It’s a little late for Thanksgiving, but then again, I’ve never been a big fan of shoving all the thankfulness onto one day. That always seemed to me to be a recipe for being an unappreciative jerk the other 364, because, hey, Thanksgiving’s got it covered. A suitably reverent tweet in the morning, maybe a few “Likes” on Facebook status updates on other folks saying they’re thankful, and we’re done, right? Meh.

Me, I’d rather cheat the calendar, or, at the very least, pull a Canute number on encroaching Christmas for at least one more day, and think about things in this very, very strange life that is professional writing that I’m thankful for. And with that in mind, here’s a very incomplete, deeply scattershot list of a few of the things that I’m thankful for – as reader, as writer, as book reviewer, as whatever.

Because, really, it’s rough out there. There are a ton of folks always eager to take anyone and anything that isn’t theirs down, simply because it isn’t theirs or isn’t them. That’s another reason to give thanks – to let the folks out there who are doing good and generous and noteworthy things something positive, a note of appreciation tucked in with the din of RWAH RWAH RWAH YOU STIIIIINK that can rise to the heavens like burning oilfield smoke. And from the other side, there’s plenty of self-interested chest-pounding, deliberate stalking of controversy in search of the elusive page hit, and general jackassery that can obscure the good stuff that’s out there. That’s a shame, too.

So, without further ado, a baker’s dozen writing-related things and people I’m thankful for.

1 – Girl Genius – Brilliantly inventive, effortlessly inventive, frequently hilarious, this gaslamp fantasy adroitly avoids the Dickensian miserablism that lurks at the heart of so much steampunk. Unafraid in all the right ways – talking cats? Hat-obsessed killing machines called Jagermonsters? Talking castles with a mean streak?? – it takes chances, embraces possibilities, and trusts that the audience is smart enough to keep up. Then there’s the protagonist, Agatha Heterodyne, who is smart, resourceful, courageous, and unlikely ever to be portrayed onscreen by Megan Fox. I’m thankful that three times a week, I get to read a tiny piece of something so brilliantly crafted.

2, 3 & 4 – Matt Forbeck, Chuck Wendig, and Mur Lafferty – They love writing. They enjoy writing. They share their love and enjoyment of writing in every way imaginable, and they do so generously, without arrogating unto themselves the status of self-proclaimed “guru”. The world is full of people who will gladly tell you how to write in exchange for your workshop fees or your allegiance or your guaranteed thumbs-ups on Facebook. How refreshing, then, to have three folks who are so eminently the real deal willing to share what they know, not to make themselves look good, but because they genuinely want to share.

5 – Jack Cady’s “The Night We Buried Road Dog” – It’s a ghost story. It was written two decades ago. I just discovered it this year, and it’s pure magic, a reminder of how good writing can be, even in the most unexpected places. Originally published in 1993, it’s a story about a young man who drives classic cars very fast across the wide-open spaces of the American West, the mysterious figure of the “Road Dog” who haunts those same highways, and the man he works for, who digs a grave for his beloved car. It’s also about ghosts, and about growing up, and about love and memory and finding one’s place and a whole lot of other things I can’t go into without spoiling things, and so I leave it to you to discover, if you haven’t discovered it already. To me, it stands for the idea that there are always undiscovered gems out there, waiting for the joy of the first encounter. (and yes, I know, “Road Dog” won a Stoker and has been reprinted in F&SF and all that jazz. It was new to me. So might it be new to someone else. Don’t judge; just envy the blue lightning of initial discovery)

6 – The community of the Game Narrative Summit at GDC Online, and the fine folks who put on STAGConf, and everyone else out there interested in good storytelling in games – Because the craft isn’t static. Because as new media evolve, as new hardware makes new techniques viable, there’s always room to learn and grow. And so, Stephane Bura and Tom Abernathy and Rhianna Pratchett and Alexis Kennedy and Jeremy Bernstein and Mary De Marle and too many other folks to count, I’m thankful you’re out there doing good work, pushing boundaries, and genuinely giving a damn about how to do this insane job right. Because God knows it would be easy enough to say “It’s just a game” – that’s what some of the critics think, right – and just fill in the blanks of a thousand “Arrggh, he shot me” variants. I’m happy and I’m humbled to work in a field that’s constantly generating concepts like StoryBricks and Andy Walsh’s Ondemand Storytelling and Well-Fed Snakes and a whole bunch of other approaches, all championed by folks who have a keen passion for telling good stories in the medium that speaks to so many of us. Thank you for being out there, guys. Thanks for never stopping. Thanks for making it a thrill to keep up.

7 & 8- ChiZine Publications and Tachyon Publications – I think every the CZP book I’ve seen is gorgeous and memorable, and even the ones that I haven’t necessarily enjoyed have been manifestly themselves, interesting and different and most emphatically not trend-sniffing. Their monthly readings, which I’ve dropped in on a few times, are simply fun, a celebration of the fact that, hey, books are gettin’ made here, folks. Tachyon’s books are elegant, visually understated and always thoughtfully put together. These two aren’t the only smaller presses whose work I’ve enjoyed this year, far from it, but they’ve been the ones whose output has most consistently ended up in the hallowed “read this next” spot on my night table. And for their willingness – and for Apex’s, and Angry Robot’s, and a whole bunch of other people’s – to put books out there that don’t just play it safe in cover art and subject matter and author choice, as a reader and reviewer I’m emphatically thankful.

9 – Anne McCaffrey – I didn’t read a whole lot of her books after the Dinosaur Planet series wrapped up. My first exposure to “The Ship Who Sang” was in a comic book adaptation called Starstream. I never had a secret recipe for klah, and I never had a stuffed firelizard doll I sat on my shoulder at conventions. But the very first videogame I worked on was an adaptation of one of her novel series. Throughout what was a grueling and messy development process, she was always extremely pleasant to work with and generous with her creation. I think I can truthfully say that without Anne McCaffrey, I wouldn’t be where I am, doing what I’m doing today, and for that, I will always be thankful.

10 – Local booksellers – The Regulator, one of the anchors of Ninth Street. Books Do Furnish A Room, tucked away in an unassuming blue building at the back of a gravel lot, where only those in the know and the lucky will stumble across it. Chapel Hill Comics. McIntyre’s. The Brier Creek B&N, where the staff has always been unfailingly polite, friendly, and well-informed. Many, many more. The Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area is blessed with an abundance of places bookish people can find treasures. Yesterday, in two stops, I picked up an oral history of Negro League baseball, an award-winning science fiction novel, a “non-fiction” account of hauntings along the Maine coast, and a volume on the unit charged with stealing art treasures back from the Nazis. Thank you for feeding my habit.

