Failing and Flailing

Real question: is computer ADHD a thing? Because I feel like a really pretty almost-together person in real life, and then as soon as I open up my laptop to do some work, everything turns into a giant digital shitblizzard.

What was I supposed to be doing? Which of these emails do I answer first? (Which of these inboxes do I even look at first?) Oh damn it, that interview was due a week ago... and there are all these texts... and I forgot to reply to that nice message because Facebook Messenger already marked it as read (I HATE that). And maybe I should just make like I never even got those last ten emails, because they're a month old already and I feel so guilty.

I hate it, y'all. I hate doing bad. I hate feeling bad. Somebody please tell me how to stop failing at pixels. Or at least tell me I'm not the only one.

A Jetlagged Confession

Things I have done in the past 72 hours:

--taken a shower at a train station (it was lovely, BTW)
--slept on the floor of LaGuardia Airport (it was the opposite of lovely)
--kicked off my first class on LitReactor
--had a collective two-day enthusigasm with 50 of my new best friends at GIFCon - Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations
--enjoyed the best little writers’ conference in Texas, courtesy of the North East Texas Writers' Organization
--signed my first gas station autograph

Things I have not done in the past 72 hours:
--literally any of the things I was supposed to do.

I HATE to admit this, but I need help, y’all. I don’t want to give up the globetrotting I love so much, but I also can’t keep disappointing the people who are waiting on me. (Or being constantly either gone or exhausted, which isn’t fair to that very good man of mine.)

So here is my ask, friendly friends: do we know anybody I might could hire to ride herd on my various email inboxes? It’d be a part-time gig, natch. I would really love to work with somebody you know and trust, who’s done the admin thing before and could maybe train me on how to delegate things. I have never wanted to be one of those people who has *people*, but something’s gotta give.

Midnight Confession II

I don't know why, but I'm having a really hard time taking off the red hat and being a real person again. It is just such a thrill to go out into the world to delight and disgust the unsuspecting masses - and SO hard to go back to all those other less-fun feelings that you just can't put off forever. Fear and sadness are dragging me something fierce today.

I tell you what, though: this weekend was just a hell of a thing. It was such a revelation to meet someone who is everything I want to be when I grow up - who has built her identity on love and realness and unstoppable charisma, both as an author and a teacher - and who is massively, awardfully, bestsellerly successful as a result. I mean, I was going to keep at it regardless... but what a blessing it is to have artisanal human proof that it CAN be done.

Tangentially: it is a special kind of shocking when you meet somebody who seems to see your entire self. We are so accustomed to spinning our hexagonal heads around to meet the world with whichever face the present audience expects (partner, employee, parent, friend, whatever) - and not at all prepared to encounter someone who speaks affectionately and directly to our raw living core. I totally get it now, and I’m sorry I didn’t before.

Anyway. Keep at that relentless, visceral person-work, y'all. Riding herd on all those stampeding feels will wear your ass right out, and STILL beats the alternative by a country mile.

Midnight Confession

I miss regular life. I miss sleeping through the night and not needing 5-hour energy to get through the day. I miss wearing my smaller clothes and caring about what I eat. I miss going to movies and baking funny cakes and being a good friend. I worry about what will happen at next week's doctor's appointment, and I feel guilty for letting my haphazard book promotion efforts lapse. I'm afraid maybe they'll cancel the UK edition of the last book because the sales haven't been good enough. I worry sometimes that I'll never have the wherewithal to write another book, or that nobody will want it if I do.

But y'all, we sure have pumped a lot of goodness into the world lately. And that's solid enough to sleep on.

No Longer At Ease

Well, it's not quite official yet: as I type, I'm sitting in seat 22F, watching Tom Cruise get the stuffing knocked out of him by Russian heavies on an 8" screen. But if you're reading this, it's safe to say that after three weeks, eight flights, four time zones, and more wonderful people than I can count, my grandiose gallivanting is finally over, and I'm home again.

I'm really, really glad I got to do that.

I really, really should not have done that.

But let me back up.

I spent the weekend at World Fantasy Con in Saratoga Springs, New York. Getting there was an adventure in itself, but I'm so glad I got to go: WFC is the first "all-pro" convention I've attended, and spending a weekend at what feels like the ends of the earth, stuck in with a few hundred of your peers, is a real experience.

I'm calling it "Still Life in Hilton Bathroom: How To Tell Your Roomie Had a Great Night."

I got to sit in on some TERRIFIC readings – truly, you don't know how badly you need psychic elephant-men, wind-tunnel aerial knife-fights, or grade-school taxidermists until you finally get some – and meet wonderful new people and have tremendous conversations. There were shenanigans and shoe-hunting expeditions and the most lavish ice cream bar I've ever seen.

And this guy. THIS FRICKIN' GUY.

Then on Friday night, a funny thing happened.

There was an "all-call" mass autograph session, which if you ask me, is a really great idea: they just filled up a ballroom with tables and chairs and invited everyone who wanted to (not just the people on programming!) to find a seat and sign their books.

And boy, it was the best kind of bedlam. I had never seen so many people rushing around with armfuls of books – not comics, but actual honest-to-god novels to be signed. It was glorious!

Look at it! Isn't it the most stupendous sight?

It was also kind of a mess: since it was open seating, there was no alphabetical order – no order of any kind. You had to cruise the aisles one at a time, angling to try to get a glimpse of the little printed name-cards – not an easy feat with people clumped up and queuing in front of the tables. After I'd looked and looked and still couldn't find the author I wanted (one of the guests of honor, no less!), I decided to go find a staffer who might be able to direct me.

That's when I realized that I hadn't seen any staffers. No volunteers at all – not one in the entire weekend.

They were there, of course. Handing out packets at the registration desk, flashing five-minute signs at the panels, setting table tents between each of the readings. But they weren't marked at all: no vests or shirts or colored badges. Just the same street-wear (okay, nerd-shirt-wear) as the rest of us. If you weren't actively watching them at work, they were invisible.

