Discipline. Demand.

If you want to be famous, I can’t help you, because I’m not famous and have no idea how to get there. There are only a handful of places in the world where you might walk into a bookstore and see one of my titles on the shelf. And that’s more blind luck than anything.

I am, however doing well enough that I don’t need a day job. I don’t need a supportive spouse paying all the bills while I pursue my dream of being a writer. I don’t teach classes or offer expensive workshops. I don’t edit for cash in my spare time.

I write.

Persistence. Keep writing. You don’t have to write every day. You do have to think about writing every day of the week and commit to writing on most of them. Even 100 words adds up quickly enough.

I used to write every single day, then take a day or two off at the end of the month when I hit my word count. Then I got into a Tai Chi class Saturday mornings in the park. Frequently, I don’t do any writing on Saturdays now. What I do during the rest of the week is make up for that day off. Instead of averaging four thousand words per day, I tend to aim for five when I can, so that skipping a day just means I stay on my monthly target of 116,667+ words.

Dedication. Writing comes first. I don’t watch shows. I don’t have other businesses taking up my time. I don’t play games. I write. That is my gig. That is first on my list of priorities. Everything else is second.

I’ll ask you point blank: Where do you spend your hours each week? I write 3-5 hours, six days per week. I also edit in the evenings frequently for a few hours. I am dedicated to the writing, to the point that everything else must take second place.

Discipline. I get up, shower, (sometimes feed the cat depending on the day,) feed myself, fix coffee, check the news and the comics, then I’m writing. Usually if I wake up at 630, I’m writing by 800. And I intend to write until noon or four (five) thousand words, whichever comes first.

Writing is a muscle. I have trained that muscle to marathon, day over day. Others can barely jog to the end of the block and back, but we all start somewhere. The key is the discipline to do it even on days when the words are hard. Or the brain is kinda mushy. Or I feel yucky. Only true illness where the brain is hollow do I give myself a day off. Then I make it up later.

But I also hit my monthly word target and stop. Boom. Middle of a chapter. Maybe the middle of a paragraph, depending. Because I know I’ll pick it up tomorrow and go.

Demand. I want this more than you do. That’s evidenced by my work ethic. I’m not cleaning my neighbor’s refrigerator instead of writing. I’m not spending hours down the rabbit hole of tvtropes.org instead of creating words. I’m not making excuses for not writing.

Research is useful, but are you using it as an excuse NOT to write? If you don’t want to write, why are you trying? If you don’t want to be a writer, why do you torture yourself into writing? Why aren’t you doing something you like?

I want to be a writer, more than any other topic. I enjoy it. I thrive at it. I get paid to make shit up for a living.

What do you want most? And be honest, with yourself as well as with me.

What do you want most?

If it is to be a writer, then write. Stop making excuses for not writing. Stop prioritizing anything else ahead of your words, and write.

I can’t help you be successful with a blank piece of paper.

Further, once you write it, go learn Heinlein’s Rules for (Traditional Publishing) Writing and adapt them to your own life.

Step one: write. You take it from there.

The Secret Handshake is a gimmick to get you to buy their book or take their seminar. You haven’t failed because you did those things and weren’t successful. They aren’t successful at that gimmick these days, either, or they’d have no time to actually teach seminars all over the world because they’d be so busy making money.

The Secret Handshake, I’m sorry, is hard work. And luck.

Not all my books work. Not every novel I publish makes a lot of money. However, when I hook a new fan, they have a whole catalog of things they can go read, so now I can slowly get them to give me hundreds of dollars each. And do it legitimately, which is even better, because I am entertaining them.

And they come back month over month, because I am publishing something new. In my case usually a novel. Sometimes two.

You should start by jogging to the end of the block and back, before deciding to run to Halifax. Write a whole set of short stories, just so you learn how to write. Publish them month over month, so the advertising robots and your fans learn to look for new work from you.

Work your way up from three thousand words per month (100/day) to 120,000. If you count a novel as 40,000+ words, then you van get to where you are generating at least one novel PER MONTH. And as you speed up, they can get longer. Some of mine are 45,000. Some 65,000. Some 100,000. (I even had one at 160,000 to publish one of these days.)

Write. Only rework it to fix errors your First Reader and Copy Editor find, rather than spending YEARS revising and writing the same novel over and over again. That’s like walking to Cleveland six times, instead of ever seeing Seattle instead.

Write. That’s the Secret Handshake. Make it a lifestyle, instead of an aspiration. Make it a hobby that takes precedence over all the other hobbies. With Persistence, Dedication, Discipline, and Demand, you can turn it into the greatest job you’ll ever have.

But you have to want it more than anybody else does.

And get over the idea that some Secret Handshake will save you.

