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.

Sock-Sacks and Happiness

Okay, so after Writers in The Field, I have a new thesis statement: we have too many huge, giant, apocalyptic nigh-unsolvable problems in this country, and not enough small ones.

On Saturday, for example, my main problem was not dropping the cookies (that LB Clark and Erin McGowan brought all the way up from Galveston!) while a hundred of us were running through the mud to escape the tornado warning.

On Sunday, my main problem was not owning a second pair of shoes. (As it turns out, grocery sacks make fair-to-middling sock-condoms.)

Today, my main problem is that I can't quite figure out how to get up off this couch.
And all of these are small, satisfying, and completely surmountable challenges.

I didn't have to worry about getting Kathryn McClatchy up off the floor of the ticket booth during the tornading, because Marsha Hubbell is a PTA Green Beret. Didn't have to figure out how to feed everyone after the food truck fell in a ditch, cuz Alex and Allison Campolo delivered pizza through flooded roads like Evel Knievel jumping the Snake River Canyon (in a Lexus, no less). Didn't have to know how to get the food truck *out* of the ditch, because as far as I can tell, Shane Richmond just Force-lifted it up like an X-wing from the Dagobah swamp. Didn't have to stop and thumb-type every late-breaking announcement, because Kathryn and Sarah and Amanda blew up the hashtags harder than a questionably-colored dress. Hell, I didn't even have time to wonder about getting the margarita machines in during the storm, because Brandon Burgess is the all-weather swashbuckling Jimmy Buffett this country needs.

My point is: all of these very short, specific, twenty-minute micro-crises are now 100% handled. Mostly because we had exactly the right people on point to handle them.

But also - you know, in a world where everything we need magically appears on a shelf or in a box at our front door (even as we wither in constant, paralyzing, existential fear), it was so good to remember what small, short, tangible challenges feel like. And now that I'm back home, clean and dry in my climate-controlled condo-box, I am jonesing for my next fix. Can these shoes go the dryer after I hose them off? I don't know, but I can't wait to find out!

How to Successfully Fail at Networking

Y'know, a big part of this author business is in the social game.  Meeting people, making connections, getting known.  They say that you should always have your A-game on when you're out in public, because you never know who you'll meet - or more importantly, who they'll be when you meet them the next time. 

But what does that actually look like?  And how can you mess up something as simple as "get along and play nice?"  Here for your enjoyment is a both a case study and a cautionary tale.

How to Successfully Fail at Networking

or

Son of Bride of Return of the Curse of the Odd-Numbered Trek Movie, Part 5: Dammit, Was That THIS Weekend?

by Tex Thompson

Once upon a time, I wrote a blog post for John Scalzi's Big Idea series about One Night in Sixes.  It was pretty rad.

One day, a handsome prince named J.R. Forasteros read the post and said, "that book sounds totally sweet."  So he bought the book, read it, and said, "that was totally sweet."

The really great thing is that he said that to my Twitter account, and also into a microphone.  For you see, this handsome prince was none other than one of the Storymen: a master pastor, podcaster, and godly pop-culture enthusiast.  When I got wind of this, I said, "who IS this ubermensch they call the Story-Man?  We must forge an alliance!"

And we did.  On Twitter.  And it was great.  Until one day, he moved from Ohio down to Dallas, in order to use his radical preaching to bring light to the suffering proletariat in the dark, benighted kingdom of Rowlett.  Needless to say, we met up and got drinks.  It was hella rad.

But in the land of Dallas, there was a prophecy: that on the portentous Friday the 13th of March, the stars would align and summon forth All-Con, spilling hedonism and nerdery through the halls of the Crowne Plaza North Dallas Hotel.  We felt ourselves drawn to it, as unwashed moths to a flaming cheeto.

"A panel!" I cried. "We shall propose a panel!"  And thus we spoke it into being:

So let it be written - so let it be done.

WHAT DOES GOD NEED WITH A STARSHIP? 

From the Christ-like figure of Superman to the frequently metaphysical adventures of the USS Enterprise, fantasy and science fiction have long provided a fertile ground for considering religious and philosophical questions in a new light. Yet while our DnD characters can pray to any number of fictional deities, it's difficult to imagine the Chronicles of Narnia being published today – and we are often much more comfortable sharing our love for Goku than God. As mainstream interest in SFF grows and religion becomes an increasingly private affair, how will their relationship change? What is it about spaceships and superheroes that touches our spirituality, and how can a passion for one inspire the other?

"Let it be!"  The Story-Man bellowed his mighty assent.  Thus resolved, we summoned the greatest heroes within easy commuting distance: Clay Morgan, the Paladin of Pittsburgh; Gabe Guerrero, the orc-forged Scourge of Denton County; and Jake Kerr, the Middle-Grade Magus.  As the con-staff raised our banner, we took council over chips and salsa, and drank to seal the deal: together, we will produce and podcast a panel of world-shattering excellence, and cement our place in convention history.

