From time to time I’ll recommend—not review, mind you, but recommend, and yes, there is a difference—books that I think authors should have on their shelves. Some may be new and still in print, some may be difficult to find, but all will be, at least in my humble opinion, essential texts for any author, so worth looking for.
This time around is my full-throated recommendation of every single book you have ever read in your life and every book you will read for the rest of your life.
If you’re writing fantasy, you should be informed, inspired, excited, maybe occasionally intimidated, and actively learning from every fantasy story you’ve ever read and continue to read and be be informed, inspired, excited, maybe occasionally intimidated, and actively learning from every fantasy story you’re going to read in the future. Also, you should be be informed, inspired, excited, maybe occasionally intimidated, and actively learning from every other book, short story, poem… instruction manual, even… I don’t know… that you’ve ever read or will read. That includes the following genres and categories:
1. All of the genres and categories.
Writing YA cozy fantasy-romance with science fiction and horror elements set in Renaissance Italy? You can still—you should still be—informed, inspired, excited, maybe occasionally intimidated, and actively learning from every science fiction, horror, mystery, romance, “litfic,” story or non-fiction work of any kind—not just specific research for your work in progress, but everything—you’ve ever read or ever will read.
Do you need the full list again? Here it is in a slightly revised form:
1. Everything.
Books, magazines, web sites, comics/graphic novels/manga, poetry, plays, and yes audio- and eBooks “count” and we absolutely can be just informed, inspired, excited, maybe occasionally intimidated, and actively learn from stuff we’ve read and didn’t like as our favorite books, favorite genres, and so on. If you read cozy fantasy, fantastic. Why not? If you read hard SF, great. If you only read (or write) those things then you’re limiting yourself, and why on Earth would anyone do that? Isn’t the world already working to limit us without our active participation? The only thing sadder than an author being “typecast” is when authors typecast themselves. By all means, write what you love to write, but infuse that with anything and everything you pour into yourself.
Reading is our endless continuing education course in writing.
In “On Fairy Stories,” J.R.R. Tolkien warned us against conjuring “the dreamlands,” saying, “Next, after travellers’ tales, I would also exclude, or rule out of order, any story that uses the machinery of Dream, the dreaming of actual human sleep, to explain the apparent occurrence of its marvels. At the least, even if the reported dream was in other respects in itself a fairy-story, I would condemn the whole as gravely defective: like a good picture in a disfiguring frame.”
It seems to me that he’s talking about the literal dreamscape, in which all sorts of fantastical things happen then the protagonist wakes up and we’re “treated” to that great cop-out ending: It was all a dream!
Except, actually, in that case it wasn’t all a dream, was it? Just the parts that made it seem like a fairy story.
But looking at the overwhelming majority of fantasy, science fiction, and horror stories and novels I’ve read in my life, which has been spent reading an inordinate number of fantasy, science fiction, and horror stories and novels, I’ve found “the dreamlands” are, indeed, that story’s real world, an alternate reality from which our hero (and villain, and everyone else) will not ever awake. Once we begin the process of worldbuilding, once we drop even one weird thing into even an otherwise realistic present day, real world story, we’ve invited our readers on a tour of our special land of make-believe.
That might sound a little “airy fairy” to my hard science fiction friends, but any science fiction novel still has to include some sense of make-believe or it isn’t science fiction at all, is it? “Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again,” said Ray Bradbury. “As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.”
And isn’t that what, as both writers and readers, we love about these genres? They take us to Arrakis or Narnia or Barsoom, or to some plausible near future or alternate past. In “On Writing: An Abecedarian,” Priscilla Long wrote, “Books allow us to drift in the space of a reality different from the one we are reading in.” Readers want to be transported somewhere, somewhen, and somehow… out there. That makes one of the more repeated bits of writing advice, “write what you know,” a lot more difficult, doesn’t it?
I don’t know how to cast a spell or power a faster than light starship. I have no idea how to either bring down or communicate with Godzilla. I haven’t been trained on the reanimation of dead flesh by use of electricity. No one has ever checked me out on the proper use of a phaser. Science fiction, fantasy, and horror authors don’t just break that “write what you know” rule every once on a while, but by default every single time. And that’s fine by me, since that advice should always have been “write what you feel.”
In a certain sense, I believe that we always write about something we don’t know: we write to make it possible for the unwritten world to express itself through us. At the moment my attention shifts from the regular order of the written lines and follows the mobile complexity that no sentence can contain or use up, I feel close to understanding that from the other side of the words, from the silent side, something is trying to emerge, to signify through language, like tapping on a prison wall.
