Matthew Wayne Selznick

Three things happened recently that have me thinking about the author’s responsibility to the reader. A friend of mine found herself questioning if she should include content in her work that some might consider blasphemous. Another friend presented a story on his podcast with some taboo content, and apparently lost a fan. Then, I received a very polite, very earnest e-mail expressing offense at my portrayal of teen-agers in “Brave Men Run.” Too much swearing, too many uses of “God damn it,” too much premarital fooling around and too much teen drinking.

It got me thinking, all right.

Should an author take into account the moral, religious, or political leanings of their audience when writing content? Should we worry about including something that might offend?

My opinion is: no, we shouldn’t. To be blunt: no, I won’t.

I’m going to tell the stories I’m going to tell in the best way I know how. If I portray something some people consider blasphemous, or offensive, or demeaning, or immoral, I must trust the majority of the audience will understand I do it in service to the story. If I’m not doing it in service to the story — if I’m just trying to titillate, or get someone’s hackles up — well, then I’m just a hack. So far, so good, I think.

In “Brave Men Run,” for example, the teen-aged characters swear. They think about sex. They fool around. They do things they shouldn’t do when their parents aren’t around. To the best of my recollection, they act like most teen-agers act. They certainly act like me and my friends did when I was a teenager… and trust me, we weren’t out of the ordinary. My approximation of the teen mindset and lifestyle is pretty close, judging from the number of teen-agers who have contacted me expressing their appreciation of the depiction.

On of my goals as a writer is to create the illusion you are reading about people as real as you are. Look in the mirror. You have imperfections. You are challenged by faults and vices. You have regrets. You’ve made bad choices. You do things… whether it’s as minor as picking your nose in traffic or as extreme as keeping a box full of child porn.

No? Look closer. If you still can’t see it, maybe you need to pay someone by the hour for the right to lay on their couch and talk. They’ll dig it out for you.

“But Matt,” some have said, “you must think of the impressionable young people who will read your book!”

No, I mustn’t. Really.

First of all, I don’t write young adult material. My first book has young adults in it — there’s a difference. If someone under the age of eighteen reads anything I write, the only person responsible for policing that is their legal guardian. I’m no one’s parent.

Second, I find it a little patronizing to think young people are so pliant, so vulnerable to influence, that they’ll read my book and go on drunken make-out sessions, taking the christian god’s name in vain in between copping feels. So far, no young person has written me to say, “Now that I’ve read your book, I’m totally gonna get someone to buy me and my girlfriend some beer so we can get drunk and mess around while everyone else is in Sunday school!”

I appreciate that everyone has different beliefs, different standards, and different limits as far as what they find acceptable. That’s the beauty of humanity; it’s what makes us so interesting. Heck, it’s one of the reasons writers write.

However, when anyone assumes an author has the same opinions and beliefs as themselves, or should… well, that’s a very particular kind of arrogance, or a very particular kind of ignorance. Either way, that attitude offends me.

I guarantee you: future work of mine will feature three-way sex that ends in murder, a suicide, drug use both recreational and otherwise, bigotry, date rape, heathen idolatry, adultery, lying and homicidal violence.

I can also guarantee that future work of mine will feature redemption, forgiveness, heroism, tolerance, justice and healing love. Off the top of my head.

Honestly, I don’t give a damn if anyone has a problem with any of that. No author should.

In fact, authors dare not worry about offending the reader. Authors have one responsibility, as I see it: tell a story that helps us all understand a little bit about what it means to be human, and do it in a way that makes people want to keep reading ’til the end.

If you are a reader who doesn’t like what you read, put that book down and find another one. Or write something yourself.

If you’re a fiction writer or storyteller of any stripe, I strongly, strongly encourage you to subscribe to the podcast feed for the Public Radio International program Selected Shorts.

Every week, you get one to three short stories read by professional actors (names you know and names you don’t; all excellent.) This is top-flight stuff, here, folks — recent stories have been by authors such as Aimee Bender, James Thurber, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick, George Saunders, Alice McDermott, T.C. Boyle, and Anton Chekhov, to name a few.

Now, I know a lot of people who read this blog are more interested in genre rather than so-called “literary” stuff, and Selected Shorts only touches on genre works. Stiil, I urge you to give this a shot. The craft of storytelling is identical whether it’s science fiction or suburbia… in fact, I will step out on a not-very-high ledge and say that a lot of genre writers could learn a thing or two about what makes a good story. No, of course I’m not talking to you!

