HAPPY NEW YEAR, boys and girls! I hope y’all made it through 2020 without too many scars. As we slide into 2021’s DMs I’ve decided to try another little literary experiment: I’m going to post a novel chapter by chapter here on the wee blog this year. One chapter a week every Monday, starting next week.
It’s called Detained, a thriller with a dash (well, more than a dash) of sci-fi:
The employees and patrons of a remote rural bar get the shock of their lives when they’re unexpectedly and violently detained by a secretive military unit. The soldiers think this will be easy duty, but some of the people they’re detaining have unexpected skills … and when they fight back, things take a turn for the deadly — and the very, very weird.
I write a lot, and sometimes novels fall by the wayside because I either can’t figure out who would want to publish them or because they’re missing … something, usually quite mysterious. This is one of those novels.
I’ll be posting it here weekly, which will take us through to December. Each chapter will also include download links for PDF, MOBI, and EPUB files for that chapter. Then when the whole thing’s been posted I’ll make a complete novel version available as a complete PDF, MOBI, and EPUB download right here on the site for free. I hope you enjoy!
Writing a story can be hard work. There’s a huge difference between a premise and a plot, and bridging that gap can be difficult. I’ve certainly had plenty of experiences where a bright, shiny inspiration that seems destined to blossom into a robust novel turns out to have just enough gas to make a short story. Or the realization that the story I’m working on is boring me to death even though it’s technically novel-length and a real story.
In either situation, the weary writer will lean back from their keyboard and scratch their chin thoughtfully and contemplate how to salvage the situation. And sometimes they will make the terrible mistake of ginning up a Busy Emergency, which is a term I just made up.
The Midnight Sky
I started thinking about this while watching The Midnight Sky, a film directed by George Clooney, currently streaming on Netflix.
Some mild spoilers to follow.
It’s an okay film in which Clooney plays a dying scientist who remains behind at an isolated Arctic research station when it’s evacuated due to a global catastrophe that soon leaves pretty much the whole of humanity dead. He stays behind to contact the crew of the Aether, a spaceship returning from a mission to determine if one of Jupiter’s moons is habitable. They don’t know they’re returning to a planet that’s become a deathtrap, and Clooney’s character wants to warn them.
That’s an intriguing premise! The film itself is a bit slow, but well made. At one point about forty minutes in, however, someone lost faith in the forward momentum of their story and introduced a Busy Emergency.
A Busy Emergency is when you thrust your characters into a panic situation just to give your story some oomph, some sudden energy. It can serve to demonstrate their skills or the way they handle stress, and it can even tie into your larger plot. But even if it does, it’s generally a meaningless jolt of action designed to juice up a sleepy story. It’s easy to diagnose: If you can remove it and its consequences without changing the core of the story, then you know it exists just because the writer was worried they needed something to wake up the reader/audience.
In The Midnight Sky, life on board the Aether is presented as pretty comfortable. It’s one of those spaceships with perfect simulated gravity and lots of creature comforts. Everyone is nice, and two of the astronauts have started a relationship and gotten pregnant. The crew experiences some mounting anxiety when they can’t contact anyone on Earth, but otherwise their sole purpose in the story is to give Clooney’s character a reason to do things (there’s also a twisty bit that you can see coming from a mile away that emotionally links Clooney to the crew).
Suddenly, the Aether veers off course! Everyone on the ship leaps into action, fiddling with this or that and analyzing the situation. They determine they can still get to Earth, but will have to pass through an area of the solar system that has never been charted, so they don’t know what to expect. This Busy Emergency leads to some tragic consequences for the crew, but ultimately has zero impact on the trajectory of the plot. If you removed it entirely and just had the Aether sailing homeward in untroubled space waters, not much would change.
Busy Emergencies are usually a sign that you are stretching a premise, like taking a short story and making it into a novel. They can be short, intense scenes designed to offer an adrenaline spike, or they can be lengthy action sequences — possibly very good action sequences — that just don’t accomplish much.
The rule of thumb is, if you can remove a sudden infusion of action without requiring extensive rewrites, it’s probably a Busy Emergency and you should contemplate why it’s in there. Of course, you can make a Busy Emergency into a more organic bit of plotting if you figure out how to make it essential, if you can get it to do some plot work or character work — if you can make it into a sequence that would actually matter if it was removed.
Of course, a Busy Emergency is better than a Busy Disaster, which is what I wind up calling most of my failed novels. It’s also, not coincidentally, a cocktail I invented in which I pour the dregs of whatever’s left in my bar into a glass and chug it, then wake up a week later.
