Just a Little Crick in the Neck

The first thing Shaun noticed was the way his head burned like fire.

The second thing he noticed was that he couldn’t move.

Have you met my associate, Seraphina?

Shaun opened his eyes with a yelp, trying to move. Trying to get away. Danger, yes, he was in danger, that woman was part of it, and-

“-down, calm down,” a voice was saying. He was frozen in darkness, his eyes weren’t adjusting as fast as they should. Eventually he found the shape next to him. He tried to pull away, succeeded in only moving his head. Finally, his pupils opened up enough for the dark.

“Honey?”

“Yeah, Honey. Quiet down, I don’t want someone hearing us.”

They were in some sort of storage room, surrounded by cleaning supplies, cheap art, and repeats of the same pieces of furniture. Side tables. Dressers. Old tube TVs. And about half a dozen mattresses leaning against the wall nearby. He realized he was laying on one, leaned up against the wall.

A motel. By the water. And Honey…

He glared at her. “You pushed me. Cracked my head open. Broke my spine, probably, which is why I can’t move.”

Honey shushed him and pointed across the room. There were two doors on opposite walls. Light streamed in through cracks between both, but one was obviously sunlight. The other lightbulbs. The rest of the motel.

It doesn’t make sense. Why would she try to kill me? Why would she still be here?

He tried to remember. He couldn’t remember anything before she was there, next to him on the roof.

Wait, the roof? Why had he been on the roof? On the roof…waiting for sunrise.

Waiting for it.

Have you met my associate?

“Perez. Seraphina,” he said. Shaun looked at Honey, still waiting patiently. “What happened?”

“You didn’t come back to the apartment two nights ago,” Honey said. She was sitting next to him, legs crossed underneath her. “I figured you got stuck out and were holed up somewhere, waiting for night. Then the sun went down, and you still didn’t come back. I went into your room – sorry – and found your board of targets or whatever you want to call it. Saw you were going after Perez. And if you were going after Perez, I figured there was a good chance you didn’t know about Seraphina.”

He tried to shake his head. “I didn’t. I still don’t, I guess.”

Honey raised her eyebrows. “You don’t remember meeting her?”

“No. Maybe? Sort of.”

It was all blurred over, like a lens out of focus. He had gone to confront Perez. Been let into his mansion. He had been getting ready to fight. And then…

Have you met my associate, Seraphina?

“She had purple eyes,” he said. “That’s all I can remember. Then…I was on the roof. And then you were on the roof, and then you pushed me…because the sun was coming up.”

Shaun could remember it, now. The sun lighting up Honey’s face a split second before she pushed him into the darkness.

“Perez keeps Seraphina close to the vest,” Honey said. “He likes to keep her a surprise, a secret weapon.”

“She’s a witch?”

Honey nodded. “Got into your brain. Told you how much you missed seeing the sunrise, then they plopped you down upstairs.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Because that’s how I ended up with Rousseau in the first place.” She was working her fingers together, staring as one covered the other covered the other. Shaun didn’t interrupt her. “She pissed Perez off. Honestly, I don’t even know what she did. Maybe she didn’t, either. We got invited to a ‘party.’ And then…Seraphina. They tied me up. Up there. Made me watch. Then they gave me to him.”

She sniffed, and Shaun could almost see her physically push the memory away. “They gagged me, too, so I couldn’t make a sound. That always made me wonder. Why bother?”

“Unless you could have talked her out of it,” Shaun said.

“Yeah. That was my guess.” She forced a smile. “Guess I was right.”

“Thanks,” he said. “For breaking my back.”

She grimaced. “Sorry about that. I didn’t mean for you to land on your head like that. I just needed you to get out of the sun.”

Shaun looked around. “They own this place?”

“They have cameras up there,” she said with a nod. “If no one has come yet, they won’t until tonight. We’ll need to run as soon as the sun goes down.”

“Hopefully I can,” he said, squirming. Or trying to, anyway. There was still no feeling, no response from his body below the neck.

“You’ll heal faster if you drink.”

“I’m not going to bite you,” he snapped.

“I wasn’t offering,” she snapped back.

She glared at him for a few seconds before pulling a backpack from behind her. From the backpack came one of the mason jars from the fridge. It was half filled.

“Hope you don’t mind drinking through a straw,” she said, rooting around in the bag. Based off the clinking, there were a couple other jars in there. “I was afraid blood would be too viscous for a regular straw so I stopped by a 7-11 when I was coming here and got one of those fat straws they sell for Slurpees. If I can just…ah!”

She held the green and yellow striped straw in front of her with a triumphant smile and then tore off the plastic with her teeth.

“We’ve got hours,” Shaun said, eyeing the jar as she twisted off the top. “I’m sure it’ll heal before night.”

Honey dropped the straw into the jar and held it out to him. He only stared at it.

“Dude, what?” she asked.

“I’ll be fine,” he said.

“No, you won’t. Not fast enough.”

She held the straw in front of his face. He only looked at her.

Honey scoffed. “Are you, like, embarrassed?”

“No!”

“Because you don’t have to be.”

“I’m not embarrassed!”

“Then what it is?”

“I don’t want to make you do this!” he spit at her.

She looked at the jar, swirling the blood to make it stick to the edges. “It’s not mine.”

“I know, it’s just…I don’t want to drag you down. Keep you in all this.”

“In all what?”

“In the darkness! All this vampire shit.”

Honey stared at him, gaping.

And then she was laughing. At first a bright, barking laughter. She glanced at the door, and put a hand over her mouth, giggling into her sleeve.

“What is so funny?” he asked.

“Is that what all of this has been about?” she asked, still tittering. “You think, what, once I’m healed and have, like muscle mass and hair again I’m just going to re-enter society? Get an apartment and a car and a job and pay taxes?”

“I mean…yes?”

She laughed for a few more seconds before she was able to get herself under control.

“Okay, part of this is on me, because I never told you.”

“Told me what?”

“I’ve been…I was slowkiss for ten years.”

Now it was his turn to gape. “Ten years?”

“Yes.”

“Years?”

“Right.”

“But that would mean you were taken-”

“When I was sixteen. Yeah. Before I was able to do anything. You know I had just gotten my driver’s license? Now I don’t remember what I was doing. I think I knew how to parallel park? I’ve never had a real job. Never done taxes. Didn’t go to college. Didn’t even finish high school. I can’t go back to society because I don’t have a place in it. If you don’t want me around anymore, that’s fine, but don’t go thinking that by pushing me away you’re, I don’t know, pushing me back into the light or something. I think I’m stuck here. Just as much as you are.”

Ten years. A teenager. She’d never even gotten a chance to get started. The life he had been imagining for her, with the little house and the cat in the window, went up in smoke. Suddenly, he could only see her as she really was. Sitting in front of him with a mason jar half filled with blood, a green and yellow Slurpee straw sticking out the top, scars from bite marks covering her neck and her wrists.

She put the straw in front of his face again and said, “Drink.”

This time, he did.

Articles You Can Write When You’re Out of Time and Self-Respect

Half Ass Listicles That Are More ‘List’ than ‘Icles’

Let’s treat the irony here like the prize Weimaraner at a Dog and Pony show and put it front and center. Because this article is basically a listicle, right? I’m writing an article that’s really a list, and have done so in the past, so I’m basically writing an article shitting all over my own practices, like some sort of awful Human Centipede mobius strip.

