Easily my favorite use of AI image generators yet: Jodo Tron. Outstanding work by Johnny Darrell, which should wake up anyone, like me, that tends to downplay the impact of the technology. (Though note that to animate and film this credibly, you would have to have humans painstakingly recreate every detail as costumes, sets and 3D models)

In this Twitter thread, author (Proof of Corruption), attorney, and online investigative journalist, Seth Abramson offers a fascinating take on the QAnon cult.

Reed Berkowitz is the director of the Curioser Institute, which explores the structure and psychology of storytelling through interactive experiences — largely using games, particularly with augmented reality. As a professional game designer, he's been fascinated by QAnon, and the ways it seems to have exploited and subverted the tools of interactive gaming with almost frightening efficiency and deliberate intention. — Read the rest

Need a fancy-lookin' mockup of a book? Sebastien Castiel's 3D Book Image Cover Generator does it using CSS, meaning it can be embedded in all its spinny glory using only raw HTML.

One out of seven men will get prostate cancer. Unfortunately, most of the risk factors have to do with age, race, and family history, so they are not modifiable. But new research suggests that daily orgasms will reduce the risk of prostate cancer by over 20 percent. From The Telegraph:

The study data showed that the participants who ejaculated more than 21 times a month were at a 22 per cent lower risk of getting the disease. As for how men achieved ejaculation, it is not a requirement to have a sex partner. Whether it be sexual intercourse, nocturnal emission, or masturbation, all are beneficial.

From an interview with Dr. Jennifer Rider of Harvard Medical School, who conducted the research:

The current study is the largest prospective study to date on ejaculation frequency and prostate cancer. It includes 18 years of follow up of almost 32,000 healthy men, 3839 of whom later were diagnosed with prostate cancer. We asked men about their average monthly frequency of ejaculation between the ages of 20-29, 40-49, and in the year prior to the questionnaire (1991). We find that frequency of ejaculation throughout life course is inversely associated with risk of prostate cancer at all three of these time points. For instance, men who have an average monthly ejaculation frequency of 21 or more times/month at ages 40-49 have a statistically significant 22% reduction in risk of developing prostate cancer compared to men with a frequency of 4-7 times/month, adjusting for multiple dietary and lifestyle factors, and prostate cancer screening history.

Dr. Rider adds: "While these data are the most compelling to date on the potential benefit of ejaculation on prostate cancer development, they are observational data and should be interpreted somewhat cautiously."

(Image: Wikimedia/National Institutes of Health)

Two pieces of reading homework before we begin:

First up, the ever-smart Kameron Hurley — the Cold Equations that govern publishing.

Second, the big news surrounding the Author’s Guild survey that suggests more and more authors are getting paid less and less, and something-something poverty line.

Kameron’s link — I got nothing to add except, high-five to her for talking about this stuff.

The Author’s Guild survey — nnnyeah, I’m not really willing to count that as meaningful information. The data in that survey, according to Publisher’s Weekly, skews this way:

The survey, conducted this spring by the Codex Group, is based on responses from 1,674 Guild members, 1,406 of whom identified either as a full-time author, or a part-time one. The majority of respondents also lean older—89% are over the age of 50—and toward the traditionally published end (64%).

Note that I am not a guild member. I’m not sure I know many (any?) guild members.

It’s a very narrow slice of the author cake, and made even narrower when you consider how many of them are strictly traditionally-published, and how many are over 50 years of age. (I’m not suggesting any age-ist critique, but rather, I’m noting that the more you dwindle survey participants, the shallower the pool becomes of meaning.)

That said, regardless of the depth (or lack of depth) the author’s guild survey possesses, I think once in a while it’s a good idea to wad up all the financial realities that surround a writer’s existence, cram them into a cannon, and then fire them top speed into your solar plexus.

I am a full-time writer.

I do pretty okay for myself. I support my family with my words, which is pretty cool — and, no doubt, pretty rare. I am aware and have been privy to the many peaks and valleys of a writer’s career, and the key to surviving as a writer is learning how to survive the valleys — either figuring out how to glide from peak to peak, or having a plan to weather the lean times when things go down. Surviving the peaks is easy — everyone enjoys good news. But some authors can’t navigate the stark elevation drop and, understandably, move on to more stable ground.

Let’s talk about the financial realities that you’ll deal with — both peaks and valleys.

On advances, sure, there still exists those advances that are $100,000, or are up over a million. But if you’re a new author, you’ll probably find yourself in the $5k – $15k range. And if you’re a practiced, published author, you might drift higher, which is from $15k-35k.

You’ll note that none of those numbers individually make for good full-time money.

You can do okay on $35k, but depending on where you live, it might strain the budget.

(And here, a digression: where you live actually matters to the writer. It doesn’t matter in terms of BEING CLOSE TO THE ACTION — your proximity to NY Publishing is not as important to an author as proximity to LA MovieLand is to a screenwriter. No, it matters because some parts of the money cost less than others. If you are one of those writers who wants very badly to live in New York City or its surrounding environs, be prepared to discover that your book advance will pay for 14 minutes of rent, and you’ll be able to maybe afford an apartment that is roughly the size of a dented Porta-potty. In fact, spoiler warning: it is a dented Porta-potty. This is also true if you want to live in most of the big cities. Everything in the cities is more expensive. I live in Pennsyltucky, where things are more expensive than, say, Down South or the Middle Of American Cornsville, but remain a helluva lot less expensive than NYC. So, if you want your advance money to stretch like Spandex — don’t live in the city. Also don’t forget to budget for health care.)

