Going Against the Granola

Happy December and a pre-emptive Merryween, y’all! I suspect this will be my last message for the year, so buckle in – there is more than my usual one-paragraph parable here this time.

Actually, what I have for you today looks an awful lot like a box of granola bars. Exhibit A:

This box box of granola goodness was gifted to me at Bouchercon at the beginning of November. And you know, you just can’t keep a thing like that all to yourself.

So I brought the box with me to Steampunk November, where it provided excellent snacks for the ticket booth volunteers.

But there were lots left over, so then I brought the box to my guest-lecture at Collin College the week after.

And to the corporate training seminar after that.

And to the Dallas Makerspace class after that.

I even brought it with me to the Fort Worth Writers meeting before Thanksgiving, but they had an ENORMOUS cornucopia of goodies already there, so my little snack-box was entirely superfluous to requirement. (Seriously, y’all. The FWW is for REAL.)

Now it is almost empty, and I could not be more delighted. It’s such a good feeling to know that my little snack-box has been so many places and fed so many people.

The thing about a box of enthusiasm like this (and you knew those shelf-stable carbs were going to be a metaphor for something, right?) is that it’s meant for sharing. And when your enthuse-o-box gets low, that’s a good signal that it’s time to leave off giving for awhile, so you can rest and replenish yourself. I always look forward to resting at this time of year. Winter is when all the conferences and conventions are over, the publishing world is shut down, and I get to enjoy a whole lot of house time.

But a funny thing happened earlier this year. I got another box in the mail, with ENTIRELY different goodies.

There are tweezers and pins and plastic baggies aplenty in there, screws and cams and plugs galore. These new treats are mechanical, analytical, procedural – nothing at all like the creative story-shaping stuff I’ve been dealing in for so long now. And I have more of them than I know what to do with.

Y’all, it is so strange to be typing this, but I seem to be turning into a little baby forensic locksmith. I got my AFL (ALOA Fundamental Locksmith) certification earlier this year. Joined the IAIL (International Association of Investigative Locksmiths). Signed up for forensic science classes at the local college. And I am now several weeks in to my new job as a bench tech at the local lock shop.

You may refer to me as "The Keymaster" :)

I found out recently that there are 49 Certified Forensic Locksmiths in the world. And I am just passionately, hell-bendingly keen on becoming CFL #50.

I’ll be the first to admit that this does not fit the narrative of my life at ALL. In every locksmithing course and conference I’ve taken this year, it has been STUNNING to find myself the only squishy little lady-wordess in a room full of top-tier tradesmen, my ignorance as pure and deep as the driven snow next to these fellas with 20 or 40 years of experience in the industry. (They have all been tremendously kind and welcoming, by the way.)

I have struggled mightily to justify any of this to myself. It has been humbling and refreshing to enter a world so demographically different from the creative-writing community in which I’ve spent my whole adult life. It is also hard not to feel like the very silliest of no-hope impostors in this new company. Almost everyone in this business seems to have come from a police, military, or family-locksmith background, and my two semesters of Latin feels mighty out of place here. It’s been an eye-opener into how some folks must feel when they dip a toe into our creative-writing world, for one thing. Whenever you consistently find yourself the only (X) in the room, it’s awfully hard not to wonder if you’re in the wrong room.

One of these things is not like the others...

I tell you what, though, y’all – and this is the part that I hope will be most relevant to you. I’ve noticed something really interesting happening here of late. When I am among writers, I am the only locksmith present. When I am among locksmiths, I am the only writer. And that has made a POWERFUL difference. I’ve already made friends in high places by transcribing and reformatting the IAIL training manual – because they didn’t have anyone who could do that. I’ve already been invited to give a hands-on lockpicking workshop at a writers' conference that's turned me down three years running – because they didn’t have anyone for that either. I have stood out and been noticed more in the last six months than I have in the past six years. And I think you can too.

Posse, the bigger and more anonymous our world gets, and the more we feel like helpless specks competing against millions of other author-hustlers for that coveted buy, click, like, share, or follow, the more I am convinced of this truth: if you want to be the best, be the bridge.

It feels truer the more I think about it. Mister Rogers was the bridge between the exciting new television medium and the timeless care and patience needed to nurture young children. Julia Child was the bridge between classical French cooking and everyday American households. My friend Bud was the bridge between me, a writer, and Shane Richmond, a master-class swordsman and outdoor events impresario – and now we have Writers in the Field. And so many of our favorite genres - urban fantasy, romantic suspense, and alternate history, just to name a few - are a fusion of others.

Or tequila suckers, which are a fusion of candy and regret.

Bridging is not an easy thing to do, I'm discovering. Sometimes your blending results in a masterfully delicious beefy cheesy chili-mac - but just as often, you are left with a quivering pile of meat jello. It takes courage to scrape the bowl out and start over - and over, and over, and over.

In the meantime, have no fear: my granola-box is not empty, and I have no plans to discontinue my regular brand of literary ruckus-raising. I’ll be travelling less in 2020 while I work on building up the far side of my bridge. But I’m really looking forward to keeping up with you and your own building projects – and if I can be helpful with those, I hope you’ll let me know. (My plotting and developmental-editing brain is ever at your service!)

Anyway - I hope you’re proud of your year, y’all, whether your win was total domination or just getting through it. And I hope you have something already set up to look forward to on other side of the holidays. Regardless: rest up, write on, and don’t give away the last of your snacks – you will need them for the road ahead!

What's In Your Box-Trolley?

Okay, so guys. You know that one friend you have? The one whose life would be five million percent better if they would just listen to you and [dump that worthless mofo / see a therapist / try the diet or program that changed your life / etc]?

Let me be that friend for a moment. And let me confess: I don't mean to be obstinate or ungrateful. It's just that even if your advice or solution is absolutely correct, I can't make the leap from where I am to where you want me to go. The gap is too big, and I can't see the other side from here.

So if you really, really, super-actually want to help me (your hapless hypothetical friend), here is what you can do: create a space where I can get completely outside this mess of mine, even if only for a day or two - a place where I can rest, catch my breath, and clear my mind. You see my problem so clearly, because you're *outside* it. If you love me, please help me get outside of it too - and then listen to me when I tell you what's really going on in there.