Something every writer has to deal with — and I do mean every writer — is rejection. Creative work is subjective to the Nth degree, and no matter what you will be rejected when you pitch ideas or submit work. In fact, I’ve experienced so much rejection in my own career success actually feels ominous to me. When I get turned down I sleep like a baby. When someone wants to buy a story I go on a bender and find myself at the bus depot, weeping and tearing at my clothes.
Infinite Variety
Rejection comes in many forms. There are, of course, those delicious rejection notes telling you with aggressive politeness that your work isn’t quite what the editors are looking for. There are the rejected pitches, which is usually an implied rejection in that the editor simply chooses not to buy it instead of explicitly rejecting it. There’s the peculiar joy of edit letters, where a story that was ostensibly not rejected gets such a heavy edit it’s almost the same thing. And then there’s the worst possible rejection — rejection after the fact, when you sell something and then the editor kills it for any number of reasons.
This is all great fun. But it’s part of the deal. When you try to put your work out there for money, you open yourself up to rejection. Learning how to deal with rejection is as important a skill as you can master in this business. You can’t let it get to you, or slow you down. Because if you do, you won’t get anything done.
Here’s how I deal with rejection. Your rejection is your own. You should give it a name and hug it to yourself when you sleep at night, and your way of dealing with it may be quite different — that’s okay.
1. Don’t linger. When I get a rejection — and again, I get a lot of them — I just mark it down and move on. I don’t think about it. At all. I don’t wonder why, I don’t analyze it, I don’t drink a bottle of whiskey and stare into the abyss. Or, yes, I do drink a bottle of whiskey, but for totally different reasons.
2. Get back in the saddle. When a story, novel, or pitch gets rejected, I immediately put it back on my list of things to submit. I aim to get it back into circulation as quickly as possible. I don’t care how many times something’s been rejected, because it only takes one person to buy it.
3. Wait a beat. Often, rejection comes with feedback. It’s tempting to read and digest that feedback immediately, but I recommend you wait. Reading feedback when you’re still upset from the rejection itself usually means you won’t be able to absorb whatever advice is contained in the rejection — or be able to tell good feedback from bad.
4. I drink. Heavily, sometimes.
Get used to rejection. The key is to realize that being rejected doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer, it just means you haven’t found a home for that particular piece yet. And maybe you never will, but that’s okay. Learning to keep moving forward in spite of rejection is probably the most important skill any writer can master.
That and appearing to be sober on Zoom calls when you’ve been drinking since 6AM. Of course.
This time around I discuss my short story No Great Trick, which was written when I was still commuting into New York City every day for my job, skulking in an office full of cubes and exhausting personal drama.
The story was published in 2003 at the defunct Drexel Online Journal, but I pubbed it here on this blog a few years ago, so you can read along with me if that’s your thing!
SO, I done went and wrote a new Ustari Cycle story. Idolator is set in the We Are Not Good People universe, and is a standalone story set after the events of that novel.
It’s funny how inspiration strikes. I last worked in this universe in the 2017 short story Nigsu Ga Tesgu, which was published in the anthology Urban Enemies. I didn’t consciously decide not to work with these characters and this magic system after that — there just wasn’t an inspiration to do so.
Then a few months ago I had an idea. Riffing off the idea of The Entertainment in Infinite Jest, I thought about a magical artifact that compelled your attention, that took over your pleasure centers. And then I wondered how it might be used to enslave people, and the chaos such a thing might cause. When you put magic, chaos, and darkness into a box and shake it, what comes out is an Ustari Cycle story starring Tricksters Lem Vonnegan and Pitr Mags.
The story is up for presale and will go live on December 15th. There’s a handy free sample available at Google Play, if you want to see what you might be reading before you buy.
If you’ve never read anything in this series, this is an easy way to dip your toe in and see if it might be for you. And if you have read the other stories, I hope this one lives up to the rest!
Ah, freelanced writing: The ideal career for people who hate comfort and serenity. It combines a few terrible things with one awesome thing: You get constant change and a lack of security, constant nerve-wracking negotiation and the occasional dispiriting edit, but at the end of the day you get to write things for a living, and that is marvelous.
It’s also mysterious and opaque for a lot of folks, which inspires some magical thinking. One question I’ve seen frequently concerning freelance writing as a career concerns tools: Things like Grammarly or FocusWriter that either purport to make your work better or help you to work better.
There’s nothing wrong with using (or paying for) tools that legitimately help you, and experienced writers can make those decisions on their own. But the questions I’ve seen recently concern the need for these tools — as in, do you need certain tools to be successful as a freelance writer?
And the answer is simple: Absolutely not.