We might be writing about the crew of a starship or the ragtag fellowship united to prevent the coming of the Demon Prince, but we don’t really know shit about starships and Demon Princes. We do, however, know how to inhabit and bring to life the people (aka characters) who crew the starship or unite against the Demon Prince. And since none of those people literally exist in the real world, we have to make them up. In “Where my Characters Come From,” Haruki Murakami summed it up like this:
I might, at one time, become a 20-year-old lesbian. Another time I’ll be a 30-year-old unemployed househusband. I put my feet into the shoes I’m given, make my feet fit those shoes, and then start to act. That’s all it is. I don’t make the shoes fit my feet. This is not something you can do in reality, but if you toil for years as a novelist, you’ll find you’re able to accomplish it because the enterprise is imaginary. And being imaginary, it’s like things that take place in dreams. In dreams—whether ones you have while asleep or ones you have while awake—you have hardly any choice about what happens. Basically I go with the flow. And as long as I’m following that flow, I can freely do all sorts of things that are hardly possible. This is indeed one of the main joys of writing novels.
Here, Murakami makes clear that distinction between the figurative dream and the literal dream that Tolkien warned us about. We conjure the impossible as a matter of routine, because sometimes the routine just won’t do. But inside that impossible is the living humans we’ve conjured to deal with it, even if that character can’t be anything like us. “…speculative writing, now and forever, belongs to dreamers, there is no argument,” said author Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas. “Because some have a greater need to dream than others, and so that’s what they do. Because imagination is required to recognize the other as another just like us.”
And though it all might seem frivolous—who cares if the crew can repair the star-drive before the quantum reactor goes critical when none of this stuff exists in the real world?—well, according to Stephen King…
In every life you get to a point where you have to deal with something that’s inexplicable to you, whether it’s the doctor saying you have cancer or a prank phone call. So whether you talk about ghosts or vampires or Nazi war criminals living down the block, we’re still talking about the same thing, which is an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life and how we deal with it. What that shows about our character and our interactions with others and the society we live in interests me a lot more than monsters and vampires and ghouls and ghosts.
So let’s take our readers, who are real people, on a tour of our lands of make-believe, via the people (characters) we’ve created out of a real connection to ourselves and all the people we’ve ever met, seen, or read or heard about every day of our lives. And even if we can’t know everything about everybody, remember what Michael Moorcock said: “I have always written ambitious fiction on the assumption I’m being read by a smart, imaginative reader. I like to offer a sort of reflecting crystal ball into which that reader can stare and use their own creativity to add further dimensions, extra narratives to what I’ve done.”
The readers we’re taking on a tour of our lands of make-believe are willing participants. They signed up for the tour, paid the price of admission, and carved the time out of their busy day because they’re just as excited about the visit to these lands as we are about their creation.
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Editor and author Philip Athans offers hands on advice for authors of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fiction in general in this collection of 58 revised and expanded essays from the first five years of his long-running weekly blog, Fantasy Author’s Handbook.
First, please watch this TED Talk, “How everyday interactions shape your future” by Mesmin Destin, a social psychologist who was almost talked out of the rest of his life by one key person…
Having heard that, I had to wonder, how many potentially great authors had some negative feedback early on, before they really even started, well before any of us got to read anything they’ve written, and that was it? They never started. They were talked out of it, scared away from it…
And, honestly, why wouldn’t they be?
Spending only a few minutes on the internet will expose anyone to massive, endemic negativity. Everyone is a critic, no one is an expert, and it seems, at least, that for every positive message about books, authors, the publishing business… there’s at least a dozen negatives. Books and authors and other readers are dragged around GoodReads, Amazon, YouTube, Discord… everywhere.
What if that one “takedown” review you posted somewhere is read by a would-be author the same age Mr. Destin was when that school guidance counsellor almost blew up his life—but your review blows up that kid’s life?
There’s no way to know if that’s already happened, or ever will happen, but if there’s a greater than zero chance it might, that’s all the reason any decent person needs to just keep it positive.
I’ve read books I did not like. Probably more than most people, but the job that I do requires me to be a positive influence on authors—and that’s one of the things I love most about being an editor. I’m not providing criticism, I’m providing advice, and there is a crucial difference, mostly having to do with specificity and timing. I get to that author and that book before it’s too late. Before it’s already out there in the shark tank, maybe being ripped to shreds for sport.
And let’s face it, ya’ll, ripping an author and a book to shreds is sport. It serves no one. Please just don’t. If for no one else’s the sake but that one unknown author still to come, who may just end up being the greatest of all time.
On February 27th, the estate of author Ian Fleming released a statement in which they made a lackluster effort to defend the indefensible, and that is their program to rewrite at least one of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books in order to create an alternate world in which Flemming wasn’t a racist.
