Matt Forbeck is one of the hardest working and utterly tireless sonosabitches in games and fiction. I think he’s attached to one out of every seven Kickstarter projects. Last I checked, he’s starting his 365 Novels In One Year project, where he writes 365 novels in a year. Or something like that. Regardless, the latest fruits of his Kickstarter labors is a novel set at the gaming convention known as Gen Con, and here he answers the dreaded ten questions:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

Matt Forbeck: award winning author and game designer. I’ve been creating games for something over twenty years and writing novels for something less than ten. I’m probably best known for my three novels with Angry Robot: Amortals, Vegas Knights, and Carpathia, but I’ve also written tie-in novels for D&D, Blood Bowl, Guild Wars, and Leverage.

On top of all that, I write for video games (Marvel Heroes, Ghost Recon Online, etc.), toys (Star Trek Mission Utility Belt), and comics (Magic: The Gathering). Plus, I run Kickstarters to help me self-publish other novels. Last year, I tried to write a dozen of them for my 12 for ’12 challenge. I fell short and only wrote ten novels, nine comic scripts, and an assortment of shorter work. So, at least I fail well.

In my home life, I’m the happily married father of five kids. That includes a 14-year-old boy and a set of 10-year-old quadruplets. (Given what I do for a living, it’s funny that the craziest thing about my life is really my kids.)

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

Dangerous Games is a trilogy of thrillers set at Gen Con, the largest tabletop gaming convention in America. It starts with How to Play.

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

Literally? Kickstarter. I ran Dangerous Games as the third of the four trilogies I Kickstarted last year.

More figuratively, it comes from the fact that I’ve been going to Gen Con since I was a kid. This summer will be my 32nd year in a row and my 11th as a guest of honor at the show. As with most writers, once you spend enough time in a place, you start to imagine how it could all go horribly wrong. That’s how I came up with Dangerous Games.

I actually had this trilogy itching around in the back of my skull for years, but I had planned to run a different story as my third 12 for ’12 drive. I’d chatted with Jim Frenkel of Tor about it a while before, though, and he’d liked it, so I made sure to clear it with him before I started, just in case. He told me he wanted it, so I put that one aside for a while and picked up Dangerous Games instead.

That original notion, by the way, is called Loot Drop — a modern thriller with MMO elements — and it should be out from Tor in early 2015.

HOW IS THIS A STORY ONLY YOU COULD’VE WRITTEN?

Gen Con is my favorite event of the year, and I know it better than just about anyone who’s not actually worked in-house for it. I’ve run booths at the show, created scores of events for it, and I’m even on the panel of folks who help select the industry guests of honor these days. The people who run the con — Peter Adkison, Adrian Swartout, Owen Seyler, and the rest of their team — are great friends of mine, people I love, and I think that glows throughout the book.

More to the point, Dangerous Games isn’t just about Gen Con but about the hero, Liam Parker, achieving his dreams of getting his tabletop game published. That’s something I’ve been through and have been helping other people with for decades. As my pal Robin Laws likes to say, the number of full-time freelance game designers in this world is less than the number of astronauts. When you narrow that to full-time tabletop RPG designers (which I once was), there are more Chinese astronauts.

It’s a rare but fascinating profession — as you well know, having done it for years yourself.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING DANGEROUS GAMES?

I had to decide whether or not to put myself into the book as a character. It seems like an egotistical thing to do, so my first instinct was to avoid it. The trouble is that everything I know about the convention comes straight from my experiences with it, and that’s one of the book’s selling points. Stripping me out of it didn’t make much sense and would have involved a lot of strenuous dancing around the subject to avoid it.

So I put myself in the book. I’m not there a lot, but enough to have fun with it. My wife and kids show up for a bit in the later books too. My pal Ken Hite agreed to serve as the part-time mentor for my hero, so I got to write dialog in Ken’s voice instead, which was worlds of fun.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING DANGEROUS GAMES?

This is the first piece of original fiction I’ve written that had absolutely zero fantastic elements in it. No magic, no monsters, and no tech more advanced than what most of us see every day. It forced me to find intriguing material more in the characters and their motivations than in the world building, which is something fantastic stories tend to feature, and I found that refreshing and fun.

