Blood Shot: Chapter 4 (Traveling)

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My flight was uneventful. The twenty-two hours flew by in no time.
I slept well, enjoyed a few drinks and caught up on my reading. I
never really understood people’s problems with flying. Perhaps it was
because commercially I always flew ABL Air, an obscure airline
known for its passenger restrictions preventing the obese, infants,
Muslims and women from booking flights.


The in-flight entertainment was strippers and prostitutes, but I
put on my Sony noise-cancellation headphones and took a nap. I had
the feeling I’d get my fill with Fran soon enough.
Thoughts of past loves sprung forth as I drifted in and out of
sleep. I had loved three women in my life.


The first was a childhood romance, my next door neighbor Sally
Ription. We used to pick strawberries in her parent’s garden and
push each other on the tire swing in the local playground. We’d
spend cool summer nights catching fireflies in her front yard. We
were seventeen.


She was the first girl to take my virginity. Unfortunately, a few
months later while looking into her bedroom window from mine, I
saw her cheating on me with a boy who looked suspiciously like her
older brother. The next day it was a man who looked like our
postman. Another day, a guy with the same hairline as our high
school principal. After a week of this, I decided to end it.

My second love was Dakota Jean, the mother of my two
children. We had met during the early part of my NBA career. My
agent introduced her as a “woman who can really flush the stress of
this lifestyle right out of you.” We hit it off immediately. It was
always a roller coaster ride with her, peaks of ecstasy and nadirs of
despair. Our kids helped settle things down for a while, but
eventually our lifestyles became too incompatible. She seemed upset
every moment we spent together, perhaps because, for some reason,
she only had time off work when she was menstruating.
The third, well, was Jennifer. Was it over now? Was this flight
the final nail in the coffin? Maybe. But maybe things weren’t that
simple.


“Would you care for a beverage?” the flight attendant asked me.
Then, raising her eyebrows, “Or anything else?”
I’m not much of a drinker, but I asked for a shot of absinthe.
Carter’s drink. I needed something to numb me a little. I downed the
shot and shut my eyes again.


So, you may be asking, what of Fran Blauchamp? The woman I
was on my way to see.
With Fran, it was pure, unadulterated lust. There were no
romantic, candlelit dinners, though we did discover a few other uses
for candles during our time together, if you catch my drift. I, for
example, learned that if your aglet – the plastic tip of a shoelace – falls
off, you can replace it by dipping the end of the lace in hot candle
wax.


Fran was too much of an enigma to fall for. She built up this
hard, steely exterior, which probably explains why she was such a
successful TV chef. When we met, her career was just taking off at
the Food Network. But she mysteriously quit six years ago, and has
been something of a recluse ever since.
Now she was back.


The plane landed, gingerly navigating the heavy fog covering the
runway. The exhilaration of entering a foreign land began to set in. I
snatched my carry-on and rushed to beat the crowd. The flight
attendants made their way through the rows, wiping down all the
seats and windows.


I got in line and waited to pass immigration inspection. I have to
admit the whole process has always confused me. Words like
“naturalization” and “visa” and “queue” have never made any sense.
And isn’t “foreign-born” an oxymoron? I looked at the nearest visa

agent and tried to put on the charm, smiling and doing my best to
remember the little Chinese I’d learned:
The woman spit on the floor and wiped it with her feet.
I was afraid I’d offended her. But before I had time to reply,
another man walked up to me, official-looking but not uniformed
like the rest of the immigration staff.


“Please come with me,” the man said in excellent English.
I followed him into a small, windowless room. The room was
host to two junior visa officers and a small inspection table. It
seemed completely normal, aside from the chair I was asked to sit in
that had the seat bottom cut out of it. The men asked me to open my
carry-on. They rummaged through the contents: my clothes, a
laptop, Where Da Ass At 3 (Carter’s gift), the bird feathers I’d bought
for Fran, the dozens of packets of fruit and vegetable seeds. They
also made me empty my pockets.


“Close your eyes, please,” the head officer said.
“Why?”
“It would be best for everyone if you just follow along. Close
your eyes. And no peeking.”
I thought the whole thing was silly, but was in no mood to start
trouble. I closed my eyes. I then heard a sharp, metallic clicking.
“Okay, you can open your eyes now.”
“Can I go?”
“A few more questions, if you please.”
“Okay.”
“What brings you to Wuhan, Mr. Anderken?”
“What brings anyone?”
“Yes, the residents of Fuck Town take pride in their reputation.
Where do you plan on staying?” I showed him the address of the
hotel Fran had given me. He glanced over it quickly, not seeming to
pay it much mind.
“Are you staying alone?”


I explained about my situation with Fran. The two junior
officers paged through an unfinished manuscript of a novel I had
written. They raised their eyebrows and looked at me.
“What, athletes can’t be literary?” I said. It always annoyed me
when people looked at my 6’10” frame and sculpted thighs and
assumed intellectual endeavors were beyond my grasp. I had a
communications major from Ohio State, damnit!


“You’re that Kable Anderken?” the head officer said.
“And your name?” I asked.
“You can call me Michael Scofield.” The officers all shared a
laugh. They looked at me expectantly.
“I don’t… is that something I should know?”
“Prison Break. The main character. The most famous and best
American television show ever made.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Well, in any case, everything seems to be in order. We wish you
a pleasant stay.” Michael said something to the junior officers in
Chinese and walked out.


“Can we see your passport, Mr. Anderken?” one of the officers
said. I handed it over. I fidgeted in my bottomless chair, ready to
leave – it would’ve been worse had I not been used to sitting in a
similar one at Carter’s penthouse.


“Where’s your visa?”
“Oh, yeah. I’m sorry. I came here in a hurry. I didn’t have time
to get a visa. I’ll just do one here.”
“You can’t just do that. China doesn’t have on-arrival visa
processing.”


“Fine, then. I’ll just pay the fine or whatever. How much is it?”
The two visa agents looked at each other.
“Ten thousand US dollars?”
“Yeah, sure.” I grabbed the twenty grand I always keep in my
backpack and handed them ten each. And I was on my way.

