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.

So, as this week is my son’s 5th birthday, I thought it would be fun to take some of the completely random shit that spills out of his head and use that as the basis for a flash fiction challenge. Below you’ll find a list of quotes from my son.

Select one (or several, I don’t care) quotation and use it inside a piece of flash fiction.

Length: 1000 words-ish

Due by: Friday, May 27th, noon EST

Post at your online space. Link back in the comments.

The quotes:

“Can I put goggles on the dog?”

“There is a three-headed flying werewolf in that tree.”

“I can cut down a thousand trees with my teeth.”

“I will defeat it with Kitten Magic.”

“I will slice you into beef!”

“I can still see without a face.”

“You guys don’t make good choices.”

“They said it was a legend, but I know it’s real.”

“I’m gonna ride you like a turkey.”

“I am queen of the goats.”