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You Can Break Every Rule

There are a lot of rules when it comes to writing. Writers love to scribble down mandates like “don’t do this” or “always do this” and pretend that we’ve solved part of the vast jigsaw puzzle of creativity.

But the thing is this: pretty much every one of those rules can be broken or ignored, if you have a good reason for it.

I want to be clear, here: I think most rules about writing are good rules, and are valuable. “Try to leave out the part of the story that the reader’s going to skip.” That’s a good rule.

But, like most things, if you get good enough at the work, you’ll run into some situation where the rules you love are not only inapplicable, they will actually make the situation worse if you adhere to them.

(Warning: If you are at all unsure you’re qualified to decide whether or not to ignore a rule, I would like to humbly suggest that you aren’t. You will know when you’ve reached that point, without checking with anyone else first. Until then, stick with the rules. I know how pretentious this sounds. Please trust that I don’t mean it that way.)

This is why I tell people not to listen to the advice I have about writing (as opposed to NaNoWriMo): when it comes to writing, I’m going to automatically assume that I’m unqualified to give advice; I’m not an expert yet.

Let me demonstrate that by poking holes in the rules I’ve mentioned here in the past.

When you’re writing, write.

The basic idea here is that when you sit down to write, you must get some words out on the page — you should be producing, not wasting time — the first million words that you write are going to be glittery unicorn shit anyway, so you might as well get them out of the way as fast as you can.

That’s not entirely true. If you sit down like that every single morning at eight o’clock, you’ll develop your work/write habit, yeah, but there’s a tendency when you’re in that mindset to approach the whole thing in a very rational frame of mine, and we aren’t any of us very rational people. If you’re in that kind of frame of mind, and you get stuck, you’re going to give up on writing for that day in about fifteen minutes.

So sometimes when you sit down to write… you don’t write. You woolgather. You shut the fuck up and listen to the echoes in the empty spaces of your head, because those echoes are coming from somewhere — some whispers and hints and intuitions that are sneaking around just past the corner of your eye, and you need to lie still to trick them into the light. Do that. It’s okay.

Rules of Three

The basic idea here is to describe everything in your story by using three facts only. A good guideline, yes, but be ready to cast it aside when you need to. Maybe (like me) you never describe the physical characteristics of your main characters for the entire length of the story — the readers never find out if her hair is auburn or blonde, kinky or straight; what kind of shoes she likes, or what color her jacket, eyes, fingernail polish, or lip gloss are. If that’s the right thing to do for you, then go for it. On the flip slide, maybe you feel a pressing need to describe one particular character in your story in absolutely excruciating detail. Will anyone remember all that stuff? Hell no, but if you’re dishing that kind of detail, then the detail itself really isn’t the point; maybe it’s telling us something about how obsessed the observer is, or how fastidious the subject is, or… I dunno. I’m not you: I don’t know why you decided to drop a microscope on this guy, but if you did so, there’s probably a good reason for it, besides needing to bloat up your word count.

Right?

“Any word you have to look up in the thesaurus is the wrong word.” — Stephen King

I’m a big fan of this rule, but it’s one that attracts a lot of flak. Non-writers often comment with something like “But… what if I actually pick exactly the right word? Are you saying I’m stupid? Are you saying the thesaurus is always wrong?” Writers, on the other hand, can almost always trot out some example where they’re writing a character with a particular kind of vocabulary: someone who would never say shit when they can say excreta. Yes, fine: you’ve nitpicked the particulars of the statement to death; you win the Internet again. Go you.

They kind of miss the point of the statement, which (taken in context) is simply that you should write with the language and vocabulary that you have immediately to hand; the tools with the most worn and comfortable grips. Writing with those words helps you sound exactly like yourself on the page, and that helps your story’s authenticity and honesty. It helps the story be true, at least in the sense of a realization, if not as an actual fact. Taken in context, it’s a very nice rule.