Get In, Sit Down, Shut Up, and Hang On…

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Got to go run errands with a buddy of mine the other day. He’s a martial artist student who has been committed for more than forty years. Senior kind of guy now. Stubborn. Hard-headed, even. Catches hell from others occasionally because the form of art he does (Karate) is hard on the body. Wears you down. Breaks things over time. Makes folks want to relax and take it easy some days.
Personally, I’ve started working on a much softer form of Tai Chi, but that’s because he and I are both 52 now (birthdays about 2 months apart, but he’s the old fart). My goal over the next 30-40 years is flexibility and mobility. To be able to walk easily and even bend over and tie my own shoes standing when I’m finally an old man (no comments, you in back).
He and I come from radically different backgrounds. About as far apart as two white guys can get, socially, economically, educationally, etc.
What bonds us is the work ethic.
A conversation with some artist friends Wednesday night brought that into sharp contrast, just before he and I went running into town Thursday.
I catch hell from any number of writers because I produce a lot of words. I got lucky in any number of ways, and was able to transition to writing as a full-time career. At the same time, that had been my goal on Day One (Nov 1, 2013, for those of you keeping score at home).
Hard work can overcome a lot of things. The easiest way to write a lot of words is to sit your ass down and actually write them.
At that point, writing is a muscle. You do not run a marathon on your first day. You run as far as you comfortably can, then slowly push yourself a little farther.
As my buddy notes, he’s not the prettiest at his kata. Nor the strongest, toughest, tallest, or smartest person, even in his small group of folks. Where he defeats them all is in his own work ethic.
“Nobody will outwork me today!” is the motto I probably need to have his wife paint on the wall of his home dojo.
You cannot control much. Your attitude, however, is first and foremost.
I get up in the morning and I get to go write. I don’t ‘have’ to go write to make my work count. If anything, I have to plan which words and make them count, because I am currently only allowed 118,000 words per month. (I could easily push to 150,000, and still be behind a number of folks I know who make me look like a slacker.)
I have the right attitude. I get to go write.
He gets up and gets to go out into his dojo and work. He and I have both been blessed to be able to do something we love. And neither of us will be outhustled at it. I will write. On any given day, my goal is 4,000 words. My target it Pulp Speed Three, or 116,667 words. Any given month, when I hit that mark, I write to the end of the scene, or the chapter, or some useful break, and walk away. For longer months, I get 1-2 days off every time towards the end.
Now, flip that sideways, because I have started doing Taiji Juan CPL99 in the park every Saturday morning. That means that many Saturdays I might not write at all. Instead, I pushed my weekday speed up enough that I’m either far enough ahead that I can goof Saturday off, or close enough that I can catch up on Sunday. Right this moment, I started about 1500 words from being on pace for the month, even though I didn’t do any writing yesterday. This will get me to a certain distance out, and I’ll close the gap Monday and be good.
Because I work that hard. Because I want it that much that I’m willing to make sacrifices.
In my case, The Sacrifice is television. (Streaming, whatever. You, passively staring at a screen, consuming visual stories produced by somebody else, with your brain turned off.)
How many hours do you spend watching your shows every day? Every week? I can easily produce one thousand words in that same hour. And that’s a slow pace. I have trained myself these days that I can generate two thousand words per hour easily. Did that all week while tracking it, just so I knew.
You will not outwork me, because I understand that hours at the keyboard yields words I can sell so that I don’t ever have to go back to work for someone else.
You will not outwork him when it comes time to run, lift, practice, or strike things. He has come to define himself by that work ethic. By that getting up early in order to do all these things before work.
While you sleep, he trains and I write. We both understand that there are other things we could do, but we both get to do that thing we love because we have put it first.
When people complain about my writing speed, I ask them about their priorities. If you aren’t writing, you aren’t a writer. If you are writing, you are. Simple as that.
What are you doing with your time instead of committing words to paper or training in kata?
What defines you? That’s those hours spent doing something that you have chosen for yourself. I know a lot of people who make all manner of rationalizations for why they can’t write. Or why they can’t finish a story and publish it.
That’s what those are. Excuses. He gets up on a cold morning and steps into a cold garage that he warms with his own sweat. My allergies right now are such that I maybe got about 3 hours of sleep last night, but I buckled down with coffee and a little sugar today, and set my mind to telling story. Even though I could have just as easily taken today off and told myself I would catch up later.
I don’t want to catch up later. I want to be pushing the envelope every day. Faster, farther, heavier, higher.
He will outwork you in the dojo. That’s what he does. I will outwork you on the keyboard. That’s what I do.
That’s what makes each of us who and what we are. And why we get along so well. That’s the bar he and I are competing against every single day. I don’t even pay attention to everyone else and where they are in their struggles, because I’m competing with who I was yesterday, and that son of a bitch busted his ass in order to push the novel a little closer to done, while spending time worldbuilding a whole new place he wanted to explore in his spare time.
He could do that because he’s not catching up. I’m trying to get tomorrow-me to a place where he appreciates what today-me did.
Faster, farther, heavier, higher.
I don’t judge you on your word count. Or the prettiness. Or the awards. Or the income or lack thereof.
I judge you entirely on your work ethic, and you don’t get to complain about mine until yours matches it.
Or, as we say in this business: get in, sit down, shut up, and hang on.

T.I.L.

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“T.I.L.”

Internet shorthand for “Today I Learned.” I typed it the other day, sharing something nifty that had come across my social media feed that I didn’t know before.

