Clarionniversary, Mega-Three-Year Edition

Three years ago, I walked out of Clarion and called a mulligan on two decades of bad writing.  I had, I said, never written a thing before this day, at least not one that counted.  And so I started clear.
I use these anniversaries to look over what I’ve done since then – both to remind myself of what I’ve accomplished, and to serve as a showcase to others as to the kind of effort it takes for a mediocre-to-good author like myself to scrape the bottom layers of what one might call “a professional” career.  (Not that I’m ashamed of what I’ve done – I’m quite proud – but I’m nowhere near a household name, and have been nominated for no awards.)
This is what it takes.  At least for me.
In three years:

• 51 stories started
• 46 stories completed
• 32 stories final-drafted and submitted to at least one market
• 172 rejections (or, on average, one rejection every six days for the past three years)
  
• 19 stories sold
• …6 to “professional” markets
• 12 stories published
• 3 stories made into audio productions
• 6 stories retired when I realize I’d be embarrassed if I got them published
• 1 novel written and completed
• 1 old novel read for notes and revision

There are geniuses out there.  For the rest of us, it’s a lot of hard work.

Covered In Bees: Who Doesn't Like Bees?

So to sum up, for those just arriving: our bees have had a rather tumultuous start this year thanks to mistakes we’ve made as novice beekeepers:
1)  We didn’t realize there was an old queen in the box of bees we got (her tiny cage was lost in a mass of other bees when we dumped them in), and as such the new queen we introduced was stung to death while the old queen was still trapped in her cage, unable to lay.  This set our bees back by about a week.
2)  When the bees stopped eating the sugar syrup we gave to them, we thought they were full up and stopped feeding them.  As it turned out, there was a heavy nectar flow that week, and the bees prefer actual food – but when that nectar flow stopped, our bees weren’t necessarily starving, but not fully-fed enough to build a colony from scratch.
The whole cycle of Ohio bees is one steady, constant goal: survive winter. They’re out there gathering honey so when the cold winds come and all the plants die, they have enough food to live on.  Gathering honey requires a queen to lay enough eggs so that they have the workers to gather the pollen and nectar, and the workers bees to build a lot of wax comb to store the honey in safely, and enough flowering plants to harvest from. If any of these fails, the bees can’t achieve critical mass and they starve to death, or freeze to death.
Given that we were starting from zero, dumping the bees into an empty box, this year’s had tension.  We feel responsible for the bees.  We brought them all the way out here from California, and if they don’t make it it’s our fault.  So our out-of-the-box errors feel like we’re killing innocent creatures.
Fortunately, we’ve been feeding the crap out of them and they seem to be responding, so now comes the next step: the honey super.
The honey super is when we take the training wheels off – they have enough honey to survive the winter, so now we put a smaller box on top that the bees will, hopefully, store their excess honey in.  In a month or two, we take off the box and harvest it, via a rather sticky method that we’ll doubtless need help with.
Does this mean we’ll get any honey?  Who knows?  Our beekeeping has been a little crazy.  We might get a little.  At this point, we’re not doing it for the honey, we’re doing it to shelter our very strange and fuzzy pets.
In any case, you can watch us trying to get into the hive here, and failing because holy crap the bees have sealed everything up with propolis:

And here is the second video of us looking at the top – look at all that honey!  That looks like more than enough to me, maybe a little too much.

There’s one other video of us after this, but it refuses to upload to YouTube – and it’s not that interesting anyway, since at this point the bees were starting to get riled and we stopped prematurely.  (It was a cloudy day, which bees do not like, and hence a bad day to be in the hive – but the weather this week isn’t good, and we needed to get that honey super in there.)
The honey super is currently wedged in between the two “living” bee supers, because we want to encourage the bees to build some comb in there.  Once it’s firmly established – say, a week – we’ll rearrange the boxes and put the honey super back on top.  It currently looks like this:

The thing that still amazes me is that I pulled a muscle in my back lifting that box of bees.  They told me that bee boxes could get to eighty pounds, but that seemed crazy – when I dumped the bees in, they weighed three pounds.  (Which, at the time, seemed like a lot of bees.)  And, when you have a box of goddamned stinging bees in your hands, you can’t afford to drop it.  My back still aches, and we’re ordering a “placeholder” super that we can lift frames out and put them back in, just to lighten the load.
Still a cool hobby, though.
 

