Author: terribleminds (page 165 of 454)

It’s the zoo’s fault.

No! Wait. It’s the parents’ fault.

No. It’s the gorilla’s fault — ah, yes, that’s it.

Hold up. It’s probably Captain America’s fault. Or Marvel’s.

Or Hillary’s, or Bernie’s, or yours, or mine.

This thing is the best, that thing is the worst. Ones and zeroes, baby.

Fandom is broken. Politics is a sewer plant on fire. Lady Ghostbusters is the end of cinema. A game is delayed and the only proper response is of course to issue death threats. America is a festering hole. We all shot that gorilla. The kid should’ve died. The zookeeper should be killed. You should be killed. I should be killed. God should flood us all again just to get it over with. The world is shit. Burn it all down. Burn it all up.

Everything is everything or it is nothing. We crave polarity. We loathe nuance.

This is a problem.

I read an article recently by the mightily hilariously wise Sara Benincasa about the election, and she asked a vital question: “Can you hold many truths in your brain at once?” As an adult, it seems to be that you have to. You must be able to hold many truths — not just about different things, but about individual things, as well. Sometimes these truths line up like little ducks, and sometimes they fight like snarly badgers. And yet, we reject that. We despise that level of complexity in our daily discourse — everything must be a toothy, wild-eyed dichotomy no matter how false it may be. Nuance is lost because nuance doesn’t bait you to click. The middle ground is widely populated with essential details, and yet it is at the fringes where we most find our reward: go to the middle and you get arrows from both sides. Stay behind the walls of your team’s fortification, though — ahh, now you will be celebrated, held aloft for your opinion, and all of you will drink and dance in frenzied froth-mouthed glory as you ready your next batch of arrows for THOSE OTHER MOTHERFUCKERS OVER THERE.

The gorilla is dead, and the kid is alive, and the worst news of it all is that it may not be anybody’s fault. Actually, perhaps the truly worstest news is that even if it is somebody’s fault, We The Unhuddled Internet Masses probably can’t actually fucking tell from over here in the digital bleachers. I’m sad the gorilla is dead. I’m happy the child is alive. I know some parents are not good with their kids, and I know some parents are great with their kids — and sometimes the parents who are great with their kids still miss the half-second window that their own child takes a header off the couch into the corner of a coffee table and needs like, 16 stitches. That’s not bad parenting. It’s just an accident. It’s just life. Life is full of things wonderful and horrible and a lot of stuff in between and it’s not always about WHO WE HAVE TO BLAME, WHO WE MUST HATE in order to make sense of it all. But blame makes it easier. Blame makes us feel just.

Captain America is a Hydra agent. Which means he’s a Nazi. Or it means he isn’t a Nazi. And he’ll be this way forever. Or for one issue. I have no idea. I know that I can hold multiple truths in mind. I know that I don’t believe the decision makes Marvel anti-semitic, nor are the creators and editors deserving of threats. I know that criticism against Hydra Cap doesn’t mean the critics deserve threats, either, and I know that the only way we seem to want to parse criticism is by dialing it up to 11 and then taking a hammer to the knob. Some troll either runs with the criticism and elevates it to death threats, or someone else says that criticism somehow punishes us all, even though criticism — agreeable or disagreeable as you find it — is an essential part of the pop-cultural conversation. And I know death threats are not an essential part of any cultural conversation ever, not against the audience, not against the storytellers.

I know that criticism doesn’t make you a hater. Or that telling a complicated story doesn’t make you a monster. Hate makes you a hater. And some stories are just stories and not sacred cows. I know that thinking the new Ghostbusters trailers didn’t look funny doesn’t make you a sexist, just as I know that hating the new Ghostbusters movie because it contains women makes you a total sexist even if you don’t tell us out loud that’s why you hate it. I know your childhood isn’t destroyed and if it is, that isn’t the fault or a movie or a TV show. I know wanting Elsa to have a girlfriend or wanting Poe to tongue-fuck Finn doesn’t make fandom broken. I know that not wanting Poe to tongue-fuck Finn doesn’t automagically make you a homophobe, unless the reason you don’t want it is because you think icky-ew-gross, then yeah, you’re a homophobe, you homophobe. I know fandom isn’t broken but it’s still got problems and problem-people and we need to see that, sometimes, and we need to talk about it even when it makes us uncomfortable. I know that social justice is not a see-saw scale from GOOD to EVIL, but rather, a delicate web, and sometimes you tug on one end and it shakes another part of the web you didn’t anticipate. I know that outrage is only outrage when it’s not the outrage you feel — because it’s easy to call something outrage when you don’t agree with it. People wanting representation in the storyworlds they love is not entitlement. People harassing creators and editors and artists are entitled and they are harassers, no matter how noble or ignoble their desires.