And, of course, there are times when you should — when you must — ignore it. Aside from anything else, you will grow as a writer/reader, and your vocabulary will expand, and what was once a thesaurus-word may become a you-word. Even then, sometimes the word you need — the perfect word — will be a word only found in a thesaurus.

(I’m still suspicious of perfect words: perfect things are rarely true things, and true things are rarely perfect, and on the whole I’d rather be true than perfect, but I’ll leave that navel-gazing alone in this case.)

Kill Every Adverb

Oh… man. I dunno. This one is tough. I like this rule. This is a good rule. Adverbs are largely useless, lazy, slugabed motherfuckers and I won’t have anything to do with em.

But sometimes…

Sometimes… an adverb is just the right way to say it.

Sometimes. Yes. Fine.

God that hurt to write. Ouch.

Some Things Are Not Rules You Ignore

There’s a difference between rules and tools. Rules are the things I mentioned up above. We will learn when to ignore those, just as we’ll learn that most of the time we shouldn’t.

Tools are something different. Tools are things like spelling. Grammar. Punctuation. Tools require respect. You don’t paint your house with a screwdriver; you don’t frame a wall without your hammer.

Create whatever you want to create, but build the fucking thing correctly, is what I’m saying.

Leave the AWOL punctuation and a weird aversion to quotation marks to guys like Cormac McCarthy or Charles Frazier. On anyone else (and, in fact, even on them) it looks like pretentious fuckery, and that’s all I have to say about that.

Now, I need to get back to the woolgathering.

You: get back to work. Have fun.

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Stuff that Helps that I used to Hate (#nanowrimo)

1. Write-ins

I’ve never been a fan of meeting new people. That’s an odd thing for an undeniable extrovert to say, but it’s true: walking up to a crowd of unfamiliar faces that all turn toward you with a blank lack of recognition? Not my favorite activity ever.

That reluctance kept me away from NaNoWriMo write-ins for many years.

The other thing that kept me away? The part where you go to a gathering of nanowrimo folks and don’t end up getting one fucking word written. Not really surprising, when you think about it: take a bunch of people who are working on a brand-new, shiny story, sit them all down with readily available caffeine, and watch them (us) turn into cute little chatty hunks of non-productivity.

That was my experience with write-ins for the first couple years I showed up. It got to the point where I didn’t go unless I was ahead on my word count for the day, and since I’m almost never ahead on my word count… well, you see where this is going.

Saturday was different, though. Saturday, after a long day in a long class, I decided to drop in at a local write-in to clear my head.

It won’t help me get caught up, I thought, but at least I’ll get a free nanowrimo monkey sticker out of it.

I showed up about an hour after it’d gotten started at the local bookstore (Tattered Cover), snagged a frozen latte, and walked over to the circle of couches and comfy chairs where our particular nerd herd tends to assemble.

Good turn out. Lots of folks, most of whom I didn’t recognize.

No one looked up.

I mean it: no one. Hands on the keyboards, butts in the chairs, eyes on the screen, tappity tap.

Damn, I thought. I found a chair, pulled out the writing machine, and got to it.

About fifteen minutes later, everyone suddenly looked up, blinked, and started chatting. Some got up to snag another coffee or hit the head. I looked around for the professional hypnotist. Folks compared word counts, chatted about disobedient main characters, compared their laptops and recommended writing software they liked. The local ML came over and hooked me up with my monkey sticker.

This… this was the nanowrimo write-in I knew; the one I expected.

About twenty minutes later, though, it all came to a stop again. Everyone was back, everyone got settled, and the ML said “Okay, are we ready for another sprint?” There was a general murmured agreement.

A gah what-now? I thought. The only time I heard that phrase was when I’d used Write or Die in the past.

“How long are we going this time?” she asked the group. “A little shorter? Fifteen?”

Again, agreement. She set a time on her laptop, tapped a key, and said “Go.”

They went. We went. Boom. Writing. Heads down, fingers going. Focused.