But wait! I’m not spending some of the finite time I have on this planet to bitch about all listicles. The definition listed on Wikipedia states that a listicle is “a short-form of writing that uses a list as its thematic structure, but is fleshed out with sufficient copy to be published as an article.” When done properly, listicles can be informative and entertaining. I spent a very large chunk of the late 2000’s reading a lot of cracked.com. Early 2010’s? I don’t know, way before the company imploded in on itself and jettisoned all its best talent out of a t-shirt cannon.

I’m talking about the listicles that don’t pay enough attention to the bolded second half of the definition. The ones that just sort of string a bunch of images, or videos, or tweets together and then offer some sort of single-lined zinger that barely lands, and the whole things reeks of some underpaid, over-exhausted twenty-seven year old rubbing their last two brain cells together to get something that sort of smells vaguely of humor onto a document so they can publish the whole thing at 5:59 on a Friday and race out to their shitty 2008 Kia Sorento, drive back to their shoebox apartment, and get blitzed on White Claws and legal marijuana on their tiny balcony.

Like, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they got paid for this dreck, but do they really want their name on it? I’ve taken massive dumps at work on a Friday afternoon too but I never fucking signed the toilet seat.

X Celebrity Did Y Mundane Thing

I’m not much of a celebrity gossip person myself, but I don’t begrudge people who are and I even get it, to a certain extent. We all have the stupid little things that brighten up our day and as long as they’re not harming anything there’s no shame in that. My thing is obviously bullshit stories on Reddit, so if your thing is hearing about the next woman Pete Davidson managed to trick into repeatedly sleeping with him, that’s cool.

What I fully don’t understand are the articles that are basically no more than a bunch of shitty paparazzi pictures of some celebrity doing something completely boring and mundane, but the article is acting like its some sort of revelation, or even a sign of Revelation. Like, the ones that just show a makeup-less Brie Larson in a t shirt and sweatpants walking out of a corner store, or Jason Momoa arriving at an airport, and the written equivalent of that TMZ voice-over having a full-body meltdown over the fact that they’re existing as people on this mortal plane. Bonus points if the whole point of the article is how they’ve ‘gotten fat,’ as if keeping the sort of physique superheroes are supposed to have isn’t both incredibly time consuming and bonkers dangerous.

“I Improved My Lasagnas With This One Small Trick!”

I search for a lot of recipes online, so my Google news feed on my phone is filled with tasteless crap like this. An entire 500-1000 words, all written to couch a single sentence. Usually an obvious sentence, too. I click on these things expecting something, not life changing because I have more self-respect than that, but at least…ingenious, maybe? Unexpected? Alas, after scanning through three full paragraphs I finally get midway through the fourth paragraph and find out the tips is something inane like, ‘Instead of plain ground beef, I use sliced meatballs!’ Like yeah, thanks Jennifer Dupris from San Jose, I never would have figured that one out by myself.

Even if they are good tips, they absolutely do not need to be in their own article. Even slapping that shit into a half-assed Buzzfeed listicle titled ’27 Cooking Tips from the Internet You’ll Never See Coming’ would be better. And speaking of curating the internet…

Articles That Literally Sum Up A Reddit Post and Some of the Responses and Nothing Else of Value Happens in the Article

I’m not even talking about all the times Buzzfeed or other agencies go into large, super-popular Ask Reddit threads and cherry pick all the good answers. Even those serve some sort of purpose, as some of those threads can get huge with thousands of replies, and having some one else sort through the actual good answers and serve them up to you can be easier than sifting through all the meta-references and karma farming bots.

No, what I keep seeing on my Google news feed lately are articles from Newsweek where a presumably paid human being is poorly summarizing a Reddit post instead of, you know, linking the actual post. And there is no link to be found in the article. I have clicked into a couple of these, hoping that somewhere in the mess of completely useless nouns and verbs and conjugation, I will find a link to the actual story almost always from r/AmITheAsshole or r/RelationshipAdvice or some other subreddit that has the juicy bits.

There is no link. There are plenty of random words that link to other Newsweek articles, but no link back to the actual story. They will even use the word Reddit. And they will have Reddit underlined. And you will think that it will take you to the actual Reddit page. You would be wrong. Instead, it brings you to a collect of other Newsweek articles where they have shamelessly summarized other Reddit posts.

They even collect some of the responses and list them out at the end. It’s exactly what I subject my husband to, except I don’t write it out and then email it to him, I just spit it all out through excited giggles and mouthfuls of breakfast. Fuck, man, if I knew I could paid for rewriting stuff other people wrote for free I would have been doing that ages ago.

My First Draft Sucks

I’m not sure why so, so many of us writers go through this phase where we think editing is for chumps and if we sit down at our computers and write really, really carefully we can get the work completely correct at the end of the first try.

I know I was like that all through high school, and I’ve seen other writers comment to the same effect. Even though we’re the ones to put ourselves in that mindset, it can be really hard to get out of it. No matter how many sources are telling you otherwise – and it’s all of them, all the sources on writing are telling you otherwise – sometimes we still cling to this idea that we can knock out a perfect short story, essay, or even novel on the first try and only have to edit for spelling.

Look at me. I’m thirty or forty years old and I feel like I’m only now fully understanding the concept. I managed to let go of the idea of a ‘perfect first draft’ years ago, but I would still put a lot of effort into them. Lots of staring, backspacing, trying to get the words just right. It took me two years to get the first draft of my first novel done, and a lot of that was staring at a blinking cursor.

For this next novel I’m working on, I’ve finally decided to let go and write my first draft with the sort of wild abandon that could only be described with a gif of Animal from the Muppets banging on drums except someone edited in a keyboard in front of him. I would show that to you, but making that is beyond the scope of my photoshop abilities so you’re going to have to imagine it. I’ll give you a second.

Anyway, everyone always says your first draft should be shit but they never really go into how shit. Like, really give details. So I thought it might be helpful if I described all the ways I am completely fucking up as a writer to get this first draft down. Let’s go through it.

Cliches Out the Ass

Avoiding cliches is the number one rule in writing, but I have shoved that rule into a space-cannon and shot it directly into the sun. I’m using all the best cliches, and all the worst ones, and I’m using them with a smile on my face. Why? Because they are easy to write. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be called cliches. In writing this first draft, I am favoring quantity over quality. I just want as many words on paper as fast as I can, and if that means writing some stupid shit like he was a loose cannon or he was annoying as fuck then by God I’m going to do it. The good thing about the nature of cliches is that they’re so recognizable they’ll be easy to spot in editing. Harder to replace with something original, but that’s the whole point of editing. For now I’m just spitting words on the page. That reminds me:

Just, Well, I Mean

Everyone has those words that they rely on far too much. Words that have become so ingrained in the way you think and speak you don’t even notice until you go to proofread a thousand word short story you’ve written and realize it contains thirty instances of the word ‘just.’ Maybe your word isn’t ‘just,’ but you have a word. At least one word. Everyone does. And I’m telling you, in the first draft, write it all you want. If thinking of a way to eliminate your crutch words is going to slow you down then fuck it, write them all. It’s so easy to do a find and replace later.

