Category: The Ramble (page 213 of 465)

[disclaimer: I am not a MINDOLOGIST or a PSYCHOHOLIC or in any way an expert on subjects relating to emotion or the human brain, so take all this with a entire salt lick]

I just read an article that literally had the headline:

THIS EL NINO PHOTO SHOULD SCARE THE SHIT OUT OF THE WEST COAST.

(I’m not going to link to it, because fuck that article right in its bloviating trash-hole.)

El Nino is so bad, the article posits, that the entire populace of the West Coast of America should — right now — stand up and just defecate themselves while screaming in terror.

It’s the kind of article whose headline should be read by a wildly gesticulating Muppet whose felt is on fire. Whose plastic googly eyes are literally melting out of his hand-ensconced face.

And this isn’t new. This is pretty much every article on the Internet — everything is either OBLIVIOUS OPTIMISM or PANTS-SHITTING FEARGASM. Your hometown is going to be destroyed by an earthquake probably tomorrow maybe! Something-something super-volcano! Global warming is going to destroy New York City! Something-something crime! Something-something serial killers! Hackers just hacked your wife! Bats fucked pigs and mice in a batpigmice fuckorgy and now there’s a batpigmouse flu and it’s probably one day going to make you sneeze your brain out of your head! Be afraid! Be fucking scared! FIERY DOOM IS ABOUT TO RAIN DOWN UPON YOU WHY ARE YOU NOT PROPERLY WORSHIPFUL OF THE FEAR YOU MUST BE FEELING RIGHT NOW AT PRESENT IN YOUR HEART ALWAYS. Now look at these funny kittens with lightsabers.

I mean, holy shit, have you ever turned on the local news? The national news? It’s just a scare parade, man. Everything sucks. Your town is dangerous. The country is dangerous. Those people who aren’t you are dangerous. It’s like watching a horror movie for the jump scares except the jump scares are things that are actually happening right now apparently right outside your door.

It’s not that we don’t have problems. We do. And will. This is a planet of seven billion people. Shit is going to get fucky with seven billion people bumping into each other and into animals and glaciers and robots and whatever else we have wandering around out there. Global warming is probably the most serious challenge in my lifetime. Right now the abuse at the hands of government surveillance and police is unparalleled. Pretty much any hobo in clown makeup and Nazi regalia can go and buy an arsenal of guns from your local flea market.

This is a time of epic challenges. This is a time of necessary change and, perhaps, even upheaval.

So, being scared is understandable.

But we also have to understand that we’re being manipulated into fear. By the media. By the Internet. By our chosen social groups and echo chambers.

Listen, here’s the thing: fear is not that productive.

It’s productive in the short term, in fear-based situations.

Like, let’s say you’re at the park. And you’re walking along, humming a jaunty tune. Next thing you know: the bushes shake, and out comes a motherfucking tiger. Big. Rangy. Mangy. Starving. You’re it. You’re dinner. And the tiger is joined by a prehistoric claw-bear, and maybe they’re working in concert, or maybe they’re competing to see which one can eat your entire head first.

Fear at that moment is entirely perfect.

It is a necessary response.

Because fear engenders in us two potential responses: fight or flight. Punch or flee. Fuck or run.

You can either stand your ground and try to go toe-to-toe with the tiger-bear combo, or you can haul ass out of that park and never go there again because who the hell let tigers and bears into the park? I don’t want to put up a fence to stop immigrants, but tigers and bears, sure okay.

Fear as a momentary response has value.

Fear as a long-term emotional strategy destroys you.

You look at global warming, and it’s becoming clear that fear-based tactics only engender (according to this article) “denial, fatalism, and polarization.” You either get so anxious about it that you’re like, “Well, fuck it, we’re all going to boil so I might as well just set fire to this mountain of tires,” or you become so angrily optimistic that you grab for any lifeline you read about global warming being a sham or about some new mini-ice age we’re about to get (which is bullshit, by the way). Driving people to a fear-based life — especially when things seem relatively okay outside your window at any given moment — is a great way to inspire a symphony of anxiety inside your head. We’re urged to PANIC PANIC PANIC but the birds are chirping and the sun is up and suddenly we’re feeling OH GOD SWEET FUCKING HELLMONKEYS I HAVE TO FIGHT OR FLIGHT BUT I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO FIGHT AND I DON’T KNOW WHERE TO FLEE and so you just stand there, paralyzed by uncertainty and fear. The fear stops being a momentary response and becomes a long-term strategy — and fear as a long-term strategy is not a healthy way to be.

