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

Ah, that common refrain.

You shouldn’t just get a trophy for participating.

When everyone gets a trophy, nobody wins.

If everybody is special, nobody is special.

Second place is last place.

And on and on.

It’s a criticism pointed at millennials. Or, wait — Gen Y. No! Wait. Gen X.

SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY SOMEONE DECIDED THAT YOU ONLY DESERVED A REWARD IF YOU ACHIEVED TRUE APOTHEOSIS. YOU ONLY GET THE GOLDEN CUP IF YOU SLAUGHTER THE OTHER TEAM AND WEAR THEIR SKIN AS A CAPE AND TRANSFORM INTO THE GREAT BEAST WHO WILL DESTROY THE WORLD. THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE CHAMPION, HIGHLANDER. EAT YOUR WEAKER FOES. REMAIN STANDING ATOP A HILL OF INFINITE CARCASSES.

Except, that’s kinda horseshitty, isn’t it?

When did we become so cynical about participation?

So sour-faced about people who are doing stuff?

This is usually aimed at children — or the environment around children (meaning, parents, schools and other institutions), and it is aimed very squarely as a criticism, but let me tell you something as the parent of a five-year-old: getting a child to participate in something can feel like a Herculean task. Just getting your kid to sit down and DO THE THING THAT IS PRESENTLY BEING DONE can feel like the completion of an epic quest. You’d have an easier time stimulating the prostate of a galloping bison. Getting children to do the thing is difficult for an unholy host of reasons. Maybe they’re scared of the other participants. Or scared of failing. (Or scared of what you’ll think of them when they fail.) Maybe they’re bored. Could be that they don’t understand what’s being asked of them, or instead that they’re obstinate and would much rather do the OTHER THING instead of THIS THING. This only gets worse as a kid gets older because kids gather a lot of baggage about doing things, and sometimes that baggage is weighted with the (arguably capitalist) rhetoric of success and failure: you either WIN or you LOSE, it’s either PASS or FAIL, you’re the CHAMPION or you’re a SUCK-FACED SHITBABY. And teenagers kinda figure out that game, and they check right the fuck out. They stop participating, in part because it’s not cool, and in part because I think teenagers are actually surprisingly good at smell-testing bullshit. They can detect these cultural shenanigans, and so they cynically give the middle-finger to the entire process and they piss off somewhere to get drunk and grope each other.

But doing stuff? It’s how the world works. It’s what makes the world happen. Participation is pretty much everything. Winning is a narrow selection without much meaning. Most of life is just showing up and doing the work — whether that’s work with family, or school, or friendships, or a proper job. Show up. Do the work. Do the best. Be the best you. And if you do that? That’s amazing. Because most people don’t actually do that.

So.

When I was a kid, I did soccer afterschool. I hated it. Fuck soccer. Fuck everything about soccer. Fuck practice and the drills and the coach and any of the kids who liked soccer. I was young — this was elementary school — and even then the focus was on leagues and getting better not to get better but getting better to win. It was a competition.

Now, to be clear, there’s nothing inherently wrong with competing. At a certain level, that’s what you’re in to do, and why you get involved. But at that level, at the elementary school level, the purpose is — or should be — different. The purpose is, hey, here’s how you work on a team. Here’s how you follow instructions. Here’s how you exist as a physical being who moves his body around in the world instead of sitting in front of a television. Here is how you participate.

But that’s not how they treated it.

I didn’t get an award for participating even though that’s the whole point of me being there. Everyone should’ve been hopping up and down because HEY HOLY CRAP YOU’RE HERE ON THE FIELD AND YOU’RE SCARED AND YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND THAT’S EXCITING AND DAMNIT IF IT’S NOT A VICTORY JUST FOR SHOWING UP AND PUTTING IN THE TIME. Doing a new thing! Being present! Partaking in the task at hand! I wanted to feel good for that, not for enduring an onerous afterschool program driving me to be an elementary school soccer champion and by the way did I mention I fucking hate soccer. I would’ve been happy with a participation trophy — and no, I wouldn’t have gotten confused thinking that somehow it was equal to actually being the winner, because winning still feels like winning. Kids aren’t confused by participation trophies. They’re not idiots. Yet we disdain participation because it is expected.

The disdain of participation is tied in with our disgust surrounding failure. Participation is barely above loserdom, and many associate the two (remember: second place is last place). But that’s not how the world works. Or, more importantly, it’s not how the world needs to work.

As a writer, I meet lots of aspiring writers who want to write but are, for various reasons, afraid to do so. They’re afraid they’ll get it wrong. They look so far ahead they see a world where they won’t be able to accomplish the thing, so why bother? They have the desire to do the thing but are somehow afraid to participate for fear of failing and not winning.

Except, there is no winning.