I also had to deal with writing about lots of people I know well, most of whom I count as good friends. It’s interesting to write about them with compassion and empathy but still leaving their flaws and eccentricities on full display. I can only hope they recognize themselves and think that I treated them well.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT DANGEROUS GAMES?

I worked hard to capture the fact that Gen Con is a magical time for me. I really do love it more than a kid at Christmas. It’s a gathering of the gaming-geek tribe that transcends all of us, and it always inspires me and recharges my battery for another year of creating fun things to share with my friends. With Dangerous Games, I tried to put that front and center. It’s a dark story in some ways, but it’s painted against the background of the Best Four Days in Gaming.

I also loved putting so many of my friends in the book. I became more adventurous with the cameos as I went, and in the final book I wound up throwing in a slew of fantastic authors as part of the Writer’s Symposium at Gen Con — which I take part in too. Folks like John Scalzi, Brandon Sanderson, and Pat Rothfuss show up, and even Wil Wheaton pokes his head in for a bit.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

If and when I ever go back to writing thrillers at Gen Con, I’d take a whole different tack. I’d go with an ensemble cast of characters and a cunning mastermind running a secret game throughout the con, by which he hopes to take his revenge on them all. I considered doing that this time around, but I threw it out because I wanted to introduce readers to Gen Con first, and I needed a fresh-faced hero to accomplish that.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

I have a lot of favorites, but I’m going to go ahead and spoil everything with the last paragraph in the entire book. It’s actually not as much a spoiler as it’s a wink and nod to the readers, as everything’s been wrapped up well before that point. Anyhow, it reads:

“Well,” Matt said with a cunning glint in his eye. “Have you heard about this new thing called Kickstarter?”

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

After Dangerous Games: How to Play — which is out now — I’m releasing two sequels: How to Cheat and How to Win. Those should all be out this summer. They each take place at Gen Con in consecutive years, and we get to see Liam grow as a designer and a hero through those three years. The first is a mystery novel, the second is a crime novel, and the third is over-the-top action. I call it Die Hard meets Gen Con.

Meanwhile, I’m finishing up my YA series of Monster Academy novels from my fourth Kickstarter. Those will be out later in the year. After that, I move on to Loot Drop for Tor. It’s a busy year.

Matt Forbeck: Website / @MForbeck

Dangerous Games: Amazon / B&N / Forbeck.com

One of my favorite things is looking around and seeing the success of the people I’ve “come up with,” for lack of a better term. Folks I wrote with in various gaming industries: folks like Mur Lafferty or, drum roll please, Rich Dansky. Rich is a guy responsible for a lot of games you probably love, and he’s also a helluva fiction writer. Here he is emerging from the ones and zeros to tell you about Vaporware:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

(Whoa.)

I mean, I guess?

The press release (with scads more detail) is right here.

I am of two minds on this. Maybe three minds. MAYBE A ZILLION MINDS.

I’m generally pro-fanfic. Like, I know some authors get their browneyes puckered over other people splashing around in their kiddie pools, and I understand that gut-level reaction — but me, I think if you have an audience willing to write fan-fiction about your work, you’re pretty fucking lucky. And it’s always half understood that fan-fiction is fan-fiction. Non-canonical. Utterly apocryphal. Yeah, whatever, sure, Spike and Angel can fly the Serenity through the Stargate and they can fight Darkseid and 69 each other on a bed of glittery vampire dust.

Woo! No problem. High-five.

And this appears to be a way to sanction fan-fiction — it’s not like, Amazon deciding to just allow people to sell it wantonly. It appears to have author (or at least publisher) approval behind it. And authors get paid! I like when authors get paid. Because mouths! To feed!

So, my concern here isn’t actually financial — like, this isn’t theoretically that different from someone licensing your work and your world to, say, the comic book space. Or to an RPG or video game. Or even to film or TV. (Though the percentage here seems likely far less.)

