NaNoWriMo: A Significant Wordcount Event Is Imminent

(for unofficial use only)

Open Memo from the Department of Literary Security

To: All Departments & Interested Parties
RE: Literary Alert Level Tango

We have been monitoring internet traffic on sites frequented by wordsmiths, and literary agents provacateurs from the Office of Letters & Light and are reporting an uptick in chatter related to writing nonstop for a month and the hoarding of items related to same.

We can only conclude that a Significant Word-Count Event (SWCE) is imminent. All writers are advised to shelter in place or seek out the nearest library or coffee shop. During the last SWCE, over 3 billion words erupted from the nation's writers and worldwide shortages of coffee, pastries, and adjectives were reported.

THIS IS NOT A DRILL!

During moments of extreme literary unrest, the department advises that it can take up to thirty (30) days for emergency supplies to reach affected areas. All writers are advised to stock up on necessary supplies and foodstuffs sufficient to sustain life and word counts unaided for thirty (30) days without resupply. 

Our experts have prepared the following list of suggested supplies for all writers:

1. A comfy place to sit or stand in a place conducive to surviving 30 unbroken days of writing.
2. Coffee, tea, hot cocoa, or coffee.
3. Sustainable levels of baked goods.
4. Vegetables for when you are feeling guilty for trying to survive entirely on items 2 and 3.
5. Writing implements to fit your age, milieu, or chosen level of pretense.
6. Ink for pens, printers, copiers, goose quills (see item #5).
7. Phone numbers of out-of-area contacts willing to take late-night phone calls when you are stuck, overwhelmed, or procrastinating.
8. A padlock to secure the off-switch for the internet for most of the duration of the emergency.
9. A supportive and/or tolerant spouse, family member, roommate, significant other, good friend, complete stranger you thought you knew but turned out you didn't but who gives surprisingly good advice on dialogue.
10. A sense of humor.
11. Additional items, medications, &c. may be added as needed for the individual. Good luck and may the spirit of those who came before guide you in this time of trial.

The department will monitor the situation and report developments via the usual channels as events warrant.

See you in December.

Regards, etc.

Scott W. Perkins
Unofficial Secretary of Literary Security

Attachment: Scanned poster of this memo for sharing.

My book's published, now what? (Or: I don't know how to Author)

I know how to write. I can assemble word pictures and put you behind the eyes of a stranger. I can plot and scheme and plan and create imaginary friends. I know how to introduce you to my imaginary friends. I know how to find words and assemble them one after another with a beginning, middle, and end.  I can sit alone in a room for hours and crowd it with events and people only I can see until you read my words and then you can see them too.

These are my core skill sets.

I know how to be a writer.

I don’t know how to be an author.

That’s the first time I’ve admitted that out loud.

A lot of people think those are the same thing. They are not. They are, in many ways, diametrically opposed. I know that with a force that is sickening and gut-twisting, and it scares me.

Writing is an endeavor of inward exploration and laughing at your own jokes and falling in love with your imaginary friends as you send them on adventures. Writing is in many ways a ticket to Narnia[1].

Authoring is writing plus deadlines, hustling, selling, promotion, hype, contracts, covers, editing, contacts, networking, and not working. It’s gutting your story from 80,000 words to less than ten so you can convince someone to read it between floors on an elevator. It’s likening yourself to authors more successful, better known, and marketable because if you’re seen as being “Like Douglas Adams if he wrote Ender’s Game” you’re more likely to sell a book. To sell yourself.

And it’s hard. It’s so hard. Worse, it’s erosive to the parts of you can sit alone in rooms drinking coffee with people who aren’t there as you listen to their Munchausen-like tales of derring do. Worse, selling your book must be paired with some level of selling yourself and there's a fine line between selling your self and selling out. And where that line is no one knows. 

Selling out is like pornography: we can't define it but we know it when we see it.

I know. I know. It's the first worldiest of first world problems, and I thought… no, I was afraid that I was the only person who felt that way. And I feared it would doom my authorship to failure no matter how successfully I wrote.

This weekend at NerdCon: Stories, I sat in an auditorium as a man who is arguably the world’s reigning king of the YA novel said “In many ways, the person I am when creating the work is the opposite of the person I have to become when promoting it.”

If you came here hoping for answers, I don't have one. I think there isn't one because everyone comes at it from different directions and either finds their own way forward or doesn't. And that sucks because we want directions. But if John Green doesn't know how to answer the question or balance the erosive forces either, at least I know that I'm not alone.

And if all else fails, hell with it. I still have a ticket to Narnia.

As I digest the stories from NerdCon: Stories, I'm sure the rest of my thoughts on this subject will begin to leak out. But for now, I'm content and I'm energized, and I'm afraid. 

And it's good to be a little afraid. The best things happen out on the edge of the cliff where falling is a very real possibility. Fear keeps you awake, aware, and alive.

DFTBA,
Scott

---

[1]  This is one of the reasons I have so much trouble imagining writing dystopian fiction. No offense to those who do, but my wardrobe doesn’t go there because I don’t want to go there.

Nerdcon: Stories, On the importance of stories

My dad was a storyteller. I wouldn't call him a raconteur because he hated speaking to more than one person at a time, but my God could he spin a yarn. If you took a sample of my dad and examined them under a microscope, I suspect that you'd see cells sitting around telling each other stories. More than anyone I've ever known, he was made of words.

This fact made it strangely easy to put my thoughts about losing him into words. I spoke at the funeral and wrote elaborate notes to thank those who helped mom and supported us as we mourned. I couldn't begin to do that in the wake of mom's death. Partly, I think this was because it was so sudden and unexpected compared to his long fight against cancer. But for the most part, it's because stories were dad's lifeblood but mom was a creature of pure feelings.