Kathryn McClatchy did exactly that for me this weekend, and it has remade me. I have known for YEARS that I needed help - delegation skills, an assistant, etc. - but have never made any meaningful progress in getting things off my plate. So finally, in a breakdown moment of frustration and despair, I booked her for a two-day intervention at a little cabin in Granbury... and oh my gouda.

She let me dump my entire to-do list in her lap, and then patiently sorted through it with me. She didn't tell me that I had to use a certain program or hire a certain person. She didn't arrive with a pre-fab holy-grail solution in mind. She just asked every good question in the book, and helped me build a system around the brain and workstyle and habits I already have. And I have never felt so helped or so overwhelmingly *heard*.

This here is a photo I took while I was walking the neighborhood around the cabin, and I hope it will serve as a helpful reminder: y'all, build your system to accommodate your nature, and not the other way around.

And if you could use some help with that, holler. I know just the lady you need to talk to.

Rapping on the A-Train

So while I was in San Francisco, I took the subway to go visit my friends. It was the end of rush hour, so not very crowded once we got into the city proper. Then a guy got on, carrying a little portable speaker and a microphone, and arranged his gear in one corner.

And then he started rapping.

The song was something about peace and harmony - it wasn't very loud, and I couldn't quite make it out. Of course, my first thought was "God, what a jackass. Doesn't he know nobody wants to hear that?"

When he was done, he walked up and down the aisle, soliciting donations with his white-papered can. Everyone ignored him. And my second thought was, "How pitiful. This is like, the saddest and most awkward thing I've ever seen."

He got off at the same stop I did, but before I headed up the stairs, I waited - and watched him get on another train heading back the way we had just come. His microphone fell and dragged on the ground as he boarded, and my last glimpse was him gathering it up and turning on his speaker as the train doors closed behind him. And my third thought was, "Oh God. That is me. That is what I do. That is what my author-friends do. We are all just hapless schmucks belting our hearts out to a crowd of indifferent strangers and trying to get paid for it."

So today's thought is: let's do what we can to be kind to each other. Some of us are more skillful or subtle about it than others - but at the end of the day, most of us are just rapping on the A-train.

Tilting at Tomorrow

Sometimes I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe. I get so wrapped up in making flyers, planning activities, visiting and traveling and trying to keep up with myself - and after a long, happy day of hard work and hobbit-wrangling, it's a shock to log on and read about a profoundly broken world.

I worry sometimes that I'm too fortunate and insulated - that all of what I'm doing basically amounts to building castles in the sky while Rome burns. I hope that's not true. More than anything, I want what I'm doing to matter. I expect we all do.

But here's what I know for a certain fact: there is going to be a tomorrow in which the all-consuming crises of today don't feature. Our current problems will pass away, just as surely as the Cold War and the 1918 flu did before them, and new ones will grow in their place.

And when tomorrow gets here, I want to make sure that we still remember how to co-exist. I want to make sure that clickbaiting and fearmongering and runaway intellectual inbreeding don't deprive us of our friends and neighbors. We're in the middle of a hard and essential fight right now, but there's something completely unlike it already waiting in the wings... and whatever that is, we absolutely can't afford to meet it at half-strength.

I hope you registered to vote today, if you weren't already signed up. I hope you have been using every good means at your disposal to weigh in on the big decisions, and take ownership of the small ones.

But I also hope we remember the last vital stranger who helped us - on the side of the road, in the hospital, a thousand miles from home - and how little their political views mattered when we really, desperately needed them. And I am going to join my fellow big-hearted eventroverts in continuing to raise up little tentpole-spaces for good people to meet face-first and practice helping each other out... because that's the best way I know to ensure we still have a common ground left to come back to after today's fight is finished.

And because I just god damn love wearing a fancy name tag and buying tax-deductible donuts.

Because Blood Is Thicker than Hilton Water

Question of the day: who here already knew that David Douglas was a miracle-working shoemaker-elf, and what are you leaving out for him at night?

Seriously, y'all. He is singlehandedly holding up half a dozen different writers organizations over here, and I am just so bowled over and thankful for him on the daily. And for Shane Richmond and William Humble and Kathryn McClatchy and Sarah Hamilton and ALL of the WORD crew, who have been BUSTING IT for weeks now to help us get Writers in the Field off the ground.

And for you guys. Man, I can't think you enough for all that good love you gave us yesterday, right when we really needed it. We blew our ticket sales target *totally* out of the water, and for the first time since, like, May, I am waking up with a cut in my strut and a glide in my stride, cuz I don't just have to believe we are doing good work - I can SEE it.

Big, big love, y'all, and endless gratitude from all sides. I know what we're doing isn't the most important thing in the world, but you sure are lighting up our little corner of it. Thank you for being our ice-cold cucumber-jalapeño water of life: we don't have to know how or why you happened to us to be strangely proud that you did.

Letter Rip!

I see you, progressively-minded DFW writers. I see you sick at heart about the state of the nation. I see you calling, writing, and patriotically jimmy-rustling our senators and representatives. I see you amping up for November.

And I am here to cheer you on, with a caveat - because it's not about November 6th for us here in Texas. It's about *March* 6th. There are a shedload of brand-new brilliant grassroots candidates who have poured THOUSANDS of hours and dollars into getting their names on the primary ballot for your selection pleasure - and if we don't roll out and support them, we're going to get whichever pre-approved comfortable establishmentarians the Party has chosen for us. 

If we vote like we've always voted, we're going to get what we've always gotten. 

Only 14% of registered voters from *either* major party voted in the Dallas County primaries last year, and the rest of North Texas wasn't much better. That means 86% of our eligible population doesn't know they have a choice, doesn't care, or doesn't have access to the ballot box. If you've read this far, you already know how important this fight is. And as writers, we have a democratic duty to use our story-telling skills to inspire our fellow citizens to act.

And if my little story-telling exercise just here has got you fired up at all, I would like to invite you to lend your penmanship to a righteous cause - as Allison Campolo For Texas Senate District 10 and I undertake to print, sign, date, hand-address, fold, seal, and stamp 12,000 real, actual letters, telling her story, to her first 12,000 voters. Because mailers are cheap and easy, and go straight in the trash. Because this campaign is not about taking the easy, traditional, conventional way out. Because being the scrappy grassroots outsider means that your only infinite resources are love and give-a-damn - and y'all, if you have any damns to contribute to the cause, we would LOVE your company.