Gifts And Obligations

I used to be very generous to my girlfriends.  If they had a breakdown at three in the morning, I’d be there at a phone call; if they were feeling insecure at a party, I’d drop everything to give them reassurance that they were loved and wonderful and beautiful.  I prided myself on how I’d always be there when they needed me.
It was also a dirty lie.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I gave an uncommon amount of support for their various psychological quirks… But it wasn’t generous at all. Because – and not that I would have understood this at the time – I wasn’t giving them any support at all.
I was billing them.
Quietly, and without letting them know, with every act of kindness I was tallying it up: When I have my breakdown, this is what you owe me.  And sure enough, being a histrionic lad,  I would eventually have some sort of embarrassing meltdown in a public place – and if they weren’t willing to drop everything to tend to my needs at that instant, I would be furious.  Did they know what I did for them?  Did they understand how much that cost me?  And this is how you repay me?
It was a shitty way of perpetrating a relationship.
I’d pretend to be giving, but there’s a trick about giving: you actually have to expect nothing, or at least very little, in return.  Now, there’s nothing wrong with a tit-for-tat relationship, as long as you know there’s a bill coming. Yet I’d claim there wasn’t a bill due, that this was just the way I was, no, don’t you like who I am?  Which surprised and baffled and angered them in the end when they found out that no, I wasn’t actually that way, I was that way when I thought my payoff was coming.
I was not giving them gifts; I was giving them obligations.
Obligations can be very subtle things; the difference between a gift and an obligation can be as a tiny as a thank-you note.  If you give me a gift and think it would be polite to get a thank-you note in return – not just a “thank you,” but the formalized, hand-written note on fine stationary mailed to your door – then that’s one thing to think it’s something people should do.  But if you give me a gift, unasked, and then become furious when I have not spent the time to write you a note for a thing I never asked for, well… you’re giving me obligations.
This happens a lot in relationships, usually to awful detriment.  A partner will unilaterally stop doing something they love doing – going to their Friday night game, flirting, eating fatty foods – in the expectation that their partner will give up flirting, going out on Friday nights, or eating fatty foods.  Naturally, they won’t mention that they’ve done it to try to force a similar reaction – no, this is because it was hurting your feelings, or because I just didn’t feel like doing it any more, or you know, I could stand to lose a few pounds.
Weeks go by. The initiating partner feels spurned, angry, robbed – because after all, they did this beautiful thing for their partner and their partner does not appreciate it.  They’re giving up the good things in their lives, and what has their partner done in return?  Nothing.  They’ve done nothing.  Eventually, after months of stifling silence, there comes a moment when all of this spurious generosity becomes too much to bear –
– and it often turns out that their partner wasn’t even particularly bothered by the thing they gave up. Sure, it’s a little nicer if you’re available any Friday night I call, but I’d be happier if you were out with people you liked.
The truth is, my girlfriends probably didn’t need me to drop everything at a moment’s notice to be there for them.  It was nice, sure, but was it worth the ultimate cost of what they’d pay?  No.  I know this because they left, repeatedly, one after another after being presented with the tab.
This is not, mind you, an exhortation to give everything without counting cost.  If you’ve let someone know that you expect a thank-you note and after five generous gifts they’ve never written one, well, it starts to feel like a sign of disrespect.  And it’s not saying that you shouldn’t praise your partner for the things they do – Gini and I practice effusive, constant feedback for the most trivial of household chores.
Yet when you think you’re being generous to your partner by doing this thing for them, ask yourself: am I giving them a gift, or an obligation?  If you’re giving them something so precious that you wouldn’t be willing to give it up without recompense, maybe you should think again.

