Tag: writing books

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31 Ways We All Fall Down

When we are feeling rudderless, the mental health gurus encourage us to find your why. Why are you a writer? If you’ve been at this a while, you may ask yourself, “Why am I still a writer?”

For many of us, getting into the brain tickle business doesn’t feel like a choice. It’s more like the profession chose you. It’s a calling, right? As a kid, you loved to read. Writing books seemed like the next natural progression.

Here’s what I want you to know:

There are many paths up the mountain, and there are a lot of twists and turns ahead:

  1. The lightning bolt of success will strike, but maybe it won’t hit you.
  2. Others will succeed. You will read their books, and you shall be mystified by their success.
  3. Some who appear successful really aren’t.
  4. Some who don’t appear successful really are.
  5. You may learn something from the success of others. You may not.
  6. There are many moving parts you can’t see and variables you can’t control.
  7. Other people’s success or failure has nothing to do with you. Don’t be jealous.
  8. You may achieve early success, but it won’t last.
  9. You may achieve success later. That probably won’t last, either. (People are obsessed with the new, even if it’s not as good as the old.)
  10. You may be writing to achieve a legacy, but in the end, despite your best and better efforts, you’ll probably be known for just one thing. Scary thought. huh?
  11. You’ll get bad reviews for something in your book you thought was innocuous.
  12. The stuff you thought might piss off some readers will sail by without fireworks.
  13. You may write a brilliant book. The market does not necessarily reward brilliance.
  14. Writing and marketing are two separate activities. A good marketer can outpace a great writer.
  15. Odds are against it, but you could hit it big with your first book or first series. It might have been a fluke, so don’t go around thinking you’re a genius too soon.
  16. Being gifted is great, but it can set you up for disappointment later. Just do the work and ease up on the unrealistic expectations. Unrealistic expectations is what the lottery is for.
  17. Hard work and consistency often outpace talent.
  18. Elementary skills, solid craft, and dramatic chops are important, but not everything.
  19. Marketing skills are important, but not everything.
  20. Gurus will act like they have all the answers. (A) Taking their courses without acting on their advice is a waste of money you could have used for a writing retreat at an Air B&B, and (B) they don’t have all the answers, but acting as if they do is Salesmanship 101.
  21. Influence, advertising, presence, and followers can be bought. If you don’t have the cash, you aren’t sprinting from the same starting line as those who have the moolah.
  22. You can do everything right, and still fail.
  23. You can do everything wrong. That’s probably your first book, the one that should have stayed in a drawer.
  24. I’ll tell you what many won’t: luck and timing are factors and they are beyond your control.
  25. Advertising, celebrity endorsements, and/or a nod from a social media influencer can make a bad book sell. (I know of an author whose books are not at all grammatical. His first language is not English. He needs translator and an editor. Because of endorsements, he’s getting sales on terrible books.)
  26. Life’s not fair. You knew that already, but as cruel as life can be, the market can be meaner.
  27. You and your readership may disagree on which are your best books.
  28. You will have a baby that you’re sure is the cutest, and yet it will squat there on your sales page, mostly unreviewed and unloved.
  29. That new shiny idea you chased might turn into a book series. Hurray! Hitch your wagon to a star! At some point, you’ll sit at your keyboard feeling like you’ve hitched your wagon to a stump. You’ve got newer, shinier ideas, but you feel like you can’t move on.
  30. Unless you’re a psychopathic narcissist, you will have doubts, and worries about your writing career. That doesn’t go away, it just ebbs and flows.
  31. Writing more books gives you more shots on goal, but failure is normal. Failure is so common, huge publishers put out big lists of books so the few successes pay for the rest that get remaindered.

These are not all happy, happy, joy, joy things to say, are they? So here’s the good news:

Contrary to what you may have thought, you do have a choice. Yes, you could quit. It may be a calling, but you don’t have to answer that call.

