2017 Retrospective: Books

In 2017 I barely missed my reading goal of 75 books, falling short by just 2. This was still up from my 2016 goal of 52 books which I also missed. This year, I decided to bring the expectations down a little bit and set a reasonable, reachable goal of 65 books. My biggest misstep last year, though, was that I focused quite a bit on older books. I pushed myself to read books that were out of my wheelhouse (some Young Adult, for example, and more non-fiction than I've ever read). Only toward the end of the year did I realize my oversight and start looking for stories released this year.

So, while these nine are my favorite stories that I read published in 2017, there are quite a few more on my list that I intend to read sometime this year. That list includes The Bear and the Nightingale, God's Last Breath, Kings of the Wyld, Red Sister, Jade City, Age of Swords, Godblind, A Plague of Giants, and I'm halfway through the audiobook of All Our Wrong Todays, which may or may not have bumped something off this list – the prose is absolutely beautiful, and the concept is fascinating. That's over a month's worth of reading right there, and releasing a "Best of 2017" sometime in March didn't really feel right.

So without further ado, here are my Top 9 Books Released in 2017.

9. Turtles All the Way Down by John Green
I bought Turtles All the Way Down on release day, one of few books I did this year. I loved each character and consumed this book in two days. Although it's somewhat short, I felt thoroughly satisfied with each character arc and entirely engaged with the disappearance of Mr. Pickett. This is one of those mushy, feely books that reaches out and caresses your heart until you cry – but you don't know if you're happy crying or sad crying because honestly there are just so many feelings to process. I loved it. I enjoyed the emotional journey that John took me on.

8. Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty
Six Wakes was one I was initially hesitant on getting but ended with the most pay off. There's a lot of excellent craftsmanship and prose here, all wrapped around an absolutely stellar premise surrounding cloning and criminals paying off their debt to society by doing public service on a starship. There are lots of great ethical questions, the front-most being how does your society punish lawbreakers when there functional is no death? There are a half-dozen great characters that are each fleshed-out and given life.

7. Killing Gravity by Corey J. White
One of the trends I noticed in 2017 (and continuing into this year) are that novellas are becoming more and more popular. It seems most of them are coming out the Tor.com house, and Killing Gravity is the first on my list to fall into that category. The amount of worldbuilding in under 200 pages is impressive, but the character building that goes along with it turns this book up to 11. If you're a fan of Warhammer 40k, but you want something a bit leaner, without all the extra stuff (or without all the superimposed unnecessary grimdark for the sake of grimdark) – this will be your go-to read, I promise. Mariam can be violent and fierce with her psychic powers, but it's not just throwaway bloodshed.

6. Artemis by Andy Weir
Artemis is the first city on the moon. Weir's book is a look at a heist in this city. What's best about Artemis is the worldbuilding and science that Weir put into making the metropolis feel truly alive. From the engineering behind the spheres that people build in, to the difference in biology that people experience after spending their lives in different gravity. This is explored in other science fiction (like The Expanse), but Weir plays with it in exciting ways. If you choose to experience Artemis, I highly recommend the audiobook. Rosario Dawson voices Jazz, the main character, and the tale is told first-person (just like Weir's previous novel, The Martian).

5. Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero
Holy shit this book is so much fun. There are quite a few different things going on in this supernatural-mystery-thriller that can get you on board, so let me break it down. The first and most important is the words. It's super unique, and at times it can feel a bit forced, but Cantero's prose and structure are absolutely a blast. Some parts were written like script scenes, some parts are written like a stream of consciousness, but it always fits. The second is the nostalgia factor, which is spot-on. If you ever watched and enjoyed any Scooby Doo movie or TV show, you will kill for this book. The whole premise feels like a "What If?" Scooby-Doo, where the what if question is a "Where are they now?" VH1 episode of the Scooby Gang as adults. The final bit to get you on board is Cthulhu. If you like that 1920's-Insanity-is-alive-as-a-monster vibe, dig into this. Please.

4. Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
I took Greek & Roman Mythology in high school, and it was really enlightening to see where a lot of our stories come from, especially to learn about the application of Campbell's Monomyth. Norse mythology has grown quite popular in the last few years (with shows like Vikings and movies like Marvel's Thor) and so reading these stories in a digestible format with the excellent writing from Gaiman exceeded my wildest expectations. Since then, I've started to seek out the mythology and religious stories from several other cultures to try and learn their stories and more about their ways.

3. Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire
The second book of The Wayward Children does not pick up neatly where the first book left off. As a matter of fact, the whole of the events takes place before its predecessor. It also focuses on just two main characters, instead of the ensemble cast of Every Heart A Doorway. Down Among the Sticks and Bones is the second novella on my list (also by Tor.com), but it packs a lot of emotion into each word. Jack and Jill are characters from the first book which have quite a bit of unspoken history and tension built up – and this book seeks to educate and detail just that. By the end of the book, I was torn for these twin sisters who must face a tragic future. Typically, these sorts of "prequel"-like stories are tough to pull off, because you already know how their story goes, but McGuire leans into that and grows the tension off of what you already know.

2. La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman
His Dark Materials has been a favorite of mine for a long, long time. The Golden Compass was one of the first books I read on my own as a child, and it was one of my daughter's first books she read by herself (which she read while I read this in late 2017). Like Down Among the Sticks and Bones, I was hesitant with this book because it takes place before the events of previously published books (prequel syndrome). However, the first book in The Book of Dust series hardly contains characters from the others. Lyra is there, as an infant, and serves more as a plot device than a character. Lord Asriel and Lady Coulter appear but not in a significant capacity. Instead, the story focuses on a little boy named Malcolm and his daemon Asta. Le Belle Sauvage is much more of a spy novel than the others when Malcolm finds a secret message and the secret agent who was meant to get that message finds him. This builds Lyra's world much more and leans into the political and religious arguments present in His Dark Materials.

1. Damn Fine Story by Chuck Wendig
Chuck tells a lot of stories. It's kind of what he does for a living. It's kind of what I want to do for a living. So when someone like Chuck tells you about his process, about the things he's learned along the way, and give tips on writing relatable characters, pacing, etc. you listen. Sure, a lot of that is stuff I've learned before from other outlets like writing conferences, panels, interviews online, etc. And some of it is covered in other books by other famous authors. But there's always something new that you can learn and I'll be damned if I didn't pick up two or three things. I will say this, though. If you're a content creator of any kind (literally, if you have a single creative bone in your body) pick this book up. The last segment has the absolute best advice for creatives. That last portion is relatable and personal, and it had me weeping. Honest.

Re-Scope

Over the last two weeks or so we've been re-watching the Avengers movies for the inevitable release of Avengers: Infinity War. A meme going around mapped out a calendar to watch one film each week to sync up with the culmination of Phase 3 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The MCU movies do quite a few things right; they have great characters, settings, plots (most of the time) but more importantly, they do something that no other film franchise had done before; create a simultaneous and connected film universe that sprawls other films, brands, and series. If you're here, you probably already knew that. The MCU is one of the most groundbreaking and intricate concepts that hits on a previous topic I wrote about; scope.

So, how does the MCU keep pulling these things off correctly? How do they continually up the stakes without letting the scope get beyond their reach 17 movies deep? The answer lies in the diversity of scope. My last post assumed that you knew what scope was – and that was presumptuous of me.

Scope is directly related to the size of the threat or obstacle in your plot. In that original post, my highlighted flaw was with Doctor Who and cited that many episodes over the last several years threaten not only the world, not just the galaxy or the universe but time and space itself. That's a vast scope, isn't it? And that's cool – it's exciting! That's a HUGE threat, and you can write a LOT about it! Here's the problem; audiences tend to want a bigger scope. Once you've threatened all of time, space, every dimension, every alternate universe; what do you have next? What's left for the next episode/movie/book? Not a lot.

The MCU is already (as of this writing) 17 films big. It also spans 5 seasons of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., 2 seasons of Agent Carter, 2 seasons of Daredevil, and 1 season each of Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, The Punisher, and The Defenders spinoff. That's a lot of content to spread around. But, for the most part, the MCU continues to maintain its size and meaning in a lot of ways.

In my original post (here), I wrote a little about the MCU and its strengths and weaknesses in scope. Strength being that all the standalone Phase One movies were very personable and small in scope, which culminated in The Avengers which highlighted the  grand gesture that Marvel was trying to enact while not getting out of hand. The weakness being that Avengers: Age of Ultron didn't really follow that up in the proper scope. Age of Ultron felt much more personable (directly with Ultron being a villain created by Tony Stark) than grand.

So what is the diversity of scope? If scope is the size or obstacle, then diversity of scope is the pan of all the different threats in your story. Most stories have more than one story to follow; in Avengers one of the stories is to get and maintain control of the Hulk while the main story follows Loki and the Tesseract opening a portal to another world. The Hulk is quite the threat, but the size of that threat in this movie is small compared to Loki summoning an alien army.

