Tag: Writing Advice

Detonation #24: The Horror of AI Generated Horror

~ Noggy

The end times are near! Don’t believe me? You should. Not that I’m fucking Nostradamus or Baba Vanga, or, heaven help me, Nate Silver. But I am a divorced Gen-X technophile know it all who lives in a microchip factory, drinks Blanton’s Bourbon like its water, and spends WAY too much time dredging social media cesspools for nuggets of filthy amusement. That’s gotta count for something. Right? Hell yes it does.

And I know what you’re thinking. End times? Really? It’s always the end of the world or doomsday or (*** waves arms ***) post-modern Armageddon on social media. The truth, such as truth is, is that endings are always complicated and, unless it’s climate change or the sun going supernova or the moon falling from orbit, probably not the absolute finale, just a change – for better or worse. Usually better. Usually. Except for Coke Dreamworld. Brutalist architecture. And possibly Pontiac Aztek’s.

Of course, in case I wasn’t clear, the latest boogeyman to strike fear into the hearts of creatives across the multiverse is AI. Specifically, AI used to create art and write. Lot of gnashing of teeth on this one. Folks taking a stand against soulless algorithms trained on unlicensed material scraped from a billion network accessible sources. And it is currently problematic in a lot of ways. And pretty crappy. Not that I don’t think it’ll get better, this is pretty much the start of something new, but I like to think it’ll be a valuable tool to assist in a variety of ways as opposed to replacing most artists. It’ll never have true imagination. And plus, bespoke is always better than mass produced garbage.

That said, why not go to the source, asking the daemonic heart of darkness what IT thought of writing horror. Well, gotta say, I was rather surprised.

Using chatGPT to write horror literature is a dangerous and irresponsible endeavor that could have disastrous consequences for the world.

For those who may not be familiar with chatGPT, it is a language model that is trained on a vast amount of text data and is able to generate human-like responses to prompts. While this technology has a wide range of potential uses, it has also been used by some to try and generate horror stories and other forms of scary content.

However, using chatGPT to create horror literature is a terrible idea for several reasons. First and foremost, chatGPT is not capable of truly understanding the nature of fear or horror. It can only generate responses based on patterns and associations that it has learned from its training data, and these responses will likely be shallow and superficial at best.

Furthermore, chatGPT has no moral compass or sense of responsibility, and it is therefore entirely possible that it could generate content that is truly disturbing or even harmful to readers. This could lead to real-world consequences, such as psychological trauma or even physical harm, for those who consume this content.

In conclusion, using chatGPT to write horror literature is a reckless and irresponsible act that has the potential to cause serious harm. It is important that we do not use this technology in such a way, and instead focus on using it for more constructive and beneficial purposes.

There you go folks, from the daemon’s mouth itself.

Detonation #23: On Professionalism

~ Lola

You are not special. If nothing else, this is the takeaway. You are not special. I’m not saying you don’t matter as a person or even that your book isn’t any good. Jesus Christ, stop crying… this is the tough love we all need. Lots of folks have written books. Lots of folks have talent. These things are neither rare nor unique. I’ve written books and I promise you I’m loads happier knowing how unspecial I am.

All that is to say that as writers, we need to get over ourselves. Because you know what will serve you better and longer in this biz than any amount of specialness? Professionalism, that’s what.

“But Lola?” you might ask. “Why should I listen to you?”

And the answer is that you probably shouldn’t, but here are a few reasons why you might want to.

  1. Writing professionally for 10yrs with 4 published books
  2. Teaching/Editing professionally for 7 years
  3. Bookseller for 7yrs
  4. Publisher for 4yrs
  5. Wrote a college admission essay for a kid. A freelance gig that, while ethically dubious, got him into Cornell and got me $1000USD

See? Aren’t I special? The answer is no. Always no. But am I qualified to speak to the fundamentals of professional competence as a writer? You bet your sweet ass.

“Cool story, Lola. But maybe you could arrive at your point sometime before 2023?”

Right, I’m getting to it.

While my tentacles bristle at anything deemed to be a rule, I really like the idea of blasting MY rules into stone, so here they are.

Lola Silkysocks’ 10 Commandments of the Professional Writer

  1. Though shalt read all information and guidelines provided by the folks you hope to work with, be they publishers/agents/editors/reviewers/booksellers. Trust me, we know if you haven’t read the material and it displeases us.
  2. Thou shalt acquire basic computer literacy. “I’m not good at computers” will not fly. Get good at them. And trust me, if you have the wherewithal to go on Facebook and spread vaccine misinformation, you can email a high-res image file of your front cover.
  3. Thou shalt not talk shit about rejections on social media, even if they’re anonymized. Rejection is not fun for anyone, but it is part of the job. So be cool.
  4. Thou shalt accept critique gracefully. Once your work is out there, people get to have thoughts about it. Any thoughts at all. My advice? Stay off Goodreads.
  5. Thou shalt not hassle people for reviews. I get it, algorithms and all that. You can ask politely, but if someone bought your book, they’re already supporting you, so don’t be a dick about it.
  6. Thou shalt read. I’ve said this before, at length, and with a lot of profanity. But read, or listen, to a fucking book once in a while. I’m quite serious. We all have ADHD and dyslexia, but find a way. Reading is essential professional development for a writer.
  7. Thou shalt support others. Locally and virtually. Go to literary events, tweet up your fellow inkslingers, spend some money at an indie bookstore because they are a vital part of your cultural community.
  8. Thou shalt learn to compose a clear, concise, and pleasant email. It AMAZES me, ASTONISHES me, and has me UTTERLY SHITTING MY BRAIN how many grown-ass adults don’t know how to communicate professionally by email. I could write a whole detonation about this. I still might.
  9. Thou shalt meet thy deadlines. Yes, life happens and we’re all doughy flawed humans blah blah blah. But deadlines aren’t put in place for funsies. As the name would suggest, projects live and die on the basis of deadlines, so the second you’re aware that a deadline is in peril, you communicate that shit.
  10. Thou shalt cultivate the ability to speak in public. Don’t give me that look. I get it. Extroverts suck so why would you want to be one? But this is something you must be able to do. A professional writer gives readings, answers questions, and has the capacity to exist in front of a crowd without fainting. I’m not asking you to change your fundamental nature, just like…suspend it for half an hour. Do what you have to do to make it happen. Don’t torture your audience by making them sweat through your anxiety attack.

Don’t be overwhelmed, this is good news! These commandments require no talent at all and will ensure you’re putting your best foot forward in a business that turns entirely on first impressions. Maybe some writers are special. For sure some are lucky. But whatever pacts they’ve made with their devils, the fact remains that nothing will shut a door in your face faster than behaving like a boob. You want to be a pro? Then goddamn well act like one.

Detonation #22: Why So Serious?

~ Noggy

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, right? Nope. Not since 1963. If they remade that classic Spencer Tracy flick now, it would totally be called It’s a Sad, Sad, Sad, Sad World. A world choked with endless wastelands of gut tearing grief. No joy to be found. Not in the important things like five-gallon pails of hagfish slime lube, not in the minor things like senior discount McDonald’s coffee nursed for sixteen hours. Instead of a madcap, zany, over the top flick where greedy idiots rush around in search of cash buried under a big W, it’d be about a bunch of bullied earless albino orphans desperate to find both their identities and lost parents who abandoned them due to crushing poverty and substance abuse and who died horribly in a Moldovan prison carving literal regrets into soviet era concrete with toothbrush shivs fashioned from their own femurs.