I know that Hillary is not a monster. I know that Bernie is not a savior. I know that if you look at both of them from a hundred feet up, they’re two qualified candidates whose policies are almost universally in line with one another. I know that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac killer. I know that this country might do better with more than two parties just as I know we live in a country engineered to reject the two-party dichotomy. I know that politics is corrupt. I know that Obama wasn’t the MAGICALLY PROGRESSIVE ANGEL we all wanted him to be, and yet despite that, he has done a lot of good for this country. I know that FDR revolutionized the country with the New Deal. I also know he put Japanese people in internment camps. We crave scandal and drama while shoving more complicated realities under the water so we don’t hear them kicking and screaming.

Many truths in your brain at once.

I don’t know where we lost that.

The Internet is probably a part of it. As I said yesterday in a rather long blabber-wank about fandom, I think the Internet is like a wonder drug. It does a great many things excellently, but it also has a lot of hinky side effects. Information moves fast on the Internet, and we’re more inclined to click the thing that either agrees or disagrees with us to the max. We don’t want somebody just to tell us we’re a little bit right — we want somebody to freeze-frame high-five us for just how fucking bad-ass right we are. We love confirmation bias. We greedily click the things that tell us what we already believe. We also seek to fulfill our wishes. This will cure cancer. This is what causes autism, ah, yes. My candidate is the best thing since masturbation, and yours is a pile of walking talking donkey shit and here look I have the polls to prove it, even though polls are notoriously unreliable and they require 1000 older people to answer landline phone calls at 2pm in Kansas. You’re stupid. I’m smart. America is the best. Wait, no, it’s the worst!

Maybe it’s the media, maybe it’s how we create and promote and read the news — news, after all, is just entertainment for the most part, isn’t it? Even in stories where we know there are real, genuine problems plaguing us — climate change or the post-antibiotic age — the stories either remind us how NOTHING IS WRONG GO BACK TO BED AMERICA or how EVERYTHING IS SO BAD WE MIGHT AS WELL JUST LIE DOWN IN THE MUD AND WAIT FOR A HORSE TO STEP ON US AND KILL US. Even there, nuance is lost. We push it away even in situations where we should know the score, where nuance and compromise both internal and external are key to tackling the tremendous problems we have in front of us.

Everything is everything. Or it is nothing. We won’t let one thing show many sides.

Maybe it’s just that we want answers. As our most renowned truant once said, “Life moves pretty fast.” Except we don’t stop and look around — we hard-charge through it, self-assured that as long as we have answers, as long as we are emboldened by unexamined singular truth, we can never be wrong. Rather than face the howling uncertainty of a gradational world, we want everything black and white. We need cancer to be cured because otherwise, that means children and mothers and really anybody at all can just die and nothing can be done. We need the zoo to be responsible, or we need the parents to face justice, because otherwise it renders that gorilla’s life meaningless. We need the thing we like to be a thing that is objectively best, lest we instead admit that so much of what we enjoy is subjective and not beholden really to any rules at all. Nuance is a lawless space, but if you’re willing to shuttle complexity to the curb, you can be assured. We are rewarded for our polarities — though, regrettably, one of those rewards is not progress, because when you’re willing to dig your heels in for everything and anything, and so is the other guy, it’s no surprise when the world burns down around you. (But at least you still have your principles.)

We need our enemies. We need our answers. We crave control. Can’t just be enough to think a thing. To examine it. We have to know the thing. We have to be faithful and ardent.

That’s not to say everything demands nuance. Human rights are vital. Representation is essential. Nobody should be starving, and they are. Everybody should have a right to use the goddamn public restroom of their goddamn gender-given choice, goddamnit. Donald Trump really is a demonic, Hitler-worshipping, self-tanner-drinking orangutan merkin who will almost surely lay waste to American Democracy the moment he presses his malevolent turd-cutter into the Oval Office chair. Not everything demands nuance and Devil’s Advocacy, no, and such diabolical advocacy can often be used to derail and dispute and distract (“Well, actually,” and “But, what if…”) — but the trick is knowing which fights need that ferocity and which ones don’t. If everything is a Crisis Level 1000, if everything is an echo of confirmation and an emblem of unswerving principle, nothing will ever get fixed, nothing will ever get done. Sometimes we need to swerve if only a little. Sometimes we need to be measured and uncertain. We don’t need Wicker Men. We don’t need heads rolling for every single transgression.

We do need nuance, sometimes.

We do need to hold many truths in our head, even as challenging and as uncertain and as muddy as that makes life. Everything can’t be everything or nothing.

Some things have to be many things all at one time.

P.S. Elsa needs a girlfriend and Poe needs a boyfriend, the end.

So, some very exciting news:

INVASIVE got a starred review from Kirkus. It’s my first starred review, actually, and so it’s made all the more exciting. It’s a crackerjack review, but I like the last couple sentences the best:

“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.”

Thanks to Kirkus for the very kind review.

