Imagine going into a Chinese restaurant. Now imagine that they have a sign saying that if you do this certain little challenge, you get the meal for free, your picture on the wall, and a fifty dollar gift certificate.  Your picture goes on the Wall of Flames… Sounds neat, huh?   

LIES!!!

I’m a sucker for this kind of thing. My picture was on the wall at Fudruckers for their 1 pound challenge. (1 pound after cooking burger, w/ giant basket of chili cheese fries and a huge milkshake) I didn’t even break a sweat. I got the t-shirt to prove it. (ironically, the biggest 1 pound challenge shirt available was a Large). 

I love this place in Layton called China Wok II (1266 South Legend Hills Dr). I eat lunch there all the time. The food is cheap, really good, and the service is always great.

So today I tried this “Wall of Flame” challenge. How hard could it be? There are five pictures on the wall.  So five people managed to do it and not die screaming in horrible fits of agony. Piece of cake.

The challenge. Any of their regular dinners, “spiced up” a bit. With one bowl of rice and one glass of water. You’ve got a half an hour. You can’t get up to leave until you are done. You have to eat the whole thing.  Easy, right? 

Except that the “spices” they use did not evolve on Earth.  You know the spice made out of giant Dune worms that makes your eyes turn weird colors, travel through time, and knife fight Sting?  No, this is worse. These spices are made from a pepper that evolved on a strange alien world of firey death pain suffering.  This pepper laughs at jalapenos. This pepper makes the habenero it’s bitch. This pepper has no name, and the ancient Middianites who discovered it referred to it only as – TERRIBLE SHRIEKING DOOM – before it destroyed their entire civilization.  This pepper exists in multiple quantum dimensions at one time. This pepper divides by zero.

Are you guys getting me yet? Can you feel it?  It is watching you…   

So one of these pepper seeds was discovered and brought to Layton Utah. (it was probably discovered on the moon, hell if I know).  The seed was then planted in a giant tub, but instead of soil, it was placed in a fine dust made of ground habeneros and napalm.  It was watered daily with shoggoth tears. Villagers sacrified chickens to the Seed. The Seed sprouted (henceforth to be known as the Sproutening)  during a lunar and solar eclipse (at the same time!) under Halley’s comet.  The pepper grew, and soon replaced Pluto as the ninth planet in the solar system.

My coworker, Dan, decided to try this too. We did not know about – TERRIBLE SHRIEKING DOOM!  The owner tried to warn us. He told us that yes, there were five pictures on the wall, but that was out of the 160 people that had tried it so far. (none of them are smiling in those pictures either).  It is currently unknown how many of them still live. (one is still in an insane asylum).

The owner said that if you could make it about 5 or 10 minutes, then everything would be fine, because that is when you would start to go numb. (now there’s something to look forward to!)  Some people had actually eaten their napkins.  Some had gone mad from the pain and gnawed their own limbs off.  I was warned not to drink the one cup of water, because water only made IT angrier, and we really didn’t want to make IT any angrier.  Satan won’t put these in Hell’s cafeteria’s because he decided that these would be cruel and unusual punishment…

This thing is stupid hot.  Only a fool would willingly put it in his mouth.

So there I was, and they bring me out something that had started life as General Tso’s chicken, before it had been covered in a sauce that looked suspiciously like fresh asphalt.  Somebody had been screaming in the kitchen a few minutes ago. I think they might have gotten some of the fumes in their eye.  But the screams had stopped… Abruptly.

You know food is scary when in order to be eaten, it can’t just be free. They have to give you $50 to eat it and put you on a wall so that you can declare you are more badass than everyone else.   You know all those statues of Julius Ceaser?  Yeah, it is because he ate one of these once.  Pompey Magnus was like, dude, I can’t compete with that. It’s all you. I’m going to Egypt.  

I ate a piece. Hot… but not too bad.  Kind of like getting pepper sprayed.  Nothing I can’t handle. I look over at Dan. He’s playing it cool… I take another bite… still okay… but then a single air molecule hit the Lovecraftian sludge on my tongue and it awoke.  Oh yeah… that is starting to hurt. One of my other coworkers (who was smart enough not to put poison alien pepper spores in his mouth) looks over and remarks about how fast my eyes have turned red.  It burns. IT BURNS!!!!