I may not know much about how the writer-brain works, but I’ll tell you one thing that’s pretty consistent: it responds to deadlines. It responds especially well to looming deadlines.

I take back everything I ever said about the write-ins. Maybe the (excellent) MLs in Denver are the only ones to figure this little trick out, but maybe not — and if not, I have to recommend dropping by a write-in in your area. Socializing with the other nanowrimo crazies is always a good thing in the long run, but now it’s something else: now it helps.

2. Twitter

Now, I like twitter, but I don’t love the easily available distraction it provides when you need to get some writing done, so what changed my mind? Two things.

2a. The #nanowrimo hashtag

If you need a little inspiration, I humbly recommend checking out the #nanowrimo hashtag on twitter. For one thing, it’s really kind of neat to see all these excited and creative people talking about what they’re working on, but it also really encourages to you to get your butt in a chair and write.

How does it do that? The same way that seeing a guy you really don’t with an “I Voted” sticker on his shirt will get you to the Ballot Booth — all it takes is about four tweets where some rat bastard is all like “Just broke 30k on my #nanowrimo WIP” to get me back in my chair. Shame and Resentment, baby: that’s what makes the world go ’round.

Yeah, yeah: “shared creative energy” blah blah blah… sure. Whatever. Bottom line? We wanna beat that other dude.

2b. NaNoWordSprints

I hadn’t heard about NaNoWordSprints until a few days ago, and I highly recommend it if you can’t make a write-in but still want that feeling of someone firing off a starting gun and saying “Go!” It’s like a write-in for shut-ins. It seems to be something semi-official being done by the NaNoWriMo folks. Check it out. Make Twitter actually help you out this year.

Here’s the Thing

Marathons are hard; even people who run them all the time know they’re hard. People who do them for fun are a) crazy and b) actually running a more difficult race than the ‘regulars’ are, because they probably trained less, run less, and may not really know what they’re getting themselves into. They show up for the race and the veteran runners are like:

This NaNoWriMo thing is the same kind of deal. As De points out, professional authors like to say they they do NaNoWriMo every month and while that’s a cute answer, it’s not – strictly speaking – true. Yeah, they’ll often knock out 50k in a month, but for most everyone doing NaNoWriMo, it’s not just about getting the word count, it’s about getting the word count while holding down another full time job, filling out TPS reports, getting the kids to school, taking care of all the things that need to be done around the house, and all that.

Have help. Make friends. Connect with the folks who are running this crazy-ass race with you — who also don’t know really know what they’re in for. The whole thing may drive you crazy, but at least you’ll have company.

(Personal hurrah: Hidden Things is heading back out to publishers today to see who salutes. I am pleased. Agent Shana is pleased. Even some of the editors getting it are pleased. A good way to start the day. I took a look at an old copy of Hidden Things this weekend — the version that I actually queried with several years ago — it’s approximately 68% the size of the current manuscript, and even that version was a far different animal than the very first NaNoWriMo copy. I will throat punch anyone who tells me their NaNoWriMo story is ready for publication as of December 1st. I will do so jovially, but still: throat punch.)

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You do not need Neil Gaiman’s gazebo

I love November, I really do. From a writing point of view, there’s a lot of enthusiasm and creative energy floating around. I don’t know if that’s something that’s generated by NaNoWriMo, or if Chris Baty just tapped into it (possibly by accident) when he scheduled the event the second time around. (I suspect it’s the latter.)

Aside from the energy, I just like this time of year for the weather — fall is far and away my favorite season.

It’s one of those times of year when I really envy Neil Gaiman. Not for his writing (he has his, I have mine), or amazingly supportive group of friends (I also have that), or his dogs (got those), or daughters (got one of those too), or even his house (which is lovely, yes, but there’s too much snow in Wisconsin).

No, I envy him for this:

This is Neil’s Gazebo. It’s where he writes.

