The Traditional Revisional Freak-Out

There’s something to be said for freaking out on schedule.
The first draft of my novel has now received all of its critiques (thanks, guys!), and the verdict is in: It needs a lot of work.  As first drafts, you know, tend to do.  Hemingway infamously said that every first draft stinks, and while that’s not strictly true, for writers like me the beauty comes from the repeated going over of each scene.
I’m a “build in layers” kinda writer.  I write a scene, and then I go over it again and ask, “Would this character really respond this way?”  As it turns out her response is too matter-of-fact, so I tweak her dialogue to be more real and bristly.  Then I think, “What’s she doing while she’s talking?” and envision the environment, and realize that she’s in a janitor’s room, her hands are filthy, she has to wipe them off on a dirty rag.  Then I think, “What’s this secondary character over here thinking when our lead is wiping off her hands?” and I remember that this secondary character is a germ-o-phobe, of course she’s going to flip out at the idea of wiping hands off on a dirty rag, and presto!  More interesting interactions, more palpable environments, more realistic dialogue.
As the writing goes on, I erase more of the original framework until all that’s left is the layers of response I’ve built in.  Anything memorable in my fiction is usually the result of something in the second or third draft.
But of course, this novel sucks.  The beginning is far too slow and info-dumpy.  The lead character’s too passive, and people hate him.  The personal stakes aren’t high enough, and the entire city is whiteroomed and doesn’t feel like a post-apocalyptic New York City. In fact, two people I’ve handed it off to haven’t even bothered to read it at all, which means that frankly, I’m already at a 33% drop rate among devoted friends of mine.  And two more of the people who read it said that they probably would have put it down at point X.
I look at everything I need to fix and break right fucking down.
I can’t do this.  The problems that are inherent in this novel?  They’re unfixable.  Beyond the level of my current skill.  All my novel starts are too slow, the world’s too massive to not info-dump, I suck at description.  This novel will fail.  I am insufficient to the task.
My nightmare’s not rejection, man.  My nightmare’s acceptance.  I get it published, having poured my heart and soul into this, and it vanishes with a resounding “Meh.”  I’m not looking to write a good novel, but a great novel, a crazy page-turner that no one can put down… and what I have here is one of those anonymous fucking paperbacks that disappears onto the shelf with the rest of the books at Barnes and Noble, gets mildly mixed reviews, and vanishes without a trace.
I’m going to do my best and create a slippery novel that’s the equivalent of Olestra potato chips – something that slides through you, providing no nourishment or relevant calories, the only permanent mark an irritating stain at the end.
This freakout is, sadly, predictable. It happens at the 65-80% stage of any first draft, when you can’t do this oh my God it’s horrible, and it happens when you get the first batch of serious critique, when all these problems are unsolvable I’m not that good.  I know this is common.  Doesn’t mean I’m not running around in little panicked Chihuahua circles now, but at least I know this is where I’m supposed to be in the process.
And tomorrow, I will take notes and hope that I can do better and look at all of the fucking cracks in this and reference Elizabeth Bear’s definition of a novel as “A piece of prose fiction between 80,000 and 150,000 words in length, with a flaw,” and remember that I do the work on the finer points.  And that work revisioning is hard, and it’s terrifying because it puts you smack right fucking looking at all of your lack of talent, and you’re going to do it anyway because hopefully maybe you won’t shatter it all to fucking pieces during the revision process.  Maybe you’ll assemble these fragments into something beautiful.  Maybe you’ll manage something.
But today?  Today, I am a terrible goddamned writer.  I’m going to try to live with that, and try not to freak too much out, and play some Deus Ex.
This is normal.  This is expected.  This is to be handled.

The Clarion Blog-A-Thon Prizes

I can’t believe that I forgot to announce who actually won the prizes, but that’s my Etch-A-Sketch brain for you.  So let me announce.
The winner of the Neil Gaiman and Michael Zulli poster is Jeremy Wiggins.  Which is good, because he’s a die-hard comics nerd.
The winner of the Catherynne M. Valente jewelry-and-signed-book is Kate Parkinson.
Next year: I’ve gotta get even more prizes for y’all, since the two don’t seem like nearly enough.  Even so, we raised $1,850 for Clarion, so thanks so much to everyone!