At this point I’m about five bites in.  Involuntary tears are coming out of my eyes. My hands are starting to shake.  Bite six, the hallucinations start. A submarine came out of the floor. The walrus that got out asked me for directions. Man, I’m tripping out. Bite seven… wait… that was my napkin.  Bite seven. My brain said “Screw this!” and shut down.

At three minutes and thirty seconds, I surrendered.  I made it to the bathroom and blew my nose for awhile because the contents of my entire skull had turned to water and came running out my nose.  Dan made it six minutes, which makes him twice the man I am.

Now, for the five men on the wall, they are manly men amongst men. They are titans. I salute them.  I tried to pay homage to the Wall of Flame.  I might still have still been hallucinating, but I believe the pictures were of George Washington, Vlad Dracula, Miyamoto Mushashi, Optimus Prime, and Christopher Walken. 

So, if you are as manly as Christopher Walken and you like to eat molten lava for fun, you need to go to the China Wok.  It was literally the hottest thing that I’ve ever eaten.  (well, attempted).  Now if you’ll excuse me, that walrus is still lost.

EDIT:  thanks to the copious amounts of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream consumed last night, I lived through the morning.  Thanks for your concern.

EDIT 2: I was just informed that my coworker’s girlfriend attempted the challenge today. We will call her “Marie”. She made it to the end but ran out of time with food left.  Which makes her ten times the man I am.  Now you guys who have been tempted have to do it, because you can’t be be beaten by a girl!

And since this post has gotten linked all over the interwebs for some reason, if this is your first time here, I’m a novelist, buy my books: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1439132852/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_t1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=02F5Q3VMNZ4RFRBH1JTG&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846

So… how do you write stuff?  Good question.  Watch this:

http://johndbrown.com/2010/02/how-to-write-a-story-that-rocks/

Or you can go direct to Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=8B94E8B54E235F72

A big thanks to Stephen Nelson for recording this and putting it together.

At LTUE, author John Brown and I did a 2 hour seminar called “How to Write a Story That Rocks”.  This was the first time we’d done this together, and I do believe it turned out pretty good.  Now, keep in mind, I’ve only just watched the first segment.  A. Yes, I’ve gotten a little chunkier this year.  B. Am I always that damn bouncy and twitchy?  Holy crap, now I know where my kids get it from.  (in my defense, I had just gotten onto a new BP medication that makes me a little bouncy)

Since this was originally John’s baby, and I was just tagging along, there were still some bugs to work out. Mostly because I didn’t really know what was going on until I got there, but I do believe that it actually turned out extremely well, and we got a ton of compliments from the aspiring writers there about how helpful the whole thing turned out. 

So I hope you find this useful.

My final revised version of Monster Hunter Vendetta is pretty much done. I’m just going to wait until this weekend so that I can look at it one last time with a good solid time block, and then it is off to Toni.  She had me make a few small changes, all of which were good suggestions. 

And I do believe the consensus is to leave in Pwn.  Though once you read the character, you’ll understand why.  His name is Melvin. He’s such an unpleasant thing that he even brings out the worst in Trip.

Meanwhile I’m working on Monster Hunter Alpha.  My problem is that I always start slow. The first 25-30,000 words of a book are the hardest, and by the time I get done, those usually get chopped and edited a bunch anyway.  The characters tend to evolve as I write, and it is usually by half way through the book that their voices have really jelled in my mind.  But once I get past that initial hurdle, the next 100,000 words tend to fly by.

I’ve finally reached that point on Alpha, and I’m pretty excited. The big challenge with Earl is that he is such a remarkable badass, that you don’t want to mess up the mojo by explaining him too much. He just is.  Earl is a force of nature.  This is a man who has issues with authority, thought of himself as indestructible even back when he was normal, and once punched out Jimmy Carter.   

One of my bad guys finally clicked the other night, and I’m having a lot of fun writing from his perspective now.  I won’t say too much, but lycanthropy for him is kind of like multiple personality disorder, only your other personality is like an angry Freddy Kruger on a bender.  This guy hung out with friggin’ Stalin. 

Earl actually gets a love interest in this one, and if you are a Southern, chainsmoking, Thompson weilding, fearless, nearly invincible maniac, you need a very special kind of girl. 

MHA takes place in northern Michigan, up in the U.P. during winter… and Earl has a bazooka. (well, actually a Karl Gustaf, but close enough)

Okay, this post is by request of publishing mastermind, Toni Weiskopf, who has been doing the final edit of my next book.  In MHV I have a creature who is hopelessly addicted to the internet use the word “Pwn” or “Pwned”. 