I remember that one of the takeaways of Bowling for Columbine (regardless of what you feel about Michael Moore) wasn’t that guns are our problem, but fear was the real problem. Fear was the Emperor Palpatine manipulating us. (And others are in turn manipulating us through fear.) The events of 9/11 were a thing that inspired us to fear-based action — our leaders used that fear to manipulate us. One thing the Star Wars prequels actually got kinda right is how easy it is to puppet a frightening population. Guns are the tools of fear, too. You don’t build up an arsenal for the art of it. You build up the arsenal for the doomsday. For the time when the people who aren’t you come to hurt you, or take something from you, or [insert made-up thing]. You can sell a person a gun by reminding them of all the things they should fear out there in the world. And then you can sell someone else a gun because that person should be afraid of the last person to whom you sold guns. “That guy’s got guns,” you whisper. “And he looks pretty sketchy. Shouldn’t you have one, too? Jeez. What if he decides to shoot up a grocery store when you’re in it? That’d be a tragedy if you weren’t PREPARED. Am I right?”

Fear is like one of those zombie parasites that controls its host.

(Here we hear the echo of FDR: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” And then we hear the modern addenda: “And also killer bees and brain amoebas and global warming and killer cops and terrorists and hackers and too many guns or not enough guns and Other People and ebola and volcanoes and earthquakes and tsunamis and did I mention killer bees already okay you know what just be afraid of your entire present and future. So, be afraid of fear, but then also be afraid of all this other stuff. HAVE YOU SHAT THINESELF YET?” FDR asks you with bulging eyes and spit-froth lips. Then he goes back to watching the news, digesting all the horror punctuated by advertising designed to get him to buy things in his fear-blind panic state.)

And the fear doesn’t even have to be real. Fear of science seems to be at an all-time-high. Fear of GMOs and vaccinations. Fear of things we need to actually help us. Sometimes social media helps clear the fog — but it can just as easily spread lies and misinformation, quick as lightning.

It’s across the board, this fear.

Listen, I talk to a lot of newbie writers, and one of the things that always seem to hold them back is — you guessed it! Fear. They’re just nebulously afraid of… things. They’re afraid of agents and editors. They’re afraid of failure. They’re afraid of success. They’re afraid of the horror stories they’ve heard. They’re afraid of getting published but then not selling, or getting published and selling but then selling a second book and oh shit what if that one doesn’t do well and next thing you know, they’re hemorrhaging blood out of their various face-holes. It’s a random rag-tag assortment of fear. And again: it’s utterly paralyzing. Total creative vapor lock, man.

It isn’t healthy.

It damn sure isn’t productive.

I don’t have any answer to this, by the way. This rant is itself unproductive. I don’t know how we get out of the cycle of fear. And I don’t mean to diminish the very real challenges we face — but the challenges we face are presented so often with just klaxons of terror and anxiety instead of solution-based direction. (This is one of the reasons I do like Obama. He presents challenges in a calm, almost comforting way. He doesn’t kick over his podium and barf into his own hands, screaming about how we better do what he says or we’re all gonna die from super-volcanoes.) (Though now that I think about it, this might be how I attempt to get things done in the future: threatening people with super-volcanoes. I mean, no, I can’t make super-volcanoes, but who wants to take the chance? Maybe I secretly do. I mean, what if, right? Maybe you should just give me that hamburger for free because FEAR FEAR FEAR and also super-volcanoes.)

We have to give up the fear.

We’re addicted to it.

We click it. We watch it. We embrace it.

And then we sit, paralyzed. Or we deny.

The change that results from fear is rarely the right kind of change. We need some way forward that doesn’t constantly try to shock our systems with panic and doom. I don’t know what the way forward is, except that individually we have to try to be conscious of when we’re being manipulated into fear and then finding the way around it — like fear is just a traffic snarl on our emotional or intellectual highway, an obstacle to overcome rather than a tool to wield.

And that is its cover.

All hail the work of Adam Doyle!

In the book, Miriam heads cross-country to look for a psychic who can help her understand — and potentially be rid of — her gift of being able to see how people are going to die when she touches them. But her search is fraught with danger, and her path intersects with that of a dangerous cult of domestic terrorists who want to use Miriam to aid in their mad crusade.

You can pre-order the book now — it comes out April 5th, 2016. Hardcover!

The first book, Blackbirds, is presently $1.99 at Amazon until Friday. That’s e-book — the print edition will release in September, and I can say, it’s very, very pretty.

And you can also check out Mockingbird (Book 2) and The Cormorant (Book 3).

(Print to follow, too.)

Further, if you’re so inclined —

“Interlude: Swallow” is a bridging novelette that connects The Cormorant to Thunderbird. You can find it in the collection Three Slices, which also features an Iron Druid story by Kevin Hearne, and a Blud story by Delilah S. Dawson.

