New Bubba out today!

New Bubba out today!

Rest High on that Mountain, the latest Bubba the Monster Hunter short story, releases today! It’s exclusive to Kindle for 90 days, but my Patrons can get it free! So head on over to Amazon and check it out, or go over to Patreon and become a patron at the $10/month level and get it free!

High on that Mountain

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bubba’s back, and so is baby brother Jason! This time, Jason has sent a pack of wolves to terrorize Bubba’s Aunt Marion for a family heirloom that he thinks will help him take over the supernatural world. He hasn’t taken into account the strength of a mountain woman, or the love Bubba has for home and family. There’s a pack of wolves on the loose, but Bubba’s here, and he’s ready for a fight!

Featuring Great-Grandpappy Beauregard, first seen in Fire on the Mountain!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ConCarolinas

Since it’s only a week away (shit! gotta make sure I have books ordered!) I figured I’d post my ConCarolinas schedule so that y’all know where to find me.

I mean, other than the bar. And at my table, selling shit.

FRIDAY

4PM – Selling & Pitching – A workshop for writers – This is for the writer guests and anyone else who has stuff published or ready to submit and has trouble working on their pitch. I’ll go over back cover matter, query letters, elevator pitches, log lines and hand-selling. I’ll talk about how to profile a customer, how to tell who’s going to buy shit and who’s just there to hang out, and how to upsell into a more profitable book or more books overall. This is a zero-bullshit, NSFW, hands-on workshop where I will listen to pitches and tear them apart. Not for the faint of heart, or for anyone who doesn’t have anything to sell. If you think writing is all rainbows and unicorns, stay away. If you’re here to make a buck, sit down, shut up, and strap in.

6:30 PM – Paranormal in Literature – Me, Emily Leverett, Tally Johnson, Sharon Stogner and a bunch of folks I don’t really know. I’m not moderating, so expect me to be my usual charming (read: smartass) self.

9PM – Those Winchester Boys – We’re gonna talk about Supernatural, y’all. I’m only on Season 6, so I got a LOT of binge-watching to catch up on by the time Friday hits!

SATURDAY

5:30 PM – This oughta be the most easily politicized panel of the weekend – What’s an award worth, anyway? I’m on a panel about awards with John Scalzi (the man most hated by Puppies both Sad & Rabid), Edmund Schubert (2015 Hugo Nominee, withdrawn), Gray Rinehart (2015 Hugo Nominee), Wendy Delmater (2015 Hugo Nominee for Abyss & Apex Magazine) & Misty Massey (wonderful human being). This could get heated, and I just hope none of my friends get their feelings hurt. There are a lot of nasty things swirling around the Hugos this year, and hopefully we can cover some of them with everyone remaining civil.

9PM – The Bad Ones – I edit an anthology series called The Big Bad. I think I’m qualified.

SUNDAY

3PM – Supernatural Detectives – Yup, I’m down with that.

4PM – Do I need a writing group – This would be a great time for me to channel the asshole hat I’ve worn on this blog for the past couple of weeks and send little baby writers running out into the world crying. And at 4PM on the last day of a convention, I’m liable to be pretty punchy.

 

This is one of my favorite cons of the year, what with the entire guest list being a who’s who of my friends, and with it being close enough for me to sleep in my own bed every night. So I hop you’ll come out and say hello, and pick up new print copies of Raising Hell, Straight to Hell and Fair Play!

Why your self-published book looks like a pile of ass and won’t ever make you any money

Why your self-published book looks like a pile of ass and won’t ever make you any money

So last week I might have pissed a few people off and maybe opened a few eyes when I listed Five Reasons You Won’t Make it as a Writer. In reality, there are a lot more, including just sheer bad luck, but those five are a good place to start. So this week I figured I’d keep the ball rolling and be a dick about self-publishing on the interwebs. And it’s one word, regardless of what my goddamn autocorrect says.

Now before any of the Disciples of the Church of Konrath’s Beard get all up in arms and storm my house with pitchforks (and seriously kids, I’m a redneck – do not bring a pitchfork to a gunfight. It will fuck up your whole day), let me remind you that I started off self-publishing and continue to self-publish to this day. So I don’t have anything against self-publishing. I plan to continue self-pubbing as a part of my career path until it is no longer viable, which I hope is never. I enjoy a lot of the parts of self-publishing, including the vaunted “control” that self-published authors talk about all the time.