Now, one of the ways that this is softened somewhat is that an author often ends up signed for a multi-book deal — usually two or three, or if you’re the mighty John Scalzi, a 43-book deal to the tune of a basket of golden dodo eggs. (That monster doesn’t even hoard his eggs like a proper person would. He just eats them. Greedily eats the baby golden dodos right out of their little luxe eggs. The crunch of tiny porcelain bones echoing across his moon veranda.) So, a $5k book deal becomes $10k or $15k. A $33k book deal, when tripled, becomes a low six-figure deal. And when that happens, that’s you cresting a peak — but it’s also good to keep your eyes peeled ahead for when that money dries up and leaves you again in a valley. (Valleys are when you try to write the books you owe and also try to stir up new book deals.)

Ostensibly, this is a good thing.

Except –

Consider the nature of the multi-book deal. Often they want to turn this into a series deal — three books might mean a trilogy, or two books might mean the start of a series (or more problematically, two-thirds of a trilogy, which means if those two books don’t sell, the trilogy will never complete). This is a tough row to hoe because traditional wisdom says that book sales for an SFF series don’t tend to go up — so, if you sell 1500 copies of that first book, it’s not expected that book two will sell more than that and is likely to, in fact, sell fewer copies. I distrust the logic behind this, as some readers want to buy into a series after it has a few books out — or they want a trilogy only when it’s completed because they’ve been burned too many times by trilogies that failed to complete — and ironically, it’s this exact logic that sometimes causes trilogies to die in the crib. B&N will see that the first book didn’t sell that well, and they will cut order for the second book — which helps ensure that second book will sell more poorly, at least in physical format. (B&N has a surprising amount of sway when it comes to traditional publishing. They can demand new covers, new titles, and so on. As the last big player in books, they have juice and they use it. Of course, they also lose more and more of their retail floor space to Things That Are Not Books.)

(Also worth a good news note here: indie bookstores are on the rise, sales-wise. But back to the bad news, B&N has suffered a loss again for the fifth straight quarter.)

Of course, that’s all physical stock. E-books are a different world, and Amazon rules that world.

Mostly. Sorta.

We now have news that says e-book sales are plateauing or even slipping in the face of print sales — the logic being, people are going back to print sales and that print is more future-proof against the digital insurgency. (Anecdotally, I have gone back to mostly print reading except when I’m traveling. Electronic devices are sources of distraction, and even when they’re walled off from those distractions, they still tickle that twitchy internet-social-media-gamer gland in me and I find it harder to lose myself in the book). Of course, what you also need to note is that publishers set the e-book prices, and have in the last several months bumped those prices up, up, up — and Amazon undercuts those prices by dropping the physical copy cost.

So, what about e-books? All of this has been very firmly traditional-flavored — what about the author-publishers putting their own work out there? I’ve discussed this in the past, but obviously with self-publishing you lose access to any kind of advance and you cut off access to certain outlets and resources, but you also gain immediate access to data plus them sweet, sweet percentage cuts of each sale. (Though the larger cut of sales should feed back a little into the ecosystem as you pay for things like covers and editors and majordomos and jet-skis.)

Self-publishing has serious value for any author, but Amazon now dominates that ecosystem. Amazon sets the rules and can change them with the fickle whimsy of a maniac artificial intelligence. NOW YOUR PERCENTAGES ARE CUT IN HALF AND ALSO FOR EVERY BOOK SOLD YOU WILL RECEIVE AN ELECTRICAL SHOCK, Amazon yells through your computer speaker. And you say, quite correctly, But I can leave you any time, Amazon. And Amazon tells you to go ahead, sure, you go right ahead and leave. And then you leave and you discover that because so many people invested their time and effort into the Amazon ecosystem that really, the other sales environments are nowhere near as robust and so while you technically have other options, that’s like saying to a food vendor, “You don’t have to sell in the grocery store, you could just set up a farmstand on the side of the road.” A viable option for some, and some will truly rock the freedom of that. Others will find the lack of access to a wider audience a struggle. Plus, Amazon institutes new programs with the distractibility of a toddler on bath salts. KINDLE UNLIMITED. KINDLE SCOUT. KINDLE WORLDS. KINDLEFACE. KINDLE UNIVERSE. KINDLE DEEP DREAM. KINDLEPALOOZA. SOYLENT KINDLE. Those present new opportunities — opportunities to make more money and sell more books sometimes. And sometimes, opportunities to have the algorithms shift like tectonic plates, losing you sales and cutting your income.

The majority of your sales will come from Amazon and, if you promote it, from direct sales. B&N, Kobo, Smashwords — those sales will be, by most experiences (though not all!) marginal.

Let’s talk a little about sales numbers.

A book that sells a few thousand copies is probably a book that’s doing well.

A book that sells a few thousand copies in its first week is really spiffy.

Some books sell a few hundred copies. Which is, erm, not ideal.

If you want on a bestseller list, expect that you’ll need to sell (roughly) 5,000 copies. Each bestseller list is curated differently and fails to factor sales from certain sources (libraries, f’rex).