There’s this thing that happens sometimes where someone asks about book recommendations from an author and that author — probably a white guy, like me — rattles off some names of other authors who are also probably white guys like me. I don’t believe this to be an actively racist kind of thing, but more a product of an industry that doesn’t publish as many writers of color. And when they do publish them, they tend to remain marginalized because of various institutional reasons. Plus, then you get that excuse that’s meant to be a positive — “I don’t see color!” — which is a noble thought that ultimately fails, because while you mean I don’t give into preconceived divisions between race, what often results is, I don’t see color because mostly I see only white and if I don’t see color then I don’t have to acknowledge people of color.

I made an effort a couple years back to include a far deeper bullpen of women writers on my shelves, and I’d say at this point about half of my SFF reading is of women authors. This isn’t because of some kind of diversity bingo — I’m not reading books that are bad just to read them because they were written by a woman. I’m reading awesome books by awesome authors. The single result of expanding my reading has been that I am reading more amazing books.

I’ve been making the same effort to include more writers of color — and so it seems like this is a good time to open the comments up to recommendations of writers of color in the SFF space (or, more broadly, feel free to wander into horror and YA if you need to). I recognize there’s some danger in making this a Very Special Post like it’s an Afterschool Special or That One Panel At A Con About Women Authors Where All The Other Panels Are Assumed Then To Be About Men By Default. The ideal goal is, when we recommend books, to have a more diverse slate of books to recommend and not sequester them in their very own marginal post — at the same time, my hope is this post serves as a seeding ground for myself and for others where we learn about awesome books we’re not yet reading. And then we read them and we include them going forward in the books about which we proselytize.

HEY LOOK, MORE AWESOME BOOKS FUCKING YAY.

Right? Right.

Here’s a dollop of reading suggestions on my part, but for your part — get into the comments, recommend some writers of color and what they’ve written. Short stories and novellas are totally on the table, though I’ll recommend only novels right now as my reading of short fiction lately has been woefully shallow. If any work is free to read on the web, feel free to drop links.

(I do recognize that not all writers of color are self-identified, and the same goes for some women and QUILTBAG authors — but, many are, so the effort must be made.)

(Also, this really isn’t meant to be a proving ground for arguments about whether or not we should read more diversely or whatever your stance happens to be — please use the comments as a recommendation engine only. In this instance, be a fountain, not a drain. Thanks.)

The Recs

Nnedi Okorafor: Lagoon. I just started reading this a few days ago and my mouth cannot make the proper pleasing sounds. This woman’s prose is fucking astounding. Cinematic, yet also occasionally dreamlike — science-fiction, but also occasional fantastical? It’s a weird, wonderful book so far. The plot is fine and all, but her prose is a place I wanna live.

Daniel Jose Older: Half-Resurrection Blues. This is how I like my urban fantasy. Real, monstrous, street-level stuff. (I have an unattainable dream of mashing up this series with my own The Blue Blazes given how both are set in and around Brooklyn and Manhattan.) It’s funny, too, and grim, and all the things I want. I have Shadowshaper, his newest YA, but haven’t cracked the cover yet as my tbr pile threatens to crush me beneath its weight.

Maurice Broaddus: King Maker. The Arthurian myth recast in modern-day inner-city Indianapolis. Good stuff — neat analogs to the mythology here (Excalibur becomes a gun, the Caliburn, f’rex). It’s a fantasy novel but occasionally pretty brutal about the lives of these characters. It’s harder stuff than you realize — not fluffy fantasy.

Aliette de Bodard: Obsidian & Blood. This is three books in one, and it was a jaw-dropper for me in what it does with your expectations of genre — what I mean is, this is essentially a detective novel set in the Aztec Empire, and is chockablock with blood magic and necromancy and the drama of the gods and goddesses. An ARC of her newest, House of Shattered Wings, just landed across my doorstep, and I’m excited to read it.

Greg Van Eekhout: California Bones. I dunno why this book is $2.99 right now, but do yourself a favor and fling yourself upon it. It’s this cool LA urban fantasy about unearthing ancient things — but just as it’s sometimes about digging up real bones of old creatures, it’s also about digging up the bones of the past.

SL Huang: Zero Sum Game. Listen, I don’t like math, so when you tell me this is a book about a person whose superpower is math, I’m not interested. More the stupid on my part, because this first book is a blast from start to finish. Huang writes with hella energy — whatever mad calculus she’s doing, she’s doing it right. Curse her for making me care about math.

Now?

Your turn.

You read that right.