How To Write a Memoir (even if your life is boring and pointless

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Picture this: You’re driving to work one day when a car cuts you off, causing you to spill coffee all over your work clothes. You want to speed ahead and brake check them, but a closer look reveals it’s a mother of four with at least one child in a wheelchair so that’s out of the question. When you get to work, you discover the Filipino man you’ve been paying to do your job for four times less than you drowned in a typhoon. Then lunch gets pushed all the way to twelve, a crow attacks you for throwing rocks at it during your smoke break, and just when you think things can’t get any worse, when you get home, your wife tells you she’s thinking of taking a Yoga class, which means you’ll have to spend a ton of time going through her texts and emails to make sure she’s not cheating on you.

But there’s a silver lining to these misfortunes. They and the life lessons they provide can be perfect inclusions in your memoir. Today, we’ll go over some tips on how to write a memoir on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

~

You might be thinking, Hey John, I’m not a super famous and interesting celebrity, I’m not superior to regular humans, I don’t have a team of underlings to whom I can subject my sex crimes, why would anyone read my memoir? Well, hold on there. Let’s unpack that for a moment.

Memoirs aren’t just for the rich and famous. Sure, people love celebrity gossip, but what makes a memoir truly stand out is the theme and the story, not the personality. Tuesdays with Morrie is one of the most successful memoirs ever, and not only is the subject not a celebrity, he’s a professor at a middling university and the only really important thing he does is die. But the book’s main message – that life is important – clearly resonated with millions of readers.

Anyone can write a memoir so long as they have a good enough story to tell. I’ve long felt that junkies and soldiers were the lowest of the low, the disposable, bottomfeeding leeches of our society least deserving our attention, but the trials and tribulations of drug addiction and war have made for excellent reading.  Something like Angela’s Ashes, also, I think taught many that poor people were worth caring about, at least for however long it took to read the book.

Let’s look at four steps to write the best possible memoirs we can.

Step One: Choose a theme

Like a wedding or a wife swapping key party, memoirs work best if they have a clearly recognizable theme. The theme should be the life lessons you learned and hope to pass along to your reader. Perhaps you’re a veteran teacher who, though decades of hard work and the close bonds you formed with your students, has come to realize free public education was a mistake. Perhaps you just got out of a cult that turned out to be a lot less lucrative than you’d hoped.

Stories of survival are very popular. In my first memoir, Into the Swamp of Madness, I wrote about my harrowing two years as a beat reporter in suburban Jacksonville.

Step Two: Write truthfully

It’s only natural to see the best version of ourselves. We often leave out details or tell obvious lies to seem better in the eyes of others. That’s why my author profile used to say I went to Oxford when I actually never went anywhere, or why I list myself as six foot seven on my Ashley Madison profile, when I’m actually five-nine.

Still, if you want to touch people, you have to reach into those ugly places of yourself and lay it out bare for all to see. Sure, some people might think it odd you’ve had four children from three different marriages run away from home, but most will relate your pain and sorrow. Similarly, I was shocked to learn that Richard Dean Anderson nearly killed his best friend by giving him a homemade blood transfusion, but then I realized these are just people like you or me, and they make the same mistakes we do.

Step Three: Think Like a Fiction Writer

Just because this is a true story doesn’t mean it shouldn’t follow the rules of your own fiction. You need exposition, you need a central conflict, you need to develop character, you need to flesh out your setting and you need an arc. If you’re in the middle of writing and you feel your story lacks the necessary drama, live it out. If you’re a successful executive, expose yourself on a Zoom call to expedite your “fall from grace” narrative. Junkies and alcoholics might need to relapse or go cold turkey, depending on your point in the narrative.

Step Four: Be relatable

Nobody wants to read a story that’s preachy or condescending that isn’t also kink shaming kink erotica. While I’m sure Matthew McConnahey thinks he’s smarter, funnier and exists on a higher plane than the rest of us, he still writes as if he wouldn’t hunt us for sport.

For many of you, this won’t be a problem, as your blandness and middle-class mediocrity will instantly make you relatable. But not all writers have this luxury. So if you’re wealthy, I suggest grabbing a few hollow points and driving through the less well-off parts of town to observe the common man in his natural state. And if you’re poor, sneak into the homes of the middle-class families you’re doing landscaping for see what you can learn.

Book Advances, Adaptations and Trying Out New Genres (Your Writing Questions Answered)

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

One thing I love about this channel is the relationships it’s helped me make with fans. It’s clear so many of you have gone without strong male role model figures in your lives, and while YouTube made me sign a contract promising I wouldn’t try to have sex with any of you, I still makes me feel great to know I’m helping some of you achieve your dreams.

Let’s take a peek at the mailbag from some fans.  Paul B. writes:

John, my high school English teacher, Ms. Altice, has assigned us to read Lady Astor’s Flock for ninth grade language arts. I was surprised we aren’t reading a more famous author, but apparently you used to exchange letters with her in prison? Anyway, what literary devices and techniques do you use to highlight the theme of the novel? If you could answer in several paragraphs and cite page numbers, that would be great.

Oh wow, you know Ms. Altice. I’m surprised they still let her teach. You must live in somewhere like Florida or Oklahoma where they’ve fired all the teachers who won’t put the ten commandments in their classrooms. Yeah, as fans of the channel will know, I use prisons to find beta readers for my books. And women’s prisons are even better because they really help you see your book from a different perspective.

Unfortunately, I don’t have time to give you several paragraphs, but a big theme I tried to get at was the societal expectations we place on young women. One way I hinted at that was all the graphic spanking scenes where the male chancellor spanks the girls whenever they act out of line. The curve of the ass represents a divergence from the norm and the act of trying to spank it flat symbolizes the desire for society to force girls to follow the straight and narrow.

Alex L. writes:

John, I’m a young writer who recently decided to write a book about a small town where most men lose their jobs because immigrants come and take all of them. But in my research, I learned that immigrants are people, too. They have feelings like we do and families and some of them are even writers. The process of writing the book really changed my outlook on life so I thought I’d ask, which book changed you the most as a person?