And that's when it hit me: what would I do if there were an actual problem? Forget missing out on an autograph – what if I got the bad touch, or watched it happen to someone else? What if there were a fight, or a theft, or a creeper?

Look again: which of these people do you go to for help?

Graceful segue goes here.

One of the readings I went to was Mike Underwood's. Well, tried to go to: I showed up, along with a few other people. Mike never did. That was unusual: we knew he was at the con, and he's not one to flake on a gig.

When I caught up to him later and gave him grief about it, I found out what I would have known days ago, if I'd been paying literally any attention to the digi-sphere: he'd declined his programming as a matter of principle – as a way of protesting WFC's disaster of a harassment non-policy.

And like... I did know about that. I wasn't so completely up myself that I hadn't learned about the controversy. But I'm ashamed to say that it wasn't until that moment in the autograph hall that I actually felt it: that it finally occurred to me that I might not be in a safe place.

I'm not proud of that. I don't like to think of myself as a person whose empathy doesn't extend past her own nose, whose concerns stop at the boundaries of her own experience. I've been doing this convention thing for two years now – more than enough time to catch wise to the serious, pervasive behavior issues that have long festered in our backyard.

Reminders of which were literally spelled out for us this weekend.

And I wonder if it's easier to dismiss those issues when it's "just us". Just us pros, or just us fans, or just us girls, or just us anything. It's easy to drop your guard around people you've known since forever, easy to forget the duty of care we accept when we undertake stewardship and hospitality. Much harder to see your community's potential for causing harm and distress, especially when you yourself have such generous intentions, and have benefited so much from the generosity of others. And downright impossible to know who's missing – who you're missing out on – because you were so caught up in the camaraderie that you neglected to take on any accountability for your guests' well-being.

I'm not sure what the right answer is for those of us on the attending side of the table. There's not a firm consensus, even among the leading lights of our community: John Scalzi has implemented a standing boycott of conventions that fail on this front, while Kameron Hurley has critiqued this approach as unfeasible if not blatantly counterproductive.

Regardless: I know what the ancient Greeks said about hosts who disregarded their sacred duties. I know we can work harder and do better. And with all my '90s-kid heart, I know I wanna be like Mike.

One Year Out: On Fame, Fear, and the End of Debut-dom

So about a month ago, I had a real Twilight Zone moment. See, my mom tagged me in one of those time-hop things on Facebook -

- and my first thought was, "holy mackerel - has it been a year already?"

My second thought was, "oh my cheese - has it only been a YEAR?"

But lo, it was so: Sixes launched in the US on July 24th 2014, which means I've officially been doing the published-author thing for over a year now.

Now, a whole belated month-and-a-half after the fact, I'm sitting at home in my clean, quiet little me-space, and I finally have time to think about what that means. Or rather, what's appropriate to say about it.

Y'know, I was having an email conversation with my great buddy Merlin a few months back (a terrific writer you haven't heard of yet, because he is almost-literally working in the salt mines while he composes his magnum opus.) We were discussing how the ups and downs get harder to talk about once you start formally putting yourself out there - because you need to cultivate a professional image, and also because nobody wants to hear a bunch of first-world problems (especially from somebody who's achieved something most of the rest of us would give our eyeteeth for). But he added something I hadn't thought about before, with a phrase I will probably remember for the rest of forever. He said,

I think people have a romanticized idea of what it is to write a book, to tell a story that needs telling.  And that idea gets sold again and again because that's the only way to keep people doing this difficult thing, right?  So, if folks published a book and then told everyone they knew 'It was just the hardest, saddest, most wonderful but exhausting thing I've ever done' then someone else that had a story to tell might think twice.  

And man, that's it. That right there. I'm overjoyed to have had the opportunity to put my work out into the world this way. I'm so, so grateful to everyone who's invested in me. I am also frequently sad, ruinously tired, and absolutely terrified of failure. Actually, it's fair to say that I spend most of my time feeling like I'm failing.

But the thing is, when you accomplish something, that accomplishment is defined just as much by what it isn't.  We see every newborn baby as a potential president or cancer-curing scientist - but that's because they're literally 8 pounds of raw human potential. They haven't had the chance to TRY, much less fail. We fill graduates' heads with grand sweeping commencement speeches about infinite possibility and unlimited opportunities - but that's because the little darlings haven't gotten out into the world and DONE anything yet. And whatever they do, no matter how valid and important and fulfilling it is, they have to give up a hundred thousand other possible futures to do it. Every decision narrows the field of future decisions. Every choice is limiting.

And that's a hard, scary thing. That's why we have the quarter-life crisis. That's why so many of us spend our freshman adult years in angst and insecurity. I felt it then, and I'm feeling it all over again now. My first book didn't set the world on fire. It didn't win any awards. I didn't generate a whole bunch of buzz or get featured on NPR or score a blurb from Stephen King. Those possibilities are gone.  I've mourned them more than I probably should.

Most of that is probably just the inevitable death of an immature dream. Hell, I can remember finishing my first novel at 17, and fantasizing about what it was going to be like to be a published author too young to drink champagne at her own launch party.  As the kids say, "LOL."

But here's what I've noticed. The other authors in my cohort, the ones who just seem to be busting out all over the place? They might be putting out their first novels, but they have been pillars of their communities for YEARS. Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a short-story juggernaut, not to mention a hell of an editor in her own right. Beth Cato is the most prolific human being I've ever met - the adult version of that one kid who was in every extracurricular activity known to man and still found time to volunteer at the homeless shelter and earn a perfect 4.3 GPA. Julie Murphy basically runs her own e-church - preaching the gospel of body acceptance and self-love, giving and taking heartfelt and frequently hilarious confessions, making time to have passionate, relevant conversations with everybody who darkens her door.  You might not have heard of these people, but their posters are plastered all over my bedroom walls. They are my rival-frenemy-secret-crush-golden-shining-idols - and as badly as I want what they have, I simply haven't matched what they've done. I haven't even come close.