You know how it feels to see something like this in your mailbox. You KNOW how it feels to realize that someone cared enough to go the trouble of sending you an honest-to-god real letter. If you can help us bring that attention and care to people who have never felt seen, considered, or truly represented before, I believe we can change the whole game. Our first 'write-in happy hour' is this Thursday night. RSVP here, and we promise not to make you lick stamps!

The Happy Human Game

Well, 2017 is officially in the bag, which means my time spreadsheet for the year is all finished. Final count: average 66 hours worked per week for the past year. Highest was 96.5 hours in one week (the Tornado Alley Tour) and the lowest was 41.5 (the week before Thanksgiving, for some reason).
Y’all, I am not proud of that. I spent a whole lot of that time being wired to the moon and miserable, and not following through on promises I made to people I really care about. I AM proud of the things I accomplished in that time (more on that in the next couple of days) – but I do not want to die of stress and fat. 

So I’m going to start doing things differently – and maybe this will be useful for some of you guys too. This year, instead of making resolutions, I made a new spreadsheet. I’m calling it my Happy Human game, since that's what I'm trying to become. I listed all the stuff I want to make a habit of in 2018, and assigned each one a points value. There’s 365 points possible – funny how that worked out – and for January, I want to see if I can get 50 points a day. I’ll see about ratcheting that up to 100 in February if it goes well, and maybe tinker with point values as certain things get easier.

Anyway, if you want to try making your own Happy Human game, you can download mine and mess with it. (Please do change the entries around; the things there are the things I personally tend to struggle with, and I'm sure yours will be different.) Here is the link!

You might also like to check out Habitica, if this kind of thing sounds appealing - it's a similar idea, but rendered as an actual, playable game, and I've heard good things about it.

Regardless: good luck out there, guys. The year won't stay pristine for long, but I've loved seeing all the can-do-itude on my feed today, and I am so looking forward to meeting your bad-ass future-self!

2017: The Post-Hocalypse

One year ago today, my last book came out. The copies got a little held up in transit, but we had a TREMENDOUS launch party, and took the leftover credit-cupcakes out for an epic bar crawl afterwards.

I didn't write anything in 2017 (it's been hard to feel like another book is really what the world needs from me right now). But as I psych myself up to get back on that horse, I can't even regret the lapse. I've had the most fantastic adventures, with more terrific people than even I can handle knowing. It's such a treat to know you, and I can't wait to see what kind of ruckus we can raise next year.

Click here for the whole album.

WFC 2017: This is How We Stop Failing

This is a post about hosting events, and more specifically about running genre conventions, and most-specifically about World Fantasy Con. It’s also about the ongoing problem of inclusivity we’ve been having over here in literary SFF fandom, and my worm’s-eye view of what we can do to improve it.

NB: I am fairly new to fandom (my first convention was in 2013), and among the younger set of traditionally-published SFF authors (I just turned 35). I am an instigator, organizer, presenter, and/or attendee for three-quarters of a shitload of events annually, most of them writing-related. I also had the singular honor of being the volunteer coordinator for the World Fantasy Convention in San Antonio over this past weekend.

Like Mi Tierra, it was lit. (Shoutout to Sam Knight for the brilliant photo.)

There is a little story to tell first, and it goes like this:

Once upon a time, there was a little girl in third grade. (Not me.)

She came to school one day with a huge rat’s nest in her hair – and man, it was making her miserable. She could NOT sit still or pay attention or hardly even stand to be in her own skin.

The teacher, my beloved Auntie M, finally stopped class, pulled a hairbrush out of her purse, sat the girl down at the front of the room, and started to brush her hair. She carried on the class discussion while she brushed and brushed – gentle and carefully, a little at a time. It took the better part of the morning – but when it was done, the difference was night and day. The girl felt SO much better without that awful knotted wad of hair gnarled up on her head. After that, she third-graded happily ever after, for the whole rest of the day.

Y’all, we do have a huge rat’s nest in SFF fandom, and it is making us ALL miserable. It’s a whole horrible tangle of issues (a rat’s nest always is). It’s harassment, and discrimination, and invisibility, and lack of accessibility, and more besides.

The people on the receiving end of those things are sick and goddamn tired of dealing with them. The people deliberately perpetrating those things are assholes we badly need to get rid of. And the rest of the people, the ones who just want everybody else to chill out and have the same good time they’ve always had – well, a lot of them are anxious, defensive, and tired of getting yelled at for every problematic thing under the sun. And none of these feelings happen spontaneously or without reason: a little neglected tangle becomes a big angry knot becomes a huge event-wrecking snarl, and soon nobody involved is having any fun. Except maybe the assholes.

But short of whipping out the scissors, there’s only one way to untangle a rat’s nest. You have to start from the bottom and work your way up. And I mean from the BOTTOM.

Con-runners, event-organizers, fellow hosts of all stripes – you see this Maslow’s hierarchy chart here?

This is what I’m talking about. We have to start from the bottom of THIS. We have to start with meeting people’s basic physical needs.

Does your event have reasonable facilities, including accessible parking and clear signage? Are there restrooms and water available, and easily findable? Is the temperature comfortable? Can your attendees sit when they want to, stand and walk when they need to? Can *everyone* hear and see what’s going on? If it’s a long event, do you have food available (for purchase or for free), and is there enough for everyone? Does the menu provide adequately for people with common dietary restrictions? (Fact: humans require protein to live, and the joyless oil salad your hotel liaison is touting as vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, kosher, and halal satisfies nobody.)

This was our improv-directory for the mass autographing session: because letting authors sit where they want is a time-honored WFC tradition, but helping guests not have to hike up and down every single aisle and row to find their person is just plain thoughtfulness - whether they have limited mobility or not.

These considerations are not the last step in the event planning process, the mandatory-minimum meat-suit maintenance we have to do in order to get on with the important stuff. This IS the important stuff. Hospitality is a sacred duty so ancient we tell stories about the people who screwed it up. Traitors to guests are tortured in the deepest circle of Dante’s hell – worse than thieves, worse than murderers, worse than blasphemers and adulterers and people who leave trash in the airplane seat-pocket – and even if you aren’t feeding your attendees the roasted flesh of their own children, you absolutely cannot afford to fail on this front. Anything you are ignorant about you’d better learn. Anything you can’t do or provide had better be unmissably advertised beforehand, so that the people you aren’t equipped to serve know to plan accordingly or stay home. The instant they walk through your door, your guests are entrusting you with their one irreplaceable human body – and you MUST care for it faultlessly.