I’m going to write the novel version to that one, by the way. Probably snag myself a Pulitzer or Booker or, heaven forbid, an Aurora if I’m unlucky. People will snap it up, devour every wretched, miserable word, comforted by the knowledge that they aren’t the only ones suffering in this cold, terrible planet. Commiserating. People love to commiserate. It’s become a top tier hobby, right up with doomscrolling and trying to find something to watch on Amazon Prime video.

So… while I’m not saying that the world’s Boomer mangled and storm ravaged corpse isn’t becoming a forlorn, dreadful hellscape, cause it most certainly is, what I’m saying is I’m fucking tired of reading about it. The last two years have been rough for a lot of people, do we really need to dwell on the emotional wrecks we’ve all become? I say NO! Cast off those chains of loss and grief and read (and write) something less forlorn, whether it be cheesy pulp or twisted erotica or weird fiction involving combines and Mexican Mennonite tacos.

Now I can tell you’re totally thinking “but Noggy, that’s the shit you write. Are you sure this isn’t just a cheap plug disguised as a timely rant?” Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But my friendly neighborhood psychoanalyst bar tender assures me that at my discount McDonald’s coffee age, self-promotion and yelling at clouds are valid coping strategies. And my writing can’t sell itself. Apparently…

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, so many goddamn loss and grief riddled books feel like award bait these days. And yes, I’m sure I’m exaggerating, but those are the books that get all the press and attention and critical acclaim. Lola loves them, of course. She leaves them lying around to tempt me into reading them, talks about the exquisite writing and fabulous depth. How the authors turn a despondent phrase. How they rock gloomy readings. How they dress like 70’s era drapes. Flashes her… exquisite covers.  I never fall for her tricks. Grief and loss. Loss and grief. Real god damn life!

No thanks.

I’ve had my fill of real god damn life and I’m hungry for Mexican Mennonite tacos. And you should be as well.

Today’s non-grief filled Detonation happy hour(s) cocktail is the appropriately named A Short Trip To Hell.

  • 2 parts Peach Schnapps
  • 2 parts Strawberry Schnapps
  • 2 parts Wildberry Schnapps
  • 1 part Jagermeister
  • 8 parts Energy drink of Choice.

Shake the energy drink and Schnapps in a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Strain into a tumbler. Put the Jagermeister into a shot glass, drop in the shot, and take the express elevator to Hell.

Detonation #20: Sour Grapes

~ Lola

Everyone loves the idea of an egalitarian prize bestowed on a truly meritorious work of literature as determined by The People. Something like the Goodreads Choice Awards should be the ultimate in democracy, yet isn’t, for… reasons. So many reasons. Like Stephen King winning the horror award every year, even for his crime novels, ‘cause he’s the only fucking name anyone recognizes.

Next rung down this wretched ladder are the awards created by readers and writers, for readers and writers. Unfortunately, what follows in practice is an award by writers for writers. Which sounds close enough, but in fact couldn’t be further afield.

The bullshit mechanism of reader’s choice awards is not often discussed openly. It’s considered bad form to acknowledge honourees as anything other than purely deserving. Fortunately, Lola and Noggy don’t take anything that seriously and will always find a way cut off their nose to spite their face.

Noggy: So… writers submit to these snobby awards AND vote for them?

Lola: Yeah, by paying to become members of the association organizing the award. Publishers can and should submit, but in practice it’s writers, especially for anthologies and self-pub’d work.

N: The writers nominate and vote through long lists and short lists and then?

L: As voting members they typically get a package containing digital copies of all the shortlisted works.

N: Wait, isn’t that like…dozens of books? You have to read them all?

L: Jesus Christ, no. Who has time to read?

N: No one writing horror poetry and tweeting 89 times a day, that’s for sure. How does voting work then?

L: Easy. In categories where you’re a finalist you vote for yourself. In categories you aren’t, you vote for your friends. Chances are the only book in the pile you’ve actually read is your own. Isn’t that wild? The short story categories are the best though; for that one I’d recommend roulette, a lottery, or pin the tail on the jack ass.

N: So much for democratized literary utopia…

***

We’ve ranted about this before. The dirty secret of how little most writers actually read. And those of us who do read a lot are not going to waste our time consuming a reader’s choice award voting package because most of the material is honestly not that good. But we’re all too busy blowing each other to say it.

Yes, juried awards have their flaws but at least you can be reasonably certain the adjudicators have read the fucking book they’re voting for.

Reader’s Choice Awards are equivalent to The Emperor’s New Clothes. We ooh and ah at the grace and dignity with which he carries himself in his exquisite robes. When in fact he’s naked and eating a chili dog while fucking a pelican. But hey, we weren’t actually at the procession that day, and he’s our friend, so he’s got our vote.

***

N: You done ranting? It’s time for Arby’s.

L: Not even close. The other thing I’m going to get mad at. Awards for best anthology. An honor that belongs to all and to none. As an editor you can say you’re a winner for a book you didn’t write. As editors we consider this a dickwad move, considering the actual authors can only say they contributed to the project, which is hardly worth wedging into their bio. So, this award sits like a square egg in a kind of purgatory for unclaimed miscellany that no one quite knows how to handle. Is there even a word for adjacent congratulations?

N: I’m sure there’s a German word for it. A long, angry German word. Hmm, probably something like Beglückwünschung – that’s sort of terrifying.

L: Germans have more efficient things to do than acknowledge reader’s choice awards.

***

You could accuse us of being fucking jealous. Sour as hell. Green little goblins, ejaculating envy in thick bitter ropes. And you’d be right. But it doesn’t mean we’re wrong. And if you think we’re sore losers? God forbid we ever actually win anything.

#17 – Don’t Bend Over and Take that Advice

~ Noggy

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

I’m not in the habit of taking advice. Of any sort. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure a lot of advice is wonderful, applicable in a variety of circumstances, and sincerely helpful. And it’s not even that I don’t think it applies to me, or I know better. Cause I damn well don’t. I just choose not to take it. Why? I’ve a stubborn streak a mile wide and I grew up telling myself I’d never let anyone tell me what to do, or how to do it. I’d find my own way – good or bad, hard or easy. My boss of the last twenty years used to growl that he may run the company, but he didn’t run me. I think he’s dead now, but it’s not my fault. I don’t listen to my wife’s advice either, though some consideration must be made to prevent marital Armageddon and all out thermonuclear war. Friends? Colleagues? Authority figures? Smile and wave boys, smile and wave. Of course, you can only pull it off with an excessive level of insanity, be willing to ignore any and all dire consequences, and have a cavalry worth of horseshoes up your ass. Your own results may vary.

But I’ll come right out and say that everything amazing comes from not listening to advice. Cases in point:

“Don’t eat a hotdog from the back alley food cart in Mazatlán at 2 a.m..”
“Don’t drink behind, under, on top of, or in that burning dumpster.”
“Don’t run a hundred miles in eyeball melting heat without pickle juice.”
“Don’t pet that beaver. Even if it’s a porcupine. Especially if it’s a porcupine.”
“Don’t stick your arm in that hole.”
“Don’t start that publishing company.”
“Um, you should see a doctor about that.”