Also, thanks to Harper for making this book like aces. The inside pages look like this:

 

Little ants, crawling out from the binding…

And, since it seems a good day to post a relevant macro (click photo for larger):

Love that shot. Kind of a TAKE YOUR LARVAE TO WORK DAY kinda shot. You can, if you blow the photo up, see the fine golden hairs on the larvae that let it clump together with the other anty-grublings. Found this one when me and B-Dub were out in the woods looking around for bugs (“bug hunt,” he calls it), and we discovered a trail of carpenter ants carrying the brood — and the line went pretty much right up to the dead tree next to the writer shed, which leads me to believe these ants are the fanboys who sometimes make it inside when I’m writing.

You can pre-order INVASIVE now — it comes out in August. Nab from:

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N.

Also, today’s the day ZER0ES comes out in paperback! Hackers versus the NSA, baby. Note that while INVASIVE takes place in the same universe as ZER0Es, you don’t need one book to understand the other.

Grab the Zer0es paperback at:

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N.

And, Star Wars: Aftermath is a Bookbub promotion, so $1.99 for Kindle.

Aaaaand, last week saw the third issue of Hyperion come out from Marvel. I wrote it, art by Nik Virella, colors by Romulo Fajardo, so excited to see this one land. Grab digital here.

LOOK AT THE PRETTY PRETTY PAGE

And finally:

Kameron Hurley’s Geek Feminist Revolution comes out today (nab it here if you please) — as I said on my blurb, I’ll pretty much read anything Kameron writes, because she’s fearless and fighty and she gives the proper amount of fucks. This is a good book, a challenging book, and it dishes a lot of deep thought and sharp wit when it comes down to geek culture’s feminist intersections. Go read it. Thus endeth the lesson.

I appear before you on a rain-slick road. You’re driving. I’m ahead, my mouth open wide, my eyes open wider, my arms waving in panicked alarm. My lips are moving, but you can’t hear what I’m saying. And you look over to your passenger and you say, “We better stop, see what’s wrong,” and you ease up next to me. You roll down the window.

Lightning flashes. Thunder drums the dark.

And I whisper something in your ear —

Then I’m gone. Gone as fast as I appeared. As if I was never there.

And your passenger says: “Who was that? What did he say?”

You turn to your passenger and say: “…It was a warning.”

“What warning? Is the bridge out? Is there an accident up ahead? Oh my god, are we going to die? Tell me! What did he warn you about?”

And you say:

“Small children. He warned us about small children.”

* * *

Our son, the one they call B-Dub, turned five.

He has leveled up, and in a few months will DO BATTLE IN THE KINDERGARTEN ARENA.

This is amazing to me, because oh, what a glorious little person he’s becoming. He loves art and he bounces around like a springheeled monkey and he’s surprisingly compassionate. It’s terrifying to me, too, because time is like air in your lungs — you can’t keep it for long. You hold onto it long as you can, but eventually you let it out, and take in a new breath. Time slips in, slips out, and slips away. One day time, like breath, will stop for us.

But one of the most interesting and unexpected side effects of all the shit about which I had no idea. It’s not that I thought having a kid would follow a pre-designed roadmap. I knew it would be full of unexpected twists and turns, and that in basically generating a new human being you’re going to see some emergent weirdness as part and parcel of the process.

I had no idea what was waiting, though. Not really. Not truly.

And so, I appear before you now: a specter haunted by the realities of life with a tiny human. Some of you are thinking of having children. Some of you are already on your way to having them, or have children who are not just small, but very tiny, and those tiny immobilized larvae will one day soon grow up. You’re not ready. I wasn’t ready.

But I am here to prepare you.

preschool is a plague gauntlet

Here is a thing that will happen:

You will send your child to daycare or to preschool. Children at that age are basically just sticky wads of animated strawberry jam — everything gets stuck to them. Further, they are not creatures possessing adult manners. They don’t think much about, say, coughing on each other, or flicking boogers, or licking walls. It’s as if evolution has decided that children between the ages of three to five must engage in a Darwinian Thunderdome where they will test their immune system’s mettle at every possible turn.

So, they cough on each other, and it sticks. It sticks real good. All those germy bits, all those viruses and bacteria — your children are walking, talking petri dishes. Assume they are coated in a persistent grease of angry paramecia.

Here’s the problem, though: you, as an adult, have not had to test your immune system’s mettle in quite some time. Sure, sure, you go to work, but you go to work with other adults who by and large have beefed up their immune response in the normal way. But preschool? Preschool is a jungle. It is a rare bit of rainforest, dark and untested, and full of squirmy things that want to haunt your body. Bird flu? Fuck the bird flu. It’s the preschool plague you gotta watch, because as an adult, you are now going to run the same pestilential gauntlet your kid runs. At that age, kids rock around 8-12 illnesses (colds, usually) a year. That’s one or two a month. And ha ha ha you’re going to get them all. You can’t protect yourself. Your kid will sneeze into your eyeballs. He will touch your food with snot-slick fingers. And after a while you’re like, fuck it. Just gimme the sickness. Just blow your nose into my face. Get it over with. Welcome to Plaguetown.

