Death by the pen. Truly mightier than the sword.

When I first started writing violent, feminist-y things, people told me, “Nobody’s going to buy that. People won’t read that. You won’t ever sell a million copies. You’re a niche writer.  You’ll just be a marginalized writer. So long as you know that, it’s cool. Maybe you should write some YA instead.”

And, you know, I accepted that. I accepted it rather blindly, because hey, that’s what it’s like when you write stuff that isn’t mainstream popcorn/established bestseller niche, right? Nobody reads you. Only critics take you seriously, sometimes (and even then, only long after you’re dead).

As I’ve been working off last year’s weight gain by listening to too much Jillian Michaels and watching too many episodes of The Biggest Loser while getting in my 90 minutes of cardio every day, there was this recurring theme on the show, and with the folks Jillian deals with, that really got to me. It was this notion that our internalized version of ourselves that we have soaked up from the world is our real selves. We outwardly express who we perceive others believe us to be.  Anybody who has found themselves confronted by prejudice knows this feeling intimately. As a nerd, a fat kid, a woman, I’ve encountered it many times, and when I felt I couldn’t fight it, when I’d internalized all the external hate so completely that I wanted to beat somebody’s head in, I simply retreated from it.

One of the reasons I’m intensely introverted and live over 2,000 miles away from my family is because I am a mimic. It’s very easy for me to internalize what I believe others think I should be, and express that. Being a mimic is one of the reasons I’m such a great corporate copywriter. Somebody can hand me something I’ve never done – brand standards guide, templated literature sheet, executive summary, email to a specific customer segment – and I can write up something else with a similar feel and tone fairly quickly. In just five minutes with a brand manager or executive and a few bullet points, I can turn out a communication that’s very nearly spot on to what they were asking for– quickly and consistently.

But those things that make me a good mimic – empathy, a good ear, a knack for translating what it is people are trying to say – also make me very good at regurgitating versions of myself that I feel will be best received. It’s why my first relationship in high school was rather abusive, and why I stayed so long. And if I feel wholly inadequate to give people the performance I fear they’re looking for, I simply bow out and avoid people all together. If I don’t, I short circuit. It’s not good.

I have certainly gotten bolder in my old age, with my big boots and loud voice and crazy hair. In fact, for many years I have happily bumped along, not giving a shit about what other people think, and I’ve been pretty happy. But writing fiction for public consumption can make even the boldest loud-mouth totally neurotic. It pulls up a lot of old concerns about what people think, what they infer, what they expect of you.

When God’s War launched, my expectations were pretty low. I figured I’d sell about 5,000 copies. I’d consider 10,000 a pretty substantial success. After all, it was a weird book. It was feminist. There was swearing. Blood. Religion. Weird pacing. Plotting issues. And I was largely unknown.

When I sold 6,400 copies in the first six months after release, I wasn’t sure what to make of that. Nor of the reviews, which were largely positive despite the above weaknesses. When it got shortlisted for an award… well, I’m still processing that.

But it wasn’t until today when I saw the fourth or fifth mention of author guests at a book club on Twitter that I realized I’d gotten stuck in my own narrow view of myself, and my chances of success. Because whenever somebody talks about this particular venue I think of how it’s not exactly known to be the most friendly and welcoming community to women.  I think, “Wow, imagine how harsh that crowd would be. Guess that’s one more place that won’t be overly excited about my fiction.”

And sure, when I went ahead and actually looked at the book club, yeah, there weren’t a lot of female guests, but I saw that there were, in fact, SOME. Like a lot of SF in particular, it’s still mostly guys talking to guys. But not exclusively. I couldn’t pretend that if I never got an invite, it was just because I wrote weird feminist books.

But what shocked me in that moment when I went from “I will always be an outsider” to “oh, uh, well, maybe when I’m uber-famous” was that I was going to let myself sabotage myself. I was just going to say, “Well, that can never be done” instead of just merrily quipping off my usual, “Of course that can be done. I just need to work harder than other people to achieve it.”

I had let all the writer-freak-out-shit get to me.

