In the Deadlands Read Free

something new every day, then lie down in a hole and let them cover you with dirt, you’re done.
    Here’s the point—at least, here’s how I see it—if you’re a writer, the single best place to learn, the single best example on the planet, is the one sitting in your own chair.
    If you—the person whose fingers are poised above the keyboard—are capable of any degree of self-awareness, if you can catch even an occasional glimmer of what goes on inside that chaotic mass of meat churning behind your eyes, then you’ve got a wealth of source material that will never run out. (The first draft of this sentence had a lot of his/her constructions. Too unwieldy. Sorry about the patriarchal inheritance of the language. Language is not designed foraccuracy. It’s the worst possible tool for specific communication that human beings have ever invented—but it’s the only tool we have. Deal with it.)
    Writers write to solidify their thoughts. Getting it down on paper—or at least onto the glowing phosphors of the monitor—codifies it, lets you step back, lets you take a second look, lets you see what your thought looks like, let’s you reexamine it, gives you the opportunity for detached observation of the self.
    Here’s the obligatory disclaimer: As much as I champion self-awareness as the author’s greatest tool, the hard uncomfortable truth is that self-awareness is not always insight—sometimes, it’s just another delusional construction. Real self-awareness is rooted in honesty. Yes, you do have a wart. Cherish it.
    Looking at your own words lets you see if you’re being a generous contributor to the people around you or just another self-righteous asshole filling a metaphorical diaper.
    Which is why every story has to be seen as a learning experience. Sometimes you learn what works. Sometimes you learn what doesn’t. But mostly, you learn that the road to quality is paved with a million words. You learn to recognize your own mistakes. After a while, you start to see them even before you make them. You learn to find better ways to phrase a thought or a description or a piece of dialog. And best of all, eventually you get lazy enough to sacrifice purple for precision—that’s when you finally achieve the real goal of any wordsmith: readability.
    Most of the stories in this book were experiments. Oh hell, everything I write is an experiment. The blank page, the blank screen, it all starts with the same realization: I’ve never written this story before, I don’t know how to do it, and I don’t know how it will turn out, and ifsome publisher somewhere is desperate enough to pay me for the privilege of publishing it, I’ll count that as a success just as soon as the check clears the bank.
    At the beginning of my career, it was my belief—now it’s a conviction, based on evidence—that a writer should not take himself seriously until he has written at least a million words. This is the “muscle memory” argument. Cue Mr. Miyagi. “Wax on, wax off. Breathe in, breathe out. Don’t forget to breathe, breathing is good.” Ten thousand hours of anything creates muscle memory.
    The stories in this book were all written during my “learning period.” Also known as my “bleak period.” The post-sixties. That time of my life when I was discovering my ability to be truly depressed. (Not without good reason, but apparently anguish is a necessary part of the process. Do writers have to learn how to suffer before they’re worth reading? Nobody said anything about that on Career Day.)
    Two of the stories in this book are terrible. At least, in my opinion, they are. I’m embarrassed to have written them. (I’ll point them out as we go; they’re included for completeness.) But even terrible stories are part of the learning process. There are also several stories in this collection that