Then it hit me. I’m not unique in actively learning new things, but many folks out there don’t seem to ever learn anything. Fabulous Publisher Babe™ refers to those people at “The Stodgies” in a somewhat derisive manner.

For most folks, they seemed to peak in their early teens. Locked in. We’ve talked previously about how the world gets fixed from the time you turn thirteen until you hit about twenty-four. From there, you listen to the same music. Eat the same general food. Wear the same clothes.

I try to expand my musical horizons by buying random CDs at Half Priced Books whenever I’m in town, just to find new stuff. Hit and miss, but that’s the whole point. Someone else liked something enough to pay for it. Then most of them converted to digital.

Today I Learned. Something new. Always something new.

I am a writer. I am also a table-top gamer. I GM a couple of groups of new players (I call them all kids, regardless of age, until they get more comfortable). These campaigns are lower power. Like way lower. Too complicated already, so I don’t need to add a lot of magic items to further complicate things.

At the same time, I like to think about what might make interesting items to throw in a future campaign. Or to ask a future GM for, for me. Things heavy on roleplay potential, rather than pure powergaming minmaxing. That sort of silliness.

So I try to learn things. Think new thoughts. Go new places mentally.

And every once in a while I have to stop and realize that most people don’t do this. Don’t get up each morning looking for the uphill slope. Instead, they are downhill, with all the negative connotations such a word implies.

Music. The CD in the car right now came out in 2002 originally. Willie Nelson, Across the Great Divide. Really amazing stuff. I was thirty-three when it came out, not thirteen. Sure, I will listen to stuff from the early-mid 80s, when I was the target demographic in the early MTV days, but I try not to be limited.

For me, I am forever evolving. Rock from the early 80s, getting harder as the decade progressed, but not down into metal all that much. Poodles never really did it for me.

The 90s saw me transition over to country music about the time Garth Brooks rearranged popular tastes. Stayed with that until it ended up tossing western out and just becoming soft-rock remakes, with former rockers hitting mid-life crisis and releasing country albums for nostalgia.

2009, for my 40th, I went to London and England. Six days in London proper, then rented a car and went upcountry to a place called Boston on the North Sea. Where my Ward side of the family is originally from. (Mom’s side was from SW Germany after Napoleon got his ass kicked the second time. They came over in about 1815-16.)

The car was a right-hand-drive Ford. Stick. Traffic circles. Six days, I put 1400 miles on the car. The ONLY radio station I could get reliably was BBC Radio One, so I listened to British Dance Pop for a week.

I like to joke that the guy who went over never came back. It is more true than not, because I changed my musical tastes entirely in the process of reinventing myself yet again.

It’s June and I did it again. Shaved the beard off a month ago and haven’t grown it back. Hair got buzzed in the winter with the beard trimmer, but getting shaggy now. Threatened my guy friends yesterday that I might just let it grow long again. Take about two years to get to my shoulder blades. They are all going bald in various manners. And have it buzzed, shaved, or mohawked, respectively. They were not amused.

Forever changing. Forever learning. Forever something.

I am not planning to grow old anytime soon. Hell, I refuse to even grow up, at the end of the day.

Instead, I look for nifty new things that can teach me something I didn’t know before.

So I can say Today I Learned.

What are you doing with your summer?

Dealing with series

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Some days, I hate series. Not in a bad way, but in the manner that I have to work my ass off to cover them. Jessica Keller came out as I wrote it, which took several years. Lazarus (almost done) required me to bounce back and forth several times to complete, all in a short period, so I could drop them sequentially. The Dominion books, like Lazarus, covered a long arc of novel. I get burned out by the end.

All well and good. Right now, I got back comments from the Fabulous Publisher Babe™ about the third Hunter Bureau novel. I solved one big mystery, uncovered an even bigger conspiracy, and set #4 up to go there. She wants me to drop them back to back. Kinda messes up the winter publishing schedule to pull something out, but I had space. Really twists my writing schedule around from what I had wanted to do.

As we’re talking about that last night, I realize that the ending of the third First Centurion Kosnett book probably also demands a fourth, so they can come out boom-boom. One (Encounter at Vilahana) and Two (Consensus at Aditi) will drop in the fall October/November. I just finished #3 this morning, and went all in with an open-ended finale that makes me write #4 and drop them.

Fans used to be more forgiving, but Trad Pub has burned them too often. And I shouldn’t ever cliff-hangar unless I drop the next one right behind it.

However, that exacts a toll on me. I always need to take a break between novels, and explore some other place. From Space Opera to maybe Adventure, or Post-Apoc, or Dieselpunk. A lot of the short fiction I’d written this year was to let me shift out of one into another. I have an Arcane Detective Historic written. It needs some cleanup, and I have to slot that time. Maybe a week. But it isn’t on any schedule but my own need to clear out that backlog of “other” stuff that isn’t Epic Space Opera.

That’s why the Gunderson Case Files just came out. Hardboiled PI set in an alternate 1955 in Los Angeles where gods, aliens, dames, and trouble might walk through his door.