I get it. I’d hate to have to carry that around, too, but the book in question went way beyond, “some racial terms which were problematic even in mid-1950s America,” and to the point where it’s essentially unreadable by any reasonable 21st century person.
I tried to read the book myself, and not only did not finish it, but sold the rest of the Bond books I’d already bought with the plan to read the whole series. I always give every book I read five stars on GoodReads, in an effort to combat the algorithm dystopia, but was moved to give this book one star and a rare one line negative review: “Everything I have to say about this hideously racist piece of crap can be found at: https://fantasyhandbook.wordpress.com…” a post here in which I call out some of the more offensive (and I have reason to believe, still extant) sections of the text for what they were.
So then, shouldn’t I be applauding this “sensitivity” rewrite? Finally, we have a non-racist James Bond, a character drawn up out of his 1950s sensibilities and shoved, however unwillingly or ham-fistedly, into our more enlightened present?
Absolutely not.
I love old books, especially old science fiction books, and one of the things that draws me to them is the fact that they are, one and all, artifacts of the time in which they were written and first published. SF from the same time period as the Bond book in question imagines all sorts of exotic future technology, but almost never accounts for women in positions of authority or responsibility. In that era’s SF, race almost never comes up, and why would it? These guys are astronauts, so of course they’re white. All the Cold War and post-WW2 anti-Asian bias is in full force, too, with essentially no positive depictions of “Orientals” to be found.
Does that mean I think we should go back in time to this sort of default racism and sexism? Of course not!
I’m reading War & Peace right now. Does that mean I long for a return to Tsarist Russia? I read Aristotle’s Poetics and smiled when he said that the protagonist of a story can not be either a woman or a slave because they have no agency. Does that mean I’m going out to Gaul once the winter snows melt to pick up a couple slaves? Surely not.
One of the things old books do is show us how far we’ve come.
Though Fleming should have known at least a little better in the mid-50s than Lovecraft did in the early 20s, these, same as Tolstoy and Aristotle, are dead guys. They wrote what they wrote when they wrote it, coming from the culture in which they were raised. They saw the world through 1920s or 1930s eyes the same way Aristotle reported on the world as it was in Greece in the third century BCE.
Do we rewrite Aristotle now? Tolstoy? Lovecraft?
And where does this end?
Mark Twain?
The Bible? That’s full of crazy stuff anyone could take offense at.
In 1984, the most important novel of the 20th century, George Orwell showed us Winston Smith laboring away at the Ministry of Truth rewriting old newspapers because “he who controls the past, controls the future.”
How do we get the message out to the Fleming estate and their “sensitivity readers” that Orwell meant us to see this as a bad thing?
Why is the world, coming from both the left and the right, so deadset on making Orwell’s nightmare dystopia real?
And that is exactly what’s happening, my friends.
The rewriting of a shitty old spy novel actually carries that much weight.
Resist now, before it’s too late.
—Philip Athans
A few more past posts on and around the subject at hand…
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Editor and author Philip Athans offers hands on advice for authors of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fiction in general in this collection of 58 revised and expanded essays from the first five years of his long-running weekly blog, Fantasy Author’s Handbook.
Way, way back in time… June 21, 2022 to be exact… I set myself the challenge of reading, in 2023, twelve very long books, one a month over the course of the year. Being a man of my word, come January 2023, I dived in head first, working through the shelf of twelve long books I’d set up months before, beginning with the longest of them, Tolstoy’s War & Peace, weighing in at an absurd 1500 pages spread over four volumes. I set schedules for myself, read, read some more, made notes in the margins, and was maybe as far as halfway through Volume One when January turned into February.
Undaunted, reminding myself that the challenge was to read twelve really long books in 2023, not necessarily one every month, I continued with War & Peace while adding The Essential Ellison, 1012 pages of the works of my favorite author of all time.
And now I’ve come to the last day in February, having been prompted more often that I’d imagined to read various books I really want to read, while inexorably plowing through two gigantic mega-tomes, and I just… can’t.
I surrender.
I am currently on page 480 of 515 pages of the first of four volumes of January’s long read, War & Peace.
I am currently on page 581 of 1012 pages of The Essential Ellison.
Yes, my computer monitor wallpaper is the classic Fiend Folio cover.
And I also work full time, which, by the way, is, y’know… reading books.
And I occasionally sleep.
I have two dogs.
And errands.
And other stuff.
But worst of all, I had added daily reading goals to my to do list: Read two chapters of War & Peace, Read two Ellison stories, etc., which had the effect of changing reading for pleasure into reading for work—and I do enough of that already. And just as bad… there are a bunch of great, shorter books—even longer or semi-long (or whatever) books—I’m not reading, and that sucks. I’m not reading any non-fiction right now, for instance. No poetry. No plays. No graphic novels. That’s not okay.