The weird thing is what happens to that comfortable space that separated canonical from non-canonical. Like, one assumes that the fan-fic remains officially non-canonical — and yet, people are paying for it. And getting paid in return. Which lends a kind of intellectual and emotional legitimacy to it. And allows for a very weird thing to happen: it lets the licensed fan-fiction to become, in theory, bigger than the material that spawned it.

And even if it doesn’t become bigger it still grants it a kind of territory in the canonical space. Someone might read Book 3 of the Miriam Black series, The Cormorant, and say, “But this doesn’t refer to that time when she time-traveled back to the Old West in that novella, Booby Nuthatch.” And you’re like, “That wasn’t real, though, someone else wrote that.” But then they say: “I PAID FOR IT SO IT FELT REAL TO ME” and then they sob into your shoulder and you wonder suddenly how they got that close and should you call the police? Probably.

That’s a pretty serious shift in authorship and authenticity.

Which is breaking my brain right now.

How much say does an author get?

How much veto power does Amazon or the publisher get?

Does this place too much power in Amazon’s hands (HAHA TOO LATE)?

Or does this put more power back in the original author’s hands?

Does this further remove legitimacy from unpaid fan-fic?

Do these pantaloons make my thighs look fat?

WUZZA WOOZA FUZZY BUZZY.

Like, if I had to make a judgment, I’m 51% this being a good thing, 49% this being a THING I CANNOT WRAP MY HEAD AROUND FUCK IT I DON’T KNOW

*detonates the Internet with the push of a comical red button*

Anyway. Interesting. Say what you want about Amazon, but they’re some crafty-ass trilobites.

What are your thoughts, Oh Goggle-Eyed Readership?

“I WILL WALK THIS SUNLESS REALM. I WILL START HERE IN THE UPPER PORTIONS, IN THE PLACE WE CALL THE SHALLOWS. THEN, INTO THE LABYRINTH CALLED THE FATHOMLESS TANGLE. THEN ONE DAY I SHALL FIND MY WAY TO THE RAVENOUS EXPANSE, WHERE THE EYELESS GODS OF THIS PLACE MOAN AND GNASH TEETH THE SIZE OF SKYSCRAPERS.”

The Blue Blazes

Coming May 28th, 2013.

Pre-order:

Amazon

B&N

Indiebound

(text by Chuck Wendig)

No, seriously, go read that right now. It is one of the finest essays I’ve read in a long time on challenging the expectations of women inside (and to some degree outside) of fiction.

It’s smart. It’s self-deprecating. It doesn’t point fingers while still making a clear case for how we need to adjust our thinking and ask questions precisely when other people think we should be quietly accepting answers. It’s great. Have I said that enough? No, really. It’s great.

Whenever I read something like this — something ostensibly targeted at writers and storytellers — I like to try to break it down and say, okay, what’s the takeaway? What’s the practical path forward after reading something like that (assuming, that is, one wants to course correct). I have a bucket of ill-formed thoughts on the subject which is usually the finest time to get onto a blog and start barfing up half-digested thought-nuggets (sarcasm duly expressed), but hey, that’s what I do here sometimes. Sometimes it takes talking through an idea in a public space.

So, that said, this is a warning: this post will contain none of the elegance or wit (or talk of llamas) put forth by Kameron in that wonderful essay. Her essay should win her an award for something. This post will win me nothing except maaaaaybe the quizzical stares of those who pass by my Plexiglas enclosure.

Anyway.

I used to work at the public library. Libraries are of course where the books live but that’s only a part of what they do and one of the things they do is a very important function called: serving the underserved population. (Note: underserved, not undeserved.) I specifically worked with a department whose goal was to find the folks the library Just Plain Wasn’t Talking To and then Talk To Them. Are we helping blind people? We’re helping children, but are we helping seniors? What about African-Americans? Or people trapped in low-income brackets? And so on.

This is largely antithetical to the way Capitalist Anything works, because unless you’re willing to excel within a very specific niche, aiming your services toward an underserved part of the population isn’t the way to a dragon’s hoard of gold coins. But that’s why public services are great (and why it’s a tragedy that library budgets are having their throats slashed in favor of Congress ordering more tanks for a military that expressly doesn’t want them). Public services ideally aim to serve all portions of the public: not just, say, rich white jizzballs who think such services are non-essential because they don’t use them.