How To Become An Unfriendly, Festering Cesspool

You’d think that most comics shops are opened for the purpose of selling comics.  You would be wrong. Most comics shops are opened for this reason:
“Hey, you know what’d be cool?  I could open a comics shop and hang out with all my friends!  And we’d read comics all day, and make mad cash!”
This is also why most comics shops fail miserably. They’re not business enterprises, but rather a feeble attempt to start a cult of personality.  Yet that attempt to create what is, essentially, a funded safe haven for one guy and his band of friends is an abject lesson in how to create an inbred, hostile, and yet somehow successful environment.
Because the truth about any of these comics stores is that while they’re radically dysfunctional to the outside world – take the offensively sexist and racist public discourse of Larry’s Comics – there’s a core of people at the inside who are continually insisting that people “just don’t get it.”  What don’t you get?  They’re good people at heart!  If they say something that comes off as insulting, well, you’re either a humorless jerk or you just don’t get who they really are. They’re doing good things.
So how do we get to the point where you have a small group of people on the inside, insulated from a reality that should by all rights be banging on their doors loud enough to wake anybody up?  It’s a process, and it can be applied to places far and wide beyond the mere comics shop.
(Which is not to say that the comics shop is automatically a bad place to shop – there are wondrous proofs that comics can be sold professionally and with great knowledge.  I’ll vouch for Carol and John’s Comic Shop and Modern Myths as wonderful, inclusive comics shops anyone can shop at.)
The first step in creating an unfriendly haven is to create a safe space.  Safe spaces are often good things – but they’re also a place where, devoid of any real dissenting opinion, you can all quietly come to a consensus on any damn fool opinion you want to.  As such, find an area where you and your friends are enough of a critical mass that anyone who comes in from the outside will be sufficiently outnumbered that they cannot speak up comfortably.
That “comfortably” is the real trick.  If you create a walled-off area where no new members join your little posse, it will become immediately evident that you’re isolated. No, you want a place where anyone can walk in, but if they disagree with you you can shout them down and win the argument by sheer exhaustion.  This can be in a physical place, where merely having two people arguing with you gets quickly overwhelming to most people – or it can be an online forum, where the people who have the time to argue with you have a lot of spare time and a willingness to call all their friends in to say, “Hey!  Look at this dork and his dumb opinions!”
What will happen is that you’ll have the illusion of a free space, where anyone can play – because, after all, anyone can walk in through that door! – but is effectively a gated community where any dissension from the core philosophy you’ve created leads to people feeling alienated, mocked, and dismissed.
(It also helps if you can come up with short-hand methods to dismiss people who disagree with you – it’s particularly good if you can come up with a nickname for each kind of unwanted behavior.  People who express concern about the practically nude pictures of women hanging on your wall?  Slot all of those concerns into a “tightass” name and shove them off to the side, no matter what the varied reasons for their concern are.  Balling them into a group is a wonderful shorthand way of saying, “They’re beyond the reach of reason, so we’re not obligated to interact with them any more.”  Bonus points if you can start reciting their own arguments to them before they even make them.)
The next step is to provide rewards for those who believe.  In-jokes are the constant currency of unfriendly havens, serving two purposes: first off, they’re alienating to outsiders, allowing you to laugh (often at their expense) while leaving them in the dark.  But more than that, in-jokes are a reward to those who have the stamina to stay with your group; they’re like little puzzles to be solved.  When they can make the in-joke properly and get a response, that’s the day they know they’ve become a member.  Better yet, creating in-jokes provides a bonding between members!
Like safe zones and comics shops in general, in-jokes are not automatically bad – but when you start using them in a way that makes people feel dumb for not getting them, then you’re successfully walling off the world.
The next step is rather blatant, and you’d think it would be hard to do – but humanity’s wired in a such a way that it’s the easiest trick in the world to pull off.  The trick is this:
Now that you’ve marginalized anyone who disagrees with you, start convincing people that this is the way the world works.
What you are doing here is not simply a group of isolated folks who’ve created their own splinter culture, but the way everyone secretly acts in private.  If they weren’t constrained by society – damn society! – this is what people would really feel, if they could only express such desires. At this point, you must all come to the tacit understanding that you have not created an artificial culture, but instead you have uncovered the true way that humanity acts.  This is freeing.  This is noble. This is honesty.
The people who disagree with you undertake a miraculous transformation: they’re no longer folks who have differing opinions on how to enact the same basic goodness that you believe in.  They are now people who are trying to suppress a righteous lifestyle.  They are trying to kill an open society because they are jealous of what you have.
Furthermore, because the people at the heart of this society are friendly, and infinitely caring to those in the circle, and are now (thanks to the reframing of this group’s efforts) trying to reclaim mankind from its flaws, they become Good People.  Good People are continually misunderstood.  If they offend someone, well, they didn’t mean to.  If they make a statement that is at its core deeply troubling, well, you don’t get their sense of humor!  They’re satirists!
And if the people on the outside refuse to believe that the people on the inside are good-hearted (or worse, say that their intentions don’t matter), well… the people on the outside are trying to tear down this whole society.  And as we all know, humans always react rationally and responsibly when they think someone’s attacking the society they live in.
It sounds stupid to think that this kind of hubris could be applied to a bunch of sexist comics shop owners… But a lot of the people who show up to these shops have been marginalized by the outside world.  They’ve been kicked about for so long that finding a place that welcomes them for who they are – or, at least, who they’re willing to be if they make a few changes – is an incredibly empowering experience. Going from “unwwashed nerd” to “vital member of this society” is something so strong that a lot of people will overlook all the other sins just to chase this flavor.
And because they came in from the outside world and were accepted after a little massaging of their opinions, they will insist to the heavens that this unfriendly haven is an open place where anyone can come in and sit down.  God help me, they genuinely believe it’s inclusive.  If you just have the right attitudes and a good sense of humor, of course.
This is how it happens.  This is the structure.
I could probably get a lot of nice comments if I ended this right now.  But here’s where I say something that’s uncomfortable:
You see this enclavish behavior in a hell of a lot of liberal circles as well.
A group of people get together who’ve felt marginalized by society, and they find an online forum, and they get together to form an inclusive, wonderful society where everyone can get along… Except that soon enough, they’ve got the numbers to effectively alienate anyone who doesn’t go along with the groupthink, and they utterly don’t see how insulting they often come off to outsiders, and they get so into believing in the equality and freedom and love that they have espoused here that they actually seem to forget that they have to make an argument to the outside world.
Within the group, [rights for group X] become such a given that anyone who asks why group X needs those rights is met with such a flurry of disdain and anger that they walk away, feeling insulted and chastised. Some significant percentage of folks with questions get labelled as “anti-X” when actually they’re just confused about the reason for a need, or insufficiently educated, or even on the fence about something, potentially able to be a convert  – and now they feel dismissed and insulted on top of it.
Unlike the comics shop owners, they have good intentions.  But they too get sucked into the vortex of making a place that feels good to them, at the expense of outsiders.  (And, one suspects, a lot of them would argue – just as the bad comics shops would argue – that they don’t need the people outside, they’re irrational jerks who can’t be talked to.)
The point is that to those within the circle, the comics shop feels genuinely welcoming and inviting – and they genuinely cannot see how off-putting they are to others.  And that’s not a comics shop urge – this is a human urge that even the best-intentioned fall into on a regular basis. But it saddens me when people with agendas I largely agree with become insular enclaves, because I genuinely think that part of any fight for the good fight has to involve outreach, not withdrawal.
How do you combat that?  Genuine inclusivity.  Having a couple of people who anger you on a regular basis to keep you honest – if all you hear are nice voices, angrily decrying stuff that other people on the outside are doing, you’re probably doing it wrong.  And listening to what each individual has to say as an individual, not as some stamped group of tightasses or X-ists or whatever disdainful group you try to slot them into.  And being willing, when called on the carpet by someone not inside the group, to take a look at what you’ve done and to see whether, in fact, your actions are really as meritous as you think.
Good comics shops run smoothly.  But they’re also not nearly as comfortable to live in as the unfriendly haven – you have to listen to complaints with a straight face, smile sometimes when you feel like slapping people, and go out of your way to address concerns that you may sometimes find ridiculous.  This isn’t to say that you take every complaint at the same value – but you listen to them and weigh them on an individual basis.
That’s how you keep the doors open, man.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

