Synopsis: A deep dive into the revolutionary practice of recursive storytelling, where reality and fiction dance in an endless loop of creation. Includes cutting-edge techniques for maintaining narrative coherence while pushing creative boundaries.

• 12 Signs You Are About to Become a Beloved Author

• Best Genre-Blending Secrets from Star Wars to Sangre's Bride

• The Ultimate Guide to Writing Past Your Inner Editor (And Into the Multiverse)

Keep Your Noodles Safe

Thinking back a bit to Yesterday.

I had the same thing then, macaroni.

Get your noodles free from mom an’ dad.

Keep your steamy cheese on your plate.

‘m ‘hmm.

Chuh cheese.

Thinking back a bit, I’ve heard it said.

Life’s little pleasures are

in your head.

Keep your noodles safe from other fingers.

Keep your steamy cheese in shiny teeth.

‘m ‘hmm.

Chuh cheese

an’ noodles.

-Bard Poet by Maurllan

Ready to Write? Again?

The most salient point John Truby makes: since 1977 when Star Wars first aired in theaters, the universe of Story has changed.

We can no longer write a straightforward set of genre beats from one genre and expect to entertain.

I immersed myself twenty-three times in Star Wars in the same theater (though not the same seat every time; the place was packed every time). The theater building closed down years later.

Why:

• The music! From sweeping orchestral motifs which announced every lead to Jazz in a diverse pub, plus the singing choirs of light sabers, laser blasters, screaming ships’ engines (in the silence of space vacuum!), and whistling chattering robots, a candy store of auditory delight.

• Two mostly ordinary robots, swept along in a hodgepodge of genres.

• The bored boy at the farm who yearns to stir his mind escapes from his savvy business farmer step-dad’s tutorage and inherits a dangerous weapon through a wizard who won’t admit the boy’s dark-hearted father built the thing from junk in the garage, and the boy goes on a Hero’s journey.

• Dune’s desert people and an empire based in the stars converge on Tatooine.

• E.E. “Doc” Smith’s mind powers.

• A Princess who never has to marry and make babies and therefore can command rebel forces.

• Did I mention the two mostly ordinary robots guiding us through genre after genre while an entire universe of storytelling forces has a rolling bar fight, while quipping about the foibles of humans, very much like LLMs do today?

• A rogue love interest who swashbuckles in a pirate role, mixing in yet another genre while reluctantly mentoring the boy who wants to be a Hero, and dude, does the pirate have a sexy hotrod ship or what? Cool hiding places and a great geek lounge!

• A death Moon stalking the living.

• And unlike a Disney movie which kills off one parent right away, both of the boy’s adoptive parents are toasted by forces from the stars.

Yet nobody seems to have a 40-hour a week job. How do all these people make a living? What kind of future are we looking at? Pure escapism?

I realized after reading Truby’s point about Star Wars, to be a top-notch storyteller I have to do what I do in the kitchen: combine fresh ingredients, use sharp knives and natural wood cutting boards, premium cookware and tasty cooking methods with a cooking-by-smell approach to oils and spices.

So here is what I do now:

• Pick one genre as the backbone of beats for storytelling

• Sniff out a few spicy beats from two to three other genres

• Organize them into a structure

• Toss in a challenge a la Stephen King

• Start writing iteratively into the Dark a la Dean Wesley Smith

The method resulted in a dark third book for my trilogy inside my “The Secret of Chocolate Series” in a book aptly titled Dea Ex Moon, which follows Maurllan’s Spell and Cursed L’Hooves.

Dea Ex Moon was stilted at first draft. My Editor raked me over the coals. I went back into the Story and fleshed out genre beats, growing the first draft from 57,000 words to 81,000, and now she’s the one having to stretch her editing Craft to catch up, ha-ha!

The method worked even better while writing my next book, Besom’s Heart — my first full-on Romance, all the Romance beats, spiced up with a few beats from Horror, SciFi, and Comedy. I have never felt so vulnerable.

Meanwhile, I had to go through a spiral from despair into depression while I processed The Real Cost of Becoming an Author.

I retooled.

I could have bought a nice fishing boat, a new car, many things with the cash outlay during my first three years in my Author career. I have seen no indie talk about those expenses.

I’m prepping to write my next book now. So far, I have written two of three powerful opening chapters for Sangre’s Bride.