Apologizing By Evidence

The analysis of this fight, and my subsequent apology, will tell you what you need to know about our twelve-year marriage, and why it thrives to this day.
The source of this scuffle was simple: I was due to leave for Connecticut in half an hour, and Gini and I were having a fight.
The problem was simple: Gini was asking when I was leaving. I, in turn, asked her why she was asking – because I could delay my leaving for an hour, if she had something sufficiently pressing and needed the car.
Gini, in turn, proceeded to ramble on for valuable minutes of the remaining time I had left – I still had to pack and shower – not actually telling me what she wanted, just a bunch of apologetic preamble that I told her I didn’t need.  I needed to know what I could do for her.  I cut her off once, twice, three times, asking her to get to the point and just tell me what she wanted me to actually do.  She did not.  Voices were raised, shouting began.
Then Gini got up quietly and left the room with that stricken “I am not dealing with this”  look on her face I, unfortunately, know so well.
Here’s what you need to understand. I’m right.  I still think I’m right.  I wanted to know one thing at a time when I had very little time before I left – something that I was willing to do to benefit her – and Gini was dorking around when I needed straightforwardness, not excuses.  She should have just said what was on her mind: namely, “I have a hair appointment, would you mind leaving an hour later so I don’t have to walk back a mile in the heat with newly-cut hair?”
But I was also ridiculously stressed about leaving for Connecticut.  I didn’t want to drive nine hours alone.  I was stressed to the gills because I’m an introvert, and the last three weekends have been all filled with people, and the next three weekends would be all filled with people, and every circuit in my body was – is – screaming for an afternoon alone to recharge.  I was nervous about visiting my Grammy, who is going downhill (as you’d expect from a 92-year-old) and I didn’t want to reenact the hellishness that was my maternal grandmother’s slump.
So I sat there, and after a few minutes of DON’T WANNA I found Gini and apologized.
I did not apologize because I felt like apologizing.  But looking at the available evidence – stressed Ferrett, rushed on time, stricken Gini – everything around me suggested that I was, in fact, being an asshole.  In fact, the only data point that didn’t suggest that I was being a jerk was the little voice inside shrieking, She’s wrong! You’re so right! – a voice I’ve learned, over the years, often leads me astray.
I was apologizing based on pure track history.  I know Gini well enough to know that nine days out of ten, when she gets that look on her face, I’ve crossed a line I shouldn’t have.  I know me well enough to know that when my energy supplies are worn to the marrow after a solid month of socializing, I act funny.  And we cuddled, and I figured out what she wanted, and I left later.  More importantly, I left for Connecticut with the feeling that we loved each other, not dashing out for three days apart after a nasty fight and having to patch it up on the road.
Sometimes, you need to look at yourself and go, “Okay, internally this feels completely correct… But viewed from the reactions of others and my situation, would a smart investigator conclude that I’m actually in the right here?”  Because every so often, you’re gonna  wind up in a situation where you’re in a bad headspace – stress, PMS, a little too wired on one drug, legal or not – and you’ve gotta be able to step outside to look at it objectively.
Cuddled up on the bed, Gini and I discussed this.  She laughed.  “You think I only apologize when I think I’m wrong?  Oh no, my love.  I do it too.”
This is why we’ve weathered twelve years.

How The Ferrett Fucks

A friend of mine hooked up with a crush of mine last weekend.  When I pressed for the inevitable details, I was told that she “fucks like a beast.”
I tried to think of how past lovers would describe me, if pressed.  I don’t think “beast” would be the term that came to mind. So I conjectured several potential descriptions:

• “Ferrett fucks like a cold shrimp.”
• “Ferrett fucks like a mattress sale.”
• “Ferrett fucks like a Denny’s restaurant at three-thirty in the morning, right after the bars have let out.”
• “Ferrett fucks like a borscht belt comedian working a hostile room after one too many glasses of Manischewitz.”
• “Ferrett fucks like… well, you know that pair of shoes that’s always hanging from the telephone line from the laces, the ones you always wonder how they got up there?  Ferrett fucks like they got up there.”
• “Ferrett fucks like a carnival, but not Ringling Brothers, like that little carnival with the beat-up ponies who comes along and sells you elephant ears with too much sugar on them.”
• “Ferrett fucks like a Ferrett.”

Suggestions welcome.