You should not trust me. I will lie to you about apes.
I do not mean to. But in my boyhood heart, the only movie that may be greater than Star Wars is the Planet of the Apes movie series.  Once a year, Channel 7 had “Ape Week” for its 4:30 movie, and showed all five movies, and my best friend Bryan and I always watched them together. Planet of the Apes was the first movie I recall seeing with not just one unhappy ending, but a slew of them; Colonel Taylor discovering it was Earth all along, Colonel Taylor detonating the super-nuclear bomb that blows up the world, Zira and Cornelius being shot as they try to protect their baby.
It’s no lie to say that the Planet of the Apes series taught me the meaning of the word “tragedy.”  It’s one of those film series that is in my DNA.  And so I am incapable of bringing you an honest review, because Rise of the Planet of the Apes was made by fanboys, for fanboys.
It is the perfect movie if you loved the original series.  (And no, I’ve never seen the Tim Burton version; when I heard what he did to the ending, I lost all interest.)
But let me take my pre-adolescent blinders off and tell you what Rise of the Planet of the Apes is: the best B-movie we’ve had in years.
The plot of Rise is simple: a kindly scientist, in his quest to cure his father of Alzheimer’s, infects a baby chimpanzee with a virus that boosts his intelligence.  The chimp, called Caesar, is in danger of being put down; as any good person would, the scientist smuggles him home and raises him as his own son.  But sad to say, the world is not quite ready to accept a super-intelligent chimpanzee.
…or at least this world.  Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a comic book movie, set in the kind of comic book world where everyone who are not the good guys exists for the sole purpose of oppressing them. The job is evil, the neighbor is evil, the primate refuge is evil.  Literally everyone who isn’t the hero of the movie goes out of their way to be a complete and utter bastard to the noble handful of men at the heart of this film, often for no good reason.
(Ironically, it’s erroneous on every level to say “noble handful of men,” because there’s one woman and one chimpanzee.  Such are the vagaries of language.  Let us continue.)
In a lesser movie (or for those who can’t appreciate the starkness of a comic-book world), this might be ham-handed – but the goodness of Rise is that the kindly scientist and poor, clever Caesar are so sympathetic, so trying to be good, that all the meanness does is make them shine brighter.  Andy Serkis’ performance as Caesar is brilliant, since Caesar has only three lines of dialogue in the whole film – and yet he is the protagonist, on-screen for long periods of time.  It is a special form of physical acting where emotions can be conveyed so perfectly with a body movement that we feel Caesar’s betrayal at the world he was born into, burn with his desire to be free.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a perfect example of what happens if you do the two things that are important in a movie: give us characters we can root for, and give them an emotional arc we believe in.  We utterly believe that Caesar wants to be treated with dignity, understand why he becomes a leader, understand his motivations for ultimately leading (spoilers!) an ape rebellion against humanity.  We utterly believe that the human scientist, so bland he barely deserves a name, wants to do the right thing in both curing Alzheimer’s and in protecting his friend Caesar. Their reasons for acting are clear, their goodness manifest.
This emotional truth salvages the monstrous plot holes in the movie.  This is a comic book movie with a soap opera timeframe, and we have such corkers as:

