The mind churns out a million thoughts a day –– most times without you even realizing. What am I going to do today? Why’d I wake up so late? I need to lose weight. That girl that walked by was cute. Why didn’t I smile? These things flow in and out of our heads at all times; most times too fast for us to analyze them –– hence therapists and psychiatrists. One of the perks of being a fiction writer is the ability to finally be able to control thoughts –– albeit fictional ones –– and channel them toward defining a character.

There are a couple ways to do this over the course of a story, and which way you choose depends a lot on what point of view your story’s set in. If first person, you can just shoot the thoughts out interspersed between narrative, which actually has a nice effect. Tom grabbed the bag of chips from the rack and stuck them under his shirt, we ran out of the store and down the block our lungs burning. What the hell am I doing?

If third person, you have to reveal thoughts in a slightly more indirect way. Instead of just blurting them out, you say something like Mike saw the kid who lives downstairs, the one with the Mohawk and hoop earrings. He hated the way he looked.

An important thing you must keep in mind while playing with thought is balancing it with action. Tweaking with that balance is what makes a good and memorable character. What someone thinks vs. what they actually do. Your characters are going to have desires. Do they act on them? Or do they just think about them? It’d be easy if thoughts and actions were in sync, but life doesn’t work like that –– humans don’t work like that. And the goal is to make your characters as human as possible. Read more »

Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Traviskurowski for getting a free copy of Flying Zeppelins by Joe R. Lansdale.

This week, we are giving away The Third Bear by Jeff VanderMeer. Compared by critics to Borges, Nabokov, and Kafka, inventive contemporary fantasist Jeff VanderMeer continues to amaze with this surreal, innovative, and absurdist gathering of award-winning short fiction. Exotic beasts and improbable travelers roam restlessly through these darkly diverting and finely-honed tales. Highlights include “The Situation,” in which a beleaguered office worker creates a child-swallowing manta-ray to be used for educational purposes (once described as Dilbert meets Gormenghast); “Three Days in a Border Town,” where a sharpshooter seeks the truth about her husband in an elusive floating City beyond a far-future horizon; “Errata,” following an oddly-familiar writer who has marshaled a penguin, a shaman, and two pearl-handled pistols with which to plot the end of the world. Also included are two stories original to this collection, including “The Quickening,” in which a lonely child is torn between familial obligation and a wounded talking rabbit. Chimerical and hypnotic, VanderMeer leads readers through the postmodern into a new literature of the imagination.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Tachyon Publications.

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In 2002, I was a high school student on a four-day retreat with my creative writing class where we took walks in the woods, did lakeside writing exercises and learned how to make handmade paper. Our teacher led us through the various steps, making a wet pulp of recycled materials, flattening it on a mesh screen and decorating with leaves and scraps. I thought it was so neat and quaint but eventually useless because the bumpy sheet was too thick to write on.

Almost a decade later, it turns out there’s a burgeoning movement of artists and writers making handmade and/or hand-bound books and paper as a response to the digital book world.

Evidence of the aforementioned: In the fall of this year, the University of Iowa will launch its new Master of Fine Arts in Book Arts. The first cohort will choose between emphases in Artist Bookwork, Bookbinding, Calligraphy, Digital Bookwork, Papermaking and Printing.

Along with U. of Iowa, there are seventeen members of the three-year old College Book Art Association. Ten years ago, most of these programs didn’t exist and people didn’t think of book making as art.

All this while people continue talking about how e-books may be hurting paperback sales. In fact, it seems they are also inspiring a growing number of small presses to treat book-making as an artistic medium.

There are hundreds of small presses cropping up all over the country, publishing in small volumes, often using handmade or letterpress technologies.

One notable example is Ugly Duckling Presse (UDP), a Brooklyn-based small press that makes chapbooks, broadsides and artist books in their one-room studio. They’ve published over 200 titles in the last ten years and many of the ones they put out have some handmade element, whether it be a letterpress cover or a hand-stitched or rubber band binding.

Co-founder and UDP collective member Matvei Yankelevich says that treating books as art objects is a natural reaction to the digitizing of texts: “Because of the ephemerality of blogs and the internet, people want a reminder of the tactile sensations of reading.”

Since 2000, the number of presses like UDP has been growing and there are resources that support this expanding network. One example is the Center for Book Arts in New York City (many similar centers exist across the country).

According to Sarah Nicholls, program manager at the Center, the rosters for their classes on book making are exploding these days. They get a range of students: from graphic designers tired of staring at a screen all day, to writers who want to learn to make their own books, to teachers who want to get their students more excited in reading by offering kids a chance to make stuff with their hands.

Nicholls sees the resurgence of interest in book arts as part of a larger cultural shift towards valuing things that are made locally and in a small scale (i.e. food, crafts).

Whatever it is, I’m happy to see it, even if it’s just plain ol’ nostalgia. Yankelevich adds, “the romance with efficiency has dwindled.” And he’s right: UDP books are well-made objects that encourage you to read more slowly, to really look at each page.

To look through the UDP digital archive, click here.

A 1-minute silent explanation of Inception using only the OS X Finder. Via Kottke.

Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner epynephrin for getting a free copy of Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.

This week, we are giving away Flaming Zeppelins by Joe R. Lansdale. What do the disembodied head of Buffalo Bill Cody, Annie Oakley, Frankenstein, the Tin Man, Captain Nemo, the Flying Dutchman, and the inestimable Ned the Seal, have in common? Find out as they embark upon a spectacular set of non-stop Steampunk adventures. For the first time, two epic chronicles, Zeppelins West and Flaming London, inscribed by a courageous young seal on his trusty notepad, are collected together in one volume. So leap from a flaming zeppelin with the stars of the Wild West Show in a desperate escape from an imperial Japanese enclave. Wash up upon the island of Doctor Moreau, in mortal danger from his unnatural experiments (ignorant that Dracula approaches by sea). Unite with Jules Verne, Passpartout, and Mark Twain on a desperate voyage to the burning streets of London, which are infested with killer squid from outer space courtesy of H. G. Wells’ time machine. It’s a raucous steam-powered locomotive of shoot-’em-up westerns, dime novels, comic books, and pulp fiction, as only Lansdale, the high-priest of Texan weirdness, could tell.

This week’s Free Book Friday is sponsored by Tachyon Publications.

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Here’s an interesting article on why creative people need to be eccentric. I’m always somewhat disheartened when I read these, because I’d like to think of myself as both a creative and a non-eccentric person. If crazy = creative and me = not crazy, then what does that mean for my creativity? But then I’m reminded of the fact that crazy people don’t think they’re crazy, and that gives me a weird kind of hope.