Sometimes it's the littlest stuff, y'all. Like pulling chairs away from the round serving table so that all feet and wheels can get the whole way around it without blocking traffic.

And that brings us to the second step on the pyramid. Guys, it is not enough to have staff on site. Their mere presence is not sufficient – because A) those people need to be equipped (advised, trained, directed, empowered) to spot problems in the making and help the guests who need it, and B) your guests need to be able to find them. I cannot overstate that second part. How do we KNOW who the helpers are in the crowd? Are they wearing matching T-shirts? Special hats? If “blue badge” means “staff”, how do attendees know that? Regardless of what insignia you use: if it can’t be spotted clear across the room, it isn’t visible enough. And if your guests don’t know that a staff member is present, he or she might as well not be.

The 'deputy sheriff' star badges I used for WFC were a step in the right direction, but not visible enough - you can barely see them here. (Fortunately, Team Domitz took the whole 'volunteer uniform' thing to a new, slightly frightening level of badass.)

Realness, y’all: I had a terrific time at World Fantasy Con in 2015, but it had conspicuous failures on both the physical needs and the security/safety steps of the pyramid. And it is FAR from the only major convention to do so.

If you’ve read this far, I trust it’s because you’ve recognized the bigger problems we have in our community – with passively excluding disabled people, with harassment and silencing of women in particular, with utterly failing to draw in minorities and then giving the “diversity panel” token treatment to those we do manage to attract. (And, I would add, with dogpiling on people who are more scapegoats for than active perpetrators of the issues listed above.)

All of the above are failures of inclusion, fault lines in our greater fan/writer community. They are conspicuous and highly-charged cracks in the “belonging” step of Maslow’s hierarchy. And we will NEVER be able to repair them until we fix those first two steps in the foundation. At a societal level, that means addressing poverty, violence, and institutionalized inequality. But in microcosm, at a convention or other event, it means ensuring that ALL our guests feel safe and well cared-for from start to finish.

All of us organizers want to put on a great show, and we are all apt to feel frustrated when the end result is criticized. Eventomancy is one of the most demanding of the extrovert sciences, and not for the faint of heart. But to my fellow party-planners: when you catch yourself feeling frustrated by criticism and sorely tempted to fire back or give up, please don’t. We need your passion and energy for big-tent human connection now more than ever. Instead, go back to the beginning. Start at the bottom, with the most basic and universal human needs, and work your way up. Ask yourself “how will they find the bathroom?” (And for a photo-annotated love-rant on what a ten-out-of-ten host-tacular convention looks like, click here.)

Unfortunately, we at World Fantasy 2017 were not able to unilaterally clear step three of the pyramid. But we have enjoyed a whole lot of post-con positive buzz, and I dare to hope that our stumbles were considerably smaller than in previous years. If that is true, it is because everyone on the back end put a hell of a lot of effort into getting those first two steps on absolute judo-grip lockdown. Watertight accessibility and harassment protocol. Killer hospitality suite with a 'conucopia' of dining options for nearly every appetite. Clear signage, abundant space, and visible volunteers everywhere. This weekend was Texas hospitality done right - and I could not be more proud to belong to a con-com and a culture that is synonymous with boisterous, big-hearted generosity.

Baltimore, the ball is in your court now. You know what to do.

A Brief Moral Meditation

At times like this, when emotions are running high and our national jimmies are thoroughly rustled, I find it worthwhile to ask: "What is is the hardest, bravest thing I could do right now?"

That is sometimes a hard question to answer. Chances are that this thing, whatever it is, will not win you easy backpats from other people on your team. It will not be cathartic or gratifying to even contemplate. It will almost certainly involve some kind of cost or risk to a vulnerable part of your identity. And it will be impossible to discover this thing while you are here in the midst of the public-opinion maelstrom.

So the next time you have a chance to be alone with your thoughts, I encourage you to meditate on what your bravest, most self-challenging act might be. It's okay if you can't bring yourself to attempt it right now. (I'm right there with you - sharp enough to know what I should be doing, chicken enough to not be doing it.) But knowing better - *hypothesizing* better - is the first, most critical step to doing better.

And telling other people how to act and feel isn't working.

Just a Little Pat on the Back(yard)

I saw an article in the NYT today about a restaurant in Japan, operated by a senior care specialist, that makes special gourmet meals for people who can't chew or swallow well. It's high-quality food that's artfully arranged and presented, so it looks and tastes like first-class fare - a big deal for older and disabled people for whom eating is a crucial pleasure.

I also saw a video this week about a guy who had a horrible time in foster care as a kid. Now he's adopted four of his own, and started a company that makes "comfort cases", so foster kids don't have to haul their belongings around in a trash bag.

And right here in my own backyard, David Doub is hard at work erecting tentpoles for geeks and creators of all stripes. He runs Dusk Comics, the Creative Women's Conference, the Texas Creative Community FB group, and now he's helping with the Texas Latino Comic Con (and probably even more things that I don't know about!)

And I just love it when somebody sees a problem in their own backyard, suited to their own expertise, and decides to solve it. Fixing the little things is how we fix the big things.
Good job, world. Good job, team. Keep thinking about you-shaped solutions to us-sized problems. We can do it!

In the Beginning, There Was the WORD

It feels increasingly trivial to talk about writing things these days. But if you’re feeling decidedly ‘whelmed’ by everything else on your Facebook feed, this might be useful to you.

Last year, I decided that it was dumb to live in a metroplex of 7 million people, which probably has about 6 million writers groups, when none of said groups even knew the others existed. We were all just hunkered down in our little bunkers, doing our own thing. To be clear: there is nothing wrong with choosing that, but it isn’t a choice if you have no alternative – if you don’t know even know whether you HAVE neighbors, let alone who or where they are.

So I started visiting every writers group I could find, and at each one I asked: what others do you know of? Who else is out there? 

Turns out the answer is, "a whole hell of a lot."

So we made our own little group-of-groups - it's called WORD (Writers Organizations 'Round Dallas).