See, the point here is not just to listen to some of the finest short-form literature available… the point is, as a writer, to learn by immersion. Soak this stuff up. Enjoy the stories on an emotional level, as entertainment, sure… but also take the opportunity to analyze what you hear. I find that hearing a short story enables me to better pick out those key “ah, so that’s how they did that” moments.

Give Selected Shorts a try. Subscribe in iTunes or in the podcast client of your choice. Selected Shorts is also, naturally, carried on a number of public radio stations in the United States. Find an NPR station local to you.

It’s a month in — how did I do?

14,782 words written in the month of January. That works out to an average of 477 words per day. In fact, I didn’t write every single day of the month; far from it.

I’ve got 189,465 words to go. 16,451 words in February — 567 words per day on average. That’s ninety more words per day than last month’s daily goal… but, heck, that’s just a sentence or so more per day. Piece of cake.

Anyone else doing this thing? How did you do?

January is half over… should I feel an obligation to do that blogger’s tradition, the year-end look-back? Am I even a blogger, for that matter, or just one who blogs?

What the heck.

Even though I’m afraid to check the archives to see that I wrote this every other January…. I’ll say that 2007 was a year of transition.

I started the year with my freelance experiment drawing to a close. I actually went back to Borders for about three weeks. Every day spent there was like walking through muddy fog. Not that the folks who worked their weren’t real nice people in almost every case… it’s that I was back at Borders, after more than a year. It felt like a step backward (it was) and it felt like defeat. Sad Selznick.

Then, two friends threw me a rope woven from plumeria and mediawiki markup, and I joined Mahalo.com in April. This is a company I drive 175 miles every day for, getting to and from Santa Monica. That should tell you something. It’s engaging, challenging, enriching, and the people are awesome. If you haven’t done so already, check them out, join Mahalo Social, and friend me up!

That covers the work front in 2007. The creative front… hm. I completed exactly one piece of fiction in 2007 — one more so than in 2006. That was the short story “Reggie vs. Kaiju Storm Chimera Wolf,” which was bought by Escape Pod, the science fiction podcast magazine, and read by soon-to-be bestselling author Scott Sigler. I’m a little frustrated and disappointed by my creative output last year, which is why I’m shooting for the unreasonable and grandiose in 2008… I want to write 200,000 words by January 1st, 2009. This should be mostly fiction, but can include essays, non-fiction works, and blog posts that are more than just “check out this cool link.” It’s really only 550 words a day, give or take… yeah… it’s a piece of pie! Wish me luck… and follow my progress by searching for the tag “200K IN 2008″, especially in Twitter.

I attended three conventions in 2007, and spoke on panels at each one — Balticon in Baltimore, Maryland, DragonCon in Atlanta, Georgia, and the New Media Expo in Ontario, California. It was my third NME, my first time for the others. Doing that much traveling was dreadfully expensive in many ways, and while it was great to connect with friends and fans new and old, I don’t think I’ll be attending anything in 2008 farther than a couple of driving hours away. It costs too much, and with both my wife and I working, it’s harder to leave the house for days at a time.

I did a lot of podcasting for other folks — mostly dramatic readings and a promo or two — and launched two new podcasts myself. Five Minute Memoir didn’t stick, but it may live again with a different host. Writers Talking was a success, and will return in 2008.

2007 was a pits and valleys kind of year. I guess every year is like that. The repercussions of both the high and low moments continue to ripple into this year. If this was an anonymous blog, I’d go into more detail… but it’s not. I’m grateful for the patience, love, support, understanding, and inspiration of all those involved, though. You know who you are.

This is the part of the post where I’m supposed to neatly sum up the entire year with some tidy phrase. A tag line that encompasses three hundred sixty five days. Yeah, sure, okay.

2007 was as much about moving forward with new opportunity as it was about stagnation. It was as much about bright optimism and excitement as it was about disappointment and self-sabotage. It was brilliant and dark.

That’s about as specific and universal as a horoscope — it was my year, but I bet it was your year, too.

And this is the part where I’m supposed to look forward, leaning into the sunrise with my shoulders back. In fact, I am excited… not about a new calendar on the wall, though. The turn of the year is an agreed-upon marker, but the real landmarks in our lives are noted by the events that matter to us. Each calendar year holds a number of these, and they overlap. April was one. May was one. October was one. And, sure, January is one, thanks to 200K IN 2008.