Two winters ago, I was pretty healthy.

This past winter, I had pneumonia twice, flu once, and like, 80 colds.

THE PLAGUE GAUNTLET IS REAL

laughing at their jokes is a pathway to madness

Kids tell terrible jokes. They make almost no sense. They learn a joke format, but they have no idea what to do with it, and so it’s like, “Why did the washing machine eat the squirrel?” And you think there’s an answer there, so you say, “Why?” and then the child responds, “BECAUSE FOUR AND FIVE POOPYBUTTS LEMONADE STINKYTOWN PROBABLY.” It makes no sense. But it’s absurd, and funny in how not funny it is — and it doesn’t hurt that the young one is cackling like a witch with a cauldron full of village children. So, you do the natural thing.

You laugh.

NOW YOU JUST FUCKED UP.

You should not have laughed. It’s like inviting a vampire into your house. That joke, like the vampire, is here to stay. All day long the kid will be galloping around, yelling “FOUR AND FIVE POOPYBUTTS LEMONADE STINKYTOWN PROBABLY,” again and again and again. FOUR AND FIVE POOPYBUTTS LEMONADE STINKYTOWN PROBABLY. FOUR AND FIVE POOPYBUTTS LEMONADE STINKYTOWN PROBABLY. FOUR AND FIVE POOPYBUTTS LEMONADE STINKYTOWN PROBABLY.

For the small person, it just gets funnier.

For you, it’s like a worm eating your brain.

And you can’t get them to stop. Not until the next joke. Don’t get me wrong. It’s sweet, in its way. They just want to please you. They want to amuse you and themselves. But it will ruin you. It will eat your mind. Endless absurd punchlines. Around and around. Again and again. Until you’re hiding under the covers, shoving LEGO bricks into your ears.

nothing will ever be clean again, you filthy filthmongers

We have taught our kid to clean up after himself, and even still, he’s like a megaton bomb. He’s a little earthquake. He is a whirling mote of chaos in a formerly well-ordered existence, and his chaos is infectious. Nothing is ever really clean. Nothing is ever really organized. His room will be clean for five minutes, and then you blink, and instantly it’s a flood of stuffed animals, or LEGO bricks, or crayons. I’m not even sure half the things we find on the floor are his. I think children open portals to the rooms of other children, and toys flood in and out like a moving tide. Mess generates mess. CHAOS REIGNS.

all your base belong to them

My kid is a little over three-feet tall. He weighs as much as a couple pixels. He’s a scrappy, skinny little root, cute as a button, as innocuous as a bunny.

And he controls most of the territory in our house.

It happened almost overnight. He went from ROLY-POLY PILLBUG CRAWLIN’ AROUND THE FLOOR to JACKRABBIT WITH A ROCKETBOOSTER RUNNING INTO WALLS AT TOP SPEED and it just happened. He has his room. He has a playroom. You’d think — dang, for a new person, that’s a pretty good haul in a house he doesn’t pay for. Two whole rooms?

Basically a kingdom to a tiny person.

But the child, he is spatially greedy.

The living room. Our bedroom. The hallway. His toys creep in like possessing tendrils. His stuff, his presence, his chocolate-smeared handprints (god, that better be chocolate). You wake up one day and you realize: “I don’t own this house anymore.” Once, he had two rooms. Now we have two rooms. I have the kitchen and the bathroom. And even the bathroom isn’t exactly a sanctum sanctorum, either. You’ll be trying to do the unholy business of taking out the body’s garbage in peace and quiet — then you’ll see a shadow descend underneath the crack below the door. Gentle footsteps. A knob, rattling. Sometimes he won’t even say anything. He’ll just stand there. Other times he’ll yell — “ARE YOU DONE POOPING.” Or he’ll say something completely absurd: “I CAN STILL SEE WITHOUT A FACE.” All to remind you that he controls it all. Get used to it. The air you breathe is his air. The floor? His floor. You’ll know when you lay in your bed and damn near get a Boba Fett up your no-no hole. Your pillow is gone because he took it. He owns it all. YOU OWN NOTHING HOW DID THIS HAPPEN TO YOU.

sometimes they’ll draw things that look like dicks or boobies

The other day at breakfast — in public — I looked over to see that my son was very plainly drawing a dong. He had his crayons and his paper and right there was just — it was a dick. It had balls at the bottom. We’re not talking like, anatomically authentic, but a basic grade school rendering of an amateur hour wangle-dang. I said, rather hesitantly, “What are you drawing, kiddo?” And he said, “I’m drawing WALL-E,” and then he proceeded to add more details, all of which thankfully eradicated the overall dickness of it. Other times, the essence remains. “I drew a plane!” Yeah, no, that’s a dick. “I drew some clouds!” Oh my god, those are boobs.

