Firstly, I should point out that Createspace is entirely free to join. They don’t spam you with ‘You haven’t visited us in 30 hours and we’re sad, so we’ll kill puppies until you log back in‘ emails like Facebook does, so there’s no downside in signing up. You can do that and not use any of their paid services, and that means you can poke around a little and familiarise yourself with the site. Feel free to do that here and pop back.

Let me give you a quick summary first: I think that Createspace is a valuable, powerful tool, and even more so because it’s free. However, like all good tools, you need to use it intelligently and with awareness. Approach consciously.

Content Creation Is King.
This is a phrase used by people who spend their professional lives working on the Internet. It means several things, but chiefly, the most important thing you can do on the Internet is produce quality content. All the other things – design, marketing, promotions, social networking – all of these things are great, but content is what’s going to make things happen.

Write-Thing is focussed on just that: getting you to create content. Damnit, people, I want you to write. And then I want you to do something with that writing. The aim is not, nor has it ever been, to turn you all into professional writers. But if you put some artistry, some sweat, some tears, some blood into your work…

Then it deserves to be seen.

What matters is your ability to create good art, distribute it, and engage in your communities.
At the end of the day, traditional publishing is one way of going about that. It means you get the support of people whose jobs revolve around helping you to succeed. In downsides, the barrier to entry to that arena is extremely, extremely high – less than 0.01% of submitted novels end up getting published. If you can balance skilful writing with cheap access to it, there are thousands of people who will want to read your book.

People love reading good stories. They love content. I love listening to music that sparks an emotional reaction from me. I love movies that do the same. Books are the best, of course – I’m a little biased, I’ll admit – but what matters is, in the end, the quality of your work.

No great novel ever got appreciated sitting in a drawer. Creating something great is one part of the battle. Giving people an opportunity to see your work is another. Remember that if you’re genuinely satisfied with the quality of your writing, especially if others have given the same opinions, you might be ready to show the world your stuff.

The Stigma Of Self-Publishing.
Traditionally, self-publishing has had a bad rap. This is because, for a long time, self-publish (or ‘vanity publishing’) was the purview of really shoddy writers who, after the Nth rejection by actual publishers, decided that their work was just misunderstood, and the instant that their book was printed, millions and millions of people would be amazed and tell all their friends about it.

Now, this has actually happened in some instances. The instances are few and far between, but self-publishing has been known to spread through word of mouth and produce some pretty badass authors. One of my favourite adrenaline writers, Matthew Reilly, did just this, and now he sits in an opulent mansion, throwing luxury cars at passersby with a solid gold trebuchet. Amanda Hocking does the same, except she spends most of her time being served diamond milkshakes by a robot butler from the future.

The Problems With Ego.
However, the sad reality is that for a long time, self-publishing was mostly an exercise in vanity for those who couldn’t get their work up to a professional standard. Rather than put in the hard yards and really hone their craft, they decide that their best bet is to publish the work themselves.

Commonly, many self-publishing authors have thought that they were misunderstood or maligned by editors at large presses, or that publishing was some vast conspiracy* designed to keep an elite few in ‘the loop’ and not let anyone else in. These things could be true. It could also be that the vast majority of work submitted to agents and editors is nowhere near a professional standard.

In addition, some small presses smeared the rest with a bad reputation after doing some dodgy stuff. Because so much of being a published writer is an ego thing, some companies took advantage of people’s desire to be published by passing off expensive ‘editing’ services, dodgy contracts, ludicrous pricing, etc.

So what’s changed? The rise of e-books, corresponding with an increasingly global market, has meant that self-published writers can interact with their audiences and potential audiences on a scale that’s never been seen before. This has flooded the industry with opportunity, and it’s up to you how much you want to take for yourself.

The Rise Of E-books.
This existing state of affairs continued relatively unchanged for some time. Self-publishing was the arena of the poet, the writing-for-friends-and-family author, and a few entrepreneurial souls who’d sell copies out of the boot of their car. The covers were glossy and awkwardly constructed, the bindings poor, and the paper often smelled suspiciously of damp basement.

Luckily for everyone, The Internet Happened. Suddenly, we’re all living in the future! Hyperlinks everywhere! And what’s this? An explosion in the popularity of tablet-sized devices? This means that people are carrying near-ubiquitous devices around with them, the perfect size for reading? And text files are barely even a relevant size anymore. Hmmm…

The Proliferation of E-Books.
It didn’t take long for Amazon, the 1300-pound gorilla of the selling-books-and-now-pretty-much-everything-else-to-people game, to kick their efforts in with the Kindle. Now, I’m not going to go into Kindles or why they’re more or less awesome for various things, but they definitely are popular. Especially great for taking away on holidays or on long trips, being able to pack 17 bagillion books into the one device makes for less straining with a suitcase of dead tree every time you want to pop to the beach for a holiday.

