Absurdism & the Feud of the Robins

Here where we are in PA, spring is basically over and summer has arrived. The cherry blooms are past, the lilacs are gone, and most of the trees are fully leafed out. Josh (spouse) has started mowing the lawn multiple times a week, and with this new activity has come the annual feud of the robins.

Have you ever noticed that robins look a bit angry? It's something about the white feathers around their eyes, I think. Anyway, while Josh is mowing, they watch with that angry glare—his ever present, ever wary nemesis. 

And when he's not mowing, they'll come close to the house, looking for worms and bugs, and because I look out the windows all day while I'm working, I take up-close photos and text them to Josh. To show him how they're encroaching on his territory.

It's all quite amusing. 

We have a lot of birds around our house—blue jays, woodpeckers, cardinals, chickadees, mourning doves, hummingbirds, tree swallows, grackles, wrens, thrashers, sparrows, orioles, crows, the occasional raven, and a big hawk that lives in the woods at the bottom of the hill. But none are quite as audacious and snarky as the robin.

The whole feud is a bit absurd, and I don't mean absurd in the sense of "ridiculous" (though it is that), but in the philosophical sense of The Absurd (in the Albert Camus sense). 

Absurdism is one of my favorite philosophical constructs. If you're unfamiliar, absurdism has two primary presuppositions: 

1. Humans innately crave ultimate, universal meaning.

2. Ultimate, universal meaning does not exist. 

Albert Camus, who originally wrote about this in the book The Myth of Sisyphus, suggested that the conflict between these two ideas is inherently ridiculous or absurd (hence why it's called absurdism). His solution to this conflict essentially boils down to acceptance: acknowledging ultimate meaninglessness in everything we do, despite the longing for meaning, and choosing to live our lives to whatever "the fullest" means for us. He used the example of Sisyphus, whose punishment for being a generally terrible person and cheating death twice, was to roll a boulder up a hill in Hades over and over for all eternity.

From The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus: "Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe now without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of this mountain full of night, alone forms a world. The struggle itself to the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

What does this all have to do with robins? Well, the robins come around every spring. Without fail. They glare from a distance, watching as Josh cuts the grass and pulls the weeds and trims the bushes. Year after year after year. 

And every year, Josh glares back. "Damn robins," he says to me, and we both laugh. 

We laugh because we know it's meaningless. Despite the fact that it feels meaningful. 

We laugh because we made up this story, and this story brings us joy, and the joy makes our lives feel meaningful, even if it's not.

We laugh because it's absurd, in all the best ways.

In the same way, I write book after book after book, and draft newsletter after newsletter. I wake up every morning and feed the cats; I move the laundry along; I make dinner. And even in the repetition, in the sameness, in the rolling of the same old rock up the hill, there is contentment.

Writing Tips (Sometimes): Selling Books In Person

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Me and my 7th anniversary gift from Josh: a 280 million year old (!!!) piece of petrified pine from AZ!

I went to a comic con a few months back and over the course of the three-day weekend, I sold 18 books. So yeah, not my best sales day ever.

I’ve done a lot of events over the years, particularly in my earlier author days. I’ve done everything from large and small book signings to comic cons to craft fairs to outdoor festivals, and holiday markets. I’ve sold 0 books at some, and once even made around $1200 at a 4-hour craft fair. I’m not sure where it came from, but for a long time, I had it in my head that if I wanted to be successful as an author, then I had to do in-person events.

But there’s a problem with this logic. And the problem is the math.

The key to a successful business is profit. And with books, we’re talking profits of roughly $0.35 - $10 per sale. This means that to make profits of $50,000 per year, you’d have to sell in the range 10,000 books or more.

Even if you did an event every single week of the year, you’d have to average 190 sales per event to even come close to making that amount of money, and that doesn’t account for event fees, which range from $20 - $500 per event, gas, hotel fees, transaction fees, and table set-up supplies. In addition, you have to purchase enough upfront inventory to have to sell, which if you use print on demand and can order books at $3 per book, will still require tens of thousands of dollars in upfront cash.