To be clear, at no point am I suggesting children or adults should be shamed about body parts — or that they should be unaware of them — just that, they have a limited availability of shapes in their palette, and when they draw, sometimes it’s a stick with a couple of circles at the end.

poop butt pee farts also humongous deuces

Everything is poop and butt and pee. All day long. And the child will never not find it hilarious. (Sometimes, you’ll think it’s hilarious, too, which will as noted only reinforces the behavior. MOMMY LAUGHED AT POOP JOKE NOW HERE ARE 758 MORE.) They will insert the word ‘poop’ into a sentence and think it’s high art. “Do you want more mashed potatoes?” “I WANT MORE POOP MASHED POTATOES HA HA HA HA.” “Have a good day at school.” “YOU HAVE A GOOD DAY AT FART HA HA HA HA.” (Okay, that was a pretty good one.)

Also, sidenote: your kids will drop Herculean deuces. It will seem impossible that the log in the toilet — which is as big as a body-builder’s flexed forearm — came out of that small person. It will be a deuce larger than you produce as an adult. It will be the kind of turd produced by a slovenly man who just ate seven microwave burritos. You will take a picture of it in the off-chance the Guinness Book of World Records will come and give your child an award.

everything is feast or famine

Last week, we couldn’t get B-Dub to finish any meal. Even snacks he’d poke at, pick at, then set aside to go play. (Basically, the meals were boring, preventing him from far more interesting endeavors, like trying to ride the dog or drawing Kylo Ren lightsabering Iron Man in the face.) And we’d have that classic fight of YOU NEED TO EAT YOUR FOOD and he doesn’t want to eat his food, and we don’t want to force him to clean his plate because sometimes people just aren’t hungry but at the same time, we kind of need him to consume basic nutritional intake so he doesn’t get scurvy or rickets or some other wasting disease.

Now, this week? Flipped on its head.

This morning along, by 9:30AM, he had eaten: a bowl of cereal, a packet of applesauce, some saltine crackers, and a generous plate of scrambled eggs. I’m pretty sure he was thinking of killing and eating one of us to slake his howling hunger.

It’s not just with food, though. This is life with a small child. It’s EVERYTHING or it’s NOTHING. It’s 60MPH in one direction only. This week, he likes My Little Pony. Next week it’s LEGO. This week he wants to constantly be outside, next week the outside is poison and the sun is killing him and it’s terrible why do we torture him. Which leads me to:

goddamnit they’re dramatic

Speaking of which, your kids are are going to be mega-dramatic. Every slight against them is Shakespearean in its dimension. You tell them, “No, you can’t have that toy,” and it’s as if you shat inside their soul. It’s like you denied them vital life services. They’re going to die if they can’t have that toy. That toy is everything. That toy is life.

They get a boo-boo and it’s like, AGGGH I AM DYING, THEY WILL HAVE TO TAKE OFF THIS LIMB TO SAVE THE BODY, I’M BASICALLY GUSHING BLOOD OVER HERE, I’M PRETTY SURE THAT’S MY ORGANS OVER THERE ON THE FLOOR, FLOPPING AROUND LIKE A FISH TAKEN OUT OF WATER. Meanwhile, there is no actual cut, and when you ask them to identify which foot they injured, the foot changes every time they answer. “This one. No, this one. That one. The other one. Just give me a Band-Aid.” (Spoiler alert: Band-Aids are basically like injury stickers. They just want them. They think Band-Aids will fix bruises.)

We have at times offended him and he has made it very clear that he would now like to go to a different family, he does not like this house, he does not like his room, he does not like the food, he likes nothing about this place including the parents, and by golly, he wants to be adopted out elsewhere. “I want to go live with another family tomorrow,” he says. I can’t even twist it around on him. I say, “Okay, I’ll get the paperwork started,” and you think, ha ha, you tiny fool, you will think I’m serious. You expect him to backpedal, but oh no. You dig deeper: “Your next family doesn’t have a TV, lives in a dumpster, and has a pet crocodile who will bite your legs off while you sleep.” “GOOD,” the child answers, “THAT SOUNDS MUCH BETTER THAN HERE.”

Sometimes, they can hurt your feelings. They can hurt you in your very heart.

Our son is fond of saying, “You guys don’t make good choices.” It’s a surprisingly hurtful thing to say. He doesn’t mean it to be. It actually sounds rather mild as a condemnation, and we laughed it off at first. But as an adult you’re suddenly cast on a doomward spiral: OUT OF THE MOUTH OF BABES COMES WISDOM AND OH GOD MY LIFE WHAT HAVE I DONE WITH IT. You suddenly question everything from that doughnut you ate yesterday to your choice in a college degree.

you can’t negotiate with terrorists except you’re going to anyway

You’ll make a deal with them. Because it seems like the thing to do. Sure, sure, you’re a real hardass who would never negotiate with your kids, except somehow despite having the patience of an irritable, pee-filled chipmunk, somehow your child will outlast your stubbornness. So at some point you’ll try to negotiate.