For the record, that means that in a country with a population of 320 million, a bestselling novel might reach less than 0.002% of the total population. Books are a niche market.

Selling a few thousand copies also might mean earning out your advance — note that the higher the advance, the harder it is to earn it out. There is no guaranteed metric on earning out. Depends on format, book cost, where they sold, who the publisher is, if a butterfly flapped its wings in Tokyo, and if you put out the proper sacrifices to all the local and national gods. Note too that booksellers can also return unsold books which can ding your sales numbers and, for all I know, impact your spiritual karmic debt and force you to be reborn in your next life as an unpaid Huffington Post blogger. *sad trombone*

Some publishers share sales data quickly. Some won’t share it until your statements are due, and publisher statements arrive with all the speed of a three-legged, antediluvian mule. You have access to BookScan through Amazon, but BookScan is notoriously unreliable (expect it to reveal about 50-80% of actual print sales, and no digital sales — also it puzzles me to this day that Amazon refuses to offer authors the added value of telling them their daily sales numbers of traditionally-published releases, though that might undercut the value of their passive-aggressive impossible-to-discern “sales ranking” numbers, which have about as much meaning as the backwards-talking dwarf from Twin Peaks). A lot of time you operate under the auspices of grave, anxious uncertainty when it comes to the question of exactly how well your book is doing.

And how well your book does goes into the equation a publisher runs when considering whether or not to publish your next book. Again, go back to read Kameron’s post, where she lays this equation out as Books Sold + Marketability + Love. This equation also factors into bookstores choosing to carry — and hand-sell — your book. They’ll carry books that sell well. They’ll push books that will look good on shelves or that the publisher has promoted to sales tables or endcaps. They’ll carry and promote books by authors the booksellers or sales team likes. Amazon is of course outside of this — as they are outside many of the traditional systems (and mostly, thankfully so). Amazon gives little shit about you as an author or your book. They’ll sell it. It’s an always open access channel because they have theoretically infinite shelf space. Sure, this changes when it comes time to promote inside Amazon — getting onto deal pages or into certain sales — then who you are and what your book is might matter. Those are curated by people, not by whatever roving Spider Robots govern the rest of the site.

All of this is to say, it’s all quite tricky.

Peaks and valleys. And the “realities” I’m talking about are variable and unknown — so variable and so unknown that it’s hard to even peg them as confirmed realities. Writers don’t actually have a lot of data. We’re not sure what works, what doesn’t. We’re not given hard facts on why a book does well or why it doesn’t. You hear urban fantasy doesn’t sell, and yet Jim Butcher, Seanan McGuire, Kevin Hearne are all rocking. You hear horror is anathema, but some of the best books and writers out there right now are ostensibly writing horror novels (Paul Tremblay, Stephen King, Joe Hill, Mira Grant). As I am wont to say, publishing is positively oracular. It’s a lot of splayed-open pigeons and futures discerned through loops and piles of bird guts.

To go from peak to peak, you do what you can do.

What you can do is write the best book you can write.

That is, of course, nowhere near enough to save you or survive — bad books can do well, and good books die on the vine all the fucking time. Luck is a factor. You can lean into luck, but you can’t manufacture it. (Put differently: it’s easier to summon lightning than to create it.)

So, you not only write the best book you can write, but — you write as much as you care to write. How do I do this thing that I do? How do I personally survive the financial aspect of the writing life? I do it by writing a whole goddamn lot. That softens the valleys and lengthens the peaks because I keep a steadily rolling series of advances, royalties, and D&A payouts. Plus, I ameliorate all that with self-publishing money — that money comprises maybe 25% of my total annual income, but it comes faster and with monthly regularity. Ah, but here’s the rub –

Some traditional publishers have non-competes, which makes it harder to publish across multiple publishers and, if they’re being really rough on you, harder to publish self-pub work, too.

This can shiv a writer right in the kidneys if you’re not careful. Not that it’s not that understandable that publishers would want this — non-complete clauses that directly highlight specific competitive products (meaning, YOU CAN’T PUBLISH NOVELS IN THIS DIRECTLY COMPETING GENRE versus YOU CAN’T PUBLISH ANYTHING EVER EVER EVER AND DON’T EVEN TRY OR WE WILL MURDER YOUR FACE) are totally understandable. And even the broader competition can be problematic in terms of booksellers. Unlike Amazon, they don’t have infinite shelf-space and if two of your books are coming out close to one another, that means the bookseller may make the choice to carry one over the other — which further means that one publisher will lose out over another. Plus, if you’re hoping to hit awards or best-of-lists or gain media for the book season upcoming, having multiple books so close together again forces a choice. Do they talk about Book X or Book Z? Who wins? Who loses?

And yet, it’s very difficult for an author to survive publishing one book a year.

So, again, what do you do?

A savvy, sassy, diverse mix will keep your bills paid. Make a budget. Have a calendar.

Write some for a traditional publisher.

Write and publish some yourself, and time the releases accordingly.

Don’t sign contracts with clauses that box you up and choke you out. Help publishers who help you. Avoid publishers who treat you like anything less than a partner.

Get an agent — a good agent who works for you, not one who treats you like you work for them. Then, when you have this good agent, trust that agent. (But listen to your gut, too.)