SIDE NOTE – I am not an “indie” author. I am a motherfucking self-published writer. I don’t wear horn-rimmed glasses and skinny jeans. I’m only ironic accidentally, and I don’t ride a fixed-speed bike. I’m not fucking trendy enough to be “indie.” I’m the biggest goddamn sellout you’ve ever met. Anybody in the world wants to write me a check with the appropriate number of zeroes, and I’ll stop self-publishing tomorrow. I have a wife, two cats, a stupid dog and my own fat ass to feed, so my hipster artistic integrity rode off into the sunset before we even started worrying about the Y2K issue. I don’t call myself an author, because I’m a working writer. I throw poop at the page every day and pray some of it sticks. I don’t sit around drinking wine with my pinky extended and discussing Shakespeare. When I discuss Shakespeare, it’s over beer or vodka. I’m self-published and I own that shit. If you want to crow about the control, don’t be fucking ashamed of the label. Own it, with the shitty history of AuthorHouse and every other goddamn thing that comes with it. /RANT

So what am I bitching about now? I’m bitching about the fact that you are making me look bad. I can do that perfectly well on my very fucking own, I don’t need any help from you. So here are some things to fucking stop doing, so you’ll fucking stop making me and the rest of the self-published world look bad.

1) Get your shit edited –  I know, I know. It’s expensive. It takes a long time. It’s fucking hard. Wah-wah-wah, my rectum bleeds just fucking listening to you. You can’t write well enough to edit yourself. No one can. I don’t edit myself, Neil Gaiman doesn’t edit himself, Pat Rothfuss doesn’t edit himself, Brandon Sanderson doesn’t edit himself. And you’re not as good as they are. I’m nowhere near as good as they are. I fuck up dialogue tags all the goddamn time. So I pay somebody to fix that shit for me. And she also asks me awesome questions about things that don’t make sense. Because sometimes what’s in my head doesn’t all make it onto the page. And with apologies to a dear friend of mine – YOU MAY NOT HAVE YOUR SHIT EDITED BY A SIBLING, SPOUSE, PARENT OR ANYONE YOU SHARE DNA WITH OR ROUTINELY SWAP FLUIDS WITH. I don’t give a fuck how tough you say your wife is on you, she’s not going to be as tough as somebody who YOU’RE NOT FUCKING. Because she knows you, your husband knows you, there is a set of shortcuts in their understanding of everything you say and do that a stranger LIKE YOUR FUCKING READER doesn’t have. Something that may be crystal clear to the man you’ve banged for the last fifteen years may not make any fucking sense to a reader picking your book up for the first time. Because they don’t know that a fibbertygibbet is your made-up word for a Colt 1911 .45 semi-automatic handgun. And that’s going to matter to a reader. So get your shit edited. It can be a friend. But it cannot be someone who you’ve ever fucked or who you are related to. And we’re not going to discuss the states in which those may be the same people. This isn’t that blog.

2) Learn to lay out your fucking pages – I fucked this up when I published the first edition of The Chosen, and it was Allan Gilbreath who called me on it. I printed the book like it was a blog, with a blank line between paragraphs instead of running them together and indenting shit. You know, the way fucking books look. So I had a book that looked like a printed blog. And my page numbers were jacked up. And my headers and footers were bad. About the only thing I did right with the print edition of that book was I picked a decent font. You can’t go too far wrong with Times New Roman, although there’s apparently a backlash now against Times. So used Garamond. But pick a nice serif font, something that looks classic and clean. A perfect example of this was a book from a couple of guys I met last week. They have a nice looking product, awesome cover, but their typesetting looks like a blog. It doesn’t look like a book that Pyr or Baen or Tor or Roc published. And that’s the point – if you think you’re good enough to compete with the big boys, you’d better present as well as the big boys. And if you don’t think you can run with those big dogs, keep your ass on the porch. If you want to see an example of a self-published book that looks as good as or better than most NY-pubbed books today, go get Matthew Saunders’ new book Daughters of Shadow and Blood Book I: YasaminOrder the paperback, and you’ll see what an amazing job Matthew did with the layout, the back cover, the front cover, the spine, the whole fucking thing. That’s my current gold standard for what a self-published book should look like. My shit’s not as good as this, but I have a little bit of a following, and they all know I’m a drunk, so I get a little bit of a pass.

3) Get a better cover – For fuck’s sake why am I even still talking about this in 2015? Covers are easy, they’re cheap, and they look good. The covers I got for the Quincy Harker series look awesome, and I paid under $100 for the pair of them. Spend the time to get a good cover done professionally. Here’s the first cover I did for The Chosen.

The Chosen Cover Art

Now in defense of the artist, this is exactly what I asked her to create for me. It references a specific item in the story, Lucypher’s keychain with an apple on it. It also says not a goddamn thing about the book and doesn’t look anything like a fantasy novel.

Chosen Cover 2011 4x6

This is the revised cover. This has a lot more interesting elements, more engaging typestyle, and a lot of neat things going on there. There’s a fire, an apple, an angel – a lot of fantastical elements that draw a reader in.