All this is a bit circuitous, I’ll admit, but my point is that libraries being eager to serve the under- or not-at-all-served is a huge thing. Huge!

And I think that’s the practical takeaway from Kameron’s essay –

Writers could do more to serve the underserved.

We’re not talking to our entire audience.

Maybe we think we are. But one of the ways, I think, we serve the underserved and speak to the unspoken is to take those conventions and expectations Kameron talks about and purposefully challenge them in the pages of our work. This is true of how we present characters who are women, or who are gay and lesbian and transgender, or African-Americans and Africans and Asian-Americans and Asians and –

– well, basically, everybody who isn’t a fairly comfortable white dude.

Whether you believe in so-called “white male privilege” or not, it’s still pretty easy to take a quick look around the halls of pop culture and see that for every Katniss Everdeen there’s a fucking army of Luke Skywalkers and Neos and John McClanes and Smoldering Glittery Vampire Douchewangs. For every Black Widow and Nick Fury you get an Iron Man, a Thor, a Hawkeye, a Hulk, a Captain America. (And, okay, a Maria Hill. Cobie Smulders!)

White dudes are everywhere.

We’re like robins during spring.

Did you see Maureen Johnson’s Coverflip? Where she asked her fans and followers to reimagine the covers of books by flipping the author’s gender? It’s a helluva thing to see.

Point is, white dudes got it pretty sweet. Particularly middle-class-and-up white dudes.

And so it behooves us as authors of all shapes and designations and genital configurations (oh and I’m talking to you, too, publishers, if you’ll listen) to look deep into the hearts of our stories and to see if we’re leaning on lazy archetypes, stereotypes, conventions, historical myths or outright buckets of bullshit. I’m not saying that every book has to be some lectern-pounding exercise in social justice but damn, a little bit of social justice can’t hurt. Why can’t we talk to those we don’t normally talk to? Why can’t we serve the underserved and challenge the expectations of what has come before us? Ask questions instead of assuming answers. Why can’t we write books where we have complex and atypical female characters? Gay characters? Does your gay character have a keen fashion sense? Is your female character a mother figure or a rape victim? Is your African-American character a gangbanger? Is that Muslim character a cleric or worse, a terrorist? That’s not to say you can’t have these characters be complex and interesting — but take a long look and you might start to see some lazy, damaging, damning patterns.

I’ve often relied on that kind of thing myself. I do it without thinking. A too-easy crutch, a crummy shortcut — a confirmation of what seems like the status quo but is really just a muddy trench in which we’ve all mired our boots. We can all try to do better. I can do better.

And that’s the takeaway: do better.

Speak to those you haven’t yet spoken to.

Serve the underserved readers.

“THE FIVE OCCULTED PIGMENTS: CERULEAN, AS DISCUSSED. VERMILION, THE RED RAGE. VIRIDIAN, THE GREEN GRAVE. OCHRE, THE GOLDEN GATE. CAPUT MORTUUM, THE VIOLET VOID, OR SIMPLY, THE DEAD HEAD. WE WILL NOT FIND THE OTHER FOUR HERE IN THE SHALLOWS, I SUSPECT. BUT RATHER, THEY MUST EXIST SOMEWHERE IN THE FATHOMLESS TANGLE — OR IN THE RAVENOUS EXPANSE.”

The Blue Blazes

Coming May 28th, 2013.

Pre-order:

Amazon

B&N

Indiebound

(text by Chuck Wendig)

What works to convince you to pick up that book and start reading?

That post generated over 180 comments.

It’s actually pretty enlightening — I’d suggest that writers and publishers and anybody peripherally related to the publishing industry poke through those comments. It’s a long read, but contains some surprising answers (f’rex, blurbs figure in more than I would’ve imagined).

This week, I want to look at the other side of the question:

Once you’ve picked up a book, what gets you to set it down?

More importantly, what ensures you won’t likely pick it up again?