That would definitely have to be Twilight. Not so much because of the writing process. In fact, I wrote the whole thing in about 19 days and that was back when I used to mash up amphetamines into my morning scotch, so I hardly remember why I made the choices I made. But the book, which came out in 2010 was, for some reason, easily the highest-selling book of my career up til then. After that came out, I was finally able to buy a car that somebody hadn’t died in. I had enough money to go to Disney World, which is where I met my second and favorite wife. And both she and the windfall both led me to creating D&E Publishing several years later. And I owe it all to a story about guy who has stop a terrorist attack between 7:20 and 8:10 pm in September.

Ian S. writes:

John, I’m not a picky reader, which probably explains why I’m such a big fan of yours. I mean, it seems like you’ve written in just about every genre. I mean, you even released a clean version of the gay erotica you released under your J.D. Salinger alias. But are there any genres you’d like to write in, and if so, why?

I’ve always wanted to write a religious text, but I feel like being a messiah is probably more work than it’s worth. So I guess I’d go with literary fiction. It’d be nice to be remembered as someone who wrote books for smart people.

Jorge V. writes:

John, I’ve only read one of your books because this guy I really wanted to sleep with was a huge fan of yours. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out. It turned out he was violating his parole to cross state lines to visit me. Anyway, I liked Nap Time, but to be honest, I’m really more of TV or movie person. If you could choose any of your books to be adapted to the big screen, which would you choose and why?

Well, There’s No Place Reich Home would probably be an obvious pick, because World War II is such a compelling visual milieu  and Hitler always commands the screen no matter who plays him. But I’m gonna surprise long-time fans and choose Ronald: Portrait of a Mother Lover. Sure, we might have to tone down some of the raw dogging scenes, but this was a book that just played out like a movie in my head. Getting someone like Michael Mann or Christopher Nolan to shoot the bank heist scene where Ronald’s trying to get money to pay for his mom’s breast enhancement surgery… I can absolutely see audiences going gangbusters.

Francisco F: writes:

John, like you, I’ve been a writer for a few decades. Like you, I’ll also avoid my loved ones if I’m really on a roll.  I’m big on both the first and second amendments, and like you, I’m not so sure if we really need the eighth amendment. Unfortunately, unlike you, I’ve only sold a handful of my books in my lifetime. It’s a long story, but I mostly blame the Democrats. Anyway, my wife thinks I should quit, but I tell her I mostly do it for myself. Would you say you ultimately write for yourself or for other people?

Oh, other people definitely. I think, like anything in life, you should only write out of a desire to change other people. If you want to do something for yourself, go hire a prostitute or buy a Twix McFlurry or do both. But writers are measured solely by the impact they’ve had on society. Studies have shown that hate crimes against pigmy street performers went down nearly three percent in the year following the release of my novel, Slight of Hand. So I’d stop thinking about yourself so much and start thinking about more important people, like your readers.

Imelda M. writes:

John, I’m a sex-positive, busty 23-year-old graduate student and yoga instructor from one of those countries in Europe where Christianity isn’t really practiced any more. I find writers very attractive, even older ones who really should stop trying to hide that they’re balding. I also get turned on by men who outsmarted their business partners. So my question is, what’s your new home address?

Okay, while I’m pretty sure this is a catfishing scam meant to provide my ex-agent my current address so he can get court papers delivered to my door, the possibility this could be for real is too tempting. Meet me at these coordinates at this date if you are serious.

Adolf H. writes:

John, I just got my first advance ever as a writer. I’m thinking of taking a trip to Paris, for literary inspiration and because this girl I met in college said I got her pregnant and she wants me to attend her son’s high school graduation. What do you think? What should an author spend his first advance on?

Great question. I think you should splurge a little. I’d like to say what I spent mine on, but first of all it was the early 2000s, so it wasn’t much to brag about, and second, I promised YouTube I wouldn’t put that type of content in my videos anymore.

Anyway, don’t spend it on your daily expenses like groceries or rent or a case of twelve bottles of bacon vodka. This was a big accomplishment. Most writers toil for decades and watch hundreds of YouTube writing advice videos and still just fail and die and never accomplish anything. Buy something to shove it all in their fucking faces.

How To Write A Memorable Dystopia (Step 1: Look in any direction)

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Let’s start with a little exercise. I want you to take a look around you right now. Look closely. Look outside your window. There’s probably a hoard of vagrants below your window, each of them one talking dog away from murdering you the next time you leave the apartment. Look around your office. I bet IT has installed some new software that seems weirdly aware of your menstrual cycle. Look around the bus. I’ll bet the old man near you sounds like he’s going to cough up something that will take out half the Eastern seaboard.

The point is, you don’t have to look far to see signs of a dystopia. Go to any news website and you’ll easily find stories about how the Earth is quickly becoming unlivable. Or just type in the word Ohio and see what Google gives you. I’ll show you how you can take the world today, add a little sex and archery, and create a smashing dystopian novel on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

~

Before we get started, it might be helpful to look at a few classic examples of dystopias in fiction and analyze why they work so well.

We’ll start with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which is a bit different from your normal dystopia. Instead of the whole world gone bad, here we watch an isolated society of young boys stranded on an island slowly devolve into madness and savagery. This story works because while the situation is extreme, anyone who attended a British school found it very relatable. But it was also a polemic for its time, and was instrumental in convincing the public why abortion should be legal.  

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World imagines a dystopia where the world is highly segregated by class, where people are controlled by meaningless sex and mindless entertainment, and there’s widespread abuse of drugs to make people feel numb and happy. While I don’t feel like this one could ever happen in real life, it’s still vividly realized.

Finally, we have Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents and Parable of the Sower. These books start out much like our world. California is a wasteland dominated by violent gangs, jobless migrants and people will almost instantly get killed for venturing out of their homes at night. After her family is killed, our protagonist founds a commune based on a new ideology preaching the importance of change. The only unrealistic thing is the populist authoritarian strongman who rises to power and becomes president, weaponizing hateful rhetoric and the slogan, “Make America Great Again.” That would never happen in real life.

Now let’s see how we can create dystopias as great as these.

Step One: Choose Your Calamity

As I’ve said, if you just watch the news for 10 or 20 minutes, you’ll probably be able to come up with 4 or 5 different ways the world is going to end. Maybe AI took over, everyone lost their jobs and with no labor to practice, Parrothead culture soon becomes the predominant way of life. Maybe scientists go too far, creating a race of super intelligent apes that enslave humanity, like in Planet of the Apes, a movie I never saw the end of. Or maybe a dictatorship rises to power after voters realize the only way to prevent it is to pick a guy who is pretty old. 