I haven't put out a whole passel of short stories. Hell, I haven't put out one. I haven't edited anything or taken any freelance writing gigs, and my online presence is the digital equivalent of me sitting in my living room with the lights off and the shades drawn and then wondering why I'm not getting invited to parties. And the one place where I basically am Celebrity Rockstar Author Jesus? Is DFWcon - where I've been pouring in volunteer hours and workshop face-time for three straight years. Is anyone else sensing a pattern here?

So... I guess what I'm saying is, this is the year I found out that the magical buzz-fairy is not going to sweep down and bless me with a box of instant-fame potato flakes. I am not writing accessible fiction for a well-established audience. I am not (yet!) a well-known person. I do not have the marketing heft of a Big-5 publisher throwing hella dollars to promote me. Those three things together mean that if there is an easy elevator to the top, I can't count on it. I am going to need to join 99.9% of the entire rest of the world in taking the stairs.

I'm up for it. I still feel like I'm failing. I'm absolutely terrified of going out of print, of being a confirmed dud that nobody will want to do business with. (Seriously, y'all: if you've read my stuff, please please please help me out with an Amazon / Goodreads review. It doesn't need to be Shakespeare. It doesn't need to glow. Short of buying 50,000 copies of my books and lobbing them through people's windows, this is the single best thing you can do to help me not sail my failboat all the way to remainder-land.) But I can do more than I've done so far, and the game isn't over yet. 

And speaking of which... you guys.

Thank you for this.

I may not have shown up on the New York Times, but my man Merlin put me front-and-center on the company shipping newsletter. Don't tell him it made me cry.

And for this.

Yes, that is one very well-loved spine.
Yes, those are marker tabs and page notes.
Yes, this is ego-pornography for authors - and my Uncle Sanford is Hugh Hefner.

And this.

Look at you. Look at you, you goddamn beautiful disasters!

And this.

FAN ART, people. Actual, honest-to-god fan art. This is not a drill!

And this, and this, and this, and this. (I print these out and love them until they're kleenex. You know that, right?)

Oh my god, and THIS.

Because you haven't truly made it as a writer until Frank has named MapleStory characters after your fictional friends.

Seriously, guys. Thank you so much for everything you've done to help launch me out into the world. I have no idea whether I can actually fly or whether I'm just 'falling with style', but you are absolutely the reason I haven't already splatted on the pavement. And let me tell you: even when it feels like the ground is rushing up to meet you, the view from up here is still pretty damn glorious.


...but if I go cold, I won't get sold
I'll get put in the back, in the discount rack
Like another can of beans

Second Verse, Better Than the First

Well, friends, as I type this, I'm sitting on my couch in my comfortably shabby Hello Kitty PJs, refreshing the Medicine for the Dead Amazon page to see whether it actually goes on sale tonight, and hosting a warm cat in my lap.

In other words: life is pretty swell.

Anyway, I wanted to say, I know that this book launch has been pretty squishy compared to the epic, Internet-spanning grandeur of The Twelve Days of Launchmas. Part of that's because you always go all-out for first books and first babies.  But a lot of it is because I just didn't have it in me this year.

Basically, my brain broke over the winter - or maybe it's been broken for a long time now, and just got to a point where I couldn't compensate for it anymore - and the time I should have spent organizing guest posts and planning a release calendar was largely squandered on irrational crying jags and days and days of wheel-spinning, self-loathing productivity failure.

And I know it's not cool to flash your insecurities at the world, but it's important to me to put that in writing here... because there is already SO MUCH "we don't talk about that in public" material in this industry, and also because the longer I spend in said industry, the more I realize that mental health is a huge, huge issue for writers.  The black dog has bitten my editor.  The brain-hamsters are chasing my friends.  And the longer you spend slogging through the swamps of sadness, the easier it is not to realize that you've already sunk in up to your neck.

Why yes, I AM still traumatized. Thanks, '80s!

So I feel like that's worth saying.  But the reason I say it on this particular day is because for me, today is a celebration of two intimately-related things: putting this book out, and getting my happy back.  I'm proud of myself for working hard on both fronts.  I'm hugely grateful to my husband, my agent, and all my wonderful friends and family who got me through the rough patches.  And I'm really, REALLY excited for you to read this book.

Like... you know, there was a day last year when I was sitting in a dingy strip-mall dressing room, trying to stuff the mutilated remains of my self-esteem into a god-awful bridesmaid's dress* and contemplating my failures... like y'do.  And then my phone dinged: it was an email from one of my best buddies and critique partners, Dan Bensen:

Wow.

That's my critique in a nutshell.  Wow.

So Sixes is a good book. It got published and it'll start your career off right. But THIS book blows Sixes out of the water. It's tight, it's focused, it makes promises and convinces me you'll live up to them. It both continues the story begun in Sixes and begins its own new story, and balances perfectly between fantasy and comprehensibility.

*NB: I bought a different, thoroughly awesome dress. 

And you know - that didn't magically fix my life.  I still had to stop and make a concerted effort to fix my own life.  But ever since then, I've been cruising on a rising tide of enthusiasm from the people who've read Medicine for the Dead - and the biggest difference between this launch and the last one is that I'm not going into it hoping that it's a good book.  I KNOW it is.  And I'm so, so happy to have the chance to share it with you.

Anyway, I won't say too much more about it here - because I DID get my happy back, and I DO now have guest-posts and events scheduled out the wazoo, and you will be hearing plenty of book-talk through the whole month of April.  For now, just know that even if it looks like there hasn't been as much pom-pom shaking this second time around, this is truly a bigger, better, greater day... and that if you ever need help finding your way back to your own greatness, I hope you'll let me know.  Happiness is a mass noun, and two people have more mass than one.

Okay, enough sloppy stuff.  Go buy my book, come to my party, and if you've already got all that licked, kick out the jams with me and Harry Solomon.  Life is GOOD!

Life has been good to me
Got very few complaints so far

Life has been good to me
Hope you're as happy wherever you are!

The Biggest Deal Ever

Y'know, when you're a kid, everything is THE BIGGEST DEAL EVER.

