Apple-Obsessed Author Fella
Yammerings and Babblings
As I have noted in the past, Twitter is great for me as an author less because it connects me to my audience and sells books (which it does!) and more because it lets me hangout digitally, by-proxy, with a bunch of other penmonkeys doing their penmonkey thing. Sometimes those authors talk. Sometimes Sam Sykes is involved.
This is one of those times.
[law and order noise, CHUNG CHUNG]
I advise you to click here:
There, you will find the ability to generate algorithmic inspirational memes.
Just like the one at the fore of this post.
You can either:
a) generate your own or
b) use the one above.
From there, design a piece of short fiction around that, um, “inspiration.”
Use the text in the story if possible.
Otherwise, just use it as a springboard to delightful story weirdness.
Length: ~1000 words
Due by: Friday, the 28th, noon EST
Post at your online space.
Link back here so we can all read it.
The end.
Being the hip, trendy tastemaker that I am, I have now joined the brand new social media network for Cool, Rad World Wide Web Users — it’s this thing called Instagram.
Have you heard of it?
WELL, I’M OVER THERE NOW, PAVING THE WAY.
Yeah, no, I know, I’m way behind.
There existed a technological shift in the last five years inside my brain where at one point I cared to stay on top of this stuff and then I suddenly cared less about staying on top of this stuff. I still don’t know what the fuck Snapchat is or does or if it’s just a rotating carousel of dick pics that erase themselves. I haven’t joined all your fancy Circlespaces and Tickleclicks and Humprs and Fudholes and Beerfaces and other social media networks that allow you to automatically share your blood pressure numbers or the contents of your medicine cabinets or various arty photos of your nipples. I’m sure I’ll catch up in the next 20, 30 years.
But I now have joined Instagram.
I am to understand pictures over there are called “IGGS,” as in, “EGGS,” but Instagram photos. IG photos. IGGS. I’m sure this is true and if it’s not true it will be true now, as I have said it, and clearly I am a paragon, a voyager, a true tastemaker and universal lingo designer.
Or don’t, I dunno, I posted one picture, relax.
Healthcare and healthcare coverage is an important topic for me for two reasons.
1.) Because my father died without coverage. He went without coverage because he had a pre-existing condition, and he was in the gap between his actual retirement and the proper retirement age, so he went without coverage for a short time until he could pick up Medicare at 65. In that time he got prostate cancer, as he went without any kind of preventative checks. It metastasized. It killed him. And that was that.
2.) Because the ACA has been a boon for me as a writer — which is to say, as a small business, because that’s what I am. I went to get health insurance initially and it was very expensive to cover my family, and it did not cover a great deal… and that was before we even got into any tussle over pre-existing conditions. The institution of the ACA was fortuitous, and allowed us to instead go to the marketplace, where we got health insurance that was considerably cheaper and covered considerably more. It allowed me to embark upon the “novelist” phase of my career in a real way. Like my books? They exist, in part, because of the ACA.
So, with those two previously-mentioned caveats mentioned once more —
Hey, how’s the healthcare debate going in this country?
Good? Yeah?
*checks watch*
*stares off at a pile of medical waste on fire*
*someone adds a pile of diapers to the conflagration*
Oh, so that good, huh?
*clears throat*
So, last night, in case you missed it, the healthcare repeal and replace failed in the Senate because it did not accrue enough support — those who bailed on it (Senators Moran and Lee) suggested they wanted an open legislative process, and some even suggested a bipartisan look at healthcare going forward (gasp, what, you mean you’d like to, to, to cooperate whoa holy shit what a revolution). And then ol’ Turtle Waddle, ol Mr. Turkey Dildo, ol’ Senator Mitch McConnell, he said, OH HELL NO, and he released a statement that said they will now pursue a repeal of the ACA without a current replacement.
In case you are unsure what that looks like, imagine that it looks like a person holding a sewing machine swaddled in fabric, and then that person leaps excitedly out of a plane in the hopes of stitching together a proper parachute before turning into a pancake of blood-and-bone.
Then, this morning, our melting shit-scented candle of a president endorsed an even uglier version of this idea, saying, and I quote, “As I have always said, let Obamacare fail and then come together and do a great healthcare plan. Stay tuned!”
Stay tuned.
Like this is a reality show and not:
a) a massive industry on which our economy hangs
b) people’s lives.
This is our, ahem, “leader” —
Someone who is content to let a thing fail instead of leading the way. Instead of fixing or repairing. Can you imagine seeing a bridge that’s failing and saying, “I’ll let it fail, then replace it.” Worse, it’s like he’s ready to commit some grand guignol of insurance fraud — “As I have always said, let the house burn down, or maybe I’ll burn it down myself, then I’ll collect the insurance and we can come together and pay for a great big new house. Stay tuned!”
He will let the system fail.
He will let people die.
And then he’ll swoop in and we’ll do “great” healthcare.
What a pal, what a chum.