As always, it’s good to know your audience. Boomers and Gen Xers lived in constant fear of nuclear apocalypse, so that old gal still packs a punch for them. Millennials hate kids, so something like Children of Men wouldn’t be very effective on them. But they live in constant fear of being deprived of avocado toast, so any type of environmental crisis works great. Gen Z kids have spent their lives with one eye at their mother’s teat and the other on the computer screen, so any society that restricts access to technology will be gangbusters with them.

Step Two: Determine the power players

Dystopias generally come in two flavors: authoritarian and anarchical. But even in the anarchy, the narratives often involve a struggle for power and resources.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale imagines a religious regime that has constructed an oppressive patriarchal society. Similarly, my dystopian sci-fi novel The Altar Boy imagines a matriarchal society where men can’t contest the results of a paternity test.

If you go with the anarchy route, have well-defined, competing ideologies. In Stephen King’s The Stand, for example, you’ve got one side who is evil, and another who thinks old black women are magic.

Step Three: Make it Believable

But you don’t have to get too crazy with it. Maybe, like in Fight Club and The Matrix, the dystopia is simply having a stable, well-paying job that is kind of boring. If that sounds a bit too 90s, interview some neighbors who work for Amazon to hear horror stories. And if you don’t have any neighbors like that, don’t worry: you soon will.

However, if reading the news or acknowledging neighbors makes you want to drop a toaster into your bathtub, then draw from your own life. In my aforementioned The Altar Boy, the men in my dystopia were enslaved and forced to procreate for a society of ruling women, and I based this off a series of trips to an underground sex club I took with my first agent.

Step Four: Pick an issue you’re passionate about

Write what you know. Like not smoking in your son’s classroom on parent sharing day, it’s just a rule you can’t get around as a writer.

Choosing a topic that you truly care about will absolutely show in your writing, and vice versa to ones you don’t. For example, I don’t particularly care for animals. In fact, I go out of my way to stomp on ants when I’m walking through the park. So I probably wouldn’t be the best person to write a dystopia about an environmental crisis.

But one thing I do love is wandering through hospitals. I love the hustle and bustle, the inherent drama, the joy that comes with being released, the sorrow of knowing these breaths are the last you’ll ever draw. So pandemic apocalypses were one of my fortes before Covid came along and ruined everything.

What Writers Get Wrong About Theme (especially you, Steve)

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As an aspiring author, you want your stories to matter, but you’ve got this strange feeling they totally suck. You want your books to have deep, resonant meaning, but you also suspect your readers feel that, aside from a few big words, a child could’ve easily written this. You feel like you have so much knowledge and wisdom to share with world, but at the same time, you feel like if some hitchhiker strangled you and left you dead in a ditch, nobody would really give a shit.

And most of that boils down to theme. Stories aren’t just about heroes winning or titillating violence against cheerleaders. Stories with good themes are a means for us to better understand human nature. Before I read Moby Dick, for example, I never really considered that secretly poisoning my neighbor’s dog that barked at me a lot might’ve been wrong.  

But what is theme? My favorite definition of theme comes from my high school literature teacher whose name I can’t recall.

“Theme is… well, okay, theme’s a thing… it’s an artistic representation… well, you don’t write it in your book, like it’s not something you explicitly… to put it another way, it’s something your reader can understand just by reading your book. It’s the subject of your discourse… or no, it’s, like, the idea they take away from your book.”

“Oh, like the moral of the story. Like ‘don’t kill people for fun.’”

“No, no, it’s not a moral. Theme is not a moral. It actually doesn’t answer any questions. When you create a theme, you’re not being preachy. If anything, a theme raises more questions than it answers. It’s basically what your book is really about.”

“Oh, like a topic.”

“No, it’s not a topic. Okay, think of it like this, if you were in an elevator with someone, what would you say?”

“Umm… Floor 1, please?”

“No, I mean about your book. If you had to explain your book to a person in an elevator in one sentence, how would you do it?”

“Do I know this person?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Well, I guess I’d say this story is like an elevator in that it goes…”

“No, that’s not.. Look, nevermind. Just use the word ‘exploration’ in your theme and you should be fine.”

“Exploration of elevators. Got it.”

~

Now, before we get into the specific tips, I’ll start with a question a lot of people ask me:

When planning my novel, should I start with theme, or should I start with plot and character and develop the theme as I go? Also, do you have that 200 dollars you owe me?

It’s a great question that unfortunately doesn’t have a concrete answer. For example, when I wrote It’s All Relative, I knew I wanted to explore the theme of “incest and society’s reaction to it.” Then I slowly developed the characters who were pro and anti-incest and the science fiction plot about incest babies on a generation ship naturally developed from that.

But when I wrote Son of Sam I Am, I just knew I wanted to tell a story about a man with mental disabilities who helps catch a serial killer because there were a lot of very popular TV shows that were basically just that. The theme of the novel–the prejudices that people with mental disabilities face–didn’t present itself until about 2/3s of the way through the novel, when I noticed all my cop characters were being total assholes.

Now, how we can we work to create better themes as throughlines in our writing?

Tip One – Don’t Be Preachy

Nobody likes preachy people. That’s why Democrats always lose elections, and it’s why right-wing ministers have to scare people with an eternity of hellfire to get them to attend church.

So as a writer, you need to be careful that your theme isn’t too on the nose or moralistic. It would’ve been easy to just preach about incest being bad when I wrote It’s All Relative, but instead I wanted to really get into intense debates and explore what incest means to different people. This has a nice side benefit as well. If you’re afraid people will attack you for your political views, being a fiction writer means you don’t need to have any real deep convictions at all and will help you avoid tough questions during interviews.

Tip Two – Embed your theme in your character’s arc

We’ve talked about character arcs on this channel before. Now let’s say you already have a theme in mind. Let’s say that you want your theme to be “Love Conquers all” because you’re trying to get your second wife to realize she shouldn’t have left you and even though her new husband might be younger, taller and he’s got a boat that he actually knows how to operate, that doesn’t mean he loves her more than you.