The other great thing about e-readers is that the overhead of digital objects is near-infinitely lower than that of physical objects. A digital book, cover and all, can be beamed to your computer in a few seconds, doesn’t age, doesn’t tear, can’t be misplaced, and can be created on demand. There are no physical items that have to be stored, shipped, unpacked, displayed, mulled over, and eventually purchased.

Click!
Done.

E-book Pricing.
As such, the prices for e-books tend to be a lot lower than their physical counterparts. How much lower? It does vary, but many beginning authors, especially those taking a self-publishing route, like to price their work at the lower end of the scale. Amazon lets you publish books through them with a minimum price of $0.99, which is about as cheap as a book can get.

How to price e-books is a matter of some controversy and discussion, and there are good points made by all sides. Some people advocate pricing books as low as possible. After all, it’s easier to buy a $1 book on a whim than a $20 book. People love cheap stuff!

Building a Reputation.
The advantages to this method are clear. Firstly, it lets you rapidly build up a fan base – assuming your writing justifies it – and people will happily recommend and buy books at such a low cost point.

If your aim is to sell books, not to necessarily make a profit, then low pricing could work very well for you. Many self-published authors I know take great pleasure from checking their sales stats and seeing that they’ve sold 30 copies of their book in a month. Not a world-changing number, but for one person who loves talking about their stories and interacting with their readers, it’s a great result.

There are arguments for pricing e-books higher – increased royalties, ‘prestige’ pricing – ‘My Book Is Worth More Than A Dollar’ mentality – but in the interests of brevity we’ll save that discussion for another time.

Social Media.
The other thing that’s grown on the Internet over the last few years is that of social media and social networking. Yes, Facebook has been a real game-changer, folks, and it’s easy to see why. People announce their engagements and pregnancies on social networks these days, folks. That’s a good sign of how normal online networking is for most people.

This is brilliant. Because, as social media becomes more and more prevalent in our lives, the makers of it get better and better at getting more and more people to use their services. By making their programs a combination of entertaining and useful, companies like Myspace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Goodreads, Library-Thing, etc, gain more value out of their users.

This increased focus on creating communities can help out an aspiring or breakout writer immensely. By being able to both connect with people with similar interests – something that all good social media networks will assist you in doing – and by being able to talk to, and share with, those people, you create opportunities to spread your work amongst people who will enjoy it.

Createspace = Creating Opportunity.
So let’s zoom in from our 10,000ft view and think about how this applies to you. If you’re looking at Createspace seriously, then you’re considering the self-publishing route. This, to me, indicates that you’ve put at least some thought into what you want out of publishing your work.

Is it acclaim? Fame? Money? Then you’re going to have to work very hard indeed. There are no surefire ways to success in any artistic endeavour, particularly writing fiction. Very few authors make it to mega-stardom level – JK Rowling, Dan Brown, and Stephen King are the only household names that spring to mind from recent years. That’s a dozen, at a stretch, out of thousands of published authors every year, out of tens of thousands of people who can’t be accommodated by traditional publishing methods.

If you think that starting to produce some work could be a good thing – whether to build a reputation, get feedback, or simply see how writing as a published author treats you – then Createspace is going to do well for you.

Independence and Decision Making.
Although Createspace does massively streamline much of the production process, the end quality of your product is going to still, largely, rely on you. Your choice of cover image, font, layout, parsing, etc will all have a measurable impact on the success of your work.

If you’re not keen on making those sorts of decisions, and want to stick purely to wordsmithing, then you can either pay a professional to do some of that work for you, ask a friend with appropriate talents (Particularly common in the cover-design field. Watch out for zealous friends without a good understanding of copyright laws. Google Image Search is not your friend when designing a book cover), or strike out on your own and fumble your way through.

If you want expert, professional guidance along every step of the way – editing, marketing, etc – or for those decisions to be made by other people, then traditional publishing feels like it might be a better fit for you. Remember that with all the advantages of a no-barriers-to-entry system like self-publishing comes the responsibility of making sure your work is presented in the very best possible way.

Reaching an Audience.
Createspace is designed to work fluently and fluidly, allowing creating artists to get their stuff up and out onto the Internet in one of the largest marketplaces available – the Amazon.com network.

The biggest advantage Createspace offers is the streamlined book production process. If you’ve already gone about creating a nice pdf file, replete with high-quality cover and blurb, then it couldn’t be easier. Literally about 20 minutes of filling in a few forms and options, and you can be done – your book will be all ready, sorted, and streaming into Amazon’s marketplace within a very short timeframe.

If that’s the case, then using Createspace makes a great deal of sense. Write it, pack it up, and ship it out: this lets you either work on promoting and distributing the book, or getting started on the next one.

Control: Marketing and Distribution
While Createspace has a (very limited) forum, with some useful thoughts on marketing and encouraging people to try out your book, their help sections are more limited to technical issues – getting paragraphs to sit right, fixing up spacing problems, and so on.