Nevertheless, I was adrift after my dad died. I didn't stop telling stories, but they changed in ways that were perceptible to me and I was a long time coming to terms with it. I was uncomfortable with this new facet of my life and how it was manifesting in the tales I wanted to tell and how I was telling them.

What does this have to do with Nerdcon: Stories?

If you've read the acknowledgements page of Howard Carter Saves the world, you'll have seen this:

John & Hank Green don’t know it, but they and the Nerdfighters helped me through a dark time. Their efforts to encourage peace and empathy in the world and to form a support community for those who are not chosen first, kids who are mocked, scared, or live in fear of themselves are laudable and should be supported. In recognition, a portion of the author’s proceeds* from this novel will be donated to their Foundation to Decrease Worldsuck. Learn more about how you too can support their efforts at fightworldsuck.org and projectforawesome.com. Don’t forget to be awesome.

When I wrote that, I had no intention of really explaining it. But events have changed around me. Of course, the death of my father was the dark time I was talking about, but I'm not sure I can fully explain the way that John and Hank helped me through it.

Being somewhat attuned to the memetic culture of the web, I'd been aware of the Vlogbrothers pretty much since they started, but only as a peripheral thing.

As a former YA bookseller, I had a lingering professional interest in John Green as the author of Looking for Alaska but I can't say honestly that I spent much time digging into the philosophical basis of his work. When my dad died, that changed and Green's message of empathy and imagining the complex lives of others suddenly sank in. The idea of telling stories as a means rather than an ends wasn't groundbreaking, but it was amazing to watch someone doing it, live on the internet.

And thus the method and mode of my storytelling changed again.

That's a profound effect to have in someone's life. Because I am a storyteller like my father before me. If you examined me under a microscope, you'd find my cells drinking coffee and trying to top one another with a funnier story. To inject a new and serious note into that conversation was shocking for me.

And over the course of their rambling conversations recorded on their YouTube channel, I was progressively, night by night, rattled me out of the funk and began charting a new course. Which led to Howard Carter.

And because I support their larger charitable mission, it's a profound effect that inspired a likeminded effort on my part.

As previously noted, Howard Carter is a very silly but pointed anti-cynical manifesto. It's about optimism, yes, but it's also about doing the hard thing. It's about trusting one generation to strive to do better than those who stood in their places the last time. It's about not shoving our duties onto the next poor sap to come along. And succeed or fail, it's about the subtle heroism of making the right choice in the face of rampant cynicism that all is for naught.

It's about planting a flag somewhere and defiantly insisting that we are not, in fact, doomed to repeat the mistakes of the previous cycle of humanity.

Whether I succeeded or not, that's where I've been. And some of you have come along for the ride.

On Thursday, I will fly to Minneapolis to attend the first ever Nerdcon: Stories. Put on by the crew that Hank Green assembled to create VidCon, the YouTube creator's conference, Nedcon is a conference/convention that's about the power of storytelling and the important nature of the stories we tell about ourselves to ourselves.

Some exciting Big Names will be there, but I'm not going to meet the big names or even John and Hank. I'm going to support the mission as a volunteer and participant at the conference. Because more importantly, our stories will be there and I will be among these storytellers assembling on the Minnesota plains to discuss how stories make us human and how we can do it better.

So I'll be spending the week swimming in words and maybe I will return with a few in my teeth, reliable old dog that I am.

Have a good week, friends.

Scott
---------

*By the way, for the first year of publication, that percentage is half, but that's another post.

How I spent my summer vacation... and why I never came back

On July 3rd, my birthday, I hung up from a phone call with my mother in Missouri. She was in the hospital recovering from a surgery that had gone well. The surgery had been unexpected, cancer had been detected only the day before and was understandably a little weepy. She had reminisced about the day 42 years previous when she had held her baby son and now I was two thousand miles away and she didn't even have a teddy bear to hold on my birthday.

She told me she loved me. I told her her the same. After a lifetime as the difficult child, we had long ago come to terms with ourselves and each other and had developed a great, warm, relationship. 

I already had a plane ticket to depart for home a week later. I'd be there to take care of her as she convalesced and for a bit after. I even went out and bought her a teddy bear to take with me.

For the past few years and especially since my dad died, I've made a point of getting home at least once a year. A previously-planned trip home that was originally going to involve wandering the streets of my hometown with a video camera to show you, my loyal readers, the town that filtered through my subconscious to became Howard Carter's Sedville.

I had a plan, you see.

As John Lennon said, life is what happens while you're making other plans. Because life -- even your life -- is not really about you.

It was the last coherent conversation I ever had with my mother.

A text from my sister alerted me that something had gone wrong. Stand by. She's had a brain aneurysm. She's being put on a helicopter and flown to Saint Louis. Get on a plane. Now.

Those were the longest days of my life, full of hurry up and stand still. Airports. Hospitals. Waiting rooms. Intensive Care. Moments of lucidity when she told us she was afraid. Told us she loved us. Asked us to sing hymns for her. Hugs from nurses. Terrifying medical procedures undertaken by increasingly desperate-sounding physicians in one of America's finest centers for neurological trauma. Moments of exhausted unconsciousness in waiting room chairs that could only charitably be called sleep.

In the early morning of July 11th, we lost our battle to keep her with us. 

The doctors and nurses wept with us at her bedside. 

She was that kind of lady.

Her last words to me were "I love you."

She was that kind of lady.

After that, it was opening safe deposit boxes, bizarre meetings with lawyers and funeral homes and florists, choosing from the many who offered to be pallbearers, talking to ministers and local dignitaries, and realizing as the well wishes and casseroles came in just how big the ripples were from my mother's death.