What is it about a story, the writing, the author that stops you from reading further? What for you is the story-killer? Something about the wordsmithy? Something about the content or about a character? I will, as always, hang up and wait for your answer.

*click*

Angry Robot has signed me on for another couple books.

That makes *does some quick math that takes two hours* six books with them.

Which is a lot of books.

I mean, I went from being not a novelist in 2010, then to having my first book published in 2011 and then… well, by the end of 2015 I should have 16 novels out in the world. I clearly have some sort of brain parasite. But it’s a fun parasite! I’m a fan!

Anyway.

One of these two books is definitely the follow-up to The Blue Blazes, tentatively titled Bloody Bride. Back down in the darkest Underworld beneath Manhattan with Mookie Pearl and his troublesome daughter, Nora.

The second is book is — well, we’re not sure yet. Consider it a “placeholder” for either the next Mookie Pearl or Miriam Black book.

As always, thanks to the fine cranky cyborgs at Angry Robot for having me. And thanks to my agent, Stacia Decker, who continues to spin publishing magic out of whatever nonsense words come out of my fool head. (Seriously, if you ever want to know why a great agent is a writer’s best friend, buy me a drink sometime and I’ll regale you with Tales of Team Decker.)

Oh, and since we’re talking a little bit about The Blue Blazes…

Time for another preview:

“Cerulean. The bright blue mineral vein shot through the prehistoric schist of the Great Below. Equal parts pigment and drug. It goes by many names: Peacock Powder, Truth Talc, the Straight Dope, Blue Jay (or just Jay), Bluebird or Blue Butterfly or BB, Blue Mascara, Cobalt, Azure… But many just call it and the effects it engenders ‘The Blue Blazes.’ Users smudge some of the blue powder ont he temples to bring on effects that include: preternatural strength, preternatural toughness, as well as a wiping away of the illusions that keep mortal men from seeing the truth of the denizens of the Underworld. In first-time users the Blue Blazes create an adrenalin rush and an eerie, powerful focus… a high that peaks with initial use and is never again matched. Blazeheads are said in this way to ‘chase the blue’ or ‘hunt the peacock.’ Many never know that the visions they sometimes see are true — they believe them to be by-products of the drug, hallucinations that accompany the feelings of invulnerability and clarity. As a drug it is quite rare and fetches a high price among those who know of its existence. The Organization controls Cerulean. Or, at least they think they do.”

The Blue Blazes

Coming May 27th, 2013.

Pre-order:

Amazon

B&N

Indiebound

(text by Chuck Wendig)

Here’s what happens:

You have this baby.

This baby is boring.

I mean, the baby’s sweet and all. Chubby-cheeked and wrinkle-butted. But after a while you figure out the baby’s only got so many tricks in his bag: giggle, fart, coo, burble, squirm, fill diaper, start over again. You can connect with the baby on a kind of primal-spiritual level, like, you hold the baby and you stare into his eyes and contained there in those big blue orbs are the secrets of the universe. (The baby, of course, is just admiring your nose hairs or eyeglasses or thinking about boobs. Secrets of the universe be damned.) But all told, the connection you feel with the infant isn’t particularly deep.

It’s strong! It’s very strong. But it exists only on that primitive level.

Babies aren’t even dogs. Dogs have that soulful look. They know what’s up. Sure, they crap on the couch or eat your trash, but they know they did something. An infant is like a human-shaped goldfish. Things happen and the baby’s like, “Nope, forgot already. Who are you?”

But then a weird thing starts to happen.

The baby nature begins to peel and fall away on the coming wind. And what emerges from this infant-shaped chrysalis is the weird, needy, hilarious individual known as The Toddler. This creature has a personality. He is different from other such creatures of his kind. He likes things and dislikes other things. He has preferences. And wants. And irritations.

And he starts to talk.

And he starts to defy.

And he starts to play pretend.

He sings and makes up words and dances around and runs full speed into things.

The infant becomes the toddler.

The toddler is a person.

And our toddler is rapidly becoming a little boy because today, B-Dub turns two years old.

Little B-Dub is a comedian.