Everyone Sounds the Same

This new novel I’m working on includes characters such as a Black man from Atlanta, an older Hispanic lady from Chicago, and a snotty Hollywood model. And yet, as of right now, they all sound like me. Same speech patterns, same starting and filler words, same sentence structure. Giving my characters their own voices is also something that happens in editing. I created an entire matrix for their speech, differentiating how they talk based off sentence length, pauses, accent, dialect, educational background, etc. Once I’m done with the first draft, and thus have a better idea of who these characters are, I’ll plug them into the matrix, tinker around until I have their speech patterns down, and do a whole edit devoted to getting them sounding like they should. For now, though, every single one of them sounds like a sarcastic white woman riddled with anxiety. And that’s okay.

Inconsistent Characterization

As mentioned in another article, I did a fair amount of plotting before beginning my first draft, so I have a good idea of where everything is going. The way I plotted everything out, though, is pretty loose. I downloaded these Scene Worksheets and filled only the basics: a couple of sentences on what happens in the scene, who’s in it, and the ultimate point or final twist of the scene. Beyond that, I’m working in the details of the scene as I come to them. I want to have a general idea of where the story is going while still giving myself some breathing room.

This has led to a lot of inconsistencies in my characterization. A specific example: I was writing my female lead as self-possessed and headstrong, until I got to an important scene and realized it only worked if she actually had less self-esteem and was consistently nervous. Later, in another scene, she reveals a huge part of her past and there had been absolutely no lead up. Now, some people might think this is big enough to warrant editing right away. As far as I’m concerned, though, this is another item on the edit list. I think it’ll be much easier to rewrite the scenes so her character lines up with where she needs to be later than to write new scenes from scratch.

General Problems with Tone and Pacing

This is the biggest one and, honestly, the hardest to ignore. I keep getting halfway through a scene and thinking this isn’t saying enough or this is boring. And I’m right. It is boring. And it takes a lot of effort to not scrap everything I have and start again, or get discourage and delete everything, or try to start fixing things as I see the problems.

I’ve been pushing through, though, because I keep reminding myself: broad strokes. A painter doesn’t start with the finer details. They start with broad strokes, getting the general gist of the pile of fruit on the canvas before drawing the flies. That’s all I’m doing right now. Putting down amorphous blobs on paper that I can start to shape into something resembling apples and bananas in later edits. It’s okay if scenes in a first draft are boring. Or ramble on. Hell, I’ve written scenes I am almost one hundred percent sure I will edit out. But for now I will keep. Why?

Because I might change my mind. I’m still working. I might find a new theme, or plot twist, or character that makes that scene work. Even if I have to heavily modify it, it’ll be easier in editing if that scene is still there. Otherwise I’ll have to recreate it, and that will slow everything down. I’ve made a promise to myself: until I start editing, every crappy word stays. If I think I’ll need to change it, I put it in my editing list.

So, how shitty is my first draft? Real shitty. Fantastically shitty. You’d have to pry this manuscript out of my cold dead hands to be able to read it. But that doesn’t matter. The point of this draft isn’t for it to be good. It only needs to exist, so I can mold it into something people would actually want to read.

I’ll write something else when I’m in the editing process, and who knows? Maybe once I’m there I’ll be cursing my current self for leaving so much shit in the pile, and I’ll take back all these words I’ve written. Maybe not though, and that’s why leaving the shitpile as-is is worth it.

Reload From Last Save

“Phew, we made it!” adventurer/thief/modern day pirate/spy(??) Chunk Dongle said, wiping the sweat off his glistening forehead with his meaty hand. “And those bastards in SWIFT will never even know we snuck past them.”

Eva Lockhart swept the scene with her stunning, outrageous, Post-It-note-bright green eyes. They had come to the museum at night, hoping to find it empty save for a bored security guard or two. Turned out the museum was a lot closer to SWIFT than they thought, and they had fought through…Eva counted quickly…twenty-six nameless foot soldiers.

Twenty. Six.

And ‘fought’ was an understatement.

“Hey, Chunk?”

“That’s my name, don’t wear it out,” Chunk said, giving her finger guns. Chunk’s best friend/sidekick/heterosexual life partner/homosexual life partner (??) Pylon Dickjoke started laughing hysterically.

“Good one, Chunk!”

“Ha ha…ha.” As a rival thief she’d always admired Chunk’s work from afar. She couldn’t understand how he managed to get whatever jewel or artifact or ancient scroll he was looking for every single time. After a few days working side by side, she was starting to get the picture.

The extremely bloody picture.

“So,” she said. “I was just wondering…you always bill yourself as a…pacifist?”

A single tear rolled down Chunk’s meaty cheek. “There are too many assholes in this world already, killing whoever they want.”

Pylon Dickjoke stood at attention next to Chunk, holding his hand over his chest and humming “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

“Too many human terrors who think only of themselves, only what they want, stopping at nothing to get it, even if that means stepping on the little man. Stepping on them…until they’re dead.”

“Right, but-”

“And to that I say,” Chunk continued, his voice echoing down the back corridor they were hiding in. “No more, sir! No more death! No more treating human life as disposable! I achieve my goals with a little grit, a few scuffles, sure! But never…never…will I take another human life!”

Pylon hurriedly pulled his cap on so he could start applauding. Eva only stared at him while he posed, hand over his heart, foot up on a trash can, staring off into the middle distance.

“You just killed twenty-six people, Chunk.”

Chunk looked appalled. Pylon started throwing up in the trash can.

“I did no such thing!”

Eva stared at him, eyes wide, and then slowly turned to gesture at all the dead bodies behind her. Another fell from the rafters.

“How did that get up there?” Chunk muttered.

“Twenty-seven!” Eva hissed. “How can you be a pacifist if you just killed twenty-seven people!”

Pylon looked up from the trash can and wiped vomit from his face. He stood next to Chunk with his arms crossed. “Tell him, Chunk!”

“It’s very simple, Eva!” he said, smiling warmly at her. “They’re not dead.”

Eva looked again, honestly wondering if perhaps she was seeing things. But, no. The closest body to her was riddle with so many holes you could drain spaghetti with him. Further on were several bodies in a very, very large pool of blood. There was the guy who fell from the rafters, directly on his head, but that didn’t matter because his entire groin area had been shot until it was completely gone. And there were the four guys in the back who had been exploded.

“Yeah, no, they’re fucking dead.”

Chunk sighed and rolled his eyes like this was the most basic thing in the world and she wasn’t getting it. “Well, yeah, they’re dead here. But they’re alive in their reset universes!”

For the first time, Pylon wore a face that wasn’t blind admiration. If Eva wasn’t off her mark, he was trying very hard to look concerned but it had been so long he wasn’t quite mastering it. He might simply have been trying to hold back the runs.

“I’m sorry…’reset universes?’”

“Well, yeah. You know.” Seeing her blank face, Chunk held out a meaty hand. “You know.”

“Pretend I don’t,” Eva said. “Explain to me like I’m a tiny, tiny child.”

Chunk sighed. “I can’t believe this, this is the most simple thing…every time we die, we don’t really die, we just restart in a new universe from a few minutes before we died. That way, we can do it again and get it right this time!”

Eva was beginning to wonder which one of them was crazy. Meanwhile, Pylon’s mouth was slightly open and there was a different look in his eyes. He seemed more…present.