You’ll say, I will give you the thing, but first you have to do the other thing.

And they’ll agree.

And you feel like, yeah. Wow. Compromise. It’s how everything happens. It’s the root of politics, of career, of life itself — compromise. And you feel surprisingly adult, because your child has learned a Very Valuable Lesson™.

Which is true.

But they learned a different lesson than you thought.

The child learned: MY PARENT IS WEAK AND WILL MELT LIKE ICE CREAM IN THE HOT SUN.

Next time, they show up, and instead of fighting, your kid offers the bargain right out of the gate. “I would like a cookie, so I will do this other thing to get the cookie.” Again you feel adult. Again you feel like — bingo, bango, bongo in the Congo, look at how well compromise works!

The time after that, though…

The child knows to test your resolve. If the small human can get a cookie after, say, eating five more bites of food, then how about four? And you say NO, IT MUST BE FIVE, SO SAYETH THE LAW, THAT IS HOW COMPROMISE WORKS, and once again, the child has rooted herself to the idea that there is literally no way in heaven, earth and hell she is going to eat five bites of food. It will be four, and there will be a cookie. Or! Or the child will eat five bites, but they will be bites so small they could be described as “molecular.” And the child will say with a cheeky twinkle, I ate my fiiiiive biiiiites. And you’re like, goddamnit, kid.

You stand your ground, of course. You plant your feet and make a decision. And maybe you “win.” But probably, the kid goes away having eaten no bites and nobody gets any cookies and now you hear about that specific cookie for the next six years.

Did I mention kids are dramatic? Yeah.

Finally, this leads me to:

never promise them anything ever

Do not make them a promise.

Because you will, by some strange universal law, have to break that promise.

And you think, oh ho ho, but it’s a small promise. Sure, we can have ice cream when we get home. Yeah, we can go swimming tomorrow. Yes, of course we can take Tiny the Owl (stuffed animal; not actual owl) to Little Jim-Bob’s house.

You’re a positive parent. These are easy promises. No problem!

Except: problem.

You get home, and there’s no ice cream, and the store is closed.

You can’t go swimming tomorrow because the pool is rented out.

You can’t find Tiny the Owl, or you remember that Little Jim-Bob is allergic to Fake Owls.

And now, now you’re trapped between the Scylla and Charybdis of a promise made and your inability to fulfill it. Adults, of course, can negotiate this disappointment well. And of course part of your job as a parent is in fact to inoculate your children against that kind of disappointment so that they can weather larger problems later. And yet, you made a promise, you fucker. Your child remembers. Your child never forgets that promise you broke. Not that night. Not the next night. I suspect your kid will remember it when he gives your eulogy, and he’ll probably tell everybody about that time you said you’d let him play Minecraft after school but you didn’t because basically, you’re a monster who hates fun.

I always wondered why my mother said two words to me very, very often:

“We’ll see.”

Now, I know why. Because you can’t promise anything. Not even simple things. Everything got the answer of “We’ll see.” Can I have ice cream? Can I have a puppy? Will there be air to breathe? Will I be murdered tonight? We’ll see, child. We’ll see.

Practice the phrase well, young parents.

Practice.

I Kid, Of Course

The tiny person is the best thing, ever. All these things aren’t really warnings (okay, the plague gauntlet is real), but is just stuff that may or may not happen and even when it does and it feels frustrating, it ends up fun or funny later. Having the kid is the greatest charm and the weirdest adventure, and happy birthday to him. We love him very much. Even though he’s taken over our house and says “poop” a lot.

And let’s be honest. I say “poop” a lot, too.

I didn’t get it.

I confess, actually, that when it first started showing up, saturating social media like a thickening sponge, I had no idea what was happening. Star Wars was coming out at the same time and I saw people hashtagging things like #FORCE4HAM and I was like, hey, I fucking love ham. Ham is just delicious. It’s the best! Morning, noon and night! But I saw nothing about ham or related pork products inside the hashtag, and then some people were talking about this thing called Hamilton. So I did what any good INTERNAUT would do and I ventured into Google Space, and there I saw some chatter about a musical about Alexander Hamilton —

And I was like, ha ha ha, that’s not it. I mean, what? Surely the Internet is not all fired up about a musical about Alexander Hamilton, because — who the hell was Alexander Hamilton? I kinda remembered something about Aaron Burr and George Washington and hey wasn’t he one of the Declaration of Independence signers? Isn’t he on our money? Was he a president? *checks Google* Mmm, no. Did he invent something cool? The pocketwatch? Paper towels? OMG DID HE INVENT HAM. (Spoiler: he did not invent ham.) Either way, he was a historical figure and surely, surely the Internet was not super-fucking-excited about American History all of a sudden.

EXCEPT OH SHIT THEY WERE.

On the one hand, I was excited that people were interested in history. And particularly in a musical featuring a largely non-white cast using hip-hop as both a musical and narrative framing device? Cool. That’s exciting. That’s interesting. YES.