And I haven't felt much like writing since.

There are so many things I'd planned to do with her. So many somedays that I thought were ahead, and the crushing fact of the matter is: today is always someday.

So, I'm back or will be, as I slowly and carefully walk through the shut-off wing of my mind where the writing comes from, turning on the lights, taking the dustcovers off the furniture, and fishing around in the couch cushions for the lost thoughts and dreams that I let fall when the call came in.

Just because life is what happens while we're making other plans doesn't mean we stop making plans; it means we realize that today is the someday we were looking for and everything we put off until now has come due.

Scott

My mother, my sister, and I discussing a Thanksgiving turkey. I love this photo.

Happy Birthday to me, here's a present for you!

Hello, Internet!

Well, it's my birthday, which usually means I get you a gift. Usually, it's a free short story. This year's gift, though, is that I've asked my publisher to put my book, Howard Carter Saves the World on sale! For this week, Howard can be had for the low, low price of $0.99 (99p if you're in the UK)!

Tell your friends. If you've been meaning to read it and just haven't gotten around to it, now would be an excellent time.

A present you have to pay for doesn't seem like much of a present, though, does it?

I may or may not wear a fedora
while signing. Salsa not included.

You're right! There's more! But it's my birthday, so I need something from you in return.

Buy Howard Carter Saves the World and post a photo of yourself holding it up with the cover visible on social media and tag me (details below).  The first 100 who do so, I will contact for their deets and mail an autographed card featuring one of my original illustrations.

Already bought the book? You can participate too!

Sorry, offer is currently open to readers in the US and UK only. Offer expires July 31st.

For all those who asked me how e-authors can sign their books, this is how.

Places you can upload your photo and tag me where I will see it: 

Facebook: ScottPerkinsWrites
Twitter: @pages2type
Instagram: @swalkerperkins
Tumblr: pages2type
Google+: ScottTypesUntilDawn

Toilet Squirrels, inspired by true events

There once was a guy in a little blue car. It was a sunny morning and he had a winding road, the wind in his hair, and a full cup of coffee. Life was good and he was happy...

Wait, I can't start there; that's the beginning of the story. No one starts at the beginning of the story anymore. Not since the ancient Greeks did away with that sort of thing.[1] This is a modern story of terror, of the harsh realism of modern life and the fragile underpinnings that anchor our society. It’s a tale of grief and woe and it should begin at the darkest moment, preferably during the high point of the action.

We'll start again.

There once was a goblin named Thistlepin who loved his job just a bit too much.

Yes, a goblin, shut up.

On this particular day, this particular goblin was bored. It was a slow day and not much was happening at Fate.com and like all bored creatures since the invention of the internet, Thistlepin was taking selfies and posting them on Instagram. 

That’s when the red light on its console began to flash.

FLASH FATE TRANSMISSION MESSAGE BEGINS>>>>  > Instagram user ‘swalkerperkins’ has ceased posting pictures of > cats and food and dared to post a selfie in his little car.
> Has declared unapproved moment of contentment.
> > Did not knock on wood or suitable substitute.
> > Take appropriate action.
> >  
<<<<END MESSAGE

Thistlepin chortled a gobliny chortle[2] and opened a window on its browser.

There was swalkerperkins, mugging for the camera. He had a shaggy beard and hipster glasses. He looked the sort who would tempt Fate. The sunroof of his little car was open and a blown-out sky beyond the open roof betokened a sunny day and little skill at cell phone photography.

          In the twenty-first century, physical manifestations of psychic phenomena don’t get a lot of respect. Every day in the modern world, Death was cheated, Time wasted, War averted, Nature tamed, and Fate tempted. Only Fate, though, had the goblins to get hers back.

Thistlepin was one of her best.

He was the cleverest, the most devious, and the most devoted to punishing those who tempted Fate’s wrath. Death, Time, War, and the rest were constantly trying to hire him away with promises of salary and all the garbage he could eat, but Thistlepin was a company goblin and Fate made sure her star player wanted for nothing.

Thistlepin called up the poor sap’s dossier. A week previously, the guy had posted another in a series of too-long blog posts about how deplorable it was that the world had forgotten how to dream optimistic dreams. He liked the movie Tomorrowland. His favorite song from The Who was Boris the Spider. His house was painted yellow. The car with the open sunroof was a blue Mini Cooper named Sweetie.

Seriously.

The guy was practically begging for it.

The goblin pondered the smug mug and carefully cracked each of the thirty-six knobbily green knuckles as it planned a diabolical plan. Finally, the cracked black lips drew back to reveal a rictus grin. This would require a comeuppance of unparalleled uppance.

Thistlepin fished the chain around its neck out of the front of his dirty white tee shirt and inserted it in a keyhole on the console that hadn’t been used in so long that it squealed as the knotty green hand forced the key to turn.

Lights lit, klaxons wailed, wood knocked, and on Earth a squirrel crawled into the exhaust pipe on the roof of a small yellow house on an island somewhere off the coast of Washington state.

---

Scott was depressingly good at what computer programmers and science fiction authors call pattern recognition. When a picture of numbers crawled across his social media newsfeed challenging him to spot the 6 among the 8’s, he never reposted because it felt too simple a puzzle. He grew up on a steady diet of Highlights puzzles and Sesame Street rhymes about one thing being nothing like the others. He excelled at find-a-word puzzles and the spot-the-difference pictures on the back page of the Sunday comics.

When he opened the toilet lit, he wanted his brain to refuse to accept a shape that was quite clearly a squirrel but his brain wasn’t having any of it. His brain didn’t reject patterns it found familiar no matter how much he begged it to.

Maybe someone forgot to flush the toilet.

Squirrel.

