"Painted Cats" is Now Out, Marking The First Sequel I've Ever Published!

Last year my novel Marked Territory dropped to a little bit of fanfare among my regular readers. The book followed my protagonist, a Maine coon alley cat named Leo, as he stuck his whiskers into some problems going on over on the south side of the Bronx. A church mouse and her friends were dealing with a territorial dispute with a pack of mangy mutts. Nothing wrong with that, things like that happened every day... but why here? The church wasn't worth barking over, much less fighting, and the deeper Leo dug the less sense everything made.

For those who want a slightly deeper dive, Rissy Reviews did a pretty great video on it recently. So if you haven't seen it yet, go check that out now!

What folks might not know is the ink was barely dry on my contract when I started work on the sequel. I finished it around Christmas last year, got it to my publisher once I'd made some adjustments, and now it brings me great pleasure to say that Painted Cats is available for all my avid lovers of hard-boiled detective stories, cats, and books that combine the two!

So What's This One About?

While Marked Territory established a lot of Leo's neighborhood, and some key facts about the world, Painted Cats gives us a very different kind of mystery to dig into. An old flame of Leo's named Delilah comes around asking for a favor; it seems a friend of hers has gone missing, leaving her kitten behind. While Mischief has seen some hard times, and made her share of bad decisions, she loves Trouble. If she hasn't come back for him, that means something is really, really wrong. While he's leery of what he might find, Leo agrees to go looking.

Reasons you should read the sequel (beyond it just being another of Leo's adventures in NYC) include:

- More heads of animal crime families (cats, possums, and even a reference to one run by snakes that I hope to get to in future sequels).

- A night spot for gay animals to mingle, meet, and eat.

- The adorable Trouble, who may end up recurring in future stories if the audience takes a shine to him.

- Celebrity animals, who earn their owners a living with their picture-perfect grooming.

You know, just in case you needed another reason to go out and buy your copy today.

Wait... Isn't This The Second Sequel?

For folks who want to get technical, there is a prequel to both of these novels. The short story "Stray Cat Strut" in the short story anthology From a Cat's View was Leo's debut into the world of fiction, and the first glimpse anyone got into his world of street beasts. The fact that I sold out of this book entirely at the first convention I brought it to was why I decided to expand Leo's adventures in the first place!

For those who are wondering, no, you don't have to read any of these stories in any particular order. I set out very specifically to mimic the style of serial detective stories like the Spenser series, or arguably Sherlock Holmes, where the order in which you choose to take in the cases won't affect your grasp of the narrative too much. There might be references to characters you haven't met, or to things that were said in other stories, but you can usually infer what happened or didn't happen without too much difficulty.

Which one should you start with? Well, I'll generally recommend Marked Territory as the official starting place since it was written to give a wider introduction to Leo's world, but if you wanted to start with either of the other two you could always fill in the blanks later.

In either case, I'm super excited to have gotten this far. For all the folks out there who've supported me, thank you. And for those who want to see even more of Leo's adventures, well, get your copy, leave a review, and tell your friends about the series! I'll keep writing them as long as people keep reading them.

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my noir thriller Marked Territory, its sequel Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Evil is Boring (And Your Story Deserves Better)

We've all seen this story before. It's the young idealist versus the Evil Empire in their snappy uniforms and insidious weapons of mass destruction. It's the empty waste of fire and filth that births monsters that fill the ranks of the Dark Army. It's the mummified husk of an ancient sorcerer who serves the Gods of Wickedness. From the Empire, to Mordor, to Mum-Ra, some of our most popular stories have a clear good guy, and a clear bad guy. Right versus wrong, good versus evil.

This week I wanted to talk about that. Because while there's nothing wrong with having two clear sides on an issue so your readers can figure out where the lines are drawn, this is a trope I think far too many of us lean on in our work. In short, the idea that our bad guys are evil... well, because they're Evil!

Well, our holy books explode with hellfire. So that's probably a bad sign, I guess...

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Evil As a Fact Feels Lazy

I blame a lot of things on Tolkien, but honestly he feels like the tip of the iceberg on this topic. From Christian scholars slanting and re-writing pagan mythologies so there was a clear good v. evil dynamic (look no further than the changes to Loki made by Sturlson), to the explosion of knightly tales in the Romantic period, a massive amount of our stories have this dynamic in place.

And what makes it boring is that this capital-E evil is a default. It's a placeholder for actual motivation and purpose held by our villains. And the more detailed and involved our heroes become, the more bland and boring Evil may seem. Because no matter how many skulls are on the warlord's armor, or how fearsome the demons they command are, it can leave the audience scratching their head and asking, "Okay, cool aesthetic... but why?"

Seriously... what are you getting out of this?