And by and by, we got some momentum going. We started having monthly meetups where representatives from different groups would all get together and trade event flyers, share news, and problem-solve together. (“How do you prevent brain-drain when your best writers get published and then leave the group?” “What do you do when your critique group gets too big for a single discussion circle?” “Does anybody know a speaker who can come talk to us about Scrivener?”)

Now, a little less than a year later, there are twenty-three groups on the map, and we’re still finding more. We’ve got our first-ever writers group “trade fair” happening next month, which I will wax ecstatic about tomorrow and for weeks to come. Thanks to the visionary Kathryn McClatchy, we’re even getting plans in place to pool our resources and have a big-name author come talk to us later this year (all the way from Australia!) Our new network is still a little speck in the grand scheme of things, but I’m really happy with where it’s going – and I think that if we work hard and play our cards right, we can help make DFW as much of a literary hotspot as LA or Seattle or Minneapolis.

All of which is to say: if you are feeling adrift in this age of millions – millions of marchers, voters, viewers, buyers, and sharers – I really, really recommend finding yourself a real-life mission of dozens. A dozen neighbors is a neighborhood. A dozen students is a class. A dozen relatives is a family. Our brains are wired to interact with and enjoy people in those quantities, in a way that we can’t manage with our 900 Facebook friends. I can make no meaningful difference to a million writers – but twenty-three of us are doing something valuable here in our little corner of the world.

And I suspect that you are *perfectly* positioned – in where you live, what you love, and who you know – to do something right now that no other person reading this could accomplish. Don’t discount that. The smallest, most intense and personal jobs are the hardest to assign, the work of the most priceless people (and if you don’t believe that, when was the last time you got a new mom?)
Your feed is constantly handing you the work of a nation, of a whole society, and that IS important – but please don’t let that be a reason to neglect the work of your own neighborhood. The tasks we assign ourselves are by definition the essential work that nobody else is stepping up to do – and in that, you are irreplaceable.

A Different Kind of Call Goes Out

Okay, so you know the “this is my 2AM phone call” post from a few months back?

This is not that. This is not an emergency or a crisis or a disaster. This is a state-of-my-union address, and... let’s say a casting call.

Today is June 27th. Six months exactly until Dreams of the Eaten comes out. And the almost-perfect halfway point of 2016.

This is how I've spent my time this year, in hours.

I’ve worked hard this year, and with good results. So far, I have:

1. Started a “secret” coalition of DFW-area writers groups. We have seventeen in the fold so far, with more still to add – and we are beginning to do great things.
2. Begun a new program for the DFW Writers Workshop, called the Writers Bloc – a fledgling once-per-month education and social group, free and open to the public. It’s still a work in progress, but we’ve had great response so far.
3. Taught at my first paid gig – a writers retreat – and been invited to another one (which is going to be awesome - you should come!)
4. Led a three-month "speakers workshop" to prepare new instructors to teach at DFWcon 2016 - which is always one of the highlights of my year
5. Started teaching for the Writers Path at SMU here in Dallas. I’m having such a good time – this is one of my proudest professional accomplishments to date.
6. Helped Kristen stay in her house. (Actually, you-all have done that – I’m just banging the gong)
7. Initiated a partnership with the Dallas County Community College District - too early and still too tentative to call a win, but one that has the potential to change the entire DFW literary scene
8. Started teaching my own one-day writing workshops – irregularly, but to great enthusiasm
9. Formed a crew of convention ambassadors from the DFW Writers Workshop – a bad-ass panelist posse if there ever was one
10. Finished the edits for Dreams of the Eaten... almost.

And I haven't even gotten rolling yet. I haven't even started putting together the fan-swag and writer-merch I want to sell - still want to create a booth-sharing con-going author-coalition - am determined to get this "Page it Forward" free first chapters project off the ground.

You notice, though, how many of those list items up there start with the word “started,” “begun”, etc. – and the one “finished” thing isn’t even finished yet.

And what I’ve learned in the first half of 2016 is that I’m not going to make it through the second if I keep this up. I’m pushing hard because these are things I want to do for a living – things I want to spend my life doing. And if I’m going to stay in the game for the next 30 or 40 or 50 years (and I plan to!), I need my health. My friends. My marriage. All of which have been back-burnered for months now – none of which can afford to stay there.

This is not my to-do list.
This is one of my ten to-do lists.

But the other thing I learned, while we were making the big push for Kristen, is that it's not always a selfish thing to ask for help. Sometimes it's the hardest, bravest, kindest, most generous thing you can do - for yourself and for the people you're asking.

So this is me, taking the plunge, asking for help. Here in approximate order of urgency are the things I need.

1. A digital me. A carnival barker – promoter – cyber-bard – whatever you want to call it. I am an organizer, teacher, motivator, and thoroughly analog human. I am not a promoter or an e-socializer. I need someone who can tweet, face, blog, and email so that the rest of the world can find out about these great deeds-in-progress. Maybe two someones (one for my books, and one for my writer-doings). And I’m happy to pay for that, but I don’t want to dig up some rando out of the phone book. I would much rather work with somebody who’s already drunk the Kool-Aid – who’s as excited about this stuff as I am. (You can buy a person’s time, y’all, but enthusiasm is a priceless, unsellable treasure.)
   
   
2. Book reviews. The kind you write yourself, on Amazon and Goodreads, and the kind book bloggers write on their websites. This is the one kind of promotion I can't (ethically) buy or barter for myself. Getting Sixes past the 50-review mark on Amazon would be terrific. Getting Medicine to 25 would be fantastic. And getting *any* book blogger of size to pick up this series would be unutterably wonderful.
   



Stockpiling pre-orders for this one would be good too.

3. Speaking opportunities. I want to be on your podcast, at your conference, in your bookstore. Anything that involves speaking out loud, in real time (in person or online) is 100% my jam - and travel and expense may not be the barriers you think they are. Hit me up. Connect me. We’ll figure it out.
   
4. Press. Publicity. Especially the kind that doesn't involve me having to sit down and gin up a 1,000-word blog post on my own initiative. (I can do those. I will do those - especially if your name is the Mary Sue, io9, John Scalzi, or Cracked. But they take a lot out of me, and I don't have the juice to do guest posts on the regular anymore.) If you can do the chronicling, I will provide all the insightful, hilarious, Textacular content you can handle.
   