The conscious surprise is Look Inside is my next book to market. Never in any period of my life prior to two weeks ago (as I write the essay her) had I consciously imagined myself writing a Craft book on writing. I’ve read nothing like Look Inside before. It’s like Mad Magazine, The Onion, and the best non-fiction writing Craft books rolled together. WTF.

In Truby’s genre analysis, every genre must have a Desire beat. Bubbles up, Desire causes the moral dilemma Truby is so worried about across genres. What I realized is not only must your Cast have Desires for their roles in an upcoming book, I, as the Author of Certain Books must identify my own strong Desire, to power my writing time.

Every book in my “The Secret of Chocolate Series” posed a Craft challenge. I undertook the challenges as part of the fun.

Playfulness is the key to creating IP. 

For example, Goddess Perfume explores this and that as powerful forces competing for a love interest, while simultaneously I was using Fictional Thought to solve a phenomenon I had encountered over the years so far: I would meet an intriguing woman and start a relationship only to discover her closest friends were even more amazing! Should I honor the first connection over the other connections?

Years later I read Caitlin Moran’s observation on how her life was fucked up by the Princess trope, and after she gave up chasing the lie, she has been much happier since — except for the ongoing drama queens of boys trying to be a Hero, perpetuating gender conflict; and except for other girls trying to be a Princess with the same result.

So maybe Goddess Perfume will dawn on Society’s conscious awareness and we’ll all quit playing by The Rules.

Yet I haven’t gotten past the first two chapters of Sangre’s Bride. Months have gone by. April Mist is a lead, as is Steve (not his real name). I had to pause for my Cast to hire Susan and she’s still deciding who she is.

Another delay — which, in hindsight’s clarity, is actually ten monumental steps forward — was, after the despair and depression of realizing what the actual cost of becoming an Author is: a necessary obsession with Craft.

The best way to learn anything is to teach someone else. You’re holding, now, my Twin Grimoire: my First Edition book on Craft. Part of me wants to say out loud, Fuck You, part wants to say Try and Catch Me Now, Bitches!

Other parts of my Inner Team want to express various forms of lovingness, because besides the tough love and the arrogance to imagine ourselves a much referred to Author, love it is: we, the Cast, want you to do well. Really well.

The downside to improving my marketing Craft is being able to spot me-too false promises.

The disincentives to improving my writing Craft:

• Rereading Good Omens for the nth time and geeks on your Inner Team starting chatting like the robots in Mystery Science Theater 3000, poking fun, “Neil Gaiman wrote That paragraph!” and “Look! That paragraph smells like Terry Pratchett! Yeah, and there is Pratchett’s footnote gag about Gaiman’s paragraph.”

• Rereading Frank Herbert’s Dune and realizing these are the same droid snakes the Empire has been looking for and we’re in serious shit because, as Jung points out in his study of dreams, the snake(s) in your dreams are early forms of upcoming Cast members.

• Reading John Grisham’s The Runaway Jury and fighting down and urge to scream, “Quit running the camera through people’s heads!” as the POV wanders around the courtroom.

• Reading Dean Koontz’ Odd Thomas and realizing the bodach are Readers visiting the story, in search of a Thriller.

• Rereading Friday by Robert A. Heinlein and realizing for the first time what a magnificent memoir is, and, in the same reread, shouting for the first time because there is no way Friday could have an hour-long cry and preternaturally end grieving Boss’s death.

• Rereading American Gods by Neil Gaiman and understanding beat-by-beat why the Urban Fantasy classic pisses off almost exactly half of American Readers while the other half feel heard for the first time.

• Rereading Competence and, while rooting for the Lioness in the Romance arc and admiring Gail Carriger’s subtle innuendo, wanting to pummel her Victorian nobility* Cast with a weaponized parasol and arguing in the margins about a better tea choice, namely dried Moringa, Mountain Tea from southeast China, or a frothy green manga from Japan. Tea trees simply do not grow in England — or have I gone too far with a personal remark about someone else’s Cast members? (*Which begs the question, is a Crux some kind of emperor and I’m just as guilty of nobility?)

• Rereading Terry Pratchett’s Thief of Time with an anxious knowing the threads of storytelling have become translucent in the light of my Craft and, just now, noting the 1.5” square lime green Post it marking the “Tick” on p.44 where I had to stop rereading last time.