• A chimpanzee in a testing facility can not only arrive pregnant, but give birth without anyone noticing it in the slightest.
• A man accidentally exposed to an experimental virus in full view of his co-workers, boss, and the CEO of his company, is allowed to go home without being tested. Furthermore, when he disappears from work for a week without calling in sick, not one person thinks to check in on and him and see if anything might have gone awry.
• There is a home for wayward primates in California (not the zoo, which is a separate place) that is a) large enough to hold about fifty various primates, b) is run by people whose sole job seems to be to torture monkeys, c) is under government control but run by a father-son team where the father seemingly expects this to be a family business, and d) actually has accumulated fifty monkeys, orangutans, and silverbacked apes.  How many random monkeys are running around in California, anyway?
• Despite the fact that the Evil Corporation of Evil supposedly discontinued all development of the Mystery Drug three years ago, said corporation still has pallets of professionally-packaged ampules of the Mystery Drug being ferried about conveniently in plain view for the good doctor to steal.  And nobody seems to notice these drugs going missing.  Ever.

But you know what?  You can pick holes in this film all day long, but the truth is that it’s no less enjoyable for having them.  The film is not necessarily about the intellectual journey, but the emotional one, and Caesar’s journey from helpless baby to chimp commander is what rings true.  The heart of Planet of the Apes has always been that monkey or man, what makes someone a thinking being is the heart – and Caesar has heart.   It’s not a great film, but it’s a wondrous good film.
And it’s an even better film if you love the original movie, since there are all sorts of callouts to the original – yes, someone says, “Take your damn hands off of me, you damn dirty ape” and someone says “It’s a madhouse! A madhouse!” – but there are subtler tributes, such as a chimp being called “Bright Eyes” and Caesar playing with a model of the Statue of Liberty.
These in-jokes and tributes render me blind.  It’s a movie that fits perfectly into canon – so perfectly, in fact, that if it didn’t negate the beautifully tragic time-loop of Zera and Cornelius, I’d cheerfully jettison all past history and slot it into 1968 canon.  As it is, I don’t know which I prefer more, but I know this: it’s a good film.  It’s worthy of the Apes franchise.
Then again, I might be lying. Don’t mean to.  But you know, you should beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil’s spawn.  A wise person once said it, and it never rings truer than when I am discussing apes.