I’ve talked a little about internalized misogyny, and my lowered expectations as a writer are a good example of it. “Oh, no one will ever read my books because they’re feminist,” is kind of a cop-out. There are plenty of other reasons if, say, my sales suck, or that no one comes to a reading. Is there sexism in the world? Are folks averse to reading really bizarre, uncomfortable fiction? Sure, but there are also people averse to wading through what amounts to a 50 page prologue and reading about morally bankrupt characters who muddle their way through poorly blocked fight scenes.

I found myself hobbled by this mindset at Epic Confusion, too, thinking the whole time, “Well, you know, it’s not like anybody knows who the hell I am. Who’d want to talk to me? Maybe I’ll just nap a lot.” So when some people did want to talk to me, I found it… really odd. I was still struggling with the fact that there were people coming up to me who actually knew I sucked air. I mean, I AM NOT ANYONE, PEOPLE.  I WRITE WEIRD BOOKS THAT NO ONE HAS READ.

This last year has been a transitional one for me. The business end of writing fiction is not an easy place, or a kind one. It’s heart-wrenching sometimes. As somebody with a chronic illness who will always need health insurance, I’ve spent the last five years coming to grips with the fact that I will always have to have a day job. For somebody who grew up wanting to be a full-time fiction writer, the reality of that is pretty brutal. I grew up with this passionate belief that you could do anything you wanted to do, as long as you were willing to work harder than anybody else for it.  But making anything less than Rowling-level dollars, one good cancer diagnosis for me or my spouse will wipe us out pretty completely without insurance (honestly, if we had no insurance now and one of us got cancer, we’d just die, because we couldn’t afford treatment without insurance).

So I had to decide this year if I was going to keep writing despite the bullshit and neuroses. And if I was going to keep writing, how I was going to make it a career that worked in parallel with my day job.

Basically, I needed to shit or get off the pot.

In the end, I made the decision to write, with the goal of a book a year – and a better book every year.  It’s a tall order, and I have to work hard for it. But the alternative, well….

The alternative is to just give up, give in. To just say be happy being a niche feminist writer that surely no one wants to read or talk to because, wow, man – WEIRD.

But you know what? It’s not like Perdido Street Station was run-of-the-mill fare, either.  I mean, WEIRD.

And today, I made the decision to stop trying to sabotage myself. I decided to start expecting more. Expecting better. And believing that what I have to say isn’t necessarily for a certain sort of reader, and that I have to just be content to sell enough to pay off the occasional credit card or take a trip to Florida. There will always be a passionate group of folks I wrote these stories for, and I will always love them best, but believing that I’ll never have more than a hundred true fans sells myself short. It sells my fiction short. And worst of all, it sells all my future endeavors short. It sabotages me before I even get started.

Failure is always easier than success. It’s easy to say that you failed because of some external thing. It’s harder to get up, dust yourself off, and say, “Next time, I’ll do better.” There will always be people around to beat me down, set my expectations, explain “the brutal reality” to me.

But, you know – I don’t need to be one of them.

Well, folks – you ask, I deliver.

Below is a very, very, very abbreviated reading list that I just pounded out top-of-mind before the panel. There is a massive epic ton of good stuff out there.  For more, visit The Carl Brandon Society and Feminist SF. Note that there is also some crossover between these lists.

 Race/Class/Gender Reading List

The Female Man, Joanna Russ

We Who Are About To, Joanna Russ

Carnival, Elizabeth Bear

Dust, Elizabeth Bear

Triton (Trouble on Triton), Samuel Delany

Illusion, Paula Volsky (lots of explorations of class, and often overlooked)

The Women Men Don’t See, James Tiptree Jr.

American Gods, Neil Gaiman

Brown Girl in the Ring, Nalo Hopkinson

Kindred, Octavia Butler

Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

Non-Western Fantasy (and SF) Reading List

Moxlyand, by Lauren Beukes

Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed

The Desert of Souls, Howard Andrew Jones

Redemption in Indigo, Karen Lord

Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jemison (am told her new trilogy is more so)

Ragamuffin, Tobias Buckell

Dune, Frank Herbert

Necropolis, Maureen McHugh

China Mountain Zhang, Maureen McHugh

The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson

Wild Seed, Octavia Butler

Acacia, David Anthony Durham

Though I can’t share my actual day job income numbers due to policies and all that, I can share exactly what percentage of my income this year came from where.  Honestly, I thought my writing income for the year was pretty high.