“Chris, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“Dude!” Chunk hissed, cutting a look at Eva. “That’s not my name anymore!”

“Okay, okay, hold on,” Pylon said, making a T with his hands. “You think that everyone you just killed in this room woke up in another universe where they relived the moment until they got it right and lived?”

“Well, yeah! That’s what happens to me!”

Eva blinked. “He said what now.”

“I can’t believe I have to explain this. Have you guys seriously never died before?”

“No!” they both said. Pylon had started to distance himself from his meaty friend.

“Have you?” Eva asked.

“Oh my God, so many times,” Chunk said. “Just tonight, getting into this museum? I died five…no, six! Six times!”

“Six?” Pylon asked.

“Yeah, first that dude hiding behind the door got me. Then I slipped in a mop puddle and hit my head…that one was on me. And then minigun, minigun, minigun, and finally that dude in the rafters dropped the dinosaur bones on me. That one pissed me off. A lot. That’s why I aimed most of my bullets at his general penis area.”

Eva shifted on her feet. Following after Chunk into the museum had made her question if he’d really been here before, even though he’d swore he hadn’t. He had seemed to make all the right moves, know where every goon was hiding before they even popped out…

“No,” Pylon said. “No, this is insane! People who die don’t just get deposited into another universe! A, that theory comes absolutely loaded with the idea that the multiverse theory has been proved, which it fucking hasn’t. And B…I mean, if this was happening to everyone, wouldn’t everyone know? Wouldn’t moving on to another similar world after death become a major, if not the central tenet of every single organized religion on the planet? Wouldn’t the scientific community be conducting continuous research to discover how this happens and if they can recreate it?”

Pylon was yelling by the end of it, panting, hunched over with his arms out, as though begging his best buddy in the whole world to start making sense again.

Chunk shrugged. “I’unno. What I do know is, I die, I come back. Must be true for everyone.”

“It isn’t!” Eva shouted.

“Look, I’ll show you.”

“No!”

Pylon ducked down under Chunk’s meaty fist holding the gun and missed the bullet by inches.

“You know what? That’s it. I’ve had it. I thought this whole ‘pacifist’ thing was just some sick, twisted joke you were constantly making and honestly, I was into it. But this? This is an actual mental health issue and I want no part of it. Fuck you, Chunk. Pylon, out.”

With that, Pylon marched out toward the front of the museum, picking his way over dead bodies and going around pools of blood.

“He’ll be back,” Chunk said. “He just gets emotional. Come on, let’s go get that ancient ceremonial headdress with the coordinates to Atlantis.”

Chunk wandered off down the corridor without waiting for her. Eva thought about following Pylon. After all, if Chunk believed half of what he had just said he was crazier than a pack of silly straws and her life was in way more danger than she thought.

But, since she was secretly a descendant of the lost Atlantissians, she had to follow, otherwise she’d never reconnect with her culture and also all the jewels that were rightfully hers.

Hopefully ‘getting it right’ for Chunk meant she lived, too.

Sad and Angry and Scared

This summer, I’m planning on learning to shoot and hunt, just in case the world ends.

That sounds dramatic. What I really mean is, ‘just in case the speed at which we are approaching societal breakdown turns from a creep to a sprint and outpaces the attempts to fix it.’ Yeah. That sounds better.

I don’t usually bring up my motives for wanting to learn to hunt because I don’t want to be labeled as a prepper. I’m not in a cabin in an undisclosed location deep in the woods, collecting guns and ammunition and MREs and burying gold and silver bars next to a series of specific trees. I don’t think that everything is going to collapse into a Mad Max situation where everyone is immediately at each other’s throats and willing to kill to get the last known bottle of Mountain Dew Code Red, or whatever.

But I do think things are going to get harder. Things have already been getting harder for the past twenty years. I don’t have to list out all the ways. If you’re willing to listen to me then you already know and you’re just as perpetually sad and angry as I am. If you’re not willing to listen to me, then you’re not and you won’t hear it. You’ve either stopped reading or are already coming up with all the ways I’m blowing things out of proportion and needlessly panicking. I get it. It’s hard to accept. I keep seeing people say the only way to be happy right now is to dissociate and I get that, too. I’m there.

But you know what I keep thinking about? I got my first job at a movie theater in 2006. The minimum wage in my state that year was $7.50. That’s an entire quarter more an hour than the current federal minimum wage. Now. In 2022. Sixteen years of inflation and the federal minimum wage has increased an entire sixty-five cents. You can’t afford rent anywhere in the US on minimum wage anymore. It’s getting hard for someone on minimum wage to afford anything, actually. But that’s their fault, because they have the audacity to want their streaming services and their occasional store-bought coffees to make their lives a little less terrible. Or something.

To be perfectly honest with you, I’m fine. I’m more than fine. As a millennial, I have beat the system and rose up on top the only way a millennial can: hard work, up at four in the morning, always saved every single dollar I could, I only eat oatmeal for two meals and then fresh grilled veggies for dinner, and I have never, ever, not even once, ordered avocado toast.

I’m kidding. I owe everything to my parents, of course. That’s the real way people in my generation geta leg up, even if most of them insist on writing entire articles that are just extensions of my last paragraph, and then somewhere toward the end drop a line about how their parents gave them $500,000, or bought them their house, or paid for all of their schooling at a top-tier college. I don’t want to play that game. I’m where I am because my parents worked their asses off in a time when that actually got you something, gave me enough money to go to college so that I only had to take out government loans, gave me more money to go to college again to get a second degree that actually got my a good paying job, and then bought the house I’m living in.

I don’t pretend like I’m some self-made person, because I’m not. I don’t think anyone is. We get where we are through the support of those around us. When I say I’m sad and angry and scared I’m not really sad and angry and scared for me. It’s for all the people who don’t have enough support, and who keep seeing what support they do have taken away. Piece by piece.

Anyway, things are going to get worse and I want to learn how to hunt in case we get to the point where hunting is the only way to keep ourselves fed. I’m also working on building a vegetable garden, and I’m going to learn how to sew. I like to think of myself as less a prepper and more an aspiring solarpunk. Less about collecting guns and being ready to shoot on sight, more about collecting skills that will help me and my family and our neighbors survive.

So. The point. Never had a gun before. The last time I even held a gun was when we did target shooting during the worst two weeks of my life AKA summer camp and that was when I was around twelve. I’ve been doing research. Local classes and shooting ranges to learn how to use the thing. How to get a hunting license, rules on what and how much you can kill and when, and looking for classes to teach me how to field dress and actually cut down the meats. And then I keep getting hung up. My mind keeps coming back to the same point, over and over. I mean it, I have had this ‘realization’ probably half a dozen times since I decided to learn how to hunt.

I haven’t looked up how to get a gun.

By ‘how’ I don’t mean where to buy. I mean I keep thinking things like:

Oh, I haven’t looked up what sort of registration forms I need.

I haven’t looked up if I need a background check.

Maybe I need to get fingerprinted again.

I haven’t looked up how to get a gun license.

I keep thinking that there’s a process to getting a gun. Because there’s a process to get everything else. I had to take classes and a test and get a license to be able to drive a car, and then I had to register that car with the state. I’ve had background checks and credit checks done to get new jobs and rent apartments. To be a nurse I had to get a couple of background checks and my fingerprints taken.