So here I am, only two months into a twelve-month challenge waving the white flag of surrender.
Here’s what I’m going to do.
I’m going to read two chapters of War & Peace a day until I’ve finished it—not because I feel compelled to do so (it will not be on my daily to do list), but because I want to. It’s actually an advisable and doable way to read a book like that.
I’m going to finish The Essential Ellison because I love it.
I’m going to keep reading all my random prompt books, because I love them, too.
And I’m going to keep my long book shelf intact.
When I finish The Essential Ellison, which I’ll surely finish before War & Peace, I’ll go back to reading other stuff—literary or other-than-SF/F genre fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays, graphic novels… whatever I want to read in the moment.
When I finish War & Peace, I’ll dive into the next long book, which happens to be Don Quixote, so in the end I’ll be reading one long book, one magazine, various random prompt books, and one other book of my choice across any category or genre.
How long will it take me to get through this long book shelf one at a time? I have no idea, and in the spirit of fully shedding any sense of reading as work, I will not allow myself to care. I’m going to read these books because I want to, and that’s all the reason anyone needs to read any book.
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In Writing Monsters, best-selling author Philip Athans uses classic examples from books, films, and the world around us to explore what makes monsters memorable—and terrifying.
You’ll learn what monsters can (and should) represent in your story and how to create monsters from the ground up.
All the way back in March of 2017 I cautioned you not to describe characters in terms of numerical statistics (height, weight, age) or obvious features (hair and eye color, etc.), but reading some more “vintage” (1950s-1960s) fiction and running into the perfectly valid question of the “male gaze” made me want to try to sort out two things:
1. How do we (regardless of the gender of the author) describe characters in a compelling, character- and story-rich way that reveals more about the POV character than the character being described?
2. And that being the case, how do we know what that specific POV character is triggered by? How would this person—and our characters have to be people—react to the other people in the story?
That’s not easy to answer in one blog post, but I thought I’d start by looking at some examples starting from around the same era when a lot of fiction, especially “pulp” and genre fiction, had a weak view of women. In the pulps, female characters did tend to be either victims or villains, and almost never the hero of the story. But in the hands of more skilled authors, we saw not just the default sexism of the immediate post-war era, but a sense of mystery when it came to women, who were not just objects of desire but puzzles that might never be solved, saviors, and… well, it turns out female characters filled all sorts of roles, and male POV characters reacted to them in ways that went beyond victim or villain.
Here are some examples from the novel Savage Night (1953) by the amazing Jim Thompson. The POV protagonist is a hired killer, posing as a student, and living in the boardinghouse run by his intended victim, his victim’s wife, and their maid—a strange, twisted sort of love triangle. Here’s the victim’s wife, entirely from the perspective of a sociopath:
“Yes?” she called, while she was still several steps away. “Can I help you?” She had one of those husky well-bred voices—voices that are trained to sound well bred. One look at that frame of hers, and you knew the kind of breeding she’d had: straight out of Beautyrest by box-springs. One look at her eyes, and you knew she could call you more dirty words than you’d find in a mile of privies.
And the maid, via the same sociopath:
She had on an old mucklededung-colored coat—the way it was screaming Sears-Roebuck they should have paid her to wear it—and a kind of rough wool skirt. Her glasses were the kind your grandpa maybe wore, little tiny lenses, steel rims, pinchy across the nose. They made her eyes look like walnuts in a piece of cream fudge. Her hair was black and thick and shiny, but the way it was fixed—murder!
And later, the same maid…
All that hard work and deep breathing had put breasts on her like daddy-come-to-church. And swinging around on that crutch hadn’t done her rear end any harm. If you saw it by itself, you might have thought it belonged to a Shetland pony. But I don’t mean it was big. It was the way it was put on her: the way it hinged into the flat stomach and the narrow waist. It was as though she’d been given a break there for all the places she’d been shortchanged.
This is not just an ordinary sexist 1950s guy, this is a person who sees people as targets, marks, and these two women in particular as pawns in a chess game where his “win” is the murder of his assigned victim according to his boss’s complicated timetable. I won’t spoil the rest of this brilliantly bizarre crime novel—one of the best I’ve ever read—but as weird and decidedly creepy as these examples are the story goes in yet more unsettling and unpredictable directions.
What’s most important, in terms of the “male gaze” question, is that this is, indeed, this one particular male character gazing on two specific female characters. This is what he thinks—and we already know he’s not a good guy. He uses the terminology of the day, focusses on things peculiar to himself, not really the women, like his mistrust of anyone who seems upper class or his weirdly sexualized admiration for the young maid. This is what this one guy thinks, what this one guy sees, and not all guys are good guys. And there is always a difference between what we think and what we say—at least we always hope so.
