Author: terribleminds (page 163 of 454)

As a total fantasy, because none of this is going to happen given our current Congress, let’s play a game of: how would Chuck Wendig do gun control? Like, if I had magical control over all governmental processes, how would I, a humble dipshit, control guns?

Let’s throw up some caveats, though, first.

First, I grew up around guns. My father operated a gun store and also was a gunsmith in his spare time. I reloaded ammo for him. We hunted. I still hunt. I wouldn’t call myself an expert, but I am no amateur. When I say I grew up around guns, I mean it — every room had at least one. The gunshop had a couple hundred. I got a new gun or knife damn near every Christmas. (Note: we never had any military-style “black rifles” around our house. My father didn’t like them, and he passed that feeling down to me.)

Second, let’s all gather around and remember that the Constitution is a living document. Not literally — it won’t fly around the room like a haunted specter, howling the Bill of Rights into your ear. I mean, it is a document meant to change — not easily, no, but it is doable. The Constitution is just a thing we made up. It isn’t a divinely-inspired document. God did not make America. Men did. Old, white guys from a couple centuries back. Jesus did not shit the Constitution into existence. Further, the Second Amendment isn’t an aperture that’s all-the-way open. That word, “well-regulated,” has (arguable) meaning. You can slippery slope it all you like, claiming that any regulations or restrictions on firearms is a restriction on the second amendment, but it’s too late. We already have restricted weapons. You cannot easily go buy an automatic weapon. (Contrary to popular belief, you can actually buy one. It just takes 6-9 months to get approved.) If any restrictions or regulations are in place on any firearm, then the slope is already slippery. It already happened. Barn door’s open. Horse is out. (Also note, Supreme Court declined to reconsider an assault rifle ban in CT.)

Third, banning individual weapons is a fraught path. You can ban certain models, but then there will just be new models. You can ban so-called “assault rifles,” but recognize that definition is more political than technical. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not on the train that anybody “needs” an AR-15. Sure, I know people like them for hunting, but I’m a little old school — you need an AR-15 for hunting, I’d suggest you learn to be a better hunter. (I have opinions about home defense, too, and I still don’t think you need one of those guns.) Just the same, the irony of regulating assault rifles is that they’re a small portion of the problem. You want to regulate them, but nobody says “boo” about handguns, which are the real problem. They’re concealable, semi-auto, and hold enough bullets to kill a bunch of people. A Glock 17 has 17 rounds in its magazine, and you can carry a bunch of magazines on you — okay, sure, it doesn’t afford the accuracy or stability that a semi-automatic rifle would, nor as many accessories, but you do earn the ability to easily conceal. Roughly 75% of gun homicides are committed with handguns.

Fourth, the folks who think “banning all guns” is the answer are, I fear, living in a unicorn world. Nearly 200 million firearms are out there. Somewhere between 40-50% of all households in America own a gun. We are a culture of gun owners. It’s in our pop culture, too. We all have a little Wild West blood in our veins. We’re all cowboys and scoundrels, all soldiers and cops. I know! It worked in Australia. It worked in the UK. And yet, those are relatively small countries comparatively. Plus, the United States is practically 50 little countries stapled together.

Fifth, I’m not sure insurance is the way to go — I’ve seen that a lot and I’ve posited it myself. I’m ignorant of how insurance works, but I have to imagine that insurance on weaponry is also a fraught path. Would an insurance company even have interest in that risk? Would the risk and the cost be so high that it would be a sneaky sideways ban on firearms? Maybe.

Sixth and finally, let’s get shut of the talk surrounding the terrorist watchlist. It’s a problematic list that contains a few thousand American names for reasons unknown.

Oh, and hey, one more: let’s also get shut of the paranoid delusion that we need our guns to revolt against our government. I appreciate that you think this is a good idea, but it is a child’s fantasy. Sure, maybe there will be some kind of apocalypse — some climate change ruination, some pandemic, some whatever — but I’d rather not legislate based on doomsday scenarios. We already have people dying in this country right now due to firearms. How about we worry about the problem in front of us rather than the imaginary zombies we fear will come clawing at our door? (Oh, and for the people who want to battle their own government, I’d argue that you should train less with guns and train more with computers. The government can outmatch you on the guns, son, but you could probably hack the shit out of their systems.)

SO, OKAY, with all that said, what do I, humble dipshit, do?

1.) Close up the secondary market loopholes. Right now, anybody can sell a gun to anybody and it isn’t tracked, nobody knows, it’s just a fluid de facto black market. You can go to a gun show and walk out with a gun because that person doesn’t need a license to sell and you don’t need a license to buy. And have you been to a gun show? Oh, you should go. You will see so much KKK and Nazi propaganda, it’s like a history lesson in horrible human beings. (I also grew up around gun shows, and once upon a time, they were not this way. But I’ve been to a couple since Obama has been elected and ha ha oh shit.) If I sell a car, I have to have the title (though there are ways to wriggle around that). A car is a less lethal, more functional device than a gun, and so suggesting that gun sales be tracked and titled — not really that extreme.