Turd. Obviously.

It's a squirrel.

Over time water and waste can sculpt strange shapes.

Including a bushy tail?

Look, it’s brown!

With a reddish chest and tiny paws?

Maybe someone needs to see a doctor?

You do if you think that’s anything other than a squirrel.

Well, at least it’s dead.

He’d lost track of which voice was which.

Scott mentally redacted every expletive he could think of.

He lowered the lid and walked out of the room.

“Honey!”

From the kitchen came a muffled answer that sounded like “What?”

“Why is there a squirrel in the toilet?”

Silence.

Footsteps.

His wife’s hands are at her side. The look on her face is not a good one.

“What?”

“There’s a squirrel,” he said. “In the toilet.”

She went and checked. Because this is apparently a story that people tell. A joke. A jape. A prank. Some sort of… squirrel.

His brain gave up making excuses. There was a dead squirrel in his toilet.

“You are taking care of that,” she said. “And can I say how glad I am that I’m not the one who found it?”

“Right.” 

Because even in enlightened 21^st century households, there are boy jobs and there are girl jobs. Either that, or as an MBA candidate, his wife had taken on the lessons about delegating jobs to fit candidates to guide their professional growth.

Besides, she wasn’t the one who tempted Fate.

He thought he heard a gobliny cackle.

His wife went into the library and he went to the bedroom to change. What do you wear to fish a squirrel out of a toilet? Not work clothes, certainly.

He put on canvas dungarees and an old teeshirt and wandered into the library to find his wife on the computer with the Google open on the screen. The internet was singularly unhelpful.

The normally reliable “Straight Dope” forum was already there with the aspiring stylings of the North American Itinerant Internet Humorist. A user named Polycarp summoned this gem from the back row of a high school physics classroom:

“It's Schrödinger's Squirrel. At all times and places, there is an infinitesimally small but non-zero chance that a macroscopic object such as a squirrel will coalesce out of zero-point enerhy. You drew the short straw.  Just be glad it wasn't a moose.”                            “Polycarp” (Guest user) Straight Dope Message Boards

How Did a Squirrel Get In My Toilet? (discussion thread)

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=559221

Accessed 9 June 2015, 9:25 pm

When he wasn’t tempting Fate, Scott was a science fiction author of a strange bent and that explanation pleased him on some perverse level even as it lit up some hitherto unnoticed dark corners of his imagination.

“Terrific,” Scott thought. “Now I have to worry about a toilet moose.”

That’s what he thought.

To himself.

No man gets credit for speaking that kind of thing out loud, and he’d been married long enough to know that. His outside voice said “Do they say how to get it out of the toilet?”

She checked again.

“No.” She paused. “Gloves?”

“I am not touching that thing.”

“Tongs?”

“Maybe the fireplace set has tongs…”

Scott tried to banish the fact that his world had expanded to include toilet mammals as a genus/species combo as he lined an orange Home Depot bucket with trash bags. The log lifter tongs made short work of the tiny furry corpse and he flushed the toilet.

Thistlepin whispered in his wife’s ear and she came running into the room to deliver the coup de grace.

“Oh my God, you didn’t flush it did you?”

“No,” he said. “No, I’m not that crazy.”

He tied a knot in the sack and headed outside.

“Dinner’s cancelled. Eat whatever you want; I don’t think I’m going to feel up to food tonight.”

As he headed outside, dead toilet squirrel in hand, he chanted quietly to himself over and over, It could have been worse, at least it wasn’t a moose.

---

[1] Not since the Greeks invented the "cold open" for their iconic dramas featuring the recurring hero Ἰάκωβος πέδη.  This innovation allowed them to show the hero smashing the Kakos syndicate before they went to the bother of showing him meeting their leader, cheating at baccarat, or wooing his bride. They also invented the little known speculatori ex machine but the Romans stole it and claimed it as their own. Bloody Romans.

[2] The goblin was required to chortle. It was in the handbook. A good gobliny chortle was a prerequisite for Fatework.

Dreamers: Disenchanted with dystopia...

Last week, I discovered that Brad Bird and Damon Lindelhof made a movie just for me. It was an old-fashioned sort of movie, with an old-fashioned message of hope. Yes, it was a little preachy, but it's a sermon worth hearing and I loved it unabashedly from its goofy vacuum cleaner jet pack to its steampunk rocket to another dimension.

It wasn't just optimistic, it was anti-cynical. As we've come to expect from Brad Bird, it was practically utopian, but in a practical way.

I must be honest with you: as a general rule, dystopia bores the snot out of me.

It's not that dystopian stories should not be told, but by dwelling solely on the inevitability of decline, we've shot ourselves in the collective foot as a literary movement and as a society.

There are dystopian stories that need to be told and certainly valid uses of the milieu. I haven't had a chance to see Fury Road yet, but the cultural conversation it spawned is evidence that dystopian futures still have the power to make us think about the dystopian now. And science fiction does and should have a role to play in warning us of the future consequences of current trends. All the same, I feel deeply and personally that we took a wrong turn somewhere.

I really want to blame the "Same but different" approach that publishing and Hollywood takes whenever something is successful. Katniss's adventures in the Land Beyond Running Man means that we're going to spend awhile feeding fictional kids into a futuristic meat grinder whether we like it or not. Just as the success of the first Avengers has doomed us to a hundred 'shared world' movie franchises and team-ups, we're also staying far too long at the dystopian dinner party, wringing the last marketing dollar out of the genre until there's nothing left of it but a husk of post-apocalyptic cliches.

Lest you think I watched Tomorrowland and had an epiphany, I said almost those exact words in November 2011 shortly after finishing Howard Carter. Howard is aggressively anti-dystopian without ever venturing into utopian. Its story rests on the refutation that cycles are unbreakable. Its stance is pointedly and fearlessly anti-fatalist.