Nice, isn’t it? All the amenities, none of the distractions. It positively screams artistic and charming, and my god, I can’t even imagine what those trees look like right about now.

It makes me want to build a writing shed in my backyard. Seriously. I’m utterly fascinated by small, efficient living spaces, and have spent hours – even days – scanning sites like shedworking, drooling over videos like this one, and making sure that tumbleweed‘s monthly hit count stays up. Wouldn’t it be great to feed that obsession and get a whole new workspace out of it in the bargain? That’d mean my office inside the house would open up… We could use the extra bedroom…

*slaps self repeatedly*

*blinks*

Right. Where was I?

Ahh… right. I was daydreaming about a nice, personal, private, darling writing space.

Instead of writing.

I’m seeing that a lot right now. There are a lot of people out there who are supposed to be writing and are instead wasting their time trying to build Neil Gaiman’s gazebo. I see a couple of people doing it every day.

“Not me,” you think, smug in your superiority.

Oh really?

Let me give you a couple examples of what I’m talking about.

Every day, Twitter sends me a message (or two, or three) that reads something like this:

@writeria90210 is now following you on Twitter!

Bio: I’m a writer. I love writing and books. And writing books. This is my new twitter account devoted to writing.

See that? That’s a gazebo. @writeria90210 has some other twitter account, but decided to make another special twitter account just for writing. How charming and artistic. Their twitter account probably looks like this:

How about:

Bio: I am currently writing my debut novel and looking for a [sic] agent.

That’s a gazebo designed to house the cart that you bought before you bothered getting a horse.

Or this one:

Bio: Switching from @oldusername account to this @myrealname account, so that all my writing is associated with ME.

I think I’ll call that one “painting the gazebo”.

I don’t mean to pick on anyone, but I think it’s really important to call this what it is: procrastination. (My granddad, puttering around in the back of my head, wants to call it “bullshit”.)

Don’t get me wrong: I understand why you’re doing this. It feels nice to create these cozy little writerly spaces. As an added bonus, these little side projects are finite and quickly achievable; it doesn’t take much time to set up a new twitter account (believe me, I know), and boom: when you’re done, you have this whole new space to play around in. You’ve accomplished something.

Writing? Writing is a sort of a never-ending battle; sometimes it’s nice to have a battle that’s a little more… endy.

Plus, once this little space is created, there’s more stuff you can do with it! Get the throw pillows just so, adjust the light through the window, get the wallpaper up, and maybe… down near the end of the day… maybe write someth — Oooh! Or you can post stuff to the new twitter account! Even better! A series of 140 character posts, each one with a definitive end, and lovely little ‘ding’ of completion! So much more satisfying than the ongoing slog of your Work In Progress.

People: I understand. I really do. Scientists have done a lot of studies on procrastination, and their conclusion isn’t that we’re lazy: it’s that we simply like things that we can have now. (Hat tip to ***Dave for reminding me of that post.)

Their conclusion is also that we’re better people who make better stuff if we can manage a little delayed gratification.

That means no quaint and adorable writer space and more writing in whatever space you’ve got handy.

It means more writing instead of building gazebos (whatever form those gazebos happen to take): less twitterbation, fewer blog posts about ‘the process’ and ‘how the writing went this morning/this afternoon/this evening/yesterday’, fewer posted excerpts, less time “getting in the mood”.[1]

More writing.

Get back to it. The gazebo can wait.

1 – Anyone who knows me knows that I am guilty of all those things. If you feel I’m directing any of these comments out to the rest of the world with you in mind, remember one key thing: If it’s not about me, I’m probably not going to waste time talking about it. Sad, but true. XOXO

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All Used Up

A few weeks back, some folks asked if I’d be ‘blogging NaNoWriMo’ again this year.

I said yes. Of course I said yes; I have a strong need for a feedback loop in the creative cycle, so knowing there’d be one built into a certain string of blog posts is an automatic draw for me.

But there was a seed of doubt.