2.) Track all gun sales. All of them. Track all the guns. ALL OF THEM. Oh, I know, I know, you precious dears don’t want to be on “a list.” But you’re already on a bunch of them. You’re not ronin ninja sneaking in the dark-net off the grid, buddy. Got a social security number? A driver’s license? Any bank or credit card statements? You pay your taxes? You’re already on a buncha lists. And maybe, just maybe, you can stop clenching your sphincter about the gun list. The government is not going to use it to come and take away your guns. If you get all blustery about being on that list — a legal, above-board, non-criminal list — then I actually start to worry you’re going to kill somebody with that gun. You know who doesn’t worry about their name being on lists? Normal, run-of-the-mill, non-killery gun owners.

3.) Keep rifles and shotguns easy to procure, as in Canada. Also as in Canada, make it harder to get handguns and higher-capacity semi-auto rifles. They basically have, what, three categories in Canada? Non-restricted, restricted, and prohibited. For purposes of AMERICAN FREEDOM !!11! let’s get rid of “prohibited” here and simply create classes of restrictedness — you could, say, bump handguns and semi-auto rifles up to Title II, make them much harder to procure. I know, someone out there has a real itchy butthole that they might need to wait six months to buy a pistol or an AR-15, but some hunting licenses take a while to get, and if OMG I NEED A PISTOL TODAY TODAY TODAY it’s probably a good bet you’re raring to shoot someone. If you can say, “Yeah, I can wait six months to get that high-powered lead-spitting shooty-shooty death device,” I think I trust you a whole lot more than the guy who needs it holy shit right now.

4.) Wanna own a firearm? You need a firearm license. It’s like a driver’s license. It’s like a hunting license. It’s like a fishing license — oh, and let that sink in. You need a license to wiggle a worm in the water to catch a trout, but you don’t need a license to buy a machine that can push a projectile through someone’s face at 1100 feet-per-second. Yes, some of that has to do with conservation, but I’d go out on a limb and say we need to consider the conservation of human lives, too.

5.) A firearms license would be like a driver’s license — getting your license the first time would be subject to both training and testing. If it is reasonable to ask that people be trained when operating a vehicle, it is reasonable to ask that people be trained when operating a firearm. This is a win-win for everyone, by the way. The NRA is the one who does most of the training in this country, and would benefit. It would create new jobs. It would ensure that people with guns were trained with them — and would likely offer some training regarding defense with a gun, too. (The fact the NRA does not support training enforcement is to me the clearest indication they support gun manufacturers more than its members. Training helps everybody but the manufacturers.)

6.) Owning firearms of different restricted classes would not only require longer wait times but also more training and, I dunno, a stamp on your license.

7.) Universal background checks — but that could be tied into the licensing, too.

8.) Israel restricts the number of weapons you can have — it’s pretty strict, if I recall. One of each type, essentially, and only if you can show you belong in certain roles. That won’t fly here to that degree, and I can speak to the fact that hunters do in fact use more than one type of gun. Around here, you can’t use rifles to kill much of anything, so that means a 12 gauge for deer, a 20 gauge for birds, a .410 for squirrels. But, some limits could be reasonable on the number of firearms you can own in each class and at each restriction level — you have some ‘splainin’ to do if you need like, 20 handguns. Restricting the number potentially undercuts and identifies people who are hoarding arsenals.

9.) Tax ammunition — casings, bullets, powder, too. I know, you don’t wanna pay more for ammo, but newsflash: any time gun control measures come up for even the whisperiest whisper of debate, prices go up because of price gouging. You’re already paying more thanks to people selling them to you. I was at a gun show just after Obama got elected, and many of the sellers had warnings up at their stalls about how Obama was coming to take their guns (spoiler alert: he wasn’t), and the prices at those tables were jacked up to exorbitant levels.

10.) Restrict certain accessories. We already restrict some, so it’s not strange to want to make sure people can’t buy a drum mag for a rifle — if you need 100 bullets immediately accessible? No.

11.) Make sure all this works nationwide, not just state-to-state. Certainly states could increase the severity of the restrictions if the constituents so demand, but gun control really only works well when it crosses state borders. Also, help the CDC study gun violence. (The restriction against it is no longer in place, but the money for those studies is also not in place. We need to study gun violence and it is perfectly reasonable to do so. Science and data can save us if we let it.)

And that’s it. It’s a start. It’s common sense. It’s nothing particularly revolutionary — for the most part, it assumes if you’re a responsible, law-abiding gun owner, nothing really changes for you except for the interjection of bureaucracy. (And I know bureaucracy is a bad word, but effective bureaucracy is valuable, and far greater than chaos and gun death.) Yes, it makes it harder to get a gun. It should be be harder to get a gun. There’s nothing wrong with it being difficult to procure a weapon that can kill several people in the span of minutes — and let’s remember, firearms have one primary purpose, and that purpose is death and injury. Target shooting is just a proxy for shooting at living targets. Hunting and defense are both part of that equation, and hunting and defense are based on death and injury. (I don’t magically shoot meat out of a turkey and he gobbles merrily and runs on while I collect my bullet-harvested roast. This isn’t Minecraft.) So, if we are to assume that the role of a firearm is to throw metal really fast through flesh in order to injure, incapacitate or kill, then it is probably also safe to assume that there should be a few speedbumps and cross-checks for people wanting that ability.

