Requiem for a First Novel

Boy, it's a hell of a thing – I went weeks without putting anything here, because I just had NO time to even contemplate it, and now I got posts stacked up and circling like 747s at LaGuardia.  

But I do have to bump the regularly scheduled programming for today.  Because today, I said goodbye to my first book.  Yep – as of right now, One Night in Sixes is officially off to the printer, and out of my hands forever.  So, you know, huzzah and bittersweetness and metaphors about sending the baby off to college and all of that.  All of it!

Here is what's really amazed me about the whole process, though.   At every milestone on the road to publication, the scope for changes gets smaller.  First the content edits (big picture story stuff).  Then line edits (sentences and paragraphs.)  Finally the page proofs (individual words, typos, punctuation.)  Like that duck in a pond that’s slowly freezing over, you the author are swimming in smaller and smaller circles, until finally you have to heave your duck ass out of the water, because it – your book – is becoming a fixed, finished thing, with no more room for you or your endless fiddling.

Which isn't to say we didn't catass every page of those revisions.

Needless to say, I've spent MONTHS angsting about how this book will be received – you know, how well it will sell, and who will hate it and why, and whether and how I can deal with that.  But what surprised me this weekend is that... like, I thought that by the time I got this far, I would look at this sucker and think, "Yes.  This is absolutely the best that it can ever be.   It is a flawless gem, one that I am now sick of looking at.  Go, my precious diamond, and cleanse the world with your light!"  

But I'm not sick of it.  I love this story as much as I ever have.  And it's not perfect.  Or at least, I'm still looking at it and seeing ways to change it, even though the deadline for those kinds of changes has long since passed.

I thought that would make me sad.  After all, this is my first published work, my first impression.  This is the thing I chose to write when I was soft and new and nobody had any expectations about me.  Once this book is out in the world, I will officially no longer be an unknown quantity.  I will be judged by my sales numbers, star ratings, genre, style, reviews – rightly or wrongly, people will look at this thing I made and think, "That's her.  That's what she does."   And although I can always go write something completely different later, One Night in Sixes will always be out there - a yardstick that people will use to measure me, and a permanent part of my reputation.

But even though it was years in the making, this book isn't my one single, special pearl.  It's more like a skin or a shell – a reflection of me and what I could do at a specific time in my life, and one that had to be finished and cast off so that I could start growing another one, and another after that.   

(With that said, I do hope you enjoy my first fictive sloughing - I will be talking about it in far more appealing terms over the next few months!)

Oh, and in the name of posterity and motivation for everybody who's still in the trenches, this manuscript was born on February 2nd, 2007, and ended yesterday, May 18th, 2014.  Seven years, three months, and sixteen days.  Keep at it, y'all.  It's a long row to hoe, and there's nowhere to go but forward.

Pulitzer Prize, here I come!  Hemingway!  Steinbeck!  Scuzzbopper!

A Happy Hiatus

Hey guys!  Sorry, no Part 3 today - I have been waylaid by a thoroughly happy task.

It rhymes with "rage roofs."

But the news gets happier still: as of today, I am officially on board for CONvergence in Minneapolis!  I'll be a panelist for "Tell Me That Again! Classic Stories Retold", "Invisible Aces," and "Studio Ghibli & Anime After Miyazaki."  (You can click on the panel titles here to read the full descriptions.  Short story: ten kinds of awesome.  Eleven kinds of excited.)

Anyway, much love and MANY thanks to everybody who's been chatting and commenting this week – I have enjoyed it more than you know.  Next week: Part 3, blog hop fun, and a genuine bona-fide insider list of Hot Tips for Winning Write Club 2014.  Stay tuned!

One town's very like another 
When your head's down over your pieces, brother

Artificial Barriers to Entry, Part II: The Inescapable Catass Factor

(Continued from Part I!)

Let me confess something right here: every time the Olympics come on, and the athletes march and the flags fly and the national anthems swell, I catch myself getting misty-eyed.  "My God!" I think.  "This is it: a true meritocracy.  A magical land where prejudice doesn't exist, equality prevails, and everyone is judged solely by their athletic ability."