Anyway, back to the Senate.
The Senate passed a repeal-without-replace in 2015, and that succeeded — in part, I suspect, because it was purely performative. They knew Obama wasn’t going to sign it, because c’mon. Obama wasn’t going to undo part of his legacy. But they showed solidarity. They passed it, he vetoed it. It gets more complicated now because what McConnell is proposing is that they excise the ACA over two years, giving them a window of replacement.
But I want you to pay attention —
They last tried to repeal in 2015.
It is now 2017.
That was two years ago.
They still have no replacement.
That wasn’t the beginning, though — they’ve been trying to undo the ACA for SEVEN years.
And still, no replacement.
They now control the executive and the legislative branches of government.
And still, no viable replacement.
So, to assume that in two years they will come up with a capable healthcare system in place is not only absurd, it is statistically unlikely. (Never mind the fact that the CBO score on “repeal-without-replace” is the most devastating of all in terms of costs and people thrown off healthcare.) The GOP have nothing. They don’t have the chops. They’ve had seven years, then two, then they gained control of everything, and we’re still with the ACA.
Which, by the way, is a good thing.
Yes, the ACA is imperfect, but guess what? It’s fixable. (It in part was hamstrung by Rubio, who eliminated high-risk corridors.) Listen, as a parent with a kid, I gotta tell you — it’s an epic fucking blessing when you learn a thing is broken-but-fixable. It saves you money to fix the things that you can fix rather than replacing them. (That, one could argue, is a truly conservative mindset. Conserve what you have, fix what can be fixed.) Furthermore, it is galling to know we have leaders who are willing to play chicken with people’s actual lives and an entire industry in order to pursue a dogged crusade against what is, very honestly, a Republican-based plan (yes, the ACA was originally a Republican plan) that happened to be implemented by a black Democrat.
So, as always, I urge you:
Call your senators.
Thanks.
See that photo?
It’s body hair.
No, calm down, not that kind of body hair. Nothing south of the border.
IT’S NIPPLE HAIR ha ha no, not really, just arm hair.
No big news to share — well, I have a couple pieces, but I can’t actually share them lest I be murdered — so I’ll just say that, had a stellar event with Kevin Hearne and Fran Wilde the other day at the Free Library of Philly (and ahem apologies it’s why there was no flash fiction challenge, I had to bust out of here too early and forgot to hit POST). Huge crowd (as Kevin is wont to draw), and had a blast the whole way.
Prior to that I did one of those things that counts as PROPER ADULTING — not like, “I cleaned my counter, yay #adulting,” but rather, “I updated my last will and testament and figured out my physical and literary estate for when I finally kick off, be it today or ten thousand todays from now, and sure, hey, let’s consider the legal ramifications of my eventual hop-skip-shuffle off this mortal coil, whee #adulting.” This is a reminder that if you have not squared away the Circumstances After Your Demise, do so. Doubly so if you have children, triply so if you are a person who has intellectual property about which to worry.
Speaking of the mortal coil —
I am sad to see George Romero go. Romero created for us an entirely new mythology, and that’s no small thing. He understood that monsters were not merely monsters, but rather, that they were a commentary on us, or a reflection of us. Further, he was a paragon to both the horror community and the independent film community. Last week I had the distinct pleasure of being in a Night of the Living Dead anthology that Romero co-edited with Jonathan Maberry, and now, Romero being gone is just a kick to the teeth.
Onward, now, to a few more macro photos for the week — the first of which is from a plant that is literally called RATTLESNAKE MASTER (also my nickname in high school). Second photo is a ladybug pupa. Third photo is waterdrop on evergreen.
You’re having a shitty writing day.
It happens.
I get a crap writing day at least once a week. Maybe twice. Once in a while, I get a whole bad run of writing days, like I’ve got some kind of creative food poisoning and every day is just the urgent regurgitation of narrative fluids without aim or purpose. It’ll be five heinous days in the word mines, where I’m sweating and raging and kicking dirt.
To repeat: it happens.
Problem is, these days, these fucking days, boy howdy — they can derail your train, can’t they? Knock you right off the track.
But it’s okay.
I’m here to help you get through them.
But first you have to get in the van.
*waits*
*waits some more*
Okay, you know what, looking at the van now, I maybe see what I did wrong. Maybe we don’t get in the van. Maybe we just stand outside the van. It’s cool. We can talk here, where you can easily run screaming for help.
The first thing you need to know is that:
Bad writing days — or, if you’re an artist, bad art-making days — are normal.
They are part of it. They are woven into the fabric of what we do.
In fact, writing is supposed to be hard. Easy things are boring things. Easy is like, putting on lip balm, or making a pot of $0.19 grocery store ramen. Those are not bad things, but they are not particularly consequential things, either. Nobody changed the world by putting on lip balm. (Cue 52 comments where people tell me that Winston Churchill and Roosevelt bonded over lip balm.) Writing a story or making art is not putting on lip balm. It’s not raking leaves, even if the mechanics feel that way sometimes.