For those folks who think this is either:

a) not enough

or

b) too much

I have this to say:

Political process is founded on compromise. What I’ve outlined is exactly that. It is middle-ground, common sense regulation — nothing particularly dramatic. Just meant to tighten things up — once upon a time, even someone like Reagan was on board with common sense controls. The NRA was, too. That’s all changed with the increased rhetoric in this country, and we need to cut that off at the knees — but you also have to recognize we can’t just snap our fingers and make the problem go away. Guns aren’t going to go to vapor. Gun culture isn’t going to just disintegrate, either. Any changes we make will have to be sensible and moderate.

But don’t worry, it doesn’t matter anyway. Nothing’s going to change and nobody’s going to do anything and the only needle that’s moving is the one marking the number of people killed.

I’ll also finish up with this:

Vote in November. You want to see change, that’s the only way to get it.

And don’t just vote this November.

Vote every November. Vote actively, eagerly, and every time you have the chance. Owning a gun is a freedom we’re so keen to protect, fine. We also must recognize that voting is a vital freedom, too, and we should be not only keen to protect that right — but also desperate to engage with the political process, because that’s the only way your voice is measured and heard. Not just through tweets, not through petitions, not through changed avatars. But voting.

Comments are on, but moderated.

Don’t get fighty. Don’t be a jerk. I will boot you into the spam oubliette because this is my house and I don’t mind hearing you squawk down there in the dark.

That image is a blueberry.

Actually, it’s one blueberry among many — I was washing them one day to make muffins, and the waterdrops rested on them just so. I nabbed my camera, and there we are. An otherworldly shot — as if looking upon a bubbled dome sitting upon an alien hillock somewhere. Nobody says “hillock” anymore but fuck it, it’s an alien planet. We can go with “hillock” if we want.

Let’s see, what else is going on?

I forgot a flash fiction challenge Friday (well, I was traveling Friday and accessing my blog remotely is not always ideal in terms of inputting new content). Sorry! Eek.

I’ll be in Doylestown, PA this Tuesday at Doylestown Books to chat with Paul Tremblay, whose astonishing (and disturbing!) Disappearance at Devil’s Rock comes out.

This week is the launch of the Star Wars: The Force Awakens comics adaptation, by Luke Ross (art) and myself. So go look for that. Or BB-8 will electrocute you.

Tor-dot-com did a post about where to start with my novels, if you’re so inclined. (The comments, perhaps predictably, spend time yelling about Aftermath? I shouldn’t be surprised any more, I guess.)

The Orlando Book Festival was a blast — a great festival with wonderful fans and run by killer staff at a beautiful library. It’s also nice to see that it’s a city that stands tall in the face of tragedy and supports its LGBT citizens. (I’m sure there are gnarlier politics at work, but at least from a cursory visit, the streets and businesses were alive with support and love.)

THAT IS ALL.

Now go forth and slay Monday. Bring me its head. So I can take macro photos of it.

To win an impossible war Captain Kel Cheris must awaken an ancient weapon and a despised traitor general.

Captain Kel Cheris of the hexarchate is disgraced for using unconventional methods in a battle against heretics.  Kel Command gives her the opportunity to redeem herself by retaking the Fortress of Scattered Needles, a star fortress that has recently been captured by heretics.  Cheris’s career isn’t the only thing at stake.  If the fortress falls, the hexarchate itself might be next.

Cheris’s best hope is to ally with the undead tactician Shuos Jedao. The good news is that Jedao has never lost a battle, and he may be the only one who can figure out how to successfully besiege the fortress.

The bad news is that Jedao went mad in his first life and massacred two armies, one of them his own.  As the siege wears on, Cheris must decide how far she can trust Jedao–because she might be his next victim.

* * *

Be able to summarize the idea in one sentence.

Once upon a time, during my *previous* attempt to write a novel, someone at a convention asked me what it was about. I hemmed and hawed and tried to figure out how to explain the three braided plot strands and the battles and the steam cannon and the *things* and eventually emerged with a sad, unhelpful, “It’s complicated.”

What I have learned since then is that “It’s complicated” is a symptom that something is whackadoodle with the structure. _Ninefox Gambit_ takes place in a complicated *world*, but I always had a crystal-clear idea of what the story was about: the battle of wits between a disgraced captain and her undead advisor, a brilliant tactician and mass murderer who might be out to kill her next. That character dynamic is the backbone of the entire novel.

Writing is about math.

No, really! I’m not just saying that because I majored in math. One of the most valuable lessons I learned from integral calculus is that even infinitesimals may yet sum up to something big. The non-calculus writing-relevant version of this is that if you write every day, even a little bit, that all adds up. And the flip side is that if you write zero words, your wordcount doesn’t advance.

