S.G. Browne

Photo by Larry D. Moore

For most of my adult life I’ve believed that when human civilization ended via nuclear weapons, biological warfare, or reality television,  intelligent alien life would arrive thousands of years later to view the aftermath of our hubris and discover boxes and boxes of Twinkies, still fresh and filled with radioactive resistant preservatives.

More often than not this scenario included cockroaches, kind of a post-apocalyptic Hostess orgy, but the Twinkies were definitely going to be in the money shot. And you’re welcome for that image that is now embedded in your brain.

But with Hostess filing for bankruptcy and ceasing operations, I have to wonder if this isn’t another omen that the Mayans were right and the world as we know it will end on December 21, 2012. After all, the tell-tale signs of the end of the world have been coming fast and furious.

First, everyone started wearing Crocs. Then Snooki got pregnant and Dick Clark died. Dick Clark has been overseeing the New Year since the McKinley administration, for crying out loud. Natural disasters hit everywhere: tsunamis and tornadoes and superstorms. Finally, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo debuted on TLC. If that’s not enough to convince you that a giant pile of you-know-what is about to hit the proverbial fan, I don’t know what is.

And now this. The end of Twinkies. The Twinkpocalypse. Twinkiegeddon. Call it whatever you want. But if even Twinkies are doomed to extinction, then what hope does that leave for humanity?

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m buying up all the Twinkies I can and building a bunker out of them. Or maybe I’ll just eat as many as I can and pack myself so full of preservatives that I’ll be impervious to whatever is coming. But I know one thing for sure: my birthday is on December 20, so I’ll be throwing a big party. Just don’t expect me to share my Twinkies.

It’s a BYOT event.

A lot of my friends who have “normal” jobs tend to have misconceptions about the life of a writer. Yes, they understand that I write, but they have these unrealistic ideas about free time and income and alcohol consumption. Okay, maybe they’re right about the alcohol.

I have to admit that I don’t understand what most of my friends do for a living, either. Teachers, dentists, firemen, artists, event planners…Yes, I understand what these jobs entail. But if you’re a retail training communications manager or a senior systems analyst or a director of advertising, I have no idea what you do.  And if you try to explain it to me, you’re just going to sound like the adults in the Peanuts cartoons: “Wah wah wah wah wah.”

I realize that many of my non-writer friends might have the same reaction to an explanation of what I do. So in the name of shedding some light on the life of a writer or, more precisely, debunking notions about the lifestyle, I’ve written up my Five Misconceptions About Writers:

1) All Writers Do Is Write
Most writers today spend a minimum of four hours a day promoting themselves on social networking sites, writing blogs, doing interviews, keeping track of paperwork, responding to e-mails, setting up signings, and updating web sites. So we’re not only writers but marketers, publicists, travel agents, administrative assistants, and web techs.

2) Writers Have Lots of Free Time
On top of the four hours a day of non-writing that many of us do, eventually we have to find time to write. When you add in another four to six hours of actual writing, that often adds up to ten hour days, not including meals. And a lot of writers don’t take weekends off. If you’re a writer with a family, the idea of having free time to just do nothing becomes a work of fiction all its own.

3) Writers Lead Exciting Lives
Writers spend most of their time alone, sitting at a computer, making up imaginary stories about imaginary people. So while our fictional worlds might be exciting, we often need to get out and interact with human beings so that we remember what it’s like to have a real conversation. And conversations on Facebook or Twitter don’t count.

4) Publishing Contract = National Publicity
Even if you’re published by one of the Big Six New York publishing houses, that’s no guarantee you’re going to get any national attention. With hundreds of thousands of titles released by publishers each year (not including self-published books), chances are your book is going to end up struggling to find an audience. After all, there are only so many books that can get reviewed by TIME or USA Today. Sure, you could pay for ads or hire an outside publicist if if wasn’t for Misconception #5.

5) We’re Rolling in Royalties
Unless your name is Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, or one of the other multiple NY Times bestselling authors, chances are you’re not making a lot of money writing. On average, authors make anywhere from $0.50 to $2.50 for every book sold. If you have representation, 15% of that goes to your agent. Since most books don’t sell hundreds of thousands of copies per year, your average published author makes just enough to get by. Or else holds down a day job to help make ends meet.

While there are numerous other misconceptions on which I could elaborate, I’ll stop at five and let you share your own. Or else feel free to share your thoughts on the ones I’ve mentioned.

I know, I know. Halloween is barely a husk of a corpse yet and here we are, talking about Santa Claus and Christmas already. But at least we’ve got a zombie crossover theme to keep us honest. And what better way to celebrate the blending of Halloween and Christmas than with some free signed copies of I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus?