Stories are bigger, stranger, sprawlier things.
Consider: the act of telling a story is you CONJURING AN ENTIRE UNIVERSE INSIDE YOUR MIND and then using words as knives to CARVE THAT UNIVERSE INTO REALITY SO THAT OTHERS CAN VISIT YOUR IMAGINATION. “Today I am going to make a world out of my brain that you can go to in your spare time,” you say aloud, hopefully realizing that this is far more significant and far more bizarre than tying your shoes or blowing your nose. Creating whole worlds is pyroclastic. It is volcanic. It’s heat and fire, it’s molten rock, it’s lightning inside black smoke amid the nose and clamor of thundering earth and boiling air. It is an astonishing, generative act.
And it’s sometimes hard.
Sometimes what we do is stage magic. Sometimes the magic is sacrificial.
Stage magic requires hours of practice where you get it wrong.
Sacrificial magic requires blood on the altar.
In both cases, the magic — be it trick or spell — is hard as hell.
As it should be. As it must be.
We sometimes get the false sense as creatives that, if this thing we do does not come naturally, then it is not worth doing — or worse, that we are somehow not meant to do it at all. I watch this with my son sometimes, where he wants to try something new and because he is not immediately successful he rules himself “terrible” at it and wants to stop. Thing is, he is terrible at it. Of course he’s terrible at it. What, he’s going to sit down on his first try at painting and summon a Mondrian Mona Lisa? No. He’s going to paint something that looks like a clown ate a unicorn and then threw it all up again. (Spoiler warning: sometimes I go to write a first draft and yeah, no, it looks like a clown ate a unicorn and then threw it all up again. This is how it goes. It’s part of the process, man.) This isn’t automatic. It’s not automagic. It takes time and effort and grit and sweat and confusion and probably hallucinogenic drugs and definitely an ingrained sense of free-wheeling foolishness.
It being hard is not a sign of it being not worth doing.
The difficulty is the point. The difficulty proves its worth.
The difficulty is not a sign that you don’t belong here.
Impostor Syndrome is real. Flip the script on it. Don’t let it have power over you. Admit you’re an impostor. Then admit that we’re all impostors — none of us belong here because art and story are forbidden, interstitial places. This thing we do is Buccaneer’s Den, it’s Mos Eisley, it’s a secret moon colony. Not a one of us “belongs” here. We all booked illegal passage through blackest night and sharky waters to get here. We’re not one ship, we’re countless life-boats strung together — a glorious flotilla of freaks.
This is who we are. It’s what we do. And what we do is sometimes hard. It’s hard for me. It’s hard for you. It’s hard for Stephen King. It’s hard for J.K. Rowling. King probably thinks that Rowling does it effortlessly, and Rowling probably thinks King sails through every draft, and the truth is, it’s hard for them, for you, for me, for every penmonkey that ever done monkeyed with a pen.
When a story reads effortlessly, it was not written effortlessly. In fact, the more effortlessly it reads, the more effort probably went into making it read effortlessly.
It took work.
Lots and lots of unholy, occasionally unhappy, hard-ass work.
Because, repeat after me: IT’S HARD.
Now, to clarify: it’s not hard in the way other work is hard. It’s not back-breaking work. Nobody’s shooting at us. We’re not training chimpanzees or wrangling eight-year-olds or wrestling bears. It’s easy, in that way. But it’s also hard in its own way, and let it be that way. If we diminish what we do, if we make it seem that the act of MAKING COOL STUFF is somehow cheap and glib and fucking throwaway, it undercuts our power. It sells short the necessary nature of art and story in the world. It makes what you do feel lesser when what you do is epic. Story moves the world. Art changes people. Entertainment gives us respite. Narrative gives us enlightenment.
It all moves the needle.
When you’re having a bad writing day, a hard writing day, remember that.
And remember too that when you sit down a week from now, or a month, or a year, the days the writing was hard and the days the writing was easy will be indistinguishable from one another. In fact, sometimes the easy days produce worse work than the difficult days. You never know. So don’t let it stop you. Put the bucket over your head and run at the wall anyway. And remember that all of this is just a draft, that it can all be fixed and changed, that what doesn’t work can be made to work. It can always be made to work with enough practice, with enough blood.
You’re having a hard day of writing, write anyway.
Do it because it’s hard.
Forgive yourself because it’s hard.
Don’t let one bad day be the gravestone for the rest of the days.
Then stop. Push a little, but don’t push so hard you drop your brain out of your ass. Go and take a walk, play with the dog, eat a churro, crank one out. Then get back to it tomorrow. Maybe it’ll be hard tomorrow. Maybe it’ll be harder tomorrow. I don’t know. Nobody knows. But the difficulty is the point. You’re ripping things out of you and putting them onto the page. Nobody said it was going to be easy. Nobody said it should be easy.
Let it be what it must be.