Yes, I wrote a lot of advicey posts last year, and they were generally received very well — more importantly, folks found them useful. But the non-secret secret of those posts is that I was really just writing notes to myself, figuring (correctly) that if the writing process followed a fairly clear pattern from beginning to end (it does, at least for me), I’d end up writing something worthwhile for lots of people.

I’ll be honest: I’m not sure I can do it again.

I mean, the process is the same, right? The stages are the same, right? What if I said everything useful last year? What if I don’t have anything good left to say?

Then again…

Every single time I’ve ever written a story (obviously not just in November), it’s been different. The challenges have come in different places, and with different parts of the story. The stories themselves have been different, and certainly I’m learning different things (and the same old things, again) every time.

And I’m different. In editing together that ebook of the advice I wrote last year, I found some things I didn’t entirely agree with. I left them in, because it’s still good advice, but it’s not quite me anymore.

The question basically boiled down to whether or not I thought I still had any words left at all.

And there’s really only one way to find that out. You go looking for them.

Story Time
I grew up in South Dakota, on a farm. On that farm, we raised cattle. Cattle are pretty simple creatures; they generally require only two things:

  • Grass. (The ‘corn-fed beef’ ideal is a dangerous, illness-creating myth.)
  • Water.

Now, out on the Great Plains, grass isn’t much of a problem, but water sometimes is, and if your pastureland doesn’t have a convenient lake handy or an artesian well set up, your livestock has to rely on a dugout.

A dugout’s basically a man-made watering hole — it looks like a rectangular pond about the half the size of a football field, with a suspiciously uniform hill lying directly along one side of it. The reason it looks like this is because of how it was made; basically, someone just hopped in a backhoe and dug a big hole in the ground about where someone decided there must be an underground spring, then piled the dirt up alongside the hole for no other reason than it was the easiest thing to do.

As a kid, all the dugouts around my home where preexisting affairs — old enough for the piles of dirt next to them to have settled down, grown grass, and become practically indistinguishable from burial mounds. I had no concept of them as a Thing That Was Made.

Then, sometime during my teen years, a well in one of our more distant pastures dried up, and my dad decided to get a guy out there with his backhoe and make a dugout.

It was a pretty epic undertaking. Via methods I’m still not entirely clear on (and on which my dad and granddad disagree), the optimal location for a dugout was determined, the heavy equipment was rolled in, and the digging commenced.

Problem was, it was two days in, and they weren’t hitting a spring. The hole was getting DEEP; both it and the pile of dirt next to it were bigger than the backhoe that had made them, and still no water.

I and my granddad had driven out to check on the digging (partly, I’m sure, so my granddad could rib Dad about the big dry hole), and after a bit of ‘conversation’ on the topic, Grandpa had walked over to talk with the foreman. I was left standing next to my dad. We stared into this enormous hole for awhile — it was pretty damned impressive.

“So,” I asked, “what do you do when you don’t find water?”

Dad didn’t respond at first; he was still looking down into the hole, and I wasn’t sure he’d heard me over the roar of the backhoe. Then: “If you know the water’s there,” he said, “you just keep digging.”

“No matter what?”

“Yep,” he said. “You’ll hit it eventually.” He put his right hand on my left shoulder, leaned in, and pointed so I could sight down along his left arm like the barrel of a .22. There, along the walls of the dugout, where the backhoe had just pulled another scoop of dirt away, there was a thin, silvery snake of water, running down toward the bottom of what would become, over the next four days, the biggest and deepest and most consistently full dugout we’d ever had.

“Now,” he said, giving my shoulder a squeeze. “Walk around t’ other side there, and make sure your granddad sees that.”

He sounded more than a little smug.

This is a cold hard fact about writing. Sometimes, you won’t feel like there’s any words there. You’ll sit at your keyboard and think “Everyone’s got a novel in them, sure… but what if I only had one? What if I don’t have anything left to say?”

The water’s there. You know it is.