Or the erotica I write as Cole Braddock. Completely different from everything else to the point that it needed its own penname. (Erotica is generally the one case where multiple names are beneficial these days, as opposed to the old days where TradPub insisted because of reasons.)

I even have some straight up Urban Fantasy that needs to be published, just to get it out there and out of the trunk. Gotta edit that.

Weirdly, I have had to slow down my writing a little this year. I had been pushing, but the goal this year is twelve months of around 117,000 words (Pulp Speed Three, according to the old system or 1.4M words/year). I had been above that, but have other things to do this year that don’t count as well, such as an RPG we’re writing, or the musical lyrics for Elton.

Fortunately, other than pissing and moaning, I can pivot around and write the next novel in a series because I need to write it, as opposed to chasing the muse. The stories are all there, and I love what I write.

(I had a conversation with a group of nitwits that were convinced that they were supposed to hate everything they ever wrote. If you do that, you stop enjoying it. When that happens, your fans stop enjoying reading it, and stop buying. As self-fulfilling prophecies go, that is a great way to end your career and never understand what happened.)

Love what you write. Internalize that you are having fun. I do. I just bitch occasionally because I don’t get to wildly hare off after some new idea. (I do, but they have to be short stories I can write in a day or two, rather than weeks spent on a novel right now. My Patreon folks have seen a lot of that. You should join to see it as well.)

So mostly, this is just me whining today. And I admit it. Finished the third Phil Kosnett book. Ambassador Kosnett has had a chance to read an early e-arc of #1 before President Biden replaces him and Phil retires. I expect seven books eventually, and my goal is to have my own set signed by Phil, once he retires.

Turned around a couple of hours later after driving into town to hit the Japanese grocery and started the fourth Hunter Bureau novel as well. Had something else I WANTED to pursue, but it has to slide backwards a bit first. Gimme 2-3 weeks to finish Hunter #4 and maybe I’ll start Kosnett #4 around July 1.

Then there is all sorts of interesting fun planned for 2022. Hope you all enjoy it.

b

How do you make it stop?

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I was chatting online with a younger writer the other day and she had a moment of utter frustration with her current project, so I had to explain that what she was feeling was a good sign.

When you go to a con panel with writers, there is inevitably some youngster who stands up in back to ask the most banal of questions.

“Where do you get your ideas?”

I can tell such folks have taken the idea of writing [insert Pooh Bear here] extremely seriously. They’ve had college or MFA programs designed to make them authors. Mind you, I just used the word authors rather than writers. Authors, to me, are those folks who want to be famous. To get that seven-figure book deal and have the Randy Penguin spend enough marketing dollars to land them atop the New York Times bestseller list.

(A hint, that list is a mark of how many copies of the book were bought in about two dozen or so bookstores on the east coast, extrapolated out for the entire nation. It had almost no bearing on the rest of the world. There are folks who have figured our how to spoof the system. USA Today bestseller list is a little better, but folks are spoofing that as well. Adding that to your resume doesn’t usually impress me, unless I know you actually earned it. Few have.)

Getting back to young authors, they think that there is a magic handshake they can learn that turns them into pros. That’s why you see them buying every book on writing that they can. Or taking workshop after workshop and taking copious notes.

Looking for the magic handshake.

There isn’t one. What there is can best be described as work ethic. Those of us who have had some success largely owe it first to working our asses off by writing a lot of words. From there, genre matters, as navel-gazing autobiographies about how someone hates their mother only sell a lot of copies if your marketing budget it big enough to spoof the NYT. Or to get you on Oprah.

Most of them sell dozens of copies, not millions.

Luck is also a factor, as you have to somehow have the right story at the right moment for a lot of readers, and convince the advertising robots to put your name in front of them. Again, I know folks who spend $10,000 or more a month on their advertising. Their sales numbers are impressive, but only as gross income.

They get really pissy when I ask what their net income is. Frequently, its not much better than mine, when my monthly ad budget is usually $250-$400. They are running in a treadmill trying to make it, instead of building something slowly so it is durable. If they stop, they get flung off the back of the machine like in the cartoons.

So luck and hard work are the minimums necessary. Write a lot of words. Make them good ones.

Also, write a good first draft. I can’t tell you how many times some deluded fool explains to me that the only -right- way to write a novel is to spend the entire first draft wandering around and trying to figure out what story they want to tell. Then they go back and redraft the entire novel a second time. After that, maybe two or three more tries, slowly polishing it until every word sparkles. (Elapsed time measured usually in years here.)

The problem is that they have ripped out all the emotional content in the process. Pretty words. Dull book. Can’t tell you how many of those I’ve seen.

I’d rather have your first draft, warts and all, than your sixth. We can fix a few things in #1 and it will drip with anger, sorrow, or anguish. Won’t be pretty. It will be real instead. Readers react to that more than they do pretty words.

Which circles me back to the young lady complaining. She was working on a project, and all these other projects kept popping up and wanting to be written too. We call those ideas popcorn kittens (google it for the video when you have some time to giggle), because they are like active kitties, popping up to look around and then wandering off.