Now, sometimes you have to take days off because your kid is sick, or you’re working out that worldbuilding bit in the middle of chapter 7. That’s fine too! But if there is a *habit* of zero-word days, that novel isn’t going to write itself. (Trust me, if I knew a magic way of making novels write themselves, I wouldn’t just be doing it, I would be working as a consultant to writers and getting rich doing *that*.)

Don’t be afraid to revise.

This novel went through six drafts. A whole lot of things in the rough draft didn’t make it to the final one, including the ill-advised scene with the slaughter of geese. (Fear not, goose-lovers; geese are still mentioned. SPACE GOOSE!)

Once in a while I run into someone who’s familiar with my short fiction and who thinks things come out perfectly on the first try. One, that’s very flattering (God knows, the short fiction isn’t perfect either), and two, that’s only because they haven’t seen my rough drafts. Most of my rough drafts are laugh-out-loud terrible.

I’ve heard that some writers prefer drafting and some prefer revisions. I belong firmly to the revisions side. Generating words is painful! But I find it easier to revise words that exist than to bring into being words that didn’t use to exist. No matter how awful a rough draft is, I can always make it better, especially with the help of betas.

Pay attention to the beta readers, but don’t lose sight of the magic.

This novel benefited tremendously from a number of beta readers. One of them in particular, Daedala, helped me grapple with structure. I’m mostly used to short stories so figuring out how to scale up and handle the emotional beats and so on was an interesting challenge.

On the other hand, sometimes the beta readers have suggestions that might make the book a better book, but a *different* better book than the one you wanted to write. In this case, one beta reader suggested deleting Jedao’s massacre from his backstory. The novel that would have resulted would possibly have been a good book. But it also would have killed the point of writing it in the first place. I had a whole scheme that the massacre fit into, and I was willing to fix things around it, but not to remove one of the keystones of the plot that made it exciting to write in the first place.

Ergonomics, ergonomics, ergonomics.

I wrote large portions of _Ninefox Gambit_ with a fountain pen (either a Webster Four-Star or a Waterman 52V–if you pay attention you may see my acknowledgment to the Waterman in the story!). This was one of the better decisions I made, although it was a complete coincidence. As it turns out, writing properly with a fountain pen is easy on the wrists, and even writing not-quite-properly is helpful. And bonus, because I used about ten zillion different colors of ink, the rough draft looks like My Little Pony vomit!

Eventually, though, I had to type the whole shebang into Scrivener. I do use an ergonomic keyboard (a Kinesis Advantage, which I love but has a learning curve), but in the white-hot heat of *please let this novel be done* in the last two days, I think I typed something like 8,000 words/day both days.

I ended up in the doctor’s office a week later with pain in my wrists because I had given myself arthritis from typing too much, too fast. Don’t let this be you! And it could have been so much worse. These days, I try to do typing with the Kinesis, but I’m using a standing desk and I also make a point of quitting or taking breaks if my wrists start to twinge, or just taking breaks frequently, period. Write, yes, but write healthily!

* * *

 A Korean-American sf/f writer who majored in math, Yoon finds it a source of continual delight that math can be mined for story ideas. Yoon’s fiction has appeared in publications such as F&SF, Tor.com, and Clarkesworld Magazine, as well as several year’s best anthologies.

Yoon Ha Lee: Website | Twitter

Ninefox Gambit: Amazon | Rebellion Store

Cassandra Khaw went for a bit of a tear on Twitter about voice in one’s writing — and how every writer has a different feel to a voice, but also how a lot of advice tries to sand that down so we all write the same. She’s right to be vexed by that, and so when she wrote a guest post on that very vexation, well, c’mon. It’s too good not to post. (And as you’ll see below, she’s also too good a writer to ignore…)

* * *

Voice.

I got angry about a picture a few weeks ago. This one, to be specific.

Now, there’s nothing ostensibly wrong about that advice, and it does drive its point home by being an ugly sentence, full of unnecessary words, and utterly devoid of music. Taken objectively, it’s good advice, especially for new writers who are fresh to the fray.

So, why was I so vexed?

Because of how the writer’s group responded to it. There’s a tangible aura of scorn, I suppose, for anyone who dips into the purple territory, for anything that doesn’t involve the most efficient language. Hell, I remember one guy declaring that ornate writing prevents you from being published. For anyone already in the industry, it’d simply be an opinion, to be discarded or internalized as necessary. But in a community with young writers, new writers? Writers who haven’t yet developed the confidence to put themselves out there? Writers who have not discovered if their prose is closer to poetry, or if a love for mathematical equations might permeate their words?

That’s dangerous.

Voice.

Voice is interesting. Voice isn’t just your go-to vocabulary, your understanding of grammatical structure, your knowledge of rhythm. Voice is more ambiguous, more ethereal. I’ve never quite figured out how to categorize it. But it is that thing that makes you you, even when someone else has channeled your style. It is an echo of your soul, your thoughts, a piece of you that strings itself through your words, immortalized in the cadence of your paragraphs, the poetry of your observations.