Read Moar Books
The idea that you can pay a subscription to the right service and instantly (and easily) improve your writing and/or your income is fantasy. Grammarly is often required by clients, and I understand why, but let’s be blunt: Grammarly is trash and at least 50% of its suggested revisions make your writing arguably worse (it does often catch boneheaded mistakes that can slip past a tired eye, so it’s not worthless — but it won’t transform your work in any meaningful or positive way, aside from apparently eradicating the phrase “in order to” from the English language, for some reason). And if you need help focusing, why not use an App or plugin designed to help you do so — but that doesn’t mean your work will be appreciably better as a result.
The only way to be a better writer is to read more. For fiction, that means books and stories. For freelance, it can be helpful to look at what other people are doing in your niche, especially folks writing for A-List web sites or mainline print venues. Study their tricks. Mimic their ledes. Just absorb it all as enthusiastically as you can — that’s how you’ll get better. All the Apps in the world won’t help.
Of course, once the next iteration of GPT-3 starts producing writing that doesn’t read as if it were written by your slightly creepy older cousin who spends their spare time reading the dictionary, we’ll all be redundant anyway. And, I assume, the phrase “in order to” will cease to exist.
LIKE a lot of writers, I read a lot of books. If you’re a writer who doesn’t read a lot — and read widely — reconsider your life choices, because I can tell writers who don’t read, or who only read narrowly. The former write like they’re describing a movie, and the latter write in a specific, usually quite stilted style (I have one writer acquaintance who thinks everything written after 1950 or so is trash, and their work reads like a gentleman of leisure in 1870 decided to try his hand at popular fiction).
Reading widely can be a burden, of course. In my professional life I review books, which means I sometimes encounter truly terrible novels written by people with more ambition and discipline than talent. I admire anyone who writes a novel — truly — but the desire to write isn’t always enough to produce something great.
But reading these bad novels gives me plenty of insight into what people get wrong. An example that’s come up a few times in recent books I’ve read is the Vanishing Character. It goes like this: The story begins with Character A, an spends a goodly amount of time with them — sometimes dozens of pages, multiple chapters worth of story. Then Character A vanishes for a long, long time. Like, completely, totally, entirely vanishes.
John Travolta in Pulp Fiction Looking Around in Confusion
There’s nothing wrong with vanishing a character, even for a very long time. But you have to consider how your reader will react, and you have to have a very clear purpose. If your character is vanishing because you ran out of story to tell about them, you need to rethink your story and its structure. If you have a plan for that character that involves making the reader forget about them so you can surprise them later, you need to think objectively about whether you’re pulling that off — about whether your readers will be fooled, or if they’ll spend the middle section of your story wondering why the character disappeared.
Because the real risk is that your story will feel like two separate books, pasted together — especially if your vanished character never turns up again, their purpose served. If the character’s purpose is purely back story or set up, think about how much time you’re spending on them. Readers can more readily accept a vanished character in what’s clearly a prologue or short back story chapter as opposed to half the novel.
Finally, consider tone and genre. I recently read a book with a vanished character where the beginning of the story is soaked in magic and occult happenings. Then the character vanishes, and the middle section of the book reads like a completely different story, with exactly zero of those things. You can get away with one of those things, but rarely both.
Some people ask me if reading bad novels can rub off on you and make your own writing worse just as great novels can make your writing better. The answer is, gobs, I hope not <uncorks bottle and drinks directly from it for several seconds>.
Just about every writer has That Book. You know the one: You started it when you were a much younger person, filled with hope. It keeps dying on the vine. Sometimes you make it 50,000 words through before it melts away like an ice cream in the rain, sometimes you write 65 versions of the first paragraph before setting yourself on fire.
But you always go back.
You go back because there’s something there. Maybe it’s a premise you love, but can’t make work. Maybe it’s a character that continues to live in your brain rent free. Maybe it’s just some especially good writing you haven’t been able to marry to a coherent story yet. Whatever the reason, the project goes in and out of drawers and recent files lists, never quite abandoned, never quite finished.
The Balance
I have a writer friend who has been working on the same novel his entire life. Literally, one novel. He’s written a very small number of other things, but this one novel has been his obsession for decades. Technically, he’s finished dozens of versions of it — complete, coherent novels. But he’s never quite satisfied, and he keeps going back to it and starting over. He tries different approaches, tweaks the characters, updates the setting, changes the rules. Sometimes he stops work on it for years at a time and just lives his life, not writing anything.