It's not, of course.  I mean, let's be clear: the athletes work damned hard and deserve every bit of their glory.  But behind just about every one of them is a family who could afford to (or went into debt in order to) have a parent become their kid's full-time coach, hire private lessons, travel around for national competitions, shell out for snow-gliders and polo-vaults and whatever other equipment their sport requires.  At the very least, that's a family who could afford to have a child focus exclusively on their sport, even at the risk of failure or permanent injury.  You can't do that when you need every able body either working a job or training for one.

Not in training for Tokyo 2020

And it's a similar story for writing.  No, the equipment's not massively expensive, and it's not like you're going to be washed up and stove in if you don't make it by the time you're thirty (thank God!)  But in a way, it's a parallel problem: whereas Olympians do their intensive training during childhood and adolescence (when Mom and Dad would be supporting them regardless), writers aren't usually publishable until well after they've become adults, often with jobs and families of their own.   That complicates the learning curve considerably.

And money IS a factor.  We cultivate the Hemingway Mystique of a lone writer banging away at an Underwood under the glare of a single naked lightbulb, armed with nothing but a ream of paper and his genius.  But the reality is that the people who could afford to drop $300 or $500 or $700 on DFWcon last weekend came away from the conference with a hell of an advantage - not only in what they learned about their craft, but in the connections they made with publishing professionals and other writers.  In academia, it's the kids who can afford private tutoring and test prep classes who get ahead.  For the athletes, top-tier coaches and training camps.  No, you can't skip the 10,000-hour time investment - but money is a powerful catalyst that can speed things up considerably.

Well, and so?  Everybody else can still get there, right?  They just have to take longer and work harder, that's all.

But that's just it.  Time itself is a commodity, as anyone raising kids or working double shifts knows excruciatingly well.  In athletics or academics or other arenas where it's death or glory by the age of 12, 18, 25, that permanently excludes people who don't have extra years to put towards their Eye of the Tiger montage.  Even with a gig like writing (where there is no ticking clock or game-over screen), that still means that people we should be hearing from at 25 or 30 or 40 don't make it until they're 50, 65, or indeed ever, because they give up in despair after decades of spinning their wheels.

In online gaming, there is a term - catassing - whose origin is a story in itself, but which basically refers to the act of devoting all your time to the game, steamrolling other players whose jobs and lives and commitments mean that they're simply unable to compete with someone who can play literally 18 hours a day.  The Oatmeal has chronicled this well. 

So what happens when you catass writing?  Can it even be done?  

Well, Jim C. Hines has done a fantastic survey charting authors' average time to publication, and the factors that seemed to shorten or lengthen their path.  From my limited and anecdotal experience, I've certainly seen some writers improve much more quickly than others.  Maybe Person A can learn in 10,000 hours what Person B will learn in 80,000 hours, and Person C just won't learn ever.  (There is a PERFECT metaphor for this, by the way, but the magic system in Final Fantasy 6 is not nearly the cultural touchstone that I wish it were.)

And oh, how I wish it were!

Still, even if every writer on the planet needed just 10,000 hours flat to get the skill portion down, people who can afford to practice for four or six or eight hours a day would still get there ahead of everybody who's waking up at 5 AM to get in 60 magical minutes of writing before they have to get the kids ready for school.   And whether we're talking college admissions, Olympic glory, or the Great American Novel, these two things - time, and its interchangeable counterpart, money - are the two biggest obstacles to just about any competitive endeavor you can name.  Talent is a big factor, yes.  So is timing and luck.  But whenever there are more willing and baseline-capable applicants than there are places for them, the people who are first to get chairs when the music stops are almost always the ones with the most time to invest in getting them. 

(Touching back on Part I: this is why I don't see Twitter and the rest of social media as a universal equalizer.  It still requires a time investment and a commitment, especially if you're doing it with any degree of effectiveness, and that's still constraining or excluding people who don't have that kind of room in their schedule.  I guarantee I would not be spending 6+ hours on this week's blog series if I were still trying to work a 50-hour-a-week desk job.)

"So, what?" you might ask at this point.  "The people with the most time and money win, and that's that?"

The evidence says no!  I mean, Margaret Mitchell made it (a wealthy, pedigreed Southern belle and childless stay-at-home wife who devoted three years to writing Gone With the Wind), but so did Frederick Douglass (who taught himself to read, escaped slavery, and went on to become one of the most accomplished preachers, writers, and political activists in American history).  Hell, so did J.K. Rowling.  So did Octavia Butler.  So did Sherman Alexie.  We have far too many phenomenal hard-scrabble success stories in our canon to believe that the cause is hopeless for anyone who doesn't have a trust fund and an MFA.