Advice given. Advice not taken. Stories for the ages.

That’s life though, and we’re here to trash talk and throw shade on more literary pursuits. Now you’re probably thinking “But Noggy, we already know better than to become a poet-musician.” And you’d be right. But that’s just common sense.

I’m way more interested in thrashing the pile of advice you’ll find spouted from many a famous author and quoted from many a writing craft tome and lapped up by the desperate and sycophantic masses.

And I understand the irony of providing advice about ignoring advice. Please ignore everything I’m about to say. Trust me, it’s for the best.

The Road to Hell is Paved with Adverbs: Sure, sure, adverbs can be lazy crutches used to hobble through flowery prose where stronger words, built up through years of soul sucking thesaurus drudgery, might be considered better. But if adverbs weren’t useful, they wouldn’t exist. There’s what, literally a thousand adverbs in the English language? So, if you feel like using a fucking adverb, use a fucking adverb. If you use too many? Well, then you’re probably a poet, in which case all bets are off anyways. Besides, you need to give your editor something to bitch about.

Show Don’t Tell: Chekhov said, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining. Show me the glint of light on broken glass.” Sometimes it’s just the moon. And it’s shining. This is the reason people write two hundred and fifty-thousand-word fantasy novels where absolutely nothing happens. They’re too busy showing you every god damn thing. Yes, yes, a story that’s all telling reads like a Pontiac Aztek repair manual, but when your character walks out of the house into the rain, you can just say “Jesus, it’s fucking raining again, where’s the damn umbrella? I’m going to chug a gallon of whisky and call in sick.” instead of “The splash of God’s tears washed away my anxiety and fear, leaving me cleansed and refreshed as I made my way to the bus stop to be whisked away to my dream job as a Walmart greeter.”

Kill Your Darlings: Why? I swear this advice is half the reason most writing is so wretchedly dull. Yeah, kill all the cool little bits that you love and may or may not need to be in the story just because some rich, famous mansion dwelling uber-author tells you to. Then again, my definition of darling may vary from the norm. Cause honestly, if something great in your story really needs to go for the good of the entire story, then it’s probably not that that darling to begin with.

Write What You Know: If everyone wrote only what they knew, all writing would be memoirs and grocery lists. All literary – all the time. How many writers have been to a galaxy far, far away, or Faerie, or belong to some super-secret spy organization that regularly assassinates brutal dictators with weapons that can’t possibly exist? Sure though, if you have some cool personal experience or skill or knowledge you can transfer directly to your story to make your Arby’s meatcraft salesman more authentic, by all means give him that Hentai tentacle fetish. And be specific. Most writers like to think they’ve had an extraordinarily cool life they can draw upon. ROFL. Pulease. So, write whatever the hell you want as long as you’re mindful of your subject. Expropriate and die. Simple as that.

Write Every Day: Nice thought. And yes, actually decent advice. I’d love to be able to write every day. And I do when I can. But I’m not going to beat myself silly trying to make it the #1 priority that trumps all others. I got a bloody life that’s full of frankly other priorities, some of which I’ll write a book a book about when I’m dead.

Write Drunk, Edit Sober: While this quote is attributed to Hemmingway, I think it was Faulkner who actually subscribed to it. Good ole Faulkner. A legend really, I’d call him a demi-god if he hadn’t dabbled in poetry, but nobody’s perfect. Could have went further though. Write Drunk, Edit Drunker, Publish Drunkest. Best to dull the pain at every step. And writing is pain. A good bottle of Blanton’s or Hibiki 17 or Oban is medicinal, take that from Dr. Noggy. Look, I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with being sober. I’ve heard stories about sober people being healthier and happier and such. I’ve also heard similar stories about Cryptids. Can’t believe everything you read.

So, yeah, whatever. Just remember this isn’t advice. This is opinion, written for promises of ice cream and beaver petting. It’s all about the priorities, man.

Detonation #14 – Such Times

~ Noggy

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

I’ve always loved those lines, and they’ve never been more apt. Such times indeed, and so true. We all have to decide what to do with the time that is given us.

So, of course, we’re totally wasting it. And I’m not talking about the last couple of months, trapped in our homes and clinging to sanity with alcohol and Netflix. Nobody is going to begrudge a little demotivation and aimlessness right now. It’s an unusual and uncertain glitch in the matrix.

But it will end and there will be a new normal. What will you do then? Try to wiggle back into your old life? Because, really, who’d want to live in those boring old times, doing the same thing day after day, year after year, living on the dying carcass of global free market capitalism? 

Well, regular people, I guess. And there’s no shortage of them. In fact, in an informal poll where I browsed both Facebook and Twitter for a six and half hours every day for ten years, it was obvious that a majority of social media users, which is to say everyone on the entire planet, is so bored and boring and unenlightened they’ve outsourced their life to a drinking bird. Like clockwork, the bird dips and another meme blasts forth, another tweet is retweeted, and the noise cloud that is our reality gets slightly noisier.

Of course, at the moment, most of this is complaining or fist shaking. Life is shit. You’re making my life shit. Don’t you know you shouldn’t do this? That you can’t do that? And now, because people are nasty, we have snitch lines. Is this the fucking Spanish Inquisition? If you see a few people walking down the street, less than two meters apart, don’t fucking call the cops. Don’t write letters to the editor. Don’t complain about it on Facebook. Look, I get it, I do. Every time I wander out to the park for some fresh air, there are milling groups of people with t-shirts that say “Oh no, the Economy” or “Cull the Weak.” Every time I go to the grocery store I see people going the wrong direction down clearly marked aisles. Makes me wish I’d brought the woodchipper. But I smile and wave and maneuver far around them. I don’t call the cops. Or complain. At least about that, complaining about complainers currently consumes most of my free time.

Damn the irony.

Right. Interesting times, which doesn’t have to be a curse. I’d posit that if you pull your head out of the social media Khazad Dum, you’ll notice there’s a damn remarkable world both inside and out worth writing about.

And I’m not talking about poetry.

Please do not write personal plague poetry, or as Lola so elegantly puts it, “Poetic observations of a nature so shallow they appear to be fathomless.” I’m not saying it’s impossible to write decent poetry about living in your kitchen, baking bread, and calling the cops on some poor neighbor who happens to break the two-meter rule, but… yeah, it is. Same goes for plague prose. Give it time. Give it a year or two. If we need to flatten the curve on ANYTHING, it’s to make sure everyone doesn’t write about the exact same thing happening to everyone, regardless of how much nightmare fuel is being poured on the fire. You think the emergency wards are taxed now? Wait until everyone is forced to read about the horrors, or possibly pleasures, of social distancing, or about what happened to all the toilet paper.

No.

There are far better uses for that pent-up wellspring of emotion, both now and into the new normal. Whether your life is currently a smoking crater, or not, you’re experiencing something novel that hasn’t happened in a hundred years and probably won’t happen like this again. There’s a lot of passion out there, generated by wanting to see other people punished for doing things you don’t understand aren’t technically against the law. Capture that passion. Capture the fear. Capture the determination to make them pay by killing or torturing them in your next story.

Let that passion infuse your work.

When this does end, don’t flush that passion away and go back to your old life. You only have so much time, you know, and you’ve probably wasted enough of it writing poetry.