11 & 12 – My niece and nephew – Because you like to read. Because you want to read. Because put together, you’re not yet bar/bat mitzvah age, and you both love books. You could not make your uncle prouder.

13 – Bull Spec Magazine – Not just because of the magazine, though the magazine’s great. Strong fiction from a mix of local and international authors, gorgeous covers, the occasional readable book review *cough cough* – it’s good stuff. Or to put it another way, I bought a subscription for my dad, and I write for it. But another part of what makes me thankful for all the work Sam Montgomery-Blinn and team have done putting Bull Spec together is this: I’ve been in Carolina for a dozen years, and until Bull Spec came along, I never found a writing community. You’d think in a region that had John Kessel and Lewis Shiner and David Drake and Mark Van Name and all sorts of other writerly types wandering around loose, there’d be more of that, but no. Bull Spec became something a lot of folks coalesced around. Sometimes it was as simple as Sam sending out an email saying “Hey, you guys know about this thing coming up?” Sometimes it was a formal event, and God help the poor waitresses who had to attend to a post-reading horde of writers. And sometimes it was the thrill of seeing someone you knew in print. All good things, and for that, I am thankful.

The list doesn’t end here, of course. It would be a sad and small world if it did. But to everyone and everything above, and to everyone and everything else out there that makes life a little better for the reading/writing type, thank you.

There is nothing intrinsically sacred about the act of writing. Yes, it’s a strong creative outlet. It’s a wonderful career for those of us lucky enough to be able to do it for a living. And it fuels one of my favorite hobbies, which happens to be kicking back in my hammock with a good book and a glass of lemonade.

But, it’s not holy, and it’s not mandatory. “Oh, you should write a book!” is a wonderful sentiment, but what’s implied in it is “You need to spend a lot of time doing something that you may not enjoy doing and may not do particularly well.” The folks who think that everyone should write are ignoring the fact that many people are neither suited to nor interested in writing – or perhaps in any creative endeavor – and yet will be perfectly fine and happy with that choice, and lead long and fulfilling lives as a result. Indeed, the more shrill voices in the “Everyone MUST write!” camp can, with a little squinting, be seen to be a bit…nervous about their participation in the second-least-sanitary thing you can do by yourself at a keyboard, and their motivational speaker-like manic encouragement of others to join them takes on an air of “convince me that I did the right thing”.

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My first actual publication, out where live human beings I wasn’t related to might read it, was in an academic journal called Lovecraft Studies. The thing I published was part of my undergraduate thesis, a ruthless kidnapping of old H.P.L. in which I dragged him through the thickets and swamps of critical analysis by way of Mikhail Bakhtin. It was, to put it mildly, dry reading for those not inculcated in the rituals of the Advanced English Degree. But when I got the notice that the piece had been accepted – no payment, just a couple of contributor copies, as is academia’s wont – I walked on air. Nearly literally – I was living at my cousin’s place in Boston at the time, and the stairs were steep, and when I read the letter with the acceptance mid-way up to the door I jumped and nearly went back down the hard way. But it was an indescribable moment, one of validation, and excitement, and the first faint embers of thinking that if I could publish once, I really could do it some more.

And along the way to publication, helping hands were there for me every step of the way. Professor Enda Duffy at Wesleyan, my thesis advisor, who taught me theory and turned me into someone who actually could write a serious paper with serious thought behind it. Professor Paul Lewis at Boston College, who worked with me to take it from student paper to professional-level material. And Lovecraft Studies editor S.T. Joshi, twice, who first read over the thesis-as-thesis and commented, and then accepted the paper for his journal.

For all that composition is a solitary ritual, you don’t walk alone in this business.

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The act of writing, if we can decouple it from the veritable supernova of how-to and motivational essays spattered across the blogosphere, is not necessarily fun. It involves long hours, hard work, research (if you’re honest), and the non-zero chance of doing terrible things to your posture, your eyesight, and your marriage. The truth of this leads to a dilemna: For the serious writer, the individual who actually does want to write, who has stories to tell and will, by God, get them out there, then the implicit obstacles in the composition process must be overcome. Don’t do it, and you don’t write. You become that ghastly bore who slinks around parties telling everyone about your novel-in-progress that you gave up on at page 32 because you couldn’t get that first fight scene just right, but, yeah, you’re going to finish some day, really and for sure.

On the other hand, if you’re a casual writer, if you’re scribbling because you enjoy the act, then the obstacles and hard work take on a new meaning. (and let me say that I think there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG with being a casual writer, a dabbler, an occasional scribbler. You’re having fun with it? More power to you) It may be surprising to some, but there is absolutely no moral virtue to punishing yourself and those around you by slogging through the writing process if you’re not actually that interested in writing. You don’t get a merit badge, you don’t get an XBox Live Achievement, and you probably don’t become a better human being out of it. What you do stand a strong chance of becoming is a miserable bastard, chained to a project you’re not enjoying but which you are going to finish, God damnit, because God damnit you’re going to finish it. In the meantime, you’re being an unpleasant git to everyone around you because you’re forcing yourself to do something you don’t enjoy for an end goal that’s at best unclear, you’re not doing other things you might enjoy – or need to do – more, and you’re lining up your friends and loved ones for the summarily cruel experience of reading your manuscript and commenting on it in a way that will not cause irreparable rifts in your relationships.

Nobody’s judging you. Write if you want to, not because you think you should.

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The worst lesson I learned about writing, I got in high school. I entered an essay contest  sponsored by the National Objectivist Foundation or something to that effect, largely because I’d read Anthem in class and not absolutely hated it. My essay, on Odysseus and how he was a strong, self-reliant figure (not actually true, if you close-read Homer: the guy’s always getting help from hot princesses, hotter goddesses, gods with bags full of wind, and a crew that indulges his idiotic whim when rowing past the island of the sirens – but I digress), went absolutely nowhere near actual Randian philosophy, because I really hadn’t noticed or internalized much of it while reading the cockamamie book.