Yeah, folks: this is a GOOD writing year, in which I had TWO books published.

7pm, Friday Salon G: Race, Class, and Gender
Steve Piziks, Kameron Hurley, Kristine Smith, Sarah Zettel, Jay Lake

WHY YOU SHOULD COME:
Oh, come on, YOU DON’T WANT TO HEAR ME TALK ABOUT THIS WITH THESE OTHER COOL WRITERS? Most of the panels I’ve done have been at Wiscon, which means this panel is pretty much up my alley. Prepare for heavy ranting, when I’m not deferring to the far more interesting things my fellow panelists will be saying. If you’re a fan of GOD’S WAR/INFIDEL and you’re interested in my take on just how vital I think these things are to creating a believable world, don’t miss it.

11am, Saturday Salon H: Killer Parties (yes, the sort that kill people! kh)
Kameron Hurley, Cat Rambo, Steve Buchheit, Myke Cole, Michelle Sagara West

WHY YOU SHOULD COME:
For some bizarre reason, I will be moderating this panel. That means I get to ask questions like, “Who REALLY writes the best ensemble casts?” and “How do you choose which party member to kill first?” and “What’s the benefit of having the biggest asshole in your mercenary group survive til the end?” and “Why write a plot when you could write a killer party?” Ok, maybe I will be the only one excited by that last question. But for sure, I know we’ll have to talk about the lowest point your band-of-rogues/adventurers can get before they throw in the towel. And how we push them to that point. Muwhaha hahaaha.

4pm, Saturday Salon F: Non-Western Fantasy
Peter V. Brett, Kameron Hurley, Christian Klaver, Howard Andrew Jones, Saladin Ahmed

WHY YOU SHOULD COME:
Besides the fact that I’m here to blather on about worldbuilding and why pseudo-European-medieval may not be the most inventive, fantastical way to go, you’ll also have the chance to hear from folks who do actual Middle Eastern-type settings instead of post-apocalyptic settings like me – Howard Andrew Jones and Saladin Ahmed have written some lovely, evocative stuff. Come listen to us chat!

5pm, Saturday Salon E: Mass Autograph Session

WHY YOU SHOULD COME:
Because Night Shade isn’t at this con and I’m not sure how many vendors are going to have copies of my books, I’ll be bringing exactly 10 copies of GOD’S WAR and 10 copies of INFIDEL to the signing table for $10 a piece, so if you’ve been having trouble finding a hard copy, here’s your chance.

Really, though, you should come to sign and chat because there is nothing worse than sitting around behind a desk twiddling your thumbs while everybody lines up behind Rothfuss and Abercrombie.

11am, Sunday: Reading. Michelle Sagara West, Kameron Hurley

WHY YOU SHOULD COME:
Readings tend to be lonely times (EVEN LONELIER THAN SIGNINGS, HINT HINT) so I am not above bribery. I will be putting names in a hat and giving away two copies of GOD’S WAR at the end of the reading.

Also! I’ll be giving the audience a chance to vote on what they’d rather I read: the first chapter of GOD’S WAR or a select, not-too-spoilery exclusive chapter from RAPTURE (which not even my agent or editor has seen yet).

1pm, Sunday Salon F: Women in Combat
Carrie Harris, Jim Hines, Kristine Smith, Scott Lynch, Kameron Hurley

WHY YOU SHOULD COME:
It’s a little-known fact that my Master’s Thesis was an examination of the propaganda used by the African National Congress to recruit female fighters during apartheid. I have a lot to say about the perception vs. reality of female fighters, and for the most part, I don’t bullshit about it in my fiction, either. We are all, I take it, folks who write about women who fight – and not just metaphorically. Kristine Smith’s Jani Kilian books are many, and feature a fine fighting heroine. And Jim Hines… well, Jim Hines is this guy. I mean, do you really want to miss that?