Detonation #12 – Subversion Recursion

~ Noggy

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Readers expect if they pick up the twenty-second volume of their favourite thriller series it’ll be more of the same, a creaky wheezing corpse dragging itself forward with rotting fingerbones. These sorts of books are where the money is. The boilerplate of the industry. Month after month, year after year, these books are churned out assembly line style for the public to ingest, absorbing three sad calories of literary enjoyment, before shitting them into the trash or closest used bookstore. 

It’s an ugly cycle. At some point people started buying these books based on firehose marketing and celebrity endorsements and in response more books were written to cater to those buying tastes, ad infinitum. It’s not a secret, far from it, authors know there is a certain magic formula that if they are talented enough, or lucky enough, to master, they can join the ranks of the serializers.

Not just the serials either, the entire mass market oozes sameness. The books look the same, the titles sound the same, the plots are indistinguishable except for the anti-hero’s cup size and eye colour — blue steel or smoky aluminum. Writing by rote. Writing by formula. Everyone wants to be the next James Patterson or Steven King or J.K. Rowling or George R.R. Martin. Rich and famous, with terrible movie adaptions and mansions full of dirty money sex dungeons.

Hmm, that actually doesn’t sound so bad. Where the hell was I going with this again?

Oh right, total lack of imagination in the pursuit of sell out success.

The ability to conjure ideas from the billion facets of existence and assemble them into unique works of music, art, and writing is a superpower with unlimited potential, so it really grinds my gears when writers, who have the entire universe of possibilities to play with, take the same old tired elements and assemble them in bloody identical ways. Sure, they may brighten or darken the paint some, and give the work a clever name and twist the marketing, but it’s typically a clone of a seminal work, and a shittier one at that.

Stories in a particular genre and sub-genre are going to have similar and even required elements. A murder mystery, by definition is going to have some sort of murder and quite possibly a mystery. A thriller should thrill. Noggy loves heist stories. Lots of people love zombie or werewolf stories, half the world either loves or hates vampire stories, traditional or glittery. There are haunted house stories, cosmic horrors, cryptids, occult detectives, you name it. Some sub-genres are narrow, some are wide, but they instill a little order to chaos that is the literary landscape. As I mentioned, there is an expectation that if you pick up a book in that sub-genre it should actually, you know, not be false advertising.

That’s not what my little rant is about though. What I am talking about are overused tropes and by-the-number formulaic bullshit. 

Sure, it’s easy to write yet another school for bizarre weirdos novel, packed with bullies and not-so secret secrets and angry, clueless teachers — sorry teachers, you know how it is. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Does every supernatural detective story, mine included, need to pay homage to a certain hard drinking, chain smoking, trench coat and fedora wearing reprobate from the 30’s? Does every epic fantasy novel have to involve an orphan from a purged royal family who grows up to be an assassin with legendary abilities because their father was king of the horny gods? Does every single heist series have to start with a book that’s entirely about putting a misfit, yet oddly exceptionally uniquely talented crew together?

FUCK NO.

Subvert those tropes. Do it!

We already discussed in a previous episode that if you want to write, you need to read. Period. And it often helps to read the sort of stories you want to write. Subverting tropes requires intimate knowledge of them. You need to know where the boundaries are and what you can twist, and hollow out and fill with explosives, and, in the end, completely break.

Does your haunted house story require a gothic New England farmhouse complete with a vengeful revenant left over from the original occupant’s penchant for baby ear soup? Nope. There are a thousand elements ripe for subversion. And I’m not talking easy ones like making the house a brownstone apartment in Manhattan and the ghosts aliens. Who says the house needs to be a regular house? And who says the ghosts have to be regular ghosts? I’m not saying write a story about a construction site porta-potty possessed by ghost pepper hot wings, but I’m also not, not saying that.

Find an angle, run naked with it. You know you can. Don’t be afraid that you’ll never get published by the big five, or one of their imprints, and get that sex dungeon. Write weird, terrible shit, that has its own unique soul and flavour, and take that unoriginal WIP, wrap it in a tarp and stash it under the Aztek’s trunk liner next to the trencher and gasoline in anticipation of the next wolf moon and a satisfying internment.

It’s for the best, it really is.

Detonation #9 – First Impressions

~ Noggy

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Warning: Explicit language and mature themes. If you’re offended by such things, you might want to venture elsewhere.

***

People are boring, living their monochrome little lives at their monochrome shitty jobs in their sad monochrome existences. Endless lists. Vague descriptions. Random numbers.

Devoid of personality.

How do I know? Because Noggy just spent the last two days reading hundreds of resumes, that’s why. And if I have to judge people, which I’m emphatically willing to do whether I get paid to do it or not, then I’m going to give it to you straight. What the absolute fuck? Does anyone ever take a step back, look at their resume, and think “Wow, amazing! I’m amazing. People are going to read this and shit themselves trying to hire me.”

Short answer: NO.

There’s blame to go around of course, all the job site optimizers and expert self-help influencers that tell you how to game the system. How to include every damn industry buzzword, stat, skill, tool, process, and methodology which, I discovered, almost always involve the word ‘cucumber’, so to better fool the modern yet stupid AI enhanced job placement fit scanners. These sorts of resumes don’t give you an actual picture of the person you’re looking to hire, they’re more like D&D character sheets without the bio and background part filled in.

But I guess there’s no room for colour when the ‘experts’ insist on mashing your life into a single page, reducing ALL resumes to the SAME resume. Which means that once it does get picked out of the labour carnival bin-o-fun by the claw and deposited on my donut crumb crusted desk, I get riled up enough to write another one of these fucking articles.

Look, I’m not saying you ARE necessarily boring, but your public business persona probably is. All I ask is that you find ways, even simple and subtle ways, to give me some idea about who you are and why I should spend any energy hiring you. Give me an interest, give me something you’re proud of that doesn’t involve this particular capitalist self-sacrifice. Present yourself differently. Show personality. If I see a flicker of light, where you casually mention in your soft skills section, that you’re drilling a hole to the hollow earth in order to find a dinosaur husband to add to your polyamorous collective, I can guarantee, given a minimal required skill set, that I’ll be booking an interview.

***

I’m sure you’re asking what the fuck this has to do with writing and why the hell you forced yourself to suffer through four hundred words of old man yelling at clouds?

Everything. It’s exactly the bloody same.

I have a question for you.

“How do you present yourself to first time readers?”

Unless you are already an established author with a solid fan base, or a true phenom, you’re constantly mining for one of the most valuable commodities on the planet. I’m talking, of course, about attention. Every author desires it. Every author strives for it. Few get more than a few grains, sluiced from the meandering, braided river of current public trends and interests. A river brimming with other prospectors, elbows up, trying to stake their claim and eek out a passable existence, hoping to hit the mother lode and strike it rich.

Let’s, for the sake of simplicity, focus on one particular type of author: the eager up and comer, one with a couple of stories ‘out there’ in the weird wide world, one who doesn’t have an agent or a contract or a big-name publisher. An indie author. Our aspiring literary star wants to gain attention, has to gain attention if they don’t want to get washed away.

As with resumes, authors fling themselves and their creations into the world. They toss the dynamite and thousands, if not millions, of eyes see the resulting explosion.

Boom!

Then what?

There are a couple of co-mingled elements at play here. The author and their writing. Not the same thing, though they eventually merge together as time goes on.

But the important part is the First Impression.