It is a precious thing that can take years to cultivate, years to develop. It’s something that never really quits growing either. It is unique to you, and only you, and it is the thing that makes a piece of writing sing. (Because, you know, voice and song and the collaboration between larynx and music — I’ll stop now.)

And here’s the point I’m trying to make: voices can be silenced. It’s no secret that writing can be an incredibly raw act. The decision to put yourself out there for public scrutiny? That’s a terrifying choice to make. Now, imagine being that afraid and being told, “Hey, by the way? People aren’t going to like you.”

Now. This shouldn’t be conflated with good critique. (There’s an entire post to be written about bad critique, especially when it’s fueled by negative emotion.) Critique can be fantastic. But it’s a different thing entirely when someone else is trying to police your technique. Sure, everyone needs a foundation. Give that new writer a book to read, a piece of advice to follow, a set of guidelines to look over? But tell them also: This is what people say, but this isn’t what you have to do.

After that? Get out of the way.

Because you don’t need to be there when the author is developing their voice, not unless you’re specifically asked to be. You don’t need to influence them. They can decide who influences them. They can choose to call up a little bit of Lewis Carroll, pair it with a glimmer of Anne Leckie. They can decide if they want to be inspired by Brooklyn hip-hop, or if they want to lace it with the patois of their own history.

And if they’re allowed to do this, if they’re given time to grow, the results can be so beautiful. Look at this excerpt from Peter Watts’ The Things.

It was malformed and incomplete, but its essentials were clear enough. It looked like a great wrinkled tumor, like cellular competition gone wild—as though the very processes that defined life had somehow turned against it instead. It was obscenely vascularised; it must have consumed oxygen and nutrients far out of proportion to its mass. I could not see how anything like that could even exist, how it could have reached that size without being outcompeted by more efficient morphologies.

Nor could I imagine what it did. But then I began to look with new eyes at these offshoots, these biped shapes my own cells had so scrupulously and unthinkingly copied when they reshaped me for this world. Unused to inventory—why catalog body parts that only turn into other things at the slightest provocation?—I really saw, for the first time, that swollen structure atop each body. So much larger than it should be: a bony hemisphere into which a million ganglionic interfaces could fit with room to spare. Every offshoot had one. Each piece of biomass carried one of these huge twisted clots of tissue.

Don’t read it in a gulp. Breathe it in. It is dense. Watts’ retelling of The Thing pulls from his scientific background, uses terminology that others would shy from. Vascularised. Morphologies. Ganglionic. Not necessarily difficult words, but words that layer into the density of his writing, which requires patience and a willing to scavenge for meaning in the jargon. But so rewarding for it. This is clearly what it is, what it should be: a scientist’s voice.

And now, an excerpt from Catherynne Valente’s The Lily and the Horn.

My daughter and I fetch knives and buckets and descend the stairs into the underworld beneath our home. Laburnum Castle is a mushroom lying only half above ground. Her lacy, lovely parts reach up toward the sun, but the better part of her dark body stretches out through the seastone caverns below, vast rooms and chambers and vaults with ceilings more lovely than any painted chapel in Mother-of-Millions, shot through with frescoes and motifs of copper and quartz and sapphire and opal. Down here, the real work of war clangs and thuds and corkscrews toward tonight. Smells as rich as brocade hang in the kitchens like banners, knives flash out of the mist and the shadows.

I have chosen the menu of our war as carefully as the stones in my hair. All my art has bent upon it. I chose the wines for their color—nearly black, thick and bitter and sharp. I baked the bread to be as sweet as the pudding. The vital thing, as any wife can tell you, is spice. Each dish must taste vibrant, strong, vicious with flavor. Under my eaves they will dine on curried doves, black pepper and peacock marrow soup, blancmange drunk with clove and fiery sumac, sealmeat and fennel pies swimming in garlic and apricots, roast suckling lion in a sauce of brandy, ginger, and pink chilis, and pomegranate cakes soaked in claret.

Less complex language, but no less intricate. Common wisdom suggests that you should show and not tell, that a feast can and should be quickly encapsulated in a few lines, instead of explained to a fine detail. But this story is so much richer because Valente ignores that rule, and instead allows us to taste, feel, and experience every nuance of the world.

Of course, you don’t need to be bombastic to have beautiful writing. Seth Dickinson’s writing is sharp, economical. It is poetic, certainly, but one that has been mapped out to a letter, ruthlessly clean. From his recent Laws of Night and Silk:

Warlord Absu wears black beneath a mantle of red, the colors of flesh and war. For a decade she has led the defense of the highlands. For a decade before that—well: Kavian was not born with sisters, but she has one. This loyalty is burnt into her. Absu is the pole where Kavian’s needle points.

“Lord of hosts,” Kavian murmurs. She’s nervous tonight, so she bows deep. The warlord considers her in brief, silent reserve.