On the other hand… I’d waited too long.

What I mean is this: pop culture has a way of getting away from you. When something surges forward in popularity, it feels like a train leaving a station or a boat drifting away from a dock, and it’s like you’re not on it. Suddenly everybody was making jokes and references and memes about Hamilton, and I didn’t get them. And sometimes they’d make jokes probably not about Hamilton but how the fuck did I know? Anything anyone said that I didn’t understand I just assumed they were talking about this Cultural Musical Juggernaut About Which I Knew Naught. I’ll put it this way: I very much like The Simpsons, but I have a brain like mole-eaten earth, and things slip through it. I do not retain pop culture very well, and yet, sometimes I find myself in a circle of people who are very excited to make, say, Simpsons jokes and references. And they’re referring to things I’ve even seen, and yet, it feels a great deal like being in a room full of people who are speaking in code. It feels oddly oppressive when you’re not “in” on the thing everyone else is sharing. It’s like being in a conversation where people want to ask your opinion about a sports thing when you know zippity-shit about sports things.

It’s like you’re sitting at the kiddie table, man.

So I kept pushing Hamilton away, fearful that I just wouldn’t… get it.

See, when a thing gains that kind of cultural weight, it feels heavy in the hand. Almost too heavy, like, what if I drop it? Everyone was so sure it was transformative and transcendent — what if it failed to transform me? What if it failed to move me? What if I didn’t like it, or worse, somehow found it just, nnnmeh? Feh? Gnuh? Like, great, that’s a thing, cool. PEOPLE WOULD MURDER ME IN THE STREETS. They would rise up and duel my ass to death.

Never mind the fact that there’s also this contrary part of me — “If it’s popular, it’s probably shit,” we think, often foolishly. “If everybody likes it, I shouldn’t like it.” Some atavism from teenagerhood, probably. Provably nonsense again and again. Yet it persists.

I avoided.

I avoided some more.

I stayed away.

And then a lovely gent named David bought me the CD on Amazon.

Shit.

I had to do it. I had to listen to it.

And I listened to it.

And I still didn’t get it.

Shit, shit, shit.

People were gonna kill me. I liked it fine? It was… nice? Clever and snappy and nnyeah, sure, whatever. Maybe I just needed to see it live, who knows. I assumed I was done with it. Still, something nagged at me. Like I had thrown away its (forgive me) shot. A day or two later, I took the music with me onto the treadmill. I put the headphones on. I listened to it that way.

Oh.

Oh.

Ohhhhh.

The first time I listened to it, I was here at my computer. I have great speakers and I thought, this will work. It’s how I listen to a lot of my other music. But my computer is host to a thousand other distractions. Email and Twitter and animated GIFs and scary news stories about post-antibiotic apocalypses and, I dunno, porn? I didn’t listen to Hamilton. I half-listened to it.

But on the iPad, on the treadmill, I used the Amazon app. It brings up the lyrics as the songs play. And then it’s just me, the words, the music, and the running. And finally, finally, I think I got it.

Listen, I don’t know that it changed my life. But it spoke to me a lot about the fear of a short life and making the most of it. It spoke to me as a writer and a lover of language and linguistic flourishes. It also made me ruminate a lot about revolutions, and present-day American politics, and the floating nature of freedom. And, quite frankly, it makes me think a lot about Star Wars, too. It’s got passion and flow, it’s vibrant and alive, it’s sad and it’s funny.

Lin-Manuel Miranda is a genius.

So, I grok it. Finally. Whew. Nobody has to kill me now.

And I will say, with this and with other things, sometimes we need to turn off the distractions. To try to reach for a larger point here, I find now that I watch TV with an iPad in my lap, a phone too near, and I turn my eyes away from the TV at every chance. Sometimes I only half know what’s going on. And you can see it during big events like Game of Thrones, too — everybody’s connected to it and to each other, but you can’t really be connected to both completely. You’re always half-a-footstep in another world. With Hamilton, it was about checking out of all those other worlds and checking in to only one: the world of the words, the music, and the story. Sometimes you have to shut everything else out to understand one thing. You have to ruminate. You have to saturate. You gotta get eyeballs-deep with that shit and put the rest of the world on hold. Hard to do both in terms of finding the time and disconnecting from the blasting firehose spray of our digital existence, but necessary, I believe.

Some songs, some books, some movies — they’re background noise.

But other narratives, other art, demands a kind of temporary monogamy. A relationship, one-on-one. For a time, at least. Until the next thing demands your mind.

That was Hamilton, for me. That’s how I got it.

THE END

P.S. In the future, I still might not get your Hamilton references, because again, I have a brain like a leaky bucket. Apologies in advance, my humble friends.

P.P.S. [insert Hamilton-Simpsons mash-up reference here]

It starts with a bang.

That’s all the inspiration you need.