So, I ask again, “how do you present yourself to first time readers?” When they pick up your book and lick the cover, fondle the spine, devour the backmatter, gape at your bio, and leaf through a few pages, what impression are you leaving? Does your bio invoke awe? Does your writing speak for you, providing amazeball feelings? When they come across you on social media or your website or at book events or conventions, do they think “Holy fucking shit, this author is the cat’s ass, I want to be them, I want to be with them, I might even read their book if I can get it on sale.”?

You’d better hope so.

Every second another hardscrabble author picks up their pan and wades into the mayhem working on just that. Sure, you can slave away, slowly building up your claim, and maybe, just maybe you’ll eventually get lucky or at least modestly successful. But if you wait for a break or let poor work speak for itself, it may be a long dreadful bitter life.

So do yourself a favour, take a step back, look at your resume and make it as fucking interesting as possible, even if it’s only eighty percent honest. Oh, and don’t forget the cucumber.

Detonation #7 – Smart Resolutions

~ Noggy

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Warning: Explicit language and mature themes. If you’re offended by such things, you might want to venture elsewhere.

***

So, it’s that time again, the commencement of yet another cycle around the sun, marked by a semi-arbitrary date that doesn’t quite align with cosmological anchors. Like how hard would have been to just set New Years on the Winter Solstice? It’s the sort of thing that grinds Noggy’s OCD something fierce. And don’t get him started on why months have their fluctuating number of days.

Fucking Romans.

It’s a happy time none-the-less. A chance to wash away the sickly stains of a cursed life with overpriced and underwhelming champagne. Maybe reminisce about the highlights you captured with your goddamn selfie stick. Eat loads of crap. Socialize with friends, enemies, frenemies, or in all probability, yourself, pantsless and eating pie in the backseat of your Pontiac Aztek or garbage filled K-car.

Call it what you want. Tradition. Ritual. Self-loathing and/or self-reflection. It’s a transition, that’s the important part. From one oozing nugget of time to the next. When you crawl out of your cocoon sometime early January, you know it’s a clean slate, you know that everything that came before is last year’s news. You made it. And this year will be different.

Special.

Energized.

Productive.

You heard right. Productive. Whatever writing or editing or design or marketing or publicity or publishing you did last year, you’ll surpass it this year. More. Faster. Better.

Why?

Because you made a fucking New Year’s Resolution, that’s why.

You’ve resolved one or possibly many things. It may be a vague decree like “I’m going to write every day”, or more explicit, like “I’m going to a thousand words every day.” Or it might be ambitious like “I’m going to write and publish three novels this year.” Or ethereal like “I’m going to procrastinate less this year.”

Kinda bullshit.

I’m not saying those aren’t worthy goals, because they totally are. They’re just soft. And squishy. Moist even. Soft resolutions are like ideas. Everyone has a billion of them, but at the end of the day, rather small and limp.

The concept of “I’m going to write more” is pretty vague, and the more vague and fuzzy the resolution, the harder it’ll be to stick with. What is “more”? What is “less”? If you can’t quantify progress, if you just jam your thumb or tentacle or mating appendage in the air and guess that you may be doing more of what you said you’d do, you’ll rapidly fall into the same old lull you’ve always fallen into.

Imagine meeting up with your writing partner at the end of January.

“How’s the novel going,” asks Lola, stuffing a grinning orifice with crisp Kale salad. “You talked big at NYE before I left you rotting in the dumpster.”

“Meh,” says Noggy. “My resolution was to write more than last year. I’m spitting out words.”

“How many more?”

“Well, more… Way more… I think. It feels like way more at least.”

“So, you’ll be done by summer?”

“I have absolutely no idea. How about you? I sort of recall you mentioning you had serious resolutions of your own this year.”

Lola slides her tongue under her lip to clear out a yard of astroturf, swishes her mouth with rosé. “Yeah, got some killer ones. Turning the hot tub into an alcoholic sex cauldron three times a week for six months and drowning anyone who doesn’t like it. Then, I’m going to ruin two marriages by seducing spouses in Japanese love hotels. Targeting one every three months, but I’ve built in a month overlap contingency.”

“Uh, I meant writing resolutions.”

“Exactly. I’m taking copious notes for my book, which will be done by year’s end. Next tub is Monday by the way, you should come.”

***

Noggy can do better. If he can stimulate his Bourbon soaked brain cells for two minutes, he’ll realize he just needs to be smart like Lola is. That’s smart as in SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. While maybe the concept has been around forever, George Doran, Arthur Miller, and James Cunningham first formalized it in the November 1981 issue of Management Review. The exact definition of each element has shifted over time, but SMART goals tend to have these elements:

Specific – Pick an unambiguous writing/editing/publishing objective.

Measurable – Make it something you can quantify with a number and keep track of progress. Spreadsheets baby!

Achievable – Make sure you can actually do it. We can go into BHAG’s, Big Hairy Audacious Goal’s, in another time and space, but don’t set yourself up to fail. And don’t include qualifiers that are out of your control – specifying that you want to sell X number of stories or novels is grand, but perilous since that’s in the hands of someone else.

Relevant – It should be an actual writing/editing/publishing goal. Sometimes I wonder about Lola…

Time-based – Choose an end date, and/or dates to measure progress by.

***

Boom!

It’s not rocket science. It’s not even literary science (which, if that isn’t already thing, it is now). Now repeat after me:

“I’m going to write at least three hundred words a day for the next month.”

“I’m going to write six short stories this year and submit them to markets until they are sold.”

“I’m going to complete my novel by the end of May, have it edited by August, and query a dozen agents by year end.”

Rinse and repeat.

***

So, call them what you want. Resolutions. Goals. Objectives. Just remember to be SMART and don’t be caught with your pants down in the back seat with only pie for company. We won’t judge unless it’s Saskatoon Berry.

Detonation #6: Hustlers

~ Lola

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Warning: Explicit language and mature themes. If you’re offended by such things, you might want to venture elsewhere.

***

Recently I watched a YouTube video of Jennifer Lopez taking pole dancing lessons in preparation for her role in the movie Hustlers. I learned that the only thing I have in common with J.Lo is…well, nothing. She’s a goddess. I’m a goblin. Moving on.

Let’s talk about the money. Makin’ it rain as a writer. You’re good at this wordsmithing stuff, and you work really hard. Is poverty inevitable? Is there a way to use your skills and ambition to make a bit more cash than it takes to buy a second helping of gruel?

Some writers make bank off their writing, we’ll call them Darryl, and they can go directly to Hell. Others, like Noggy, are gainfully employed in a day job where they go to an office, do business, get regular paychecks that are more than three digits, and can afford to get their kids teeth unfucked. I both respect and resent that, but I’m not talking about them either. I’m talking about Lola, and those like her. The freelancers and part-timers, Frankensteining an income through several different writing adjacent streams. I’m talking about the writerly side-hustle.

Here’s the thing. Lola is nothing if not an opportunist. She’s been fortunate, strategic, and manipulative enough to do work that dovetails with her writing career. Like Lola, I coordinate literary events at an indie bookstore, teach creative writing, and freelance edit. I’ve also written articles, done one-on-one mentoring, and ‘assisted’ young people with their college admission essays (all ethics are situational). It’s a juggling act I perform on top of my own writing projects, publishing, running in the woods, attending to family and friends, and other…interests (see the Six Lives Theory).