Okay, now you can construct your main protagonist’s arc around that theme. Your book doesn’t even have to be romantic. Christopher Nolan used the theme to save a dying planet. Maybe, in your story, it’s a love for math that gets your protagonist to turn their life around, stop smoking PCP and win the Fields medal in the end.

Tip Three – Use Symbols and Motifs

Sometimes the best way to deepen the thematic richness of your story is to think small. Think about your word choice. Think about symbols. Think about repeated phrases. In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut keeps using the phrase “So it goes” to hint at the theme of the uncontrollable nature of fate. In fact, it’s a phrase I love so much, I put it on my first wife’s headstone when she was killed by that biker gang and nobody else was willing to claim her corpse.

In my coming-of-age novel Tomorrow’s Sorrows Borrowed the theme is the disillusionment that comes with entering adulthood. To hint at that theme of disillusionment, the motif of masturbation is used over and over and over and over and over again to show how isolated my main protagonist Catcher Ryerson is.

If You’re a New Author, You’re Probably Making These Mistakes

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If you clicked on this article, I’m guessing you’re having some trouble breaking into the industry. You probably have had dozens of rejection letters from literary agents or indie publishers. So you probably self-published some short stories on a blog, maybe even a novel or two on Amazon, but nobody bought it because why would they? You’re a no-name piece of shit. You know you have talent, but if you died today your obituary would likely list you as a masturbator before a writer. What’s an aspiring writer to do? In today’s article, I’ll discuss some of the biggest mistakes new authors make so hopefully, by the end of this, you’ll have a 1 or 2 percent better chance at becoming famous. 

~

#1 – Not attacking critics at every opportunity

Most new writers experience high rates of rejection. And because most of you were terrible at sports and unpopular in high school, you’ve grown accustomed to let the criticism roll right off your back. Fight that urge. You ever notice how the greatest businesspeople, celebrities and politicians are all huge assholes? That’s because people respect and admire assholes.

The more you stand up for yourself, the more people will take you seriously. Get a bad review? Hack your reviewer’s social media and have them proclaim vocal support for NAMBLA. Get rejected by a literary agent or publisher? Hack their social media and post visual depictions of the Prophet Mohammed.

#2 – Limiting your marketing avenues

As I’ve shown, a social media presence is key for any aspiring author, but most writers stop there. In doing so, you lose a lot of potential readers: the elderly, poor people without access to computers, Luddites, obese people whose fingers are too fat to type, or even people who like to go outside.

You can try these things. If it’s a comedy, read your book in a crowded café and laugh loudly. When people ask you about it, say it’s an unknown author who should be way more famous. If money isn’t an issue, promote it with a billboard. And if money really isn’t an issue, promote with skywriting.

#3 – Writing for yourself

Most writers think writing’s supposed to be fun. But really, the only fun thing about the writing process is giving a busty fan your hotel key card at a book signing, but it takes decades for most writers to get to that point.

Writing is a job, plain and simple. No different than being an office worker or a barista or Secretary General of the United Nations. But unlike any of those jobs, you have to take it seriously, because you’re the boss. So if you quit your day job to become a writer, just remind yourself that you’re doing it for the money and not because you thought it’d be more fulfilling than helping autistic children.

#4 – Spending big bucks on a book cover

Ever heard of the phrase “Don’t judge a book by its cover”? Even schoolchildren know that. It’s the content that matters. But I still see new writers drop four figures for an eye-catching cover. Please stop. Do yourself a favor and spend that hard earned cash on something more useful, like editing, alimony or insulin.

#5 – Disregarding the competition

A big mistake a lot of new writers make is thinking that their work will stand on its own merits. But in reality, your reader is just going to compare your work to other authors they’ve read before. So you need to be proactive. Discredit and shame as many famous authors in your genre as you can. For example, Robert Ludlum rose to prominence largely because he was the first to say Tom Clancy had been using orphan ghostwriters.

#6 – Living your life

Lots of writers think they need to live their life to get inspiration for their writing. Oh, really? You writing a hard-hitting thriller about a porn-obsessed chronic masturbator? Are Midwest summer barbeques a bastion of character, wit and intrigue? Your life is boring and pointless, but your fiction shouldn’t be. Family reunions, recitals, baptisms, funerals and pleasuring your wife just gets in the way of those key edits, those opening hooks that need polishing. Focus on the work. It’s all that matters.

Here are a few more mistakes you can fix on your way to becoming famous.

#7 – Not joining the secret Satanic societies to which most literary agents and New York big six publishers belong

#8 – Not getting an email account

#9 – Using the “hunt and peck” method of typing

#10 – Forgetting that agents are open or susceptible to bribes, extortion and blackmail

How to Write Minor Characters

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

From the barista who makes your coffee, to the nanny who raises your children, to the doorman who keeps drug addicts and couriers serving you legal papers out of your building, our lives depend on little people whose existence we basically never acknowledge.

In literature, perhaps even more than in real life, these little people matter. Your reader will not respond to your writing if your world is populated by flat characters who exist only to serve your main protagonist’s narrative, in much the way a judge might respond to you not remembering the names of your company’s custodians and security guards who died when your building burnt down because you were siphoning electricity from next door.

Sure, it’s much easier to go through life not having to think about all the little slave hands who knitted your socks. And dehumanizing others, while sometimes problematic, has had many great benefits throughout human history. For example, we’ve made an impressive stockpile of weapons should aliens ever arrive and threaten our existence.

But writing is about exploring the rich fullness of the human experience. Let’s do a little experiment. Look at this photo:

Now at first glance, you probably think it’s some sort of woke mob. You don’t really think of these people as individuals, nor do you consider their individual motivations. “They’re just trying to steal from hardworking billionaires,” you might say to yourself. Some of the more sociopathic of Stories’ Matter viewers might fantasize about following one to their home, strangling them and watching the light go from their eyes. But most of you would probably be fine tear gassing them so they disperse and you can drive to yoga class unimpeded.

But as a writer, use this as an exercise to practice humanizing others. Pick five random people and write a few paragraphs of background.

