Continuing on today’s visual theme, and on my general topic of discussing the various appurtenances of the publishing biz, I see that HarperCollins in the UK has launched a video game to promote a book. But…well, it’s a wee bit appalling to be perfectly frank. It’s called Apache, “an online game allowing players to pilot a helicopter gunship to [promote] the launch of ‘Apache’ by Afghanistan pilot Ed Macy.”

I knew this would piss off David Rees no end, so emailed him the link. He did not disappoint.

OMG, if only we had the budget to make an online game where you drop cluster bombs in Afghanistan and then civilians die all over your screen. . . with pop-up graphics displaying the percentage of likelihood that their kids will join the Taliban seven years later. . .

David, for those of you for whom the name only vaguely rings a bell, is the creator of the cult internet comic Get Your War On, which we originally published in book form in 2002, lost  to Penguin for the sequel, and then got  back for the definitive edition publishing Oct 9th.

We’re not only calling it the definitive edition of the comics, but also the definitive history of the War on Terror to date, and you know what’s weird? It is. And a lot more truth than in the three volumes of the Bob Woodward books.

A fabulous development in the life of the comic is that it has just been animated, by 236.com, the humor site affiliated with HuffPo. And it just won an award from NewTeeVee for how bloody brilliant it is, cause, you know it is. See for yourself.

(David and the animator get a terabyte hard drive, holy shit, aren’t there like export controls on those?)

A review for Womans World the most remarkable visual book I’ve ever and frankly will ever publish, has come my way from SEE, the Edmonton Alberta alt weekly. Now I’ve hustled off and on on my own blog about this book, which got almost no conventional review coverage, but was feted by folks like Mark Frauenfelder and the Institute for the Future of the Book. I won’t go into the details of the book here, but what you need to know is that, in the words of the author, “Woman’s World has been collaged from individual fragments of text (around 40,000 in all) found in women’s magazines published in the early 1960s. It has taken five years to produce.” [Examples here, here and here.]

What I what to reproduce here is the final lines of the Edmonton review, which really just gave me the chills right now:

I love thinking of all those magazines Rawle destroyed in order to create this book—all those glossy pages, with holes now cut into them where the best sentences used to be. To think that Norma used to live in those holes, scattered over thousands of pages. How lovely to know that Rawle has gathered up all those pieces of her soul and finally reunited them.

The author also has an illustrated Wizard of Oz coming our way in a couple months. (In a fit of true shilling, albeit of the generous variety, you can download the whole shebag here.)

And while I’m giving away PDFs of pretty pictures, this is Cristy Road’s Bad Habits, not “pretty” as such, but kind of punch-in-the-gut-gorgeous. [PDF here]

Jeff did a piece called How to Write a Novel in Two Months a little while back, and when I read it, I smiled, because I’ve run that race, too. I wanted to post my thoughts on speed-writing, as I have many—and now, through the power of bloggery, I can put my essay right next to his! It’s like some kind of crazy magic. And because Jeff nailed a lot of the nitty-gritty, things, I can just blather. Best of both worlds!

So here’s the thing–I am a fast writer. I think this is a skill I developed in college, a combination of stress and a vital part of my personality: I am incredibly lazy.

Because I am incredibly lazy, it is very easy to convince me not to work, since I don’t want to work anyway. Which led to an abnormal number of papers completed the night before they were due…and then the early morning hours before they were due, then the not so early morning hours*…And if even once I had failed to turn in a paper, failed to churn out twenty pages on gender anxiety in Gawain and the Green Knight, if I had even once failed to get an A, I think I would have rethought my methods and come to some sort of conclusion about work ethics.

Didn’t happen.

So what my brain learned was not what it should have learned, namely that this sort of thing is about as risky and dumb as huffing whipped cream canisters. My brain learned that there was no deadline it couldn’t meet.

This is a dangerous thing for a brain to know, and I recommend failure to meet deadlines to everyone. Human behavior means doing something until it doesn’t work. This sort of thing still works for me. I do not expect it to work forever, and frankly, it giveth and it taketh. You get the work done fast, but your body is shredded and you end up with the interpersonal grace of Gollum on a meth binge.

But you’re not going to listen to these warnings.

The 30 days is an arbitrary number–it is kind of an absolute minimum for me**. I haven’t pushed myself to see just how fast I can turn out a novel, but I don’t trust myself with less than 30 days. I’m not crazy. Obviously, Nanowrimo influences that number (50k in a month, at something like 1400 words a day, is not actually very hard if you’re a fast hand at the keyboard and don’t have a day job) and now it can be told that I did Nanowrimo in 2002…sort of. See, those were heady days. I was 23. I was all balls-out and brazen and come-here-world-I’m-gonna-take-a-bite-out-of-you.