But here is what I'm driving at.  It is really, really easy to get discouraged in this business.  It is even easier when it seems like all your writer-buddies are beating you.  Easier still when you keep hearing that "real writers write every day" - that they write amazing books AND do eleven kinds of social media AND read all the latest in their genre AND do boatloads of research AND keep up with all the industry trends AND AND AND. After awhile, it all swirls together in this toxic Martha Stewart soup - you know, the one that makes Harriet Homemaker feel like garbage because she can't keep up with the rich lady making soap molds in her fake TV kitchen.

Well, at least we hope that's soap.

And speaking as one of the Margaret Mitchell types, I guess what I'm trying to express is that

A) a lot of that "real writers _____" business has been propagated by people who are talking out of their silk-lined hats (please listen to Ann Bauer if you have ANY doubt about this), and

B) how quickly you progress compared to your writer-buddies may have VERY little to do with your talent - or theirs.

And although you can't control whether or how successfully anyone else catasses their way to fame and fortune, I sincerely hope you can avoid feeling like an ass yourself.  If it's taking you longer to get there, it doesn't mean you're not talented, not committed, or not trying hard enough.  It doesn't mean you won't make it.  It does mean that you might have a longer, harder row to hoe.  And I really hope you won't give up - because the harder it is to get let in to whatever club you're aiming for, the likelier it is that they are desperately short on people like you.

There is one more thing I want to say, actually - about how all these obstacles and limiting factors affect our industry even after writers show up to the table with well-written, original stories finished in hand.  Let's do that on Friday.  In the meantime, I would be really interested to hear your take on this stuff here.  What would you say have been the biggest limiting factors on your progress as a writer?  Are there others we haven't considered here?

--For one brief moment, victory was within our grasp.
--And then the game started.

Artificial Barriers to Entry, Part I: Twitter, the SAT, and Peanuts

It's become something of a spring tradition.  Every year, a few weeks before DFWcon, I watch my Facebook feed fill with writers testing out pitches and business cards, and my Twitter followers list blossom with egg icons - aspiring writers acquiescing to the Social Media Mandate.  I love it.

But I know a lot of people don't.  And I admit that sometimes I'm one of them.  Being around real live earth-persons makes me feel like a million bucks - it's the biggest thrill, honestly - but email and Twitter and Facebook and blogging easily reduce me to tears.  I know I'm not alone in that.  "Why do we have to do this social media garbage?" cries that reliable wailing and gnashing of teeth.  "This has NOTHING to do with the quality of my writing, but agents keep saying they won't even consider me if I don't do it!"

This is an almost perfect echo of what I hear in my day job (well, night job), doing test prep classes for high school students.  "Why do I have to take the SAT?" the little darlings keen in frustration.  "This has NOTHING to do with how much I know, but colleges won't even consider me if I don't do it!"

And you know, I think these two mournful choruses really share the same origin.  A hundred years ago, the SAT and ACT didn't exist, and social media was in its dots-and-dashes infancy.  (Though Face-book was not unknown.)  You got your book out to the world the good old-fashioned way: by sending your manuscript to a publisher.  And as for getting into college - well, what could be easier than sitting your Greek and Latin exams, producing your certificate of good moral character, and waiting for your acceptance letter?

Sounds like a simpler, friendlier time, doesn't it?

Well, here is a question: did you ever see Charlie Brown's All-Stars?  It's a Peanuts special from the '60s, and the short story is this: Charlie Brown has the chance to get his baseball team real uniforms, and entry into a real league, and (naturally) jumps at the chance - until he's told that the league doesn't allow girls or dogs.  If he wants his team to go pro, he's going to have to ditch some of his teammates.

Who don't always appreciate his managerial style.

And it seems to me that the academic and publishing worlds of old were much the same way: it is easy to miss them today, because it's easy to forget that they were very exclusive realms.  And part of the reason why writers and students today are having to jump so many extra hurdles is because there are so very many MORE of us now than there used to be - because now girls and dogs and gays and minorities and blue-collar people and pink-collar people and no-collar people have entered the good ol' boys' ring, stiffening the competition for what are still a limited number of top-choice seats.