The essay came in roughly 249th in the country. I was a national semi-finalist, or some such; I still have the letter around somewhere. And I’d written the damn thing on an electric typewriter in the basement the night before the deadline, one draft, no revisions, because I’d told someone I was going to enter and then forgotten about it until the last minute.

The good lessons there, about working under pressure and generating something coherent under tight deadline – have stayed with me. The bad lesson – the idea that with some natural talent and a little bit of razzle-dazzle, it’s possible to skate without putting the real hard work in – took a long time to put into context. There are times when you really do need to just pound something out and let the fancy fingerwork cover for the fact that you haven’t pored over it the way maybe you would have under ideal circumstances. But it’s too easy to fall into that mode for all writing, to push everything up against the deadline as a way of getting out of a lot of the hard work of writing – iteration, editing, revision, putting in the research to get it just right – and tell yourself it’s the best you could have done under the circumstances.

When it’s the best you could have done under the circumstances, it often behooves you to take a look at how exactly those circumstances got arrived at, and who put you there. A lot of times, it’s you.

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There are only so many tropes that writing advice can hit. Your villains should be interesting. Your hero shouldn’t be an [N] Sue, where n = some value of you, except with bigger secondary sexual characteristics and a smaller waistline. Write every day. You get the idea. These things are everywhere, constantly rewritten by some very smart, very talented, very generous-of-spirit people who do write, and write well, and want you to do the same. They’re also rewritten by mean-spirited jerks, hustlers who don’t write themselves but who will gladly take your nickel in exchange for advice they’ve never put to the test, and never-was-es making their best guesses at a target they can only see through binoculars.

None of which, ultimately, matters. At a certain point, you put down the advice and pick up the pen, or reasonable facsimile thereof. If you’re going to write, you write. If you’re not going to write, that’s fine, too. If you enjoy reading writing advice, and get a kick out of looking for the pithiest way to say, “If you’re going to write a sex scene, it helps if at some point in your life you have actually been naked”, then good on you, and happy reading.

But the fact remains, there is no ultimate end here. There is no moral weight, no checklist, no Mandate of Heaven that you, yes YOU, must write or the pillars of the skies will topple. If you choose to do so, do it well, and to the level that you find rewarding – occasional limerick writer or full-time novelist, it’s your life and you make the call. If you choose not to, that’s your decision, too, and get comfortable with it. Don’t feel you’ve failed God, the universe and your sainted mother because you never finished turning your Shadowrun campaign from college into a grim, gritty urban fantasy novel indistinguishable from the last twenty you just read. You haven’t. You haven’t even failed yourself, unless actually writing that novel was something you did indeed want to do.

And if that’s the case, get off your ass and get to work – but because you want to, not because I told you to.

Sometimes, the biggest obstacle to your writing is writing.

Sounds counter-intuitive, I know. I mean, writing’s writing, right? (Right.) It doesn’t matter so much what you’re writing, as long as you’re putting words on page, because, hey, it’s all writing, and the act of writing is sacred and glorious and wonderful, and if you don’t believe that why are you reading a writing advice blog.

To a certain extent, that’s true. You get better at writing, you become a better writer by actively writing. Depending on how seriously you take Malcolm Gladwell (and I, for one, have started taking him far less seriously since he started hanging out with Bill Simmons), this is part of the ten thousand hours of practice it takes to get to a hypothetical state of mastery, and in that sense it doesn’t matter so much that you’re writing novels or short stories or blog posts or captions for cute cat pictures.

OK, maybe the LOLCat stuff doesn’t actually help. But that’s beside the point. Bear with me.

No, the real kicker is whom you’re writing for, and therein lies the trap.

Writers, to make a broad and sweeping generalization that will no doubt produce at least one angry comment, are often insecure creatures. We want our writing to be wanted. We want it to be read. We want to find places for it out in the big bad world. And so it’s always seductively easy to say yes, when offered an audience. A guest blog post? Absolutely. An interview request (with an interview that turns out to be twenty pages of questions)? Hey, it’s exposure! A short story for a charity anthology with ridiculously strict guidelines? It’s for a good cause! A lengthy blog post on the relative merits of Supernatural vs. The Vampire Diaries? Hey, gotta keep the online presence going, even at six thousand words a pop. You get the idea.

It’s not that any or all of these are bad ideas. The trick, however, is figuring out who really benefits from each one, and prioritizing them accordingly. Assuming you’ve got a day job and and still insist on writing, odds are A)you’ve got limited time to write in any given week and B)you’ve got limited energy, unless your employer has spiked the free coffee with a mix of Red Bull, Five Hour Energy, and Colombian marching powder. As such, you need to look at every project on your docket and dope out which ones are most worthy of your time, attention, and energy. Prioritize the ones that benefit you the least – the freebies, the dives into areas of small readership, the nobly clothed time-wasters that feel oh so very urgent but which really are there just to keep you from working on the big stuff – and you find yourself devoting less and less time to the stuff that you need to get done for you.

And that’s not saying that “blogging is bad!” or whatever. That’s a silly, reductionist take, and not at all true. Blogging’s damn useful for building and maintaining a presence. Book reviews, in addition to providing a steady stream of books, tend to have a short turnaround and get your name out there when other pieces of the publishing machine are going slowly. Interviews, well, assuming you’re not being interviewed as the Author Of The Month over at White Supremacist Lifestyle Magazine, hey, it’s good pub, right? It’s just a question of learning to assess how much you get out of it as compared to what you put in. A ten page interview for a website that gets a couple of dozen hits a month is  probably not as deserving of your time as working on your own stuff. A lengthy blog post that takes you from sit down to bedtime may be enjoyable, but you have to ask yourself whether there was greater benefit in that than in doing a shorter post and perhaps laying down a few hundred words on a short story. Answering questions from a student who’s trying to break into professional writing? Absolutely admirable, but answering questions from five students starts to represent a serious time commitment, and one that may prevent you from doing the very thing they’re asking you about. Writing a story to post for free in order to bring in new readers? Very cool and very 21st century, but if the hits aren’t there, it might be worth investing that time – or that story – someplace else.

Ultimately, it’s not enough just to write. You have to write smart, and you have to be ruthless in assessing why you want to write project A instead of project B at any given moment. It’s ridiculously easy to self-sabotage by loading up your plate with tons of distractionary (yes, I know that’s not a word) deliverables, any of which seems like a good idea at the time but all of which, together, gang up on you to prevent you from doing the big stuff, or the hard stuff, or the important stuff. But hey, in the meantime you’re a busy, busy writer who’s constantly writing, and that’s what’s important.