Alternatively, you could let it go to voicemail while you reevaluate your assumptions, rejuvenate your mind, and rethink your strategy. Or you could just plunge forward, full steam ahead, damn the torpedoes. You will probably do exactly that. I’m not here to discourage you. I just want you to know you are not alone sitting there in doubt and frustration as you stare at the horrible, impatient blinking cursor wondering if you’ve made an irreversible mistake.

You haven’t made one mistake. You’ve made plenty and you’ll make more. But someday, maybe, all those mistakes will contribute to your creation of something glorious for all to see.

~ I am Robert Chazz Chute and I’ve written a lot of books. Here’s the one I’m most proud of, but what do I know? You decide.

Endemic is live on Amazon!
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Every Evil Thing

Seen on the internet: Did you have a happy childhood or are you funny?

Last night I went on a long walk. Usually, I have my earbuds in. Craving stimulation, I listen to podcasts (mostly about how the world is falling down and the landing won’t be a soft one). If I want to walk faster, I’ll pump music into my head and swing my arms faster. On this stroll, I was in a mood to ruminate. I walked in silence for a change, listening for what my brain offered up. Unless I’m at my keyboard engaging in the writing life, this is generally a bad move.

Sunny people see a sunset and enjoy the beauty. I move on from those feelings quickly. The looming sunset in a silent sky served as an existential reminder of Nature’s cold indifference. I can be funny, but my nature is not sunny. Irony and dark humor? A lot of that comes from a dark place.

And so I plunged headlong into the past

Passing through a stand of trees, the green aroma pulled me back to memories of Nova Scotia, where I grew up. I ran through a lot of woods in those days. If I did that now, all I’d think about would be ticks and Lyme Disease. (I’m fun at parties, but that’s hard to imagine, isn’t it?)

We like to think we are proactive, a cause in the world. Sometimes, history condemns us to little more than an effect. My father refers to Nova Scotia as “God’s Country.” I would say it is a nice place to visit. It’s not all bad, not at all. I miss the sound of foghorns lowing to each other when a thick white blanket falls over Halifax Harbour. I miss Atomic Subs on Jubilee Road (sadly and inexplicably, long gone). In my hometown, the #4 Special at the House of Cheng was special. There are kind people there, but my mind doesn’t allow me to remember much of that.

Years ago, I met a fellow at a party who was born in the same hospital as me. Though he never actually lived there, he rhapsodized about how great our little town was. He became irritated when my lived experience didn’t match his fantasy. He seemed eager to overlook the casual racism, for instance. I could never watch an episode of Trailer Park Boys. I knew too many guys like that in real life to find it funny. I recognize that people are just as different and also the same everywhere. Human failings and mental deficits are certainly not unique to that place. However, painful memories specific to me lie there in the shadows. I am haunted.

When I wrote The Night Man, the town of Lake Orion, Michigan is just as much a character as it is a setting. I grew up in a small town. I know what it’s like when everyone remembers you from when you were in diapers. I remember how gossip is an engine that never stops revving. Growing up where I did informed Ernest “Easy” Jack’s experience of coming home to Orion. I have plenty of ghost voices in my head. They’re useful for what I do for a living.

History is generic, trauma is personal

The writing life is a sedentary one. I aim for 10,000 steps a day. Last night was a 14,000 step walk, plenty of time to dwell on regrets, unforced errors, my own shittiness, and the shots not taken.

Unfortunately, I have an eidetic memory for every negative thing I’ve witnessed. In perfect, excruciating detail, I remember the look on my mother’s face the last time I saw her. On her deathbed, she was furious, angry that she was dying, at how unfair it was. Loathing any display of weakness, she seemed most rageful that she was not immortal.

I remember every unkind word spoken to me like a fresh wound. I have always had a problem with authority and giving up control. In childhood, the locus of control is always elsewhere. Perhaps that’s why that time can feel so terrible. Everything feels important, even when it isn’t. Every failing is the end of the world. Everything is taken personally. (Still is.)