There exists a sliding scale of various milestones, sure — cascading victory conditions that open up, but this is less like WIN THE GAME AND GET THE GOLDEN TROPHY and more like PLAY YOUR CHARACTER IN THE RPG SO YOU SECURE MORE EXPERIENCE POINTS TO BUY COOL UPGRADES TO YOUR LIFE. Writing doesn’t come with a golden cup. It’s not like once a year one writer gets to shed her carapace and emerge as J.K. Rowling to become the temporary headmaster of Hogwarts’ School of Storytelling Magic. Further, failure is an essential part of what we do. I wrote five books before I got the sixth one published. I wrote countless unfinished books in and around those first five. Life is constant failure. I’m sure I fucked up the first sentence I ever tried to write. I’m sure I shitted up the first paragraph. I have one of the first stories I ever wrote in elementary school, and newsflash: it is about as entertaining as watching a turtle fuck a hot jockstrap. (Actually, that might be pretty entertaining.) Failure is a critical state. My son does things all the time, and most of those things he does poorly — then he does them better, and better still, until he succeeds. And you might say, THERE, TA-DA, HE WON, and that’s true.

But I didn’t chide him for trying all the while until he got there.

Every time he tried and failed to write his alphabet, I didn’t play a fart sound buzzer and boo him from the bleachers. I did not merely champion him upon success, I cheered him for trying. For doing. For participating. Because that’s how you get there. And it’s the hardest part!

My writing career has been all about participating. Participating when it was hard. Participating when I did not know what the floppy fuck I was doing. Participating when other people told me not to bother because I was going to fail, because it was an impossible career, because I would make better money if I just dug ditches instead. Why try when you might fail? Doesn’t participation just lead to failure anyway? Why bother at all?

Participation has been my everything. And rejection has been vital to that. Rejection is a battle scar. It’s proof I’m in the arena. It’s some Viking-level shit. It’s two gladiators showing off their injuries: “I GOT THIS ONE WHEN I FAILED TO UNSEAT THROMGAR THE INCONTINENT FROM HIS WYVERNOUS TIGERWOLF. I LOST THE FIGHT THAT DAY, BUT I HAVE THIS COOL-ASS SCAR TO SHOW FOR IT. AND I LIVE TO FIGHT AGAIN.” Rejection is a sign of doing the thing and surviving. You know who doesn’t ever get rejections? People who don’t participate. Most people write a novel once every never, and if you’re writing a novel — or doing whatever the thing is that you wanna goddamn do — then that is a victory worth celebrating.

Here’s the thing: we say, we shouldn’t reward people for the bare minimum, and when we say that, we mean participation. But participation is not the bare minimum. Observing? That’s the minimum. Watching instead of doing is about as low as you go. The kids on the field kicking the ball? They’re doing shit, man. That’s awesome. Good for them. The parents in the stands decrying the trophies those kids will get for participating? They’re fucking spectators. They’re only bystanders, not doing a good goddamn thing except placing their own proxy hopes and dreams on their little genetic champions.

I cheer my kid when he tries a new food. I cheer him when he draws, or reads, or does something he’s afraid to do. I cheer his participation in life, because that’s what matters. That’s all we have. Winning is hollow. Getting to the end of the road only happens by walking it. Participation is its own special victory, and fuck anybody who says different. Double-fuck you if you hate on your own kids for not coming home with the win. Huzzah to adults for participating, too. You vote? Good for you. You participate in a charity? Fuck yes. You DO THE THING THAT MUST BE DONE? Have a lollipop, you wonderful person, you.

Get shut of the illusion that winning is everything, participation is nothing, failure is the end.

Perfection is the enemy. Failure is more important to us than victory. You will fail a lot more than you win, and you learn a lot more when you lose — you don’t improve through victory. Victory is a plateau. You improve by capitalizing on your loss.

Be present.

Participate.

No, it isn’t the only victory. Yes, it’s only a small one.

But it’s a victory just the same.

We all die. Nobody wins that contest. Life is not The Hunger Games, man.

But we are all here. We can all chip in. We can all do the thing.

Participate, and don’t be made to feel small for doing so.

GO DO THE THING. And celebrate doing it.

That is an old Emperor Palpatine action figure of mine given the macro treatment. I like doing that, sometimes — taking a gander at toys, particularly older ones, from a new angle.

Here’s an older one I took of Nien Nunb:

I may take some more — I have a bunch of the old figures and sets (which I let B-Dub play with because I ain’t no collector who keeps all the fun stuff in boxes, ew).

Anyway, them’s your macros for the day.

And in Star Wars-related news:

For some reason, Star Wars: Aftermath on Kindle is $1.99 — it started yesterday, and I’ve no idea how long it goes. Could be ten minutes, could be ten days. I expect it to actually end early today. So go grabby grabby. And MTFBWY, monkey-lizards.