Then again, maybe it isn’t.

So the next time you sit down to write, think about what you’re writing. Then think about why you’re writing it, and who you’re writing it for. Learn to say no to projects that are quite literally not worth your time, because time is a precious, precious commodity. And be honest with yourself as to why you’re picking the projects you’re picking. If you’re not there’s no way you’re going to optimize your time, your productivity, and your words. That’s not the path to mastery, or a successful writing career, or happiness with your work.

But in the meantime, at least you’ll be keeping busy.

1-Why do so many writers spend so much time writing about writing?

Because deep down, many of us are still in thrall to the delightfully archaic notion of “Write What You Know” – which, in some form or other has been zombified since the first writer picked up a travel guide and said, “Gee, I guess I don’t have to go to Sasketchewan to write this thing after all[i]”. And since we all write, we all theoretically know about writing – as opposed to, say, the history of the Adams-Onis treaty, string theory, or the mechanisms of ontogenic development in axolotls[ii], and thus we are qualified to inflict our particular thoughts on the subject on you, the innocent and helpless reading public.

The fact that deep down, many of us harbor the nagging suspicion that we’re somehow doing it wrong and thus compulsively seek affirmation by dangling our techniques in front of the world in hopes of told we’re getting it right, is pure scurrilous rumor.

2-You told me not to do [thing X] in my writing, but I just bought [book y[iii]] and the author does that all the time, and she’s sold more books than you. So who do I believe?

That kind of depends. Odds are, the specific example you’re pointing out is not the reason the book in question sold so well, so doing that particular thing and expecting it to rain shirtless Robert Pattinsons is probably not an effective career plan.  There’s also the little thing that the nature of transitive properties is important – just because one book contravenes something an author says is good did well doesn’t mean that A)everything in that book is good B)all books do it or C)everything that writer has ever said about everything now needs to be thrown out post-haste.

And of course, there’s the notion that the magical notion of “good” writing isn’t always “appropriate” writing or “what the audience of a particular type of fiction wants” writing or even “accessible” writing. So deal with it. Judge for yourself what works better as a model – the original advice or the book that succeeded by violating it. Just don’t expect a single right answer.

3-Why do so many sources of information on writing disagree so much?

Because writers are contrary, ornery people who  over the years have found a wide variety of routes to success, some of which are tuned to the needs and skills of the individual writer. Also, many people who are writing about writing, even successful or famous ones, have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about, and as such their advice may be contradicted by others. What this means is that you need to figure out what works for you, not take something on faith just because you read it in glowing electrons, and be willing to toss a source of advice – be it Robert McKee or the guy at the local comics shop who’s self-publishing stuff with a circulation of twelve[iv] – if it doesn’t pass your personal sniff test.

4-What caused the explosion in writers writing about writing?

The fact that the internet removed the barrier to entry to the market. In days of yore, there were only a couple of ways a book on writing got published, largely because they tended to be long, dry, and about as likely to succeed fiscally as a remake of Highlander starring Gary Busey[v]. Now, however, everyone who wants to write about writing can. Generally, this is a good thing – it services lots more niches, it allows different voices to be heard, and so on and so forth. It just also means that there’s a lot out there, and not all of it is well thought out or deathless or universal or whatever. In short, it’s a good thing that there’s more writing about writing out there. It’s a bad thing if you don’t approach it with a critical eye.

5-Is all this writing about writing merely an excuse not to write?

You are a bad and cynical person for asking this question, when all writers want to do is share their hard-earned wisdom with those who come after them, in hopes of sparing them the faltering missteps that the writers made on their way along the trail.

Seriously. We’re all givers like that.

6-There’s so much good information on writing out there! How do I narrow it down?

Here’s a useful guideline: If you spend more time reading writing about writing than you do writing, you need to cut back. If you produce more tweets of links to articles about writing in a day than you do words, you need to cut back. If you have spent more time laying out plans for a blog you intend to write on writing but will never actually do anything on than actually writing, cut back and punch yourself in the back of the head a few times for good measure.

A good rule of thumb is to read until something sparks an idea and makes you want to write something of your own. If, over an extended period of time, nothing does that, you may want to ask yourself why you’re reading about writing, and instead turn to blogs and podcasts about golf, cooking, Bigfoot hunting, or making your own cheese from common household chemicals.

7-Why do so many of these articles take the form of lists?

Because it’s a lot easier to develop seven ideas for one paragraph than one idea for seven. Because the format lends itself admirably to snark, which, as we all know, is the leading indicator of quality online essay writing these days. And because single points developed over multiple paragraphs can sometimes be mistaken for giant walls of text, and thus get dismissed as “TL:DR”.

In related news, I’m doing next month’s piece entirely in rebuses.

If there are more proper nouns in your back cover text blurb than non-proper ones, you’re probably doing something wrong.

When I worked in a bookstore (yes, one of those quaint things that sold bits of dead tree bound up with black squiggles in them), there was a pretty regular process to the courtship between reader and book. The reader, drawn in by the cover art or the name on the cover, would make several passes by the shelf where the book in question stood, demurely shelved. The reader would then pick it up, and, if the front cover art met muster, flip it over. This was a key moment, as it was the first time the prospective reader would actually, you know, read something to do with the book – the dreaded back cover text. If it’s good – if it’s appealing and it’s interesting and it’s accessible – then odds are, the potential reader is going to do something silly like buy the book. If not – if your back cover text is an indecipherable swamp of capitalized terms that are worth more on a Scrabble board than they are to an uninitiated reader, odds are that text is going to serve as what we in the videogame industry call a Barrier To Entry.

In other words, it should entice the reader, not terrify them. You’re looking to get someone to get to know your kingdoms and monsters and wizards, not give them a Wonderlic test on their suitability to read without resorting to a dramatis personae cheat sheet. So if your book comes back with back cover text that reads like the fantasy equivalent of the President’s morning briefing, complete with strategic analyses, family trees and threat levels, suggest a change for something simpler. Your unminted readers will thank you.

Unspeakable evil probably doesn’t live in your mom’s basement.