Since I’m heading to my first con as a “real writer” next week, I thought it was time I put up a post about my take on fan fiction written in my worlds/featuring my characters, since there is, uh, rumor that some may be floating around.  That way I can refer back to it whenever I get asked the question (because it’s inevitable this will come up, unless you’re the type of writer who doesn’t write character-driven fiction, in which case, nobody cares enough about your characters to bother. Cat Valente says this all much better than I can).

First, I’m incredibly happy you love these worlds and characters enough to write about them. That is so wacky awesome I can’t even say. When you write all kinds of wicked crap like I do, all you can do is hope somebody loves a character or two half as much as you do. To find folks who love them MORE than I do is great.

That said, PLEASE do not send me links to fan fiction of my work, or tell me where to find some. Here’s why:

There is this tricky law to do with copyright that says that if I actually see somebody “infringing” on my copyright (writing in my worlds/about my characters), I must “defend” that copyright by immediately issuing a cease and desist and etc. If I don’t do this, then a lawyer could argue that because I didn’t defend it then, that anybody could just start publishing copies of GOD’S WAR (with or without my name attached) and start selling them for $50 a pop and not only would I not get a cent, but there would be nothing I could do about it – because I hadn’t defended my copyright on the work when it was initially infringed by a fan fiction writer just doing it for fun.

That… sucks. There’s nothing I’d like better than to share and engage with fan fiction (I would LOVE to have a whole fan fiction message board here! Alas), but if that opens the door to somebody else writing and selling books with characters I created and making money off it while I’m still alive (or even my own books! And not pay me anything for them!) – well, sorry. Book money pays for stuff like vacations, home improvements, car repairs, and holiday gift-giving. Yes, I can do without that stuff, but I have absolutely no intention of my 15 years of hard work (and continuing work) just evaporating overnight. I like to have a good time with what I do, but I’m not a fucking doormat.

Folks vastly underestimate the time and effort that goes into writing books. I work a 40-hour day job (copywriting), do freelance writing an additional five hours or so a week, and then write an additional 10-20 hours of fiction a week. This doesn’t including blogging, interviews, marketing time, accounting time, or any other administrative work. All that additional work netted me about $8,000 last year (before taxes).

It’s not like I’m swimming in gold, here.

So though I may not personally give a care in the world if you write, share and post fan fiction (just don’t tell me about it! I’m not allowed to read it!), the minute somebody tries to sell something that infringes my copyright, well, THEN I am going to “become aware” of it – and that’s when the agent, the publisher, and the lawyer get involved.

So, quoting Cat Valente again: “Don’t make money off it and we’re cool.”

I love writing books. I love people reading my books. I love people loving my books and the people in them.

Thank you for loving my books.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been social, so I’m looking forward to meeting and re-connecting with folks I haven’t seen in years. If you’d like to see me rant about all sorts of crazy things I like to rant about, or just sign a book, or just want to say hello, here’s where I’ll be:

7pm, Friday Salon G: Race, Class, and Gender

Steve Piziks, Kameron Hurley, Kristine Smith, Sarah Zettel, Jay Lake

11am, Saturday Salon H: Killer Parties (yes, the sort that kill people! kh)
Kameron Hurley, Cat Rambo, Steve Buchheit, Myke Cole, Michelle Sagara West

4pm, Saturday Salon F: Non-Western Fantasy

Peter V. Brett, Kameron Hurley, Christian Klaver, Howard Andrew Jones, Saladin Ahmed

5pm, Saturday Salon E: Mass Autograph Session

 11am, Sunday: Reading. Michelle Sagara West, Kameron Hurley (PLEASE COME! I shall bring a sneak peak of RAPTURE. And possibly give away a copy of GOD’S WAR)

1pm, Sunday Salon F: Women in Combat
Carrie Harris, Jim Hines, Kristine Smith, Scott Lynch, Kameron Hurley

It felt so daunting this year that just getting in 20 minutes on the bike a couple times a week counted as a win. Getting in 10 minutes of weights in the morning was just… agony. Churning out 90 minutes a day in fitness, for me, was like trying to churn out three thousand words a day in writing was for me not long ago – total agony.