The question she asked wasn’t “Where do you get your ideas?” like most of them do when still filled with grand dreams of a beret and a coffee shop.

She asked “How do you make it stop?” with true anguish.

Young lady, that’s how you know you are a writer. Everything those college courses taught you was wrong. Genre fiction is where you make money. Your professor was a failed novelist writing about hating her mother and nobody wanted to read it. I’d rather read about that submarine pirate captain who is secretly a werewolf and spends all his time trying to hide it. That sounds like fun. Sounds new.

Professors don’t want to have to grade papers, so they would rather you spent your life on the same paragraph, over and over, instead of blasting out a novella every week for class.

Been there. Done that. Got the T-shirt. Nearly thirty-five years later, I still remember that vicious [redacted] of a professor and how she went her entire academic career without a male student ever—EVER—receiving an A in her creative writing course. That’s some pretty impressive sexism there. She believed that only female units could be authors.

If she wasn’t dead these days, I’d drop ship her some of my successful novels, just to be an asshole. But even Amazon balks at delivering anywhere guarded by three-headed-dogs.

So for the budding authors out there, remember just a few simple thoughts.

  • There is no magic handshake. Butt in chair, fingers on keyboard. Nothing else matters.

  • Genre is what you write if you would like to make money. Literary wins awards and then you go back to your job at the call center or the bookstore.

  • You can’t make it stop. What you do is ignore them all as best you can. The bad ideas will eventually recede, and shouldn’t be written. The good ideas will circle back time and again until you do write them.

  • Keep notes, but don’t become that fool who hangs out in a coffee ship with a notebook of ideas and never actually writes. Those are poseurs.

  • Writers write. If you are not writing, you are not a writer. If you are, you can call yourself a writer.

  • Anything you write is valid, even if nobody will ever read it. I have six volumes of poetry in a trunk that won’t probably ever see the light of day. I have failed novels where I realized as I got into them that I lacked the skills to pull it off, or it wasn’t as good an idea as I originally thought it would be.

So write. Given the state of modern traditional publishing (shrinking monthly if not weekly), learn how to indie publish. A $5.99 novel on Amazon nets you about $4 per sale. How many such sales do you need to replace your current job? TradPub pays about $0.10 per unit sale. You won’t ever get rich. You can win awards and accolades, and hopefully have a spouse who will support you. Or a job at the call center you can stay at until you die.

Because you can’t make it stop. Not if you are really a writer.

Nor do you want it to.

Legacy

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Lazarus 5 came out over the last twelve hours. Hopefully y’all have downloaded it and it’s high on your TBR file. I had a lot of fun with this series. Originally, it was supposed to run six novels, but as I got down to the end of five, I realized that it would be seven, just because I had so much ground to cover. Hell, it could have been ten easily, had I really wanted to wallow in certain aspects of the universe that didn’t get as much coverage as they might have otherwise.

I won’t call it short shrift, because they weren’t the key elements.

The Lazarus Alliance is about found family. That’s a fairly common theme in my work, because that’s the sort of life I’ve chosen to lead. I am not entirely estranged from my family, but close enough. Mostly, we just live such radically different lives that all we really have in common is the weather and gossip, little of which I’m interested in pursuing.

Because I have a found family. Fabulous Publisher Babe™ has a fantastic extended clan. Two brothers, one of whom is an ass but the other is wonderful. Eight nieces and nephews, plus some of them have spouses. A dozen grands so far, aged 4-14 and all great kids. We’ve had a Sunday Dinner Zoom call all through the lockdown, and will continue it, because that clan is in Washington State (us), Minnesota, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Los Angeles.

They just adopted me immediately, and keep me around, whereas my own family seems happier not to have to deal with me. Sad, but we’re all adults.

This was my first Mother’s Day after mom died, and she was kind of the last link I had to large chunks of my own family in Kansas and Missouri. I have mostly ridden off into the sunset, now I might simply fade away.

Not that I’m going anywhere, mind you. My mom was 79 and died of brain cancer. My dad just turned 81. Both sides of my family live a long time, and I’m in better shape and healthier than any of the older generations of relatives I ever met. One great-grandfather lived to be 96, dying in 1980. After smoking his whole life. He used to take the bus down to the Masonic Lodge every day to hang out with his fellow masons. In his nineties.

But at the same time, I’m the youngest of my generation on either side, save for one distant cousin two years my junior. The older group of Publisher Babe’s nieces and nephews are on either side of forty now, so just a decade or so younger than me, with another set around 20 (long story). I’ll hang out with them and theirs.

This is on my mind because I know a lot of writers who don’t have kids. (I have steps and extended, but none by blood that I am aware of at the present time.) I was mildly arguing with a couple of other writers over the weekend. They have books, novels, whatever.

Intellectual Property. When they die, it will vanish, because they have made no plans for their estate. I’m tempted to tell them to write a simple will assigning me all their publication rights on death, just because I plan on training up some of the kids to handle things.