I tried very hard to walk the line between the two without betraying my central idea that the thing I miss most in modern science fiction is the sense of hope. Hope that children can make better choices than their parents. Hope that humanity can improve and change. Hope that the ingenuity of humanity can eventually triumph over the inhumanity of humanity.

Zombies are so over-done there's nothing left on the bone. The Dystopia became just another setting and more often than not these days, it seems to be another setting: Do I set this novel in post-apocalyptic wasteland or Belgium? Attacking the underlying set of assumptions that make these apocalypses feel inevitable is the bravest thing Bird and Lindelhof have done, and should garner them a much larger audience than the latest disaster flick, no matter how charming Dwayne Johnson might be.

I used to like dystopian stories for the same reason I used to be more enthusiastic about zombie movies: they meant something. These two semi-connected constructs were our muse for decades, an airing of inchoate fears about the state of the world and stark, if at times hyperbolic, warnings about our inevitable fate should we continue on our current path. Regional and economic inequities are given a harsh and satirical spotlight among the adventure elements of The Hunger Games. I haven't seen the movie yet, but the evocation of a feminine warrior element at the center of Mad Max: Fury Road has given rise to a valuable and ongoing societal debate around the gender assumptions that it leaves shattered in its wake.

But will its message of equality give rise to more? Or will its success give rise to a storytelling wasteland of tropes and cliches written on the back of a napkin by movie execs who cannot see past the dollar signs to the message that filled those bags with cash?

I fear the latter.

If you're with me and you too miss the idea that we should and can dream, and that positing futures should be at least as much about hoping for better tomorrows as it is foretelling doom, go see Tomorrowland.

My least favorite question

I've mentioned it before, but it bears repeating, my least favorite question isn't the infamous "Where
do you get your ideas?" I like that question, actually, and cannot understand how anyone could move through this world and not end the day with their pockets stuffed full of stories (whether they have the will or the wherewithal to write them down is another matter).

No, my least favorite question is "Which character is you?"

The thing I like about "Where do you get your ideas?" is that it has as its underlying theme a genuine understanding that this writing thing is something I could do if I could just understand how to get started.  The question of which character is me gets at a fundamental misunderstanding of what fiction is, much less how it is done.

I probably didn't help much by writing in character as Dr Deeds on Twitter. That isn't to say that Howard's mad science teacher doesn't have a lot of me in him, but no more or less than Howard, or Old Suit, or Erica for that matter. But none of them are Scott in disguise.

I can't think why I'd want to put on Groucho glasses and a wig and wander into my story. "Nothing to see here, author coming through, carry on, nothing to see..." what a distraction that would be.

Which isn't to say that authors never inject themselves into their stories. "Never" is a dangerous word and almost always the first word of a lie. Some writers do and I find it deeply annoying in much the same way that I've grown to hate the inevitable Stan Lee cameo in every Marvel movie. Let's step out of the story for a moment while we all acknowledge the creator of this fictional narrative we were enjoying before you interrupted it for an inside joke.

It can be done right, and carefully in the correct circumstances (Kilgore Trout springs to mind). But you don't serve your story or your reader by forcing your story to form around an ego trip.

That's the fundamental conceit of fiction that this questioner doesn't understand and a bridge that far too many have trouble crossing. The purpose of storytelling is to let both the reader and the storyteller live lives we'd never be able to live, to experience things we might never encounter, to feel empathy for people we've never met or never could.

All of these kids and mad scientists and government agents and robots and alien creatures are part of me, but none of them are me. We use stories to inject ourselves into other lives, other times, and other situations. To breathe humanity into dry history and to postulate very ordinary human reactions into extraordinary situations. None of it requires me to inject myself into the story as a thinly-veiled character and nothing would be served except my own ego by doing so.

Which character is me? All of them. And none of them.

---

GETTING BACK IN THE TIME MACHINE:

Next weekend, I will be in Port Townsend, Washington for The Brass Screw Confederacy May 29-31st.  There will be writers panels, radio shows, and other shenanigans.

I hope to see some of my Seattle-area folks there!

My Lovely Blog

The strange thing about writing a book is the number of people MOST OF WHOM I'VE NEVER MET who are reading words that I wrote and hopefully laughing in the right places. My Twitter followers went from 750 to almost 1,000 and quite a few of those new people are actual people. (Which is astonishing if you know anything about Twitter.)

Welcome all of you!

So I feel like I need a "Getting to Know You" post. Handily, I was tagged awhile back by fellow Crooked Cat author Kim Walker for something called the "My Lovely Blog Hop".

The title of which makes me feel like I might need a new author pic...

Why hello, I didn't see you there! Welcome to my lovely blog...

I'm not sure how the thing was named, but who am I to complain about a chance to sit on a park bench under a flowering tree making passers by uncomfortable? Six questions are posed and I shall take them in order and possibly combine a few: First memory, books, libraries/bookshops, what's your passion, learning, writing.

On my first memory...

My first cogent memory is my parents' wedding. It was my mom's second (hence my sister and I) and my dad's first. I was three and being a total squirrel, filling my pockets with cocktail peanuts and those chalky dinner mints that were everywhere back in the 1970's. Dad picked me up and held me on his hip through the ceremony, mostly just to get me to stop screwing around and it cemented in my mind that This Was the Beginning of Something.

On Books, Libraries, and Bookshops...

All my favorite pieces of furniture are all designed for the care and feeding of a book habit.
My dad brought to our family an insatiable love of reading and cars. My sister got the car thing and I started acquiring a library. By this point in my life, "Library" is another word for home.