One of these covers sells a hell of a lot better than the other. I’ll let you decide which one. No I fucking won’t, that’s the whole point! The second cover is obviously better, but some of you are still putting out half-assed covers. It drives me nuts and drags me down by association.

 

 

 

 

 

 

4) Get better back cover matter –  If I read another self-pubbed back cover that tells me everything about the character and their backstory then tells me how much I’ll love the book, I’m going to fucking vomit. Have none of you ever gone to a bookstore and read the back cover material on a book? What the fuck? Do you think this shit just materializes from the word fairies? That they just sprinkle this shit all over the shelves and descriptions appear? Go read back cover copy! Rip off the best ones! Every fucking body else is doing it, why should you be the special goddamn snowflake that has to write some Pulitzer-winning bullshit for the back of their book?

Do you write horror? Read the back cover of Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door. Do you write fantasy? Read the back of some awesome fantasy books. Do you write romance? I got nothing for you. Duh! Read the back of romance novels. But don’t give me this bloated, hyper-descriptive shitball of a back cover with eighteen paragraphs in 8-point Helvetica telling me the entire prologue that you wanted to write but didn’t because some other dickhead on some other blog said that prologues are out this season, like skinny jeans and floral prints.

5) WRITE BETTER – Seriously, goddammit, work on your fucking craft. If I read another opening page that’s a dream sequence I swear to Jebus I’m gonna wipe my ass with it. Don’t tell me every fucking thing about your character’s morning ritual. I don’t give a shit how many squares of TP she uses to wipe after she pisses. I don’t care about how she scratches Mr. Pibbles, her Maine Coon Cat behind the ears as she passes him on the way from taking a piss to putting on clean undies. I care about the fucking zombies coming up the fucking stairs. Get to the point. Tell me the story, no bloat.

And show me the action. Show me the relationships. Do not tell me that your main character loves his sister, even though he picks on her all the time. Build the fucking characters. Show me through their actions, expressions and dialogue that they love each other. You spent so much fucking time describing the wallpaper in the shitter, but you won’t take three paragraphs to develop the character? That tells me you haven’t learned what’s important to the story yet.

Avoiding passive voice is a given. Adverbs weaken your writing is a cliche because it’s true. Avoid filter words is a maxim because it’s something everybody needs to remember. Show me, don’t tell me runs off the lips of every editor because it’s the truth. Polish your craft. Work on getting better every single day. I spent four years and over four thousand articles writing about internet poker before I moved to fiction.

Between five years of blogging almost daily and four years of poker writing, I worked my way through a million shitty words before I ever started work on The Chosen. And I’ve still got a lot shit I work on in my writing. But I’m working on it. Everything I write this year is better than anything I wrote last year, because I’m writing all the time. I’m reading all the time. I’m working on my craft. If you’re not willing to do the same thing, get the fuck out of my profession.

I fuck off a lot. I make wisecracks, joke around a lot, but there is one thing I am deadly serious about – my craft. Do not come in here thinking you’re the next fucking Hemingway and you don’t need to work to get better. Because I’ve got over forty titles out, I’ve sold over 50,000 books since I started this journey five years ago, and I still have a loooong way to go. I’m nowhere near the best I can be, but I write the best I can each day. And I make sure that every single product I put out with my name on is the absolute best I can make it. Because that’s all you get in this world – your name. Your reputation is what you make it, and so is your career. You might judge success differently than I do, and that’s fine. But there are benchmarks for quality, and if you can’t hit those benchmarks for quality – don’t hit “publish.”

But if you’re willing to work hard, and you’re honestly ready to bust your ass and get things done, then jump on. Let’s ride.

If you enjoy this shit, please consider buying something from my Amazon Author Page or becoming a Patron on Patreon. 

Five Reasons you Won’t Make it as a Writer

I’ve decided to just embrace my role as the Simon Cowell of the writing world. I’m honestly tired of being nice and supportive to everyone who comes up to me with a half-baked idea or worse, a half-baked product, and asks what I think. Because they don’t want to know what I think. They want to hear how awesome they are. And most of the time they aren’t awesome. Most of the time I’d be better off trimming my toenails than reading their godawful attempts at a book or story, because at least that can get exciting if I trim a little too closely. So here goes – unexpurgated Hartness on why you’re not going to make it as a writer.

Let’s start with a definition of “make it.” You’re not going to ever be able to quit your day job and write full-time. If you make $40,000 per year at a nice comfortable job, you’re going to need to make at least $50K as a writer to cover the self-employment tax and other costs associated with being self-employed. And that’s if you live somewhere cheap.