My novels will remain under copyright for 70 years after I’m gone, at least under current law. Disney might extend that before I need it. I have a twelve-year-old grand niece who is a budding business tycoon. Her great-grandkids will be dealing with my estate, if I do it right, earning monthly income.

Think about that. Her great-grandkids. She’s just a kid now. But I plan to be around and writing for at least another forty years. Call it 90 even for sake of discussion. I was born in 1969, so that’s 2059. My copyright would expire in 2129. 2129. Hell, let’s say she has kids starting at 25. And they do the same. And they do the same. Her first might be born in 2032. Jump out twenty-five years to 2057. Jump out twenty-five more to 2082. Her great-grandkids might be forty-something when Blaze Ward finally stops generating them exclusive copyright income.

Kinda mind-boggling, when you think about it. Most writers do not prepare their legacy worth a shit. Publishers like Wordfire Press frequently come in and just buy a full literary estate, because they know how to handle it. My heirs might do that. I hope they get good money for it. That’s what this is all about.

What kind of legacy I am leaving for them? And mind you, they are all found family.

I occasionally chat with a young woman we’ll call R. She is my second wife’s oldest brother’s second wife’s ex-husband’s daughter from his second family.

And she’s family.

If you are a writer, what are you doing to make sure your kids, heirs, and found family are ready to keep making money from your books, after you are gone?

Matt Buchman is a good friend of mine. When he was putting together his book on estate planning, I handed him a copy of my will, because it has some weird and complicated bits dealing with my first wife’s art. (Donna was a fantastic artist and I have some, but most of it is finally in her daughter’s hands, save for a few pieces I kept. They still get to claim them when I’m gone.)

If you are a writer, you have a literary estate. Plan and organize your shit, so people know how to exploit it.

https://www.amazon.com/Estate-Planning-Authors-Strategies-Success/dp/1945740256

2129 CE.

How far out are you planning?

Social Media Inflection

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We might be seeing the impending death of social media, as it has come to define much of American culture over the last decade or so. Some of you found me on places like Facebook. I’m not planning to deactivate my account anytime soon, but over the weekend a number of friends hit their own, personal inflection points about staying.

Used to be, people could say a lot of things on those platforms without trouble. Over the last six months, the fascists in charge of the biggest one went all in on their politics. I’ve had friends who had never gotten put into social media jail suddenly start racking up time. Then more time, when the folks moderating started going back months and years and dinging them for stuff that had been acceptable then.

You will note that one party never seems to face any difficulties on that platform.

I’m not shutting down, but in the last 72 hours many of my author friends have either made their last post, or announced that the last one is coming soon. They’ll keep the account so they can talk with certain folks that they can’t reach any other way, but won’t be around much in the general conversation.

What we are seeing is the movement away from a common, public square, and back into silos of the internet. Some of you are old enough to remember the era before good search engines. Yahoo used to be a great way to find things. Then search engines let you find everyone.

The first real social media platform (MySpace) was adequate for the tools of the day. Then the other one came along and turned into a place where you could find lots of people. Complete strangers in other countries could become what we might call con-buddies. These are folks you only ever used to see at conventions in the old days, and then nothing until the next year.

D**, S**, and T** are tired of being flagged and jailed, but recognize that it is a private platform, and the fascist in charge is free to cater to his fascist friends.

They are leaving. I hope that Liker comes back. It was intended to be a left of center sort of place, but the big gorillas ganged up to try to destroy it. (I’d love to see an investigation into conspiracy to commit computer crimes, which I suspect would be fruitful.) It claims to be coming back in May 2021. We have hope.

In the meantime, my friends are leaving, and going back to their blogs, rather than posting things on the billboard at the square. Fragmenting off, so you and I will be back to rss feeds (you old enough to remember those?) and emails about blog posts from our friends. The world will be a little sadder, but it became inevitable when the bald android went all in on supporting the Trump platform and helping him attempt to overthrow the government.

What does this mean to you? I have been thinking about communications this week, after sending four different newsletters on the 1st. Seriously. FOUR. And none of those were this blog.

As folks move away from that hive of scum and villainy, my best way to reach folks will be newsletters and blogs, but coming entirely from www.blazeward.com.

I control that platform. I get to say what is acceptable behavior. I get to police your vocabulary and politics. Since I don’t generally allow much dialogue, what you’ll see is more of my monologuing, and occasionally approving comments in order to foster conversation.

But not a lot. I don’t have time to police my boards for content, and I am not making enough money to hire someone else to do it. Plus, I have to spam a half-dozen comments a day across all of my websites, just because robots out there crawl around and try to sell things.

(I have found a couple of better plug-ins for wordpress that supposedly cut down on spam commenters. Hopefully, they work.)

So you should sign up for my newsletter. (Anti-Stodgy/Redneck Chef on the 1st. Publishing News on the 15th.) It still feeds out a few places, but that’s just because I’m too lazy to cut the cable on a few of them. If they fray on their own, I won’t miss them.

You should sign up for my blog here directly, so that you don’t miss anything, because obviously I need to spent more time here and less over there, as much as it might cost me in the short term for being accessible to fans and friends like you.