But over the last few weeks, all that stutter-stop finally changed. I’ve been consistently getting in 60-100 minutes of fitness time each day, at least 5 days a week, and I’ve even started putting in 20-45 minutes on the weekends.

Here are some of the tricks that helped me turn the corner:

1) I like fitness videos. I have a whole library of them. The trouble is, you do them enough and they get achingly monotonous. It’s not that I couldn’t do that 15 minute video in the morning, it was just that the thought of doing it felt like too much to ingest at 5:30 in the morning. And 30 minutes? 40 minutes? Yeah, at 5:30 a.m., that’s just laughable.

I realized a while back that because I’d done these so many times, I didn’t need to listen to the sound, so I listened to music instead. But that only worked for so many minutes, because invariably, I’d listen to the same kind of music, too. It was monotony multiplied.

Instead, I decided to try listening to podcasts while I worked out. Audio books can work for this, too. The idea was to give my mind something else to occupy itself with besides the grinding monotony or how tough certain exercises were, or how tired I was. I needed a brain exercise that could trick my mind into staying busy so it didn’t obsess over what my body was doing.

And, sure enough, I went from throwing tantrums about having to workout 15 minutes in the morning to working out 30-40 minutes in the morning with ease. Time just clipped along, and before I knew it, I was fitter and more informed. Now I’m rolling out of bed in the morning actually looking forward to the a.m. workout instead of looking at it like something to dread.

2) If you have Netflix, you can stream it on your phone. Most folks who have Netflix know this, but sneer at the idea of watching something on such a small screen. Well, guess what? When you’re working out at a gym that doesn’t have little TV’s in the readout, this is an absolute lifesaver.

I was working out at my day job gym a couple times a week for 20-30 minutes, really struggling every time. Then I remembered Netflix had come out with its Android app.

Literally overnight, I went from doing 20-30 minutes to 50-60 minutes on the elliptical each workday. There are plenty of long-running shows to choose from. Start at season one, episode one, and dig in. I’ve already started associating midday and evening workout routines with the pleasure of catching up on my favorite shows.

3) I like video games. I also need to workout. But, as yet, I don’t have a Kinect, just a Wii Fit with the same half dozen games that I’ve gotten sick of. But if you have something like a stationary bike at home (much more compact and easy to manage in a house my size than our old elliptical was), park it in front of your TV and play video games to help take your mind off the burn.

I’m slowly working my way through God of War III when I’m not ingesting massive amounts of serial TV (we don’t actually have proper TV programming in my house, just Netflix. That means I don’t watch any season of anything until it shows up there, so I tend to get it in bulk).

4) Whenever I thought “fuck, I need to workout for 90 minutes. Where the hell can I find 90 minutes? How can I keep going for 90 minutes?” I just got discouraged. Instead, I break it up. I do 30 minutes in the morning, 30-60 minutes at the day job gym, and another 30-45 on the exercise bike when I get home. By breaking it up into chunks, there’s no one workout that feels like 90 minutes of death.

This being Friday, and wanting to having the full sum of my Friday night for leisure, I already got in my 90 (30 this morning, 60 at the day job gym), so when I get home, I don’t even have to concern myself with the extra evening workout unless I feel like it.

Now, all of the above is primarily cardio work, with some strength training in the morning mixed in. When I finally get to the heavy lifting stuff, I intend for that to be on top of what I’m already doing, but I’m sure that if I can figure out how to be active 2-3 hours a day instead of just 90 minutes as a sedentary writer-type -you’ll be the first to know.

Sure was DARK. Sure was STORMY.

We’ve all experienced it: you’re reading along and you find a scene in a book that you could swear you’ve read a hundred times before – in some other book, or in some other show.

There’s a formula to much traditional storytelling, especially the stuff that’s written and/or produced very quickly. Formulas are great for creators. They help you bang out stories – whether it’s novels, short stories, TV or movie scripts – quickly. It’s the boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl setup (always the boy doing the doing, of course). It’s the opening montage comments about a country in some travel show that asks a question, shots with happy locals, pretty scenery, ruminations on the question, and finally, an end-of-episode sum up that answers the question.