Write across a variety of formats  — a novella here, a short story there. Write across media if you can manage it — freelance an article here, write a comic there, something, anything. Try a small press. Serialized content. Non-fiction. Keep loose. Get ready to jump to something new. Write only in one genre at your peril. Write only one type of thing to your detriment. Go all-in with any ecosystem and if that ecosystem dies, then what? Multi-class like a motherfucker. NINJA NECRO-WIZARD ACCOUNTANT. SORCEROUS DARK SIDE PALADIN. INQUISITOR FREMEN MONKEY TRAINER. Be a writer like those cool-ass assassins in movies where they unfurl their weapons case and it’s got like, knives and guns and grenades and lightsabers and shit. What you write is like your fighting style. Know many styles for maximum punch-fu. Be versatile. Be awesome. Be as productive as you are able and as career-focused as you can muster.

Don’t be some drunk driver just wildly veering through your career. Aim for stuff. Have goals and accelerate toward them aggressively. Stay sharp. Stay frosty. Be ready for the next thing, but not at the cost of the thing you’re currently doing.

Have a plan for the next year, for two years, for five years, and for ten years.

Course correct when you must.

But stay on target until you’re forced to do differently.

And fuck anybody who tells you that you can’t do this.

You got this. But you gotta have a hard head and a callused heart to survive.

Note that none of this information is going to be perfect — and no advice found here is perfectly applicable across the board. But it’s a good start.

A writing career is tough, financially, but far from impossible.

What else? What am I missing? Got questions?

Either me or other AUTHORIAL or PUBLISHING PROFESSIONALS might have answers.

[EDIT: Fellow penmonkey Django Wexler brought up a good point about subsidiary rights — one of the other ways to shorten the valleys and sharpen the peaks is through subsidiary rights. That means foreign rights, plus variable editions of the books [library, book club editions], audio, film/TV, games, etc. — you can’t really control those, strictly speaking, but what you can do is have you and your agent maximize your rights in that space. Keep as many of those rights for yourself and sell off the rights. The foreign rights for the Miriam Black series have paid considerably more than the domestic rights across two publishers. Add in the film/TV payment, and that number only jumps higher. Some publishers will keep certain rights, and when they sell the book’s rights, the advance is paid against your advance. Leading to theoretically quicker royalties. This isn’t ideal, though — the best and sharpest way to utilize those rights financially is to keep them for yourself and to sell them through your agent or through a sub-agent.]

* * *

ZER0ES.

An Anonymous-style rabble rouser, an Arab spring hactivist, a black-hat hacker, an old-school cipherpunk, and an online troll are each offered a choice: go to prison or help protect the United States, putting their brains and skills to work for the government for one year.

But being a white-hat doesn’t always mean you work for the good guys. The would-be cyberspies discover that behind the scenes lurks a sinister NSA program, an artificial intelligence code-named Typhon, that has origins and an evolution both dangerous and disturbing. And if it’s not brought down, will soon be uncontrollable.

Out now from Harper Voyager.

Doylestown Bookshop| WORD| Joseph-Beth Booksellers| Murder by the Book

Powells | Indiebound | Amazon| B&N| iBooks| Google Play| Books-a-Million

Let me say this up front: if you’re a writer of any age or experience level, you need to be looking at your writing process. Always. Yesterday, today, tomorrow. You gaze into it to see if there’s anything you do to change it. Anything you can do to understand it better. You’re looking for bolts to tighten, widgets to wax, hedgehogs to tickle. Anything to fully weaponize your writing process.

You don’t do this to become some kind of CRASS FICTION FACTORY. This isn’t (necessarily) about becoming faster. It’s about getting better. Why wouldn’t you want to tell better stories? Why wouldn’t you want to refine your process and make the thing that you do easier, more fun, and more awesome? WHY DON’T YOU LIKE AWESOME THINGS.

*clears throat*

Anyway.

My process is this, roughly:

At 6AM, I get up. Like a vampire rising from death into monstrous revivification.

I make myself some coffee. Pourover, because there’s something meditative about it. And the coffee is fucking amazing — I don’t just drink coffee for the kick. I drink it because it’s delicious.

I also drink it black as a mirror at night.

I put the coffee in a carafe — this one, actually — to keep it warm all day.

THEN I GO TO THE SHED.

I get quick shit out of the way — any outstanding ASAP emails or tweets or silly stuff like that. Sam Sykes may be tweeting at me from the end of his day and the start of mine.

And then by 7AM, I get my ass to work.

I write in Microsoft Word. I’ve tried Scrivener, because people love it. It’s not my thing (though I am pleased if it is yours). Learning curve is too steep, it’s ugly as bad wallpaper, and I’m comfortable with a draft in Word going all the way through to the Track Changes stages of editing.

One small ritual ritual I have is, I have to make sure the font is right on the story.

Just a thing I gotta do. Probably the only “quirky” ritual component.

(That and the “bathing in goat’s blood” at 11:11AM every day.)

Eventually my son will be awake, and when he is, I am summoned by text message and then I head inside to do the whole breakfast thing, where he eats whatever it is that he wants to eat — pancakes or eggs or maybe he just wants to gnaw on the table like a nibbly bunny.

Then I walk with the dog every day and some days, run.

Then it’s back to the keyboard.