Indoctrinated into ideas I now find abhorrent, young adulthood was difficult, too. I couldn’t get hold of all the variables that might allow me enough independence to be left the hell alone. I was told I was too young to have a valid opinion, that my thoughts and feelings did not matter. I think some people might be getting better at valuing children so they learn to better value themselves and others. Sadly, there’s still a better than average chance you were told the same things I was. Maybe you got over it. I hold grudges.

I’m still resentful of the interview for the publishing job where I was told that, if hired, I couldn’t possibly have a valid opinion for the next seven years. Shit, why not just go train to be a brain surgeon? I’d get to a position where I counted as a human being a lot faster that way. Or how about those job interviews for newspapers where the interviewers tried to bully me? That didn’t go well for them and I learned that I was truculent. (That’s also how I learned the word truculent.)

I know grudges are not healthy, but I don’t know how to unring that bell.


In silence, my busy brain breaks open the floodgates: the crazy Spanish lady I should have fired, the landlord who cheated me, the boss who scooped up my commission bonus, the thousand little affronts, the threats of assault, the bickering, the anger that’s always simmering…the constant grating sense that for every little win I might eke out, I’m still behind and losing ground. The near-certainty that I WILL NEVER BE ENOUGH.

Thinking about it last night, I will never return to Nova Scotia. Though I enjoy being in faraway places, I hate the process of traveling. The last time I flew, my left eardrum burst. With a pandemic burning across the world, staying in my blanket fort is best. I still have family Down East, but it’s a long way to go to be told I’ve gained weight and my hair has turned white (as if I didn’t know).

I don’t feel a desperate need to be underestimated and condescended to in person. I outsource my self-esteem and moods to strangers on the internet (AKA book reviewers). Besides, there are lovely tourist destinations calling. Why go for awkward personal interactions where criticism is mistaken for love? Some families write off cruelty as “teasing” or “banter” where they are rude to relatives in ways that would rightly earn them a bloody nose from a stranger. Exposure to conflict does not breed warm feelings. It often breeds anxiety and hypervigilance.

Conflict used to be a steady diet for me. My interactions with the public are rare now. Through careful choices, astonishing luck, hard work, and seclusion, I’ve edited out most potential for conflict. It’s a peaceful, contained, and controlled life wherein I often manage substitute humor for anger. I write in a literal blanket fort, for God’s sake! However, since I worked in retail from the age of 13, I’ve got plenty of drama to draw on to spin my stories of murder and mayhem.

I remember very well the urge to commit homicide, for instance. That coworker deserved it. That feeling is still handy, anytime I reach out to fire up those neurons. Humiliation, rage, and fear are all on call, ready to flow into the keyboard. All our experiences can be rewoven to create new patterns, new characters. To weave plots, to tell engaging and relatable stories, pain is useful.

Despite time and growth, I remain hypervigilant and anxious. I still feel that I will never be enough and that I am losing ground. If you are, like me, a writer who can’t let go of every evil thing, use that shit.

If you’re a reader, enjoy it.

~ Interested in reading The Night Man? Find out what happens when the prodigal son leaves the war abroad and finds a new, more insidious plot at home.

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Novels with secret messages

In writing a novel, my first priority is to weave a compelling story with interesting characters with fun twists and solid jokes amid the action. The theme emerges eventually, it does not come first. Now that I’ve written several apocalyptic books, here’s what came out of the subtext of the following works:This-Plague-of-Days-OMNIBUS-Large-2

This Plague of Days: The right person in the right place at the right time can make all the difference in the world and the two most powerful words are “Begin again.”

Amid Mortal Words - High Resolution

Amid Mortal Words: With great power comes great consequences.

AFTER LIFE INFERNO AFTER Life: Through adversity, we evolve.

Robot Planet: Solutions arrive when we embrace our problems, not when we run from them.

Robot Planet - High Resolution

Haunting Lessons: You don’t know the depth of your capabilities until you are challenged.
Screenshot 2017-06-08 22.24.50

Dream's Dark Flight REVAMP full


Dream’s Dark Flight:

We find our power when we let go of the fears that do not serve us.