Leaving the pulp crime stuff behind, here’s another example, this one by Harlan Ellison from the 1977 story “The Other Eye of Polyphemus”:
She was in her early forties and crippled. Something with the left leg and spine. She went sidewise, slowly, like a sailor leaving a ship after a long time at sea. Her face was unindexed as to the rejections she had known; one could search randomly and find a shadow here beneath the eyes that came from the supermarket manager named Charlie; a crease in the space beside her mouth, just at the left side, that had been carved from a two nights’ association with Clara from the florist shop; a moistness here at the right temple each time she recalled the words spoken the morning after the night with the fellow who drove the dry cleaner’s van, Barry or Benny. But there was no sure record. It was all there, everywhere in her face.
And consider this from The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., first published in 1959:
But Beatrice did have a face—and an interesting one. It could be said that she looked like a buck-toothed Indian brave. But anyone who said that would have to add quickly that she looked marvelous. Her face, like the face of Malachi Constant, was a one-of-a-kind, a surprising variation on a familiar theme—a variation that made observers think, Yes—that would be another very nice way for people to look. What Beatrice had done with her face, actually, was what any plain girl could do. She had overlaid it with dignity, suffering, intelligence, and a piquant dash of bitchiness.
Here Vonnegut let’s us decide what she looks like. When he says, Yes—that would be another very nice way for people to look… it’s now our responsibility to fill in what we think is a nice way for people to look, which is much more interesting than giving us the results of a medical exam. How tall, exactly are these women? No idea—doesn’t matter. What color are their eyes? No idea—doesn’t matter. How much do they weigh? You get the idea…
And lest you think this sort of deeper, admittedly stranger way to describe a character only applies to women, here’s Harlan Ellison again, this time in the story, first published in 1959, “Sally in Our Alley” and featured in the collection Gentleman Junkie:
There was a glob of fat and slime behind the desk, and the nameplate read L.T. B.C. KROLL.
Let me tell you, this Kroll character was so far out, he’d automatically have to have a ticket stub to get back in.
Less to say there, but those two sentences say a lot about how a POV character can sometimes peg someone, make a quick, rash, uninformed… human decision about who someone is from the first glance filtered through embedded stereotypes.
These POV characters are not a walking list of aspirational hopes for the future of a united humankind. These are people, products of their times, cultures, and subcultures. Some of them are bad people, and all of them carry around baggage. And it’s the baggage that makes us who we are, even if we’re desperate to unload all that crap.
From time to time I’ll recommend—not review, mind you, but recommend, and yes, there is a difference—books that I think authors should have on their shelves. Some may be new and still in print, some may be difficult to find, but all will be, at least in my humble opinion, essential texts for any author, so worth looking for.
Having seen it recommended by writers and artists alike here and there, I checked a copy of Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon out of the library, and finally took the short time yesterday to read it. It’s a very small book, physically, with huge type and lots of graphics, so an easy one-sitting read. I would definitely recommend it, especially for newer authors, anyone seriously thinking about getting into the indie publishing game, and especially the introverts out there—and I know there are a lot of us! The book does a nice, accessible, easygoing, and positive job of psyching us up to do exactly as the title states: show our work!
It’s a book about putting yourself out there alongside your work, and if I keep typing I’ll have basically retyped the book, so go out and find it and read it for yourself, and take from it what you will.
The one thing I’d like to focus on is Kleon’s idea of the cabinet of curiosities. Rather than filling a physical curio cabinet at home with knickknacks and tchotchkes, Kleon encourages us to share our sources of inspiration on the Internet.
Okay, then, challenge accepted, with prompts courtesy of a list of questions on pages 76-77 of Show Your Work!
Where do you get your inspiration?
I know this is going to feel like a copout answer, but the only real answer is everywhere. The slightly more honest answer is I have no idea. Inspiration just… appears. From where? Well, I’m not a spiritual person, so won’t give you any sort of metaphysical answer, but the human mind is a complex, and exceedingly weird place. From time to time, shit just pops out of it.
What sorts of things do you fill your head with?
Novels, poetry, short stories, graphic novels, movies, TV series; and books, articles, and YouTube videos about books and writing. And, as above, everything I see, hear, feel, touch, taste, or otherwise experience. I have never found it possible to not fill my head with everything, the result being it’s a rather crowded place, and never shuts up. Ever.
What do you read?
See above… I really do make a concerted effort to read as “all over the place” as I can. This year I’ve embarked on my personal long books challenge, and thanks to an overwhelmingly busy January that’s gotten off to a rough start. I’m still only in Volume 1 (of 4) of War & Peace, which was January’s book, and not yet hallway through February’s book: The Essential Ellison. But I’m not looking at this challenge as a monthly thing. The goal is to read all twelve by the end of 2023, and there’s still an awful lot of 2023 left.
