The Tale of the Wicked

I’m currently rereading Dune, and it’s even more amazing than I remember, probably because I am not 12 years-old anymore, and I can appreciate things now that I didn’t even know existed, then. My copy is a glorious hardback, so I can’t read it in bed after Anne has gone to sleep, on account of the “fucking light that’s so goddamn bright and why is it on after midnight”. This means that when I can’t read Dune before bed, I read something on my Kindle, so there is isn’t enough light to earn me The Wrath Of Anne Wheaton.

A few nights ago, I had finished an old Asimov Robot story that I got in a Humble Bundle, and when I went back to my homescreen, my Kindle recommended a short story from Scalzi, called The Tale of the Wicked. It is described thusly:

Captain Michael Obwije of the Confederation Armed Forces has been hunting a Tarin battle cruiser in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse. But when he orders his own ship in for the killing blow, the hot pursuit turns into a potentially more dangerous situation. One with implications for the entire Confederation.

That’s more than I knew when I bought it. In fact, all I knew when I bought it was that it was a short Scalzi story that cost 99 cents. For the record, that’s typically all I need to know to go ahead and make that kind of purchase.

It’s short and I think even that official description tells you more than you need to know, so I won’t spoil anything for you by adding my own details. I will say that I rated it 5 out of 5, and I would like very much to adapt it into a screenplay, if John hasn’t already made a deal to do that.

You can read it in under an hour, and if you’re like me, and thought that Zachary Quinto did the audio version of it, you can hear it in his voice while you read it, which is pretty nice. Or you could imagine that it’s me, which is not as nice, but is still kinda nice.

Three books that helped make me a better writer

I’m really tired, and don’t have a whole lot of motivation to do anything today, but I don’t want to break the chain of daily posts that I started over a month ago, so here’s some writing advice I gave on my Tumblr earlier today:

Do you have any recommendations for books on how to be a better writer and/or how to go about getting published? Or any advice in either. Thanks you’re the best!

Before you get into books, read and listen to Ira Glass talk about The Taste Gap. You’ll come back to this many times over the next few months and probably years.

Books:

Stephen King’s ON WRITING is incredibly valuable, and each time I read it, I learn something new because I’ve grown as a writer, and unlocked new perception abilities.

Save the Cat, by Blake Snyder, is very good, too. I don’t agree with all of it, and its primary focus is on screenwriting, but the fundamentals of pacing and working from a logline and basic story type are really useful.

The Anatomy of Story, by John Truby, is also very insightful and helpful. I love that it uses movies you’ve already seen and know to help explain the mechanics behind building them, so you can use the same mechanics in your original work.

As far as getting published goes, don’t worry about that until you feel confident and mature as a writer. Put your effort and XP into developing your voice, your discipline and commitment to doing the work, and rewriting the first draft. Once you’ve gotten all of that into your build, you can go ahead and start looking for publishing.

I hope this helps get you started. If there was one thing that I could make you listen to and internalize, though, just one single thing that you would be compelled to do, it is this: Write every day, and keep it simple.

I say to keep it simple because we all have this tendency to complicate things, in an effort to show everyone how clever we are. There’s certainly a place for that, but when we’re learning and developing, it’s going to be complicated enough on its own. Think of it like learning to play guitar: get your scales and basic chords down before you decide to tackle Metallica’s One or Stairway to Heaven.

the spice must flow

I first read Dune when we were filming Stand By Me. I remember that I loved it, even though I’m sure that most of it went over my head. I think about “I will not fear. Fear is the mindkiller…” and “The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience” all the time. I imagine that reading Dune again, as an adult, will open some portals in my tiny little brain that weren’t accessible when I was 12.

My son, Ryan, recently read the entire series for the first time. He loved it, too, and has been talking about it so much, I decided that I’d finally reread it … but then I got stuck in this decision process that I’d illustrate with a Sheldonesque flowchart if I wasn’t lazy. It basically went like this: Should I get it as an eBook? That’s convenient and I can sync it across all my different devices. But maybe I should get it as an actual book, because actual books are beautiful, and I feel like Dune is something that I’d want on my bookshelf. But if I want to read it in bed, there’s that whole “risking the wrath of Anne when the light wakes her up” situation. Maybe I could listen to it as an audiobook! But I have so many story ideas in my head right now, my mind tends to wander when I listen to anything. So maybe an eBook is the way to go, but … and so on.

So it was a whole thing and I ended up not making a decision.