And when there are 50,000 people applying for 1,000 places, you do have some extra work to do in whittling them down.  It's not enough anymore to just toss out the ones with rotten grades or lousy spelling.  That still leaves 20,000 solid competitors.  So you have to start looking at other things.  Throw out everyone who doesn't do extracurriculars.  Then put in a standardized test, and axe everyone who fails it.  What does that leave, 5,000?  Okay, new rule: we want to see volunteer work.  Tell them to start clothing the hungry and feeding the naked and neutering shelter-puppies on the weekends, or they're out.  And if too many students start making it through all those hoops, I promise you that they will invent a new one, or make the existing ones even smaller.

Which isn't to say that the hoops are all completely arbitrary.  For example, a successful writer is going to have to be able to sell themselves and their book - so it's reasonable to see whether and how they've made a start on that. 

"So, Tex," you may now resentfully sigh, "you're saying that the New World Order is good and right and just, and Twitter is the price we pay for diversity and freedom."

Not at ALL, my hypothetical friend - not at all, and I will tell you why.  But let me pause here for the moment, and resume on Wednesday.

In the meantime, here is a question: for those of you with skin in either game (publishing or college admissions), what do you reckon we could do to level the playing field?  How can we more fairly assess the applicants - or should we quit squabbling over who gets a piece and focus instead on enlarging the pie?

 
So they have one man on first, but if they think they can beat us, they'd better try. 
 ...
I hate it when they try.

Prose and DFWcons

All right, you guys.  Real talk.  These last few months have been the most stressful, challenging, miserable months since... pretty much ever.  And now that I'm finally out from under it, I can tell you the tale.

See, I was going like gangbusters trying to get my second book written, and teach a night course, and help with DFWcon, and get two classes prepped for the aforesaid con.   Everything came to a head last week: book was due on Monday, programs/schedules had to be finalized by Tuesday, the last conference meeting and bag-stuffing was Wednesday, night course finished on Thursday, and Friday found me crying discreetly at the pre-con mixer because I was supposed to teach a class the next day and wasn't even half ready for it.  At one point, I was up for 36 hours straight.  It was ruinous, absolutely insane, and I never, ever want to be that crunched ever again.

HOWEVER.

Let me tell you what the victory lap looked like.  Let me tell you how completely worth it all that agony was.  Let me tell you what a fantastic time I had, and how many super-awesome people I met, and how many (now former) total strangers came up to me and said, "Oh my God. Your class was amazing.  My mind – you blew it.  I seriously can't even deal with your realness."  

(And if any of y'all from the "Punching Up Your Prose" class are reading this, look at that last paragraph again.  Yeah, it's one of those!)

This was me.  This was what I did.

So let me write this real quick and sloppily, before the glitter wears off and I start second-guessing it.  Are you ready, world?  Here it is:  this what I just did is without question what I was put on this earth to do.  I want to write awesome books, and I want to help other people write awesome books.  That's it.  That is my talent.  That is the goal.

So here's how it's going to happen.

1.  Going to send the two class presentations to all the awesome folks who signed up for them.  That's job #1.

2.  Going to resurrect this blog here, do more fun cool stuff.  I definitely want to do more GrammatiCats (the posts take so much longer to write than you would think, but maybe we can run them once or twice a month).  I also want to start showcasing other authors – because man, I know so many truly first-rate fictioneers, and the world desperately needs to pick up what they're throwing down.

3.  Going to work on doing more classes.  Maybe online, maybe in person, probably both.  (Y'all holler at me if you have any genius ideas or secret leads on this front.)  Not sure yet how that will shake out, but I'll tell you this right now: I am not waiting for DFWcon 2015 to do this again. 

And whether I blew your mind in the last 3 days or have been sporadically ignoring you for the last 3 months: if you're reading this right now, please know that I am so, so grateful to know you and have you in my posse.  I will never know how I got lucky enough to have this life, but I intend to make really damn sure the world is better off because of it.

People are all like, "oh, it's okay, don't cry."  No.  This is DFWcon.  If you're not crying, you're not trying.

