You Are All Bad And You Should Feel Bad If You Think This

When I discuss health care, people tell me, “I have good insurance.” I always reply, “Have you gotten seriously sick?  Have you ever had to make a serious claim on your insurance for major surgery or a large-scale illness?”
To which they have until this point inevitably replied, “Why, no, I haven’t.”
You don’t know, then.  So shut the hell up.
The problem I have with a lot of the health care debate is that it frames “health insurance” as some sort of magic shield where everything is covered and you can’t go broke.  But here.  Take a look at Jay Lake, successful fantasy writer and owner of a fully-fledged and well-paying Day Jobbe with what he considers fairly good insurance.  He got cancer, pretty bad cancer that’s required multiple surgeries and chemotherapy.  He’s paying roughly $200 a week in co-payments for his medicine,  and estimates that the cancer is costing him at least $10,000 a year in medical bills alone.  No word on what it costs him in terms of time off from work, his inability to attend writing workshops as an instructor, his lost writing time thanks to cancer-brain, et al. Lord knows what will happen if his Day Jobbe is callous and finds that Jay’s fogged brain is a liability to his productivity, and sorry, time to let you go.
If not Jay, then think of my sister-in-law Kristi, who had health insurance through her husband.  She got a deadly, rare illness – and the insurance company refused to pay for the only known surgery that was known to treat it.  In the meantime, they pulled every bit of bureaucratic bullshit they could get, delaying her payments to the point where she had to keep switching to other pharmacies because it was three months before they paid up, switching representatives whenever she convinced one this surgery was in her favor, denying routine claims on the first couple of tries.  If it wasn’t for our constant advocacy (terminally sick people don’t have the strength to fight bureaucracy) and her family kicking in the money to hire a lawyer, she’d probably be dead.
Insurance doesn’t necessarily save you.  As my wife the bankruptcy lawyer can tell you, over 60% of all bankruptcies in the US are due to medical costs…. And 78% of those people had insurance when they started out.
Here’s the deal: your insurance is always good on paper.  But that’s like assuming all your friends are close, reliable buddies because they hang out at the bar and drink beer with you.  Of course your insurance is awesome now, when all you’re doing is the occasional doctor’s visit for that cold and the Advair you need to keep breathing!  You’re not asking anything of them.
The real test of a friend comes when your partner’s left you, and you have to move out of hir apartment, and there’s a shit-ton of heavy dressers to move while you’re on the verge of crying and your girlfriend’s there and there’s a good chance a new fight’s gonna start up while you decide who gets the Blu-Ray, and your friends know all this is likely to happen and yet they show up anyway.
Every insurance is wonderful until you say, “BTDubs, I’ve got $150,000 in surgery I need.”  Then a lot of them make their excuses at the bar and find somewhere else to be on moving day.
So you know what? Stop talking about “insurance” as though the act of having insurance keeps you safe from any illness.  There are levels of insurance, and levels of disease even within good insurance, that can still leave you utterly untouched or bankrupt should you get the wrong kind of sick.
That’s what the conservatives don’t want to acknowledge: you can do everything right according to the system and still get screwed.  That’s the core problem.  And I don’t mind them exploring other solutions to it aside from Universal Health Care, but I do mind them acting as though “insurance” is a generically wonderful thing that saves everyone equally.
It doesn’t.  Try to face reality when making decisions, folks.

Can't Decide If This One's For Poppy Or Seanan

You know what I want?  A “LARRY UNDERWOOD AMERICAN TOUR” T-shirt, showcasing all the lovely stops Larry made on his trip across America, flogging his great new hit “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?”
The year would have to be smudged, of course.  And the final dates of the tour would be Boulder, then Vegas.
 

A Letter To Those Who Would Write To Me

About once a week, I get an email from someone, saying, “You don’t know me, but I’m in this situation with my partner, and I don’t mean to bother you, but I wanted to ask for your advice.”
I just want to be clear: that is totally cool. Do not hesitate to contact me. 
I would not write all these insights I have on having mostly drama-free relationships if I didn’t intend it to help.  I’m not saying I’m an infallible guru on such matters – I’m not necessarily correct, and often I have a very narrow window into your world – but if I can be of service, I am happy to.  It’s not an insult, it’s not a waste of my time, I’m happy to do what I can for you.
Now, my timeliness on this may be in doubt – I’m busy, sometimes you get spam-trapped, sometimes it takes a day or two  – but if you don’t hear from me, follow up.  You’re not an inconvenience.  I am deeply committed to helping people be happy as best I can, and if I fail, it’s not you, it’s me.  Yell at me.  I’ll come around.
The only non-cool thing?  I usually know who you are.  If you’ve commented in here a few times, I generally have some bead on you.  Don’t think you’re that forgettable, okay?  Though telling me where I know you from will help, because I have no idea that Danielle Dericky Deschamps is actually LJ User=CharityWhore.
(However, I usually don’t spread links asking for monetary assistance unless I know the people in question.  No offense, but if I’m asking people to donate money to a cause, that’s partially me vouching for them – so I have to believe personally.  That’s a tricky thing, since I don’t like to spam.  If I point folks at someone, I want it to be super-effective.)
 