• Admitting openly I have never finished an Anne Rice book, even my favorite, Belinda*, and while I have a relatively new edition of Vampire Chronicles Collection as a resource to honor the cannon Rice established about sensual vampires, I just can’t get through the verbose hand wringing. (*My favorite part: “THIS NOVEL IS DEDICATED TO ME” -Anne Rice.)

• Rereading The Wind Through the Keyhole and, while admiring Stephen King’s nested dolls story structure and rich sensate storytelling, impatient with the pre-teen boy Hero trope — exactly why Fairy Tale will collect dust before another reread.

• Lamenting the cost of research — not regretting — having heaved three dozen paperbacks by contemporary indies into the trash in 2023 while searching for storytelling to broaden my Craft as a Reader.

• A Ballantine/Science Fiction 25182/$1.50 paperback edition of Nomads of Gor, where John Norman writes the most luscious world-building circa 1969, yet here again is a (this time) purple 1.5” Post it where I stopped reading on p.88, “I mentioned this to Kamchak and he laughed loudly. He was right, of course.” The descriptions run on and on, lovely as they are:

I could clearly smell the herd, a rich, vast, fresh, musky, pervasive odor, compounded of trampled grass and torn earth, of the dung, urine and sweat of perhaps more than a million beasts. The magnificent vitality of that smell, so offensive to some, astonished and thrilled me; it spoke to me of the insurgence and the swell of life itself, ebullient, raw, overflowing, unconquerable, primitive, shuffling, smelling, basic, animal, stamping, snorting, moving, an avalanche of tissue and blood and splendor, a glorious, insistent, invincible cataract of breathing and walking and seeing and feeling on the sweet, flowing, windswept mothering earth. And it was in that instant that I sensed what the bosk might mean to the Wagon Peoples.

• Another sweeping twin galaxy of world-building which captivated millions and informed George Lucas’s Star Wars: E.E. Doc Smith’s Chronicles of the Lensmen, and my favorite among those books, Children of the Lens, the latest Doc added to the series circa 1953. (The earliest, 1948, originated by Doc in a serial, the original Lensman sequence as published in the 1930s and 1940s in Astounding Science Fiction.) Yet in rereading, I feel starved for playful Romance beats, as there seems to be only one or two beats for Romance in Doc’s toolkit, and here we have “he screwed up” and “apology:”

“Since when, Kim, did you think you could get away with blocking me out of your mind?” Clarissa Kinnison directed a quiet thought. The years had dealt as lightly with the Red Lensman as with the Gray. She had been gorgeous; she was no magnificent. “This room is shielded, you know, against even the girls.”

“Sorry, Cris — I didn’t mean it that way.”

“I know,” she laughed. “Automatic. But you’ve had that block up for two solid weeks, except when you force yourself to keep it down. That mean’s you’re ‘way off the green.”

“I’ve been thinking, incredible as it may seem.”

“I know it. Let’s have it, Kim.”

-Children of the Lens, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Chronicles of the Lensmen Vol. 1, Vol 2, SBFC Science Fiction Printing, Old Earth Books, June 1998

• A quick check of dogeared pages in my dusty, old-book smell Del Ray paperback collector’s edition of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien and the scene immediately reminds me Bilbo and the dwarves were bickering about marketing to write and Bilbo was the only Author in the Cast who had shifted his internal compass enough to steer a way forward, er, downward:

They calmed down. In the end, of course, they had to do just what Bilbo suggested, because it was obviously impossible for them to try and find their way into the upper halls, or to fight their way out of [marketing] gates that closed by magic; and it was no good grumbling in the passages until they were caught again. So following the Hobbit, down into the the lowest cellars they crept.

-Barrels Out of Bond, The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein

What signal can we take from the symptoms?

What is the downside of becoming an Author? You will always be an Author going forward. You spelled yourself, and now it’s too late to simply get lost in the books of other Authors. You’re aware of the magick. You can see the other Author twiddling her fingers and hear her susurration as she works through a difficult paragraph to continue her long-form spell. You now have a growing awareness of Story. You have become a Mage.

“Use your [marketing] powers wisely.” -Kipp Bodnar, CMO, Hubspot, and co-host of the Marketing Against the Grain Podcast

I do hope you continue to enjoy my Twin Grimoire, First Edition.