I want you to write a short story with that in mind — the tale must begin with a bang. You can, erm, interpret that how you choose, but it definitely means we begin in the middle of the action.

That’s it. That’s all you gotta do.

Length: ~1000 words.

Due by: June 3rd, Friday, noon EST

Post on your online space.

Link back here through the comments.

Go forth and go bang. Er. You know what I mean.

Jolene Hall is dead – sort of. She can walk, think and talk, but her heart doesn’t beat and her lungs stopped breathing ages ago. After Jo is abducted and subjected to horrific experiments, she wakes up to find her body is a mosaic of jagged wounds and stapled flesh. Jo has a choice: turn herself in to the authorities, or team up with her best friend Lucy and her boyfriend Eli to find a way to save herself. To Jo, the choice is clear.

* * *

Dreams can be AMAZING.

HEARTLESS was based on a dream set in my college dorm room. Standing in the threshold between my bedroom and the world stood two girls. One was giggly, beyond hysterics. The other was…weird. Odd. Stiff and awkward.

She stepped inside. “I’m dead,” she said, her voice husky. “Can you tell? Can you smell me?”

For months, I couldn’t stop thinking about that dead girl! What had happened to her? Why was she dead? What was she? She was too smart to be a zombie, too solid to be a ghost.

Finally I began writing, and realized: Jo, the dead girl, was Frankenstein’s monster. Ish. Part robot, though, and falling apart. An experiment gone terribly wrong. A book was born, all from a single dream.

Writing can be a gorgeous escape.

I wrote HEARTLESS in the middle of summer.

In Charleston, South Carolina.

It also happened to be the hottest summer I’ve ever experienced. Like, face-melting, drought-inducing, make-you-angry-when-you’re-outside, three-shower-a-day kind of hot. Ridiculous hot. Temperatures soared well above 100 for more days than I care to remember, and with the coastal southern humidity, heat indices were…well, they were painful.

How’d I cope?

I set my book in the coldest setting I could trust myself to accurately describe. The mountains of New Hampshire, in the dead of winter. I’m a Jersey girl originally, and I know cold. I know snow. Every night that summer, I’d walk myself and my characters through snowdrifts and blizzards. Through frigid air that burns your nose and lungs. Through frostbite. Through frozen tears.

By bedtime, I’d be shivering.

It was a heavenly escape from Hell in South Carolina…even while I wrote about a walking, talking corpse.

Real life can inspire, even in speculative fiction.

HEARTLESS is made up. Obviously. Unless you know something I don’t, part-robot-girls don’t exist. Yet…

That said, I relived college while writing it. Jo wasn’t exactly my alter ego, but her best friend was my freshman year suitemate. Some of my favorite parts of the book are their interactions. Their conversations. Some actually happened. Some didn’t. But their voices were stolen from real life. Their meeting in the bathroom between their rooms was exactly how I met my suitemate. Exactly. She was (still is) bigger than life, and I loved spending time with her again.

Music is not always the answer.

Many writers use music as inspiration, creating create playlists for their novels, selecting songs for their short stories. I love that. I wanted that!

When I began HEARTLESS, I knew how I wanted her to feel: like how The Black Keys’ album, “Brothers,” sounds. A little dark, a lot gritty, and also, often, funny. I played the album while writing, over and over and over again

You know what happened?

I got sick of the damn album.

For me, music is just music. It’s not a creative spark. I’m not an audio person. But that’s okay! We’re all different! I have other cues, other inspirations. What works for me may not work for you. And that’s okay. We can all go our merry ways, using our own methods, and at the end of the day, we can all be writer-friends! Yay friends!

Reincarnation happens in many ways.

HEARTLESS is a little genre-bendy, blending horror, sci-fi, and a campy, dark humor. After she was written, I queried her to agents and a few small presses. Sadly, back then, she just…didn’t fit.

I’d have let HEARTLESS die. I’d have let her go. But my brother and husband both loved her. “Whatcha doing with that Jo book,” they’d ask. “When are you going to publish her?”

So I reincarnated her for the first time. I self-published. I found an awesome editor and a kick-ass cover and I put the book on Amazon. I sold some copies, got some nice reviews, and thought I was done with her.

Until Jason Pinter at Polis Books found her. You see, I’d submitted a different book to him, but he stalked my web site and found my Jo. He liked her. With a little work to pull out all the f-bombs (I curse like a sailor), he thought she could be a super-fun YA novel.

Jo and HEARTLESS found another new life at Polis Books. I’m still riding the coattails of that life, to see where they take me. It’s exciting. It’s fun. It’s reincarnation.

* * *

Leah Rhyne is a Jersey girl who’s lived in the South so long she’s lost her accent… but never her attitude. After spending most of her childhood watching movies like Star Wars, Alien(s), and A Nightmare On Elm Street, and reading books like Stephen King’s The Shining or It, Leah now spends her days writing tales of horror and science fiction.

Leah Rhyne: Website | Twitter

Heartless: Indiebound | Amazon