I’m grateful to be a professional creative, but it didn’t just fall into my tentacles. When I was just a baby mollusk, slinging ink and dreaming of one day maybe, maybe, seeing my work in print, someone gave me some very good advice. GET INVOLVED. The writing community is not just a group of people doing what you do, they are a resource, a pool of limitless opportunity. So, I took classes, went to events, volunteered, collaborated, and worked hard at building real relationships. Finding kindred monsters is its own reward, but beyond that, when paying work comes up, so does your name, and when it does, you gotta be ready to say yes.

Jennifer Lopez is the original Lola. A creative role model. An artist with an appetite for experience and an eye for opportunity. Dancing, singing, acting, and learning to kill on a pole at fifty freaking years old. I bet both her kids have Invisalign. Making a living off your writing is great, for Darryl, but if I did that, I probably wouldn’t have the drive to do and learn all this other cool stuff, like planning burlesque literary salons, singing, acting in plays, and posing as a corpse for someone’s book cover. My writing is better for the experimentation, and while I may not be J.Lo, I’m definitely a hustler, and my back porch ain’t half bad. Just sayin’.

Detonation #5 – Ending It, One Way or Another

~ Noggy

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Warning: Explicit language and mature themes. If you’re offended by such things, you might want to venture elsewhere.

If you’re a rational human bean you undoubtably spend more than a trivial amount of time contemplating the end. It’s inevitable, right? Everything has a beginning and an ending. Everything. It’s a fundamental law. The universe began with a singularity programmed by an alien basement dwelling nerd and will succumb to painful, spasmodic, heat death, billions of years in the future.

Entropy is a bitch, and there is no appeasing her.

So yeah, everything ends, and the literary landscape is no exception. Books have beginnings, middles (we’ll delve into those horrid soggy messes another day), and endings. When you spend your ill-gotten lucre on that piece of trash dead tree, recommended by someone you’ll never trust again, you’re invested. You dive in, praying you can figure out what the fuck those metaphors actually mean, and crawl along, double checking the back copy every fifteen minutes to make sure you’re actually reading the right book. Maybe you’ll put it down so you can re-enter your pointless existence for minutes, days, or in rare cases, years, but you will eventually finish it. You will! Unless it blows chunks, or the book is Alan Moore’s Jerusalem. At twelve hundred and sixty-six pages, you’re likely to kill yourself first.

And the end, after you’ve put in so much time and energy, has an excellent chance of not meeting your expectations, and in many cases, just plain disappointing. There’s a ton of reasons for that of course, the primary one being that writing awesome finales is hard. Like brutally hard. Authors are vicious, emotionally conflicted monsters when they write, and unless they’re pumping out four shitty, cookie cutter books a year, they want their books to be award winning masterpieces from start to finish. But, unfortunately, that doesn’t mean they’re capable of doing just that.

Here are a few bits we dislike about endings, in no particular order except metaphysically.

It’s better to Burn Out than Fade Away: Chuck Wendig swears even more than Noggy, and that’s saying something, so when he talks about the third and major climax of the book needing to hit Holy Goatfucker Shitbomb! magnitude we tend to agree. Too many endings fall short by not exceeding what came before, ramping down instead of up. The last thing a reader wants to find when they’ve clawed their way to the top of Mount Doom is that the eagles got there first and those idiot hobbits could have retired to the Prancing Pony for ale and weed.

John doesn’t Die in the End: You’ve set the stakes high. The moment arrives where everything is on the line and you pull the punch right before it lands, striking a glancing blow or missing all together. On purpose. WHY? A poet-musician has to die, or at least be brutally maimed, or your reader is going to break the spine and use the pages to line their neurotic parrot cage. If your book says Poet John has to die, you better bloody well kill the bastard.

Too much of a Known Thing: Noggy and Lola step out for ice cream. One thing leads to another and they’re racing down the blacktop, police cars and angry spouses and various aggrieved parties hot on their trail, a famous yet poor life choice thriller writer bouncing around in their trunk. And then? Off the preverbal cliff, nose diving two thousand feet into the bottom of the Grand Canyon. The end of the road, both figuratively and literally. Everyone suspected it would end that way, hopefully with some inspired screaming.

Entertaining? You bet. Unexpected? Not at all. You, the reader, knew they were going to going to be eating fireball sandwich the moment they snatched the drooling lush from his opulent digs and roared away in their Pontiac Aztek. At least set the damn story in Gloucestershire with a subplot involving a cheese wheel race for god’s sake.

Overstaying your Welcome: While the climax and end of your story aren’t technically the same thing, we’re in the camp that feels they should be close together. If your heroine slays the dragon and gets the girl and then goes home and bakes cookies for a hundred pages, there better be something sinister about those cookies. Just because Tolkien got away with it at the end of Lord of the Rings doesn’t mean you can. After a world spanning adventure of epic proportions, he earned it (though the movie version destroyed a generation’s worth of bladders).

Best to leave the bar before they toss you out.

Ends that Aren’t Ends: While standalone books need hard, satisfying endings, the current genre writing trend is trilogies (which, contrary to the laws of mathematics, can comprise anywhere between two and fourteen books) where endings are often just transitions to the next episode. This is often extremely unsatisfying. Every book should stand on its own, with an ending that wraps up the story the book is telling, even if there is MORE ending at the absolute end. And don’t get us started on cliff hangers if there’s a better than average chance of abandoning your baby, or dying of old age before you write the next one (I’m talking to you George. And you, Lola…).

***

Call us negative Nellies if you must, but yeah, so many bad endings. Can we explain what makes a good one? Sure. Avoid writing a bad one. As we said, not easy, but honestly, not THAT difficult. There are eight million stories in the naked city, and every one of them has potential for a horrible, gruesome, unhappy ending. So get writing.

Detonation #4 – Networking on Social Media: Do We Really Need to Go Over This Shit Again?

~ Lola

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Warning: Explicit language and mature themes. If you’re offended by such things, you might want to venture elsewhere.

Facebook defines people with whom you agree to communicate as ‘friends’ and I wish they wouldn’t. Friend is a loaded word. If a person has agreed to speak with me, it doesn’t make us friends. We don’t have a relationship. We don’t even know each other. At best we might know a few people in common, which is usually my criteria for accepting a friend request.

So what the fuck is up with dudes on the internet? And Jesus Christ of course #notalldudesontheinternet Look, if you aren’t a creep, then you aren’t being kicked here, so quit yelping. And for the sake of argument, let’s not even single out dudes on the internet. Let’s invoke Kant’s Categorical Imperative and design rules of conduct that are most effective when applied to every digital meatloaf currently hammering away at a keyboard, or staring slack-jawed at their phone while masturbating in their Pontiac Aztek.