Not getting a cookie = biggest deal ever.

Christmas when you're four = biggest deal ever.

Middle school crush = biggest deal ever.

High school breakup = the catastrophic, world-ending bigness of this deal cannot be overstated.

And part of that's because your brain hasn't pupated yet, and you're still working on things like impulse control and executive function.  But I think a lot of it's because everything just feels SO MUCH MORE EPIC when you're experiencing it for the first time - you know, there's no precedent to fall back on, no "well, this is like that other thing that happened that other time" to help you put things in perspective.  (This must also be why we unabashedly LOVE the stuff we read/watched/listened to when we were kids, back when everything was brand-new and there was no such thing as a cliché.  I love many things, but nothing will ever match the savage virginal ferocity with which my 15-year-old self loved Sailor Moon.)

Except maybe for Youkai Yume's Sailor Ponies.  Be still, my throbbing ovaries.

I kinda feel like we don't make enough allowances for that in adulthood.  There's this prevailing opinion that by the time your prefrontal cortex is fully up and running (when you're about 25), you should pretty much have all the emotional training you need to deal with your life.

The thing is, though, the first-time stuff keeps rolling off the line.  First marriage.  First real job.  First kid.  First major illness in the family.  First death in the family.  First kid leaving home.  And even though you're trying so hard to do a good job piloting your grown-up mecha, it all still feels like the biggest deal ever - because it's all still totally new.

All of which is to say, I'm sorry for falling off the planet over these last couple months.  No, no dire secret tragedies here - I just got into this weird, nasty funk, and it's taken me awhile to discover the source of the River Angst.

See, when we were launching Sixes this summer, I tried REALLY hard to get it all right.  Guest blogs, con appearances, Twitter things, Facebook things, launch party, the whole nine yards.  It went great - better than I could have ever expected.  I didn't manage to do everything, but I had a fantastic time. 

Things got kind of backed up in fall.  Commitments and deadlines piled up, and I fell off the promotional wagon altogether.  Sales and mentions nose-dived.  By winter, I was totally wiped out - and then the "best of 2014" lists started rolling out, and I came down with this awful cocktail of bitterness and exhaustion and guilt.  Bitterness because my book had disappeared without a trace, exhaustion because I was too dang tired to contemplate another round of the "look at me, aren't I wonderful?" schtick, and guilt because A) I knew I hadn't done everything I could to help myself, and B) it is incredibly stupid and petty to get bent out of shape about stuff like this.  (I have a book that is published and in the actual bookstores, and another one on the way.  I AM the 0.00001%.)

The funny thing about these biggest-deals-ever is that you can KNOW that they are really the smallest of the small stuff - lepton-like in their #firstworldproblems insignificance - and still not be able to get past it.  The best you can do is keep your mouth shut and try really REALLY hard not to channel your inner Dudley Dursley, throwing a fit because you only got 36 presents this year. 

But then a happy thing happened last week.  Sixes got a great mention on SFsignal's latest Mind Meld (thanks, J! You are the queen!) Then a couple of days later, 4 out of 5 stars from the San Francisco Book Review.  And yesterday - this one's totally lighting up my life right now - a place of pride on a book blogger's Best of 2014 list.

And that just, like... I don't know, totally parted the clouds.  I realized that it was never really about wanting the big prizes or winning All of the Buzz.  Almost without exception, the people in the running for those are people who've invested years - decades - in the craft and the community. I might still throw my name in the ring, but I have not put in NEARLY enough hours to be a serious contender.  That's all right.  That's really as it should be.  I think more than anything, I just wanted assurance that I don't have to keep pushing every single second in order to keep my name out there, that I wrote something that can stand on its own - you know, that people who don't know me at all can still pick up my strange, dense, offbeat little book and find good things in it.

And I almost didn't post this, because for all that we praise the inner child, you're really not supposed to show the world your inner two-year-old... but I've talked to several other writers lately who are all in different stages of the process, and all going their own special kind of crazy.  It's a wonderful, peculiar business that we're all lucky to be a part of, but the thing people don't talk about much is that there really is only one way to stress-test a submarine... and you don't know where your weak spots are until you go deep enough for something to spring a leak.  That's normal - all part of growing into a big strong grown-up author - but you can't fix it until you figure out where the water's coming in.  I expect that's true for other things, too.

So all of this is to say that you, upstanding sophont that you are, are almost-certainly doing a great job of adulting - but if you ever do catch yourself feeling massively, disproportionately irrational about something, and can't implicate any of your usual suspects, it might be worth checking to see if maybe you aren't having a first-time-induced biggest-deal-ever.  They sneak up on you long after you've taken charge of your own juice and naptimes.


--"I don't mind dragons THIS size," said Mother.  "Why did it have to grow to be so BIG?"
--"I'm not sure," said Billy, "but I think it just wanted to be noticed."

DC Comics and the Case of the Deathless Media Franchise

It's been a big week for comic book drama.

The greatest tidal wave of Internet outrage has come from DC's new contest - and while asking artists to draw Harley Quinn naked and suicidal is definitely not the worst item on the company's social sensitivity rap sheet, it's really not helping.  (Next up: Batman sobbing helplessly as he masturbates to a Leave It to Beaver rerun!  Ha-HAAaaaaa!)

The second wave of the PR shit-nami has come as DC vetoed Batwoman's marriage to her long-term partner - while being careful to articulate that they are not objecting to lesbian superhero marriage, but superhero marriage across the board.  (And yes, dear reader: even Aquaman.)

Which brings us, rather retroactively, to A Lee Martinez's latest post.  He calls it Continuing Drama vs. The Dreaded Third Act, and opens with this:

One of the reason I enjoy writing standalone novels is that it allows me to tell stories that have a beginning, middle, and an end.  Series fiction is, almost universally, stuck in the second act by its very nature.

ACT ONE: Peter Parker gets bit by a radioactive spider, gains superpowers, learns a lesson on personal responsibility.

ACT TWO: Spider-Man struggles to fight crime and redeem himself in his own eyes and the eyes of the city he defends.