There will be more to come!

Just in the last month or so, I’ve reconnected with several folks I haven’t heard from since elementary and high school. This has been a special pleasure — a real treat. I realized I should catch these people up on what’s been going on with me for the last twenty to thirty years… and then I recognized that this is probably going to keep happening, so why not do it once, here?

So… my family left Glendora for Mission Viejo in… 1978? I got there in time for sixth grade. I don’t recall much, except for having a crush on the little red-headed girl (Charlie Brown, much?) and experiencing the effects of one of my best friend’s parents’ divorce (he had to move away.) Junior high school was interesting — I broke both of my wrists (at the same time) and so spent a good part of one semester with casts on both arms. Awesome.

In the summer of 1981, between junior high and high school, my friend Matt Maxwell and I collaborated on a “novel” called “Devastator.” It took everything we loved about comic books and science fiction and, well, smeared it with fourteen-year-old enthusiasm and inexperience. Somewhere, I still have my copy. Matt has threatened to kill me if it ever sees the light of day. Fair enough… but the baby universe we created with that manuscript has expanded to influence a whole lot of my creative output since then. These days, Matt is actually in the comics industry, and I’ve written a novel and a bunch of other stuff.

High school… I went to Capistrano Valley High from 1981 - 1985. I remember Karen Wynn (journalism, yearbook, photography) and Paul Pfleuger (contemporary world problems) as my favorite, most positively influential teachers. I started playing bass guitar in high school, when I was sixteen, and picked up the acoustic guitar two years later. Me and my friends talked a lot about starting bands, but nothing serious ever happened until the tail end of my senior year, when me and Roger Huff started up an acoustic duo that had many names and incarnations over the next few years.

Of all my friends from high school, I still keep track of my best friend (though we are rarely in direct contact despite the fact that we have very similar interests and passions) and my longest steady girlfriend. Through the magic of blogs and other threads, we can trace each other’s lives even if we rarely get in touch. It’s comforting to know they’re out there, though.

My first job out of high school was at the Tower Records in El Toro at El Toro Road and Rockfield. I worked in the video department for a year and a half. That was an eye-opening experience. I met many people who would be very important in my life for years and years to come — people who, through the lines of connection hindsight gives us, truly changed my life. I go into that in more detail here. It’s enough for now to say that the eighteen or so months there went a very long way to making me the person I am today.

In the late eighties, I had played my first live gigs in real bands. Psychopathway was the first, with Theresa Copell, Tony Lekas, and Steve Harvey. We played around San Clemente, San Juan Capistrano, Doheney Beach, and a couple of parties in Los Angeles and Davis. I played bass and shared vocals and songwriting duties with Steve and Theresa. After that came Loveless with Gus Contreras, Kyle Hall, and Marco Solferino. We played pretty much all the same places Psychopathway did, plus the occasional gig in Costa Mesa and Anaheim. I played the legendary Linda’s Doll Hut while I was with Loveless, a place I would play many more times with other bands.

In the late eighties, I moved a lot, had a steady string of relationships, a series of jobs (mostly retail), partied a lot, played a lot of music, and lived several movies I have yet to write. In other words, I was in my early twenties.

In between bands, I played a lot of solo acoustic shows — singer / songwriter stuff. I also wrote, here and there, but didn’t have much discipline for it. I enjoyed creating the settings — what’s known as worldbuilding — more than the actual writing. I recognize it now as a form of procrastination, which is another name for not wanting to face the possibility of failure. Still, I was very creative in those days, if scattered.

At the beginning of the nineties, I met the woman who would become my first wife. We married in 1995. She was a good friend, but I think we both came into things with far too much baggage and I, for one, was not mature enough to properly deal with it all. It’s a long story, of course, but we separated in October of 1999 and were divorced by August of 2000.

From 1995 to 2005, I worked for Borders, a worldwide chain of book, music, and media superstores. It was, overall, a very positive experience. While they are a dying company as I write this, in the late nineties it was an amazing place to work — open, ambitious, and compassionate as a corporate culture can be. I wouldn’t take back the time I spent there for anything.