Marketing and distribution of your e-book* is going to be up to you. There’s lots of advice out there on how to best go about it, and I don’t really have much space here – this article has gone on longer than I intended already – but having a plan and a few different options up your sleeve can make the difference between ignominious obscurity and glorious triumph**.

*You can do print on demand, as well, but the market for those is significantly smaller and mostly dominated by large and small print press books .

**Triumph not necessarily glorious.

Your Priority Should Be Writing.
Remember through this that the aim of writing is to write. It’s to put words on a page. All the other things that come with writing are extraneous, and if we can minimise them or cut them out entirely, then we should do it.

The more you consciously write, the better you will become. Finishing one project, taking a deep breath, and starting another is one of the best things you can do. The period between finishing writing something and starting on the next is downtime, and from a writer’s perspective, something best left alone.

Obviously, I’m not saying you should write until you burn out. Rather, that your skills in writing could very well be wasted by spending days or weeks trying to set up distribution for your work.

Clearly, then, a streamlined process of book creation, setting up a blurb, and beginning distribution takes a lot of the mess and fuss out of it all. And this is where Consecrated Sphinx really begins to shine: it’s been specifically set up, and manages to succeed at, letting you get your books and other creative work out into the public’s eye as quickly as possible, allowing you to return to your precious writing.

Becoming An Arbitrator Of Quality.
Only you are the arbiter of the quality of your work. A conscientious writer is unlikely to finish his or her story and assume that it’s word-perfect from the first draft. An intelligent writer will seek feedback from friends, family, and maybe an editor or two if they can wrangle one.

At the end of the day, though, it’s the author’s decision when to let their words out into the wild. Too bold or too early, and the quality of the writing might not be enough to stand out from the crowd. Too timid or too late, and opportunities will be missed.

I wrote a few paragraphs up about the increasing freedom the Internet brings. Unfortunately, this also means that professions and arts with a low barrier-to-entry get massively flooded, so you’re not competing against just the mainstream authors any more, but also the thousands and thousands of self-published authors throwing their hats into the ring.

Createspace is not an editor. It won’t tell you that your pizza-scoffing policeman-alpaca-hybrid-from-the-future mystery-romance isn’t likely to find a large market. It will take what you’ve written and let strangers think that they might want to buy it.

That’s all.

With that in mind, and assuming you have written the definitive policeman-alpaca-etc book, then Createspace is a great way of getting your stuff out there.

Flying Solo.
Doing things on your own creates more decision-making work, but gives you a degree of freedom that’s unlike anything other. Have an idea how to promote your work? Excited by the thought of interviews, blogging, pounding the metaphorical pavement with your work in hand, flinging at all and sundry? Fantastic! Intimidated by it all? There are communities on Createspace that will give you some inspiration… And you can always ask here and I’ll do my best to answer any questions you might have!

No Risk
The final point I’d like to make about Createspace is that it has very little downside. It is free to join. The pricing structures are very reasonable. It’s easy to get involved and get your hands dirty with creating a finished, relatively slick looking product within minutes of signing up. Like I said at the top of the article, Createspace is one tool that’s worth adding to your repertoire. It’s not a panacea, but it can make a significant difference in how you get your writing out into the world.

As always, any questions or comments can be left here or emailed to me using the Contact form.

Cheers;
Pip Foweraker

On a good day.
Sometimes, everything works. You know what it’s like. Some days, you sit down, think quickly about what you’re going to write, take a deep breath…

Time passes…

And you emerge, tired but satisfied, a few hundred (or thousand!) words later, content with what you’ve done. You had some output. Got the article or chapter done. It might need some reviewing, but you can go reward yourself with a cup of hot chocolate and an episode of The Wire.

The Bad Days of Writing
Sometimes, that’s not going to happen. You might not have slept well enough. You might have had an argument with someone, got a depressing email, had a swathe of bills come in. You might have a splinter under a fingernail. You could be cranky. Sleepy. Hungry. Gassy.

Sometimes, a little bellowing can be cathartic.

A Kick In The Writing Butt
Time to get ready for a session. Here is a list of 7 simple things you can do, in twenty minutes or less, that will make get you ready.

1. Go to the toilet
Don’t take anything to read. You don’t want to interrupt yourself later. Don’t rush, but don’t dawdle.
2. Turn off your mobile phone
Go on, turn it off. How long are you going to write for? 2,000 words? Two hours? Nothing is going to need your attention in that time. Turn off your goddamn phone.
3. Turn off the Internet
No, you do not need the Internet. Not even to do research. If you need to research something, put a [placeholder] in what you’re writing and come back later. If the Internet is accessible, then you’ll be tempted to just ‘flick’ over to Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader… And then half an hour will have slid by when you aren’t writing anything. Switch off your modem. Disconnect it if needs be.
4. Grab a glass of water and a snack
No excuses to get up while you’re writing. Your snacks can be as healthy or disastrous as you want. I don’t care.
5. Turn on all the lights
Make sure the writing environment is a happy, productive, warm, welcoming one. Don’t work under a fluorescent light if you can help it. I don’t care if your desk is messy, if the room’s had something explode in it… None of that is important. Feeling good in your writing environment is, and warm, yellow light is the quickest way to achieve that.
6. Experiment with music
Try playing some music. Ideally, you want something that pumps you up but without overpowering lyrics. I’m a fan of Immediate Music, who make nicely generic, trailer-style music for Hollywood consumption. If you think it’s going to distract you, skip this.
7. Set a firm limit and start.
Set a word limit, not a time limit. Make it achievable. 500 to 1,000 words is enough. Make sure you write enough that you can finish, stand up, walk away, and go ‘Hey, today wasn’t the greatest in terms of output, but I wrote something.”