If anyone knows of a social media platform that is to the left of Adolf Eichmann, I would be interested in hearing about it, because the Overton Window has moved far enough to the right, thank you.

Failing that, there is always the chance that someone creates a word-press microplatform where folks can log in and chat with one another, instead of me having to navigate everything. There are a few, but they are a pain in the ass last I checked.

In my various mastermind groups, we try to anticipate what the future will look like, so we can prepare the ground to take advantage of it. We’ve talked about the end of FB as a central place, but couldn’t figure out how or when it would happen.

MySpace got bought by an Australian fascist and promptly got abandoned, because the other options weren’t immediately funding the founder of Fox News. (That came later.) The current platform is even worse, but only got there over the last two years or so.

I’m not sure that any one place will ever replace it. At least not until the government breaks up all the big players (which I doubt, considering the money available to buy politicians) and requires a better platform.

Private enterprise might go through a “Thousand Flowers Campaign” kind of thing shortly, but we all know how that worked out.

So for now, expect a lot of writers to walk. To pick up their marbles and head back to their own URL that they control. Make sure you find out where they are and sign up for their newsletters and blogs as well, because they are likely never coming back. Not in any format you’ll recognize.

Hopefully, I won’t lose to many of you as I pull back, but I can see that avalanche starting to rumble. As people on the left abandon the platform, it will move harder right. Harder than it is today.

You can imagine what that will be like.

One Down

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So yesterday, I finally got my first shot. Washington State started bad a year ago, but got better once the governor (Democrat Jay Inslee. I can only imagine what a shit-show either of the GWP morons who ran against him would have had) shut things down. I live on the edge of an extremely red zone, such that in late April I can still drive by DRUNK 2020 posters on my way into town. Several of them. For the longest time, Enumclaw spiked harder than the other areas around me, mostly because the rest are either way rural or have more purple.

Maple Valley, WA, has been gentrifying hard since I first bought the farm ten years ago. New suburbia creeping in, as folks build mcMansions in town as well as new apartment complexes. More colors/ethnicities/nationalities of people moving in, too, which is all sorts of awesome, when the old place used to be largely descendants of the southeastern European (Slovenia, Czech, etc.) who moved in a century ago to work the coal mines around here. (Black Diamond, WA is a neighboring town, if that tells you anything.)

Something weird happened in the last month or two, though. Enumclaw went from having some of the worst numbers per capita around to doing pretty good. Not great, but down significantly. Maple Valley, conversely, swapped with them and started trending harder.

All this is a bit of background. Once enough shots had been delivered to folks at greatest risk, the governor opened everything to anyone over 18 who wanted to get a shot. That went into effect April 16. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) got her first shot on the 16th. Moderna.

She had previously had a mild case of what we assume was covid about a year ago, so we were prepared for her to suffer. She also woke up that Friday with a ‘meh’ day and maybe a touch of a cold, so her entire last week was a rotating bunch of yuck and symptoms as everything worked its way out. According to studies, folks who had been exposed or had COVID react hard to the first shot. She did.

That was why we didn’t schedule me to get a shot on the same day. I needed to be available to take care of her, which I did. At the same time, because I was exposed to her but never came down with anything, I figured I was asymptomatic.

So I was all set for a really shitty day yesterday, followed by several more after it.

Went down and got my shot at 1:10pm. Waited the 15 minutes. Drove home.

My wife has the metabolism of a hummingbird. I like to call her an elf, because a good drunk buzz on her lasts about 15 minutes tops. She reacted to the first shot in about an hour. Was mostly over the flu-like symptoms in a day, but had other things.

I came home and made a variant cheesecake. (Coconut yogurt vegan. I’ll send the recipe out with a Redneck Chef newsletter some first of the month for folks that want to try it.) Threw it in the freezer and sat down on the couch to just burn the rest of my day.

I had planned ahead, so I wrote 5,000 words per day instead of 4,000 all week, expecting that I would be too far gone to write today or Monday, and not wanting to fall behind. (And I also managed to get myself put in FB jail for reasons they won’t explain, and with no deadline, so I’m not sure when I can post over there again. Maybe ever. Maybe this is the sign I need to walk away. Will wait a few days and see.)

Was kind of brain-dead last night, but part of that was the emotional let-down of finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel. It’s been a year. And I had my first shot. I am frequently surrounded by murderous nincompoops who still tell me the disease is a hoax until I block them. [I HAVE KNOWN PEOPLE WHO DIED FROM IT, YOU FUCKS!]

About the only group I am physically social with includes a fireman (first line, got his shots on day one, basically), a guy recovering from open heart surgery last fall (co-morbidities, also high on the list), and a retired army vet who was able to go down to JBLM early for his. With their spouses, I was literally the last of eight folks to get a shot. The rest are all covered at this point.

So I woke up this morning having slept on the couch. Really warm and would have kept her awake cooking her out of bed, plus I was expecting to snore. I do that when I’m sick. Slept well

Feeling reasonably okay this morning. She made bacon and eggs. I added some biscuits and homemade gravy. Sat down to blog, because I’ve been a little slack here.