Wait, what's that? I promised you a cautionary tale?  Oh, right - well, the thing is, I forgot that I'm going out of town this weekend for a Vegas wedding, so unless somebody invents a portal gun this week, I can't actually be on the panel.  That's why my name's not up there.

So let that be a lesson to you, kids: if you're going to spin one idle tweet into an epic Central-Time-Zone-spanning alliance for the ages, check your date planner first.

No, but for real this time.  If you want my networking advice, here it is: try to minimize the time you spend doing things you actively dislike, but always, always tack towards the things that are a little bit scary - whether that's hanging your opinions out on a big-name website for the world to judge you on, or tweeting a stranger out of the blue.  And don't be discouraged if it doesn't seem to net you anything: you just don't know what kind of fantastic fruit it might bear, months or even years down the line.

Oh! And here's another hot tip: if you're going to All-Con, park yourself at the panel and bear witness to history in the making!  (The rest of you can bear witness to history once it's actually made - the podcast will go up on the Storymen site when it's done.)  Don't think this is a one-time deal, either, for we have been diligently machinating, and there are plots afoot that you wot not of...!


--It's a song, you green-blooded... Vulcan. You sing it. The words aren't important. What's important is that you have a good time singing it.
--Oh, I am sorry, Doctor. Were we having a good time?
--God, I liked him better before he died.

Ike and Tina: A 20-Gallon Love Story

This is Ike and Tina. 

I'm pretty sure they're inbred. 

They came from the same tank of baby zebra-striped angelfish.  Then they grew up, paired up, and started spawning like crazed cichlids in heat.  (I had to take the third angelfish back to the store because they were beating on him so relentlessly.) 

They raised one batch of fry, which was an epic adventure for me and my roommate.  Since then, they still spawned constantly, but they've been careful to eat all the eggs.  I guess one round of parenting was enough for them.

They survived the Great Tank Leak of '08, lived in a bathtub for two days afterward (and somehow didn't die from the soap scum, which is a minor miracle in itself), and then did a three-week tour of duty in a plastic goldfish bowl while I glued and re-glued the seams of their swanky glass penthouse. 


Anyway, last month, Tina started swimming in weird loops.  Usually that's a sign of a swim bladder problem, so I consulted the experts and tried what I could: shelled peas, epsom salts, antibiotics, you name it.  Nothing worked.  I figure she's got a tumor of some kind pressing on her swim bladder, or else (more likely) she's full of eggs she can't lay. 

This weekend, she started crashing out on the bottom of the tank - still getting up to eat (oh my God, does she eat), but then falling back to the bottom, totally knackered.  At this point, she's been sick for a month, and she's only getting worse.  So I figure it's time.

As I write this, Tina is drifting off to sleep in a vodka cocktail (tank water, clove oil, and a splash of Smirnoff.  Tears optional.)  And although I'm even more sad than I thought I would be, the thought I keep coming back to is this:

We love our cats and dogs (and horses and ferrets and chinchillas) because they're great little buddies.  We play together.  We have lovey times.  We're friends in the truest sense of the word.

That's not really true with fish.  To them, I am merely the Great Shadowy Force that causes food to appear in the Holy Purple Floaty Ring.  But Ike and Tina didn't need a human person in order to live big, amazing lives.  Growing up, parenthood, a bona-fide love-triangle, danger and hardship and adventure on the bathtub seas... and here at the very end of it, Ike poking Tina relentlessly to try to get her to swim again. 

In a way, it is immensely comforting to know that there are dramas and epic stories unfolding all around us, ones that don't need our attention, much less our intervention, to play out in grand form.  And sometimes I think all we really to do is learn how to notice them.

--We still have to name them...
--You wanna name all of 'em, right now? All right. We'll name this half Marlin Jr., and then this half Coral Jr.  Okay, we're done.

String Theories

Today, the Internet is full of people talking about how they have the best mom ever.

I always feel a little weird posting about Mother's Day, Valentine's Day, and even Christmas, because it seems like the culturally-mandated Celebratory Period doesn't leave much room for the people who don't have a big shiny happy Norman Rockwell parent / sweetheart / family to gush about on Facebook.  (This holiday paranoia is probably a result of having watched Gremlins at much too young an age.  Chimneys, you guys.  Don't go down them.)

BUT.

The universe has been kind enough to issue me a truly stellar mom.  This deserves recognition.  So in the spirit of "show, don't tell," here is something of her that you can enjoy for your very own.

See this here?

This is a crude replica of something I found while I was helping her clean out her office one day: a little piece of cardboard with two sets of strings glued onto it.

So I said to her, I said, "Hey Mom, what's this?"