Look, I get it. Horror is largely a symbolic genre. The ghosts and vampires and unnameable critters from the vasty plains of Fgg’gtt’btt’tt (or, as I like to call it, Brooklyn) all stand in for something. Unfinished business, sex, giving yourself up to something else, the undefined future – whatever. We get it, and we get it instinctively, which is why we like reading that stuff.

And so, it’s no-brainer that the boojum lurking at the childhood home would be a major player in all of this. Childhood’s scary. It’s when all the deep down frights get hard-wired into you by a big, bad world that you don’t understand. It makes sense that a childhood home would get wrapped up in the scares that hit closest to home, the ones you have to face down before you can move on as a fully integrated adult-type human being.

That being said, it seems odd that every old family home that falls into the hands of every struggling writer on the planet has a gate to interdimensional evil in the basement.  I ask you, does it really have to be the end of the world every time a guy who’s blocked on his second novel goes home? Can it just be town-devouring evil? County-devouring? Hell, is there room for it in the basement with all the bloggers who are allegedly crammed in there?

Because really, what you’re saying when you claim world-destroying evil is seeping out through the walls of the place you grew up is that your childhood fears are the worst and most important ones that ever were. And considering how many novels there are about blocked novelists fighting world-destroying evil in the basements of their ancestral homes, the math simply doesn’t add up. They can’t all be the most uberscariestest things ever, can they?

Try some perspective. Put it in scale. Scale back the ambition, and by doing so, you just might give it a bit more personality, a bit more individuality. I mean, seriously, destroying the world is about as generic a monster motivation as you can get (Besides eating brains. Eating brains is the new beige.) Trying something even a little bit different might make your unspeakable horror a little more interesting to talk about.

If your star-spanning galactic empire doesn’t have working cell phone technology, you may want to rethink things a bit.

Yes, hard science fiction is hard, largely because hard science is, well hard. Look at it. The word “hard” is right there in the name. Also, the hard science stuff tends to get in the way of giant space dogfights, zippity-zoom travel between star systems, and remarkably human-looking green alien ladies who are happy to go reverse cowgirl on any number of Captain Kirk wannabes. It does this mainly by virtue of pointing out that such things are impossible, which is roughly the equivalent of pointing out that Edward and Bella makes Woody and Soon-Yi look like nothing at ground zero of a Sparkly Vampire Online Dating Site Meetup.

So really, it’s OK. Handwave the faster-than-light travel. Make all the aliens want to boink like space is one big rave at Ibiza and Orbital is doing their version of the Dr. Who theme song. Throw in zap guns and nanotech and God knows what else to your heart’s content, if it makes for a better story.

But the moment your intergalactic space cops need to rely on a communications device that can’t do half the crap my iPad does, you lose me. The instant your plot hangs on a mystery that could be solved in fifteen seconds with Google (and I say fifteen only because space cops are lousy typists), you bore me. When your novel of the future has a technological paradigm that was cutting edge at the same time Zaxxon was, I’m putting your book down.

So take ten minutes with one of those newfangled electronic typewriter thingies attached to the intertubes, and check to make sure your science fiction is, in fact, fiction, and not the sort of stuff you see at yard sales. The results might surprise you. And they might interest your readers. Which, as they say, is a good thing.

Question: What is the appropriate price-point for an ebook?

Answer: Whatever the point of intersection is between the readership’s level of interest and willingness to shell out cold hard cash. Until we reach that point, everything is just the accrual of data points. I for one have no particular dog in this fight; I’m merely horrified at the apparent willingness of various participants in the online discussion to garrotte each others’ children over the absolute moral principle of $0.99 versus $4.99.

Yes, it’s an important discussion. Yes, the answer will go a long way towards shaping the future of the ebook market. No, it’s not a statement of personal moral turpitude for someone to take up a position opposite yours.

Question: Why should I boycott Dorchester? For that matter, what’s Dorchester?

Answer: You should boycott Dorchester and its associated imprints because they’re jerks. And because they’re selling books they don’t contractually have the right to sell. And because roughly 87% of the horror novels they published under the Leisure imprint had spooky old houses on the cover, and I’d really hoped that we as a genre had moved beyond that.

Question: Should I self-publish? There are all these stories about people making tons of money doing it.

Answer: Yes. Just bear in mind that people are a lot more motivated to share their stories of huge success with the world than they are their tales of abject failure. There’s not a lot of incentive to post, say, “I went to self-publishing and nobody bought my damn books.” That being said, there are an awful lot of those stories out there, too.

At this point, anyone who denies that there is viability to self-publishing is sticking their head in their sand. People, as J.A, Konrath will be happy to point out at great length, can make a lot of money at this. However, it’s not going to happen magically, or without a lot of hard work, or all by itself. Expecting self-publishing to be a panacea, wrapped up in a golden ticket to Willie Wonka’s factory wrapped around a chewy candy center, are exactly as wrong as those who think that getting a book accepted for publication by a mainstream house means they’re now off to Neil Gaiman’s tax bracket without ever having to lift another finger. The hard truth remains that, no matter what approach you choose, success in writing requires a hell of a lot of hard work.

Unless, of course, you’re Snooki.

Question: Why are the shelves full of paranormal romance novels/teen angst with vampires/zombie novels when I can’t get my brilliant stuff a sniff anywhere?

Answer: Because publishers think that paranormal romance, teen sparkly vampire wizard ninja angst, or zombies will provide them a better chance of selling books than whatever you’ve written, even if it’s really, really good. There is no moral judgment. There is no commentary on you as a person. There is honestly not even a judgment on your work in most cases, other than “we don’t think we can sell more copies of this than we can of this other proposal about teenaged vampires trapped by the zombie apocalypse on board a zeppelin.” And I say this as someone who’s currently peddling a horror novel about a sentient video game, and another one about a private detective who’s a sasquatch.

It can be frustrating, It can be maddening. It should not be personal.

Alternately, you can take it personally, develop a massive persecution complex, splash it all over the net, and in doing so provide yourself with plenty of hands-on research for your next project, which will be about angsty teenaged wizard ninja sparkly elf vampires. And which will sell millions.

Dear readers, writers, and fellow nerds of all stripes, I feel I must unburden myself to you of a terrible, profound, shocking secret that, over the course of my professional and personal journey, I have uncovered.

Pay attention. This is important.

There is a lot of entertainment out there. And one of the inevitable consequences of there being so much out there is that different people like different things. And this is fine.