Do you guys remember Sudafed and how well that stuff worked? I haven’t taken any in over a decade because tweakers started using it in meth and they regulated it to the point where I don’t understand how to get it or if the stuff I’m paying for is even the same as the stuff I got in the early 00’s.

It’s so incredibly logical that you’d have to jump through hoops to buy a literal weapon that my brain keep insisting there’s some part of this process I’ve missed, something I still have to research.

But there isn’t.

In my state I do need to fill out a form for a background check. A form I fill out at the gun store, and the websites I’m looking at say the approval/rejection process typically takes less than half an hour. I had to wait four entire days to find out if I passed my boards to be a nurse, but I could pass a background check to buy a weapon on my lunch break.

I just…I don’t…I can’t…

My husband and I have also agreed that if I do buy a hunting rifle, first we will be buying a gun safe. Because the idea of having a gun in the house just…out. A gun. A weapon. A thing that could kill someone, either intentionally or accidentally. And it’s in the house. Sitting somewhere. On a shelf, maybe, with the ammunition right next to it. Or leaning against a wall. Being a weapon. In my house.

I can’t get over it. It’s a thing people absolutely do and it freaks me out.

Anyway, sorry. Usually when I get too scared of the…everything…I write something like Dick Dangerly, but everything feels too broken and I’m scared and sad and angry and I feel helpless. I’ll try to write something funny or weird for Tuesday.

What a Vampire Eats

Shaun came back the next morning, missing dawn by mere minutes, to find Honey sitting at the folding card table and chairs he used as a kitchen set. She was eating one of the microwave French bread pizzas and drinking a can of beer. Her scalp gleamed dully under the industrial fluorescent hanging from the ceiling, the skin there seemed to have finally lost that angry red color from being stuck under unwashed, matted hair for so long. The radio had been tuned to local news, and she reached over and switched it off as he came into the apartment and locked the door behind him.

For a few seconds, they only stared at each other. Honey seemed to be studying him. Shaun was tired and hungry and really wanted this moment to end.

Finally, she took another bite of her pizza, made a face, and swallowed it down.

“You’re really not going to bite me, are you?” she asked.

Shaun sighed. “No. I’m really not.”

He’d been over and over this with her for the past week. Ever since she’d woken up, really. To be sure, he’d never actually gotten to the core of why he’d never bite her: that the very idea of slowkiss was so weird and alienating to him it made his skin crawl. The idea of keeping a human around and occasionally feeding on them, and what? They like it? They stick around for that? You’re friends with this person you’re slowly killing? What was he supposed to do, go to the movies with them? That was the part that he truly didn’t understand. That a human might actually like living like that. That they’d want it. Familiars, sure, he understand that in some twisted way. They wanted to be vampires and thought they’d get there through what was essentially indentured servitude. But slowkiss?

Barf.

But he hadn’t told her any of that because he didn’t know how to explain any of it without sounding weird and hysterical. Shaun had simply kept telling Honey that she was free and hoping she’d eventually get it and leave.

One week, no luck.

Until now?

“If you really want me to believe you,” she said, almost making him scream, “you need to tell me how you’re getting blood.”

You don’t want to know that, he thought. The urge to keep humans out of vampire affairs was practically primal.

She raised an eyebrow at his silence. “You have to be feeding somehow. You’ve got good color and you’re not wasting away. And I’ve seen the jars of blood in the fridge. Did you really think I wouldn’t notice them if you stuffed them in the vegetable crisper?”

Shaun sat down on the other folding chair. “I wasn’t hiding them, exactly. I merely thought the sight of blood would put you off your appetite.”

Honey rolled her eyes. “Spare me. So, come on. Spill it. I’m not going to believe you’re not going to attack me at any moment until you tell me where your food comes from.”

This is simple, Shaun thought. Lie.

“Most blood banks and hospitals know about vampires,” he said. “Blood bags ‘fall off the back of a truck’ every night.”

Honey stared at him for a few seconds, blinking slowly. Then she slouched down in her chair, moaning lightly.

“Ugh, you are going to bite me.”

“What? No! I just said-”

“You just said a total lie! Everyone knows those blood bags don’t do shit. Something about how they’ve been processed, or, fuck, I don’t know, the blood has been out of the body for too long. A vampire drinking those things is like a bunny rabbit eating iceberg lettuce. Sure, they get a full belly, but eventually they’ll starve to death.”

Shit.

“Fine. I lied. I thought that would sound better. The truth is…I go after animals. Whatever I can-”

Honey lifted her hand into a thumbs down and made a wet raspberry noise.

“Please stop. We both know if you were drinking animal blood regularly you’d be completely bugfuck by now. I once knew a vampire who thought if he actually drank bat blood he’d get to fly. He started speaking in German – a language he did not know, by the way – and then tossed himself off a fifty story building. They were scraping him off the pavement for hours and he was still blathering in fake-German.”

She took a swig of her beer and put the bottle back on the table a little too harshly. Inside the beer foamed and ran up and down the side.

She’s not using a coaster.

“Fresh human blood from a human. A living human. That’s the only way a vampire can sustain. Maybe you can drain ‘em and stick the blood in jars, but that only lasts for so long. Days, maybe a week.”

She shouldn’t know all this! Much less be talking about it like we’re going over old recipes!

“So, tell me how you’re getting blood, or I’m going to continue to believe you’re just lying to me about being free and any second now you’re going to freak out and stick your fangs in my neck.”

“Bad people!” he spat out.

Honey crossed her arms in front of her. “Bad people?”

“When I show up in a city I do a little legwork and find the people who should have been in prison a long time ago but keep getting away with whatever they’re doing. Organized crime, abusers, people who prey on kids, the odd serial killer. Those are the people I go for. And then, yeah, I attack them and rip their neck open and drink their blood until they’re dead, except for the blood I save for the nights in between. Is that what you want to hear?”

“Yes,” Honey said, fanning herself. “Honestly that is such a relief to hear.”

“What.”

“You’re a vigilante type, why didn’t you just say that in the beginning?”

“Because…of the part…where I’m actively killing people?”

Honey made a face and waved her hands in the air. “Oh, no, you’re killing people, I’ve never heard of that concept before. Get out of here with that. And you’re killing bad people? Like, shit, why do I care then?”

Shaun opened his mouth but it turned out he didn’t know what to say. Closed it. Opened it again.

“Has anyone ever told you you’re very damaged.”

“All the time.”

Fog

When the fog sinks in you can go anywhere.

It’s not like this in other places but it’s like it here. Wherever ‘here’ is. I’ve lived here my whole life and I used to know. Or I think I used to know.

The fogs come faster now. It’s almost all fog, all the time, and then ‘here’ won’t have a meaning anymore. What is ‘here’ if ‘here’ is everywhere?

The first one was five years ago. I woke up. Ate a cold breakfast and poured coffee into my travel mug with the hearts on it and got into my car. My house is a little up the slope, work down. So as I drove to work, I drove into the fog.

I wasn’t thinking about work on my way in. I was thinking about all the places I’d rather be besides work. Any place, really, but that morning I was thinking of the Redwood forest, in California. I’d never seen it in person. Only pictures. But the thought of being next to something so much bigger than me, something alive and that much bigger, had taken control of my imagination. I thought about being in the redwoods, and I drove through the fog.