The Ferrett's Hard Limits Of Dating

Writing The Wrong Scene

I spent three hours on Sunday writing a scene that didn’t work at all. My hero-protagonist Amichai was in prison after smuggling a pony into a hospital (don’t ask), and the antagonist paid him a visit to try to talk Amichai out of his rebellious, destructive, and self-harming ways. And though I technically added everything I wanted into the scene – MOAR CONFLICT! PHILOSOPHY! FINER-GRAINED CHARACTERIZATION! – in the end, it was still lifeless.
That novel had been rocketing along until this scene.  Suddenly, two interesting characters sat down for a chat, and it all cruised to a stop like a car with a blown tire.
I brought my new chapter to Gini, hoping that she’d tell me that it wasn’t as lifeless and uninteresting as I thought it was – but no.  She gave me the headshake, that little embarrassed lip-purse that means, “Yeah, you gotta fix this.”
I did not hold my breath until I turned blue.  Wanted to.  Didn’t.
When you spend three hours revising a 1,500 word scene – which is not a lot, it should be said, barely bigger than flash fiction – then that scene should be magnificent.  But though I’d fixed everything in that scene that I set out to do, it didn’t serve the purpose it needed to, which was to keep the ball rolling. It contained all the things that should be necessary to make it good, but it was like throwing raw meat, chopped carrots, and a whole onion into a cold pot of water and calling it stew.
I had to remind myself that this was a good thing.
When you’re a writer, you’re gonna have to toss out scenes from time to time.  That’s a positive thing, because it’s way better than the alternative, which is to keep a scene that you think is good but isn’t.
For me, the dead scenes are a boon and a curse – they’re a curse, obviously, because I’ve just spent my writing-time producing absolute dreck that needs to be thrown out.  But they’re also the place where I learn the most.  Figuring out why a scene is flat and lifeless is the clean-and-jerk of the writing process – I can’t just throw more words at it, I’ve already done that.  Something’s fundamentally wrong with the idea behind this scene.  And rather than endlessly tweaking the prose, I now have to get under the hood and figure out what, narratively, is wrong with the setup.
In the end, that’s what makes you a better writer.  You can dazzle them with prose, you can wow them with fun characters, but in the end the core unit of writing is the scene – what happens between these characters in this space.  The scene can be tilted towards action, or emotional growth, or self-reflection, but learning how to focus and refocus the scene for maximum effectiveness is a fine tool – and you can’t improve it by fiddling with some words.  You’ve gotta get under the deck, pry up some floorboards, ask the hard questions.
For me, after going for a long walk with Gini, what I realized was that the reason this scene didn’t work is that, at its core, it was two guys walking into a room and saying what was on their minds.  There was no subtext, because it was a straight-up appeal to save Amichai’s soul; there was no action, because Amichai was in prison and neither of them could move; there was no possibility of change, because the antagonist’s failure state was to leave Amichai alone to his own devices. There was no sense of forward motion because, although there was a lot of back-and-forth, the two guys entered the room in one emotional state and left it in that same state.
I could add all the words I wanted to this, but I’d be polishing a turd.  The problem was that I’d set the characters up wrong.
This led to a long and damp (it had begun to rain) conversation about what we needed to do to have the antagonist and the protagonist doing something interesting, something that could actually fail.  And how could we create not just conflict in words, but conflict in action?  What emerged was the bones of an entirely new scene that had Amichai interacting with a third party while in prison, and the stakes are now what the antagonist will do to the people who are trying to help Amichai.
Will this scene work?  I don’t know.  What I do know is that by breaking it down this discretely, I’ve learned something more about the building blocks of writing.
Viewed in terms of progress, I’ve spent four days working on a tiny block of words and produced nothing writable.  That’s depressing.
Viewed in the long term, I’ve spent four days discovering more about how to do this properly. That’s encouraging.
I’m gonna look at this as encouraging.