I write until I’m finished for the day, which is — nngh? Bare minimum, 2000 words in the day, but ideally I go above 3000. Like, for me, 2k is a barely passing grade. A D+ or something.

I write roughly 1000 words an hour. The first 1000 words is a bit sluggish, but the second 1000 words is where I usually move at a brisker, more limber pace.

I generally write for an hour, then take 15 minutes off to, y’know, fuck off in and around the Internet. I get on Twitter and TWEET THINGS. I get on Facebook and BOOK FACES. The usual.

I’m done writing new content by early afternoon, usually.

Then it’s onto lunch and whatever administrative or extraneous stuff needs a-doing. Outlines, emails, spreadsheets, finances, remembering where I put my pants.

I tend to do blog posts on weekends, though sometimes throughout the week too if there’s something that chafes my pee-hole enough that I have no choice but to write about it ASAFP.

Again, everything gets written right into MS Word.

And everything gets edited there, too.

First drafts get a look ideally from my agent, and then an another edit/polish (again: perfect world) before it gets catapulted into my editor’s eyeballs.

I track my day’s writing with a spreadsheet. I know if I’m over or under my daily goals. And I also know where I’m at according to my overall writing plan.

I tend to write a new novel ever one to four months. That’s first draft. Edits take longer.

And I think that’s it. That’s the process.

But now, I turn the question around to you. What is your process? How do you do it? How much time per day? Do you write every day? Whatever you feel like telling us about your writing process, I’m all ears. Like I said, I’m always a process monkey and it’s interesting to hear how everyone does it — no writer has the same writing process as the next. Some are similar; others are wildly different. Hell, just the quest to discover one’s writing process (similar to the quest to discover one’s voice) can be epic. Where are you at in this quest?

I get this sometimes from new writers:

“Well, at least you’re published.”

Or, “Well, you’ve had a lot of books published.”

Kind of a must be nice comment.

And it’s not entirely false, either.

I admit — there’s a big privilege to being, y’know, a published author. (I hesitate to say a “successful” author, in that success is a bullseye duct-taped to the back of a coke-addled hop-frog. I consider it a success just to finish a book. That right there is an Epic Eat-A-Motherfucking-Cupcake-Messily Grade-A Bonafide Success. Remember, most people finish a novel Once Every Never.) It’s amazing having a book out there. On shelves. In people’s hands. I’m privileged that anyone would want to read whatever cuckoo shit I’ve dumped out of my own head onto the paper. I get to play in a sandbox for a living, and people pay me to do it so they can watch.

It is, in fact, weird and wonderful.

It isn’t, however, without its own kind of stress.

I liken it to this metaphor: in a RPG, you start out as some dick-nosed schlub hunting rats with like, a sharpened spoon. You’re the worst warrior ever, basically, or the crappiest mage who knows all the worst spells (“I cast UNTIE SHOES on the ogre!” “Sorry, he’s more than ten feet away, and your spell has a limited range.” “Oh, goddamnit”). So, you think, I just need to level up, and then I’ll get to do cooler stuff. And you will. Them’s tru-fax. You’ll get to leave the spoon behind and pick up a proper sword. You’ll eventually be able to, I dunno, conjure flaming birds that you can summon to attack your foes.

But your foes also upgrade at the same time. It’s not like you become RANTHAGAR, VAGABOND PRINCE OF THE HISSING WASTES but you still hunt mice with your legendary blade. Now you fight dragons. You get better, but the world gets harder to match your skill. The pressures of the narrative increase: before, the townsfolk just asked that you get rid of those rats out of stables and cellars. But suddenly they’re pleading for you to save them from stompy orc armies or big smelly naked giants who keep stepping on all the houses. The quests increase in difficulty. The monsters get bigger even as your sword gets sharper and starts to sing showtunes.

The real world analog is like this:

You get a book deal, yay.

Then the book approaches release. You start getting reviews and pre-orders and buzz. Or bad reviews and no pre-orders. Or good reviews and no pre-orders. Or no buzz. Or some buzz but not enough buzz. Then the book comes out and: nervousness and excitement! Magic and madness! It lands on shelves. Into people’s hands. You have no idea how many gets sold. Even if you’re self-published and you can see the metrics unfolding before you — you still don’t know how the book is really doing. Are they digging it? Quitting before it’s done? How far in do they get before they abandon it? (The wizards at Amazon probably know all of this. They probably can say, if pressed, “The moment they gave up on your book is when you used the word ‘widdershins’ on page 47. That is the moment you plunged your book into ruination and ignominy.”)

A book release is a bright flash: a supernova of heat and light. And then it kinda collapses back in on itself and there’s this vacuum in its place that is akin to the feeling of summer being over, or of a vacation ending, or of the pit of shame you feel after successfully masturbating. And then you do it all again: you try to generate more heat and light. You write another book. Or a third book because the second one is maybe already in the pipeline. And those books come out and –

Listen, it’s the same thing. It’s the same thing now for me (ZER0ES is my 13th novel) as it was when my first book came out. I still feel nervous and excited. I still feel full of magic and madness. I still feel hungry and bewildered and scared. The pressure is, in fact, worse. Because every book that lands has to do well, or the next book after it is suddenly in question. And every book requires some kind of extra effort beyond just writing it — you gotta do the marketing honeybee butt-dance, you gotta write blogs and be on your game and go do stuff amongst ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS (remember that many writers are just introverts playing at extroversion; all failed actors afraid of the stage). Every time feels like the first time. Every book feels like the first book.