ACT THREE: Spider-Man learns to balance his obligations as both a superhero and an ordinary man, gets married, has some kids, stops being such a sadsack.

Yes, it’s that Act Three that’s the problem.  It NEVER happens.  It was never intended to happen.  Spider-Man is stuck in that second act, and he will never actually get out of it.

(I highly recommend clicking over to read the whole thing - it's a humdinger of a thesis.)

For all the publicity it's garnering at the moment, DC's weird, regressive Peter-Panning just shines a brighter spotlight on an issue that's been endemic to franchise fiction pretty much since the get-go: namely, that you've set up a system that pits your brand against your story - and the brand wins every time.

Would it be interesting to see Spider-Man get his Act Three?  It certainly was back when they called it The Incredibles.

But if we actually let Spider-Man grow and change as a character, we'd eventually run out of Spider-Man stories to tell - and Happily Ever After does not sell comic books, action figures, or kids' underoos.

So we have to keep the machine going.  Superman and James Bond and Dr. Who have been so calcified by time and money that their adventures will never, ever end - we'll just keep swapping out their puppeteers as needed.  And the more closely a supporting character orbits that fixed heroic center of their universe, the less they will be allowed to change.  (Killing off Squid-Boy?  No problem.  But Jean Grey just can't stay dead.)

That is the part that sticks in my craw.  When you know going into the story that the good guy can't achieve final victory OR die trying - that the Earth will not get blown up, or stay blown up if it does - that any substantial growth the hero has to do already happened back in his origin story - it feels like... well, kind of like how my good buddy Ike probably feels when he bumps up against the aquarium wall.  You know, like the story should be moving you forward into consequences, costs, changes, fallout -  but there's something artificial holding you back.  (Or in the case of mainstream comics' chronic retconjuration, letting you move forward and then teleporting you back.)

It's like some kind of invisible force field...!

And to be clear: I don't mean to dog on deathless franchises, or snipe at the people who enjoy them.  But I think it's interesting that we advocates of progressive nerd-dom get so vexed about these things - about DC's misogyny and militant super-bachelorhood, and the eternally white male Doctor, and all that mess I ranted about in Skyfall - when for the whole life of the franchise, we've basically been paying its creators not to change.


Not that we shouldn't ask for our favorite series to become more progressive, more inclusive.

Just that if they seem to be terminally stuck in the 1960s, it's because that's where they came from... and if they seem to be hell-bent on staying there, we might ought to quit spending so much energy ranting and begging and shaming them to move forward, and start putting our love and money into series that already have.

I hear Image Comics is lovely this time of year.

He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion.

Listing to Port

You know, I feel really bad that I haven't updated here more often.  I'm so full of thoughts - oh, happy reader, if only you could taste a delectable full-bodied slice of my gray matter today! - and yet having so dang much trouble with follow-through.

Actually, a better way to say it is this: I feel like half of my brain is burning out from overuse, and the other half is rotting.  I knew it was getting bad when I found myself suddenly, desperately excited at the prospect of teaching GMAT math.  Or hell, ANY math.  My 10th-grade tutoring student whipped out her geometry homework this week, and it was like someone had offered me - dare I say that deadly four-letter C-word? - cake.

Meanwhile, the right side of my brain is busy failing at two blogs, four social media accounts, six email addresses, a line-editing project, and writing the first draft of one whopping big manuscript that really, positively needs to be done by Christmas.

To be clear: these are all TERRIFIC problems to have, and I'm grateful for every one of them.  It's just that collectively, they do end up with me sitting at my computer, begging myself to do something - anything! - but mostly staring at the dried sneeze-speckles on the screen in vacant fascination.

Dramatic re-enactment, starring my nephew, Pete.

Actually, I think this is a small part of the reason why I am so dang excited for WorldCon this week.  Hanging out with people in real-time is such a joy, you know?  Yes, it wears you out in its own peculiar way, but what a relief to only have four seconds to draft your response, instead of letting that blinking cursor leer at you for hours, or a whole entire weekend, while you attempt to compose the reply which will stand forever as a testament to your craft and thoughtfulness, or embarrassing lack thereof.

Dear Grandma,

Thank you so much for the Precious Moments figurine.  I'll think of you every time I see this adorable club-footed cherub, and remember to make my monthly donation to the Tow-Headed Caucasian Children's Fund.  Can't wait to see you at Kitschmas!

And no, it's not like every tweet and post and 3AM drunken gmail missive has to be some Ozymandian monument for the ages - but every one of them is explicitly meant to be noticed by somebody (especially when you are now in the business of being noticed by as many people as possible!), so why wouldn't you want them to look their best?  Especially once people have seen what your best really looks like.  From then on, they'll know in a heartbeat if you show up with anything less.

My God, is this what it's like to feel incapable of leaving the house without makeup?  Shall I never again browse the aisles of the Internet in my social sweatpants?

Well, perhaps not today.

And so I continue overclocking my frontal lobe, wallowing in problems that I am absolutely delighted to have, cultivating perfectionism at the expense of promptness, and wishing like the dickens that I weren't always, constantly, CONTINUALLY keeping at least one person waiting on me for something or other.

Sorry about that, y'all.  C'est la belle vie.  But if anyone needs any help with solving simultaneous equations or calculating probability, I am prepared to render aid with positively blistering vigor.  In the meantime, bring on WorldCon!

Psst.  Your participles are showing, dear.

Writer's Digestion: After the Elephant

I'm sure you guys have heard it before.  When you're despairing over your writing and how unfathomably far you have to go, some angelic soul will invariably offer you a comforting pat on the back and that sage advice: "it's like eating an elephant: just take it one bite at a time."

So you tie your bib like the obi sash of a battle-hardened samurai, daub HP sauce under your eyes, and make valkyries of your knife and fork, until the bones of your enemy lie devastated and fleshless before you.