Hit your limit. Even if it hurts. Then stop and walk away. Get a housemate or spouse to high five you.

Fantastic!
You did it! You pushed through an uncomfortable spot and got some writing done. Sure, it might not have been your best, but the important thing is that you did it. You didn’t give in to the fallacy of ‘writer’s block’.

Bookmark this page, or print it out and tape it to the wall. The next time you sit down and immediately feel stuck, look over this list, do it all, and you know you’re on the way to writing success.

What have I missed? What other ways can you think of to push through that feeling of stuck-ness? Write a comment below or email me, editor@write-thing.com

Cheers;
Pip

Here, then, are 15 more things that, if you write about them, will make you cooler than the testicles of a cryogenically frozen Wooly Mammoth.

1. Hallucinations
Hallucinations can come about through a number of ways. They can be brought on by periods of extreme mental and physical stress, by poisons or sickness, or by hallucinogenic drugs, and by mental illness. Each of these avenues to hallucination brings about new cool things to write about, and gives you a boosting point for a story or some of your plot.

Stress: Walking through a desert, dying of dehydration? Classic oasis hallucination, coupled with the phenomenon of mirages. Simply explained… Or is it? Sleep deprivation does strange things to one’s mind. Once, I stayed up several days straight while out camping I hallucinated a complete lounge set, including matching upholstery, sitting on the opposite face of the valley I was camped in. After passing out, it had been mysteriously removed.

Illness: A staggering amount of plants, mushrooms and other edibles are, if consumed in sufficient quantities, both poisonous and hallucinogenic. Often the two go hand in hand; some of the more extreme symptoms of poisoning from several plants include hallucinations before lapsing into coma or death.

Drugs and poisons: Hallucinations brought on by drugs and poisons deliberately consumed or administered can range from a mild shift in the perception of time and colour to full-blown psychotic episodes, where people lose the capacity to ‘see’ reality and envisage things entirely in their own minds. It can be terrifying and traumatising for those suffering the hallucinates, and people on the outside may not be able to effectively communicate with them. Poisons and drugs with hallucinatory effects are usually ingested orally and take some time to kick in, often with milder effects at first and then increasingly intense hallucinations as more of the substance is absorbed by the victim.

Mental illness: People suffering from a wide variety of mental illnesses view the world in distorted ways. Their conditions may be permanent or temporary, and triggered by any number of things. A heightened emotional state. Exposure to something seemingly innocuous. Flashbacks may occur at random. Those suffering both form permanent psychosis and temporary affliction may experience visual and audial hallucinations seeing things that are not real and hearing voices that are not their own It is nearly always a terrifying and deeply unsettling experience.

As you can see, hallucinations can be triggered from a wide variety of sources. How realistic they are to the viewer depends greatly on their mental fortitude and the cause of the hallucinations in the first place. Hallucinations clearly provide fantastic fodder for inclusion in your story.

2. Troglodytes
Darkly muttering figures in caves have had a bad rap in the Fantasy press. Generally represented as dank, dangerous and stupid. Often blind, finding their way about through touch and some sort of weird, unexplained echo-location. Often resembling bipedal slugs. Stupid singly. Dangerous en masse. Cn be tricked into worshipping people who bring sources of light into their caverns. Spread throughout underground networks. Bad-smelling.

3. Bitterness
Bitterness is a sign of a poisoned mind. Something bad has happened to a character, enough to turn their mind towards the darker side of the options presented to them. Bitter characters often speak with the voice of experience, foretelling doom and destruction on more idealistic characters. Bitterness can lead to betrayal; if someone expects to be set upon at every turn, they’ll often take ‘the initiative’ in betraying fellow adventurers. Bitter characters can have their hopes raised and then dashed, leading them further down a path of misery, or they can be redeemed by their own hand or by the actions of others. Adding a level of bitterness to one or two of your characters gives other characters a mirror to reflect their qualities off, and adds an enjoyable level of cynicism and tension to dialogue and group dynamics.