He likes to do silly things and say silly things not merely because of their delightful silliness but also because he’s watching you like a hawk to gauge your reaction. He’ll fidget out of his pants and go “OHHHHHH” as if to say, dude, I just totally slipped out of your pesky pants trap. He’ll pretend that his truck is eating food and he’ll watch you with a puckish look to see what you say about it. He’ll call us by funny new names — “Moppy Boppy” for my wife (or “Moppy Poppo”), and “Daddy Tot-tee” for me — just so we can correct him and he can cackle.

He’s got empathy. If he hurts you or sees you get hurt, he’ll rush over to give a hug. If you tell him you’re sad — like, say, he decides to fight reading a book one night — he’ll come around and try to fix it. Then he’ll say, “Daddy happy!” and all is right with the world.

I don’t want to suggest that it’s all perfect.

He’s a sweetheart. And hilarious. And smart as a whip.

But toddlers, man. Toddlers. Some days I wonder if we’ll get PTSD. It’s like living with a hand grenade. One minute it’s all laughter and trucks and Curious George and next minute it’s like someone opened the door and invited a tornado in for tea. A rage tornado. Sometimes it’s rage that has a clear and present source: he wants a popsicle but it’s lunchtime so we say, yeah, no, we don’t eat popsicles for lunch, good try, A for effort. You tell him “no” and you might get him to comply or you might see him melt down as if all the bones in his body turned to beanbags, as if all he can do is pile up a sack of of spilled potatoes. But at least that has a cause.

Wants popsicle. No popsicle. Rage. Easy equation.

What happens sometimes though is that the rage has no known source of agitation. It’ll just be like — whoosh, the tides shift and a squall crashes through your seawall. The shriek, the tears, the incoherent inchoate frustration! You know what it is?

I’ll tell you what it is.

SATAN, THY NAME IS TWO-YEAR MOLARS.

Two-year-goddamn-molars.

I thought we were done with teething! I was like, “Great, whatever, he’s got all his teeth, he can chew his food better than most old people.” You feel like you won. But then it’s MORE TEETH. Big mamma-jammas, too, poking up through his gums. And it hurts. He’ll tell you it hurts. Parts of his jaw are breaking away and becoming teeth. It’s like something out of a horror movie.

So, you couple that with the fact he’s basically a turbulent broth of intellectual, physical and emotional development and you have there a recipe for what amounts to a Godzilla-attitude crammed in a very tiny person-shaped creature.

Good times.

When you’re a baby, your entire perception is that the universe exists for you and you are cradled at its starry center. All the people around you have manifested to serve you. You’re like a chubby little-big God-Baby. A divinely cherubic Jabba the Hutt.

At this point, your whole life is solipsistic.

But then, as Toddler Spirit begins to manifest, that solipsism is forced to the margins and you start to realize what must be a rather shocking reality: you are not the center of a universe created just for you. Imagine that. Imagine being God and then someone saying, “No, that was just a delusion cast unto you by a brain still forming itself inside your doughy little head.”

Oh, shit.

So, B-Dub the Toddler is grappling with that, I think. And he acts out in ways that suggest he’s still trying to hold onto some measure of his flagging Divine Power. The kid’s like a Little Napoleon. He does this thing where he assigns one parent to a task — say, the washing of sticky hands or the ascendance of God-Baby up a flight of stairs — and you know who hath been chosen because he jolly well fucking tells you who hath been chosen.

“Mommy,” he’ll say after dinner, waving his food-crusted hands about. “Hands dirty.”

Go ahead, ask him: “Can Daddy wash your hands?”

“Nope.” (He prefers “yup” and “yeah-yeah” and “nope” to the more traditional yes and no.)

Sure, you can ask him again: “Can Daddy please wash your hands?”

“No.” And now you hear the irritation in his voice.

Subtext: HOW DARE YOU DEFY ME, PUNY KERNEL OF HUMAN CORN.

And if you ask him again — or if you just say, yeah, fuck it, I’m going to wash your hands — you have invited a certifiable shit-fit. A nuclear toddler meltdown. A RAGE-DIAPER.

You have defied the God-Baby.

And now the God-Baby is mad.