There are other elephants after that, of course.  Some smaller, others tougher, maybe one or two abandoned halfway through the brisket, when the sun and the flies beat you to the punch.  But you sharpen your eating-irons and step up your game, until - an indeterminate tonnage of meat later - you finally achieve that coveted Diners Club card, and entry into the blessed realm of Cornutopia.

Where you are woefully unprepared for what awaits you.



The Writer's Food Pyramid?

It's wonderful, of course.  No more sweating over a solitary carcass: here, you are seated amidst the beautiful people, with ten thousand delectable niceties passed from one illustrious peer to the next.  The variety is astonishing, delightful; the camaraderie intoxicating; the honor immense.

Until you notice that you're falling behind.  More and more goodies pile up on your plate, untasted, growing cold, as you frantically stuff yourself, marveling in despair at the swift, graceful ease with which your betters not only seem to dispatch every dish - website Wellington, chicken-fried conference, blog au jus - but keep carving themselves fresh slices of elephant all the while.  And then you begin to wonder whether the unsettled churning in your gut is indigestion, or the bile-soaked fear that you just might not belong here after all.

Or maybe you don't.  Maybe you were smarter than me and didn't spend five years living exclusively on malt liquor and elephant.  Maybe you started working this other stuff into your regimen a long time ago.

But if you didn't or haven't or just started wondering what might happen when you finally do start to get somewhere, I'll tell you what I've figured out so far.

1.  If you feel overwhelmed by it all, it's probably because you're still trying to do All of Something, and it's hard to switch to Some of Everything.

2.  Nobody else is really doing All of Everything, even if it looks like they are.

3.  Since you can't possibly do All of Everything, you might as well focus on the Somethings that you actually enjoy, and the ones that will get you closer to your goals.  (The more closely you can align those two, the better.)

4.  Ultimately, the worst thing you can do is Nothing.

5.  Life gets so much better when you give up on Perfect and set your sights on Better Than It Was Before.

And because I can't resist: apologies to everyone, for everything.  There's so much I'm dying to write and read and talk about, and all I want for Christmas is to sit down and interbrain with you.  Gimme a few more days to make it home again, and I will pre-empt the hell out of Santa.

If you could put my lunch in a blender and liquefy it and put it into a caulking gun and then inject it right into my femoral artery, even better.

Confessions of a Closet Pedivore

This is Peaches.

She's a pretty great cat by any standard, but what I really love about her is that she's the most single-minded, laser-focused life-form I've ever met. When it's lovey time, you've got a furry vibrating mogwai draped on your face. When it's playtime, she's a mackerel-striped Lamborghini doing carpet-ripping donuts around the living room (or mauling feet, as above). And when it's time to go to the vet, there's an 8-pound meth-addled velociraptor in the Kozy Kitty crate.  Basically, no matter what she's doing, Peaches is doing it to the max.

I'm pretty much the same way. Not that I express affection by wiping eye-boogers on people's faces or anything - but man, it is SO easy to pick one thing and just go at it. Whether it's work or writing or hangout time, I shove everything else to one side, latch on to the goal like a facehugger alien, and don't let go until my success is skittering off the organ-splattered dinner table.

So to speak.

This kind of single-minded toe-chewing tenacity was essential in college, but lately I've been running hard up on its down side. It just doesn't work for things like losing weight, or saving money, or making e-friends - you know, the stuff that you can't just lock yourself in a room and power through for 8 hours at a time. And it is so dang exhausting to have to constantly keep on top of half a dozen little piddly things!

So for all you competent multi-taskers out there: what the heck is your secret? Do you make a schedule or a do-list or something? Is there a sticker chart on your wall where you give yourself a gold star every time you hit the gym or practice the glockenspiel? Tell me your winning strategy, so I can make it mine!

In the meantime, Peaches and I are going to use our mutant power to do NaNo this month.  Wish us luck!

The game's afoot;
Follow your spirit: and upon this charge,
Cry — God for Harry! England and Saint George!

Wedging Open the Wardrobe Door

You know, there's no shortage of Magical World stories out there. The ones where some schlubby Earth-person (usually of the teen varietal) is drawn into another world and has to pass the test, save the world, win the day before they can go back to their own life in Anywhere, USA. It's a fantasy-genre classic.

But there's a handful of yarns out there where the magic door stays open - or less literally, the magical/fantastic elements become a semi-permanent fixture of the hero's life. So then Dapper McTeen has to defeat the Dark Lord while simultaneously cramming for an algebra test.  (See: Animorphs, Sailor Moon, Buffy, Spider-Man, etc.) 

Those kinds of stories maybe don't fit so neatly into Joseph Campbell's narrative designs, but I've always had a soft spot for them.  Because that's what real life is.  No dying alien ever takes the time to write a note saying "Please excuse Hal Jordan from his mission tomorrow; he has to go save the galaxy."  That sucker just drops a load in your lap and croaks. 

And for most of us, if the giant purple wormhole in the sky is not *actively* spewing out Geiger-esque alien abominations, it is really, really tempting to just leave the spandex in the dryer and try like the dickens to get caught up on e-mails before you have to start fixing dinner.  This is why so many of us are rattling around with unfinished manuscripts and lingering guilt.  It's not because you're a grown-up and the wardrobe door to Narnia has closed.  It's because it's all blocked up with dirty clothes and boxes of unsorted tax documents and that one cooler you're afraid to open because you're pretty sure you never cleaned out the leftovers from last year's 4th of July shindig. 

On second thought, maybe I'll let Mr. Tumnus come find me.

This is pretty much where I've been at the last couple of weeks.  Missed writer's workshop on Wednesday because I had to go give an exam out in Alfred J. Shitkicker County.  Missed FenCon this weekend - 8 hours of driving/delivering on Friday, 14 hours of helping a friend move house on Saturday, 10 hours of teaching and tutoring on Sunday.  Good chance of missing workshop again tomorrow, because my company is comprised of helpless assholes.  It's exhausting and depressing and miserable and I want to go play cowboys-and-frog-monsters so bad I can taste it.  (It tastes kinda like pickled boot-leather, if you were wondering.)  More than anything, I really, really, REALLY want to finish the first draft of my book proposal before my in-laws hit town on the 13th - to hit Save, turn 30, and enjoy a week of unrelenting Texo-Scottish anarchy with a clear conscience and an empty inbox.