4. Poisons
What isn’t there to like about poisons? With poisons come poisoners, plots, treason, sneaking, suspense, discovery, horror, despair and danger. Who’s been poisoned? How was it administered? Can we denitrify it What about that spectacular death? Poisons get cool names, like Widow’s Kiss and The Barbed Strangler. Poisoners are the lowest of the low, the scummiest of the scummy, universally reviled… And yet extremely useful to the politically minded. Poisons are small, concealable, deniable weapons. Tip a vial into a pot and you poison a mercenary troupe. Dribble a little into your nuncle’s ear and become a king. Throw some scorpions into the sultans bed and marry a grieving princess a few days later. The opportunities are endless.

5. Cave networks
Quick! Hide! Where? In this cave!
So begins many fantastic adventures. What’s in the cave? A tunnel, leading into darkness? What could be in there? Troglodytes? Goblins? Orcs? A dragon? Treasure? Nazis? Carefully-obscured Nazi lookalikes (Thanks, Enid Blyton.)? An escape route? Who knows their way through? Do you have a dwarf in the party? What if people get lost? Can they find their way out? What lurks in the darkness?

Cave networks can be natural or artificial. Mines get made and abandoned, rusted equipment left lying to trip the unwary. The deepest, darkest caves can hold whole hosts waiting in their depths. THey’re very rarely mapped out and signed, leaving adventurers to rely on markings, instinct, memory, air flows, half-remembered guesses…

6. Torture devices
Thumbscrews. Tooth pliers. Eye pokers. Wang Manglers. Sharpened but rapidly growing bamboo stakes. Interpretive dancers. Mind leeches. The list goes on. Once you’ve got a captive, then you’ve got to torture them, right? They might have valuable information. Or you might just want to hurt them. Torture doesn’t need to be all subtle and elaborate traps, Saw style Smashing someone’s feet with a hammer does the job quite well. But if you’ve got a little bit of equipment, preferably laid out with glittering precision on black velvet trays… Well, now you’ve got atmosphere.

7. Minstrels
With a hey-nonny-nonny and a merry ballad, minstrels – particularly travelling ones – add a welcome element of lyricism and history to your story. A minstrel is the perfect excuse to a little bit of disguised info-dumping. Minstrels are inveterate gossips and slandermongers, usually possessed with an excellent memory for names, faces and scandals. That, and they’ll know everyone’s favourite songs – the balladeering equivalent of Baby Got Back. Sneak in the names of a few famous tyrants, castles, battles and victories, and you’ve laid out your world for us in iambic pentameter.

8. Submarines
Water is pretty cool. Travelling on it is even cooler. After all, that’s where pirates come from. But what about underneath the water? Well, now you’re talking. Submarines take us to where humans aren’t meant to go – well, not for more than thirty seconds of pearl-diving, anyway. What lurks beneath the surface of the ocean? Mega sharks? The Kraken? Davey Jones? Rogue submarine commanders, armed with nuclear torpedoes and deadly accents? Submarine warfare is the very definition of suspenseful. Lurking in vents and ocean valleys, hunting prey with invisible pings of echo-location, torpedoes burrowing through the water, sleek and deadly… Ye Olde Submarines have their own unique attractions, too. The image of bespectacled adventurers and scientists peering out at aquatic wonders revealed to them is a fantastic one, and something you can weave into a story of adventure and discovery.

9. Clockwork
Clockwork is all about precision, engineering, delicacy and planning. Clockwork makes watches tick, orreries rotate, and automata shuffle. Clockwork in your story can range from the simple to the complex. A clock in the town square. A simple spring-driven motor on a dirigible. A low-power electrostatic generator. The gubbins of a Victorian Time Machine. You’re only limited by your imagination on this one. Plus, it makes for a fantastic hand-waving device for anything unusual built around the Elizabethan through Victorian era.
“Zounds, man, is that a Demon Machine?”
“Faugh! Stuff your superstitious nonsense, old boy ‘Tis powered by clockwork!

10. Uniforms
There’s nothing quite like a shiny, spanking new uniform. Unless it’s an old, tattered, blood-stained uniform. Uniforms give a sense of identity to a group, and also make them an easy target for the enemy. Without uniforms to distinguish who you should whack with a sword, ground battles would be even more chaotic and messy than they already are. An individual can have a uniform, of course. Usually something either over-the-top balls-to-the-wall all-out impressive, like a Barbarian massive codpiece/black leather straps combination, or something they wear out of habit or allegiance.

11. Maintenance
Swords need sharpening. Cars need inspections. Bows need re-stringing. Lutes; tuning, guns; cleaning, muscles; workouts, moats; dredging. A wooden ship stays afloat by constant, vigilant maintenance. Armies function by constant drilling and practice. Skills un-practiced grow blunt. Lockpicks need to thieve. Master swordsmen need to duel, or at least run through training exercises.

Showing characters maintaining their skills and equipment speaks of where their focus is. A group of hardened men might sit around a campfire in filthy clothes, smelling like a boar’s flatulence, but ten gets you one they’ll be keeping their blades sharp. Showing a lack of maintenance is just as telling. What does it say when things are left to rot and ruin?