 

 

Second-Class-Citizen-COVER-DEC-16

And now, Citizen Second Class: Even when at war against the powerful, peace may be achieved not by strength but by bravery and guile.

Citizen Second Class just released. You can pick up my latest dystopian adventure along with all the others here.

 

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The War is Here

People often ask writers where their ideas come from. My answer, no matter how crazy the premise of the book, is real life. Here’s a look behind the curtain with a couple of my most recent books and why their origins are relevant to you.

Earlier this year, I released The Night Man, a thriller set in rural Michigan. It’s about people who go outside the law because of crushing medical debt and medical bankruptcy. (Think: Breaking Bad but with more German Shepherds.)

I believe medical care is a human right. Insurance agents with profit agendas shouldn’t get in the way of diagnosis and treatment by doctors. Nobody should be condemned to death or poverty because they get a scary diagnosis. No one should have to choose between seeing their doctor or paying rent. I was recently diagnosed with pneumonia and have seen many doctors for several problems over the last few months. I’d hate to think where I’d be if I had to choose between financial security and health!

In the United States, the richest nation on Earth, universal health care is often rejected out of hand because of the stigma of socialism. This is despite the fact that every other First World nation provides some form of universal health care to protect their citizens at lower cost and with better outcomes. Some patients even opt for suicide rather than burden their families with debt. How can this be? How can this still be?

Reality often fuels fiction. Unacceptable and challenging situations provide a context that readers can relate to. Powerful motivations make people do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do. So it is in The Night Man. Easy Jack’s father turns to smuggling to try to escape medical debt. Complications ensue and events spiral out of control.

Then came Amid Mortal Words. It is a story I did not intend to write. I have several books in my editorial pipeline and I thought I was done with apocalyptic books for a while. I was supposed to work on revisions to those stories first. However, Amid Mortal Words woke me at 4 a.m. every morning. It was a story that pestered me, insisting on being written. Writing the book was the only way to get some sleep and it turned into a wild story. I like it a lot and I hope you will, too.

The plot to Amid Mortal Words springs from a lot of anger I’ve observed in real life. Everywhere you look on social media, there’s a war on. It is a domestic war in the United States but it is not confined to American borders. Political norms have been shattered. Expectations have been lowered.

The currency in this war is hatred and fear. The consequences often translate into physical violence. Sexism is still thick on the ground and women’s rights are more endangered, not less. When called out for their racism, racists cry foul. Voting rights are suppressed and the democratic system undermined. Climate change isn’t a far off theory. Climate breakdown is here. As one character tells another in Amid Mortal Words, “It’s a fuckle.”

There are solutions to our problems. Some stand in the way. Thinking selfishly and short-term, there are many who believe that saving the planet, practicing empathy and accepting equality is too expensive, too impractical and bad for business. These folks act like the idea that we should care for each other is suspect. Ideals are out the window and it’s every mad dog for himself.

All this in 2019? We could have done better by now. We should have, but for those who are only out for themselves, sexism, racism, and many other ills are a feature, not a bug. It’s not that they don’t know better. It’s that they don’t care.

Personally, I’ve made a transition in my thinking. I used to believe that rational debate and better education would save everyone from the worst of us. I thought good ideas would win because it was in the common interest to have a society that works for everyone. I now accept that, in a strange way, I was underestimating people’s intelligence. Many people who support the actions of Donald Trump knew what they were doing when they elected him. They weren’t all fooled. They knew his long history of sexism and racism. It wasn’t that they were deceived. They got the candidate they wanted.

Now the United States is divided, not exactly down the middle but close. The rhetoric is harsh. I’ve heard Alex Jones call for decapitations (and then pull back from that call later, subtly.) I saw a comment on a thread where some nutbag called for a “cleanse” of libtards. There’s a fascinating podcast called It Could Happen Here that gives the odds of a new American civil war serious analysis and consideration. Subversion of the due process of law has turned a lot of conservatives into Banana Republicans.