And then I was in the Redwoods. I had to slam on my breaks. I stopped two inches away from the red bark of one of them. It was big. Huge.

Bigger than I thought they would be. I remembered the pictures I had seen, in the nature magazines. The images on my television, an expensive OLED flat screen that made you feel like you were there. The redwoods there had been big. They had carved a tunnel for cars into one. A single car at a time.

The redwood I almost hit, if you carved a tunnel in it five cars could go through. At least. It was so big I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around it. And there were more. I was surrounded. These trees were bigger than my home. Than the building I worked in. They stretched into the sky so far I couldn’t see the ends of them. Only feel the shade of their branches and leaves, far up among the clouds. In every direction, I could see more and more of the giants.

Every direction, that is, except one.

I drove back through the fog and found my home. I decided not to try leaving again until the fog cleared up. My boss was pissed.

I had decided it was all a dream until the fog came back. This time I was going to the grocery store, but day dreaming about the show I had been watching the night before. I only remembered the oversized redwood forest as I passed through the fog out onto another planet. This time the sand stopped me. The planet was nothing but sand. Dunes of sand, rising up over each other for as far as I could see. The cold, wet, damp of the fog was replaced by heat. Dry, sizzling heat. I absently turned the air conditioning on as I stared out the windshield. I was too afraid to get out. In the show, this planet was not a friendly one. The fog was still behind me, and I reversed quickly. Before something could come at me from under the sand.

I thought I was going crazy until I heard the others in town talking about it. I was at the diner, having lunch and talking to the waitress and the line cook and a couple of guys from the mill. I’ll never forget their faces, as we realized what we thought were dreams or creeping insanity was real. It’s a sort of quiet look, a mixture of relief and buzzing fear. Relief: not crazy. Fear: everything else.

You could get through the fog if you kept your mind on track. When I drive to work, now, if the fog is there (and it usually is) I just have to keep imagining the little parking lot. It’s hard work. The drive is fifteen minutes, and a single slip up, a single second of drifting away and thinking of somewhere else, and that’s where you end up. Some mornings it takes me close to an hour to get to work. Nobody gets mad at me anymore. We have all learned to manage.

But it’s not enough. The fog has not stopped. It comes almost every day now. It is spreading. I used to be on top of it in my house, but no longer. The fog surrounds my house on all sides, pressing against the windows. I’m afraid if I let it in I won’t be able to go down the hall without ending up under the sea, or on the moon, or a very tiny man on a very large shelf (don’t ask).

‘Here’ is being erased by the fog. The fog will take all and put us where it thinks we want to go. ‘Here’ will be everywhere, which means ‘here’ will be nowhere.

I’m thinking of moving.

Stupid Rich Asshole’s Stupid Moonbase

The first clue anyone had that something had gone wrong was when the billboards on the Moon went off.

The first clue Neil had that something went wrong was his phone receiving roughly fifty calls and three thousand messages in the space of him getting up for the shitter and coming back.

The entire drive from the bar to the office he kept staring up at the moon. Almost got into a couple of wrecks, but still he kept his eyes up.

“Come on, come on, come on,” he muttered to himself, not even realizing he was doing it.

The Work Reform Terraforming Project had not been his at the beginning, but it had been handed off to him when it seemed like the whole thing might blow up in everyone’s face. That was his place in the corporate world. Neil Bowland: Project Bomb Squad. Either he fixed the damn thing or he blew up and took a cushy retirement. He always made sure that was written into his contracts.

It had taken him close to five years to get the WRTP on track. It was a creation from all the way at the top, EdiNile’s CEO Chance Rapids. A dream project of his. Put people in space! The dream of nations since the one small step for man! Of course, they would put people in space his way, aka prisoners and debtors going to moon to ‘work off their sentences’ by terraforming the damn thing, and then once that was done being kicked back down to Earth so the Ultra-Wealthy could sit up there away from the other lowly masses and dream up some other place to escape to. Good money was on Mars but Neil had actually put his money on Elysium-like Earth Halo in the office pool. Seemed easier.

As a concept, Neil thought it was disgusting. He hadn’t actually been up there but he’d seen pictures. Heard stories. And, of course, could see EdiNile’s advertisements lighting up the moon. The ultimate billboard, one the entire planet couldn’t get away from. Full, new, night, day, didn’t matter, there was always an ad up there that could be seen and understood even through the vast distance of space. When he’d gone into Harvey’s two hours ago the usual ad about shipping discounts with Chance Rapids’ ugly, hairplugged head had been up there.

Now there was nothing. It was only a crescent moon, so tearing ass down Williams Avenue Neil could only see the corners of the terraforming domes. The Terraforming ‘Team’ – sad laugh – was only a couple of years from finishing.

And that was all thanks to Neil. Yes, the thought of it was disgusting, but the actual implementation had been the best sort of project: a puzzle. Where others might only look at the logistics and legalities of sending a bunch of prisoners and buried-in-debt volunteers up to the moon to perform labor that definitely needed multiple degrees to oversee and run screaming into the night, tearing their hair out and barking at a LED laden moon, Neil, to be perfectly frank, sort of got off on it. An immense puzzle, filled with an incredible number of moving pieces, and with actual lives hanging in the balance? It was the best job Neil had ever had, bar none, and he was thinking of retiring when it was all done.

If the billboard didn’t come back up, though, he’d never retire. If he didn’t fix this before Chance Rapids noticed, he’d be up there with the rest of the Terraforming ‘Team’ before he could even call his wife and tell her where the offshore accounts were.

“What the fuck is going on?” he was yelling before he had even fully entered the command center.

“We don’t know, sir,” Jarrod said, hustling over from where he had been stooped over a computer technician. “They just went down. The technicians aren’t getting any sort of signal.”

“And what does Lunar 1 say?”

“Well, uh, sir…that’s the thing…we haven’t been able to reach Lunar 1…”

Neil stared at Jarrod in the exact same way he stared at his first wife after she admitted to having an affair with her yoga instructor who also happened to be her first cousin.

“What the fuck does that mean?” he asked.

“It means we’ve been hailing them, and they haven’t been answering.”

“I know what the fuck that means,” Neil said. “What are their systems saying?”

Jarrod looked helplessly at a technician, who gulped and then started speaking like that pimply teen from The Simpsons.

“We’re not getting any sort of signal from their systems. They all cut off simultaneously.”

“Simultaneously? What could bring everything down simultaneously?”

Jarrod and the Teen Tech shared a glance, and the Jarrod shrugged.

“Either the entire station and terraforming machine blew up, killing everyone instantly-”

Neil’s blood pressure jumped. “And destroying everything instantly and also putting me on the eleven o’clock news. Instantly.”

“Or…”

Neil waved his hands. “OR?!?”

“Or someone up there cut the reports from getting down here.”

Neil stared at the wall across the room for exactly five and a half seconds while his brain performed a system reboot.

“You’re talking about an uprising.”

“I mean, that’s an ugly word…”

Shaking his head, Neil started toward the first computer he could get to. He pushed the mousy-haired woman’s chair away hard enough that it slammed into the soda machine in the corner, but he was already putting in his credentials to care.

“Sir?”

“There’s no way anyone up there has managed to gain control.”