See, but that’s the weird thing. You push it with your kids, right? You do this in part out of frustration and stubbornness (“You don’t tell me who washes your hands, I pay the mortgage around here and I can wash the hands of any sonofabitch who comes through that front door”). But you also sometimes capitulate instead for entirely different reasons — maybe you think, “Me washing his hands is really not the hill I want to defend right now,” or you think, “I really don’t want to make him cry. I want him to be happy, not sad.”

And it’s that last part that really trips you up as a parent.

Because your knee-jerk reaction at any given moment is to protect, protect, protect. To help them. To restrict from them all the sadness-making things that may happen to them. You might think, “Life is short and hard and so what’s the big deal if I let him eat a popsicle a half-hour before dinner?” (B-Dub would shank a dude for a popsicle, especially while teething.)

But that’s bad news, that attitude. Because whatever life is or isn’t, it’s filled with an endless array of potentially unpleasant moments — and there comes a point when you realize your job as a parent is less about making your children instantaneously happy and more about preparing them to deal with the unpleasant moments life will fling at their heads. You need to teach them ways to be happy in the midst of potential unhappiness, to be able to weather the slings and arrows of dissatisfaction. You want to give in and buy them every toy they see, but then you have to realize that not only is it your job to help them handle disappointment but sometimes it’s your job to actually foster that very disappointment. It’s like “disappointment training.”

Which is really very cruel.

But also really very necessary.

So you say no to things. You deny them things.

And you do so even when you want to do otherwise.

FINE YES HE SAID HIS FIRST CURSE WORD, OKAY.

He was in his seat eating.

I opened the door for some reason and our new puppy — the Red Dog named “Loa” — shot out like a bolt of lightning and so I went out to get her back in and whilst out there I uttered the — totally appropriate! — curse word of, “Oh, you bitch.”

I’m not proud, but there it is.

So.

The door was mostly closed behind me.

I didn’t yell it. I said it. Spoke it in my normal volume.

But B-Dub, he has some kind of SORCERER EARS.

Because he says to my wife:

“Bitch!”

And then you’re left with a struggle as to what to do. Laugh? Cry? Yell? We went with the: Just ignore it and hope we give him no satisfaction. It seems to have worked because he never said it again. Still: we’ve let slip a few half-cusses — “dick,” or “douche” — and sure enough, he plucks those words out of the middles of sentences like they’re delicious candies and immediately begins trying to say them and savor them.

He truly is my son.

He says lots of nice things, though, too.

He says please when he wants something.

He says thank you when you give him something.

He says thank you when he gives you something, too.

He’s just letting you know you owe him some gratitude, damnit.

It’s surprising what he’ll eat. He’ll eat kale. He’ll eat mushrooms. He’ll eat peas. Things that when I was a kid you couldn’t get into my mouth. My mother would try to sneak green peas in my food and I’d be like a dog sorting out a pill — I’d eat the rest and then ptoo. Bye-bye, pea.

Thankfully, we also haven’t had many instances of him eating things he shouldn’t. When I was a tot I choked on a bottle nipple. I choked on a penny. I almost died drinking well water where a possum had died (oops), though that wasn’t really my fault (thanks Mom & Dad for the dead possum water, which is like Vitamin Water except full of infant-killing bacteria).

Knock on digital wood, but B-Dub’s been healthy as a horse for the last two years.

Maybe it was the breastfeeding? Or the kale? Or the gamma rays we subject him to so he can become The Incredible Hulkbaby whenever someone won’t give him a popsicle?

HULKBABY SMASH

BUT FIRST HULKBABY POOP

THEN POPSICLE

THEN SMASH

We’ve had two years of miserable sleep. This kid has never slept well. Up every couple hours. Restless. Irritable at night. Like he always wants to be doing something, and sleep ain’t it. People told us all kinds of shit to fix it. Here’s the danger of parenting advice, by the way — parenting advice is geared toward One Specific Child, and as it turns out, all children are not built off the same template. We had everyone giving us advice on how to fix the sleep problems — attachment parenting, cry it out, give him a mini-bar bottle of whiskey, stick him on a northbound tractor trailer, let him read some Dostoevsky. We tried it all and all of it failed.