Got a little coffee left. Planning to hydrate like hell today, but brain is there. Yesterday, I just let myself rabbit-hole down wikipedia. (Example: FLIT-gun. go look it up for fun.) Backbrain was generating story (“How do you make it stop?”) and I will pivot shortly to either the novel in progress or an origin story for a new “villainess” character (kind of a bad babe, but not. It’s complicated.) and work on her, so I can introduce her to a new Space Opera series I plan to write in the summer/fall.

I’ve gotten my first shot, and things seem (knock on wood) to be doing okay this morning. Which probably just means that in a month I will feel like I got run over by a beer wagon.

Y’all stay safe. Get your shots, or unfriend me, because that choice makes you an anti-vaxxer, plain and simple, and I don’t want to come anywhere near a plague rat like you, because you’ve decided to kill random strangers rather than act like anything but a toddler. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you that your life choices got you here?

Go make better choices and stop killing people.

Professionalism

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So here’s the scenario: I put up a semi-open call for the newest Blaze Ward Presents anthology about a week ago. I only post them on FB, because that’s the only social medium I pursue beyond my own newsletter, but that newsletter is for readers, not writers. (Got a different one for artists, if you want more information.)

I immediately got several submissions, because a number of folks had been told ahead of time what the theme was going to be. I’m okay with that, as I’ve worked with all of them in the past.

One gentleman (we’ll call him Mark for now) sends me a note that I had sent something in. In the fracas, I lost track. If you send me something, I will reply when it arrives. Even something as simple as “got” just so you know I saw it.

Mark’s never came in.

About a week later, I am responding to other folks that have questions and see his original note. Check my notes and realize I have nothing from that person, so I ping him and ask him to resend.

According to his response, he does. About an hour passes, and I see nothing, so I reach out via DM and send him my email, just in case he wrote it down wrong. He sends me his, so I send a direct ping email. You can never really trust email these days. Especially not if you are through a crappy isp like comcast.

So far, so good. I’m conscientious here. Trying to reach out to someone and let them know that there seems to have been a problem at my end and can we resolve it? I’d like Mark to submit, if he has something. Even if it ends up being slush, I try to send back rejection notes that are more than “pass.”

Mark replies on FB with “Sounds like it’s not worth it.”

So, lemme tell you how rude that comes across to an editor. I might be overreacting a shade with the particular profanity that emerged, so I replayed the conversation with Fabulous Publisher Babe™ just because it can be a “measure twice, cut once” kind of thing, but she had the exact same reaction.

A professional works with an editor/publisher who is asking for help. Mark snapped his fingers in my face instead. I’m sure the grapes were already sour, as the old saying goes, but Mark here did something extra special today.

He moved himself into that special (and pretty damned short) list of artists with whom I will never work again. As he intended, suddenly even reading his emails became “not worth it.”

Not that I expect him to learn anything from the subject, because after stewing for a few hours, I just went ahead and unfriended that punk and blocked him. You don’t ever get unblocked. I just presume that I had a damned good reason to block you in the first place and would need a long and cogent apology from someone after they had begun to show public evidence of having grown up and wanting to act like an adult. (“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”)

Telling an editor that it’s not worth working them is a mark of juvenility that rubs me the wrong way. And it cuts both ways. If that’s your idea of professionalism, you and I will not be working well together at any point in the future, so we should just ahead and cut to the chase now.

And cut we did.

I won’t work with Mark. There are a lot of folks out there trying to present as professionals with whom the original response would have been somewhat less antagonistic. But unlike Mark here, I don’t believe that my shit doesn’t stink. I make mistakes. I admit them and try to make amends. That’s why I tried several times to establish a direct line of communications with the guy.

He decided that I wasn’t worth working with.

Okay. Strange response, but I’m willing to honor it. Will make sure not to work with you in the future.

Ever.

For the rest of you folks out there as accidental bystanders, I have found that starting from a presumption of innocent mistake is a much better spot. I get that folks are stressed out after a year of this shit, but in vino, veritas. If you are an asshole to a random stranger on the internet (and I have no idea who the guy is, other than he found me at some point), then I’ll assume you’re just an asshole.

It goes back to how someone treats the waitstaff at dinner. Doubly so if a mistake has been made. Do they explode in righteous indignation, or chill and remember that shit happens if the person is apologizing?

Bridges are pretty easy things to burn. Especially with me. I’m not a confrontational person. Especially with total strangers. More than a few folks have blown up in my face over the years, only to discover that the blow-out argument that they had apparently been hoping for wasn’t the outcome they got.

I’ll just walk. I do that. Communication is a two-way street, but only if I believe that I am working with an honest broker. Sour grapes don’t cut it.

Hopefully, this little PSA makes you stop and think about how you treat the folks around you. Are complete strangers left seething at your words, or thankful?

Simple as that.

Are you acting like an asshole?

We won’t find out what excuse he wants to give me if and when the emails suddenly start working, because he has become an unperson.

That’s what folks call consequences. Your behavior has them, even if you weren’t paying any attention.