Or, to put it another way, there are things that you like that I don’t like. There are things that I like that you don’t like. There are things out there that we both like, and things that neither of us like. There are things you like a lot that I kind of enjoy, and things that I’m fanatical about that you can only enjoy in small doses.

And again, this is fine. When I say, “I do not like this thing you like,” I am merely stating a personal preference. I am not making a value judgment on you as a human being based on the fact that your love for Dollhouse is probably far greater than mine. I do not cast you out from the charmed circle of those I bless with my presence because you do not give a rat’s ass over whether the 12” remix of Marillion’s “Assassing” is superior to, inferior to, or simply different[1] than the album and single mixes. I actually enjoy conversing at levels below 100 decibels with people whose taste differs from mine because exploring what each of us likes or does not like about Joss Whedon’s latest project can lead to some very interesting discussion. This, in my opinion is a good thing.[2]

However, and I may be getting silly here, I expect the same of you. I would hope that you would understand that others’ tastes are not precisely congruent to your own, and that by going on fanatical crusades across the internet to flame at the stake the heretics who did not show sufficient love for Firefly or John Scalzi’s latest book or whatnot, you look like jerks, and make actual interesting discussion beyond “I LURV THIS SO MUCH” pretty much impossible.

By the same token, exploding into wrathful condescension against those who like stuff that you do not like – particularly things that fall into the category of Things That Sold Better Than Things I Like And Which Are Liked By Many Other People – at the drop of a hat is also counterproductive to anything except the reinforcement of a particularly weird and defensive tribal mindset. This siege mentality, which can best be summed up as “Everyone out there likes crap and I like the good stuff” is magnificent at driving off people who might actually have been interested in trying the stuff you’d like had it been offered in a friendly, accessible and non-fanatical way.

It also, once liquor gets into the equation, turns parties boring as hell, because there’s always some drunk asshole in the corner declaiming loudly about how Twilight[3] is actually a sign of the oncoming zombie apocalypse. Said asshole used to hole up in the same corner ranting about how The Wheel of Time was the end of literacy, and before that The Belgariad, and before that D&D tie-in novels, and before that, all the way back to Seabury Quinn (with a side trip circa 1984 into “U2 sold out, man, and now their music sucks!”), but never mind. Not important[4]. What is important is that you scratch that loudly voiced concern lightly and you get a highly counterproductive mix of clannishness and snobbery and jealousy, which A)doesn’t discourage a single 12 year old girl from buying a poster of Taylor Lautner flashing his abs and B)makes people actively want to avoid the stuff you’re holding out as brilliant. Why? Because you’ve already told them that the stuff they like is crap, and that’s not a good indicator that your tastes are then magically going to align once you force them to watch YouTube clips of the best moments from Warehouse 13[5].

So, in short: relax. Or calm the fuck down. Whichever. Unhitch your self-esteem from your entertainment choices and just enjoy them for a change. And while you’re at it, allow others to enjoy theirs as well. Then, if you’re really feeling crazy, you can sit down and talk about what you liked/didn’t like and maybe be glad that other folks are getting enjoyment from what they read, or watch, or listen to. Understand that no one is secretly judging you and finding you wanting because you liked Patrick Rothfuss more than you liked Tolkien. And understand that the person you talked to who couldn’t give a crap about what happens next to Kvothe is not a bad person because of their withholding of that metaphorical lump of kaka. If you can talk using a noun-to-expletive ratio of better than 3:1 about why Brandon Sanderson’s latest slab[6] of heroic fantasy didn’t do it for you with someone who did like the book, great. Maybe they can talk about why they did like it, and everyone walks away from the conversation a little happier. At the very least, you’ll be able to be slightly more accurate in your holiday shopping for one another[7].

But as for me, I liked Rubicon more than I’m liking The Walking Dead so far. I preferred Millennium to The X-Files. I don’t listen to a ton of MC Frontalot or Dresden Dolls or J-pop. I think Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora is the most enjoyable fantasy novel I’ve read in years, that James Knapp’s The Silent Army is the most interesting zombie novel I’ve read lately, and that Jeff Strand is someone more people should be reading. I’m mildly amused by The Guild, I don’t read Wil Wheaton’s blog on a regular basis, and I’m more interested in Keith Law’s take on books than I am in that of most genre reviewers.

These are my opinions. Having them does not make me a bad person[8]. By the same token, I would not consider you to be a bad person if you held opinions counter to mine.  And if you could do me – and everyone else whose tastes aren’t precisely identical to yours – the same courtesy, then maybe we’ll all be a little happier. At the very least, we’ll all have a lot more time for reading.

[2] It has been scientifically proven that the only entertainment choice all sentient life-forms can actually agree on is Law & Order reruns, which everyone agrees are OK for background noise if there’s nothing else on.

[3] For the record: I have never read a Twilight novel. I probably never will read one. I don’t find the premise interesting. Do not mistake the referenced paragraph as an endorsement of, commentary on, or judgment in the case of Twilight. Because if you do, you’re wrong.

[4] A bunch of people sitting around a table agreeing with each other that Twilight sucks is not equivalent in any way, shape, or form to the Algonquin Round Table, except possibly by the fact that in both instances, chairs were involved. Remember this.

[5] And while we’re at it, this essay is not about you, personally. If you think it is, you need to re-read it, possibly several times.

[6] This is not a comment on quality; it is a comment on bulk. Any novel that I can do step aerobics on, whether it be Mark Helprin, Normal Mailer, Brandon Sanderson or whoever, is summarily designated a “slab”. As in “this book could conceivably be used as a paving slab”.

[7] Unless you engage in “proselytizing-through-presents”, which I regard as being on the same level as Homer buying Marge a bowling ball labeled “Homer” on The Simpsons. Unless, of course, you’re pushing my books. In that case, have at it.

[8] Or an idiot, or a moron, or whatever other pejorative leaps to mind as a replacement for “person whose opinion differs from mine”

There is no such thing as “writer’s block”.

More specifically, there is no such thing as “writer’s block”, if you are defining “writer’s block” – notice the clever use of quotes there – as some sort of externally imposed mental lump of concrete that – for no reason – stands between you, the author, and the precious, precious words that you need to continue writing.