In 1998 I left my college job with REI for a management gig at Barnes & Noble, followed by a 9+ year stint at Borders before a very weird dinner party where I found myself in a conversation with Mercedes Lackey and Stephen Brust (picks up the dropped names and puts them back in his pockets) convinced me to spend more time writing my own stories even if it meant less time to read other peoples.

I doubt either of them remembers me, but it was the beginning of the end for me at Borders. The company and the store I worked in were changing for the worse and I made my exit. You can read more about that here if you're interested: Beyond Borders -- The Borders bankruptcy as seen by this former bookseller.

I love bookstores but I mostly spend my money at the independents these days, in part because that's all that's left around here. Which is both awesome and strangely sad. Chain or independent, bookstores are the repositories of our cultural aspiration to be well-read and literate. And too many towns lost their independent bookstores in the kerfuffle when Borders and Barnes & Noble were building their megastores in every town on the map at what turned out to be an unsustainable rate. And now the chains are gone and we have... not much really.

Hopefully new stores will arise to take their places.

What's your passion?

You're soaking in it.

On Learning...

I have the peculiar skill set common to writers of absorbing information quickly, retaining it for the duration of a project, and then erasing it to make room for the next thing on my list. Writers are human chalkboards. (Not dry erase boards, mind you, the smell of the markers gives me a headache.)

As I often say: "I can pick a lock or repair a watch. I can conduct surgeries, examine corpses for forensic evidence, bind a book, dress a deer, identify or concoct poisons, and reproduce Lord Nelson's flagship down to the last knot and nail. If necessary, I can also conduct a Latin Mass, reproduce the scripts of Carolingian scribes, shoe a horse, summon Cthulhu, or swear like a WWII soldier. I can walk the streets of forgotten cities in lost kingdoms and navigate the alleys of Calcutta in the year 2010. And I can do it all from the safety and convenience of my writing chair."

Some of these things I can do because I'm weird that way. For the rest of it, I have reference books and a prodigious memory that's good at making the connections that others miss. (Strangely, this did very little to help me in my school days, but it won me a few awards as a journalist and makes my life easier as an author.)

On Writing...

Writing is work. It's a job. Treat it with the respect that you would any job that you love: Show up for work every day. Put in your time. Do the work. Shake the hands and meet the people and hang out at the watercooler once in awhile, but most of all, you have to write to be a writer. "Writers write" is the dumbest thing in the world, not because it isn't true but because it really should go without saying.

The central thesis of this blog (if it has one) that there's no magical path between 'I want to write' and 'I have written' except to sit down and start putting words on a page. If a writer's to-do list, blog, or writing guide cannot be summed up as "Butt in chair, fingers on keys" then ditch it; it's not worth reading.

And on that lovely note... good night, Internet. And well met.

- Scott

Throwback Thursday: Dropping the dime on Ray Bradbury

The other day, I lost an i. It's a key key as keyboards go and now it is gone. I'm not sure how, but one minute it was an i key and the next moment it was suffering total existence failure.

I suppose that's what I get for writing about pirate robots. I was asking for it, really.  I mean look at that thing! It only had one i to begin with... 

(Yes, I've worn the letters off my keys. It happens quickly in my line of work. If I wasn't a touch typist, I'd need to use disposable keyboards because I'd go through at least one a month.)

Anyway, as I was poking around online trying to find a replacement, it reminded me of the last time a laptop died on me and the story of Ray Bradbury's typewriter. That laptop died shortly after he did, so in honor of Throwback Thursday, here is the piece I wrote on what he taught me about the value of a dime...

----

8 June 2012

Computers. They make our lives easier, except when they don't, and recent computer problems have made me spend some time working on my penmanship and reflecting on the nature of time: I only have so much of it to devote to this endeavor, and doing this thing the old-fashioned way is aggravatingly slow.

Apologies to my readers, but my writing time has been somewhat curtailed of late. When given a choice between writing stories or writing blog posts, I choose the stories every time. And it's been a choice I've had to make with special delicacy lately due to the untimely demise of my laptop. It's hard to upload a page of a legal pad to my blog. It's not impossible, mind you, but the two technologies are not compatible without a special adapter and that special adapter is me.

But I do not alone beweep my outcast state because I am re-learning a valuable lesson about the value of my writing time.

On the day Ray Bradbury died, I was sitting at a computer loaned to me by a college library. This is important because Mr. Bradbury, you see, didn't own a typewriter when he started out. He rented one in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library for $.10 per half hour. Fahrenheit 451 famously cost him $9.80 to write.

A bargain by any measure.

But think about that. If you've never used a typewriter to write anything of length, I invite you to go do so and come back to marvel with me at the economy of this claim. One of the great works of American Letters took less than 49 hours to complete. That's a groundbreaking novel (originally published as a serial in Playboy) written in 6 and a half standard work days. All because its author was counting his dimes.

How many dimes did you spend on your last story?

I understand that there's infinite variety in writing styles and there's no such thing as a correct answer to "How long does it take to write a good book?" As with any art, it takes as long as it takes.

But if your computer charged you a fee for every half hour you spent, how much faster would you write? If you're like me, you would write so much faster it would make your head spin. Because one of the problems with writing on a computer is all the many other things you can do with a computer. 

If you were paying for the time on the computer, how much less time would you spend looking at cute pictures of kittens and poking your friends on Facebook?

How much farther would $9.80 get you on a typewriter versus an internet-enabled laptop?

There's no right answer to this. The internet is blessing and curse. A digital circus that is hard to ignore, but also a bottomless cup of stories from which to drink. I think it boils down to whether you want to write stories or put on digital clown makeup and take the center ring.