Today, I’m not asking for 1000 words of fiction.

I’m asking for a 1000 word essay (meaning, blog post).

And I want it on this subject:

WHY I WRITE.

That’s it. I wanna know why you write. What it is that makes you want to tell stories and write them down. What drives you? Something biographical? Something internal? Dig deep. Be thoughtful. Write it out like the bad-ass that you know you are.

The standard rules apply, otherwise:

Write it at your online space. Drop a link to it here in the comments.

Due in one week: 7/31.

Your time is now: tell us why you write.

*loads shotgun, fires a hot load of NEWS-SHOT into your gut*

So, first up, I’m going to be at GenCon next week in support of the Writer’s Symposium.

And maybe you’re gonna be there too. (Are you? Say hi!)

As such, my schedule, should you so require it:

Thursday, 11AM: Writer’s Craft, Eliciting Emotional Responses, with a pack of COOL HUMANS like Aaron Rosenberg, Elizabeth Bear, Gregory A. Wilson.

Thursday, 4PM: Business of Writing: Recovering from Controversy, with Jaym Gates, James Minz, James L. Sutter, and now I’m weirded out because I don’t have a James-flavored name.

Thursday, 6PM: Storium LIVE! A live Storium game with Sam Sykes, Stephen Blackmoore, and Delilah S. Dawson — three of my favorite people gathering with me for charity!

Friday, 1PM: Writer’s Life 101 with a glorious bunch of miscreants: Gwenda Bond, Christopher Rowe, Anton Strout.

Friday, 2PM: Q&A with… well, me. Come! Query me and I will answer you.

Saturday, 1PM: Writer’s Craft: Sustaining the Tension in Novels, with a passel of bad-asses named Lauren Roy, Matt Forbeck, and John Hornor Jacobs.

Saturday, 5PM: Character Craft: Supporting Cast — Real People Vs. Plot Devices, starring holy shit Terry Brooks, and Maxwell Alexander Drake, and Geoffrey Girard.

Holy shit, I’m gonna be busy! Good stuff.

(Bonus: download the entire symposium schedule here.)

What Else?

• Blackbirds remains $1.99 for Kindle, but only for one more week.

• You read the Star Wars: Aftermath excerpt at Entertainment Weekly? If you want a signed copy, there will be a signed, limited edition of the book — pre-order now at B&N or Books-A-Million. You will apparently receive a book that I have defaced and devalued with my autograph.

• One month till Zer0es, holy shit-wicker. I actually got a couple of early hardcovers, and they look freaking cool. (I always love the books where you touch the cover and it has texture and it’s shiny and you then get naked and rub it on your body wait what). You can pre-order now from a variety of favored book locations. Indie bookstores through Indiebound, for instance. Or Amazon. Or B&N. (For some reason it’s at a pretty deep discount at Amazon.) There will exist a pre-order bonus, too, which is that you’ll receive the first couple chapters of my next Harper Voyager novel, Myrmidon. (It counts if you pre-order now, by the way, no need to wait — I’ll post a link next week to a site that allows you to enter in pre-order details to Harper, and Harper will send you the two chapters of Myrmidon in August.)

• Hey, Kirkus reviewed Blackbirds! Full review here, but a glimpse: “The first in a series, this delightfully vicious and bloody urban horror novel provides a perversely entertaining introduction to a dangerous fugitive with a little something special up her sleeves.”

• Two scheduling additions: first, I’ll be at the 92Y in NYC on August 25th, helping to kickoff the launch of Libba Bray’s newest: Lair of Dreams.  Then, I’ll be at Doylestown Bookshop on September 2nd helping Fran Wilde launch her debut novel, Updraft!

• One woeful scheduling subtraction: I will no longer be attending the Central Coast Writer’s Conference in Cuesta College due to some family things. I may still attend in spirit (er, Skype!), and may be able to attend next year, but we’re all kinda working that out, still. Apologies in advance, but I have to make room for life stuff, sadly.

• You really need to read Paul Tremblay’s Head Full of Ghosts because holy fuck.

What the fuckity-snacks is wrong with you, dude?

Sorry, let me back up.

Earlier today I got a bit of hate mail — though I guess hate mail is strong, as the writer of said email was not like, threatening to murder me with a brick or anything — from what appears to be a male, adult reader of my young adult series. In particular, he read the third book in the series, which came out last week: The Harvest.

I won’t reprint the email here, but he said, and I quote, “I didn’t like that you had a main gay character reviling [sic] in a homosexual sexual relationship.” (Reveling, I guess he means?) He feels I “corrupted” the book with the presence of “gay male relationships.” He then added that he feels I was jumping on some kind of “bandwagon,” which I assume (he did not clarify) means that I was doing this to fill some kind of diversity bingo card. Finally, he concluded that it “didn’t matter” or “effect [sic] the story” that the character was gay so why include it at all?