“Tonight we will bind you to a terrible duty. The two mature abnarchs are our only hope.” Her eyes! Kavian remembers their ferocity, but never remembers it. She is so intent: “You’re our finest. But one error could destroy us.”

And Malon Edwards’ writing? The Half Dark Promise is an absolute triumph, one that does not rewrite its core to fit everyone. It uses words and sentence structures that are uniquely its own. It doesn’t pause to explain every word, like what we’re often told to do, to provide English translations for foreign words. And that decision makes this story all the more powerful.

I was surprised on the first day of school when Bobby took my hand on our walk home. He was nervous. He flushed rose-red down to his neck. But he didn’t let go. He’d signed the half dark promise just like every other timoun in Chicago. Even lekòl segondè elèv yo with their teenage swagger and their foul mouths held hands on the walk home. Bobby’s hand was sweaty. Large. Callused. The hands of a smith’s son. But I didn’t mind. Vrèman vre—truth be told—I was just pleased Bobby wasn’t calling me names while speaking to me. That didn’t happen at my old school. Actually, that didn’t happen at my new school, either.

I could give you a thousand examples, point you to a hundred more writers, each completely different from the next. My own work is influenced by my native tongues, my national background. Hokkien is tonal and I look to find a kind of music in words. I think also in smells, tastes, regardless of whether they’re foul or delicious. Here’s an excerpt from my upcoming novella Hammers on Bone.

“Yeah?” I champ at my cigarette, bouncing it from one corner of my mouth to the other. There’s a pervasive smell in the hallway. Not quite a stench, but something unpleasant. Like the remnants of a molly party, or old sex left to crust on skin. “What about his old man? He working the kid? That why your son isn’t showing up at school?”

The broad twitches, shoulders scissoring back, spine contracting. It’s a tiny motion, one of those blink-and-you-lose-it tells but oh, do I catch it. “My fiance doesn’t involve our sons in hard labor.”

“Uh huh.” I rap ash from my cigarette and grin like the devil come to dine on Georgia. “Mind if I look around?”

‘Old sex left to crust on skin.’ I’ve had beta readers tell me that the description turned their stomachs, concise as it is.

And honestly, when you get right down to it, There is no one shape for writing to take, no singular form that is better than any other. Voice is unique, and voices need room to exist.

Let them grow.

You don’t want to miss seeing what they could be.

* * *

Cassandra Khaw is a London-based writer who still has her roots buried deep in Southeast Asia where there are sometimes more ghosts than people. Her work tends to revolve around intersectional cultures, mythological mash-ups, and bizarre urban architecture. When not embroiled in fiction, she writes about technology and video games for a variety of places including RockPaperShotgun and Ars Technica UK.

Offerings of fluffy things are always welcomed.

Cassandra Khaw: Website | Twitter

It begins with men. Young men, usually.

(This is a recipe that simmers a long time on the stove.)

You teach them that the world was made for them. That they own it and can do what they want and take what they desire. You also teach them that they are not allowed to express themselves. Doing that is to be like a woman, and men are told that they are very explicitly not women. Men own everything, remember. It is their right to own and to want and to take. Women are lesser, for they do not own the world. So to be like a woman — to cry and to manifest other feelings — is to be lesser. It’s not that they don’t have feelings. It is that they are taught to keep them inside. In boxes and bottles. In lead-lined trunks locked tight lest they ever escape.

We call them names if they fail this test. Thee names are slurs, and these names serve two purposes: one, it limits the victim and course-corrects them away from them being able to express themselves; two, it conveniently also reduces an entire other segment of the population and treats them as lesser. These names summarize women as their body parts, and associate men with them. These names tell us too that LGBT is lesser, weaker — gay men are really just women. Do not be like these things, we say. Or we (the other men) will call you out. We will bully you. We will hurt you. To make you better, because men are good at pain, we explain.

Giving pain. Receiving pain. Never ever revealing pain.

These slurs continue across the board, actually. If you’re lazy, you’re this group. If you’re dumb, you’re that group. If you’re a criminal, you’re like another group. And it all has the very special effect of reminding the young man that he is the most special of them all, and the only way he limits his specialness is by being not-a-man, and quite likely, not white. We have built a fence for him cobbled together of insults aimed at other people. Stay in the fence and be a man. Do not stray and we will not punish you.

Inside the fence is a too-small pasture. So little space to roam. Like with animals, the less space you have, the more agitated you become. Chickens pecking each other apart. Dogs wearing the skin off their neck from a choking chain and collar. But the fence is the man’s identity and with it, we limit his freedoms to be anything other than a pure young man, even though to limit an animal’s freedom is to drive it slowly mad. (But don’t worry, we won’t give you the mental health care you need when you have been driven to the brink. Men don’t need care, remember. Men are good at pain. Bottle it up. Don’t let it out, don’t you dare let it out.)

But the fence is the fence.