In addition, every single sale has to be handled by you. If you only have one book, then each sale is simply that: a sale. You need a new customer for every single purchase, which means not only do you need 10,000 sales every year, you need 10,000 new customers.

And if you want to scale, then you have to look at other models—hiring people to sell for you (which costs money), selling through bookstores or malls (where you have to share profits), or partnering up with other authors to have more inventory available for potential customers (which means they may be poaching sales from you).

Every efficiency you add in will cost more money or take away from your profits.

If you’re bored by all the math, I don’t blame you. But the conclusion you should draw is that in-person events aren’t a great way to make a living wage from selling books because they’re extremely difficult to scale.

I definitely think they have a place in a larger context. Being visible in your local community is great, and developing relationships with readers always has value. Getting newsletter sign-ups or developing relationships with other authors can also have immense value.

Just make sure you understand the numbers before you go all in on traveling from event to event in an attempt to make money.

Did you know cats can get acne? Yep. Our beloved Wilfredo Potato gets blackheads all over his chin. We lovingly call it “catcne” lol.

Spring Swarm Season!

I have very exciting news! When we were at the dog park the other day, we saw a swarm of bees! It had just landed on a tree branch, only about six feet off the ground. There weren't too many people around, which was good, because a lot of people are afraid of bees. 

I called several local beekeepers, and finally got one to come and collect the swarm, so they have a new home. I was very relieved to hear about it.

You may not know this about me, but I grew up in a beekeeping family. My dad has had beehives for as long as I can remember; I can't tell you how many times I got stung on my feet because I walked around barefoot constantly. Every year, I would help him with the honey harvest, and he often would take me out on swarm calls. As I got older, I helped with colony removal from buildings, attended a couple conferences with him, and helped with bee events in different capacities. 

Seeing the swarm at the park, hanging out with it for a bit, and warning dog owners not to get too close, made me awfully nostalgic. I'm reasonably certain I'll never have my own bees. They're a lot of work. And expensive to get started with. 

On the other hand, you never know. Perhaps the call will grow too strong and I won't be able to resist. 

Since I'm writing about this, let me give you a few tips in case you encounter bees in your springtime travels. First of all, if you're allergic, please carry your EpiPen when you're wandering around outside. There are several varieties of bees that live in the ground, and if you step on their house, they will sting.

If you see a swarm settle onto a branch or bush, and it seems like a weird spot for a lump of bees (this is more likely to happen in the spring), leave it alone and call a beekeeper. These bees are probably not going to be aggressive, so don't panic, but it's still best to leave them alone. They are wild animals. You can search "X County Beekeeping Association" to find the closest beekeepers to you. They often have a "swarm call" list on the site, with at least one phone number. You can call 911, and sometimes they will help, and sometimes not. Beekeepers will usually retrieve these bees for free, at least if they're not too hard to get to.

If you come across bees and they seem to be flying in and out of some kind of hole—in a tree, a wall, a garage, a log—or if you see any comb, this is probably a colony. Definitely keep your distance and call a beekeeper. This is likely their home, and they will defend it if they perceive you to be a threat. Beekeepers often charge to remove these colonies from various locations, even if they are honeybees. This is because it is significantly more work to uproot an established colony than catch a swarm, and the bees will likely be somewhat aggressive as they are defending their home.

Bees are great. Don't kill spring dandelions. Buy honey locally!

Anyway, all that said, I love bees and hope you do too. I plan to incorporate beekeeping into a future book, but I haven't quite committed to whatever that will look like yet. 

How To Pants A Novel

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My next book for writers is here! Technically, it was here two months ago, but I was so busy, I didn’t have a chance to announce it.

It's called How To Pants A Novel.

Blurb: 
If you've spent much time in the writing community, you've probably run across this question: "Are you a plotter or a pantser?" Plotters plan and organize their books ahead of time, while pantsers "write by the seat of their pants"—or, in other words, wing it.

But how? How does that work? How is it possible to just sit down and write a book?

The short answer is: it's not. There is a lot more that goes on in a writer's brain than just sitting down and writing a book. Even if that's what it looks like from the outside.