This woman, for example. Let’s pretend she’s not very politically active but is here to impress this man. You see, last week she first saw him at Whole Foods when he asked if she knew where the arugula was. He was so hot she got tongue-tied and just silently pointed in a random direction, and in fact, she didn’t and still doesn’t know what arugula even is and hopes he doesn’t ever bring it up again. Anyway, she followed him out of the Whole Foods and was excited to learn he only lives a few buildings away so she’s been spending the past few nights hanging around the entrance to his building hoping they’ll cross paths again. If he asks what she’s doing, she’ll say comes to that building to leave food for a stray cat. Anyway, that didn’t happen, he must work nights or something, but this Saturday morning she saw him walk with a group of people to a local protest. And so now she hopes he shouts out some funny slogan or comment so she can laugh really loud and draw his attention.

Anyway, we’ll take radical detours that seem to be pointless on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Now, before we get to the tips, let’s make a clear distinction. Minor characters are not secondary characters. Secondary characters get lots of page space and are crucial to the plot; minor characters are a step below that. To give a relatable analogy, if a main character is a wife, a secondary character is a mistress, and a minor character is a Waffle House waitress from Memphis you once banged while on a book tour whose name and hair color you can’t remember, but you do distinctively remember she got sexually excited by tornadoes.

Tip 1 – Minor Characters Should Feel Like They Have A Life Outside Your Story

A minor character shouldn’t exist just to info dump, nor should their only purpose be to support your protagonist. I mean, in real life the only reason we do things for others is to achieve our own goals. At least that’s how it is for me.

There are lots of ways to do this in your fiction. Give your minor characters a memorable hobby. Hint at a secret motivation. In Blake Colby’s Blood Shot, one of the detectives is trying to solve the crime, but the other is mostly worried about whether or not his wife is having an affair.

This is something I had to learn as a boss, as well. For years, I thought of my workers as mindless drones who only existed to take me more money. But now I make it a point to get to know my employees. For example, every Monday morning, I spend two hours monitoring their social media feeds. This has the added benefit of checking to see if they’re uploading pictures of themselves holding various books from the D&E backlog like I asked.

Tip 2 – Don’t Forget to Give Your Minor Characters a “Look”

Remember, a minor character may only exist on a few pages of a 300-page novel. So you really have to make those words count. Some strange clothing choices or gaping holes where your eyes should be is a great way to grab your reader’s attention.

Try to think of some minor characters in movies whose names you don’t remember but whose look you absolutely do. If you’re anything like me, the first thing that came to mind was the chick with three tits from Total Recall.

There’s science to support this as well. Humans are bad with names, but we’ve been trained to recognize abnormal or differing appearances. This was how we learned to cast sick or genetically inferior people out of our caveman societies. At my publishing company, I remember most people by specific traits instead of names, like “big head,” “nerd face,” “wife material if she smiled more,” and “what I imagine my mom might look like today if she hadn’t abandoned me.”

Tip 3 – Give your minor character a specific role

It’s no secret that lots of books have been written. Because of this, many roles for minor characters have been established. Let’s look at a few.

First, we have comic relief. Think about the gravediggers in Hamlet. In my novel, The House on Pain Avenue, Daniel’s brother’s frat brothers serve as the comic relief. Peeing in the dean’s coffee helps lighten all scenes where Daniel’s father kicks him out of the house for being gay.

Then you have the guide. They are meant to assist the protagonist on their journey. In my novel, Deep Throat II, the titular character guides the journalists in uncovering the president’s pizza parlor child sex ring.

This Query Letter Method Has a Guaranteed 1% Success Rate!

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Literary agents: can’t live with ‘em, can’t deal directly with a publisher without getting a restraining order and needing to change your legal name without ‘em.

Writers hate writing query letters for many good reasons: fear of rejection, difficulty distilling a 200,000 word novel into a few sentences, lack of confidence in your salesmanship stemming from the constant death threats you got as an eighteen-year-old telemarketer.

It’s best to think of query letter writing as toadying up to a sick relative in the hopes they’ll include you in their will. So we’ll look at how to put on our best smile and ignore that awful smell and disgusting goiter, so to speak, on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Maybe you need a letter opener. Perfect for creating quick easy access to your mail and for defending yourself against belligerent guests who won’t stop complaining about the smell of your office, you can’t go wrong without a letter opener. Visit your local office supply store for more information.

Before we start, let’s look at what we want a query letter to do. A query letter needs to seduce a prospective agent into believing that you’re going to make them money. Much like a pimp would look at a young man or woman’s body, posture, relationship with law enforcement and tolerance to various illegal substances, an agent will look at your writing credentials, tone, hook and ideas to decide if your book will sell or not.

Here are the main do’s and dont’s for query letter writing.

Do: Sell yourself

Mention any previous publishing credits you have. Mention if you have an MFA. Mention any academic honors related to writing. If you don’t have any of those, and YouTube analytics tells me that’s likely, then simply lie and make them up.

Worried about getting caught. No problem: Just create phony websites for bogus publishers. Write phony press releases and create fake book review sites with very positive reviews of your phony book. Then buy some burner cell phones and list the numbers on your website. Get good at different accents in case they call. Most importantly, whatever you do, don’t be yourself.

Don’t: Reveal too much about yourself

You don’t want to share too much with the agent you’re querying or appear too chummy. Despite everything else I’ll tell you in this video, literary agents are just people like you and me and they’ll see through obvious manipulation.

When I was first starting out, I’d often make the mistake of mentioning I became a writer because a favorite aunt had wished it on her death bed. My hope was to guilt trip the agent into considering my manuscript, but I learned that came off as needy.

Literary agents, I’ve found, also don’t care about what inspired you to write this book, what you or your girlfriend look like naked, what you think the literary agent might look like naked, the models from your vintage typewriter collection, or copies of floor plans of the office where the literary agent works.

Do: Research the agent you’re querying

This is a time-consuming process and you don’t want to waste your time querying an agent who represents, for example, hardcore queer erotica when you’re writing a pastry cookbook. (Though it’s a common mistake, it turns out.)

You also want to make sure your agent actually has connections and works for a reputable agency. If your agent gave you the address of an abandoned office, speaks with a thick Indian accent, their webcam is constantly broken and asks to be paid in Apple gift cards, you might want to ask LinkedIn if Tom Everyman’s profile is legitimate.