Keep digging til you hit it.

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This is How I Get It Done: Making a quick ebook with Jutoh

This one’s going to be short, because I’ve kind of been looking at this screen all day.

A few days ago, I asked if anyone would be interested in getting all of my NaNoWriMo advice posts pulled together into some kind of epub format.

The answer was “yes.”

I kind of ignored that for a bit, because frankly I didn’t know where to start with creating something like that, beyond a PDF; all the stuff I used a few years ago is abandonware.

But today someone sent me an ebook they’d ‘just slapped together’ in eCub, so I went and looked at that.

It seemed fine, but I did notice this bit:

eCub does not do WYSIWYG or syntax-highlighted editing.

Hmm. I may be reading that wrong, but it sounds like it doesn’t do something like “highlight that word and hit ctrl-I for italics.” So… may a little simpler than I wanted.

But then I read:

You may like to consider the Jutoh ebook editor for easier, WYSIWYG editing, more sophisticated import, and greater configurability. Jutoh also handles footnotes, index entries and other aspects.

Well, that certainly seemed a lot closer to what I was looking for.

So I grabbed it, installed it, and got to work. First, I saved copies of all the individual posts as html files, then I pointed Jutoh at that directory full of a mess of html files, images, links, and… you know, stuff, and said “Do something with that, wouldja?”

Here is the result — This is How I Get It Done – Daily Kicks in the Ass for NaNoWriMo Authors, in:

It took me longer to get a decent picture of a composition notebook cover than it did to format the first chapter.

Now… it wasn’t THAT easy — I spent most of the afternoon cleaning out text I didn’t need, and dropping some (but not all — or even most) of the comments from the posts. And I had to recenter pictures and format the captions and…

Okay, yeah, it took awhile, but it was a piece of cake.

The end result (at least for the .mobi – I can’t check the others) is a document that Kate can read on her Kindle and I can read on my phone. The text formating is clean, the pictures are totally legible, the table of contents works perfectly, and all the links to other people’s websites (the commenters, for example) are live and do exactly what they should. I’d love to hear how it works for you guys on your readers of choice.

Unavoidable Snark: A whoooooole afternoon to format a clean, readable, twenty-three thousand word ebook with pictures and an extended reading list that reaches out to the rest of the internet. Yeah. Wow. I can totally see why publishers are charging as much for ebooks as hardbacks. Totally. Yeah.

Finally, for those folks who just want it in their browser, here’s the complete collection of the original posts.

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Working Like a Rockstar (The October Forecast)

My short-term contract job came to an unhappy/happy end on Friday. And while you might assume ‘unhappy for me’, I’d have to say that the real unhappiness was felt by my now-ex-employers, who really wanted me to stay and really liked me; they just ran out of budget.

They liked me so much that my boss basically wrote the new update to my resume, bragging me up even more than I usually do myself. Contract jobs are actually pretty good in that way — you can come in like a superhero, smash the crap out of problems, gird yourself in accolades, and leave before office politics sully your fancy spandex costume.

The big trick is making sure you’ve got somewhere to land when you leap over the next tall building in a single bound. (Freelance writers will find this kind of thing very familiar; it’s a kind of rockstar lifestyle, assuming one reads that to mean “striving to see the difference between homelessness and living out of a tour van.”)

I may have a new gig lined up pretty soon — another -opolis that needs saving from an Atomic Menance — but to be perfectly honest I’ll be happy if there’s a bit of a lag before the next corporate thing.

I am ready to do some other things.

Let’s review what’s on the to-do list.

New cub.

There’s a new kid on the way to the Casa, so there are more than a few home projects going on. The kid’s room is actually pretty much ready to go, but in the meantime we’ve been working on other rooms in the house.

We’ve painted our bedroom and the front greatroom, and of course Kaylee’s new bedroom needs to be framed in and painted and carpeted and all that cool stuff, but we’re letting some professionals handle that, even though I’m pretty sure I could nail (heh) the framing part.