And she said, "Oh, that's from a workshop we did a few months ago.  They gave us little pieces of string and told us to use them to illustrate a problem, and show how we would solve it."

"Oh, I see.  So the problem was that they were all in a jumbled mess together, and you straightened them out and organized them."

"No," she said.  "The problem was that they were all separate and lonely, so I put them together."


...I was originally going to use this as a stepping-stone to wax philosophical about something.  On reflection, I'll just say this: my life has been immeasurably enriched by people who arrange their strings in ways that never would have occurred to me.  Thanks for keeping it funky fresh, Mom.

Okay, this screw is important, so I'm putting it here with the oranges.

The Unbearable Likeness of Beans

See, my sister and I each got a bean plant as a present from our mom in January.  They're "magic beans", like you can order from a catalogue, that have a little message branded onto the seed pod.  Don't judge us.

So we each set up our plants on our respective windowsills, watered them, the whole nine yards.  (Though given that we're talking about bean plant maintenance, that should maybe be "the whole two inches.")  Eight weeks later, here they are:

 

Yeah, you can probably guess which one is mine.  (Though I will have you know that I do own an identical armadillo statue, and it is being used for God's intended purpose, which is the holding of a souvenir beer bottle.  I said don't judge us, dammit.)

As you can see, my pathetic plant has pasted itself to the glass, consumed by solar frustration.  Hers sprawls out in an orgiastic display of chlorophilia, wantonly flashing its under-leaves like a celebutante stepping out of a Bentley.

And I've had a hard time looking at these little life-forms, because they keep reminding me of what I could have, should be, must get to doing.  "Look," they say to me in their tiny leguminous voices, "it's not rocket science.  If you put it in the sun, it will grow.  The longer you leave it there, the quicker it will happen.  If it's not in the sun, it's in the shade - there's no such thing as in-between."

I know, right - big talk from somebody whose major life goal apparently involves seducing the paper towels.

So anyway, there I was, my magic bean a flaccid symbol for my every personal failing.

Then I had a great chat with Jenny Martin (who's awesome enough that she probably shouldn't be talking to me, but does anyway.)  Read INTERN's Real Actual Hilary's "Writing is A Job Like Any Other, and Other Angry Ghosts."  Followed that up with an e-mail from a friend of mine, who is making a veritable Charge of the Light Brigade against a whole slew of health problems and striving like the dickens for standard human functionality.  Got to thinking some more.

I don't blame my plant for not growing.  It's living in a second-floor apartment with no east-west windows, so of course it's not getting enough light.

And yet it's so hard to forgive ourselves likewise.  There's this notion that since everyone has the same number of hours in a day, we all have an equal opportunity to get things accomplished.  We seem not to account for the fact that our little window-shelves don't all face the same way, that hours in a day aren't the same as daylight hours, that we aren't all issued identical quantities of fruitful, useable, potentially productive time.

So I've decided:  I will continue to feel bad when I waste my own personal daylight - when I have the time and energy and choose to squander it on Nothing Especially.

But I will not be guilted by other people's success, and I will make damn sure that I don't get haughty about mine.  All we can guarantee is that seasons do change, for better and for worse, and the success we've had to date says as much about the conditions we grew it in as it does about us personally.

Plus, you don't want to be the cheap tart flashing your axillary buds at every passing poinsettia, because oh my God, gauche.


The human bean is not a vegetable.

Adding the Egg

Gentle readers, let me tell you a story.

It's a story about cake.

In the latter half of the 1950's, sales of commercial cake mix flatlined.  Which was a real stumper for Duncan Hines et al: they'd enjoyed barnstorming sales numbers in the ten years since the first high-quality, shelf-stable mixes went on the national market. 

During this time, cake mixes had been marketed overwhelmingly for convenience.  Here's an example from 1955:

"So simple you CAN'T go wrong."

So General Mills dispatched a fellow named Ernest Dichter to get to the root of the problem.  As Laura Shapiro reports in her excellent book, he came to this conclusion:

After interviewing women and exploring the emotions that surrounded cakes and baking, Dichter reported that the very simplicity of mixes - just add water and stir - made women feel self-indulgent for using them. There wasn't enough work involved. In order to enjoy the emotional rewards of presenting a homemade cake, they had to be persuaded that they had really baked it, and such an illusion was impossible to maintain if they did virtually nothing.

The solution?  Give the baker more to do.  In microcosm, this could be as simple as adding an egg to the mix, transforming the process from menial dump-and-stir to 'real' baking.  But in the bigger picture, this idea took off in the form of cake decorating.  Marketing emphasis shifted to what the baker would do once the cake came out of the oven: a whole explosion of creative and often labor-intensive cake-crafting how-tos ensued, next to which the 'indulgence' of using a prepackaged mix was nothing.


"Try one of the happy ideas on these pages and just listen to the praise you get!"

Y'all know where I'm going with this, right?