Maybe that changes. Maybe it’s different for other writers — of course, it must be, given that we’re all different people and not cloned clippings from the Author Tree.

Still — for me, at least, it’s still the same.

It’s wonderful and horrible and scary and amazing all in equal measure.

And right now it’s even harder than it was when I started. I know more. I’m better at this. I’ve done well enough with my past books. And that only amps the pressure. It doesn’t reduce it.

I wouldn’t change any of it for the world, and I wouldn’t give it up for any other work. I adore it. This is the kind of pressure on which I thrive — but I think it’s worth noting that it’s the same all the way down. Unpublished writers, newly-published writers, legacy authors — I think we’re all just putting ourselves out there. Every book is a chance to make readers or lose them. Every story is one soaked with our blood and our tears and every story is our weirdo book-baby stumbling into the world. We all want the best for it. We all fear the worst for it.

But we keep on keeping on.

Because this is who we are. Isn’t it?

As many of you know, whenever I’m quiet I’m busy. Lately I’ve been very quiet because I’ve been very busy with my biggest project to date: a collection of essays on True Detective Season 1. I’m still at work on the final pieces of the manuscript, but the book will be coming out this summer from the good folks at Sequart publishing.

Much like my essays already available on Sequart’s site, the book will focus on the genre elements as well as literature, film, musical and comics influences at work in the first season. Adam & Mark Stewart are contributing a excellent piece focusing exclusively on the comics influences and I’ve written a musical appendix listing all of the songs used in the show along with a brief analysis of how they contribute to the scenes in which they appear. Miguel Rodriguez of the Horrible Imaginings Film Festival and podcast also contributed some intriguing film suggestions for our related readings/ viewings appendix.

Warren Ellis is a writer. You may know him from Transmetropolitan, his acclaimed cyberpunk comic book series about a gonzo journalist, or from his novels like Gun Machine. And then there are the television shows, film projects, and magazine columns, many of which comment on our relationship with technology and the future.

Read more...

Another new science fiction magazine has just joined the internet. Vice Magazine, which was already writing about science fiction via its excellent Motherboard site, has launched a SF mag called Terraform, with stories by Cory Doctorow and Bruce Sterling. But the interesting part is, they want to see more fiction go viral.

Read more...

The colorful life of Jack Parsons as revealed in the biography Strange Angel by George Pendle will appear on AMC in miniseries form, according to a Deadline report.

Laughing Squid: "The Hemingwrite is a writing device styled after 90s word processors that features built-in syncing to contemporary technology, letting writers back up to the cloud and apps like Google Docs and Evernote."

Author Karen Traviss has published a slew of successful books, from her own Wess'har Wars series to a number of Star Wars, Halo and Gears of War novels. But for her new techno-thriller Going Grey, she decided to walk away from a mainstream publishing contract and self-publish. She explains why.

Read more...

Tim Powers' novella, Salvage and Demolition, is a film noir love story showing time travel may not be neat and orderly.

Revival, Vol. 1: You’re Among Friends

These days there’s a lot of discussion around diversity in comics, both on the page and in the creative teams. There’s also a lot of noise about the “right” and “wrong” ways to add diversity to stories, most of which have more to do with personal taste than any objective standards of success. In light of all that, I want to nominate Revival as a series that is getting it right in all the best ways and pulling a cool twist on the nearly done-to-death (no pun intended) zombie genre.

One day in rural Wisconsin, the dead came back to life, but they don’t come back as zombies. The dead come back as themselves –  confused, disappointed, amazed and scared as everyone else around them. They are dubbed “revivers” and when a murder takes place at the same time as the revival, it’s unknown if these revivers really are who they appear to be. The event isn’t widespread; it’s limited to a single, sparsely populated county. The area is put under government quarantine as national media, religious zealots and conspiracy theorists descent gather to fan the flames of fear. We follow Officer Dana Cypress as she tries to solve a brutal murder and keep a lid on the mounting pressures of her community, family and personal life.

Author Tim Seely’s set-up is clever because it allows him to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of zombie stories. Everyone in the world of Revival already knows about zombies. They’re all aware of the Romero films, so Seely doesn’t need to waste any story time on characters struggling for a metaphor to understand what is happening. This frees Seely up to focus on the far more interesting personal struggles and conflicts his characters face. He also wisely limits the scope and duration of the revival event, which means that the story doesn’t get sidetracked with the possibility of everyone who dies over the course of it coming back to life. At the outset of the story there are a limited number of revivers. This allows Seely to switch the tension from panic over a growing horde of revivers to paranoia over undiscovered revivers hiding in the quarantined community. The fear is no longer of outsiders or others. The fear is that the familiar faces neighbors, friends and loved ones are harboring a dark secret. Who do you trust? Do you judge people by what you see on the surface or do you judge them by what you fear lurks beneath the surface?