That last part is alien to me, but I wonder sometimes if I should take a note or two from the rest of his approach. I’m generally a fast writer. I like my first drafts (probably too much) and usually tear through a story pretty quickly. But I wonder sometimes if I shouldn’t, if maybe I might benefit from letting more stories sit and marinate for long periods. But who has time? I’m going to die someday, kids. I can’t take the risk that I’ll be leaving a notebook filled with idea I never got around to working on.
I do have a novel I can’t quit. It’s been two years now, which I know for some writers isn’t very long, but for me that’s unusual. I love all the parts of the novel, but I don’t like the whole they Voltron into. And so I keep putting it aside, then tearing it open and trying to find a new path for the characters and setting and bits of business in there that I do love.
I’m not sure this book will ever be a success, but unlike almost all my other weird failures, this one is still alive in my head. Usually when I hit a certain level of frustration with a book I start to drift away from it, and slowly forget it. Sometimes, if I’m 95% to an actual novel, I’ll put in the effort to cruft up a serviceable ending because I’m a completist, but that’s with the full knowledge that the book is going into a drawer probably forever after that. But this one keeps whispering to me that there’s a plot that will pull it all together, I just have to find it.
Strategery
So, if you’ve got a book that won’t gel but also keeps flopping around, refusing to suffocate, what can you do. Here’s how I’m going to try and get this thing finally off the ground:
1. Plantsing. As some of you no doubt know, I’m a Pantser by nature. I take an idea and run with it, and sometimes after several months of running I have a novel, sometimes an enormous mess. But when I’ve got a novel that’s a hot mess like this one, it can sometimes be very helpful to chart the plot I have, then plot out the rest of the book. The shift in approach often clarifies things.
2. Brain Salad Surgery. Sometimes when your plot sputters out halfway through like this, the problem isn’t figuring out where to go next, but to figure out where you went wrong 100 pages ago — or even further back. So if the Plantsing doesn’t yield fruit, I’ll probably try starting fresh with a brand new beginning, then slowly fold in stuff I like from later in the story. Sometimes that jolts things back to life.
3. Go Episodic. And sometimes the solution is to just keep writing. Just keep writing little vignettes and short stories and subplots and backstory and whatever else I can think of. The material produced probably ends up being cut in the theoretical future of this novel, but in the mean time my Underbrain might tease a solution out of the material. And if nothing else, some of those episodes might turn into standalone short stories.
I’ll keep y’all posted. In the mean time, if you’re working on a novel that just won’t give in and become great (or at least coherent), maybe try one of these tricks. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to start drinking. Don’t look at me that way. It’s my process.
In which I watched Terminator: Dark Fate so you don’t have to.
1984’s The Terminator is a delightfully deranged, violent sci-fi story that somehow combines Linda Hamilton’s 1980s feathered hair and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s inexplicable Austrian accent and improbable body into a near-perfect story. Sure, it’s trash, but it’s very good trash, at least for some of us.
A sequel should have been a disaster. It shouldn’t have worked. But somehow James Cameron avoided simply remaking his first film with a bigger budget and managed to surprise viewers with a story that cleverly flipped the hero/villain dynamic. Making Arnold’s Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 Series 800 Terminator the good guy, then having it stumblingly learn why human life is important, was a (slightly stupid) very cool plot twist, especially when coupled with Robert Patrick’s slender-but-relentless Series 1000.
Alas, like Daffy Duck’s gasoline and dynamite schtick, it’s a trick that only works once. Watching the horrifyingly terrible Terminator: Dark Fate the other day, I was struck by the fact that the diminishing returns on the T-800 Terminator learning how to be human have slipped down into negative numbers. This is an idea that has to stop.
Villain Decay
Since the glorious days of 1992, there have been four major films in the Terminator franchise: Rise of the Machines, Salvation, Genisys, and 2019’s Dark Fate. Rise was a second sequel, and was relatively successful despite being a pretty boring retread of the previous films’ tropes. But at least it still had a relatively young Arnold Schwarzenegger (he was 55 during filming) who could at least look like a deathless killing machine.
After that, the franchise fell into a pattern: For three films, they’ve been trying to reboot the series, failing miserably, and then trying again.
2005’s Salvation tried something different. Set in the post-apocalyptic future, it tried to leave Schwarzenegger behind; Arnold only appears as a brief, CGI version of his 1984 self, the original T-800 model in a tiny cameo. If only Salvation had been a brilliant film and a huge hit, because the last two movies have been stuck with Grandpa Terminator, and it is terrible.
Everyone likes Arnold Schwarzenegger, and there’s no sin in growing old. But after the failure of Salvation, the film studios took a look around and obviously concluded the film failed because of a distinct lack of Arnold-style Terminators. And the only solution they can think of is to keep bringing Arnold back as an increasingly ludicrous killer robot.