Don’t: Forget to proofread

If you can’t get through a one-page letter without a myriad of spelling mistakes and subject-verb confusion, what’s the likelihood you wrote a book that’s going to sell. You don’t want to, for example, say that you wrote this book because your “favorite cunt requested on her death bed.”

Do: Create a strong hook

Just like your book, your query letter needs to start off with a bang. Your hook should answer these three questions. Who is your character? What do they want? What is stopping them from getting it? In my 2009 romantic comedy Just the Tip, I used this hook: Dan Stevens is a down-on-his-luck tax auditor who is forced to audit the woman of his dreams, a young waitress at his favorite Chinese restaurant. And just when he thinks it can’t get any worse, his wife starts asking questions.

Don’t: Try to sympathize with your agent

Don’t say things like “I know you’re very busy” or “I’m sure you must get tired of looking at 1000s of these every day” or “I bet you’d like a nice strong man to rub your shoulders after a stressful day.” Trust me: I’ve tried begging, I’ve tried offering sexual favors or hiring other people to provide them, I’ve tried bribing them, I even wasted a whole month getting one agent’s son released from prison.

But I’ve come to learn one thing. Literary agents are soulless automatons. Now, does the job make them this way or does it merely attract psychopaths who get off on crushing other people’s dreams, is hard to say. Either way, it’s best to think of them as a necessary evil, like a colonoscopy, paying taxes or having to sell your book on a platform owned by a company that forces workers to piss in bottles.  

Here are a few more quick do’s and don’t’s.

Do: Demand writers in your local author group give you copies of their successful query letters and do fake cry if they won’t.

Don’t: Try to stand out by sending a query letter in a strange font like Papyrus or Wingdings.

Do: If you’re querying a male agent, mention things like football and beer, and if you’re querying a female agent, mention things like menstrual cramps and Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

Don’t: Mail a query letter signed in blood to show how serious you are.

How To Write Character Flaws (without just looking in a mirror)

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

Look around your room right now and try to find something wrong. For example, there might be dirty clothes piled all over the floor. Maybe there are several wedges of half-eaten cheese on different tables in the room. Perhaps there are painful cysts growing in your armpits which your doctor says is likely caused by over-consumption of old cheese. If YouTube analytics is to be believed, all of these things are true.

You might think I’m a psychic. But actually I’m just a writer who, through years of hard work, taught himself to be perceptive of character flaws, in fiction and in real life. And while that didn’t stop me from marrying a woman who turned out to be a serial bigamist, it did teach me to write many complex heroes with compelling characterization. We’ll explore how to exploit our worst personal demons to earn a few bucks on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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No one is perfect. For writers with large egos, sometimes this can be hard to remember. Hell, as a man who was first published at 25, sports a full head of hair at 52 and has erections that last three hours and fifty-nine minutes, sometimes it’s hard for me to think of any personal flaws. But trust me, I’ve got plenty. For example, as I’m writing this article, I happen to be twirling a loaded pistol.

In any case, it’s flaws that give your characters depth, that make them relatable and memorable. But it’s important to remember that flaws are always internal, never external. So having an alcoholic mother or living in Ohio aren’t flaws, depressing as they may be. We’ll start by looking at different kinds of flaws and analyze some classic examples from fiction.

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Minor Flaws

For starters, we have minor flaws. These are often unique or memorable, but don’t have any real impact on your narrative. Indiana Jones’s fear of snakes is a classic example of a fun, humanizing flaw. In my revenge novel set in Georgian England, Bride of Prejudice, Leeandra has a hideous scar that runs from her right temple to her left tit. It’s a unique character trait but doesn’t really affect her or her arc in any way.

Major Flaws

Then, we have major flaws. These are catalysts for action and they drive the story. For Holden Caulfield, it’s his self-pride and inability to cope with his trauma that sets him at odds with everyone in the story. For Kable Anderken in Blake Colby’s Blood Shot, it the memories of missing free throws to get an 8th seed in the playoffs that haunt him.

Fatal Flaws

Then, we have the fatal flaw. These either make or break the character. For the hero, the whole story might be about overcoming this flaw and for the villain, it’s often their downfall. Ahab’s obsession for revenge and Humbert Humbert’s pedophilia are classic examples here. And in the sitcom, Heil Honey, I’m Home, it’s Hitler’s lack of social graces that ruin the dinner party.

Now let’s look at some ways to construct our own character flaws.

Step One: Create Relatable Flaws

If you want your reader to connect with your character, there’s nothing better than making them relatable. Think of common flaws that most people have. Maybe your character masturbates 10 times a day.  Or maybe they’re bad with money, spending half their income on antique guns.

In one of my early stories, Zero Point Infinity, one of the characters constantly tries to kill himself but is thwarted at every turn. Almost every reader I talked to, most of them millennials, felt like this spoke to them on a deep personal level.

Step Two: Don’t Get Preachy

This is especially important when writing villains. Like a bartender or the guy who cleans the elevators in the Aruba Holiday Inn, a fiction writer shouldn’t moralize. Your writing loses its effectiveness if you don’t let your characters beliefs and actions speak for themselves.

In Crime and Punishment, for example, Dostoyevsky isn’t concerned with the moral implications of what Raskolnikov has done. He’s just trying to tell an exciting murder mystery.

Step Three: Create a Balance Between Positive and Negative

Saints and demons aren’t interesting. The worst of us have our virtues and best have our flaws. Hell, Hitler was a vegetarian and Steven Seagal donates to environmental causes. And then there’s Mister Rogers, who somehow thought children wanted to look at this fucking thing.

Complex and three-dimensional characters should be balanced. Like how Sherlock Holmes’s brilliance is balanced by his lust for cocaine. Or like how the dumbass clones in Never Let Me Go’s generosity is balanced by their inability to realize they ought to just go on a rampage and murder everyone.

Step Four: Use Flaws to Create Conflict

Think of any drama you experienced in real life. It was probably caused by a personal flaw. Maybe you got in a car crash because you really liked the way you looked in the rearview mirror. Maybe you lost your job because you’re so fucking dumb you thought the world’s most obvious conman really was looking out for what’s best for you. It could be anything.