No one is evil for the sake of being evil. Not only that, but evil is not a universal constant across all peoples and cultures. Taken on a wide enough scale, the very idea of evil as a force becomes almost meaningless... and that can really bring down the story you're trying to tell.

Take one of the most basic versions of this concept; a knight in shining armor standing against a fearsome foe. Sure, you can just say, "Well, it's a dark army of the undead ruled over by a necromancer who's going to kill everyone because they're evil," and just leave it at that. And there's definite stakes to that confrontation... but it's kind of like a burger with no condiments. You can eat it, and it might be a good experience, but you could make it so much better with a few added spices.

What does this necromancer hope to gain in their victory? Why did they join this conflict in the first place? Why have they chosen this particular method to achieve their goals instead of something else? If we don't have answers to this, then our villain is just some nebulous bad thing that our hero is opposing, and we never have to really think about their actions because hey, whatever the hero does has to be better than the army of the Horned King over here, right?

The Broader The Population, The Worse It Gets

Having an evil god, or a powerful evil enemy, is one thing. Having an entire evil nation, though, is where things can really start to fall apart. Because whether we're talking about a regime of fantasy fascists who bind devils to their service, or a nation of orcs that are seen as brutish, backward, and wicked, there will always be nuance in these populations. By not providing that nuance, though, you just have a big lump of people that are painted with a big brush, and we don't have to think about who they are, what they're doing, or what their place in the story is other than as plot-filler villains.

I'm a respected member of my community, you know.

This is something I've been tackling myself while working on my fantasy RPG setting Sundara: Dawn of a New Age, and I thought I'd offer some tips based on what's worked for me thus far.

As an example, Ironfire: City of Steel is a place that's built on forging Dragon Steel. That's the primary industry, and in the city's early days it was a target for a bandit army that wanted that valuable resource. This conflict escalated to violence, and the city employed several free companies of mercenaries to defend itself. This led to Ironfire becoming the center of the mercenary trade in the region, and it is the presence of so many freelances for hire that has kept the city safe from outward attack as it's grown.

There was no need for an evil, outside force there. No need to make the antagonists bloodthirsty cannibals dedicated to a dark god of murder. A simple economic interest (one side has a valuable resource, and the other wants to take it by violence) was more than enough to stir that conflict and cement the city into both the setting, and the reader's memory.

These are the kinds of conflicts I set up, planting the seed of the challenges unique to the different locations one might come across. In Moüd: City of Bones we have a city deep in the desert run by a guild of necromancers. The challenges are not liberating the city from the black-robed wizards who dabble in the dark arts, but finding relics buried beneath the city, and helping to keep the elements at bay so the living can still survive in this particularly harsh environment. In Silkgift: City of Sails we have a place whose primary industry is innovation and invention, but whose government provides food, shelter, and enrichment for all citizens. As such, industrial espionage, and attempts to sabotage creations that could upset the status quo beyond the city are far more common. And in Hoardreach: City of Wyrms we find a place where refugees and outcasts of every sort are taken under the wings of the Cooperation of 5 dragons. It's a place where there's friction, yes, but also where plotting and machinations of outside forces may try to sabotage this "monstrous" place before it grows too powerful.

Broad social ills can be a part of a given society. Whether it's exploitation of the lower class, human trafficking, chattel slavery, or similar awful institutions, we all know full well that these things can and do happen. Political systems based on fear and hatred, like fascist movements, are also something that can happen. However, it's important to examine the role of these elements in a society, to ask what affect these things have on the story, and to use them to put things into context. Don't just front-load a location or culture with these things so we don't question the actions of our hero who opposes these cultures. That's just cheap shock to code these cultures or nations as evil without having to use the word.

Don't Be Afraid To Ask Questions

To be clear, it's still very possible to have a conflict in a story where one side is clearly in the wrong. Whether it's a more powerful entity trying to force people off their land, one class of people exploiting another, purges over ethnic identity or religion, and so on, and so forth, these are all bad things. However, all it usually takes is a glimpse into the motivations of the antagonists to see the structure of these conflicts at play. It lets us see what our hero is fighting against, rather than just keeping the villains in the dark, as it were.

And, as always, this is your story. If you want to have light side v. dark side, there's nothing to say you can't just do that. Angels and devils, the whole nine yards, if that's the structure you want then it's your story.

All I'm suggesting is taking a moment to pause, and ask if that is the best frame for your conflict. Because if you decide to use it after careful consideration, more power to you! Just don't assume that it will automatically make your story better just because it's worked for other stories in the past.