Know, deep in your lizard brain and chatting monkey brain, in your twin ear-brains and sugar-drooling limbic system, I have been studying shit for decades. I have argued in the margins of Carl Jung’s works, Robert Hand’s, Stephen King’s, Dean Wesley Smith’s, Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s, John Cleese’s, Richard Bandler’s, Aleister Crowley’s, and three or four dozen other big thinkers. BUT (and I rarely use the ‘but’) they don’t know everything, dammit.

There is no silver bullet.

There is no secret sauce. Bill Goldman wisely tells us:

You have to have a Story — a narrative to carry you past forty-five minutes… But storytelling, remember, began in the caves. All we’re trying to do with any of this stuff is get through the night… [And,] I don’t know what’s going to work. Remember: nobody knows anything… You [just] have to learn how to do it. It’s hard.

-Screenwriting Seminar, John Cleese and Bill Goldman, October 14, 2000

So what is Story? Robert McKee in a nutshell:

No matter how intimate or epic, contemporary or historical, concrete or fantasized, the world of an eminent artist always strikes us as something exotic or strange… Once inside [her (or his)] alien world, we find ourselves. Deep within [her Cast] and their conflicts we discover our own humanity. [We read her books] to inhabit vicariously another human being who at first seems so unlike us and yet at heart is like us, to living in a fictional reality [which] illuminates our daily reality. We do not wish to escape life but to find life, to use our minds in fresh, experimental ways, to flex our emotions, to enjoy, to learn, to add depth to our days.

-Story by Robert McKee

Now, close Robert’s book. You have everything you need right there.

Be weird and exotic.

Forget “writing to market.” READ: Read everything and everything else. Write into the margins as you go, arguing, drawing little hearts in pencil, stars, underlining shit. Throw junky books across the room and try to score a goal in the trash bin — at least you’ll have a moment of satisfaction once in a while with the clunkers. Bolt shelves to your walls to collect the best grimoires. Get weird. Smell exotic. Dart your eyes when in public.

Next, you need a technical challenge inside a sandbox of constraints, near an ocean in your mind where gulls cry, “Four! Look out below! I pooped a big one!” while the waft of sea scents causes your hair to droop in humidity, and you know with a deep certainty the Moon will rise tonight while the sea glows with patches of green and crabs skutter by sideways. Then, before Moon rise, identify what you Desire most and hope to solve with a long-form spell. Pick a genre of beats for your Story’s backbone. Select half a dozen beats from other genres; because people are messy inside.

I have yet to meet anyone who isn’t complicated by a little Horror, even the sweetest kisses girl with starry Romance eyes has a few beats of Horror lurking in the dark corners of her mind, chewing on the bones of furry, suicidal bunnies.

In the 1800s, we invented ‘children’. People fear: being thought of as a child; acting like a machine; becoming socially loathed for being an Animal. Yet, my dears and dearettes, girls and boys play the same damn childish dating games throughout their sad, 40-hour a week android lives while longing for the next Big Bang as any virile Animal should. Go figure! That’s Comedy. Throw in a few Comedy genre beats.

Here is my Desire for Sangre’s Bride:

I, Maurllan, the Author of Certain Books, want to create a long-form spell which will transform a few Princesses from money grubbing toads into playful partners. My accompanying challenge is to gift three Cast leads with beats from distinct genres and see what happens as they mash things up.

For selfish dating purposes, I want to dissolve the tropes of patriarchal-Princess nobility mavens who drive the ridiculous striving for classism. As a result, I want one or three playmates in my life with, as Caitlin puts it, really fabulous hair.

The New Elite Playful Class.

In hindsight, after assembling my Look Inside by Maurllan, my burning Desire to write my Look Inside is part parlay; an apologia on behalf of us indies who didn’t get, at first, we had to bang out the unique tools of our marketing and writing Crafts; a temptation as well, a flirtation to Romance your hand into joining me in the fun — to smell your redolent typing sweat and, selfishly have something fabulous for me to read in the upcoming months — new shit which will stretch my reading and writing Craft.

There may even be a Battle to the Death wherein the evil Ego of Society has to die and be reborn into a new self-mistaken identity of whatever humanity turns out to be next in my messy, exotic, weird world-building.

Kiss me with Fictional Thought and a New Reality; I feel a Story coming on.

For the love of your Craft,

Maurllan.

(Pronounced Mar•Law•on)

Once Upon a Time there was an Author of Certain Books…