The following are Lola’s ten commandments for networking with new Facebook ‘friends’. Listen up motherfuckers…

  1. Thou shalt not follow up an accepted friend request with an immediate pro forma DM to like your page/buy your book/subscribe to your podcast.
  2. Thou shalt keep DM inquiries related to your common interest. Remember, you don’t actually know this person, so don’t ask personal questions.
  3. Thou shalt not stalk your new friend’s page and like old posts and especially not their old photos.
  4. Thou shalt be honest. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with saying “Hey, thanks for accepting my friend request. I’m trying to get to know more people in the writing community.”
  5. Thou shalt not ask for favours. Ooh, remember? You aren’t actually friends and they don’t owe you a beta read or a blurb or a review so don’t make it weird by asking.
  6. Thou shalt keep DM exchanges brief. Demanding a lengthy conversation with a near stranger is a good way to get ghosted.
  7. Thou shalt like or comment on current posts if you find them interesting. This is actually the best way to get to know your new friend. In the common area. Chat ‘em up in the living room, don’t corner them in the toilet.
  8. Thou shalt not slide into their DMs and steer the conversation into sexual territory. Fuck, that this has to be said is fucking exhausting as fuck and I’ll just leave it fucking here.
  9. Thou shalt keep your personal problems to yourself. That door isn’t open yet, in either direction.
  10. Thou shalt be cool. Can’t we all just be cool? Social media is about connecting with people that share our interests without the barrier of geography. That shit is brilliant! So enjoy it, and be cool, ffs.

Detonation #3 – You’re a Grown-up Monster, so Meet Your Goddamn Deadlines

~ Lola

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Warning: Explicit language and mature themes. If you’re offended by such things, you might want to venture elsewhere.

Everything is connected. Each critter throbbing on this planet is at least indirectly dependant on every other critter. For food, shelter, companionship, employment, transportation, entertainment, and bulletproof alibis etc.  It’s the great social supply chain and we are all but tiny links in the mail. We give in order to get, and we don’t like to wait. We want the Amazon Prime of existential deliverables, human and environmental costs be damned.

This is a way of saying deadlines are a fact of life. The key word being “dead”. As in, something unpleasant may happen should you fail to accomplish your task in the allotted time. This is the colloquialism we use to explicitly define when things need to be done. Work projects, school assignments, household chores, car maintenance, taxes etc.

So why do we have such a hard time meeting our creative deadlines? Because we’re busy, we don’t have family support, society doesn’t value art, we’re uninspired/day drunk/on the run from law enforcement… Yeah, yeah, yeah…

Time for real talk. On the most primitive level, human beans, and almost every other sentient piece of ooze, are far more motivated by aversion than affinity. Want to avoid starving? Store up nuts for the winter. Want to avoid freezing or being eaten by a mastodon? Build that fire and keep it burning all night. Want to avoid being friendless and lonely? Don’t be a cunt and return a text once in a while.

The problem is that nothing objectively terrible happens if we don’t finish writing that novel, essay, or poem*. World keeps on turning, you know? Maybe we’re frustrated and sad, but there’s no shortage of well-meaning friends to tell you it’s okay, you’re a brilliant artist, and you’ll get around to it eventually.

Well guess what? It’s not fucking okay, you’re not that brilliant, and why on earth would you get around to it eventually when you haven’t managed to get around to it already?  I mean, is this important to you or not?

But Lola, you may ask, doesn’t this make you a big slimy hypocrite? Heck, yes**. But it doesn’t make it any less true. The first step is realizing that your excuses are worthless. With few exceptions, getting shit done is within your control.

Okay, hear me out… maybe we’re more motivated by punitive measures, but if no one is going to flog us if we don’t write (unless we pay for it) and rewards don’t work, what’s a writer to choose? Neither. This is about habits, children. Forming good habits, so you don’t have to rely on external validation or condemnation to be productive.

But where’s the roadmap? Don’t worry, I gotcha. I call it the 3Ps and I’ve applied them to a case study for your amusement and edification.

The subjects: Noggy Splitfoot and Lola Silkysocks are writers. They are both quite good writers. They are also unmotivated bags of hot diaper pail trash. How can the 3Ps help them meet their creative deadlines?

P1 – Prioritization

Schedule writing time. Plug it in the damn calendar if you have to, and find a buddy if you can. It’s a lot harder not to show the fuck up when someone else is waiting on you. Lola and Noggy agree to check in over FB messenger on Friday night. Like they had anything better to do?

Noggy: Hey Silkysocks, ready for our writing sprint?

Lola: Yes, indeed. Having a friend to write with creates a compelling illusion of accountability.

Noggy: Plus, depravity loves company, so there’s that (sends gif of hippos mating in a mud wallow).

P2 – Planning

Mission statements are horse shit, until they aren’t. You need a plan, man. What are you going to use your writing time to work on, specifically? Share this with your buddy.

Lola: Imma edit that Detonation about meeting your deadlines.

Noggy: I’m going to write the sex-cannibal scene in my middle grade novel.

Lola: Right on. Check in again in an hour?

Noggy: See you then!

Lola: (sends gif of lascivious typing tentacles)

P3 – Permission

You’ve got your tush in the chair, set your intention, and perhaps like our subjects you’ve poured yourself eight fingers of bourbon. Now it’s time to actually write. But here’s the thing, don’t hobble yourself by demanding greatness. You’ll never commit anything to paper with such high standards. Get over yourself. It’s okay to churn out rubbish. It’s more than okay. It’s encouraged, necessary even. So, stop whining, drink your bourbon, and embrace mediocrity.

Lola: How’d you make out, Nog?

Noggy: I wrote ten thousand words

Lola: You…in an hour?

Noggy: It’s mostly shit, but I got one salvageable paragraph, wanna read?

Lola: Hit me.

Break up the writing sprints in any way that works for you, refill your glass, tuck your crotch goblins into bed, swap more disturbing gifs (sometimes sending them to unsuspecting friends because you’ve got too many conversation windows open).

And so it goes. Lather, rinse, and repeat. Do it enough and it becomes routine. Kind of boring, right? Maybe, but this is how a body of work is generated. One sprint at a time, using the 3Ps or however you want to organize your process. Not through a system of punishment and reward, not through will power, or hauling up buckets of inspiration from a magic well, but though habitual practice.

Take it from me: you can finish what you start. All you have to do is show up, decide where you want to go, and get there. One shitty word at a time.

*If you must

**Take all advice with a pillar of salt, and hypocrisy is the least of our sins, trust me

Detonation #2 – The Six Lives Theory

~ Noggy

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Warning: Explicit language and mature themes. If you’re offended by such things, you might want to venture elsewhere.

***

There’s a terrible word echoing across the thankfully not endless blacktop of life. If you slow down and poke your head out the window, you’ll hear it, day in and day out. You might even hear yourself scream it, whether consciously or unconsciously. It’s insidious. Always out there, easy to snatch from the wind and repeat without conscious thought.

Busy.

It’s the go to for thousands of authors and poets on this rotting planet, toiling away in their pit stop cafes and roadhouse lairs and squalid pits. And you know exactly what I mean. It doesn’t matter what situation you’re in, when someone, typically not desiring an actual answer roars by and asks you how you’re doing, you inevitably mumble “Good, just goddamned busy.”

Bullshit. (A word not used nearly enough in our humble opinion!)

Busy. Yeah, what else is new, everyone is fucking busy. At this stage in our evolution, it’s the norm. The word means nothing.

It’s not that we don’t get it. Everyone has a lot going on, we know that, and making the time to write can often be difficult, if not seemingly impossible, but it’s not because you’re busy.

It’s because you’re a shitty driver with no self-control, and you don’t make it a priority.

But, if you’re reading this, you’re either looking for cheap entertainment, or you desire our simple brand of… enlightenment, so hang on tight baby, we have both. 

***

Here’s the true’ism we’re going to force down your miserable throat, one we’re calling The Six Lives Theory, which is sort of self-descriptive, semi-deep, and bloody obvious.