To date, I have not been on TV. But I've definitely been near TV.

5. An artist - one who has enjoyed my books. Again, I will happily pay for time and talent - but it would be really great to have enthusiasm come pre-installed.
   
6. Website help - especially someone who knows their way around a shopping cart. (And Shawn, Jonathan: thank you so much for putting yourselves forward for the Droughtworld website. I'm absolutely going to take you up on it. This bat-signal is for the events/workshops side of things.)
   
7. Classroom/workshop spaces in DFW. They need to be suitable for video presentations (I can provide all the A/V equipment), ideally able to seat up to 25, available nights and weekends, and - here is the critical part - okay with me accepting money on the premises. I'm happy to give a percentage of what I make - so if you have an office or big back room that's going unused after-hours and want to see if we can help each other out, please hit me up.
   
8. An A/V pro in DFW. Someone we can hire to help us to create professional-quality recordings of our Writers Bloc classes (one Saturday a month in Irving.)

Yeah, I know - it's a hell of a list. And the delicious irony of all this communal ruckus-raising I've been doing over the past couple years is that I've surrounded myself with people who are as driven as I am - who are stretching themselves to the max to chase their own dreams. It makes for a fantastic friends-circle, but doesn't leave any of us with much room to help each other out.

So for all of you wonderful people who would walk through fire and brimstone for me if only you could find five spare minutes to fire up the coals - don't worry. And don't let your chronic altruism sucker you into overcommitting yourself. I need your friendship more than anything on this list - and in that, you've already given me a great gift.

Including but not limited to the gift of shenanigans.

But if you do see something here that gets your inner overachiever all fired up ("Ooh! Me! Pick me!"), and you genuinely do have the bandwidth for it - please let me know. Here or email (tex at thetexfiles.com) or smoke signals or a brick through my front window. And when you do, let me know how this will fit into your bigger picture - because so often we can do for each other what we can't do for ourselves, and I would love to be part of your success, too.


My name is Alexander Hamilton
And there’s a million things I haven’t done
But just you wait - just you wait...

The Bold, the Beautiful, and the Badass

Oh, friends. Oh, blog. Where do I even start?

Well, let me start back at the beginning of this trip. Earlier this year, the fantastic Dr. Maslen invited me to speak at the University of Glasgow, which was a huge honor, and turned out to be an amazing time. I'd asked to do more of a discussion than a lecture, and he kindly rounded up a conference room and as many willing bodies as would fit in it (and then some!) It was a terrific conversation, and a phenomenal evening.

As you would expect, given that he's one TARDIS away from world domination!

A few of the hardiest souls joined us for drinks afterward, and then I learned an amazing thing: of the students at our table, none were from Scotland – and most had only been at school for six weeks. We had students from China, from the US, from Italy and Greece, all packing up their lives – sometimes on less than a month's notice! – and moving to Glasgow for the promise of a first-rate education.

That was nearly two weeks ago, and I'm still thinking about it. Like, I just can't fathom what kind of guts it takes to do a thing like that.

Nor am I a very good photographer for the people who are actually doing it!

I guess I've been thinking a lot about bravery this year, and on this trip in particular. Since I left Dallas, I've done things that my soft, doughy soul couldn't have contemplated five years ago. I sang karaoke, badly and stone-cold sober. I went by myself to a country where I can't even read the alphabet, nevermind speak the language. I held a baby. I let myself get lost. I ate horse meat and beef tongue and things I didn't even think to ask about. By the time I go home, I'll have solo'd New York City public transit, shared a room and a bed with someone I haven't actually met, and probably racked up another couple of firsts along the way. And while I'm proud of all those things, I still don't feel even half as brazen as those students, some of whom are at least ten years my junior.

For the record, this is свински късчета по кметскн, or "pork nibblies in the mayoral style." I didn't meet the mayor, but let me tell you - she's got serious swagger.

While I was in Bulgaria, Evil Dan and I had a great discussion about this, because (as someone who likewise packed up his life and moved halfway around the world) he's also high on my list of unfathomable badasses. His theory is this: a badass is someone who's been through something worse than you have. When you're five and the worst thing you've done is shut your finger in a door, it's the kid who broke his arm falling out of a tree. When you're twenty and just moved away to college, it's the student who spent two years living on the street. When you're thirty and just had a baby, it's the parents who had preemie triplets and lost one.  It goes on forever, because there's always someone who's had it worse than you. 

And of course, we all have to deal with something sometime. Badness happens, and you just have to suck it up and handle it somehow. So what really stands out to me at the moment are the people who have actually volunteered for that up-suckery - who willingly put themselves out there for something that they knew was going to be tough (even if it's also worthwhile, because why else would you do it?)

Because you can't get to the land of immaculate patisserie by staying safely in your house, that's why!

Actually, I didn't intend to talk about book stuff here, but that's one reason I'm so glad that Pamela Skjolsvik asked me to edit her first book, Death Becomes Us (which I just finished last week!) She's a friend of mine from our writers' workshop, and she's a lot like me, bravery-wise: we both feel like sheltered little homebody hobbits for whom the wizard never came calling. The difference is, when she decided to hitch up her britches and do something about that, she really went the whole nine yards.

Hello, my name is Pamela Skjolsvik and you don't know me and neither does your son, but he agreed to talk with me the day before the State of Texas kills him, so um, can I take the 9 to 10 slot or would you prefer if I spoke to him later in the day?

And yes, she is exactly as awkwardly, sweatily badass as she sounds. You'll be hearing more about her before her book comes out on the 13th, but don't wait on me – check her out and then get you some.

I mention awkward and sweaty because I think that's what really holds us back, most of the time. There's the brain-stem fear, sure (what if you get lost and mugged and eaten?) – but past that is that insidious fear of failure, of humiliation, of looking foolish and feeling ashamed. It's SO hard to do the hard things, not just because they're hard, but because you know you'll do them badly (at least at first). That's probably killed more dreams than anything else: whatever you do, your first efforts are going to suck – and it takes real courage to be okay with sucking. Or as they say in Saga, "You have to be brave before you can be good."

So whether you're doing NaNoWriMo, moving to the other side of the planet, or just trying to work up the guts to say hello – go bravely, y'all. Goodness awaits.