That’s right. I’ve got two copies of my new Christmas zombie novella and sequel to Breathers to give away—signed, sealed, delivered, and they’re yours. So what do you have to do to enter for your chance to win a copy? I’m glad you asked.

For those who are familiar with Andy Warner, the hero of Breathers, you’re aware that he was fond of penning an occasional haiku to deal with his less than glamorous existence. Well, in I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus, he’s at it again.

So following the 5-7-5 syllable format (I know, I know…in traditional Japanese haiku it’s not really syllables, but we’re not in Japan), write a haiku about zombies. Or about Santa Claus. Or about zombies and Santa Claus. Whatever strikes your fancy. Here’s an example of what Andy came up with:

pine-sol bubble baths
mask the stench of rotting flesh
i smell like christmas

But don’t feel a need to emulate Andy. It’s a broad canvas, so grab your palette of words and have at it. Once you’ve created your masterpiece, share your haiku in the comments below and voila! You’re entered. See, wasn’t that easy?

I’ll pick two winners from the entries. If you choose to include more than one haiku, that still counts as a single entry. Sorry, no stuffing the ballot box.

Contest is open wherever Santa visits good little boys and girls. In other words, everywhere. But the contest ends Thursday, November 15, at 11:59pm PST. So no dawdling.

Ready? Set? Haiku!

As I prepare for the upcoming release of my novella, I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus: A Breathers Christmas Carol (coming to a commercialized religious holiday near you October 30), I’ve had a number of people contact me who are confused about the difference between novelettes, novellas, and novels. Well, I’m here to help. Or possibly confuse. I haven’t decided.

According to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula awards rules, the novelette has a word count between 7,500 and 17,500, while a novella runs from 17,500 to 40,000 words. Based on this, the novel, whose length has often been debated, begins at 40,000 words and runs from there up to infinity. Or at least up to Infinite Jest, which comes in at just under 500,000 words.

(Fun fact: According to Listverse, the longest novel ever written was Mission Earth by L. Ron Hubbard at 1.2 million words. Take that, Tolkien.)

For the benefit of providing some reference, below are half a dozen of the more notable novellas written in the English language that fit the SFWA’s definition:

The Call of the Wild
Of Mice and Men
Animal Farm
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
The Old Man and the Sea
A Clockwork Orange

Stephen King has published a number of shorter novellas that run in the 25,000-30,000 word range, grouping eight of them into the collections Four Past Midnight and Different Seasons—the latter of which contains “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” and “The Body,” my two favorite King novellas.

In the afterword of Different Seasons, King calls the novella “an anarchy-ridden literary banana republic” and contends that there shouldn’t be a hard and fast definition of what either a novel or short story should be in terms of word count. He goes on to say: “But when a writer approaches the 20,000-word mark, he knows he’s edging out of the country of the short story; likewise, when he passes the 40,000-word mark, he’s edging into the country of the novel.”

Although King doesn’t endorse the SFWA’s delineation of the novella, the 40,000-word mark seems to be where the boundaries are drawn. So while officially categorized as a novella, I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus comes in at just over 44,000 words (and just under 200 pages), which means that according to both the SFWA and Stephen King, I’ve edged over into the country of the novel.

I hope that helps to clear things up. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some cross-country exploring to do.

In August of last year, I wrote a blog post about dialogue and suggested that any writer or aspiring writer should watch films and read screenplays for a lesson in writing good, believable dialogue. After all, most films are action and dialogue. Except for The Graduate. There’s a lot of comedy there in silent pauses.

But in the same way that movies are great teachers in writing snappy conversations, plays are just as helpful. After all, they’re pretty much all dialogue, so if the dialogue doesn’t work, neither does the play.

I read a lot of plays in college for a scriptwriting class and fell in love with a number of works by Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, though I wouldn’t recommend them unless you’re looking for some heavy themes and a lot of disillusionment and despair. So they won’t exactly take you to your happy place. But the dialogue is excellent, especially A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

But my favorite plays, naturally, fell more along the lines of the comedic and the absurd—like Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee. (Which I’m currently re-reading.) If you’ve never had a chance to read either of these and would like to see comic and insightful dialogue at it’s best, I suggest both of them.

For more contemporary plays, I’d recommend August:Osage County and Killer Joe (the film version of which I recently reviewed) by Tracy Letts. You might also want to check out The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh, who also wrote the screenplays for In Bruges and the upcoming Seven Psychopaths, which tops my list of fall films to see.

Obviously there are fiction writers who know how to spin a good conversation, but as writers our job is to learn how to improve on what we do and it would be to our detriment to ignore two mediums where dialogue rules and exposition drools.