Here is my response that I won’t actually bother sending to him, but maybe he’ll read it here:

Dear Pouty McGee:

Thank you for reading my book. That’s nice of you.

I’m sorry* the book features gay characters who love each other and engage in sex. I suppose the more pleasing alternative to you would be for the characters to suffer in loveless abandonment and quietly pray to themselves while looking directly at heterosexual pornography, but that feels fucking goofy to me, so I didn’t write it that way.

I’d much rather write characters who are nuanced and complicated and who also are free to partake in the human spectrum of love and sex and sexuality (and their opposing sides which is betrayal and breakups and the loneliness that results).

I did not do this to jump on some kind of gay male bandwagon, though I would assume that a gay male bandwagon would be a lot of fun. I love both bands and wagons very much.

That said, while I do not subscribe to the notion of diversity bingo or writing books simply to fill some kind of imaginary social justice quota, I do like to think that it’s important to write books that feature people who aren’t me because I really, really hope that my readership is not just a room full of beardo white dudes with grumpy sourpuss faces staring at each other. Diversity matters to my readership, and I don’t mean that in a salacious “equates-to-sales” way, but rather in a, “equates-to-acknowledging-the-vast-complexity-of-the-humans-who-exist-around-us” kinda way. I also think it’s vital to read books that aren’t by people like me so that my own perspective is opened up. You should try that. Maybe you thought because I looked like you in some way we shared a certain bigoted point-of-view, like how sometimes white guys go up to other white guys and then say racist or misogynist stuff thinking that our whitemaleness is enough of a self-selected symbol, like it’s basically an invisible Swastika or Confederate Flag imperceptibly branded across our foreheads to indicate a shared social shittiness.

I did not write the character into the story because he affects the story, but at the same time, he does reflect it — the Heartland begins as a world where teenagers are forced to marry each other, and that means very explicitly that the Empyrean government enforces heterosexual couplings and nothing else. Which is a pretty horrible place to be as a person who isn’t heterosexual like, say, how America was just a few short months and years ago. Also, is gayness supposed to be a “plot point” if the character features? Is that essential? Why does that not apply to straight people? Why weren’t you mad that the character’s straightness didn’t matter and affect the story? And how exactly is that supposed to happen? The bad guys build a machine meant to run on one kind of sexual orientation or another? “BRING ME MORE GAYNESS THE MACHINE MUST FEED.”

I think your complaints are weird. What the hell, man. What the hell. Maybe you’re a parent, and that’s what this is? Certainly a lot of the complaints I receive from the readers of my YA work are from adults who have teenagers. These parents tend to be mad because I acknowledge that teenagers sometimes (gasp, I know) have sex and do drugs and say naughty words. One reviewer once said that teenagers, carte blanche, don’t say bad words. Like it’s never happened in the history of teenagerdom. But ignorance of teen habits is how you get abstinence training which is how you get pregnant teenagers and bad MTV reality shows about those pregnant teenagers. Teaching abstinence is like telling people not to ever get in a car (ever!) instead of teaching them where the fucking seatbelts are. Either way, your kids will not be harmed by fictional exposure to gayness, or gay sex, or bad words, or sex in general, or drugs, or any of that. I got bad news, Jack — your kids go to school and live in the world and that means they’re in the middle of it. That’s just how it is. Better to lend narrative context instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.

Your teenagers are probably socially way ahead of you, by the way.

Is it just that you think two dudes making out is gross and weird? Because that’s gross and weird if you think that. Don’t be gross and weird. Be awesome and cool instead.

Oh, and as a sidenote, you’re on the third book of a series and this character isn’t new, so…? The whole gay thing has kinda been in there since the first book. (Not to mention: the book is filled with violence and yet, none of that seemed to bother you at all. Ah, Puritanical handwaving. Violence is cool. Love is bad. Good times.) How’d you get here? There were signs. Big gay signs. That had to be a willful choice on your part, or you don’t know how to count. If it’s the former, then I ask again: what the hell? If it’s the latter, I remind you: it’s 1 then 2 then 3, not 3 then 2 then 1. I’ll let my four year old teach you about counting and I think I’ll also let him tell you about loving consensual relationships between adults of any stripe because he literally has no idea that any of this is wrong and in fact I’m pretty sure he doesn’t even notice at all.

Anyway, thanks for reading! Here is a picture of a cuddly pug** to help soothe you.

*not sorry

**not a photo of a cuddly pug