WHY DO YOU CRY
The explanation for why a soulless killing machine would age and grow old is just barely acceptable, and then only if you’ve already suspended your disbelief to the sky-high levels these movies require: The T-800 is covered in real human flesh, complete with blood vessels, in order to fool the future scanners of the resistance. That flesh ages, even as the robotic chassis beneath it remains immortal or as close to it as technology can make it.
Sure, that makes no sense, and doesn’t explain why Old Man Terminator walks like a stiff, 73-year old man in pretty good shape, but fuck it: It’s Terminator Town. I’ll allow it.
The real problem is in Dark Fate‘s extension of the learning-to-be-human trope established in Judgment Day, where John Connor gives the T-800 simple lessons in how to be human, culminating in a line of dialogue that still makes me want to kill someone every time I hear it:
The whole “robot learns value of human emotions” isn’t exactly a new trope, and the decision to double down on it with Grandpa Terminator in Dark Fate is a terrible storytelling decision in a film filled with them. The T-800 in Dark Fate isn’t the same one from either of the two original films. There were several Terminators sent back in time, and after the end of Judgment Day one of those other ones found John Connor and, er, terminated him. Then it walked away, its mission accomplished, and instead of self-destructing or something else a real, programmed machine would have done, it goes off, starts a drapery business, and hooks up with a single mother.
This is real. This happened.
So we have Grandpa Terminator pretending to be the asexual stepfather of dreams, because apparently all Terminators have secret subroutines or unlockable achievements concerned with being a father figure. Which is a remarkable thing for an evil AI to introduce into the design, if you ask me. This leads to Grandpa Terminator doing all sorts of goofy old man schtick, like a lengthy monologue about talking a customer out of some really bad drapery decisions, and the sight of Grandpa Terminator sitting in a lawn chair that miraculously supports his 400 pound weight, passing out beers to everyone.
There’s a broad strokes argument for this sort of nutty twist, but it falls apart in practice. This is just terrible character work, necessitated solely by the desire to have Arnold Schwarzenegger in the film as the T-800 without just going ahead and animating him.
So: Mistakes were made. Someone made this movie, for example. And I watched it, as another example. Take some lessons from my shame: Playing around with making your villains into anti-heroes is fun, but it comes at a price, and that price is usually the ruination of the character. It’s a trick that works once, and you should be aware of it before you go Grandpa Terminator in your own story.
Something non-creative folks don’t understand is the private rush that accompanies creation. For me, as a writer, nothing feels better than writing THE END on a story I’ve been working on, whether it’s been days or years since I started.
And that rush is especially powerful if I’ve tried something new. I write a lot, and much of my work is fairly standard — I have my ways of doing things, the tics and subjects that grab my attention, the tics and techniques I like to use in my storytelling. I start with an idea, imagine characters, and go to work.
But sometimes there’s an innovation, what in chess is sometimes referred to as a ‘brilliancy.’ These don’t have to necessarily be brilliant, it’s more like they’re ideas or techniques that are new to me. An innovation can be exhilarating, it can remind you why you started this lonely, low-income life of words in the first place. And when you pull off a brilliancy like that, you want to show off. You want to rush that story out and flex on everyone, say ‘see what I did? DO YOU SEE WHAT I HAVE WROUGHT?!?!’
The flex ain’t worth it. Brilliancies are exciting stuff. But remember, an incredible technique doesn’t make a good story, necessarily.
Look at me, Damien! It’s all for you!
It’s easy to be so struck by some new idea you have, some new trick, that you let it cloud your assessment of the overall work. You write an entire novel in a breathless stream-of-consciousness style that really sings! But you forgot to tell a compelling story doing it. Or you managed to pull of the sort of epic, mind-bending plot twist that comes around once in a lifetime, carefully dropping seeds throughout your plot in an assured way that often evades you! But you forgot to make your characters interesting, three-dimensional people.
Brilliancies are great. They’re often the oxygen that keeps us going creatively because they get us excited about writing all over again. But it’s important to remember your fundamentals. It’s crucial that your brilliancy serve the story and not the other way around.
Of course, sometimes you have to wallow in the great idea for a bit, just enjoy yourself, and then go back later and make it into an actual story. The sad fact is, you often have to use an exciting new idea until it stops being so exciting, and then you can use it like a tool instead of showing it off like a new toy.
Of course, as a writer, my most recent brilliancy involved rigging up one of those beercan baseball hats to feed me sips of whiskey while I work, so … I may be the smartest human alive.
I done did it again: A new episode of 