In fiction, flaws like these should drive the narrative. Recklessness might get your hero’s friends killed. Callousness might tear a friendship apart. In basically any noir, being a thirsty simp for crazy strange is nearly always a catalyst for destruction. In my drama Storming the Gates of Heaven, the prejudice of the protagonist gets the story in motion. Karl Eichmann shoots a Mexican that he thinks is trying to illegally enter the US, only to find out that Grand Canyon isn’t actually located on the border between Mexico and the United States.

What Hiring A Prostitute To Pretend To Be My Ex-Wife Taught Me About Writing Romance Novels

Daniel MadisonLeave a comment

I have some bad news for fans of the channel: John Lazarus is no longer in a relationship. The prostitute I’ve paying to look, act and talk like my second wife has decided she’s no longer willing to provide me with her services.

It’s a tough thing to say goodbye to someone you still love. All those happy memories we shared — dinners together, movie nights, meetings with plastic surgeons and dialect coaches – just bring me pain and sadness now.

Unfortunately, Destiny decided it was time we moved our separate ways. So much time spent pretending to be someone she wasn’t caused her to lose her own sense of identity, it seems. Once she started dreaming as my second wife, she knew it was time to give nursing school another shot.  

As a romance writer, you will similarly construct a romantic identity for your characters in much the way I did for Destiny. In this article, I will show you how the mistakes I made with her are probably very similar to the mistakes many aspiring writers make when attempting their first romance novel. We’ll try to stop glamourizing underage relationships on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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So, if you’re new to the channel, I’ll just give you a little bit of background. I have been married three times in my life, but my second wife was definitely my favorite. But that’s not just because my first wife was a serial bigamist who was already married to several other people, or because my third wife was my therapist who used hypnosis and other forms of psychological manipulation to make me fall in love with her.

Cindy was simply a wonderful woman. And I’m not just talking about a pair that defied gravity or the fact that she introduced me to pegging. Cindy taught me how to cook. She convinced me to start my own publishing firm. She was instrumental in removing my dad from his burial plot, selling the plot to fund a down payment for a new house and then dumping him at sea. She was also the only woman I never cheated on.

But unfortunately, this storybook romance wasn’t meant to last. We parted after two short years together. While my love for her remained strong, she didn’t feel the same way. I’ve had over a decade to wonder what went wrong. Perhaps I was too wrapped up in my writing. Perhaps I was too clingy. Perhaps the fact that her new husband was taller, younger, richer and had more friends than me was my undoing.

In any case, that’s not especially important for the purposes of this article. Because I’m actually here to talk about Destiny, the escort I’ve spent the past six months forcing to look, talk and act like Cindy.

Step One: Forcing Chemistry Instead of Building It

This of course relates to our key writing rule: “Show, don’t tell.” You can’t tell your reader that your characters are in love, you need to show them interacting in an organic way that shows them building chemistry.

If you want to write a story about a reformed Islamic terrorist who falls in love with a female Silicon Valley CFO, that’s fine. “Opposites attract” is a great trope. But you’ve got to find a way to make their connection make sense. Perhaps they slowly bond over their love of Colin Firth movies or something.

Looking back, I realize I forced things with Destiny. The speech therapy is one thing, but making her listen to tapes of Cindy’s voicemails while she slept was too much. Maybe I could’ve called her Destiny on Mondays-Fridays and only forced her to pretend to be Cindy on the weekends.

Step Two: Making One Character Passive in the Relationship

Relationships aren’t about one person seizing control and making all of the choices; this isn’t the state of American democracy in 2025.

And this isn’t just a problem with male writers. You’d be surprised how many manuscripts I get from female writers whose male love interest in their novel is basically a dildo with nice hair who also happens to be a ghost.

I now realize I should’ve given Destiny more agency in our relationship. I should’ve let her choose her own restaurants instead of screaming that “Cindy didn’t like Italian.” I should’ve let her buy that boat even though Cindy was terrified of water because her brother drowned when she was five.

Step Three: Writing Relationships Without Commonalities

Your characters need to be together for a reason. Sure, in real life, people might be put together solely because they’re part of the Chinese government’s attempt to create a superrace of excellent basketball players, but your reader wants your couple to bond over something they share.

They shouldn’t be carbon copies of each other, obviously. They don’t have to love the same music or types of porn. But you still need to make that connection. In my novel Above the Rim, it was shared sexual experiences in basketball arenas. In Heartland, it was the shared belief that 9/11 was an inside job.

When I followed her on her days off, I saw that Destiny was into gardening and visiting her family and volunteering at a dog shelter. Those are all things I wouldn’t dream of doing.

Step Four: Not Allowing For Vulnerability

Human beings are frail things. We aren’t like the common salamander; we can’t survive if our head gets cut off.

It’s important that both members of your couple show weakness and fragility. For example, maybe she had both of her hands chopped off by a helicopter. Maybe he’s a control freak who wiretaps everyone, even his best friends and himself.

It’s clear I expected Destiny not to be the perfect woman but the perfect approximation of Cindy. And I expected myself to be perfect as well. One time, I accidentally called her Destiny while we were having sex. This was particularly egregious because I usually only shout my own name during sex. Anyway, I locked myself in a room for a day after watching home movies of Cindy and I.

Step Five: Having Contrived Conflict for the Sake of Conflict

I mean, sure, in real life couples fight. They slap each other. They throw drinks in each other’s faces. They break each other’s garage doors. They sneak devices that emit chirping sounds once every five minutes under their bed and pretend they can’t hear the sound. That’s all fine and normal.

But in your story, conflict must arise organically. Characters need to remain in character.

After Destiny and I settled into our groove and she really got the character of Cindy down, I tried to reenact a fight Cindy and I had several years earlier. The problem was, because of Destiny’s profession, she was cool with taking a cumshot anywhere. So she wasn’t able to channel Cindy’s rage. The next two days of silence and the following “make up” sex just felt so forced.

Step Six: Portraying Abusive Behavior As Romantic

While this doesn’t really relate to my situation with Destiny, you should try to avoid this. I see this way too often in romance novels.