Frames and formulas have their place. They create very comforting stories. I like watching shows where I know that – unlike in real life – the bad guys are going to get it. One of the shows I saw falling into formula its second or third season was Burn Notice. There would be some ruminations on the overall plot arch, then the introduction of a Wronged Client who would enlist the help of the ex-spy and his team. The ex-spy would be reluctant, nearly turn them down, but be urged to take on their case by his team. They would vanquish the bad guys while sharing some McGyver-esque spy facts with the audience, save the Wronged Client, and meet for drinks afterward and touch on the overall plot arch for the show.

It’s nice to know the good guys win, and good people are saved, but to be honest, that formula was getting old. In Season 4, they started doing something different. The stories the Wronged Person told them weren’t always true. In fact, sometimes they were outright lies. The situations became less black-and-white and more complicated. Instead of every plan working, the first plan or two often failed. There were more double-crosses, more unexpected explosions, and a lot more gunfights. Main characters got shot, or kidnapped, or interrogated (sometimes by the supposed Wronged Client, sometimes by their own team members). Changing the formula resulted in a much higher level of suspense. The neat, cozy story I expected wasn’t so cozy after all (I recently watched one where the supposed Wronged Client was shot dead within the first 15 minutes of the show, and we learn that he wasn’t quite as Wronged as we thought). As a result, the show became much more interesting, and though I don’t think the writers have the guts to truly take out one of the show’s main characters the way, say, Joss Whedon would, I’m certainly a lot more interested and invested in these stories than I used to be.

One of the problems with being reasonably well-versed in genre tropes is that they’re easy to fall back on. When I’m writing fast, it’s easy to throw in the scene where they defuse the bomb with 1 second left on the clock, or have everybody speak a “common” tongue so you don’t have to deal with tricky stuff like who can understand what’s being said in what language, or god-like aliens ruled by logic who are trumped by the human spirit/power of our emotions, or those bizarre nursing scenes where a guy gets injured and a woman patches him up and they totally fall in love.

But what’s wrong with this stuff, really?

On the face of it, nothing. They’re good stuff. People like them. It’s why they endure. They’re comforting. In a world of chaos and infinite possibility, it’s sometimes nice to sit back at the start of scene and know exactly how it’s going to end (“Oh, she’s patching him now! Finally, they will fall in love!”).

Trouble is, if you’re going for maximum tension and suspense, the kind of thing that keeps even the most jaded reader hooked, you need to push beyond these cozy tropes. I recently finished reading Stephen King’s Misery (ha ha, I know). The guy’s early books have the most masterful plots because they are often so bloody unpredictable (I kept expecting that the movie ending was different than the book ending. I should have known King wouldn’t kill his Writer, but I totally expected it). The genius of Misery was in casting a totally mad and unpredictable antagonist. You really never knew what she was going to do next, and each random horror she came up with was more horrifying than the last. You kept thinking, “Surely, she can’t get any worse,” and sure enough, she did. And the ante was upped in such a way, and set up in such a way, that when all the horror happened, you totally believed it.

King also doesn’t fall into the superhero trap. His protagonists are totally ordinary people, and they act like the way real, flawed, terrified people would act. For every one of us who says, “I would fight back! I would totally beat that psycho up and escape!” there are those of us aware of exactly how pain and fear and sickness and terror can utterly transform a brave, reasonable person into a screaming, urinating, flailing wreck. His protagonists are, if nothing else, terrifyingly human… and masterfully flawed.

This brings me to why I’ve been thinking so much about clunking old tropey scenes lately. Last night, I finished a draft of a scene that anybody who’s ever read a book or seen a movie set in the desert has seen before. You’ve read this before:

Sorry, dude. No one is coming. Now what?

The protagonists are trudging across a vast desert, either because they were dropped off there, driven there, or need to cross it to get somewhere. Their water has run out. They continue to trudge along. The sun is very hot. The sand is very hot. It is, indeed, very hot. They start dropping across the sand like flies, leaving a long trail of bodies along the way, until there’s only one person left, usually dragging another one with him, and still no sign of water, or an encampment. Death must surely be certain!

But, of course, we know death is anything but certain. In fact, we’ve read this so many times we KNOW it’s not.