As Robert Lynn Aspirin said in the forward to one of his books: "There are fast writers and there are slow writers, I'm a half-fast writer." I, for one, have been on an unintentional journey between the the land of fast and the land of half-fast.

At risk of plundering the pun, I don't want to be a half-fast writer. I don't want to be a half-assed writer either.

In the past couple of months while this blog has been limping along in the shadow of my inattention, I have spent less time writing and written more than I would have otherwise. I have filled several notebooks with story ideas and notes and snippets of text. I've re-edited a book I'd long ago thought worthy of abandoning into something sleeker and more worthy of a reader's time.

The simple fact is that writing is a business, so even though I don't have an hourly wage as a writer, I am very much paying for every minute spent at the keyboard. If you're going to be your own employee, be a productive one. I would never treat my hourly employer this way; why treat myself like that?

Ray Bradbury was infamously curmudgeonly about the internet. He hated it like my cat hates baths. I dis agree with him on that point. I think it's an inexhaustible well of words and enthusiasm. An entire virtual world built entirely out of ideas. But he has a point nonetheless; and though my computer ills are now past, I think I'll remember how good it felt to just sit and put words on a page.

In the end, it's your dime.

Thanks for all your stories, Ray. You left us with a lifetime supply of new worlds to explore. You legitimized the business of writing dreams. And you have left us with some incredibly big shoes to fill. Rest in Peace. We'll take it from here.

---
Note: Adjusted for inflation, $9.80 in 1950 translates to $98.02 in today's money. Still cheap at twice the price. http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%249.80+%281950+dollars%29&x=0&y=0

6 Tips for Avoiding Sociopathic Storytelling

We are not always in the story we think we are and we are not always playing the role we think we are playing. Just as we are not always fully aware of the endings, the beginnings, or who the heroes and villains around us truly are. Stories are going on all around us all the time, and though we may fancy ourselves the hero of our own tale, we are mostly bit players in someone else's.

I think that's important to keep in mind when telling a story. It's so very easy to fall into a mindset that the only thing going on in the universe is the story you're telling. Every character springs into existence when they walk into your scene and ceases to exist the second they exit the page.

Even though there are moments when the most important thing going on in your world are happening in your story, that doesn't mean it's the only thing happening or the only thing that's ever happened in the lives of the people involved. When you get the feeling that it is, the world becomes smaller, shrinking until I stop caring about the outcome because the world you're trying to save is paper-thin.

Because I'm in the habit of naming things, I think of it as Sociopathic Storytelling Syndrome.

For the sake of keeping it all in my head, I created the acronym S.L.O.W.L.Y. to keep in mind the six things I want to know about every character that has more than a passing mention in my stories: Secrets, Loves, Origins, Wits, Learning, and Yearning.

If you know these six things about a character -- even if they never come up -- just having it in your head will bleed into their dialogue and their actions and breathe a larger life into your story. Because when that waitress leaves the scene, she's going somewhere, doing something, loving someone, or yearning for them.

And that's the kind of thing that brings a world to life.

1. Secrets:  Often what's unsaid forms us more than anything else. You should know at least a few things about the character that have nothing to do with the story: What are they passionate about? If you walked into their home, what would stand out about them? Are they shifty or a straight-shooter? Know the character's secrets and you'll know the character too.
   
2. Loves:  A character's gender preferences and relationship status would and should tie directly to how they interact with other characters. What or who does the character love? Are they in a relationship or are they looking?
   
3. Origins:  We are where we come from. Where was the character born? How were they brought up? What kind of family circumstances did they grow up in? Are they lonely or a loner?
   
4. Wits:  How smart is this character? This isn't the same as education and often more interesting if their smarts comes from a place of experience rather than academia, so you can tie 'Wisdom' in here too if you like.
   
5. Learning:  The demeanor of even the most incidental character will at the very least display how educated they are? Did they go to college? Drop out of high school? Home schooled? Hold advanced degrees?
   
6. Yearning:  Everyone has a goal, something they yearn for. What does the character want? What drives them? What are they willing to risk anything in order to obtain or defend?

Future Friday: All of yesterday's tomorrows...

A bit of news to kick off our Futurific Friday post: I accepted an invitation to The Brass Screw Confederacy (brass-screw.org) in May. Brass Screw is a Steampunk event (not a convention) that takes over the idyllic seaside town of Port Townsend from time to time and has made the town a steampunk destination of sorts.

I'll be presenting a workshop on where ideas come from. The workshop, you might be amused to know, arose from a popular blogpost I wrote here called "Drinking from the font of ideas (Also Lasersharks!)" and takes participants through all the surprising ideas that can be culled from a single day's news feed and seeks to finally answer that persistent question: "Where do you get your ideas?"

Oh, I have hatched a thousand elaborate

heist scenarios dedicated to liberating

this sofa from its home at the Seattle

Museum of History & Industry...

"But wait," I hear you cry. "Howard Carter isn't really steampunk is it? Also, what does this have to do with futurism, Scott. This is Future Friday, so get cracking with the jetpacks and flying cars. I want to hear you rip on Elon Musk for nixing flying cars!"

Not a chance. Musk is basically right about the flying car thing and it depresses me to admit that, so today we're going to talk about Steampunk, and the tomorrows that we dreamt about yesterday.

Because that's what Steampunk is: futurism through different foci. We get so caught up in the trappings of the genre sometimes that I think we forget that part of things.

One important thread of Howard Carter Saves the World is the trouble wrought by a misbehaving family of time travelers whose Victorian meddling accidentally created the modern world as we know it. Their efforts to repair the timeline set up much of the plot that Howard and his friends become tangled in. The modern world as we know it is wrong, they cry. They want their tomorrow back and they're going to get it no matter how badly they mess up our present.