12. Logistics
Logistics are a challenge to work successfully into a story. Often taking a back stage to the action and adventure, a quick thought on logistics is necessary to keep any semblance of reality. Two adventurers strap on some swords and head out into the jungle, unequipped, to find the Lost Gem of NgThungu? Two days later, one’s dying of dysentery and the other’s gotten lost.

Any adventure is bound to end up in pedestrian disaster without maps, food, water, shelter, weapons and all the other things someone sensible would take with them. Logistics are a necessary element of any story. Don’t feel obliged to give us a full-on packing montage, replete with itemised lists of what everyone’s got. This is a story, not reading off a D&D Character Sheet. But give reasonable thought to what’s going to be necessary. Is anything rare or difficult to get hold of? Would the acquisition of it be a worthy part of the story? How much can people take with them? What do they have to leave behind? What will they regret not bringing?
“Boy, it sure would be nice if we had some grenades, don’t you think?” – Jayne Cobb, Serenity

13. Drugs
Drugs do wonderful and terrible things to people. Administered properly, they save lives ease pain, open the mind, relax tension, and take people on journeys that are profound and life-altering. Abused, they can drive people insane, lead to life-destroying dependencies, cost vast sums of money, fund criminals, and end lives.

Very rarely is a drug all positive or all negative. This balance of influences creates enormous tension, especially for this using, administering, creating, smuggling, selling and policing drugs. Medicine and recreational drugs can be bought and sold on black markets all over the world. Drug companies with budgets bigger than countries influence entire governments.

14. Cryptography
This is Neal Stephenson’s forte, but I’m sure there’s something left over for you to play with. Cryptography, the art and science of hiding messages from those who shouldn’t be reading them, is as fascinating as it is complex. From simple letter substitutes all the way up to 1024-bit encryption and beyond to quantum fiddlings, people have wanted to keep secrets as long as there have been lies to tell. A clever code-breaker is an invaluable tool to whoever owns his services.

The military, spies, industrialists, lovers, criminals, plotters, inventors, investors and schemers all have excellent reasons to communicate ideas with a select audience, while being concerned about their messages falling into the wrong hands.

Facing off against them are the code-breakers and cryptanalysts, working furiously to break codes, extract secrets, and take advantage of the fruits of forbidden knowledge. Warning: researching cryptographs will put you in the realms of some scary, and scarily smart, people. Don’t get too sucked in, or you’ll never finish your story.

15. Facial hair
Twirled cryptically. Stroked luxuriantly. Grown ineffectually. Beards and facial hair can be a marker of gentlemanly respect, barbaric danger, manly gruffness, grandfatherly wisdom, grand-vizierly plotting, test-pilot adventurousness, musketeering dexterity, piratical rapscallionism… The list goes on, limited only by design, density, colour, and whatever you can find on the World Beard And Moustache Championship gallery.

Well, that’s enough inspiration for one article! Make sure to check out the updated Ultimate List Of Cool Things To Write About for more ideas, and, as always, your comments are welcome.

You are a liar, and what you’re writing is a lie. It’s a creation, spun from your imagination into sticky threads of semi-truth. You hope that if you weave this well enough, we, your audience, will become enmeshed in it. We’ll gloss over the holes in the web and fill in the blanks from our imagination. If you don’t tell us with conviction, we’ll break free. We’ll say ‘the story didn’t grab me’. We want to get stuck in your story. Make it happen.

I am an accomplished liar.
This is a skill that I’m quite proud of. Many things that I do for fun let me develop my skills at lying. When I play cards, I lie with my face, my body and my words to throw off my opponents. “I’ve got the answer to what you’re doing”, I confidently tell my opponents. I When I fence, I lie with the my sword. I say “Look here while I stab you”. I want you to become a great liar, too.

Believe everything I tell you.

You’re a liar, too.
I know this because a huge barrage of sociological tests tell me so. Lying is a social coping mechanism, a way of us smoothing the way for our relationships to continue. You lie all the time, often unconsciously.

“Have you sent that email to Accounting?”, your boss asks.
“Yup”, you confidently reply.
Crap, I’d better send that email to accounting now.

See? Easy, smooth, no harm done. The email gets sent as soon as the boss isn’t looking. Accounting gets their email. Everyone is happy. Writing a story is simply an extension of this tendency of ours to lie to push the world into a better shape.

Writing is a lie
Writing a story is the best lie you can ever tell. You’re in control of everything. What happens. How it happens. How your audience is going to relax. You can do it free of interruptions, of contrasting views, of arguments. You can rehearse and craft your lie until it’s perfectly indistinguishable from the truth.

And then people will applaud you for it. Think about it. The stories that make your heart sing, the ones that fill you with emotion and keep you coming back for more, are the stellar stories. They are the grand lies that we love being told, being sold on.