Now, there is such a thing as “I don’t actually want to write this and can’t admit it to myself.” There is also such a thing as “This is going the wrong way and I don’t know how to fix it”, not to mention “I’ve written myself into a corner and don’t know how to get out of it but don’t want to throw away the stuff I’ve already written”, “I’m bored with this project but can’t let myself think that,” and “I’d rather be writing this other thing.” There are even instances of “I have to write this thing or else all these other bad things (contract cancellation, not getting paid, having your pet hamster get repossessed, etc.) will happen.

Any and all of these can bring your writing to a crashing, skidding, stuck-axle-deep-in-gooey-mud halt, simulating the symptoms of the mythical ailment called “writer’s block”. Certain other things also simulate the core symptom of “writer’s block”, including not being at your computer, spending hours playing Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook, watching realtime score updates from the World Cup while following the vuvuzela’s twitter feed, and so forth. But really, “writer’s block” is an inaccurate catchall, a symptom labeled as a disease and about as accurate as declaring someone cursed with imbalanced humors, dropsy, or the vapors.

That’s not to say that at certain points, you won’t find it impossible to go forward on a particular project no matter how hard you try. There are various workarounds for this: jump tracks to another project, do some editing, try to bull your way through one painful adverb at a time. But the best and most efficient use of your time in that case is to figure out what’s really going on that your subconscious has decided that your muse has had a few too many and is getting cut off for the rest of the night. Figure out what’s really going on, from “I just need a nap” to “My hindbrain is telling me that I’d actually rather watch a Real Housewives of Harrisburg. Pennsylvania marathon than spend one more minute trying to pound it out”.

Be honest. Be unstinting in your scrutiny. Be willing to admit to yourself something you may not want to hear – like, say, the fifty three thousand words you’ve already laid down on that vampire novel are painfully derivative and deep down you know it – and act on it. And acting on it may be hard. It may mean starting over. It may mean mass edits. It may mean stepping away from a project for a while until you actually like it again, assuming you can afford to do so. But until you pinpoint the real problem and deal with it, you’re going to be dealing with its monstrous, unproductive offspring instead.

Which means no writing. And nobody wants that.

A while back, I got a pretty positive response to an essay about questions that you should never, ever, under any circumstances ask a writer. (I’m serious. Like, not even if they’ve got zombie plague and you’ve got the antidote, and it can only be administered through a ritualistic makeshift quiz show. Trust me.)

But with that in mind, I thought it was worth exploring the questions that you should ask a writer, the ones that will generally provoke an interesting and interested response. The ones that won’t cause a writer to transform into a snarling ball of maniacal fang-toothed fury. The ones they’re liable to answer in complete sentences, stone cold sober and with at least a faint hint of enthusiasm.

1-Tell Me About Your Book

This never fails, largely because almost all writers have enthusiastically and emphatically inscribed something into their latest book that nobody besides them – not the readers, the reviewers, the critics (and no, they’re not the same beast; cross-breeding them mules you out the dreaded Two-Starred Amazon Kvetcher), not anyone has teased out of the text. This is the one thing that (almost) every writer is dying to tell you about, the clever thing they did that they’re balloon-burstingly proud of.

Mind you, it often is clever, or subtle, or well-hidden. It is often worth hearing about, and knowing about it can often make the reading experience richer and more rewarding. Alternately, it can be where the author snuck the name of his favorite watering hole into the text (to be fair, I only ever did this in roleplaying books, not fiction), but even that can be fun, if taken in the right spirit.

2-Who Are You Reading?

Not “Who inspired you?” or “who are your favorite authors?” It’s “Who are you reading now”, with an implied “and can you tell me about the cool stuff.” Most writers actually like to read, and often do so voraciously. Being asked about what they’re reading lets them share the stuff they like – which everyone, writer or not, likes doing – and also presents an opening for the writer to talk about what he likes in someone else’s work. Rarely will you get something like “I’m reading [insert book title here], and it’s pretty good.” No, writers are an educated audience, and just like baseball stat geeks wanting to discuss the latest pitch data analysis they’ve seen, or Lost fans wanting to discourse on how precisely the series finale let them down, writers like to talk about cool writing they’ve seen and explain why it’s cool. It’s analysis and a show of appreciation and, every so often, an insight into the writer in question’s work as well.

3-What Are You Working On Now?

This one can be double-edged. Some authors prefer not talk about a current project, for fear of disrupting their mojo or getting it out in words instead of on the page, or having someone sprint down the hall and compose a similar-themed piece on their sparkly new iPad.  And that’s fine.

On the other hand, lots of authors do like to talk about a current project. Seriously. Check their blogs. The word count meters – 2045 words today on “The Vampire’s Ukelele!” Score! – alone are staggering in their omnipresence. So ask. Maybe the writer wants to talk about it because they’re looking for feedback.  Maybe they’re stuck on something and want to talk it out. And maybe they’re just doing something really cool, and can’t wait to share it because they’re xcited.

4-Which Book Do You Wish You’d Written?

If only to see how many variations on “The one that sold a zillion copies” you’ll get as a result.

5-What Were You Going For With This Thing In Your Book? (where “This Thing In Your Book” = something coherent, thoughtful, and actually evidentiary of the fact that you read the furshlugginer book with something approximating attention.)

Asking a question that indicates you actually read the book tends to go over well. Asking a question that indicates you actually read the book, liked it, and thought about it goes over better. And asking a question that indicates that you read it, liked it, thought about it and came up with something new and interesting to ask will make you a friend for life.

There is danger here, though. Asking a question that’s been heard a million times before? Asking a question that indicates you didn’t get further than the first paragraph of the back cover text (which was written over lunch by an overworked intern who had only the cover art to go by, and who has a psychological condition whereby they must use the word “mordant” at least twice per sentence or else become convinced they’re George S. Kaufman risen from the dead)? Asking a question you already know the answer to? And worst of all, asking a question that’s not really a question, but rather a chance to show off how brilliant you are when it comes to the author’s work. These don’t go over so well. Trust me on this one.

6-Can I Buy You A Drink?

Yes. Yes, you can. Next question.

7-What’s Your Process For Writing?

Not “How do I become a writer?” Not “Please tell me I’m doing the right thing with my own quirky, convoluted approach, any criticism of which will provoke an angry blog post and possibly an assault with a sock filled with quarters.” A genuine inquiry into how a writer works – really works, as in “puts butt in seat and starts typing” – can deliver valuable insight into how the act of writing happens for a particular author. If you’re lucky, you’ll get an honest answer along with some explications of the whys and wherefores of that process. If you’re not, you’ll at least get a story of how Famous Writer X was rude to you for no reason whatsoever, and you’ll be able to cadge drinks at conventions on that one for years.