Then, yesterday, I picked up a bunch of mail from my manager’s office, and holy shit there was this package from Penguin Random House that contained the Penguin Galaxy Edition of Dune! Look at how beautiful this is:

It has an introduction by Neil Gaiman, titled “What We Talk About When We Talk About Science Fiction”, which is amazing. So it turns out that, I chose not to decide, but still I made a choice … with a little help from whoever is writing the events of my life.

The reread begins today. Maybe I can find some inspiration and solace in a work of science fiction, before the world is engulfed in flame.

Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free

I worked on an audiobook all day yesterday. I don’t think I can talk about the specifics of it, but I’m proud of the word I did.

But I can point out this cool news that Cory Doctorow posted on boingboing yesterday, about an audtiobook that I read for him a couple of years ago:

I released an audio edition of the book in 2014, read by the incomparable Wil Wheaton, who also read the audiobook of my novel Homeland). At the time, I tried to get Neil and Amanda into a studio to record their intros, but we couldn’t get the stars to align.

But good things come to those who wait! Neil Gaiman’s 2016 essay collection The View From the Cheap Seats includes his introduction to my book, and the audiobook edition — which Neil himself read — therefore includes Neil’s reading of this essay.

Thanks to Neil, his agents, and the kind people at Harper Audio, I was able to get permission to include Neil’s reading of his essay for a remastered audio version of the audiobook.

I really like Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free. I learned a lot from it, and it helped me grow as an independent artist and creator. You can get your own DRM-free copy for $15.

you just start and you keep going until you’re finished

I’ve had this idea for a short supernatural horror story for years, but never actually committed to writing it. I guess the idea of the thing was so pleasing to me, I didn’t want to risk ruining it by writing it badly.

But a few months ago, I wrote an entirely different story, and showed it to a friend of mine who is a fucking amazing author who had offered to take a look at anything I wrote, if I ever wanted his feedback.

So on this other thing (which is called The Magician’s Path), I just wasn’t sure if it worked. I wasn’t sure if it all held together, or if it even told the story I wanted to tell. I sent it to my friend, and told him that if he thought it sucked, it would be really useful and helpful if he could tell me why it sucked, so I knew where to focus on developing my skills as a storyteller. He didn’t reply for a few days, and I thought, “Jeeze, I guess it sucks even harder than I thought it did.”

Then he texted me and told me that he really liked it, and didn’t think it needed much work. He hadn’t replied to be because he had gotten busy. Let that be a lesson to all of us about the things we presume based upon incomplete information.

As it turned out, he was coming to LA, and he offered to come to Castle Wheaton and go over it with me, so I could understand what I’d written from a structure standpoint, a story standpoint, a prose standpoint, etc.

We sat in my kitchen and went through it (it’s not long at all, like 4000 words) and while he showed me things, I began to feel like I was more capable than I thought I was. My instincts were good, my ideas made sense, and while the draft didn’t exactly need anything, if I did a couple of things to it, it would help it be better.

I want to say that it was like learning to walk, but it was more like suddenly having the confidence to stand up and stop crawling. My friend unlocked this thing inside of me that I’d been holding back because I was so afraid of failure, and all these ideas that I’d had for years started clamoring around inside my imagination to get out and become proper stories.

I started and abandoned a couple of things, because they weren’t the right thing for me to be writing at the time, and finally settled on the thing that was a short story that became a novella that wants to be a novel and still really needs a good title. Neil Gaiman says that each thing you write teaches you how to write it, that you have to learn while you’re doing it, and that every story is different. While that thing was teaching me how to write it, it was also teaching me how to just write the idea I have, without fear or judgement, and keep going until it’s finished.

Around the second week of October, I had to write a really difficult scene in that story. Without getting too precious about it, I just had to walk away from it for a little bit, and my brain was all “Why don’t you write the swamp story, and release it around Halloween?”

There isn’t a swamp in the story anymore, but I was like, “Good idea, brain,” and I got to work. It ended up being more than I expected, and I didn’t come close to making that Halloween deadline. But I finished it on Friday, and I’ve been deliberately taking this weekend off from it, even though I really want to get back to work on it and do the rewrites.

I’ll probably finish the rewrites sometime next week, and then I’ll go back to the novel, which feels like it’s about 90% finished, because I want to finish the first draft of it by the end of the year.

When it’s finished, I’ll go back to my whiteboard and pick the next thing that’s going to go into the collection of short stories that all of these things have come out of, and if everything goes according to plan, I’ll have at least one book (and hopefully two) published early next year.