In the meantime, my random behavior modification prompts occasionally tell me to read a book from one of my various collections. To whit, I’m currently reading an ACE Double: Bring Back Yesterday by A. Bertram Chandler/The Trouble With Tycho by Clifford Simak.
I have an iTunes library consisting of 12,978 songs, which would take 34.7 days to listen to all the way through, and occupies 97.51 GB of hard drive space. My iTunes library on shuffle is one of the greatest cultural achievements in human history. In it you will find every song ever released by Cocteau Twins, which is my favorite band.
What movies do you see?
I love science fiction, horror, comedy, and smart, grown up drama. I haven’t gone out to a movie theater in years, but I watch way too much TV at home. I just watched David O. Russell’s Amsterdam late last night and loved it. I liked The Menu, too. And last October I made it a point to watch one independent film a day. The ones I liked the most were: Spiderhead, Apostasy, The House, Luckiest Girl Alive, Windfall, Heavy, The Devil All the Time, Naked Singularity, The Snakes, The Father, Pig, and The Lost Daughter.
Do you look at art?
Yes, but not regularly. Not as much as I should. I went through a mini Bruegel period a couple months ago, but I do need to look at more art.
I don’t have a scrapbook. Do people still have scrapbooks? I have notebooks, which are mostly work-related notes, etc., but I haven’t looked at anything like a photo album in… years. Decades?
What do do you stick on your refrigerator?
Who’s done work that you admire?
Too many people to list here, but let’s hit the all time favorites, in no particular order: Harlan Ellison, Cocteau Twins, Andrei Tarkovsky, Mark Z. Danielewski, Elvis Costello, Gary Gygax & Dave Arneson, H.P. Lovecraft, Tom Waits, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Gene Roddenberry, and Stan Lee.
Who do you steal ideas from?
Literally anyone and everyone. Definitely see the list above for starters.
Do you have any heroes?
No. If you look at the list of people whose work I admire you’ll find at least a couple people who weren’t necessarily terrific human beings. And in a world where no one can hide anymore, it’s harder and harder to practice any version of “hero worship” and not end up with… Bill Cosby…? So I’m going to pass on this, and even recommend that we don’t have heroes anymore. Let’s take each other at face value—our work, at least.
Who do you follow online?
I’m pretty much confined to Twitter. Here are some people I follow there, in no particular order:
@AndrewPorter
@harukimurakami_
@thebookseller
@RackSpinner
@GrantaMag
@torbooks
@BackintheBronze
@GoProFun
@Siennafrst
@krazykeithrules
@HyperdriveFleet
@HumanoidHistory
@Weirdmedieval
…and lots, lots more…
Who are the practitioners you look up to in your field?
I met David Hartwell at a convention once and I think he’s had a huge effect on my reading since I was a wee tot. Other than that, editors tend to be the guy behind the guy, behind the guy… so it can be difficult to tell who’s doing my job better than me, but I know there are lots of them out there. I’m forever indebted to my old TSR coworker, the late Bill Larson, who taught me more about the craft of editing than any one person.
…and that wraps up my Cabinet of Curiosities. I hope you didn’t mind me showing my work here and I hope this, and Austin Kleon’s book, inspires you to share your own “cabinet.”
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Editor and author Philip Athans offers hands on advice for authors of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fiction in general in this collection of 58 revised and expanded essays from the first five years of his long-running weekly blog, Fantasy Author’s Handbook.
…but I’m writing this blog post anyway because you know I never miss a Tuesday!
Let me talk a little bit more about this whole vacation thing and at least tangentially in context of what’s going on in the culture at large around the idea of work.
I grew up in the culture of work. Work, work, work. Money, money, money. Though something about it always felt toxic to me it was just the way the world (at least America) worked, so the pressure was always on. Don’t be a lazy sack of shit. Don’t be a shiftless freeloader, a welfare queen, or whatever demeaning label we can throw on someone who maybe needed a little bit of help—Heaven forefend—or maybe didn’t have any particular interest in being rich for riches’ sake. Then I graduated from college into Reagan’s America in which the new yuppie culture took all this to absurdist extremes. Those were the bad old days of bragging about how many hours you worked. If you weren’t putting in seventy hour weeks you were a lazy bastard who was never going to make it to the executive level, where, I assume, you started working eighty hour weeks? Or was that when you could finally start to coast?
I don’t even know. And honestly, I don’t care, and I didn’t care then, either. And I turned out to be right, anyway, so there’s that. All those seventy hour weekers who were summarily dumped onto the streets in 2007, if not before, learned the hard way that you can still fail at a job you hate, and that the company you’ve sacrificed your life to is much more likely to drop you without hesitation for no reason at all or simply collapse into nothing around you than it is to grant you a gold key to the Executive Bathroom.