The View From A Thousand Different Points

Here is a flowchart, telling you how to pick up a woman.  It’s long, and visual, and probably pretty effective.
I can’t stop reading the fucking thing.
See, viewed from one perspective, the whole Pick-Up Artist thing is an eminently rational response to a common conundrum: I’d like to have sex with someone I find attractive.  How do I do that?  Well, let’s use science!  And so the breaking down of the stages of flirtation into small, easily-digestible chunks and methodologies is something that really is quite helpful for guys looking to know how to charm a girl – or at least a certain type of girl.
Viewed from another perspective, it’s absolutely goddamned creepy.  It’s mind-manipulation at its crudest, using hooks to push the animal centers of a certain type of woman to goad them into having sex with you.
Yet viewed from another perspective, I mean, shit, isn’t that kind of crude hooks what corporate America does all the goddamned time?  We’re flooded with advertising and political campaigns designed to do exactly what the Pick-Up Artists do – hell, Yahoo! has at least an article a week on “How Supermarkets Manipulate You.”  We’re in an age where scientists are paid to find our weakest points – they’re like a psychological karate-master, knowing that if they hit us in the back of the knees, we go down like this every time.
The reason we don’t find that every bit as creepy as the Pick-Up Artists are a) we rarely get a raw look inside the mind-process of a corporation in the same way that we get a look inside the brains of Mystery and company, b) “men wanting to have sex” is often seen as inherently a creepy thing for men to do, and “women consenting to have sex with men” is something that OMG WOMEN DON’T WANT ICKY SEXX THEY MUST BE MEZ-MO-RIZED, and c) the corporations that create that sort of mind-scanning really don’t want you to look too closely at it, so they tamp down that particular animal terror.
But somewhere inside the corporation are a bunch of modified Pick-Up Artists, looking at your buying and voting habits with just this kind of creeptastic eye, looking at you as though you were a Skinner box with buttons to punched.  Their goal: find those buttons.
Yet viewed from another perspective, is learning manipulation explicitly really bad?  I mean, shit, speaking as a guy who had to learn whatever charm he possesses naturally, I can tell you that when you have zero skills in the “get people to like you” department, the folks at the top of the high school social pyramid did things that seemed like magic.  I had to watch them and learn things that seemed elementary to you, like “Don’t wear a shirt full of chocolate milk stains” and “Don’t interrupt people to tell them how they’re wrong.”
Some people have the charm naturally.  But that charm is still a form of manipulation, whether they consciously honed it or not.  They may not overtly mean to charm you when they touch your shoulder, but somewhere deep within they’ve learned that the shoulder-touch gets better results, and they do it.  So why is it creepy when one person is naturally talented enough to do something by a set of naturalized instincts, and the other learns it through hard work?
Isn’t that just punishing the socially inept, telling them that if they don’t have it, they never should?  Shouldn’t we encourage the kind of charm that sways us, no matter where it comes from? Why is it kind of a creepster thing to say, “I totally live by Dale Carnegie’s ‘How To Win Friends And Influence People’?”
To me, it feels like a way of saying, “We had all this talent naturally, and you shouldn’t be able to get it if you didn’t acquire it.”  That barrier to entry is creepier, in its own way.
Yet then I go back to the flowchart, and I see some pretty creeptastic shit buried in there: “It’s on, bitches!” and “No matter what she says here [at this stage], you’ll have to accept her” and “If all three answers are sexual, she’s a tease… you’ll have to build a lot of rapport to get through her barriers.”  GUH.
And I realize that for all of my rationale that this could be a thing that could help the innocent asocial nerd become a person who can get by in “normal” society, this is also the kind of Lex Luthor shit that can turn a nerd into a guy who views other people as safes to be cracked.  You wind up with a bunch of super-nerds, charming on the outside, shitty on the inside – not pick-up artists but con artists.
Then I loop back to the corporations doing the same shit to us, and I know for a fact they don’t give a rat’s ass about me aside from the contents of my wallet.  Shouldn’t I be more concerned about their manipulations, which are constant and effective?  What about the lonely nerds who could benefit from this?  What about the creepy way that a lot of the negative reaction to all of this assumes, on one level, that women are so hostile to sex that any normal guy who gets a “hot” woman to sleep with them must be an evil mastermind?
It’s creepy.  It’s useful.  It’s institutionalized.   And so I keep looking at this goddamned flowchart over and over again, trying to fit all the pieces together, and they don’t quite mesh.