But let’s be honest – that’s not everyone’s goal. Some folks just want to sell well enough to make a bestseller list, or see their book in a bookstore without having to sneak it in under their coat. Some folks want to sit on panels at conventions, and maybe even be a Guest of Honor. Those are also reasonable, achievable goals for a lot of writers.

And here are the reasons you won’t get there.

1) You are Fucking Lazy – If I’m wrong, prove it. Stop whining about how much time you don’t have to write, or how much “real life” gets in the way, or how much time it takes to raise your kids, or work your job, and how you’re too tired after working all day, coming home, fixing dinner, feeding a family, cleaning up after dinner, bathing the little ankle-biters, getting them to bed and then performing your husbandly duties so your wife still loves you. Yeah, shut your cake hole.

Somewhere out there is someone who is doing all that shit while wiping the ass of their Alzheimer’s-riddled father and taking online classes at the University of Fuckstickery just so they can get a $1,500/year raise at their cube farm. And they’re still jamming a thousand words a day. That means that while you’re all caught up on Agents of Shield, they’ve cranked out 250,000 words in a year. That’s not just a novel, that’s a fucking Brandon Sanderson novel.

So before you send me hate mail about how hard you’ve got it, go read this – The Road to Publication. If you read that and have had half the fucked up shit happen to you that Sherrilyn Kenyon has lived through, then you’ve had it rough. If you’ve gone through all that and THEN pulled your shit back together and blown the doors off publishing – then I promise I’ll never call you lazy again. Sherrilyn Kenyon is a motherfucking inspiration to me and I go back through that story whenever I feel like I’ve got it rough. Then I shut the fuck up and write.

2) You don’t want it badly enough – This is tied to the first one, but different. I’ve spent my life in the arts. Theatre and writing are how I’ve made my living, at least tangentially, since I got out of college. I’ve spoken to many high school theatre kids and I’ve always told them the same thing – if there is anything else in the world that will make you happy, please go do that. This (theatre and writing) is a lonely, bizarre, world-destroying, soul-crushing business where you accept rejection as the norm and the tiniest bit of encouragement is like the first rainbow after Noah docked that fucking ark.

A life in the arts will destroy your health, relationships, and any hope of routinely seeing sunlight. It is not a career, it is a calling, it is an addiction, it is my church. If you can imagine yourself doing anything else – go do that. Save yourself the suffering. Because you will get rejected ten or twenty or fifty times for every acceptance, and you will fall down so often your knees will feel like mashed potatoes, and you will spend more time flat on your ass than a Floyd Mayweather opponent. So go do something else – this isn’t for any reasonable person.

3) You have a huge ego – If you can’t accept honest criticism and understand that sometimes your shit just isn’t good enough, then you’re going to be a dick and no one will want to work with you.

4) You don’t have enough ego – If you don’t think you’re fucking amazing and the best thing since sliced bread, then nobody is going to believe in you and no one will give you a shot. I’ve given kind of short shrift to these two points, but the heart of it is that there is a very fine line between confidence and arrogance, and you need to dance along that line. I tend to land a little more on the arrogant side of it (I’m writing a post on how to be a writer, after all), but you should find out what works for you.

5) You don’t know how to write – Let me be clear here – I am not a great writer. I am a very good storyteller, and I have some skill with putting words together for a desired effect, be it humor or horror. But I am not a great writer. I don’t have to be. Neither do you. The world has one Neil Gaiman, one Pat Rothfuss, one N.K. Jamison, one Ken Liu. It doesn’t need more than one. But it does need a cadre of people who understand the basic tenets of storytelling and can string words together in a coherent manner. And that doesn’t come easy to anyone.

Stephen King says you have to write a million terrible words before you get to the good ones. Malcolm Gladwell says you have to spend 10,000 hours working at something to be good at it. Before I wrote The Chosen, I spent five years working for the internet poker industry, churning out roughly 500,000 words of poker tournament coverage. I spent half a million word trying to make the flop, turn and river interesting and trying to find new ways of saying “This jackass got all his money in as an 80% underdog and crushed his opponent’s soul when one of this eight outs came one the river.” I also blogged for six or seven years, turning out another few hundred thousand words.

I wrote my million shitty words, and still there’s a bunch of crap that comes out in my first drafts. I have a degree in Theatre, with an English minor, and a fair number of Creative Writing classes under my belt. I’ve studied my craft. I read books on writing. I attend workshops and panels on writing. I continue to work on my craft. If you don’t know what passive voice is and why it’s bad, don’t waste my time.

 

You’ll notice I didn’t say anything about talent. I don’t give a fuck about talent. Talent doesn’t do a goddamned thing for anyone that skill won’t do better and more consistently. You want to make it in this business? Then go write. Write a thousand words a day, five days a week, at a minimum. And the comments you send me telling me what an asshole I am to write this post? Those words don’t count.