But still, we all gotta eat, yeah? We still need money coming in. Bills gotta get paid, roofs have to be put over heads, cars require gas, and all that stuff.
I’ve somehow, and in many cases by sacrificing the “luxury” stuff I was never particularly interested in anyway, to live the life I actually wanted. I’ve lived a life, for the most part, in books, which is the thing I’ve loved most for my entire life. It has not given me enough money to buy a ten million dollar yacht, which is fine because I don’t want a yacht. I have no interest in yachts. Or European vacations. Or bespoke suits. Or Cuban (or any) cigars. Or, really, much of anything except, y’know… books.
I love my job and over the years I’ve worked hard at it, and in so doing have gotten good at it, and I love it so much I continue to work to get even better at it.
My job, primarily as an editor, is actually pretty hard. Mentally strenuous work, precise, intellectual labor, can be as exhausting as physical labor, and I think maybe even more so. As much as love what I do it is possible to get burned out. Your brain only has so much to give.
Over the course of the last half of 2022 I let that burnout get the better of me. Even after taking a week off in July, I came back still a little overwhelmed, which caused me to get a little more overwhelmed, and finally I finished out one of the worst years of my freelance life in a Deadline Hell that caused 2022 to spill over into 2023 with a series of seven-day work weeks.
But that all finished up yesterday, just in time for the scheduled week vacation my wife took off from work because we planned to go back to Vegas every seven months, and seven months have passed.
So, okay, Vegas didn’t work out, but we kept the vacation week, and here’s why.
You can get too much of a good thing, even a good job. So now, having decided never again to consign myself to Deadline Hell—and it was me who put myself there, no one else, including “America,” or the Protestant Work Ethic or whoever or whatever else—I sat down, took a look at what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong, and got my shit together by making two key decisions.
I will now, religiously and without fail, take one week off every seven months.
That’s still not a lot of time off, but before the week in July it had been five years between vacations. That’s not enough by any reasonable human’s estimation. During that week we might travel—we love Vegas. Like this week, we might stay home and putter around the house, binge watch something fun, read, go to bookstores, read some more, maybe take the dogs to the dog park… Crazy stuff like that.
I’ve figured out exactly how many hours I have to work in a week to get to a target income.
This is essential math for any freelancer—and it’s a perfectly reasonable amount of time, what I came up with. Lots less than seventy hours a week, I promise. I absolutely can hit that goal, serve my clients in the best way possible with reasonable deadlines and the attention to detail they and their books deserve, and not melt my brain in the process.
This is not rocket science, nor is it some amazing revelation on my part. This is basic stuff, actually, but sometimes you have to go off the rails to be reminded why you set up the rails in the first place, then get back on.
So today we’re going to the casino to once again test our luck on the slot machines. We might go to the buffet for lunch.
Yesterday we ran some errands then hit the used bookstore because I’m never going to really take a vacation from books. Books are my vacation. Anyway, I got all these for about $45, and that’s fantastic.
I don’t think I’m going to make it to the Day of the Accordian, but…
We’ve got some other fun staycationey things planned for the rest of the week, too. And I even managed to force myself not to look at my email yesterday at 5:40 pm. Though I did take a peek this morning at 5:40 am…
Your characters need to earn the things they need to succeed in their own stories.
Don’t let anything come too easily, and in most genre fiction, at least, I mean anything and everything must feel that it came at the cost of significant effort. If not, it’s not worth including in the story.
I’ll refer you back to a previous post on why you don’t need to cover every little minute detail of a character’s experience—we don’t need to follow them into the bathroom or see every little twitch and itch—but anything and everything we do see should, at least in a small way, actually move the story forward. Stephen King said, “When I sit down to write, my job is to move the story. If there is such a thing as pace in writing, and if people read me because they’re getting a story that’s paced a certain way, it’s because they sense I want to get to where I’m going. I don’t want to dawdle around and look at the scenery.”
And anything that moves the story forward should come at some cost.
That doesn’t mean you need a string of redshirts to kill in order to get your hero across the street… unless it does mean that. Are the enemy operatives shooting down from the rooftops, and the hero’s secret weapon is in the Starbucks across the street? If so, maybe a member of the hero’s team does need to take a bullet for the sake of the story, so the hero gets to the Starbucks across the street and activates the secret weapon, but damn it, Ensign Smith paid for that with her life!
That sounds like more fun than: The enemy soldiers took positions on the rooftops so Galen pushed the button on the secret weapon and they all instantly returned to the Otherverse. Galen finished his coffee in peace.