You know, totally different than now.

So I just did it on my own in early October (at the same Rhode Island Starbucks where Tobias Buckell started his first novel, as we discovered this summer) and I clocked in at a lot less than 30 days. The result? The beginning of my career, and how I met Jeff.

The key, really, is to never learn you can fail.

I really enjoy timed writing–with deadline from without (editor) or within (online project, personal goal, etc). I think it’s because I enjoy obstructions. Things created within boundaries, where the boundaries become part of the object, creativity fueled by restriction. It lights me up inside–your mileage may, of course, vary. This is not how I write every novel–it took me six years to write The Orphan’s Tales. As I said, I don’t recommend this: first of all, no one will think you can have possibly produced anything good in that time, because time spent = quality, obviously, and no other factors come into play. Second of all, you absolutely have to play by this first rule. No exceptions, no hall passes.

Rule #1: Be a Genius

Guys, I cannot stress this enough. See Kerouac’s Belief and Technique for Modern Writing. Rule #29? You Are a Genius All the Time. (Yes, I have that list nailed above my desk.)

I don’t care what kind of writer you are. I don’t care how many rejections you’ve had, I don’t care how long you’ve been doing this. For 30 days, you are a genius. Everything that flows from your fingers is pure light. You do not have the luxury of not being a genius–not being a genius is laziness and sloth and you just can’t tolerate that shit right now.

Writing this fast is an act of unadulterated, stupid, blind faith. Faith in yourself, in your voice, in your story, in your sheer ability. If your faith falters, you lose time. In my experience, if you’re working on a 30 day cycle, you can afford to lose maybe three days (non-consecutive, if you lose three straight days you’ll never recover) to self-doubt, internal criticism, and not being a genius. More than that and you’re running up against words-per-minute, and when you get down to it, typing speed is actually a big factor. Us Millenials who grew up in chat rooms have generally fabulous-fleet skillz, but seriously, this is no time for long-hand.

2. Tell Everyone

Make sure everyone knows what you’re doing. This will provide the heady ingredient of shame to the proceedings, and I find that shame is an enormous motivator. If you fail alone, in private, no one will ever know, and you can claim that writing a novel in 30 days is impossible, for hacks, etc, with impunity. If you post to your blog and tell all your friends, you have to admit to it if you fail. This is assuming you are not subject to the major reason for speed-writing: you have a deadline and you watched Alias reruns instead of working until the last possible second.

It’s also important that your partner and social group knows not to expect you to be anything like human for the next month. Fortunately, you’re a genius, and geniuses are never expected to conform to primate behavior standards***. Just, you know, apologize later. If you are very lucky, you might have a partner or friend who is willing to provide any combination of the following salves for your chafed genius muscles: food, quiet space/leaving you the hell alone, a clean house, inspirational backrubs, crazy-ass genius sex.

But probably not.

3. Be Crazy

Jeff said that one ought not to try for much more than a transparent style when writing at breakneck speed. I, rather predictably, disagree. If anything, I’d suspect this doesn’t work so well for complex plot than complex language, but that’s likely because I find language easier than plot. Pick what you’re best at, and make that the focus of this marathon. I rather think that no technique is better suited to beatnik-pomo-style crazy writing than this–let go of your internal editor, of the ways writing is “supposed” to be (hint: it’s not supposed to be done in 30 days), any ideas your English professors might have given you about literature, and just open your brain onto the computer. Direct flesh-to-motherboard communication. Remember, this is blind faith we’re talking about. You are St. Teresa, and you are here to be transfigured. This is radical, revolutionary trust that what you are creating is worth the world.

You may not actually end up with a novel at the end of the month. But you’ll have something. Kerouac said not to be afraid to be a crazy dumbsaint of the mind. Quite so.

4. Sacrifice Your Body

Come on, you weren’t using it anyway.

The fact is, this sort of thing is a horrific strain on your human suit. You stay up late, you eat whatever is easy, you have to ice down your wrists at the end of the day. You burn your brain out, no joke. Make time for recovery afterward. Get out of the house occasionally, to Toby and my Starbucks, or the front lawn, or a laundromat. Look up at the sky. Accept the fact that you will fall down on your household chores–which is why this sort of thing is usually a childless writer’s gig–and that several times, you will literally want to die rather than write another word. Keep going. Talk to marathon runners. Rejoice, and conquer. Die, if you have to. Then get up and get back to work.

5. Don’t Fail

You don’t have time to fail. You don’t have time for writer’s block. You don’t have time to wibble.