DFWcon: The Clock Strikes Thirteen

Yep, you read that right.  In thirteen hours, regular registration for DFWcon ends, and baby Toby will officially belong to the Goblin King.

Register, people.  For yourself.  For your writing career.  For David Bowie.

I saw my baby, trying hard as babe could try.  What could I do?

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?

Everything I Want to Say About That Stephen King Quote on Adverbs

Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick. 

Ullman stood five-five, and when he moved, it was with the prissy speed that seems to be the exclusive domain of all small plump men. The part in his hair was exact, and his dark suit was sober but comforting. I am a man you can bring your problems to, that suit said to the paying customer. To the hired help it spoke more curtly: This had better be good, you. There was a red carnation in the lapel, perhaps so that no one on the street would mistake Stuart Ullman for the local undertaker.

As he listened to Ullman speak, Jack admitted to himself that he probably could not have liked any man on that side of the desk—under the circumstances.

Ullman had asked a question he hadn’t caught. That was bad; Ullman was the type of man who would file such lapses away in a mental Rolodex for later consideration.

“I’m sorry?”

“I asked if your wife fully understood what you would be taking on here. And there’s your son, of course.” He glanced down at the application in front of him. “Daniel. Your wife isn’t a bit intimidated by the idea?”

“Wendy is an extraordinary woman.”

“And your son is also extraordinary?”

Jack smiled, a big wide PR smile. “We like to think so, I suppose. He’s quite self-reliant for a five-year-old.”

No returning smile from Ullman. He slipped Jack’s application back into a file. The file went into a drawer. The desk top was now completely bare except for a blotter, a telephone, a Tensor lamp, and an in/out basket. Both sides of the in/out were empty, too.

Ullman stood up and went to the file cabinet in the corner. “Step around the desk, if you will, Mr. Torrance. We’ll look at the hotel floor plans.”

He brought back five large sheets and set them down on the glossy walnut plane of the desk. Jack stood by his shoulder, very much aware of the scent of Ullman’s cologne. All my men wear English Leather or they wear nothing at all came into his mind for no reason at all, and he had to clamp his tongue between his teeth to keep in a bray of laughter. Beyond the wall, faintly, came the sounds of the Overlook Hotel’s kitchen, gearing down from lunch.

“Top floor,” Ullman said briskly. “The attic. Absolutely nothing up there now but bric-a-brac. The Overlook has changed hands several times since World War II and it seems that each successive manager has put everything they don’t want up in the attic. I want rattraps and poison bait sowed around in it. Some of the third-floor chambermaids say they have heard rustling noises. I don’t believe it, not for a moment, but there mustn’t even be that one-in-a-hundred chance that a single rat inhabits the Overlook Hotel.”

Jack, who suspected that every hotel in the world had a rat or two, held his tongue.

“Of course you wouldn’t allow your son up in the attic under any circumstances.”

“No,” Jack said, and flashed the big PR smile again. Humiliating situation. Did this officious little prick actually think he would allow his son to goof around in a rattrap attic full of junk furniture and God knew what else?

Ullman whisked away the attic floor plan and put it on the bottom of the pile.

“The Overlook has one hundred and ten guest quarters,” he said in a scholarly voice. “Thirty of them, all suites, are here on the third floor. Ten in the west wing (including the Presidential Suite), ten in the center, ten more in the east wing. All of them command magnificent views.”

Could you at least spare the salestalk?

But he kept quiet. He needed the job.

 

Heeeere's Johnny! 

Conferences and Conventions and Human Contact, Oh Boy!

Merry Monday, Internetizens!  The world is an especially bright and lovely place today (as it tends to be when you are backed by industrial-strength doses of ibuprofen and a healthy rage to live.) 

Three con-ish things:

1.  I've just now uploaded the preliminary schedule and class descriptions for DFWcon 2014 (scroll down there on the main page - you'll see three links).  If you are a writer who might be able to make it out to our neck of the woods in May, please check it out - this conference is my first love, and the literal foundation of all my success to date, and I can't recommend it highly enough.  You will hear me gushing more about it soon.

2.  A quick word to my fellow white people - more specifically, my fellow con-going, SFF-loving white people.  You know how at conventions, there tends to be a whole lot of ... you know, us?  Does it ever make you feel kinda weird to live in a city that is fully 50% non-white (as I do here in Dallas), and yet walking into the local convention hall is like entering a melanin clean-room? 