We force them to understand that they are MEN. They are MASCULINE. They are aggressive, dominant, alpha. They must be or they are weak. Big dick. Big muscles. Hot girlfriend. Prove your manhood. Wear it as an emblem. Just in case, we can make sure it’s driven home in the toy aisle, too. Make sure they play with guns and weapons of war (while at the same time limiting a young girl’s social ability to do so). Do not let them be nurturers. No dolls for the men. Men are soldiers, generals, builders, leaders. Trucks and cars. Guns and swords. But they also learn by limitation — the girls have their own aisles. They have not only dolls, but stuffed animals. They have little toy shopping carts and hair salons. They cook. They clean. They are soft like the stuffed animals. Not hard like guns. No Black Widow toys for the girls or for the boys. Even if the world gives us Ghostbusters who are women, let’s make sure that the packaging shows boys — lest they be made to believe they aren’t special, they aren’t the best, they aren’t chosen.

You’re trapped, but you’re special. Boys will be boys. It isn’t rape because she wanted it. We excuse the worst because it fits the story. We discourage anything that doesn’t fit the story.

Fences, fences, so many fences. Do not stray, we say. Do not stray.

We have reminded them not-so-subtly that everyone is different in the wrong way, and to be different is to be weak. We have reminded them that they own the world, but now they’re entering a world where the fact of that seems in dispute. Young men are not even the dominant majority, and yet, they are told they are, anyway. The world seems out to prove them wrong: women do not just fling themselves at men, after all. And for white men, it’s even more troubling, because they were sold a 1950s bill-of-sale — they were sold a group of Founding Fathers who look like them, who made this country with manhood and muskets and destiny.

And now the world isn’t that. It looks different. It feels different. And we have told them all along that they are the best, the most special, the most beautiful snowflake — no, wait, I didn’t say beautiful, I meant virile, I meant tough, I meant manly. The most manliest big-dickenist snowflake ever. Not even a snowflake, because snowflakes are fragile. They melt. They weep. No — men are special like throwing stars, like grenades going off, like the puckered hole carved into the top of a hollowpoint bullet.

To help them deal, to explain this new world, we give them enemies.

You cannot get a job because of that group.

You cannot just take what you want because of this other group.

You don’t make enough money or have the nice house because of them.

These groups want to limit how special we know you are. The group changes. It needn’t be just one. As time goes on, we switch enemies on them. Just to keep it interesting. Just to remind them that the whole world is against them because the world has forgotten how special they are.

And so when we tell these young men — young white men, usually — about feminism, or about how black lives matter, or how there are men who want to love other men and (gasp) get married to them, they short circuit. They hemorrhage. That doesn’t fit the narrative. Young white men are the best. Feminism recenters that conversation. BLM recenters that conversation. LGBT rights recenter that conversation. It paints for them a world where all is not a mountain and they are not at the top of it — it paints a flat plane where everyone is equal and all have a chance to breathe the same oxygen. It is a crack in the veneer and the young man must ask how true the narrative has been. Feminism says little to nothing about men. BLM says nothing about whiteness. LGBT says nothing about straightness. And yet, how can that be? The young, white, straight man is so special, though. Why do these groups so bitterly ignore that?

It’s fine, though. We will keep reminding him that the narrative is true even if the rest of the world doesn’t see it or resemble it. And we will have politicians and media who drive that home again and again. Congress is mostly men, and mostly white. The media is mostly men, and mostly white. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of mostly men, and those are mostly white. And we say to them, see? Look, these are your idols. This is the pattern. Here is the narrative. If you don’t fit it, it’s not your fault. Someone is keeping you away. It’s those people who want to blow you up. It’s those people who want to take your jobs. It’s those people who want to take away your manhood and make you like a woman. These are your enemies.

They are standing in your way.

They are not of your tribe. Your special, precious tribe.

If we need to, we can always add a dose of old-timey religion. And that adjective, old-timey, is key. Religion is not a poison, but the old ways of it cleave to a world where men are its center, where God Himself is a man and women are cattle. The laws and commandments of each religion are for your tribe only. Not for ‘them’ over there. The old-timey religion reinforces the narrative. And it repaints the enemy not just as one that is biological or cultural, but one that is spiritual. And so your crusade against the enemy is sanctified. It is holy. The Man God told you that it is, and it is kill or be killed. The things that make men as men are not sins. The fence is now built of religion. Outside the fence are the women and the queers and the heathens. They are sinners. You are pure. All you do is pure. The Man God has pre-empted you with forgiveness, he has built you of Himself and those who are not like you are not like Him. Do what thou wilt.

Politicians seize on this, too. They enact legislation that never says, but always reminds, that the men — the white men, the straight men — are so very special. We bake the identification of our enemies into our laws, and we braid in that old-timey religion to make sure that it’s all sweetened by the sanctity of a divinely-driven message. We say, these bathrooms are for you and not for anybody else. We say, this marriage is for you and not for anybody else. This job. These benefits. This life. It’s all for you, Damien, all for you. God says it. Our laws say it. And that document made of God and Man, the Constitution, says it, too. (Never mind the fact that the Constitution is just a piece of paper written by men of dubious religiousness who meant for our laws to be ever-amendable and totally elastic — that narrative must change, for you are a young man living in a country blessed by the Man God, and so that means the Constitution is as iron-clad as the Bible itself, as long as you don’t mind sanding down the rough and disagreeable parts for your own convenience.)