In shifting the source of fear in Revival, Seely creates a story framework that emphasizes the relationships between characters, and in turn, the characters themselves. This is exactly the type of set-up that could be hampered by a lack of diversity in the cast. Every new gender, ethnicity, role, religion or class provides a new type of conflict or doubt between characters, another reason for characters to questions each others motives or to misunderstand their attempts to help. Seely chooses rural Wisconsin as his setting, an area where the population is usually assumed to be whiter than the snow that covers it all winter. In reality, the Midwest has a large Hmong population. Seely includes a Hmong community in the quarantined zone and fully incorporates it in the story. He also includes a Muslim man as the liaison from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, allowing him to bring up the very real generalization and fear happening in the US today. Three of the main characters (Dana Cypress, her sister Em and the reporter, Ms. Tao) are women and none of them are one-dimensional. They each have complex lives with shifting responsibilities to family, job and self-satisfaction.

What is most impressive is how diversity adds to the organic nature of setting, character and conflict created in Revival. The central conflict – that the dead have risen – is not new, but it’s just a starting point for the story. The setting defines what type of characters can populate the story. Diversity of characters increases the possibilities that can come out of the main conflict. Each of these three elements acts upon the other, working together to create a single story and in Revival, that story is an imaginative twist on a familiar tale.

I also need to throw in a few words of praise for artist Mike Norton. His style is clean and expressive. I love the resemblances he gives family members. Norton also rewards those of us who “read” the pictures as much as the text by providing visual clues (Keep an eye on those police patches!) and visual irony (On her way to investigate a murder Officer Cypress passes a sign that proudly proclaims “The City of Wausau is a CRIME FREE COMMUNITY.”). And the cover is great. Look at it up there, dripping with black & white noir and the cold desolation of a Wisconsin winter.

That’s all the raving I have in me for today, so if you want to know more go pick up Revival!

submitted by Will Kane

If you want to start from the beginning, part one of the True Detective Essay can be found HERE

THE WORLD NEEDS BAD MEN. WE KEEP THE OTHER BAD MEN FROM THE DOOR.

– Rust Cohle

Detectives Hart and Cohle are bad men in the position to do bad things. As Cohle points out to a prostitute, “Of course I’m dangerous. I’m police. I can do terrible things to people with impunity.” It’s a common theme in pulp and detective fiction that in order to stop criminals the men who chase them must become equally as brutal. What makes True Detective unique is that it doesn’t focus on the morality of Hart and Cohle’s decisions. It remains focused on the bigger question: Why does Evil exist? If Evil did not exist, there would be no need for men like Hart and Cohle voluntarily spend decades of their lives chasing it. If there were no monsters, we would need no labyrinths to contain them and no heroes to slay them.

In the Minotaur myth the hero is Theseus, a brave youth who volunteers to kill the Minotaur in order to end the practice of sacrificing boys and girls to him year after year. Cohle clearly fills this role in True Detective, being the driving, obsessive force who runs headlong in to the labyrinth in pursuit of the monster. But it’s Hart who fills a more quiet, but equally important role: that of Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos who falls in love with Theseus and gives him the ball of string he uses to make it out of labyrinth alive. For all the jokes about the “bromance” in True Detective, there’s no denying that Hart and Cohle are involved in a meaningful relationship. On Cohle’s side, the interest seems largely driven by utility at first – Hart is a good partner and does solid police work. Hart’s interest in Cohle is a little more enigmatic. Hart is well respected by his superiors. He’s on track to rise through the ranks of the police force, should he want to, and yet he chooses to partner with Cohle, an obvious trouble maker. Cohle bothers him on a visceral level, challenging Hart’s religion and calling him on the hypocrisy of spouting family values while cheating on his wife. There seems to be no gain for Hart in maintaining his partnership with Cohle, and yet he chooses to follow him in to the labyrinth once in 1995 and again in 2012.

In his interviews, Hart fancies himself a great judge of character, but ends up telling us more about his own nature than he does about anyone else. He is a man who knows what matters in life, what keeps people tethered to their communities and responsibilities. In the first episode, he describes the problem with Cohle by saying, “Past a certain age, a man without a family can be a bad thing.” In a later portion of the interview, he talks about his security business and Private Investigative work telling the younger Detectives, “once you’re out (of the police work), you have to stay busy. Most end up in the cemetery.” Both are good pieces of advice, but Hart isn’t great at following through on them. He loses his family through infidelity and his retirement is far less busy than he would have people believe. Still, he can see the thread that ties people and society together, just as clearly as Cohle can see the spiral pattern of the universe. Theseus and Ariadne, Hart and Cohle, both pairs of characters need each other in order to kill monsters and live to tell the tale.

One of the first things Cohle says upon waking up in the hospital after killing Errol Childress is, “We didn’t get them all.” Even fresh from a coma Cohle knows that the job of slaying Evil is not done. It is Detective Hart, the man who holds the string, the man who knows the way out of the labyrinth and back to society, who keeps Cohle from getting sucked in to his destructive spiral again by reminding him, “but we got ours.”

Detectives Hart and Cohle have done their time as bad men guarding the labyrinth. They’ve played their part and in turn, the job has taken a toll on them. By the end of the show Hart is gone to seed, divorced and estranged from his daughters. Cohle is a suicidal alcoholic. The only way for them to have a happy ending is to step away from the chase, to stop running down the same path only to find a different monster at the end each time. There are other, younger men like Detectives Papania and Gilbough to guard the labyrinth and fight the monsters. In time they too will age or die and the cycle will begin again with new names, new faces, new monsters. Time is a flat circle and this story is another version of a myth about a labyrinth, a monster to be slain and two people searching for a way out.