"Maybe", you might say, "but this isn't the first time I've heard about it, and I'm kind of tired of having to feel bad because I happen to turn pink in the bathtub."

 Well, *I* would submit that there is no need to feel anything but powerful, enthusiastic, and motivated - because we-the-converted are the carriers of the torch, the keepers of the faith.  We veteran con-goers KNOW how fun and cool and awesome a good con can be - and so we are uniquely equipped to help bring that joy to people who might otherwise miss out.  And (here's the part that's got me jazzed this morning): you can help diversify the con-going world just by doing what you normally would anyway.

"What?" you may ask.  "Which part?  Curating my collection of autographed Timothy Zahn novels?  Filling my life-sized TARDIS with handcrafted plush tribbles for my Dr. Who / Star Trek fanfic re-enaction group?"

Basically, yes!  Con or Bust is an organization dedicated to helping fans of color attend conventions - and all you have to do to support them is to buy from their auctions.  They have some amazing primo stuff, too - books, crafts, jewelry - autographed, limited-edition, out-of-print - and writers, sit up and pay attention!  They're auctioning off critiques from Tor editors, Hugo winners, serious heavy-hitting industry pros.  So if you want to score some amazing goods AND help bring new fans into the fold, get over there and shop your heart out.  (But do it fast - it's ending this Sunday the 23rd!)

3.  Okay, I guess that second thing was not as quick as I thought.  I'll make this third one brief:  I'm going to ConDFW this weekend, and it would be my life's delight to see you there!


We have many different beliefs, but today we must put them aside and unite. Gryffindor and Slytherin! Jedi and Sith! Jack Nicholson Joker and Heath Ledger Joker! This is our time to take what's ours... for tonight we dine in hell!

The Long, Dark Night of the Teeth

It started on Wednesday, with an achy, not-too-bad kind of pain on the left side of my upper jaw.  I thought it might be a sinus issue.

It got worse yesterday, and I was lucky enough to get an on-the-spot appointment with my dentist, who confirmed that no, actually, the root canal I had a few years back has gotten re-infected.  Better handle up on that ASAP.

Tomorrow (today), I have a 9:00 appointment with an endodontist to re-do the root canal.  But in the meantime, I'm up and blogging in the middle of the night, nursing a pain that the drugs can't even touch.

So here is a thought.  Wouldn't it be a different world if we could actually feel other people's pain?  Like, on an individual level, how many of the people that today will be dismissed by their doctors for "psychosomatic" (read: imaginary) distress would get real help?  And on a societal level, how much more quickly could we progress if we could actually feel the mental anguish of our fellow sapiens?  How fast would bigotry crumble if the average person KNEW the kind of pain that comes from having to live in a body that doesn't match your gender, or trying to suppress a sexuality that will get you shamed, fired, hurt, or killed? 

Maybe it would be a utopia of compassion and understanding.  But then you have to think about how that would change our manners.  Like, it's already bad form to go into the office when you're sick, because somebody else might catch what you've got.  How much worse would it be if you showed up KNOWING you'd inflict your pain on your co-workers as soon as you walked in the door?  And does the person who walks onto a crowded subway on the verge of a nervous breakdown become a commuter, or a terrorist? 

So there'd have to be social coping mechanisms.  It might become polite to shut yourself in at home when you're miserable, so you don't wound every random stranger you pass in the street.  Certainly you'd be expected to medicate yourself.  The chronic, severe, and untreatable kinds of pain might even require you to kill yourself.  So in the longer, Darwinian run of things, the people who survive and prosper would be those who are the least prone to pain themselves - mental or physical - and those who are the least affected by the pain of others...aka the bullies.

On the balance, maybe it's best that we stay over here in Earth 616.  It's not perfect - not by a long shot - but I like the idea of living in a world aligned to the virtue of striving to understand other people's feelings, rather than the necessity of scrambling to escape them.  (And on a selfish, vocational note, a good story is basically empathy in a can anyhow.)

All right.  It's 7:00AM.  Two more hours to go.  I can make it.  But it's a really good thing that I don't know where to score drugs on lower Greenville.

Oh, I’m in pain! I think this is what pain feels like!