Music kept happening in the nineties. From about 1993 - 1995, I was in a band I formed that, to date, was my most satisfying creative experience. Called PIGBAT, it was a power trio featuring drummer Jon Strunk and guitarist Kris Shine. I played bass, sang, and wrote most of the songs — though it was, musically, a very collaborative effort. Our drummer left to take a job offer in San Francisco, and while we continued briefly with a different drummer (Jeff Senske, now with Bright Men of Learning) it just didn’t last. I played dozens and dozens of acoustic solo gigs, formed two short-lived duos (Widdershins and Wednesday In The Barrel) and, toward the end of the century, joined with Gary Fitch, Erin Foster, and Tony Dare to form the power-pop Running Erin. Running Erin lasted until 2002 or or so.

The Internet, you will recall, happened in the nineties, too. I think I first got online in 1996 or so. I remember exploring Gopher and using the Mosaic browser, if that gives you some idea. Webcrawler was the search engine everyone swore by. I was entranced by the whole thing.

In 1998, I read a particularly bad tie-in novel featuring Marvel Comics’ X-Men characters. Now, as mentioned above, I’m a long-time fan of the comics, but this book was just… so… very… bad. I told myself I could do better, and set about planning a universe of my own wherein I could tell super-hero stories. Gradually, the idea grew to become a web-based magazine called Sovereign Serials. From 1998 until 2002, with varying regularity, I used Sovereign Serials to tell episodic stories set in the Sovereign Era, when “individuals with remarkable abilities change the course of human destiny..!” I also invited other authors to tell Sovereign Era stories in the magazine, and ran two or three.

By the end, I realized I had written more than sixty thousand words over the course of almost four years. I could have written a novel! I shelved the floundering Sovereign Serials to do just that. There were a few false starts. During this time, people wrote me to ask if I would ever finish the stories in Sovereign Serials — one story in particular. I began to write the book that would become my first novel, “Brave Men Run.”

In February of 2001, I married a second time. I know, that seems like tight timing, but we had known each other a few years, although not well, and had the occasion to spend a great deal of time together in a very short period of time. We fell in love — that’s how it happens sometimes..! We lived in her apartment in San Pedro for a time, and bought a house in Hesperia, a community in the High Desert of San Bernardino County in 2002. We’re here still, with our four cats, two dogs, and a turtle.

In 2004, driving “down the hill” to work in Pasadena, I heard an episode of Leo Laporte’s “The Tech Guy” call-in talk radio show. His guest was Adam Curry, and they were talking about this crazy new media thing called podcasting. I was inspired. In less than a week, on October 15th, I released the first episode of the MWS Media Radio Show. That podcast, now called the DIY Endeavors podcast, has had sixty five episodes to date. The first sixty were very nearly weekly. These days, I record one when the mood to create a mix tape of excellent independent music strikes me.

Podcasting is another one of those things that has changed my life in a major way. The people I’ve met, the things I’ve learned, the opportunities presented to me… let’s run down a few:

• When “Brave Men Run” was finished, I knew I would self-publish in keeping with the DIY ethic. I also decided to follow the example of the handful of people who put their books out as free podcasts. At the time, those people were Tee Morris, Scott Sigler, Mark Jeffrey, and Paul Story. “Brave Men Run” wasn’t the first podcast novel by any means, but I’m pretty sure it was among the first dozen. It’s been in two different top ten lists at Podiobooks.com perpetually since it came out, and donations from listeners — people who listen under no obligation to pay anything, mind you — have surpassed royalties from the print, e-book, and CD audiobook versions of the book.
• The day after Thanksgiving in 2005, I left Borders and embarked on fifteen months of promoting “Brave Men Run” and doing freelance work. I did some fiction editing, but my biggest clients wanted me to help them with their podcasting. While my first run at being a freelancer didn’t have long-term sustainability, if you will, it would have been a much shorter run if not for podcasting.
• I’ve become a recognized authority, which has led to speaking engagements at several conventions. I’ve been profiled in “Tricks of the Podcasting Masters” and on About.com , and interviewed on scores of podcasts and websites.
• Through my friendship with two podcasters, I was brought on at Mahalo.com , which is proving to be a challenging, enriching, and fun experience. We’re doing social search on the Internet in a way that hasn’t been done yet (or still.)
• The best thing podcasting has given me is a far-flung network of friends. Podcasting has given me my tribe, and that’s worth more than anything.

We’re pretty much caught up, folks. As I write this, I’m working at Mahalo.com, writing my second novel, “Pilgrimage,” and taking a hiatus from recording podcasts until the book is finished and ready to launch.

How are you? It’s very cool to hear from you again.