So, now we’ve got men of all ages. White men and straight men, too, in that pack. And we teach them that they must be manly men, and that the world is against them, and that their failures are the fault of enemies at the gates, enemies who want to besiege them and de-center them. The ingredients are in the pot, now. Been simmering and slow-cooking for days, years, centuries.

But to really make this soup pop, you gotta get it hot.

So we add some gunpowder to it.

Real gunpowder. And with it, real guns.

We say, look at those enemies. They’re trying to take away what’s rightly yours. And that anger the man feels, we conveniently don’t acknowledge that the anger is something we put in there — because we built for them a very tall fence around a very small pasture and now the men are traumatized and clawing at themselves because they can’t cry or they can’t nurture or they can’t love who maybe they really want to love. They’re like pressure-cooker bombs — their metal exterior denting and bulging like a botulism can at all the toxic shit trying to get out but goddamnit we just can’t let it out gotta keep it in gotta 

Here, have a gun.

No, no, it’s okay.

It’s easy to get one.

It’s not just easy, it’s part of who we are, we say. It’s baked into the Constitution. Never mind that the Constitution was written by men who had muskets which took about, oh, three years to load and fire. Never mind that the guns we have today are concealable and have bits of lead that travel hundreds or even thousands of feet per second and that they can discharge these little angry metal wasps at an alarming rate of however fast your finger can twitch. We say, it’s right there. In this holy, God-sacred document that governs our nation. And just so nobody gets any fancy ideas we remind them that this document is unswerving, unchanging, etched not just in stone but in our God Damn DNA — and we lionize the Founding Fathers and their AR-15s even though they made a document meant to change, a document written for a time over two centuries ago when it is safe to say that things were just a little bit different.

We make sure that the men can have as many guns as they want, as easily as they want them. It’s harder to get a driver’s license. You don’t need training. You don’t need insurance. You only need a cursory background check, and that’s only if you buy it certain ways. Any little change to that is the slipperiest of slopes, a slope slick with your future blood, young man. They try to modify anything about your right, and you might as well just put on a dress and start kissing some other religion’s god. Doesn’t matter how sensible it is. You’re special, remember. Sense has nothing to do with it. This is manifest destiny. This is manhood’s destiny.

You’re special.

Those people aren’t like you.

They’re your enemy.

You get to have what you want.

You get to do what you want, take what you want.

(Nobody will do anything to stop you anyway.)

Just don’t cry. Don’t feel. Bottle it all up.

God says it’s okay.

The law says it’s okay.

Long as you’re a man, a manly man, not a pussy, not a queer.

Here, now. Have your gun. Go on, take it.

Don’t use it, of course.

Wink, wink.

Don’t use it.

Don’t stray.

Those are your enemies.

Here is your gun.

At Tor.com, you can snag a copy of Zer0es and an early copy of Invasive.

You can do so by clicking right here and leaving a comment at the Tor site.

If you have not read the starred Kirkus Review of Invasive:

After the events of the last novel, FBI Agent Hollis Copper is understandably spooked by a world that’s becoming increasingly threatened by expanding technology. To help him push back against the things going bump in the night, he’s seconded futurist Hannah Stander to his department to help shine a light on bleeding-edge tech gone awry. She’s suitably intrigued when he calls her with a dilemma: “I’ve got a cabin on the lake with more than a thousand dead bodies in it….Think of it like a riddle.” What she finds in rural New York is a dead man with no skin, surrounded by hundreds of dead ants. Hannah’s investigation leads her to Ez Choi, a punk-rock Asian-American entomologist. Ez discovers that the ants weren’t just unleashed, but engineered, and they bear the same genetic markers employed by biotech billionaire Einar Geirsson, a reclusive Icelandic billionaire operating a secret biotech lab off the coast of Hawaii. If the setup sounds very Crichton-esque, it is, but Wendig puts his own stamp on this propulsive techno-thriller with his signature action set pieces, a deeply damaged heroine, and a pervasive threat that will give all but the most hardened readers the creepy-crawlies. The book makes some very salient points about the ethics of genetic engineering but doesn’t forego action as the book culminates in a biological catastrophe, not to mention a deadly cat-and-mouse chase on the treacherous Kalalau Trail on the North Shore of Kauai. Hannah Stander is a standout heroine—raised by survivalists and gifted with an unparalleled ability for predictive analysis. Think Thomas Harris’ Will Graham and Clarice Starling rolled into one and pitched on the knife’s edge of a scenario that makes Jurassic Park look like a carnival ride.

Another rip-roaring, deeply paranoid thriller about the reasons to fear the future.

The contest runs until 6/14.

Enjoy, and thanks to Harper and Tor!