So wish me luck, fellow Fantasians, and the best of same with your own wardrobes, wormholes, star-gates, and time machines.  There are wondrous worlds on the other side - we just gotta get there!

Life isn't all fricaseed frogs and eel pie.

Authors on Twitter, or, The Problem With Selling Jesus

Let's be honest: evangelism is a rough gig.

And as trying as it must be to brave the tide of rude indifference as you hand out New Testaments outside the ShopKo, or to tell yourself that leaving Chick tracts in bathrooms is a legitimate and fruitful use of your time, the worst has to be the door-to-door business.

You show up, pressed and professional and with a holy gleam in your eye that would put a Fuller Brush salesman to shame.  You knock, and steel your smile as you venture the first words that will - God willing! - snatch this lost lamb in the Winnie-the-Pooh nightgown from Satan's slavering jaws... and she slams the door in your face.  Repeat dozens of times a day, every day, and it's a wonder you don't throw your bike in front of an oncoming bus and run off to join the Pepsi Generation.

Let's meditate for a minute on the real problem here.

When you knock at my door, you're making two sizable assumptions: first, that I have not already found Jesus, and second, that I am receptive to receiving Him.  (There's a third issue with the door-to-door model, namely that your ringing of the bell compelled me to stop fornicating or beating my children long enough to answer the door, which puts me in a coarse mood before the Word even enters into it.  But we'll leave that one aside.)

Is this you?  It probably shouldn't be.

If I've already got the Holy Spirit within me, then you've wasted your time.

If I'm a hellbound heathen and happy with it, then you've likewise wasted your time.

In fact, your approach works reliably only if I have A) not heard of or never seriously considered your faith, B) found myself unhappily lacking in the spiritual department, and C) cultivated a lifestyle and identity not radically incompatible with your beliefs.  That's a pretty hard trifecta to hit.

So what I am saying, aspiring authors of the Twitterverse, is that if you follow me, and I click and find that most of your tweets are hawking your book, there's really no incentive for me to follow you back.

First of all, if I don't read your genre, I'm not going to read your book no matter how good it is.  And secondly, let's say I DO buy your book, and read it, and give it eleventeen stars on Amazon and Goodreads and tell all my friends and blog about how Three Hundred and Eighty-Five Shades of Beige opened my eyes to the tyranny of accent walls.  What do I get for all that?  If the answer is "pretty much just more tweets about your book," then there's no reason for me to keep following you.  I have used you up.  You have nothing to offer but more annoying ads for Cheetos, when my fingers are already orange with the chem-o-cheez proof of my fealty.

So whether you're selling the Great Armenian Novel or a ticket out of perdition - please, y'all, think about your business model.  Leave my doorbell for the cops, and focus on selling yourself.  Make me think "man, s/he's so cool and rad and deep and interesting - this kind stranger surely possesses some unearthly wisdom.  It must be mine!"  That right there is the difference between "eh, nothing for me here" and "okay, Aunt Matilda, you know that grammarian Regency romance isn't my thing, but this author I know has a book out - it's called Pride and Parentheses, and you simply MUST read it."

By the way, I'm absolutely not an expert on how to do Twitter the "right" way.  That would be Kate Cornell, the blackest belt in social media that *I* know, and Ben M. Wallace - and if you're feeling adrift, I highly recommend his Giving the Bird: The Indie Author's Guide To Twitter.  (I know it says indie, but he'll let you read it even if you're not self-publishing.  He's cool like that.) 

And then we got the people who knock on your door at 6:30 in the morning on Sunday going, "Have you found Jesus?"  You just wanna come to the door nude and go, "No, help me look for him!  Come on!"

Changing Perspective

Once upon a time, I decided to write a fantasy novel.  And lo, it was anime.

Wait, let's fast forward. 

Once upon a time, I realized that the vaguely-defined, sanitary-generic medieval setting for my fantasy novel was as boring as a packet of unflavored oatmeal on a flat gray pillow, and deleted it.

"Everybody since Tolkien has been doing Euromedieval fantasy," thought I.  "What'll I do instead?"

By and by, I hit on the idea of setting it in something like the American West.  A stunning leap forward for fiction?  No.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I actually had something to say about a setting like that. 

You know, so much fantasy is about Our Heroes rallying together to beat the Dark Lord, and for me, growing up in America has basically been the act of cracking open the family album and realizing that the Dark Lord was dear old great-great-granddad, and he WON.  And that most of the privileges I grew up with are the spoils of unimaginably brutal conquests, and that their consequences are still falling like dominoes through five hundred years of history and right through the present - right into the future! - and that even though *I* didn't do any of those horrible things, I'm still a product of them, and all I have to do to help keep my ancestors' monstrous legacy alive is to complacently mind my own business and accept things the way they are.

It's some galling shit, y'all.

So I decided, "right, if I'm going to do this, I gotta get it RIGHT."  No noble savages, magic Negroes, whitewashing, tokenism, and most especially no heroic white-folks leading a bunch of good-hearted helpless brown people to salvation. 

Anyway, I've been reading up on some of these ways that reasonably well-intentioned writers Get It Wrong, and am still continually amazed at how often I am just bowled over in the process.  At some point, you understand why the stereotypes in Twilight are so immensely awful, have read all about the enormous cringeworthy problems with The Help, are actively unpacking your invisible knapsack, and reckon you're levelling up your cultural awareness.  "Man!" you start thinking.  "I am so enlightened, I should move to Seattle and start ordering my free-trade coffee in Gujarati!"

Then somebody tells you that To Kill A Mockingbird is racist, and your mind is blown.

Well, mine was, anyway.  It was an astonishing reminder of how much I STILL don't know, how readily I STILL make all kinds of sick cultural assumptions, and how much I am STILL a product of my programming. 

Not gonna lie, it's a bummer.