And no, the vitriol is not equal on both sides. You can point to one or two lies by Obama while Trump is north of 10,000. He’s dangerous and is not in control of all his faculties. One day, assuming we’re lucky, we will look back on these days as very dark and dangerous times. America is not headed toward a constitutional crisis. It’s in one right now. The Democrats are, in general, responding weakly. The Republicans will back their guy right to the brink. It is so sad this devolution is happening because so many of us love America and its people. This is the nation that produced a top-notch space program, Iron Man and Spider-Man for God’s sake!

And so it came to pass that Amid Mortal Words posed the question: If you could get rid of everyone who is making the world a worse place, would you? What if you could do it simply by reading a book or reading the book to someone? And what if there is collateral damage? How many deaths of innocents are acceptable on the way to utopia?

I never set out to write a theme. Themes emerge in the writing. Otherwise, the story would devolve into preachy and boring. Though Amid Mortal Words is not a straight-up liberal revenge fantasy. It’s packed with action and mysteries. Respect is given where it is due. There are answers but they aren’t all easy answers. I’m talking about impact. AMW will move you. Some of those answers are going to leave readers thinking a long time after they close the book.

I think there’s something in these books for people no matter where they are on the political spectrum. Heh. I guess I do still hold out some hope that I’ll be able to change some people’s minds by bypassing their fear responses and entertaining them. No matter. You don’t have to agree with me to have a great time staying up all night, pulling your head into my books and turning pages.

I am, first and foremost, in the brain tickle business. My priority is telling an action-packed and interesting story that entertains you. My books can take some very fanciful turns at times but the core ideas are often rooted in reality. That foundation in what’s happening now is what makes the characters real, motivated and relatable. That’s certainly true of Amid Mortal Words and The Night Man. Despite all the violence, twists and mayhem in my books, there’s heart and meaning in the subtext that propels the plot.

I hope you take the time to check them out and enjoy them.

FREE EBOOK OFFER

For the next week, one of my books will be set to free each day. Check back each day to check out my Amazon author page to see which ones you want to pick up. Here’s the link.

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2019 Writing and Publishing Goals: Specifics

Please note: The Night Man has just been released.

It’s about a wounded warrior who returns home to the shady side of small-town America. Earnest “Easy” Jack just wanted to come home to train guard dogs and be left alone. Then his father got kidnapped. Between a billionaire’s bomb plot and dirty cops, Easy has hard problems to solve.

You can grab it now at this link or wait until tomorrow, Saturday, January 12, for fan pricing (read: free)! Either way, enjoy!


And now, on with the nigh hopelessly ambitious list of what I plan for 2019. (I said nighhopeless, dammit!)

1. Revise and publish the huge vampire novel I’ve got banked.
2. Revise and publish the huge literary novel I’ve got banked. (Or submit it to a publisher. Since it’s more literary, trad pub may be the way to go.)
3. Revise and publish my next Hit Man novel I’ve got banked (working on that now).
4. Publish The Night Man, my new crime thriller. I’ll do that this week.
5. Write and publish the sequel to The Night Man, launching in November.
6. Publish a big book and a novella under a pen name (in progress). 
7. Publish six anthologies (five stories each).
8. Revise and prepare three books for publication that will finally go wide, off the Amazon platform. (Here comes Kobo, Apple, etc.,…!
9. Learn how to make my AMS ads work using Dave Chesson’s course.
10. Figure out how to use Machete properly.
11. Blog three times a week, twice on AllThatChazz.com, once on ChazzWrites.com.
12. Set up the website and email etc for the launch of the pen name.
13. Write a paranormal thriller trilogy with Armand Rosamilia (the first book’s already done.)
14. Contribute 10-minute segments to the Mando Method Podcast (all about writing and publishing).
15. Send out a newsletter once a month and build my email list. (Yes, I have some ideas on that I got from Seth Godin.)
17. Facebook Live, every second Wednesday night at 8 p.m. EST.

I’m writing full-time but this list is too ambitious, isn’t it?
Fetal position.

Weeps softly.

Passes out.


Gets up.

Gets at it.