Then there’s painting the house itself. The outside. We must — absolutely must — paint the whole thing before winter, or we’ll need to replace all the siding next summer, and if I’ve got some time before the next gig, I’ll probably be doing that myself and saving us mumble-hundreds of dollars.

The main problem with this cunning plan is that there are three spots where the siding needs to be replaced, and of course the problem spots aren’t anywhere a mook like me could handle it — they’re complicated places like where the chimney meets the house, right under the eaves.

By the way: if you’re in the market for a house, or planning to build one? Fuck chimneys. I don’t care how much you want a fireplace; don’t do it. Embed a firepit in your deck or something. Chimneys are to houses what a bad smoking habit is to an otherwise healthy person.

Anyway. I am pretty much ready to go with the painting thing, but we’re going to have to wait until we can get these sections fixed by someone competent experienced.

Why isn't it ever simple?

NaNoWriMo is on the horizon, and the prepatory murmurs are audible even at this great distance. Some folks have asked if I’m ‘doing’ it again this year which… c’mon. Of course.

But I’ve got a lot of other stuff to do first. A publisher handed me some revision requests which — damn them — are actually really good, so I want to get those done and handed back to my awesome agent before October is dead and gone.

What will I be writing?

Actually, I have a story to finish that needs at least another 50k (well, two, actually, but I’m picking one over the other), so I’ll be getting it down. Yes, I know you’re not supposed to do that with NaNoWriMo, but at this point, I think I’ve done it legit often enough to pfff those kinds of restrictions.

But that’s just me; if you’re trying to finish NaNoWriMo for the first time, BY ALL MEANS OBSERVE THE RULES. Doing it my way (picking up an unfinished story) is actually making the whole thing harder; I’m just stupid self-challenging that way.

What would I write if I weren’t working on something extant? I dunno.

I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t suggest, though: steampunk.

I love the stuff currently lumped in under the heading of ‘steampunk’. Love it. But steampunk is kind of like vampires right now; something people mix in because it’s cool, not because the elements are being used in any kind of meaningful way. I’m getting sick of it.

You want to use the trappings? Fine. Call it whatever it really is, though — zeppelin fantasy, gogglerotica, or whatever.

Punk anything requires class struggle, the social effects of technological revolution, and people with no influence and power rebelling against a monolithic Authority.

Slapping goggles on your protagonist doesn’t make it steampunk.

Ahem. Anyway. Rant over. There’s my advice for NaNoWriMo. At least for today.

Hey, that reminds me.

Last year, I wrote a bunch of NaNoWriMo advice, broken down for day-by-day consumption. People seemed to dig it (and I’ll probably repost them to twitter as appropriate), but would there be any interest in seeing all those posts brought together into some kind of ebook-like thing prior to the start of the madness?

Not to buy, obviously — I’m not wondering if there’s money in it — I’m wondering if there’s enough interest to justify the work of putting it together before 11.01.10.

Is that it? I think that’s it. Damn but I’m out of practice writing these things — this post was all over the place — I’ve got blog-rust all over the keyboard now. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Nothing like being blocked from your own site during the day for the last two months to make you really pine to get some blogging done.

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“The Image may be Closer than it Appears” – Mira Grant’s Feed

Fact One: I like zombies.  I like considering the ramifications of a zombie outbreak as a mental exercise, and sometimes even use that as an excuse to buy pretty things. None of this is a surprise to anyone who knows me.