But it's all right, because I'm still going to educate myself.  In Paper Mario terms, my goal is to go from this:

To this:

(Granted, Mr. Mario himself is kinda symbolic: he's white, powerful, heroic, and those hapless wacky fungus-folks in the Mushroom Kingdom never can keep their shit straight without him.)

So what I'm saying is, learning to see in eye-popping cultural 3D is almost certainly a lifelong and imperfect project.  The prospect of Getting It Wrong is intimidating, because the only thing I dread more than getting savaged by critics is actually, seriously hurting somebody through my own blundering ignorance.

But it's also tremendously exciting.  In many ways, trying to write fiction for a living is kind of a selfish pursuit.  You're not curing cancer or saving the rainforest or teaching orphaned kittens to read - mostly you're just trying to pursue your passion profitably enough to quit working second shift at WeenieWorld. 

This part, though - this isn't about quitting the day job or getting famous or book-slapping the naysayers in your life with a hardcover copy of the novel they said you'd never write.  This is about helping to fill in the gaps on the shelves, giving readers of all backgrounds more characters and stories worthy of them, and making your (tiny, individual) contribution towards the raising of the literary bar.

No, changing perspective isn't as easy as pushing a button - but the view is so, so worth it.

And we'll call them... 'goombas'.

The Nature of the Beast

You know, I used to think that getting a book written was essentially doing battle with the Beast.  The agony of suckage and rewriting, the ecstasy of some brief stroke of genius, the back-and-forth and rest and retrial - all of it an epic struggle, yes?

Nope.  Come to find out that all of this, the writing and rewriting and feedbacking and editing?  That was just the training montage.  Eye of the Tiger, and so forth.  The Beast is actually called Publicizing - pitching, querying, networking, marketing, social-media-whatevering, please-look-at-my-stuffening - and it's licking its chops waiting for me.

On second thought, maybe I need to practice a little more with the backswing.

So it's come to this, has it? A fight to the death, mano a mano, man to man... just you and me and my... GUARDS!

Backing Up the Winnebago

It's like... when you're doing your first draft, or second or maybe even third, it sucks because what you thought was awesome before turns out to look like total shit when you read back over it again.  But I'm coming up on a new snag, here, because I've finally hit the point where it all looks great to me - genius, I say! - and that means it's time to rely on other talented folks to give it an objective eye.

It's like trying to back a trailer into a parking space, or something - you can think you know what you're doing and be good at it, but ultimately the person on the ground is the only one who can really tell you how close you are to hitting that fire hydrant.

And right now I am just not sure I will ever be able to get this goddamn thing parked.

"Well," the reasonable reader might enquire, "if YOU feel like it's good to go, why don't you start sending it off?"

Two reasons, say I.  First, you need an absolutely KICK ASS beginning, and while I've gotten considerably divergent feedback on what particularly is wrong with mine, kick-ass it is not.  And second, it's not that 148,000 words is totally out of the question for big fat fantasy novels, but if you're going to try and sell that, you have got to make SURE that every single one of those words is absolutely mission-critical.  And mine aren't.  (I think it's more a case of trimming bits here and there, rather than cutting out vast tracts of irrelevance, but I have lost considerable confidence in my bit-trimming insight - again, it's gotten to the stage where it all looks pretty good from here.)

Anyway, the consolation in all this is that I already know I'm going to keep working at it until I'm dead or published, so no danger of quitting in despair.  AND I have already gotten awesome feedback from awesome people, with more yet to come.  Right now it is just real hard to see how this giant unwieldy thing is ever going to fit between the yellow lines.

Fantasia has no boundaries.

New This Week #3: Finding Misery

Well, this was an apt title to choose for today - I wouldn't say I've exactly found MISERY, but I did just find out that my submission didn't make it through this round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, so it's not exactly puppies and rainbows either.

Anyway, so Finding Misery, by Russell C. Connor.  This guy is another I’ve met through the book group; as before, I wanted to try at least one of his books, but I confess: ever since Pet Sematary scared the daylights out of my 12-year-old self, I’ve been too chicken to revisit the horror genre, which is Connor’s bread and butter.  (I do really want to try his Whitney at some point, though: the idea of setting a horror story in the aftermath of a hurricane, when the power is out and streets are flooded and looters are prowling through wrecked homes EVEN BEFORE the unspeakable whatever-it-is comes crawling up out of the sea, is pretty thrillsome just on principle.)

So I was delighted to find out that he had a new book just coming out, this one in something of a different vein.  I could sketch it out here, but let me put it to you the way that the book itself does: our man – earnest nice-guy underachiever Rudy Compton – just found out that his wife is cheating on him.  Again.  And in the aftermath, on his first and only night in jail, shit gets REALLY weird, REALLY fast.  I want to emphasize this opening part of the book, because for me, it’s what sells the whole thing.  Sure, there’s plenty of awesomeweird spec-fic supernatural stuff further in, but I wouldn’t have gotten that far if Rudy’s Earth-normal life didn’t hook me all by itself.  I think Connor’s winning strategy comes down to two things, really.

1.  Triggering the reader’s morbid curiosity / rubbernecker instinct.  Relationship drama (of the call-the-cops varietal) is always ugly, fascinating stuff, and packs an extra punch here because it’s as new and shocking to Rudy as it is to us – this is NOT his accepted norm.  Which brings me to:

2.  Casting Rudy as a true newbie in all this – sharp-witted and a little scrappy but also profoundly lost.  You can picture Ed Norton’s character in Fight Club without going far off the mark, and maybe that’s the best way to sum it up: in both cases, it’s the voyeuristically-detailed shambles of the main character’s life that draw you in, and the story just gets bigger from there.  

There's a few more points to make about this book, but all of them are over in my review, so I'll leave it here.  Apparently even the rejected entries get feedback from two reviewers though, so I'll probably come cast up my private shame here in the next day or so.  Look forward to it!

Hemingway said to never write about a place until you're away from it, because it gives you perspective.  But one look at that exposed metal toilet in the front corner of the cell reminds me I'm no Hemingway.