Is Pwn too obscure to use in a contemporary action fantasy monster-killing novel?  Would you, the reader be cool with that, or would you scratch your head and think it was a typo?

I got home from LTUE today and I am bushed. Three days of writers talking about writing, mixed in with writer’s schmoozing, book signings, and more panels, jeez, no wonder my brain is fried. My first LTUE was last year, and I was a “participating guest”. This year I was a “special guest”, which basically meant that I got a cooler title on my badge and I showed up earlier in the program book. Sweet. I’m moving up in the world. On a serious note though, a lot has changed for me as a writer since last year. There was a subtle difference from being some a new guy that had self published and then gotten a book deal, to being an “up and comer” who everyone had heard of.

I was on several panels, but the biggest event I did was in conjunction with my friend John Brown. http://johndbrown.com/2010/02/handout-to-how-to-write-a-story-that-rocks/ It was called “How to Write a Story That Rocks” and was 2 hours of hyper-intensive brainstorming. John and I went on book tour together, and when you spend 30 hours in a car with somebody you get to understand their philosophy of writing pretty well. We went over how to come up with ideas, how to tweak those ideas into character and plot, and the basic creation process of building a good story.

I’ve never been an analytical writer. I don’t know jack about the “rules”. I never learned anything or paid any attention in an English class after my freshman year in high school. (now, Mrs. Silva on the other hand, was a tough lady!) I don’t know what the points are of the Hero’s Journey, nor have I ever read a book on the 3 act vs. 7 act structure. I’ve never had a lick of training on how to write, (and grammar? Holy crap, I suck). When I started out, I was basically a guy who liked to tell stories. My knowledge of how to tell a story comes from instinct and being a random dude who has always liked to entertain people. You try to make enough people laugh, you start to understand how they think, and you start to understand what works and what doesn’t. Writing is the same for me. I’m telling you something in order to get an emotional response. When all else fails, have a monster eat someone’s face… Oh, and at least one explosion every hundred pages.

John Brown, on the other hand, is a deeply analytical writer. He really ponders on writing, story, character, narrative flow, everything. John is one of those guys who will get better and better with every single thing he ever writes until the day he dies. John loves to entertain just as much as I do, but he’s also fascinated by the craft. He’ll experiment and work his butt off to not just write something good, but to also understand just what makes it good, so he can share that too. Hanging out with John was good for me as a writer, because our conversations helped me put into words a lot of the techniques I use. To John, these are techniques that make up an art, and I always just thought of them as my toolbox of tricks to make stuff cool. (typical Correia margin note – NEEDS MORE NINJAS!!)

So we put our discussions together, used John’s story outline tool, and went from there. The workshop went extremely well. We had more than 120 people (don’t know, but that’s how many hand outs we had, and we still ran out). John conducted, and I served as the Vhanna to his Pat, and as comedy relief. Two hours flew by, and we threw up a ton of information. The whole thing was recorded (Thanks Stephen!) and I’ll post a link as soon as I’ve got one so you guys can see what you think for yourselves. We got a lot of really positive comments about how helpful the workshop was, and some good critiques to help us improve it for next year.

I was on several other panels with some truly awesome writers. Some of them were authors that I’d worked with before, like Paul Genesse, Howard Tayler, Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, or James Dashner. Plus I had the opportunity to meet lots of people that I’d never gotten to work with before, and I was able to run into many old friends and acquaintances from other cons. (BYU learned their lesson and did not put Dan Willis and me on the same panel like last year, because of Correia’s casual swearing problem. Damn Aggies).

Last of all, John and I did an interview with Steve and Nick of http://elitistbookreviews.blogspot.com/ . It was a low key and informal interview about writing and the business thereof. We had a lot of fun. I’ll post a link to the interview as soon as I see it. I’ll tell you guys what though, if you’re not checking this one, you’re missing out. They’re tough, but fair, and read more books than anyone I’ve ever met other than Mrs. Correia. They gave MHI a positive review (and that was before I had met them) so I’ve decided to kill Nick as a terrorist in Dead Six, and Steve will probably be devoured by a werewolf in Monster Hunter Alpha. So another LTUE comes to a close, and I’d just like to say thanks to all the wonderful folks that I was able to work with, and all the great fans and aspiring writers I was able to talk with. I love you guys.