Let's go back to the Phase One movies. These are all really personal stories about the four main Avengers. Thor follows the Asgardian as he screws up, gets banished from his home, and learns and grows while he struggles to find a way home. Yes, he's a god from another world. Yes, he has a magic hammer. Yes, a giant alien robot comes to Earth to try and kill him. That's a pretty large scope, right? Wrong! Thor only really interacts with a handful of people, his brother Loki doesn't really kill anyone, and that giant alien robot lands in a desert and barely makes it into a town that seems to have less than a thousand people. The world at large is never really threatened or in any kind of actual danger. The scope of the plot is relatively small.

The Avengers, on the other hand, provides a threat (Loki, again, but this time with new toys) capable of laying waste to the majority of downtown New York City and has a great potential for being a threat to the whole planet (enter Chitauri army). The scope is so large that six heroes are forced to come together to manage the threat. This makes the audience feel like there is a real threat. You've seen these characters and how strong, smart, and "super" they are – what force could feel like a threat to one, let alone six, of them?

A lot of you may be thinking; great! But you said the audience always wants bigger! We're 17 movies in and that's only film number 6! How did they maintain the rest? Well, as strange as it sounds, they didn't! This is the most interesting thing about the scope of the MCU. Think about this; after The Avengers was Iron Man 3 which saw Tony Stark explore part of his past. This is a more personal story. It has a bigger scope than Iron Man 2 (who's villain was from Stark's father's past) because it sees Tony struggling with the events of The Avengers. If Iron Man 3 had aliens invading again and upped the stakes from The Avengers why wouldn't Tony have called Cap and Thor back?

The MCU works because each movie is part of a series that's part of a bigger series. Iron Man 3 doesn't want to have bigger stakes than The Avengers. It wants to have bigger stakes than Iron Man 2 which allows it to cheat the audiences' expectations of "what's bigger scope?" This is a wild outcome, and something that seems to be exclusive to this "cinematic universe" format, but is great for storytelling.

Scope is one of my favorite aspects of stories, and it's something I put quite a bit of time and effort into in my work. It's easy to get lost in the story or to just put "cool scenes" in there. But it's important to me that the threat and the obstacles fit correctly into the story I'm trying to tell and the themes I put into my pages. It's fun to right small scope, personal stories that feel deeper and imposing – they're some of my favorites. In a future post, I'll talk about my all-time favorite type of scope.

Wonder Woman Spoilers Within...

Wonder Woman is so good. It might be the best DC movie of all time. Yes, I know it’s nerdy sacrilege to down talk how good The Dark Knight is, but Wonder Woman represents a lot more - and I’m not just talking about feminism, I’m talking about the potential for the DC universe and comic book movies as a whole.

Let’s break down what makes Wonder Woman good. First, Gal Gadot. Gal Gadot is Diana Prince in the same way that Robert Downey Jr. is Tony Stark. Gal Gadot was a good actress before this, if a little underrated. But as Wonder Woman, she hits a stride, she carries herself like Diana, talks like Diana, fights, walks, etc. just like you can imagine Wonder Woman doing. Gal Gadot is gentle, loving, compassionate but at the same time she is hard, assertive and fierce. Gal Gadot makes Wonder Woman jump off the screen.

Wonder Woman also stands for something. This goes back to a previous blog post where I discuss what superheroes are lacking these days; standing for something. I truly feel like Wonder Woman is a blessing because it teaches us that you can be fierce, hard but also loving and compassionate. Wonder Woman is a ferocious soldier, but she doesn’t fight for a war because she is entrenched in patriotism or loyalty to one side or the other; she has no concern of what her actions will do to the economy, she doesn’t care if the British win. She cares that the good guys win.

Patty Jenkins, director of Wonder Woman, also achieves a teaching that George R. R. Martin has been trying to say since 1996. Martin has gone on record as saying that A Song of Ice and Fire was written as a way to convey that evil is done through men - not some mysterious and all powerful dark lord. Wonder Woman has a beautiful and powerful moment between Gadot and the male lead discussing the choices of men. Perhaps there is no God of War influencing men and women, leading the armies and killing innocent. Perhaps men are inherently evil. Diana is so shook by this she refuses to believe. It’s later revealed that Ares is involved, but only as an accomplice; and to the British, not the Germans - showing Diana that men are the problem. And it’s done in such an elegant and powerful way that it leaves you wondering; if Ares was involved, why are there wars after World War 1?