Lies can be hard
Anyone who’s watched children’s cartoons on a Saturday morning will know that lying often backfires. It seems simple enough. You tell an easy lie to get out of a hard situation. Then you find yourself needing to tell two more lies to cover the first ones. More people become involved. They aren’t stupid. You build a network of lies, piling them on top of each other, faster and faster.

Then one of two things happen. Either you build your network well enough that everyone accepts your ‘truth’, and you get away with your lies, or the real truth is exposed, and everything comes crashing down around you. In the cartoon, we usually learn a valuable lesson about friendship and listening to adult authority figures. In real life, a crashed pile of lies leaves your friends distancing themselves from you and your relationships suffering.

So don’t think that lying is going to be easy. We’ve all been trained, our entire lives, to accept certain untruths but be suspicious of others. We all want to believe that the vacuum cleaner we buy won’t break down one month after its warranty expires. That it’s OK to tell children that magical faeries exchange money for teeth. That the bus is going to turn up on time today.

The larger lies, though, we’re naturally suspicious of. We want to check out this seemingly amazing apartment before we sign that lease. We intuit that just because something’s ‘fat-free’ doesn’t mean it’s good for us.

The glory of telling a good lie
If you’ve ever told a good lie, an excellent lie, then you’ll know what I’m talking about. People lean in to listen to you. Their eyes gleam with enthusiasm. Maybe you’re telling a favourite story, embellishing a little as you go. Perhaps you’re repeating a bit of slander that neither of you believes is true, but you both want to be.

Your pulse quickens. You speak lowly, earnestly, quickly. You nod, waiting for your audience to nod in agreement with you. Your words fly out of you, searing with the red-hot truths you’re imparting, branding themselves across the consciousness of the recipient.

There are few better feelings in the world.

The best thing about lying is that you can do it, without hurting anyone, and without any ethical concerns, simply by writing.

What is writing?
Writing is a lie that is willingly shared between the writer and the reader. It is part of a secret, unspoken compact that runs like this:

”I will entertain you, and give you a glimpse of something splendid. Another life. Another world. Another time. Trust me.”
“I know that what you’re telling me isn’t true, but I’m going to let go anyway. Take me on this journey.”

When you write a story, what are you doing? You’re pulling something out of your head. The story comes together out of ideas that you have. You put together a plot to glue it all together. Populate the world with characters you’ve imagined. Generally, yo try and make sure everyone has a reason for doing things, somewhere they want to get to, and you think of obstacles to put in their way.

The fact that none of these things are real means nothing at all. For the purposes of storytelling, there’s no difference between you repeating the story of what happened to your mate’s mate’s girlfriend last weekend, and recounting a story of a knight fighting a dragon. Between yourself and whoever’s listening, there’s that same shared experience there.

Practicing lying
Any skill needs a conscious application to improve upon. Writing, and lying, are no exceptions. The better you are at putting your mind into your story, experiencing it as fully as you can, the better you can communicate this to your readers.

Lying for fun and profit
Build worlds in the history of your imagination. Here’s an experiment. Think of a story of an adventure that one of your friends has had. It might be something that happened to them at school, on the way to work, while they were overseas. Recreate the story in your head, except substitute yourself into their shoes.

Imagine you are going to tell the story to someone you’d just met, who doesn’t know that the story is really someone else’s. Try saying it out loud, or running through the story in your head. Rehearse it like the guy from Reservoir Dogs. And what you’ll find is that, with each repetition, small details start to creep into your head.

Your brain is an amazing machine. By taking a story – one that wasn’t yours to begin with -and telling your mind that it actually happened to you, over and over again, your imagination solidifies into something that feels as real as a memory does. This is a fantastic resource for writers.

(Incidentally, this is why so many of us get upset when we see movie adaptations of our favourite books. If you’re read something twenty, thirty, forty times, then you’ve probably got a solid and mostly unchanging view in your head of what’s going on. It’s extremely unlikely that you and the director are going to agree on all the minutiae.)

Convincing yourself
The more you think about your writing like this, the more solid your story will become in your mind. The first, second, third times you run through it in your head, things will still be a little hazy. Motivations might not be clear. The lay of the layout hasn’t occurred to you yet. Some plot holes might prove bigger than you’d thought.

What this rehearsal and revision of the story does is tighten everything up. If you’re telling a story you’ve told an audience a dozen times before, and someone jumps in with an interruption, you answer it easily. You can clarify a point they’re not clear on. Repeat yourself. Focus on a detail that one audience will appreciate more over another.

The same applies to your story. Telling it fluently, as though it’s actually happened, is a matter of convincing yourself so you can then convince others.

Stronger story building
You can see where this exercise is leading. By thinking your stories through repeatedly, you niggle out all the uncertainties. There’s a world of difference between your initial, inspiring idea and the finished product. A good, finished story will be solid, undoubtable. By believing in it yourself, you will add a weight of certainty that will clear away any lingering cobwebs of doubt.