At least, not complete control. This was his system, after all. He’d put it together, hired the right people, had those people hire more people, contacted the prisons, worked with EdiNile’s Deep Space Division, and somehow gotten all of the people and supplies that were needed onto the moon in the space of sixteen months. Did those people up there really think that he hadn’t taken the time to build a back channel into the Lunar Command Center? A few more key strokes, a couple of slams of the mouse on the counter just for fun, and then the multiple screens all showing either snow or nothing switch over to an image of the Lunar Command Center.

And the three dinks trying to work the computers.

Neil picked up a microphone and tapped it a few times. After a couple of seconds, the people in the Lunar Command Center winced.

“This is Neil Bowland, Executive Director of the Work Reform Terraforming Project. I am demanding an update on the situation in the Lunar Command Center and a fucking explanation for the Lunar Billboard to be completely dark.”

The three of the people on the screen – all wearing security uniforms and not ‘Team’ uniforms, he noticed – glanced all around the room, trying to find either the camera or his face on some screen to look at. They found neither. The one in the middle, a woman with her black hair tied to the back of her head, picked up a microphone.

“This Shelly Brown, Head of Security for the Work Reform Terraforming Project, coming at you from Lunar 1,” she said in a sultry radio voice. “And I’m telling Neil Bowland he can fuck any amount of donkeys he so chooses from literally thousands of miles away.”

“What.”

“Yeah, Neil, I hate that you’re finding out about it like this. Mostly because we meant for the planet to find out through the Lunar Billboards. But someone got a little excited, and blew it all to hell before we could broadcast our message.”

She was glaring at one of the three in the room, a wirey man with burn marks up and down his arms. He shrugged and made a who me face before devolving into giggles. Neil suddenly noticed there was a brown bottle in his hand, and he was smoking something.

“That’s not a security guard, is it?” Neil asked.

Shelly winced. “Dude, did you seriously just call another human being an ‘it?’ Fuck, you know, that’s exactly what’s wrong with all you C-Suite EdiNile bastards. This man is named Ray. And no, he wasn’t a security guard. But neither am I anymore. We ain’t playing cops and robbers up here anymore, man.”

“This is ridiculous,” Neil said. “You there, the other one. Arrest them.”

The third person in the Command Center, a large man who looked like a drill sergeant, heard his orders and immediately started laughing so hard he had to kneel down to regain composure.

“Oh, my God, you are not getting it,” Shelly said. “Okay, honey, let me spell this out: we the people of moon are cutting ourselves the fuck off from Earth. We’re not working for you anymore. We’re not coming back. And we’re not letting anyone else up here, either. All of you can just get in a conga line around the equator and fuck each other to death for all we care.”

“You can’t do this.”

“We did.”

“No,” Neil said, snapping at the technician. “You literally can’t. You think you can just completely cut us off from our systems? Don’t make me laugh.”

“Not trying, fuckface. And I don’t think we can cut you off from the systems. I know we can. Because we did.”

Neil did start laughing. The two Command Centers were too intricately connected. There was no way this fucking security guard managed to separate the two systems. From the Command Center on Earth they could flood the airways up on the Moon with knock-down and have all the traitors sleeping sweetly until they could send up another team to clean this mess up. All he had to do was press a button and…

The technician Neil had been snapping his fingers at was only staring at him, face completely pale and eyes completely wide and hands out to his sides as he shook his white, flat, stupid face side to side.

Neil turned off the microphone.

“We have zero control. Sir,” Jarrod said. “They’ve cut us off from everything. From what the techs can tell, this separation is something they’ve been working on in secret for a long time. Maybe months.”

“I’m sure someone down there has filled you in,” Shelly said. “The only thing we missed was the backchannel you put in, and now that we know it’s here good old Doug is going to have it shut down in about two minutes.”

“What do you want?” Neil growled.

“Oh, we have everything we want.”

“You can’t be serious. You’re on a dead rock with limited air and food.”

“Actually, we are on a nearly completed terraformed rock, with enough air and food to last us until the processes are finished. And the process is basically automated from here on out. Why do you think we waited until now to pull this off? We’ll be destroying the landing pods next, and firing up these sweet security measures Chance Rapids wanted us to install and thought we’d never figure out what they were.”

Neil stared at Jarrod and mouthed security measures?

Jarrod sighed. “Experimental laser weapons.”

“How successful were the experiments?”

“Extremely.”

“So, what you’re telling me is a bunch of criminals are now in complete control of a terraformed moon?”

“Looks like it.”

“Look, I am missing a huge celebrate talking to you chucklefucks, so I’m going to go. Final message: don’t start nothing, won’t be nothing. Hasta la bye bye, dicknuts.”

The audio and visual feeds cut out, and Neil was left with nothing from the moon except what he could see in the sky.

An intern ran up, cell phone in hand.

“Sir, Mr. Rapids is on the phone.”

Pantsing Vs Plotting

If things on the website seem a little different lately, it’s because over here at Chez Wherever The Fuck I Live I’ve been throwing myself into a new book. I recently finished the first novel I’ve ever fully completed, ever, and while I have a little period of self-reflection, asshole-puckering anxiety about what happens next, and nightly cocktails before moving onto the next step (am I right that I now have to actually talk to people? That can’t be right. The whole reason I’m a writer is because I’m terrible at talking to people. This is a major flaw in the system and I demand to see a manager) I’m working on this second book. First, to distract myself. Second, as an experiment.

The first book I pantsed. This book I’m plotting. Which is better? Only time will tell!

Actually, I already know the answer to that, but let’s go over a few things.

What is This Word You Used? ‘Pantsed?’ You Mean to Tell Me You Pulled Your Book’s Pants Down In Public?

No, invisible person I have made up for this article. ‘Pantsed’ in this context is a writing term, short for ‘flying by the seat of your pants.’ Basically, you sit down and write the story as it comes to you, from beginning to end. Stephen King has famously said a lot about how the stories just come to him and he feels like he’s just the conduit through which the stories arrive or something, I can’t give you a direct quote because it’s late and I’m not looking it up but I’ve read a lot of King and I know I read that somewhere. So I’m guessing he doesn’t do a lot in terms of outlining.

Stephen King? The Guy With the Notoriously Bad Endings?

And great character development! And intricate plot lines! And whatever the Christ was happening in Needful Things!

And, yes, the notoriously bad endings. And I do believe these things are potentially related. But maybe not. Because pantsing a novel doesn’t mean you don’t edit. And, actually, side note…

Hey, you. Teenage writer. The one who thinks that editing is for everyone else and because you’re such a good and careful writer you can write your whole piece in one shot and never have to go back and edit anything.

You’re wrong. It’s okay, every writer has to go through this phase where they think they’re too good for editing, or that editing just ‘isn’t their style.’ But editing isn’t a style. It’s a vital part of writing. You’re basically saying, “If I just work slowly and carefully I can totally make this cake without putting it in the oven.” And you can’t. Unless it’s one of those cakes that set in the fridge, in which case replace oven with fridge. And don’t make those, they’re disgusting. What was I talking about?

Hmmm? Oh, I Stopped Listening Sometime Around Needful Things. Look at This Tweet From Tom Holland, He Spoiled-

I’ll kill you with my bare hands.