In fiction writing, the idea of "leaving the reader something to do" works on almost every level.  It can be as small as saying that John slammed the door, and leaving the reader to understand that he's left the room.  It can be as vast as writing a story about some talking farm-animals, and prompting the reader to draw in the real-world politics and human nature behind them.  But if you do everything yourself - if you explain and describe like a manic entomologist, if your characters feel all the necessary feelings and reach all the necessary conclusions and wax philosophical about What It All Means - then eventually your reader will get the idea that the story can get along perfectly well without him, and check out.

Sure, the whole DIY angle has its downsides.  Betty Crocker knows, some fool will use bad eggs or forget to grease the pan or try to frost it while it's still hot, and then get pissed at you when it doesn't turn out right.  (And as my patient and forbearing beta readers have taught me, it DOES help if you actually include some directions.)  But anytime you feel tempted to idiot-proof your story, hold fast to the sacred tenets of our man Ernest Dichter up there: good fiction, like homemade cake, is about helping the audience enjoy the emotional rewards of their work.  And they can only do that if we give them work to do.

(Big shout-out for this post to my fearless betas and my workshop posse, who are as sweet vinegar to the dry baking soda of my soul.  Also, if this post has given you a mind to indulge, head on over to Book Binge, where Jenny Martin will hook you up with all manner of prose-and-pastry double-headers.)

Cake, and grief counseling, will be available at the conclusion of the test.

The Tale of the Tilting Tower, or, Fun With Unintended Consequences

Well, life has lately been long on income-earning opportunities and decidedly short on fun, but let me pull up something from the old cranial DVR for an evening's entertainment.

In fact, let me tell you the Tale of the Tilting Tower.

By ogrish standards, Oh was something of a disappointment. She was lamentably intelligent for an ogre, and curious, and got decidedly less than the expected thrill out of ripping the limbs from living creatures.  So it wasn't all that surprising when she eventually wandered down from the Foothills of Gurn and got herself mixed up with a human adventuring party.  It was the usual story - the same vaguely-defined but creeping world-threatening menace that bands of misfits always seem to find - and eventually it led to a tower.

Which wasn't so much a tower as a giant rusted-out metallic spire, thousands of years old, which leaned precipitously to the west like the hand of a stopped clock.

Of course, long-extinct caretakers never leave anything of interest or value on the ground floor, so there was nothing to do but to get in there and start climbing.  That's a lot of stairs under the best of circumstances, and this wasn't the best of anything: the tower's tilt, combined with the rust-eaten floors and decaying supports, made every room and hallway a slow, treacherous task.

The seething nests of monsters didn't help either.

Being a sensible bunch, Our Heroes were determined to keep falling deaths to a minimum.  So it was decided that Kara, the light and architecturally-sensitive rogue, would tie one end of a rope's length about her waist, while Oh likewise girdled herself with the other end: she was careful to walk nowhere but in her companions' tried-and-tested footsteps, and her handsome ogrish weight would make her a fine anchor if Kara's explorations ever ended with a shriek and the sound of collapsing floor-tiles.

Our Heroes had made it pretty handily to the twelfth floor when yet another quick and brutal skirmish broke out, this one in a damnably cramped room full of ruined furniture.  Oh, being a strapping young lady of 10 feet and about 600 pounds, couldn't maneuver through the doorway to help her little friends.  Mightily frustrated by the sound of their struggle, she raised her great-club and smashed the wall to ruins.

"Are you sure you want to do that?" asked the DM.

"Absolutely!" said I, with a glance at Oh's 9 Wisdom score.

The monsters were helpless against the heroes' combined might, and soon lay dead or banished.  "Well!" said Regar, wiping the blade of his axe.  "Let's press on."

And so they resumed their careful exploration, the party waiting in gathered safety as Kara wound her way through empty doors and crushed corridors, delicately searching out a safe path to the next stairway...

... until, with her first giant-sized step forward, the screech of breaking iron sounded under Oh's feet.

She was gone in an instant, leaving nothing to her astonished comrades' eyes but an ogre-sized hole in the floor, a black chasm sucking up rope like a strand of wet spaghetti as Kara's terrified soprano shriek whipsawed around distant doors and portals at the speed of gravity...

They didn't die, I'm pleased to report.  A single axe-stroke broke the rope, and I think it was about the sixth floor down that finally broke Oh's fall.  But they make them of sterner stuff up in the Foothills of Gurn, and as the saying goes, "the only hit point that matters is the last one."

So ends the Tale of the Tilting Tower, and to me, its lesson is this: if you REALLY want to have fun with your characters (be they shaped by the rolls of a die or bound within the pages of a book), treat them every once-in-a-great-while to a truly disastrous mistake.  Where the Law of Unintended Consequences is concerned, you can't beat a first-rate felony. 

Oh sorry.