Finally, and this may be a bit more technical, is that Wonder Woman is the first literary superhero movie that makes sense. What does that mean? In the world of entertainment, a lot of people perceive pieces of media as either commercial or as literary. Commercial pieces are made to appeal to as many audience members as possible, have serious moments, teachable moments, laughing moments, fighting moments - and they’re all tailored to a particular market. It’s made to pump out and make money. Think about James Patterson novels, the “next big” series that you’ll forget in five years or most comic books now.

The literary, on the other hand, are made slowly. With time and care. They usually cater to a specific market, teach a specific thing or have a specific meaning. Good literary writers can write about a specific thing and make it feel universal. This is largely the difference between the Marvel and DC films. Most of the Marvel films feel very commercial (that’s not a bad thing, just a different thing) while the DC films tried so hard to be literary - until now.

Congratulations Gal Gadot, Patty Jenkins and the rest of the cast and crew that worked on Wonder Woman. I look forward to seeing what comes next.

Scope, or How Little Should My Story Be?

Stories have a problem nowadays of being too big. This isn’t, inherently, a bad thing - but everyone is obsessed with being much bigger than they need to. Often, stories that are smaller in scope connect with people better and have a much heavier impact.

The biggest modern culprit of being “too big” is Doctor Who. The scope of the show has gone from making an audience care about a time-traveling alien with two hearts to throwing the pacifist into wars where the very foundation of all times and all realities are the stakes. The problem is that since it’s a successful show, and thus a successful product, the producers keep having to face the fact that those stakes need to be played up.

Upping the stakes is a common, and effective, way to keep an audience engaged from episode-to-episode. But there’s a point (all times and all realities, seriously?) where the stakes get too big, and your original stakes get lost. The purpose of the story, and the characters, get lost. Other stories have a plan to control or maintain their scope. Take the Marvel Cinematic Universe for example. Phase One was a great culmination of stakes. All the players had their own personal stories; Captain America and the Red Skull, Iron Man faced an enemy in his father’s company, and In Iron Man 2 dealt with some of the fallout from that and Thor faced his father, his maturity and his brother. Then we get to Avengers where they’re brought together to fight bits and pieces of all three of those things.

But the MCU faltered a bit at the end of Phase Two with Age of Ultron. One of the biggest problems in that movie is that it feels out of place, and the reason why is because it has a scope problem. Ultron isn’t really more dangerous or threatening in the movies. He doesn’t really bring anything more to the table. In fact, many of the standalone Phase Two movies are bigger in scope (Thor: Dark World) than Age of Ultron and even those movies suffer from that because the scope is off-kilter.

So far, Phase Three has wound those problems up. Doctor Strange and Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2 are both fairly standalone, so their scope doesn’t necessarily hurt the rest of the MCU (the exception being the comparison of the first Guardians to the second). Even Captain America: Civil War was a downscaled scope, significantly more of a personal story than an Earth-threatening apocalypse - but that works because it integrated the scope of its surroundings. For as personal and small of a story as Civil War is, it makes sense to the characters and to the setting. It doesn’t need to be a huge monstrous threat to be a good story.

The final scope that I’m going to talk about is the unclear scope. For as many scope problems as Doctor Who has, the most important part of scope is the expectation. One of my favorite shows of all time, Lost, suffers from this. Many people had huge expectations about answers, mysteries, time travel, Smoke Monsters, etc. because that’s what the show presented. But the reality is that Lost is a show about people and their relationships. Yes, strange, crazy stuff happens to them - but the story isn’t about the stuff, it’s about the people.

People expected, and wanted, the scope to be massive and life-shattering, Earth-threatening and stuff like that. And, yes, they had that - but that wasn’t the story they were trying to tell.

Scope should be looked at as small, instead of large. How small can you make it while still having a deep impact? If you need a large scope for the story you’re trying to tell, the villain you’re trying to make real, or the characters you’re trying to relate - then do it. But try not to have a big scope for the sake of having a big scope.

Superheros And What They Stand For...

Superheroes used to stand for something. That isn’t to say that heroes don’t mean anything anymore, or that they don’t stand for anything. But it’s hidden under layers of marketing, 50+ years of continuity and an attempt to sell nostalgia instead of a true attempt to stand for something. Superheroes are often glorified commercialization now.

A recent conversation with another writer got me to thinking about what I loved about comics and superheroes as a kid and whether or not the fundamental joy is still there. And if it isn’t, why do I throw $30 or more a week at my local comic store (other than it being an awesome store)?