If you want to start from the beginning, part one of the True Detective Essay can be found HERE

IT WAS ALL THE SAME DREAM, A DREAM THAT YOU HAD INSIDE A LOCKED ROOM…AND LIKE A LOT OF DREAMS, THERE’S A MONSTER AT THE END OF IT.

– Rust Cohle

In the detective genre the term “monster” is nearly synonymous with the concept of big Evil – it’s not tossed around for street thugs who kill over drug deals gone bad or squabbling in-laws who shoot one another over a borrowed car. “Monster” is reserved for those who commit the most heinous of crimes: the rapists, the torture artists, the child killers. True Detective operates under the same rules. We see a parade of terrible people doing terrible things, but there’s only one individual referred to as a “monster.” It’s not even Reverend Tuttle, he of the child porn tapes. No, “Monster” is reserved for Errol Childress: the man with the scars, the man that Hart and Cohle chase through a labyrinth and kill.

The most famous labyrinth in the Western world is the Cretan Labyrinth, designed by the architect Daedalus to hold the Minotaur. Being the product of bestiality, the Minotaur fits the classical definition of a Monster, but he is also the living reminder of the sins of his father, King Minos. When he ascended to the throne of Crete, King Minos was obligated to sacrifice a beautiful white bull to show honor to the gods. Being greedy, King Minos ignored his duty and kept the bull for himself. The gods had their revenge on the selfish king. They made his wife, the queen, lust after the great white bull so much so that she copulated with it and birthed a deformed child with the head of bull and the body of a man. The Minotaur’s deformity and his entire existence is a direct result of his father’s greed and selfishness.

In True Detective, Errol Childress, the scarred man, also bears the sins of his father and grandfather. In episode 7, Hart and Cohle learn that Errol is the illegitimate grandchild of a member of the wealthy and powerful Tuttle family. If Sam Tuttle, Errol’s grandfather, had not been so sexually greedy and fond of philandering, there wouldn’t be a murderous bastard grandchild on the loose in the bayou. Like the Minotaur, Errol Childress also has a facial deformity that can be traced to his father. In talking to a former Tuttle family domestic servant, Hart and Cohle learn that Errol’s father burned him when he was just a child, giving him his trademark scars.

Both the Minotaur and Errol Childress are monsters and both fit the big “E” definition of evil; they are murderous, incestuous, the products of brutality and bestiality. Though they are removed from society these monsters still exact their tolls. In the Minotaur myth, every seven years the city of Athens chooses seven youths and seven maidens to be eaten by the Minotaur or die while lost in the labyrinth. Similarly, Errol Childress abducts and murders his young victims on a schedule and with a great deal of ritual. When Detective Cohle chases Errol in to a series of labyrinthine tunnels we see what appears to be a human skeleton with antlers wrapped in a shroud, a pile of children’s clothes and an altar made of branches and human skulls. Errol’s labyrinth is a final resting place for sacrificed children, just as much as the labyrinth of the Minotaur. Both places are shrines to death of innocents and the endurance of Evil. A chosen few enter, but only the monsters survive.

In most myths resolution comes with the death of a monster, but True Detective subverts this pattern. Hard and Cohle slay monsters in both 1995 and 2012, but they do not gain any satisfaction or resolution from their heroic deeds. If True Detective followed a standard narrative, the story would have ended in 1995 after the Detectives killed the bad guys and rescued a little girl. Instead, this “success” leads to a collapse of the partnership and further doubt and unease about the morals by which they live. No one else seems to notice it, but the detectives know theirs is a tainted victory. In truth, they didn’t really save the children the found. The boy was already dead when they arrived and the girl was irreparably damaged by her abuse. Cohle is particularly haunted by his actions, and the incomplete nature of his victory. When recounting the incident he says, “and that little boy and that little girl, they’re gonna be in that room again, and again, and again, forever.” In 2012, Hart and Cole chase Evil again, but this time there are no innocents to save. No children to rescue.The second time around, the Detectives want something more than to save people or protect their community. They want the truth about Evil, they want an answer to the question that haunted them for 20 years: why does Evil exist? When Hart and Cohle find and kill Errol, the physical embodiment of Evil, they find no answers. The center of the labyrinth may have held the monster, but it was devoid of the truth that they so desperately sought.

We don’t need to look to fiction to understand why catching a flesh and blood monster isn’t satisfactory. In real life, the government captured, tried and convicted Jeffrey Dahmer. Top forensic psychologists spent months questioning Dahmer, trying to learn what drove him to torture, rape, kill and eat his victims before decorating his home with their bones. Their interviews gave us more detail than anyone would want to know about these activities, but left us with no more insights as why such an Evil exists in the world. Capturing this real life monster left us with a few more tools in our psychological profiling kit, but it left the good people of the world just as powerless as we were before. We have as much hope of stopping the next serial killer as we do of stopping the next hurricane that will hit the Gulf coast. Evil is a cycle, a spinning force of nature repeating the same patterns over and over again. It cannot be stopped permanently, but it can be contained by structures like the labyrinth and held in check by men like Theseus and Detectives Hart and Cohle.

Our Thrilling Conclusion: Part 4: The World Needs Bad Men