Obviously, these are not hard and fast rules. Rather, they’re suggestion based on years of observation, discussion, and having to bail out writer friends from local holding cells after they beat one too many over-eager interrogators senseless with rolled-up convention programs. But if you do want to talk to a writer – really talk to one – you could do a lot worse than to start here.

By itself, an object tells you nothing. It is the context that tells you everything, the description and motion that lets that object become part of the story.

Take, for instance, an ambulance. By itself, it isn’t much. But put it on a busy freeway, lights flashing and moving a hundred miles an hour, and you have a story. Life and death, the skill of the driver, the race to the victim or the emergency room. The simple object full of possibility – for rescue, for tension, for a thousand things – has become part of a story.

Or, conversely put it somewhere else. Put it on the road, coming around the corner from the place you’re desperately trying to reach in time. Turn the sirens off, and the lights, too. Set it at normal driving speed, not the frantic plunge of a lifesaving sprint to the hospital.

Make sure it’s going in the wrong direction. Watch it go the other way.

That told me a story, too.

###

I don’t think my grandmother ever read any of my books. By the time I started getting published, her eyes weren’t the best any more. Besides, ghosts and vampires and magic swords weren’t really her speed. There were other books on the shelves of her house. Chaim Potok. James Herriot. Things like that, Some were hers, some were my grandfather’s. I never did ask who preferred which.

She had all of my books, though. They were displayed prominently, tiny paperbacks with purple werewolves on the cover tucked into a towering bookshelf in between the coffee table-sized monsters that discussed American Cut Glass and The History of Israel.

They meant a lot to her. And that meant a lot.

###

My mother wanted to write. She was good at it, won lots of awards in school. Once she told me about the time she accidentally walked out on stage to receive someone else’s writing award, simply because she and these other girls had won awards in the same order for so long (first, second, third) that it had become rote. When the order got switched up, just this once, she was already on autopilot and out on the stage.

If you know my mother, it’s hilarious. Trust me.

Mom stopped writing in college. She ran into a professor who didn’t like her work. He slammed it. It stopped her cold. To my knowledge, she hasn’t written since.

It means a lot to her that I write, even if it’s not necessarily the sort of thing she would prefer me to be writing. “When are you going to write something nice?” she’s asked me a few times. The fairy tale that I did as the intro to the second edition of a game called Changeling, lavishly illustrated by Rebecca Guay, remains her favorite thing that I’ve written. But what matters is that I write. I think she’s glad I didn’t give up on that dream, that when I ran into my own professor who critiqued my work with “We have nothing to say to one another,” I kept going. Or maybe she’s just happy I found something I genuinely love doing.

We found some of her writing, back when we were packing up the family house in Philadelphia in preparation for my parents’ move south. It was well preserved and hand-written, neatly scribed on a sheaf of lined paper.

I read it. It was good. Maybe if she’d ignored that professor, if she hadn’t stopped, things would have been different. Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten the encouragement to write that I got from her. Maybe I would have gotten more, and found that particular calling sooner.

I don’t know.

It is what it is. But her writing’s still here, and it’s not too late for her to start again.

###

At a certain point after the death of a loved one, the stories blur. You become hesitant to tell them, because you’re not sure if they really happened that way or if that’s the way you wanted them to have happened. You pause before beginning the telling, afraid that you might not get it right, that you might accidentally offend through misremembering or dramatic license.

You worry that your memories of the one who’s gone fit with everyone else’s, and you become afraid. Afraid to share them. Afraid to risk adjustment to the cherished recall through someone else’s recollection that, no, that’s not what happened. Afraid that the discussion or disagreement will take precedence over the memory itself, and somehow subtly replace it, attach itself in association.

I have memories of my grandmother. Memories of her catching me stealing an extra piece of candy out of the bowl on her glass-top coffee table, and telling me I could have it but there’d no candy next time. Memories of asking her for her chicken soup recipe for the first time, and of her clueing me in to the true and sacred secret of the light and fluffy matzahball. Of asking her if it was OK to change the recipe, because my friend Ed had suggested – sacrilege! – adding shitakes to the mix. Memories of Thanksgivings and weekend visits. Memories of sitting quietly with her in the TV room, telling her what I’d been up to in the months since the last time I’d been able to get up to see her, and all the while her cat rubbed against my feet in hopes that I’d be the sort of sucker who knew where the cat treats were kept.

These memories may not be accurate. But they are mine, and they are true.

###

There are things in my house that came from my grandparents. Some are valuable. Some are not, at least not in the sort of way the marketplace values. Some I was told to take; a few tools, my grandfather’s whisky collection, things like that. A few were given to me, things it was decided I should have because I was the right one to have them.

And at the last, before my grandmother came south on what would be her final journey, I asked for one last thing. It was a tourist gewgaw, a bit of memorabilia that my grandparents had picked up on a trip to Spain. It was a stand, and a series of cocktail skewers done up to look like swords. Swept hilt, basket hilt, mock-gold and steel and inlay every color of the rainbow – all that, and maybe two inches long. Sharp enough to hurt if you jabbed someone with one with intent, tiny enough that a mock duel fought with them looked ludicrous, even when the hands clutching them belonged to children.

That’s what I asked for. My mother, who was helping my grandmother get ready for the trip, seemed surprised. She asked me why.

I told her it was because when I was a kid, all of us grandchildren would take those swords and pretend to duel, which wasn’t strictly true. Mainly, we poked one particular younger cousin with them, but that’s not why I asked for them. He’s bigger than me now, and in better shape, and if he remembers and decides he finally wants payback, I’m going to need more than cocktail skewers to protect me.

But really, that’s not it, either. The real reason is that they are indelibly fixed in my mind as being perfectly and utterly of that house, of that time, of my grandparents. Because every time I walked into that house, child or adolescent or man, I found myself reaching for them as I walked past the shelf where they stood, to reassure myself I was really there. Because I want that stories – all those stories, really – with me.

An object, imbued with time and place. Description, too, I hope. No motion, though. Not now. Maybe someday, and for someone else. But not now.