Preaching in the Dark - a DFWcon Epiphany

Ah, you guys. What can I say about DFWcon that I haven't already said?  It's the highlight of my year, the filling of my well, the thing that convinces me that yes, I can and should do all those other, scarier things.

But here is a thought that might be relevant to you, whether or not you went to the conference, whether or not you're even a writer.

See, I did a great class with Laura Maisano on Saturday, called Prose P90X.  It went swimmingly - we filled up the whole room, and got loads of compliments. We were a great team!

Look at all those shining faces!

But then I had to rush off to do a solo class, The Comma Sutra, in a different part of the building.  It was on the main stage of the theater - big lights, black curtains, the whole nine yards.  I was flattered they booked me there - obviously the Powers That Be expected that I could fill a significant chunk of the seats.

Here's the thing, though: because the class started exactly when extra pitch sessions went on sale, I didn't get nearly that kind of turnout.  When it came time to start, there were only maybe twenty people scattered through that huge, cavernous room.  More than that, the bright stage lights meant I couldn't see them, and the distance meant that unless they hollered right at me, I couldn't hear them either.  It felt like teaching a class at the bottom of an empty swimming pool at midnight.

Meanwhile, photographic evidence suggests that it LOOKED
like some kind of xenopornographic TED talk.
(Big thanks to Amber Draeger for the photos!)

That was a really hard thing.  My entire schtick relies on being able to see people's faces, to hear when they laugh and notice when they're confused or annoyed or distracted.  (This is one reason I'm comparatively crap at social media - my super-empathy powers don't work when there's an Internet between your face and mine.)  And let me tell you - it is SUPER awkward telling grammatically-instructive alien sex jokes when all you hear is silence.

But I kept at it, and kept soliciting questions, and started getting substantial answers, so I knew there were at least a few people who were out there and wanted to talk to me. By the time we finished, it had stopped being a sermon and become a true discussion, which is what I love best.

Well, imagine my surprise when I finished and stepped aside, and saw that the room had filled up.  People must have been trickling in during that hour, coming in ones and twos as they finished buying their extra pitch sessions and headed up to catch the class.  I don't know how many were there at the end, but I got over sixty names on my email sheets - and that's just the ones who cared enough to stand in line and sign up to get the PDF slides.

Image blurred to protect their identities.

And of course, the happy denouement: I got some great compliments on the class, and found wonderful mentions of it on Twitter. I even got this amazing email, which has been lighting up my life for three days straight now:

I'm sorry, but this morning I didn't know who you were.

Then you showed up on a panel and made some great comments.

Then I saw you at lunch and you were having SUCH a great time.

So when I checked my after-lunch class selections and saw your name, I altered my initial choice to take in P90X.

Wow... Great information, delivered fast and entertainingly.

So here I am in the balcony, listening to Comma Sutra. (Excellent!) But mostly I'm wondering: who the Hell are you and where did you come from? You're a freak of nature, and we need more.

Thanks for sharing yourself. You make it a better - and smarter - world.

And thanks for making my conference!

And maybe this doesn't make for a riveting anecdote, but like... that hour summed up my entire year to date.  I've spent so much time out and about over the past few months, striving like the dickens to be seen and get known. It's fun and I genuinely love doing it - being out in the real world with real people lights me up like nothing else! - but there are so many nights when I flop into a Motel 6 bed, utterly spent, and stare up into the darkness wondering what the hell I'm playing at. When you're promoting yourself, you're not really helping other people, and not really creating anything new, either - you're just trying to shine a spotlight on something you've already done, which people may or may not even notice, let alone care about. And most of the time, you can't tell if it's working.

And I know that's not just me, and not just book-promotion. Every facet of writing is like that sometimes. Shoot, LIFE is like that sometimes.  My mom said that about raising kids - you know, how you spend your whole entire day exhausting yourself, and at the end of it, you can't see that you've accomplished anything, because the house and the kids and your life look exactly like they did when you got up that morning.  My dad would say the same thing about his job, too: how he was so happy to mow the lawn on the weekend, because it was a measurable thing with a definable, visible, guaranteed result - not at all like the nebulous phone calls and vague paper-pushing that made up the rest of the week.

The red days are my out-of-town days - which are usually interspersed with oh-god-I'm-wasting-my-life nights.

So I guess what I'm saying, to myself as much as to you-all, is that at some point, we're all just preaching in the dark. It's a hard thing to do - to stick to your guns, to resist the urge to stop and check for approval, to trust that what you're doing is noticed and needed (or will be), even when nobody is there to tell you so.  It requires you to be truly self-sustaining, which is so, so much harder than it sounds.

But I hope you'll keep at it, whatever 'it' may be - and I believe that if you do it well enough, for long enough, you will eventually start getting those pingbacks, seeing the fruits of your labor.  Maybe you'll fill up the metaphorical room, and maybe you won't - but statistically speaking, there is almost-certainly somebody out there who's waiting to hear EXACTLY what you have to say... and you can't know that until and unless you have the courage to stay the course and say it.

All right - sermon over.  Go forth and preach, y'all - and if you have time, holler some encouragement to the people in your life who are doing likewise. Yours might be the only voice they can hear.

What You Give Up

Still alive!  Still deep in the trenches.  Going to write one hell of a "what I learned" post about my freshman year of publishing someday, but for now I got my hands full with the actual learning.  Suffice to say that I'm doing a pretty good job of holding my hair back while I cry glitter and barf rainbows, and I wouldn't trade places with anybody else in the world.

But my good buddy S.E. Dee put a blog post up this week, about how hard it is to keep going when your grip slips and suddenly the rock that is your story is rolling all the way back down the hill you've been sweating so hard to climb. 

When you’ve slipped up so bad, like so bad that whole chapters are getting demolished, characters obliterated and whole landscapes changed, moving forward is scary.

And boy ain't that the truth!  Here I think is the real beast of this whole writing gig: when you're in the trenches, your only objective metric for progress is your word count - and so often that goes right out the window.  Because you're ripping the stitches out of everything you wrote yesterday and the day before, or because you have to stop and do research, or because you're making yourself nuts trying to map out the exact distance from the Empire of Exposition to the Kingdom of Kickass and figuring out all the names of the twenty-seven elite Masters of Midge-Slapping. It is really hard to feel like a Real Writer when everything you've worked so hard on is slipping through your fingers like so much shitty, ungrateful sand.