When you read this scene you pretty much know that one of two things will happen: 1) the last person standing will find water right before they collapse 2) the last person will collapse and it will look like everyone dies. But then! They wake up and are being cared for by some local desert people and brought back to health.

Hurrah!

The reason this scene became so popular is because, well, the FIRST time you read it, it’s pretty suspenseful. I mean, your protagonists are in the desert! It’s hot! No water! No shelter! They’re going to DIE! The trouble is, when a scene has been done to death by everybody, the chances are your readers have read/seen it at least a couple of times. That means when they start the scene, they already know how it’s going to turn out. They’ll find water or the locals will save them. No worries.

Miracles are cool, but if you're just waiting around for the dragon, well, you're sacrificing tension.

And suddenly, this scene that was supposed to have such great suspenseful potential becomes something gimmicky and sad and… well, boring.

So I did what I do when I realize I’ve written something I’ve seen a million times (and don’t like. Oh, let’s be clear. There are some tropes I cling to so passionately that I won’t dump them, but that’s the subject of another post). I did some googling about the salt content of blood. I sat down and discussed the scene with J., and he made some suggestions about bugs, which led to me to thinking about a scene in the Conan movie when Conan attacks and eats a vulture while he’s hanging from a tree in the desert. And that got me to thinking about birds, and my world’s shape shifters, and maybe clouds of birds, and blood, and bugs. Hrm.

There are many ways to save your protagonists, but for me, it’s far more satisfying to figure out how the ways of the world and my protagonists’ own resourcefulness can help them save themselves. Maybe they don’t find water. Maybe no one saves them. Maybe they do something else.

It’s the “something else” that’s my job as a writer to figure out. That means sitting down and thinking about scenes, not just going with the first thing that occurs to me (because trust me, all my first ideas are crap). It means a lot of googling. And a lot of time at the library. Honestly, it hurts my head. I spent so long trying to figure out some truly strange tech for my same-world related short story, Angels and Avengers, that I pushed out the release date from September this year to September next year. I needed the time to gnaw on how to create something really different.

For instance, space travel tech in films hasn’t changed much since I was a kid. It’s all bulky suits and helmets and escape pods and cruisers. It about blew my mind the other day when I was rewatching Thundercats of all effing things and they board another ship by just beaming this laser/ray thing into it, cutting it open, and then having the boarding party walk across this ray of light and into the ship. No physical umbilicus. No leaping onto the ship and opening a hatch. Just, you know, BEAM OF LIGHT. Which got me to thinking about all the other stuff I make assumptions about when I’m writing.

For an SF/fantasy writer, there is nothing that will kill your fiction more quickly than falling into assumptions. I still do it all the time, and every time, I pay for it. I would rather say something ridiculous, though, like “She cut off her hair with a machete” (you can, in fact, saw off long hair with a very sharp machete [google it], though there has been some contention about that from readers) than just have somebody go to the barber. I would rather have people die who aren’t supposed to die. And heroes fail who aren’t supposed to fail.

Definitely more interesting than trudging through a barren desert.

Now I’m going back and re-writing my trudging-across-the-desert scene. It’s looking a lot different so far. There are no happy-to-save-you locals (there are, in fact, some “fuck you!” locals), and no nourishing water wells. Tough choices have to be made. Blood is spilled. And there are some fist-sized, flesh-eating bugs that show up to make things really interesting. Oh, sure, some people are “saved.” But some aren’t. Some plans fail. And coming out alive in this one has a lot more to do with digging deep and being resourceful than falling over and hoping for the best.

I know which one I find more interesting, and far more suspenseful.

Because the truth is, it’s honestly more fun if the bomb goes off, and nobody can understand each other, and the god-aliens are the unpredictable, overly-emotional ones. Why is it more fun? Because fewer people take the risk of writing it that way.

There are a bazillion people in the world who can write books. The only thing you’ve got on any of them is your ability to write something in a different way than other people are writing it.  It’s filtering your words and worlds through your own unique experiences, and forging a road through the bloody fucking buggy volcanic spew of mud instead of happily skipping along on the pavement.

Ok, so, maybe that’s my road.