Eventually our doctor was like, “You know how some adults don’t sleep well? Some babies are like that.” She has two kids herself and one of them worked well with cry-it-out and so for a while she assumed that was the go-to advice but then it totally failed with her other child.

So, turns out, every kid is different. WHODATHUNK.

Just the same –

Suddenly, B-Dub is sleeping.

Two years later and he can finally sleep through the night. I can be up and writing in the morning before he wakes up which is some kind of divine intervention. It’s also horrifying at first because you’re like IS HE DEAD DID HE ESCAPE IS HE IN THE VENTILATION SYSTEM LIKE JOHN MCCLANE FROM DIE HARD WHY ISN’T HE AWAKE YET OH GOD OH GOD

But then you get over it and enjoy the relative peace. Short as it is.

He loves trucks. He loves trucks so much. I’m pretty sure he might marry a truck someday.

He loves every kind of truck out there.

Even trucks I would normally consider to be “lesser” trucks — like, an excavator is kinda bad-ass. Some tractor trailers are pretty bad-ass. But he’ll get excited over a garbage truck. Shit, he loves garbage trucks. Pick-up trucks, too. ALL TRUCKS EVERYWHERE.

I tried indoctrinating him early into other interests. Like, “Hey, dinosaur!” No, fuck that dinosaur. “Dude, robots!” I got a little bit of traction with the robots but it’s fleeting. “Here’s a cutesy-wootsy pre-school version of Batman!” No, Batman can eat a bag of bat-dicks. Stupid Batman. We’ve had some luck pushing other vehicle-types on him — he’s definitely into trains now and has some love of planes and boats, too. It’s a game of inches.

But at the end of the day, give him a truck and he’s happy.

Which is why we have approximately 4,000 trucks.

All of them sharp.

The bottom of my feet have truck-shaped calluses.

I walk through my kitchen like a lizard dancing across a hot desert.

The intellectual leaps-and-bounds occur daily, now. He’ll spit new words at you — words you never actively taught him. Like, for a while in terms of language development it’s you and him together in a concerted effort to pick up new words. You’re going, “Can you say antidisestablishmentarianism?” And he’s like “dibblesnot” and you’re like, “Fine, good enough, let’s move on.” He gets a cookie and everybody’s happy.

But eventually he just starts… repeating. Or saying words you don’t even remember telling him.

Which is so strange. You get the sense that someone is coming into his room at night and teaching him words. (Maybe that’s why he didn’t sleep for all those months.) It also reveals itself not just in parroting words but in the comprehension of those words. Like at one point he — of his own free will — picked a dandelion and went and gave it to my wife. And she was either genuinely thrilled or put on a really good show about it and then he runs back to me and is like, “Mommy, yellow, happy.” And this was a little while back when he hadn’t been saying three-word sentences — and here he put together a statement that wasn’t just an objective statement but is actually somewhat abstract and subjective. Happiness was not a thing we taught him about. Not even the word “happy.” And there it was. He made Mommy happy by giving her a yellow flower. And he recognized it and could talk about it.

The last two months have been a springboard of brain development.

He can count stuff.

He knows his ABCs — well, not the ABC song itself because it blew my mind one day to realize that the actual order of the alphabet is largely meaningless and what’s meaningful is that he can identify individual letters and know their sounds. Words don’t give a shit that C comes after B comes after A — words just care that you know what each letter does on its own and in relation to the letters next to it in that given word. So, we’ve concentrated less on the rote memorization of ABC and more in a, “I’ve emptied this bag of letters let us identify them together or you will be eaten by this Kodiak bear I’ve invited to our learning session.”

Every parent thinks their kid is a genius, I know, I know.

BUT MINE IS HE’LL RULE YOU ALL SOMEDAY FEAR HIM FEAR THE DIAPER

So, now he’s two.

I don’t know what happened.

I don’t know what happens next.

But that’s really part of the fun, isn’t it?

He’s fun. And sweet. And strange. And occasionally a rampaging monster.

Happy birthday, little person. We love you very much.