In a nutshell?

Everyone has six lives. Well, maybe not everyone. It would, in hindsight, be better to call it the Many Lives Theory or the More Than Two Lives but Less Than Eight Lives Theory, but six lives has a certain je ne sais quoito it, so we’re going with it.

So, six lives, let’s examine this for a moment though a totally fictional author named Noggy Splitfoot. Noggy is a ‘busy’ fellow, though if you ask him how he’s doing he’ll probably just shrug and go back chugging from his brown paper bag and scrawling words on the side of the cardboard box he’s living in behind his small yet opulent mansion. You see, Noggy, for all his business, haspriorities, and writing is way up there, probably close to the top. If Noggy had to make a list, it would look something like this:

Life 1: Family and/or Friends and/or Pets

Life 2: Work

Life 3: Ultra-Running

Life 4: Publishing

Life 5: Dirty Deeds Done In the Dark.

Life 6: Writing

Six separate highways that may or may not intersect with each other, roads that need to be driven day in and day out. The first couple are, of course, mandatory unless you don’t actually happen to have family, friends, pets, or work—in which case, fuck, how could you possibly be complaining about being busy, you’ve won the bloody lottery mate—but in all likelihood you’re shackled to that 2001 Pontiac Aztek you know will eventually crash and burn, leaving you a smoldering blackened marshmellow praying for a death prolonged by unaffordable health care. 

Then there are your hobbies. The sports of all sorts. Reading trash because you don’t know quality literature if it bashed your face in. Overpriced video games. Netflix and Chill with discount hookers. Travel to exotic destinations like haunted gopher hole museums and Bigfoot hunting grounds. Posting fake news and feral cat pictures on FB and Twitter. We could go on and on (and we could, trust us, we soooo could).

Publishing we just tossed in there because… well, let’s just say if anything is a time and money sinkhole, that’d be it. But everyone has one of those, a life that consumes, like a black hole, everything that comes in contact with it. Sure, it brings joy—in theory at least—but it sucks, both literally and figuratively.

Noggy’s fifth life? Let’s just say if we told you the details we’d have to kill you, and nobody will know the absolute truth until he’s dead, missing-presumed dead, and/or the sun goes cold. Intrigued? You should be. A secret life. A… sinister sounding secret life. Everyone worth more than a wooden nickel has one of these puppies whether it involves collecting vintage porn from a creepy old bastard named Lazlo, going to late night strip karaoke, or cuddling chickens in an intimate, yet shocking manner. Stuff you’d never cop to, yet there you are.

And that brings us to writing. Noggy, bless his cursed and twisted soul, needs to find time to write. Needs to make it a priority. And, even with all those lives crowding him, sideswiping him, pushing his kitted out futuristic, yet oddly retro camper van, onto the shoulder so he plows through all manner of road kill and unfortunate cyclists, he needs to put his foot on the gas and stay on course. Not in the fast lane maybe (except to pass, he’s not a savage. Usually.), but in one of the lanes that doesn’t make it too easy to take an off ramp to the Olive Garden.

So how? How can you get any goddamn work done when you have to deal with the endless stop and go? Great question.

Two words.

Zipper Merge.

You’re welcome. Look it up, learn how it works. Don’t fuck it up and you’ll be ahead of the game in no time, nudging your way to the front of the line, weaselling your way in between every other car clogging your six lane life.

Get up an hour early and write before work. Run at lunch so you free up that hour to write in the evening. Take the bus so you can write on your commute. Wedge yourself into those cracks, take advantage of every opening. Sure, you gotta be aggressive. Fearless. Willing to endure the seething hate from all the clueless drivers who never read the classic Advances in Queueing: Theory, Methods, and Open Problems by Jewgeni H. Dshalalow and, you know, actually get it. But trust us, it works and your life will never be the same again.

Detonation #1 – Embracing Auto-correct for Fun & Profit

~ Noggy

Navigating Life in a Literary Minefield

Warning: Explicit language and mature themes. If you’re offended by such things, you might want to venture elsewhere.

***

We’ve all be there. One moment you’re slamming away on the keyboard, a trickle of bottom-self Bourbon leaking down your chin, when you stop to read your last chunk of dialog. “I’m sorry Mrs. Harris, Katie won’t be at school today. She got dick yesterday and spent the evening bent over the toilet.”

Hmm, you think, both synapses misfiring in sympathy with the piece of shit 2001 Pontiac Aztek parked outside the mouldering, rat infested writer’s pad you inhabit. Hmm. There’s something about those words that aren’t… quite right. You realize what’s happened, of course, by the fifth re-read. Katie wasn’t technically bent over the toilet; she was leaning her head against the seat so her crazy Rapunzel hair wouldn’t end up soaking in vomit or flushed. And technically, given your sketchy as fuck outline, it’s Saturday morning and thus no school.

But still. Hmm.

You hmm a lot these days, cylinders spitting and sputtering, so close to compression, yet producing little more than black, oily smoke. Your fingers deform the red Solo cup left over from your bestie’s Solstice smudge party and you take a sip of the rotgut and grimace, knowing your feeble mind is missing the obvious.

Only one thing to do: what every responsible Hemingway wannabe does in a situation like this. You wrap a ribbon around the troublesome prose and fire it to your closest writer compadre. And wait.

The response is immediate. “Lol.”

“What?”

“Brings me back to when you wrote all those Penthouse Letters in college. Awesome.”

“Uh, thanks,” you reply, hastily re-reading for the sixth time and finally catching the elusive switcheroo your firmware refuses to acknowledge.

You select the word and type in the intended adjective, watch it magically revert to it’s erotic alternative, and mash your face into the keyboard.

***

Auto-correct is both a blessing and a curse. Sure, if you’re using a heavy-duty word processor or some ancient nostalgia relic like WordStar, it’s probably not a huge issue, but if you write on your phone or tablet, using the same learning algorithms you sext with, it’s an inevitable fact of life.

Most of the time you’ll get some sort of bullshit gibberish, or wildly obvious replacement. You groan or shake a fist at the gods or even laugh, if it’s silly enough. And you fix it, hoping it’ll stick.

So what if I told you there’s a better way?

What if I told you to embrace your worst auto-correct transgressions and run with them? Because face it, most writing is dreary. Literary. Memoirs and poetry. It desires spice. Requires spice. Nobody wants to read boring crap, unless they are old or responsible for grants specific to non-commercializable artistic ventures. Your subconscious yearns for more. The algorithms designed by a thousand horny nerds yearn for more. You just need to give in, embrace it.

Look at this sad, bland throwaway:

Billy wiped his forehead with a soiled handkerchief, reached down between his scuffed knees, and jammed his hand into the roiling muck bucket.

Or this gem:

Willy wiped his forehead with a soiled handkerchief, reached down between his scuffed knees, and jammed his hand into the roiling fuck puppet.

Yeah. I thought so.

Billy, the poor orphan, abandoned on the doorstep of Conception Abbey and forced into menial drudgery suddenly becomes Willy, a rough and tumble sort of fellow, going all in with his insatiable Factory girlfriend. Maybe you won’t win any awards, but it’ll pop. 

Screw the red pill. Blue all the way baby. Dive head first into that rabbit hole and see where the twisted tunnel leads you. You wont’ be sorry.