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my cat noir novel Marked Territory, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

I No Longer Roll The Dice With My Work (Because I Can't Afford To)

Being an author is a lot like playing the lottery. I've said that before, and generally it means I'm referring to what happens with your finished product. Because no matter how much time, energy, sweat, and grit you put into your book, there's no telling whether you'll find your audience for it or not. It's impossible to say whether the algorithm is going to defeat you, or lift you up so that everyone can see your work so you can become this week's success story.

Today, though, I wanted to talk about something else. Because there's a weird situation for many authors (especially those of us who are just starting out), where we rely heavily on chance and luck to even get our work published in the first place. And now that I've decided to step out of that particular game, I wanted to mention how frustrating it can be to participate in.

Come on baby... we REALLY need a contract this time...

Before I get too far into things, though, remember to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all of my latest updates sent right to your email! And if you want to help me take even more of the gambling out of my monthly earnings (so that I can keep my landlords happy), consider becoming a Patreon patron today!

Hitting The Jackpot Once is Hard Enough

The first thing I did when I started my career as a writer was look for open calls for short stories. The way these work is that a company will put out a theme, a word count, and a general description of the sorts of fiction they're looking for, and writers can submit their work. Editors go through the pile, pick the ones they want, and those stories will go into the anthology. Smaller companies tend to offer a royalty split among all contributors (which amounts to almost nothing unless they sell a lot of books), some will pay authors a flat fee for the story, and some very few will give you a flat fee and a royalty.

What a lot of writers will quickly find is that unless you are very lucky, you probably don't have a short story laying around that's exactly what an open call is looking for. If you're fortunate, you can retool something you've done to fit. Most of the time you're going to have to write something entirely from scratch, submit it, and then pray to the typewriter gods that you catch the editor on a good day and your story gets picked.

This exact same process happens on a larger scale for novels. So while you might spend a year or more penning a manuscript, there's no guarantee that it will get picked up. You have to find a company that seems to be interested in your kind of book, submit a pitch, and cross your fingers that you get a call back. Worse, a lot of companies have a policy that you can't submit the same book to other agencies, so you're stuck in limbo until they make a decision.

I did manage to get lucky a few times.

For years I went through this process with short stories and novels. Some of my stories hit the mark, like "Stray Cat Strut" which was picked up for From a Cat's View. A lot of short stories I wrote got re-purposed, and managed to find a home in other collections. However, after several years of dancing this dance I had enough content left over to publish The Rejects, which were all the dark little darlings that hadn't managed to find an editor that wanted to give them a chance to shine.

So, to recap, you need to complete an entire piece of work (short story or novel) before you can do anything. Then you ship that piece of work off to a publisher that you hope will be interested in it. Most of the time you have to wait till they say yay or nay before you can move on. This process of back and forth querying can take months in some cases, or years in others. And at the end of the day, your piece might not get picked up by anyone. Ever. Period. Meaning that, from a return-on-investment perspective, all that time in writing, editing, submitting, etc. was just energy thrown into a pit.

Honestly? I don't have time for that anymore.

I Wish I Had a Better Solution

I started thinking about this because a few weeks back a friend of mine tagged me in an open call for short horror stories. It's been a while since I applied to one of these calls, but as I was looking over the terms, payment, timeline, excitement started bleeding out of me. I realized why soon enough.

Because if an editor had tapped me on the shoulder and offered me a spot on this project, I'd have been all in. Being told I had to compete with a group of other authors of varying skill levels and experience to maybe get chosen and get a check? For something that was going to take several weeks to a month of my labor? No. I don't have the margin of error to deal with that anymore.

The pandemic forced me to make a lot of changes, and one of those was putting the majority of my energy into books, fiction, RPG supplements, and stories. Because, simply put, the "safe" clients I was ghostwriting for all shut up shop and stopped paying their bills, while gamers and readers demanded more content as fast as I could put it out. It's why, if you keep an eye on my release flow, you've probably noticed more stuff coming out at an increased clip since roughly this past winter.

I've built up a base of clients and contacts over the years, and at this point in my career if I have an idea that I think will do well I don't have to put together a proposal, submit it to a slush pile, and wait several months for a response from a publisher. Because I either know the platforms where I can put these projects together myself, or I have contacts that I can shoot an email to and ask, "Hey, Charlie, had one of those crazy ideas. If I put it together, would you be interested?"

Either way, publication is going to happen, so the only die I have to roll is trying to make sales once it's out.

Just say the word, and I'll get it done!

I try to be a realist on this blog, which is why I feel it's important to point out once again that who gets published is almost never a matter of talent or quality. Sometimes all you have to do is write in a certain subgenre a publisher thinks will be popular. Sometimes you just need to do something one editor loves (or hates) for them to accept or kill your story. An editor might have had a bad day, or be under pressure, which alters their reading experience. It could even be the order your story was read in, meaning that it got forgotten in a backlog, or stayed with an editor because it was the last one they read.