So here's a list that I keep to look back at whenever I get frustrated or feel like I'm writing garbage:

• TV
• DnD sessions
• video games
• leisure reading
• regular blogging (including this year's A to Z challenge)
• friend emails
• social media in general
• cooking
• cake decorating
• critique group meetings

That up there is what I've stopped doing in order to make time to write.  Some of those things are on temporary hiatus (I NEED to catch up on my emails and my to-read pile, let me tell you), while others I gave up years ago. 

"Wow, Tex," you may say, "that makes you look like a really miserable, boring, un-fun person.  That doesn't sound healthy at all." 

"Sure," I'd tell you, "but you don't see what's not on there.  Going out to eat with my friends and making wedding invitations with my sister and having epic slap-fights with my cat while blasting 'The Bridge of Khazad-Dum' in the background.  The essentials are still getting done."

So here's my point.  You might spend hours doing homework without adding a word to your manuscript.  You might flush your whole manuscript and start over again.  You might stare at your keyboard until beads of blood appear on your forehead, praying for a good idea or a swift death.  But no matter what you do for your writing, you are by definition giving up something else to do it.  The words you write today might be gone tomorrow - but the hour of TV you didn't watch will stay unwatched. You spent your time on writing instead, literally bought and paid for your work with an hour or or three hours or ten hours or whatever... and as the Beanie Baby craze proved to us lo these many years ago, anything somebody is willing to pay for has value.  Even if you don't always love it.

And that's it.  That is my deep thought for the month; I hope you enjoyed it.  So what's on your list?

Snow, Ergo White

Hey, I got a question for you.  Does this gal look like a cool character for a Disney movie?

made by the excruciatingly rad heysawbones.  Used with permission.

I know, right?  How neat would it be to have a princess from Tibet?  (Her name's Nyima, by the way.)

Or how about these guys?  Like, why don't we set a movie in Argentina, maybe high up in the Andean mountains somewhere?

made by the amazing Amy! Used with permission.

Oh, and one more: I didn't hear back on permissions, but you need, want, and deserve to check out Qila and Nanook.  Go do it right now.  I'll wait.

Anyway, here's what all of these ideas have in common: they all are fan-drawn characters, created by artists who wish that Disney had gone a different direction with its upcoming Snow Queen reimagining, Frozen.

And I tell you what: I could not agree more.  There's an interesting Tumblr, thiscouldhavebeenfrozen, which posts fan submissions and rebuts a whole array of "no, but this totally had to be a movie about white people" arguments (and does so pretty fiercely.)

Anyway, there's one post / infographic gallery in particular that I REALLY recommend checking out, about diversity in Disney, and the lack thereof.  (It doesn't look so good on the author's tumblr, but if you click the initial picture, you can click through the gallery one at a time and it's much easier.)  Here's the part that that blows my mind:

The white princesses are never given real-world locations and any assumed setting is based on the origin of source material and sometimes influence in design.

But with the exception of Aladdin, the movies with PoC characters are given explicit settings that justify their existence.

White princesses never have to justify their existence. 

Oh, and for those of you who for some reason don't have your finger on the throbbing heady pulse of the Disney Princess lineup, we're up to 11. (I know, right.  At this rate, the Earth's supply of winsome fictional royalty will be exhausted by 2037.)  Here's the current lineup. 

from Fanpop  © Disney

Anyway, it's a hell of a notion.  The part about how Ambiguous Fantasy Neverland is whiter than Chubbuck, Idaho, and if we're going to have any kind of princess-of-color, we have to program the TARDIS for Jamestown, 1607, or New Orleans, 1923 - you know, go to Earth and set the friggin' GPS, because we need precision scientific accuracy in order to locate sufficient justification for a brown girl.  (Or even a white girl with an accent, in Merida's case.)

Okay, so I was thinking about all that.  And then I thought - you know what Disney movie is COMPLETELY AWESOME?

from Feedio.net  © Disney

YES.  Would you believe that they were originally going to set Lilo and Stitch on a farm in rural Kansas?  Can you imagine how much less interesting that would have been?

Okay, okay, let's go again - think of another one that just took Standard Formula Disney and snapped it over its knee.

from Generic Movie and TV © Disney

Yeeeeeeees.

The Emperor's New Groove is easily one of my favorite films - I am always hugely impressed with any movie that can do genuinely funny all-ages comedy, and this is easily one of the best.  And again, how much less memorable would it be if we sucked out all that indigenous high-altitude flavor (freaking LLAMAS, people!) and set it in Vaguely Germanic Neverwhere?

And you know what's weird about these?

There is nothing in "cuddy but violent alien crash-lands into the lives of two struggling orphans" that screams modern Hawaii.  There is no part of "outrageous buddy comedy about learning how not to be a jerk" that even suggests Incan Empire.  We got to have two solidly non-white settings just for the hell of it - and I would submit, two fantastic movies as a result.  Why?  Well, here's a theory: because a creative team willing to go beyond generic settings and protagonists was far more likely to do likewise for plot, characterization, and dialogue.

And hell, let's throw up some props for Atlantis while we're at it.  Like, who would have beefed if Kidagakash had looked like Namor the Sub-Mariner?  Nobody!  But there we are - free complimentary princess of color!  Look at her, all powerful and magical and shit!

from Disney Junior © Disney

(So why is Kida not in the Disney Princess lineup?  Maybe because her movie didn't do so hot.  Or maybe because she's an actual twentysomething adult who becomes a queen and leads her people instead of, you know, skipping off into a nebulously responsibility-free happily-ever-after.  But I digress.)

Okay, so I guess what I'm saying is:

1.  I don't think Disney deliberately sets out to be stodgy or exclusive.  (On the contrary, they'll do whatever gets them the best PR and the most money.)

2.  I do think Disney is far more willing to take risks outside of its giant expensive tentpole Standard Disney Formula films.

3.  I absolutely believe that more underrepresented characters and settings need to be brought into the picture - and the more we ask for them and talk about them and support the ones that do make it into the world, the more likely that is to happen.

So that is what I am doing here.


You know, it's a good thing you're not a big fat guy, or this would be really difficult.