How To Pants A Novel is an explication of my experience as a lifelong pantser. It explores what the process of pantsing a book might look like, delves into the intricacies of crafting a story on the fly, and answers a few common questions often posed to pantsers.

Pantsing is a less frequently discussed method of writing a book, but for many writers, it’s the only way that works. And if you’re one of those writers—or if you’re not sure what kind of writer you are—hopefully this book will help you better understand and refine your own process into something that works the best for you.

You may be familiar with the concepts of “plotting” and “pantsing,” which are both different ways of thinking about how to approach the process of writing a book. Plotting essentially means “to create an outline of the book before beginning to draft it” and pantsing means “writing by the seat of your pants”—in other words, winging it with no outline. And for those who split the difference—they're called plantsers!

Different writers have different brains, and different brains work better with different methods. Outlining and organizing a story before beginning the drafting process is really common, and there are tons of books about it. Pantsing is less common, and there are far fewer books about it.

So I decided to add my perspective into the mix.

This book explores my own process of pantsing—or intuitive writing or discovery writing, as politer people than I like to call it.

Now, many books on plotting, for example, aim to give other writers a definitive process they can follow on their own. But that is not what I attempted to do with How To Pants A Novel.

I think there is this (false) idea that pantsers simply “sit down and write a book” and just like magic, a fully formed manuscript appears. But this isn’t true. There is a lot going on behind the scenes that is invisible to readers, and also to other writers watching a pantser work. 

So my goal was to explicate my own process, so that perhaps other pantsers would see some similarities with their own process, and maybe find ways to improve it or create efficiencies for themselves, and be encouraged to embrace pantsing—if that’s the right method for them; and to the contrary, encourage other writers to embrace outlining or explore the gray area between, if pantsing is the wrong method for them.

All that said, How To Pants A Novel is now available! And if you feel so inclined, please consider leaving a review.

If you would like an entry into my writing for writers, the first book in the series, How To Build A Book Marketing Strategy, is free!

The Five Types of Cliffhangers

There is a lot of talk about cliffhangers in the writing and reading communities. Some people absolutely despise them, with the passion of an exploding star. Other readers don’t mind them.

This can cause conflict when one reader leaves a review that says “Great book. Ended on a cliffhanger. Can’t wait until the next one.”

It also spawns the age-old question in writing groups: “Can I end this book on a cliffhanger?”

But the problem is, there are several types of endings to a story that people like to call cliffhangers, even if they are all different. And to be fair, the actual definition of a cliffhanger is “an ending to an episode of a serial drama that leaves the audience in suspense” or “a story or event with a strong element of suspense.”

And suspense itself, even if you’re left in suspense at the very end of a story, isn’t inherently a bad thing. But as a writer, what I personally want to avoid, is disappointing my reader.

Suspense, good. Disappointment, bad.

To be clear, I am making up these differentiations myself, based on my own writing and reading experience. I don’t think these are “official” in any capacity. But I do think more nuance around how we communicate about cliffhangers would be extremely helpful. Both so writers know what they are trying to accomplish, and so readers can be more clear about their likes and dislikes with each other.

Type 1: The Truncate

I’m assuming most people are familiar with a typical story arc. There are lots of systems for understanding story, but most go something like this:

Meet Character In World —> Inciting Incident —> Rising Action —> Climax & Resolution —> Falling Action —> The End.

How this plays out within a story is going to be different from book to book and writer to writer. Some have a mini climax and then the true climax. Some stories have “dark night of the soul” moments or “the ordeal”. Some writers like the Heroine’s Journey, others like the Save the Cat method, some like the Snowball.

My point here, is that the large majority of stories have a climactic moment, in which the question asked at the beginning of the book is answered, a realization made, a character arc shifted.

But with a Type 1 Cliffhanger, the book ends before the climax completes. There is no resolution to the story.

In my opinion, when people talk about hating cliffhangers with the passion of a burning sun, this is usually the type of cliffhanger they’re referring to. It’s super frustrating to put all that time and energy into reading a book, only to not find out what happens at the end.