Jesus, Okay. Something About Pants

Oh, right. Pantsing. See, I pantsed my first novel. I sat down and I wrote two thousand words in a sitting, and then I came back on my next day off and did it again. I did it all in order, but some people will write the scenes as they come to them and string them all together. The point is that you’ve done little to no outlining prior to putting your ass in the seat and stringing the words together.

The biggest reason I liked pantsing was because I really felt connected with my characters and the world. While I had a general idea about where the story was heading, I was figuring out what was going to happen next mere seconds before they found out. This involves a lot of sitting and staring at a blinking cursor, never blinking slower, or faster, always going at the same speed. Maintaining a momentum you never had to start with. Mocking you. Tormenting you. Worming it’s way into your brain until the only thing you see at night when you close your eyes is a blank Word document and that half inch black line straight from hell.

And then you finally figure out what happens next and all of that goes away for roughly five to twenty minutes. While this is happening you’re really soaking in the scene. Making minor edits, adjusting the scenery or the blocking or dialogue as needed. Everything starts to feel a little more lived in, and personal.

When you finally finish the damn thing, though, you hit the editing part (put your fucking cake in the oven, teenagers) and then everything goes to shit again.

At least, it did the way I did it. No outlining, vague idea of what I wanted to happen, everything written in order, and (most importantly) any mistakes made put in a list to be dealt with editing. Which is where I hit my first snag: I had to do so many structural edits just to get the thing to make sense before I could get into the fun editing aka completely deleting a character because ultimately he wasn’t working and then changing the entire back third of the book because that wasn’t working. And not for some stupid reason like I had written a scene, decided it should happen later, and put the scene in again for my loser future self to sort out. No, for actual fun reasons, like correcting tone and theme progression and reader empathy for characters (see, hypothetical teenager, this is why you edit).

Wait, Are you Talking to A Completely Different Hypothetical Person?

…no.

I Don’t Believe You

You’re not real, so I don’t care?

Okay! Tell Me About Plotting!

Phew.

This book I’m working on now I decided to go with one of the many plotting techniques out there. I don’t know if it has a name, there’s lots of names for lots of things. Basically what I’m doing is almost the same as pantsing, except instead of writing scene after scene after scene, I’m describing scene after scene after scene in one or two sentences. This is immediately better, because when I hit a problem or a plot hole I can immediately fix it without flushing a couple thousand words down the drain.

I also feel like my scenes are a lot shorter, and a lot more focused. When you’re finding the plot as you go there’s a lot of rambling that you have to cut out, which is a totally valid way to do things but sometimes it can be hard to kill your darlings. After I’ve completed the scene outline for the entire book I put everything in order, and I start with scene one. I write down my characters, what they want from the scene, and the ultimate point of the scene. And then I start writing, and I have to tell you, I get something a lot sharper. I ended up adding a lot of scenes to my pantsed novel while I was fixing the damn thing and the difference between pantsed and plotted chapters was enough for my beta readers to notice.

So far, this book I’m working on does feel a lot more clinical than the last one. By that I mean I feel less like I’m relaying a fun adventure and more like I’m actually working on a book. It feels a little disconnected in the moment but I’m hoping when I get to the editing part I’ll start to really feel like I’m in the middle of the world.

Also, this plotting shit is making things go way, way faster. With pantsing I was struggling to get two thousand words out in the span of three to four hours, but with everything plotted out I’ve been consistently dumping three thousand first draft words onto the page in about as many hours.

Great Info, Entertaining and Satisfying. So, What Should I Do?

Oh, I have no idea.

What.

Yeah. Writing is both a personal and personalized journey and no one can tell you exactly how to write best. This is just a recap of me figuring out how I like to write. You have to sort through advice from as many different writers as possible and figure out what works for you.

So, I Had to Sit and Listen to You Talk About Yourself When I Could Have Been Watching Tom Holland Dance to Umbrella?

Nobody made you sit next to me.

…shit.

In the Immortal Words of Dashboard Jesus

In times like these, I remember the words of my Dashboard Jesus.

Oh, the Jesus on my Dashboard can talk. I should have mentioned. How or why doesn’t really matter, it’s not relevant to the story, you just need to know that he can.

Okay, fine, I don’t know why DJ can talk. He just started one day. Honestly, the hard part now is getting him to shut up. He sings along with the radio. He’s…not good.

Anyway, in times like these, I remember the words of my Dashboard Jesus.

We were going to…

Huh. Where were we going? This was in Raleigh, I’m pretty sure. Yeah, yeah, he started talking my sophomore year of college when I was in New Orleans, and then I transferred out for my last two years. So I was in Raleigh…oh, I must have been going to work. I worked at this super shitty seafood place, really, I told everyone I knew to go to the Joe’s Crab Shack down the street because even their retail food and gift shop and the mind melting awkwardness of having a waiter tie a lobster bib around your neck was better than getting food poisoning from the salmon that ‘fell off a truck.’ I wonder if that place is out of business yet. Hold on.

Oh. My. God. It burned down? Look at this article! A couple of years ago…owners crying…’tragic for the city’…wow. Wow. They said it was an accident? Bull the fuck shit it was. I am telling you, this dude burnt his own restaurant down for the insurance money. I bet he bought a bunch of bougie shit, too, like one of those yachts you can park a jet ski in.

What?

Oh, yeah, DJ.

So, I was living in Raleigh and I was going to work and this complete dipstick in a lifted truck with those stupid truck testicles cut me off and…

No, it wasn’t that time. That time I had Roger in the car and DJ knew not to talk to Roger. Roger was, like, heavy Evangelical.  He lives somewhere deep in North Carolina and his wife and daughters all wear ankle length jean skirts. That level of religious, and DJ knew he wouldn’t be cool with it. He turned out to be a prick in the end for other reasons so I sort of wish DJ had said something. Maybe Roger would have jumped out of the car going seventy down the highway and saved us all a ton of trouble.

If it wasn’t that time, it must have been when I almost got pushed off the road by that ninety year old…

No! I remember now! It wasn’t Raleigh, and I wasn’t going to work! It was after I’d graduated and had my first job up in Hartford and I was driving up and through New York and I was stuck in traffic trying to get over the George Washington Bridge. Terrible situation. Never try to get through New York in the middle of the day.

This idiot merged into me. Well, almost. I slammed on my brakes and missed him by bare inches. And then he has the audacity to honk at me and flip me off. Like I did anything besides mind my p’s and q’s. This is why I don’t drive anymore, you know? I take public transportation as much as I can or I just don’t go. My blood pressure was so fucking bad when I was driving every day, you have no idea, I seriously don’t know why this country can’t be more like Europe. Everyone here thinks getting on the bus is something to make fun of but driving fucking sucks, dude, I live off my bus pass.

What?

Oh, yeah, DJ.

This guy almost me hits me, and I’m raging, and DJ, who had been singing along with the radio…I think it was Lady Gaga or something…yeah, it was Alejandro…anyway, he stops singing, and stares at me, and just when I’m about to get out of the car and start beating his stupid Jeep with my tire iron, DJ says something I’ll never forget.

“Fuck ‘em.”

What?

No, that was it. It’s, like, a life message, see? ‘Fuck ‘em.’

I mean, it can mean whatever you want. That’s why it’s so profound.

It is.

God, whatever, I’m going to Chipotle.