I like reading about superheroes because I like being a part of something. A lot of the stuff that I read is discussed with like minded individuals. I interact with lots of comic fans at my work (both co-workers and people I do business with), and so the conversations are great. I also belong to several comic-themed subreddits. I remember during Blackest Night there was so much conversation Wednesday nights and Thursdays when I was a kid after the comics hit the shelf. It was amazing to feel like you were part of something. This is the same joy I got from watching Lost live.

On top of that, a lot of the characters were relatable and allowed me to feel super by putting myself in their shoes. This is great for me, but a lot of people don’t feel this one is accurate. This is definitely a personal truth for me, and I recognize it’s not a universal truth. Clearly I can’t relate exactly to a space alien who’s invincible and recharges with the sun, but I did relate to growing up in a small town and learning a lot morals the same way that Clark did.

Most importantly, superheroes used to be deeper in the same way things like A Series of Unfortunate Events and Lost are deeper. On the surface, they’re very commercial products meant to sell their brand, just like comics. But they were always deeper. Lost isn’t just about this island with great mysteries and time travel and polar bears. Those are elements that help tell a story about a dozen broken people who get a second chance and how they deal with being put on an island. Just like Superman isn’t about an invincible man flying around the world beating up bad guys with no problem - Superman is about a man who struggles with his morals constantly, who tries to be a beacon of hope in a shitty world. Yea, Lex Luthor is a genius mastermind with a power suit and they have some good fights. But Lex Luthor is also a morally corrupt selfish politician who tries to manipulate people to get his way - that’s why he’s a good villain.

And that’s what a lot of comics now have lost. With 50+ years of continuity and storytelling, comic publishers are looking for hooks to sell characters that have been wrung dry. This means getting away from the moralistic tellings of old comic books and trying whatever’s new or “flashy”. And that creates a problem. If in your first arc the big threat is to the city, then your next arc has to be bigger - the thought is that if the stakes aren’t higher than your story isn’t growing. Eventually, you get to what I call the Doctor Who fallacy where your threat is so big it’s kind of ridiculous.

The reality is that a lot of the best comic stories are personal, or have an underlying moral or point instead of just saying “every timeline is at risk if we don’t X”!

I could go on about this, but instead this is where I’m going to talk about my next book. Right now I’m calling it Firestarter and it’s the start of a Young Adult Superhero series. The first draft is about halfway done. There’s a lot of superhero ideas still out there, and this series is going to capture a lot of those ideas while pairing them with interesting, modern themes that will hopefully reach a new generation of superhero fans!

Stephen King, Character and Endings

About 8 years ago I wrote a short story called Stephen King is the Anti-Christ. I wrote it on a cruise during my first honeymoon. I had brought one of his short story collections to read with me on the plane. The story came to me as sort of a meta-poke at King in his Dark Tower series and the book Misery. It was a story about an author who tried over and over again to get published and when it eventually happens he is drowned in popularity and keeps pumping out books at an unreal rate.

The catch is that the writer has sold his soul to the devil to become insanely popular, but now his books are coming true and coming to haunt him. At the end of the story the writer takes his place at the right hand of Satan to become the anti-Christ and begins writing the events from the Book of Revelations. It was a lot longer than most of my other short stories (about 40 pages), and the name of the character in the book wasn’t named Stephen King (admittedly it was something like Steve Krall).

I want to love Stephen King. I’ve read his On Writing a dozen times. I’ve read the books in The Dark Tower series a few times (except for The Wind Through the Keyhole and The Dark Tower, which I’ve only read once each). I still work my way through his other works, I follow him on Twitter and Facebook and I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am for his upcoming Hulu show Castle Rock.

But, if I’m being honest with myself, his writing varies so wildly that I find myself curious how he got so popular. So I’m going to dissect a lot of King elements, and I’m going to start with what he does best: unparalleled to anyone else in the industry, characters. For the most part, King can make some killer characters. They’re super deep and have these absolutely stellar conversations, ticks and backgrounds. There are a few exceptions (I’m lookin’ at you Wendy Torrence you boring old bat) but for the most part King crafts so many great and wonderful characters that you feel like you could know them.

What is King not good at? Info dumps. One of the reasons some of these characters are so well crafted is because King will often pause the main narrative to force feed you facts and histories. Often paragraphs at a time. A lot of his post-2000’s books minimize this, but it’s still present.