It's a subplot that burbles quietly in the background and will be more thoroughly examined in future stories because nothing fascinates me more than the difference between how we imagined the future and the future we ended up with.

So is it Steampunk if the setting isn't Victorian?

I'm not a big fan of genre restrictions, so for the most part I honestly don't care. However, for my money Steampunk shouldn't begin and end with the reign of Queen Victoria. The interesting bit to me isn't the airship pirates and top-hatted chrononauts. The thing that makes steampunk interesting to me is the idea of imagining a different past, a better past in which the wonders of technological advancement and inventive enthusiasm weren't saddled with the most shocking sexism, racism, and colonialism (among other appalling isms).  And then -- this is the important part for me and my story -- imagining the world of today that would have arisen from that better yesterday.

Because at some point, as storytellers, makers, and musicians, we should to move beyond the dreamy supposition of "What if the Victorians had steampowered iPhones?" and ask what a world would look like further along that timeline. So they had aetheric cell phones and flying ships and snazzy brass goggles... tell me what future that gave rise to. Because I'm not convinced that a more inclusive, more inventive version of our past would necessarily give us the dystopian worlds that most of my dieselpunk friends envision. (Dieselpunk being commonly anchored by a re-imagined World War One...)

Maybe it would. Maybe the chaos and war of the modern world was inevitable and the power of the aetheric phlogistonic manipulator arrays would inevitably give rise to a war machine that would lay waste to the world. Maybe. But one essential elements of imagining yesterday's tomorrows was the optimism that those dreams were based on. And I, for one, hold on to that. Because if you know anything about the real batsh*t crazy inventors of the actual Victorian age, you know that they were generally trying to make the world better, not tear it apart.

And I, for one, prefer that scenario.

Anatomy of an Online Launch Party

My publisher has set up an online launch party to celebrate the release of Howard Carter Saves the World. I've had a couple of people ask me what an "online launch party" was and what it is for.

It's a Facebook event, so it will take place on social media. Specifically, it is a page they set up that I can invite people to (consider yourselves invited) where I will spend a large part of the day on Tuesday  talking to readers, answering questions, sharing stories, posting more of my illustrations and silly artwork from the world of Howard Carter, sharing previously-recorded readings from the book, and generally having a digital hootenanny.

Fun fact: Because it was set up by my publisher, who live in the UK, it technically starts at midnight BST. I'm not sure if that means that the book drops on Amazon and elsewhere at that time (5:00 pm here in the Pacific Northwest, if I'm not mistaken).

I'll have some silly giveaways, additional writing, and a limited number of autographed postcards with one of the aforementioned silly illustrations on it that I will be sending out to a lucky few.

Howard Carter lives in a world that is rife with silliness and much of it leant itself to my penchant for illustration and faux ephemera, so there's quite a lot of it lying about waiting to deepen the world that is introduced in Howard Carter Saves the World.

All are welcome to stop by! You can find us here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1396956627287554/

More to come!

National Grilled Cheese Day (Now with Giant Robots!)

My novel is coming out on Tuesday, there are a thousand words of a new novel sitting on my laptop waiting for me to get back to them, and the science fiction world is embroiled in a kerfuffle about the Hugo award. The impending debut of Howard Carter fills me with a certain gut level of anxiety that I've never encountered before, my work in progress is a bit 'in the weeds' at the moment, and the Hugo imbroglio just saddens me.

It's also National Grilled Cheese Day, so let's talk about that instead.

Grilled cheese sandwiches weren't a Thing in our house growing up, so I don't have nostalgic warm fuzzies attached to the idea of the thing. I'm not sure why, but mom just didn't feed us cheese sandwiches for some reason. But I have a deep and abiding, possibly genetic, yen for things involving cheese, so it was the first thing I ever learned to make on my own without help.

Two slices of wheat bread, margarine, and pre-wrapped sandwich slices of American cheese*. Heat control when cooking is learned behavior and I burned the crap out of the first three or four that I made without ever getting the filling to melt. I ate them anyway because we didn't waste food in my family.

By the fifth sandwich, I'd sussed out that "Back end of a Mercury Rocket" was not the correct setting for the stove if I wanted something edible to come out of the skillet and I was off and running on my first culinary adventure. Eventually I also worked out how to handle a sandwich that's been buttered on the outside pre-cooking.

I've since learned a thing or two about what does and does not count as 'cheese' and tested my wits against various cooking implements that were intended to deliver prime sandwiching to the huddled masses yearning to eat cheese. My favorite is the panini press, but I don't have room for one on the counter in our small kitchen, so I stick with the cast iron skillet by preference.

The best grilled cheese sandwich I've ever had was at Beecher's Cheese in Seattle, which is where that photo above was taken. That is the moment of bliss, caught with the lens of my wife's smartphone. Their mac & cheese is God's gift to humanity, by the way, but National Mac & Cheese Day isn't until July** so that's another post.

Though maybe we should contemplate how many National ________ Day's one country really needs to have.  I don't know who comes up with this stuff, but if it gives me a ceremonial excuse to eat cheese, I'm down with it.

Oh, and Howard Carter Saves the World is coming out on Tuesday, so I declare April 14th to be National Giant Robots Day! Don't miss out on the giant robot event of the year. If you have a Kindle (or the free Kindle app) you can pre-order from Amazon now: http://tinyurl.com/HowardCarterSavesWorld or it will be available on Nook, Kobo, and other formats soon. (Amazon just makes it so easy to upload and do presales on eBooks.)

Now if you'll excuse me, there's a block of Beecher's cheese and a loaf of bread in the kitchen with my name on it.

* Which may or may not have actually contained any measurable amounts of actual cheese.
** Yes, really, July 14th apparently.