I don’t have a perfect example of this type off the top of my head, though I rather felt Cinder by Marissa Meyers was this type of cliffhanger, but could also be convinced that it was instead:

Type 2 Cliffhanger: An Embankment

Next up we have type two: the Embankment. This is often referred to as a cliffhanger as well, and there is a certain subset of readers who don’t like this either.

An embankment takes place after the climactic moment, and the story’s resolution is still achieved. Often, however, there is little to no falling action, so the book skips right from climax to ending. Problem solved, book over.

In this type of ending, while you do get to find out “what happens,” as it were, you don’t typically get resolution on any of the other threads that might have been woven throughout the book. You probably won’t get romantic resolution, if there was a romance subplot. You might not find out if the MC and her brother got over their fight. You might not even know if everyone survived the big battle.

In addition, there is often no time skip between Book 1 and Book 2, so when the reader begins the second book, the story dives in right where it left off in Book 1.

This is a technique some authors like to use to increase readthrough from book to book, and I think could be considered a technique for building series-level tension.

An example of this is one of my own books, City of Dod, which is book 2 in the Land of Szornyek series. There is a big fight scene and battle at the end where you fight the villain and make some progress on the series goals, but then, the book is over right after the battle ends and there is little to no falling action.

Type 3 Cliffhanger: The Flabbergast

The third type of cliffhanger is the Flabbergast. In this type of cliffhanger, you read through the climax, through the falling action, and then, at the very last moment of the book, something CRAZY happens that is shocking and, hopefully, makes the reader want to pick up the next book. This technique is sometimes combined with the Embankment, making for a double whammy for the reader.

My favorite recent example of this that I have off the top of my head is in Ledge by Stacey McEwan, in which at the last moment of the book (SPOILER INCOMING) one of the main characters is presumed dead in a surprise assassination. So yeah. Very big surprise. And given that there will a Book 2 & 3, the question is: will the character return to life somehow? Or in more colloquial terms, “WTF just happened?”

Type 4 Cliffhanger: Threads

Type 4 “Cliffhangers” are threads, in which the writer deliberately leaves questions unanswered that tie the story together from one book to the next.

Truthfully, I don’t think most people confuse threads with cliffhangers most of the time. But sometimes, especially in long, epic series, there are BIG threads left unresolved at the end of a book that might occasionally look or feel like a cliffhanger, especially if the reader was particularly invested in that specific subplot.

Most long series have threads. Just look for a question posed at some point in the book that wasn’t answered. Bigger threads tend to be posed earlier; smaller threads tend to be posed later in the book. The one thing that all threads have in common, is that the key question is asked in one book, and then answered in a later book.

Type 5 Cliffhanger: Fizzlers

This last type of “cliffhanger,” aka Fizzlers, I’m not really sure I’d qualify as cliffhangers at all, but I do think the occasional person uses the term this way, so I’m including it.

Fizzlers can look like a lot of things. They can have the resolution happening offstage, so you don’t see it. They can have unbalanced, disappointing rising action and climaxes—like when you’re playing a video game, do all the work to get to the final boss, only to kill the final boss in like five seconds. Sometimes, instead of making forward progress on solving their series arc problem, the characters go backwards. Sometimes a favorite character is killed off.

A disappointing ending is not necessarily a cliffhanger, though a cliffhanger can be disappointing. Unfortunately, some stories are just… not what we’d hoped for.

And that’s okay. Not every story is perfect. Not every story is for every person. Not every story is for us.

Can I Write A Cliffhanger?

If you are a writer considering writing any one of these five types of cliffhanger, and you’re tempted to drop into a group and ask, “Can I write a cliffhanger?” let me save you the trouble.

The answer is: yes. You can do whatever the hell you want. If you think a cliffhanger is the best choice for the story you’re telling, do it.

Sure, some readers might not like it. But you’re not writing for them. You’re writing for your readers.

Can I Hate A Cliffhanger?

And if you’re a reader and you hate the cliffhanger ending of a story? I’m sorry.

Us writers are just people too. Nothing we create is perfect.

But, if you leave a review, I hope you clarify precisely what type of cliffhanger it was, so that readers who do enjoy that sort of thing will still try it.

And I hope the next book you read is exactly what you were looking for <3