Wow. Galen… pushed a button.
Galen was never really in danger.
There was nothing at stake in the enemy soldiers taking up position on the rooftops.
All Galen’s doing is enjoying a coffee, which is…
Not a story!
Please, I beg you, look for anything like this in your writing and shoot it dead from the rooftops!
I know that secret weapon example is goofy and weird, but you might be surprised how often I see stories that actually contain some variation of this, at least: The hero has to get from Point A to Point B and to get there he travels through the forest, passes a lake, goes up a hill then back down, turns left at the intersection, and gets to Point B just before dark.
And nothing happens along the way.
So then why am I reading this?
And that one sentence is bad enough. I’ve read chapters in which this uneventful journey is rendered in torturous, tedious detail, accomplishing nothing in terms of the narrative.
Look, I know you’ve drawn a map, on which is placed the Throughwood Forest, Lake Inconsequence, Ordinary Hill, and the intersection of This Road and That Road. That’s swell. But you have to seriously ask yourself this question:
Do my readers give a fraction of a shit?
“The first principle of aesthetics is either interest or suspense,” said author John Cheever. “You can’t expect to communicate with anyone if you’re a bore.”
That said, if Galen leaves Point A and is beset upon by forest glimps in the Throughwood Forest and they eat his left foot—now there’s a reason to take your readers through that forest.
Galen manages to fight off the glimps, and, bleeding, crawls to the edge of Lake Inconsequence, where he washes his wound and gets a drink of its healing waters, so at least he’s no longer bleeding to death.
Meanwhile, a lake squid had eaten his horse, so now Galen, has to climb Ordinary Hill on his knees, which would be fine except a pack of hill wolves are circling him the whole time. The wolves nipping at his heels, he makes it to the other side and rolls down the hill while tossing the last of his throwing knives to wound a few of the wolves and scare off the pack.
At the bottom of the hill, a young maiden, out picking berries, helps Galen to his feet and gives him a ride on her donkey the rest of the way to Point B, but Galen gets weird vibes from this maiden, who vanishes just at the entrance to Point B, whispering, “We will meet again…”
That makes the journey something Galen had to get through in order to earn whatever it is he finds at Point B, and we, your readers, are left hoping it was worth a foot.
Now, all that’s not to say that every trip from here to there has to be so hard-fought. There is too much of a good thing, as Ray Bradbury told us: “If you’re not careful in tragedy, one extra rape, one extra incest, one extra murder and it’s hoo-haw time all of a sudden.” So then in this case, maybe Chapter 3 ends with: “Galen rode out of the gates of Point A.” And Chapter 4 begins with: “Entering Point B just as the sun set, Galen noticed that…”
Just remember: If it’s important to the story, make your characters (hero and villain alike) earn it. If it’s not important to the story, skip it.
Okay, I have to admit it, I’m currently residing in Deadline Hell in order to get the Year of Phil off to a proper start the first full week in February, so how about a short story this week?
This one was published in the Spring-Summer 2017 issue of the literary magazine Word Fountain, and the editor was gracious enough to nominate it for a Pushcart Prize, which is always flattering to hear. Enjoy…
JUST EXACTLY LIKE
“What’s this?” she said after she’d crossed right in front of him.
He didn’t really think she wanted to know the name of the movie she’d momentarily interrupted but still he said, “The Vampire Bat.”
There was, of course, no reaction, just the sound of her opening a cabinet in the kitchen then the refrigerator.
“It’s got me thinking,” he said, raising his voice a little to make sure she could hear him. “Every generation has a woman who looks just exactly like Maureen Stapleton.”
“Who drank the last Diet Coke?” she replied.
“In Maureen Stapleton’s generation, it was Jean Stapleton,” he said.
“Is this grapefruit juice still good?” she said.
He shook his head—didn’t care if she could see him or not. “I’m not happy,” he said.
“Can you get some more tomorrow?” she said. There was nothing in her voice to indicate she thought he might not.
He shook his head again. It never occurred to him to wonder if she meant he should get more Diet Coke, more grapefruit juice, or more of both.
“Did you check the voicemail when you got home?” she said.
He’d never left.
“I’m thinking of getting a Playstation 4,” he said then something in the movie made him realize he hadn’t been paying attention. Who was Herman?
“Can you move Aiden’s dentist appointment to next Tuesday, the eighteenth?” she said.
In the movie, three men in suits walked down a staircase and met another man who told them Herman was dead.
“Poor Herman,” he said.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d worn a suit.
“Is the car still making that weird sound?” she said, the sentence reeling itself out as she crossed back in front of the TV again.
“It’s calling out for help,” he said.
If she heard him, she gave no indication. She went up the stairs.
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