Become an accomplished liar. Tell a story that sells itself to your audience. Convince them, while their eyes dance over your pages, that the world you’ve created for them is as real as the one they’re in.

Go write. And lie consciously.

Stina Leicht’s debut, Of Blood and Honey, is a melding of historical fiction, mythological horror and dark, gritty fantasy. Leicht’s meticulously researched story paints a convincing picture of life during The Troubles, an unusual setting for dark fantasy, but an effective one. The mythology of Ireland has roots extending back hundreds of years, and Leicht draws upon them to create even more trouble for the Irish.

Troubled young man
Liam Kelly is a classically troubled young man. Not only is he growing up in the middle of The Troubles – and if you don’t know anything about the amazingly harsh treatment the Irish have gone through, this book will educate you – but he doesn’t know who his father is. Not only is he brutalised by the authorities, but darkness is creeping into the edges of his world. He has dark flashes, a temper that’s increasingly hard to keep in check, and perhaps something a little more sinister in himself.

To make things worse, Liam is brutalised – physically and sexually – while in prison. He essentially collapses as a person, and this lets the monster in him surface. When it does, Liam starts to drown, losing parts of himself to the dominant force within his own flesh and blood.

Despite these disadvantages, not everything goes against Liam. He works to carve a place in the world for himself, falling in love and working on a family. A priest keeps an eye over him, providing some support and watching over Liam’s growing troubles. His friends and colleagues – workmates and political allies – alternate between ignoring and exploiting his supernatural condition. As the story

Religion and politics
Religion and politics play as important a role in the story as character and mythology. Leicht has done a fantastic amount of research into what life was like for the Irish when the book was set, and talks about that in more detail in a blog post at the Night Bazaar. She makes an analogy to research being like an iceberg of facts floating in the sea of story – mostly submerged, but powerful nonetheless. Leicht’s iceberg is of Titanic-smashing proportions.

Leicht doesn’t waste time with unnecessary exposition. She either assumes that we know enough to get by, or has faith we’ll stick with her. To an extent, this works fine. Leicht is a talented writer and the first quarter of her book pushes along at an excellent place. Her writing is swift and sure, with ventures into a vernacular that opens up a new side of language for us.

When we move into the mystical parts of the story, Leicht lags a little. Her exploration of Irish mythology and history is not as comprehensively immersing as the mundane parts of the book. This is understandable in part, as our hero doesn’t know what’s going on with him until much later. Still, there is ample opportunity through the book when more knowledgable characters occur for some more exposition, and this left me feeling a little unsatisfied.

Comparatively, Leicht’s focus on the political and religious parts of The Troubles is superb. Her attention to detail and representation of actual history is brilliantly done, and she weaves what little mystical elements she shows us into the story deftly and with skill. Leicht’s writing of things like the internment camps, the splitting of communities along religious lines, and the amazingly strong ties of family and tradition that bind Irish families are all outstanding.

The story itself is strong if, as mentioned, a little imbalanced. Time passes quickly and we see Liam having to deal with crisis after crisis. Some of Leicht’s strongest writing is when she shows us how Liam deals with the horrible situations he’s forced into. His moments of weakness, of letting his inner monster surface, have a visceral solidity which make the most powerful scenes in the book.

Relentless darkness
This is not a cheery book. There are no wise men giving quests, no pots of gold, and definitely no leprechauns. And if leprechauns arrive in the next book, I bet they’re cynical and coated in poisonous quills. Like the constant misfortunes and obstacles the Irish face, Of Blood and Honey has a sense of beleaguered resilience about it.

It reminds me of a slightly less cynical Tales of Thomas Covenant. It requires some stamina to get through, simply because sympathy for the hero has us wincing every second page as he is beaten, assaulted and betrayed. The hero is set about on all sides by enemies, some invisible, some plain to see. He has powers that he acquired unwillingly but cannot use easily. His allies flicker and fade, or prove to be unreliable, and his actions puts his loved ones in danger.

A brilliant start
Of Blood and Honey comes across strongly as a ‘part one’, despite not being marketed as such. The climax doesn’t resolve most of the issues raised in the books, only settling immediate problems of survival. Dozens of questions are left unanswered or unaddressed, and a sequel will hopefully expound on the fantastic, if uneven, setting that Leicht has prepared for us. If we can delve a little more into the workings of the Fae and Fallen, explore the mystical world as well as the mundane, then I have high hopes for an excellent series from this talented debut author.

As it stands, Of Blood and Honey is an excellent novel, and one that has me eager for a follow-up. The bleakness of her hero’s life is heart-wrenching, and we can’t help but cheer him on through adversity. My only minor quibble – the leaving-out of such fantastically intriguing mythology and mysticism – stems not from a weakness of Leicht’s writing, but my own enthusiastic impatience to see more of this world she’s crafted for us.

Of Blood and Honey gets 7 mischevious Faelings.

Buy Of Blood And Honey at Amazon