Fact Two: I like Mira Grant‘s new book Feed. Again, this should also come as no surprise to anyone who’s been around me for the past week or so; I can’t shut up about the damned thing. The query-pitch summary for the book might go something like this:

Somewhere around 2014, some genius came up with a viral cure for cancer. Some other genius came up with a viral cure for the common cold. Neither of those two things were bad on their own, but when they met one another in a human host – bam, zombies. The infection spread, leading to the psuedo-death of a massive chunk of the population of the planet. During the first year of “the rising”, bloggers came into their own, providing survival information while the news networks were still making jokes and pretending it was all a prank. As the book opens it’s 25 years later, humanity has survived (so far) and so have the infected. This new reality affects virtually every aspect of daily life (the repercussions woven in a wholly believable backdrop throughout the book). We get to experience this brave new world through the eyes of George and Shaun, a professional brother-and-sister blogging team who ride around in a well-equipped van with a blonde poetry-writing tech-nerd named Buffy. [*]

But I’ve mislead you.

I’ve let you think, based on Fact One and Fact Two, that I like this book because it’s a good zombie story, but that’s too simple: my enjoyment and admiration goes beyond an affection for the walking dead, and Feed is more than a (really, truly) well-done story about zombies.

It’s about fear.

The trouble with the news is simple: People, especially ones on the ends of the power spectrum, like it when you’re afraid. The people who have the power want you scared. They want you walking around paralyzed by the notion that you could die at any moment. There’s aways something to be afraid of.

What does that have to do with the news? This: The truth isn’t scary.

It might (I said might) surprise you if I said that one of my most frequently visited newsreader feeds are for sites like FreeRangeKids — sites that look at activities that should be perfectly normal and perfectly acceptable which are instead seen as horribly irresponsible simply because there’s a one-in-sixty-thousand chance that something might go amiss and a kid could skin their knee. It’s sites like those where you can hear about schools that won’t “risk” kids playing tag anymore… or allow kids on a jungle gym… or a seesaw; where you can read hysterical, screaming comments from people who want parents to spend time in jail for letting their kid ride a bike to school.

(I also make sure to stay aware of examples of politicians and other folks in power using fear to leverage their current or nascent control of the general population, but I don’t feel as though I need to link to a specific site for this — just stay abreast of current events and examples will readily present themselves.)

But… that’s just the world we live in, right? One more thing we can’t let our kids do that we did when we were little; one more activity that used to be okay and now gets you a drive-by visit from the local sheriff’s deputy; one more security checkpoint where we used to be able to walk through; one more (and one more, and one more, and one more) cctv camera on the drive into work. We can’t look at the situation entirely clearly anymore — we’re too close to it, and the background roar (“threat level has been raised to orange”) is so loud that the only way to examine it is to make it much bigger — to zoom in. To turn the dial to 11.

What sort of thing could do that?

Zombies could do that.

Zombies turn up the dial on parents overprotecting their kids to the point where they grow up hopelessly and helplessly phobic. Infection gives government agencies the ability to shoot anyone at the merest suggestion of a threat. The walking dead allow politicians to base their campaign on a platform that would get even the most fringe right-wingers laughed off the stage today.

Zombies let us look at an incredibly paranoid, over-careful, insular, suspicious, stranger-dangered, xenophobic world… and realize that it is not actually very far away from where we are today. Not very far at all. Not far enough.

Not by half.

Beware: you are looking at this through my eyes.

Far, far be it from me to say that this is specifically what the author intended; I’ve had too many people talk to me about theme-stuff in my stories that I’d swear I didn’t put in there — there’s no way I’d assume that what I see in Feed is what Mira Grant intended to package in the tin.

It could be that this is merely an excellent zombie story with compelling main characters, believable politics, well-envisioned technological advances, tight and suspense-filled pacing, masterful use of foreshadowing and misdirection, and an ending that left me not-so-subtly pining for an ARC of the next book in the trilogy. Merely.

There is only one way to tell.

You must read it.

You must read it.

“This is the truth: we are accustomed to being afraid. It’s an addiction. People crave fear. Fear justifies everything. Fear makes it okay to have surrendered freedom after freedom, until our every move is tracked and recorded in a dozen databases. Fear creates, defines, and shapes our world, and without it, most of us would have no idea what to do with ourselves.

“We took a world that was huge with possibility, and we made it as small as we could.”