So many of us believe editors are like Anubis weighing a soul against a feather to determine worth, and that they have some special gift or insight that only lets the talented and deserving get published. They don't. Editors are people, and their decisions are often just as much up to chance, mood, and whim as any other person's. Sometimes they publish great stories from really good writers. Sometimes they publish drek. And sometimes the drek is what sells millions of copies, while the new, unusual, or outside-the-norm gathers dust in a discount rack because the drek is what the reading public was willing to shell out money for.

To cut a ramble short, this pandemic has caused me to write more than I ever have before. At the same time, though, I've grown increasingly mercenary with the projects I take on. Because when the words coming off my desk decide whether my landlord gets paid, and if I have food in the cupboard, I don't have time or energy to waste on open calls that might pay me, if I get accepted. Maybe. Half a dozen months from now.

And the fact that so many people in my profession are forced to run that gauntlet as a matter of course to "prove themselves" or "pay their dues" is something I wish I could change. I don't know how, but I've reached a point where submitting and waiting is no longer possible. I'm sure there are thousands of writers out there for whom it was never possible because you can't take a gamble on a "maybe" when you need your bills to be paid for sure.

Just some professional thoughts for the week.

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my noir thriller Marked Territory, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Genre is More Often a Marketing Concern Than a Story One

If you go into any bookstore you find pretty rigidly segmented shelves and sections for genre. Sometimes you'll see two genres sharing space (fantasy and sci-fi tend to be bunkmates in this way), but even then all it usually takes is a glance at the cover art to know which genre label is getting slapped onto which book.

Libraries are also quite fond of this specificity of category.

While genre can be a useful tool, I think it's worth reminding people that it's still pretty new in terms of fiction. Hell, sci-fi didn't even exist as a concept until the fairly recent past (a lot of folks credit Mary Shelley and her infamous Frankenstein for birthing the genre in the first place), and less than a hundred years ago you still had fiction magazines referring to sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and other mixed genres simply as weird fiction.

So if you're getting all caught up in what genre your story is or isn't, just remember that genre is a lot like gender roles. It's real, in the sense that we made it real, but it can be ignored if the existing system of labels simply doesn't conform to the tale you want to tell.

Genre-Fluidity in Writing

At its core, genre is a classification system. However, it's often been used to pare down and define genre fiction for the purposes of marketing and sales, rather than out of some purer, ideological devotion to providing a tool for understanding storytelling themes and tropes. That's more of a side effect.

What kind of book is it? Ummm... well...

The issue a lot of writers run into is when they start using genre to control what is allowed in their stories, rather than to help define those stories using widely-understood themes and terms. Whether it's automatically assuming that fantasy stories must have a pseudo-European Middle Ages flair to them, assigning any book with a romantic subplot to the romance category, or flatly stating that ax-wielding barbarians cannot get in fights with sentry robots while confronting alien beings from beyond the stars because it's an unholy union of too many genres, this sort of mental block often trips up a lot of creators.

This is sort of like guys who won't wear certain colors because it's "not manly," or women who worry about whether cutting their hair a certain way means they aren't feminine enough. Because if it makes you happy, then you should rock whatever style you want, regardless of the "rules" society expects you to follow (spoken or unspoken) have to say about it.

Another way genre purity is like rigid gender roles? Most of the assumptions and rules are a lot newer than we think, and have zero resemblance to earlier norms.

For example, as recently as the 1920s pink was considered a masculine color (something changed over the ensuing decades via Freud and others). High-heeled shoes were originally invented for men, and let's not even get started on powdered wigs, and the other bits of fashion favored during that era. Everything from dresses, to elaborate hair styles, to beard grooming that we would now consider "feminine" have had strong masculine connotations in the past. Hell, even makeup was used pretty widely between genders until the mid-1800s when it was declared a women's only product.

What does that have to do with writing rules and genre conventions? Everything. Because looking at what genre was and wasn't over a long timelines shows that a lot of our classifications are simply made up to suit the tastes of organizations, editors, and publications who shape the business of fiction. Sort of like how "psychological thriller" exists because the academy didn't want the horror movie Silence of The Lambs to win best picture, so they had to make up a whole new category to shunt it into. When you realize that there are no rules except the rules you choose to use, it can be a very freeing experience when it comes to shaking off the boundaries of your stories.

So with that in mind, and in the spirit of all things weird and unclassified, get strange with your stories! Write dwarves that have French accents and specialize in swashbuckling! Create starships driven by fairy dust! Write vampire private eyes who still go to museums to catch up on what was going on when they were young! There are no limits except those which you impose yourself!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my cat noir novel Marked Territory, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!