And if you don’t fail this time, you’ll never learn that you can fail, and every time you don’t fail, your faith in your ability to not fail will grow until one day you’ll wake up and you won’t be a failure at all. It’s kind of awesome, if you can manage it. But the key is not failing, and the key to not failing is stupid dumbfuck faith that you won’t fail. Life is circular like that.

The reason I don’t credit Nanowrimo is not because I don’t think quality can be produced in 30 days. That would be a silly opinion, considering. It’s because they don’t think quality can be produced in 30 days. Their whole site is about producing crap and having it be okay to produce crap. It is okay. But I don’t have time to produce crap. Life is too short to produce crap. And the only way I know how to do this is to be absolutely convinced that what I’m writing is gobstoppingly amazing.

And I can only maintain that sort of conviction for short bursts. Say, 30 days.

______

*This is where being a classicist REALLY pays off. Ain’t no English class (see what I did thar?) can lick you–you know most of it before you set foot in the room, and your base of knowledge is broad enough that you can sound damn smart in a number of varied fields. I in no way mean to imply that in graduate school I did the research and the composition the day the paper was due. That would be crazy.

**I’ve done the 3 Day Novel competition–they expect you to produce something like 30k words, and that’s a novella at best.

***DO NOT DRINK ALCOHOL. You are not that kind of genius.

Sometimes I feel like a housewife. Take today, when I’m at home at 10:00 a.m., chatting it up with the dishwasher repairman, who moved here from the Ukraine twenty years ago and, God love him, keeps dropping the kind of hints for which dishwasher repairmen are so justifiably famous, as in, “Does your husband treat you good? I can treat you very good. You need anything, you call me. For you, I give a very good price.” I ask if I can pay with a credit card. “My dear, you can pay with anything.”

After he leaves, it’s over to the couch with notebook and pen and, of course, coffee, to try to get a handle on the novel-in-progress. And this feels very much like playing hooky. No matter that the book is sold, my editor is waiting, the publisher has a calendar on which it is quite firmly penciled in; no matter that writing this book is technically my job, I cannot help but feel that the very act of staying home to write is akin, somehow, to spending my day eating bon-bons. Shouldn’t I be out in the world, providing a service, replacing a lung, building a bridge, repairing someone’s dishwasher?

Writers have said some pretty self-important things about writing over the years. Take Frederick Busch’s A Dangerous Profession: A Book About the Writing Life. A dangerous profession? Really? (more…)

I’ve been thinking over the past couple of days about the evolving nature of the internet and how that relates to writers and writing. Here are a few guidelines I think make a lot of sense for writers. I am sure someone somewhere has already codified all of this, but it’s important to me to state it for myself, and to remember how I want to strive to conduct my own communications.

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One of the more audacious novels of the past few years, Light by M. John Harrison contains its own comment on labeling of fiction, I think. Whether Harrison intended it or not, the following passage speaks to the craft and art of creating fiction as well as anything in a book of writing advice:

“Every race [humankind] met on their way through the Core had a star drive based on a different theory. All those theories worked, even when they ruled out one another’s basic assumptions. You could travel between the stars, it began to seem, by assuming anything. If your theory gave you a foamy space to work with–if you had to catch a wave–that didn’t preclude some other engine, running on a perfectly smooth Einsteinian surface, from surfing from the same tranche of empty space. It was even possible to build drives on the basis of super-string-style theories, which, despite their promise four hundred years ago had never really worked at all…It was affronting to discover that…”

(more…)

Jeff: How’s it going.

Evil Monkey: Fine.

Jeff: Anything new.

Evil Monkey: Just contemplating heroism.

(more…)

I get a fair amount of email asking advice about internet PR. Things like, “Should I do a video promo for my book?” Or, “is a podcast a good idea?”

My reply, first, is usually: “Who is going to host it and how are you going to guarantee an audience for it?”

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Canadian writer (and for a long time a good friend) Cliff Burns has a provocative post here on basically telling editors to f— off, with “compromise” being a dirty word.

I think I have three reactions…

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So I was sitting in the audience a couple of years ago watching my brother Francois and the Eastside Class of 2006 graduate and I was thinking about advice. Especially during the speeches given by members of the graduating class. These speeches had the ingredients one would expect: hope for great accomplishments in the future, pride at the accomplishments of the past, a gung-ho attitude. Sprinkled with advice on dealing with college and the job market. And so I started think about what I would have wanted as advice as a graduating high school senior (I can’t really remember what advice was given out back then–it was, after all, 20 years ago).

The term “permission to fail, sir,” kept running through my head.

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