As a matter of fact The Shining is one of the biggest culprits of this and it takes thirteen chapters for the family to actually arrive at the hotel. That’s right, the first thirteen chapters are mostly comprised of Jack interviewing, coming home, talking to his wife briefly - and King telling you about his characters. Does this work? Yea, sure. It’s King, he can break the rules, right?

We were listening to The Shining on Audible on our way to a book signing (I hope you got out for Bookstore Day last weekend), and about 2 hours in I paused it and had a discussion with my wife. The crux of the conversation being: if King’s name wasn’t on this, would you still be reading it? The clear answer was no.

The last thing that King does that I’m going to talk about is something that I do. It’s something several agents that I’ve queried and submitted to have said I’m doing wrong, and it’s something I’m very mindful of. Head hopping. This is a term that writers (and agents, and editors and publishers) use when they refer to changing point of view in writing without some kind of break.

King is the king of head hopping. It can happen a dozen times or more per chapter and without any kind of word break (like a page break, switching chapter or anything) if poorly done it can leave the reader confused. I’ve been told this dozens of times in the last ten years. When asked what point of view, I used to always say ‘third person’, but after the first few times I changed to be more specific: ‘third person omniscient’. Omniscient points out that the piece of work doesn’t have a single narrator, but instead encompasses multiple narrators, that the narrator is all knowing somehow or (more commonly) the narration of the story is not limited to a single point of view.

And here’s the catch. Even after that change agents will still ask for my submission and be caught off guard, or turn me down based on the fact that there’s head hopping. I’ve been pretty upset by this, but I’ve also asked a few agents about this and had some really thorough discussions on this - some have been able to say that head hopping isn’t for them and it’s just a taste thing (which I respect), while others flounder with their response or just don’t answer at all.

So to wrap this long winded post up I want to share the only bit of advice that King has in On Writing that matters: not everything works for everyone, find what works for you and stick to it.

Hidden Information and Expectations

There are lots of tough moments in being a writer. In addition to struggling over word choice, sentence structure, etc. there are certain expectations that writers don’t necessarily know they’re supposed to follow, the most obvious one being word counts. Lots of genres have different agent and publisher expectations of word count. This information is readily available on the internet (through a few different outlets with a little wiggle room in answer). It’s not put in front of the author. Even in agent submission websites. They will say they’re looking for Science Fiction but the hidden information there is that they expect the manuscript to be between 90k and 125k. While a different website recommends a much narrower 100k to 115k words.

Another difficult thing for writers is removing work. Often writers will remove up to 50% of their original manuscript in order to get it to the goal, make things more fast paced, improve the flow of the manuscript or (literally) hundreds of other reasons. This is often referred to as “killing your darlings” because we’re a bunch of people who want to rub elbows and tell inside jokes.

This often comes after spending weeks or months writing a draft, reading it, making some minor changes, giving it to critique partners, etc. Then someone points out that “X doesn’t particularly make sense”. X happens to be something you peppered into your manuscript at the beginning, so you have to remove it or change it so it does make sense.

Sometimes, though, changing that element doesn’t work. You spend hours (or maybe days) talking with people about how to change that particular element and how you can make it work. Sometimes you need to just step back, look at the big picture, and kill your darlings. Save that element for a different project, or perhaps a sequel.

There’s a third option. Shelf the project. Make notes, so you don’t forget what you were trying to do. Put it on the shelf and wait. Wait a month. Three months. Do another project. Keep working. Pick up your problem project when you’re done. Yes, it means that the project will take longer. Shigeru Miyamoto, Director of Nintendo and designer of the Legend of Zelda games once said “A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever.” The same is true about books (and most other media, I imagine).

Here’s the important part; for readers and authors alike: this is okay. Books can be delayed. There’s a huge taboo in the world of entertainment right now about the delay of things. About how long it takes George R. R. Martin to write the next A Song of Ice and Fire books. About how far pushed back the next season of Westworld is. These are fine.

We like this content because of its quality. When we give less time to creators to spend on a project, we’re sacrificing quality for instant gratification. It took years to make Game of Thrones, and even more to make A Clash of Kings. There were two years a piece between the first three books, five years between A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows, and another six years before A Dance with Dragons! And it’s already been six years since then!

I have shelved a recent project. It broke my heart to do so. But the book will be better off in the long run because I did that. It was exhausting. I felt like a drug addict being walked in on while using. Like having all the puzzle pieces but not knowing the end result.

So a few weeks ago, I started something new.