It's Fine, I'm Sure

I was a medical transcriptionist for five years, which I think everyone should do.  Listening to doctors diagnose their patients lifts a much-needed veil on the idea of Doctors As Gods, and gives you more of an honest portrait of Doctor As Mechanic.  It’s not that doctors are bad people, it’s just that often they’re pretty confused and vexed that this patient isn’t responding to treatment, which is code for “When I do this, it usually works, and now it’s not, and I’m not sure why yet.”  If you work long enough for an orthopedic surgeon, eventually you start diagnosing exactly what he does – you don’t have his knowledge base, and honestly I’m not even sure what a torn rotator cuff is, but by God after working for Dr. George I knew what the symptoms were.
So I know when a doctor shrugs and goes, “No clue.  Let’s run every test on him just to see what turns up.”
Which is what’s happening now.  I had an ECG this morning, and am now wearing a holter monitor for the next 48 hours to take a recording of my daily heart rate.  Next week, I see a sleep doctor, and at some point I have a perfused stress test scheduled, where I go for a jog with an IV in my arm.
The ECG was an ultrasound, in which I laid down and a technician typed with her right hand and ran a sensor over my chest.  Basically, I served as an overweight mouse pad.  It hurt much more than I was expecting, as apparently I have a large chest cavity and she was jabbing that thing into my ribs fiercely enough I was concerned about bruises.
Then I saw my heart.
Normally, I’m thrilled by medical procedures.  You may remember how gleefully I posted the photos of my gum surgery.  But this time was like looking into the void; I saw this grainy convulsing sack of flesh and thought, that’s the failure point.  If that goes, everything I am dies.  My heart, which I’d always thought of as a hard knot of flesh, seemed hideously slack, flopping and thrashing, and it made me sick to view it.  Periodically, the technician would flip on the sound and I’d hear not the reliable tick-tock lub-dup of my heart, but this sloshing noise like a washing machine, hideously organic, like a small child wobbling a huge sheet of plastic back and forth.
I could not watch.  I had to close my eyes.
Then the nurse attached the holster monitor, which will record my heartbeat for the next two days.  I shaved my bear-like chest this morning, and I am surely glad I did, even if by the time I had finished it looked like I had drowned a squirrel in the toilet.  She actually shaved me again, then used a little thumb-sized snippet of sandpaper to ensure the electrodes were in perfect contact with live skin. No dead cells here.
I do, however, have to record every major exertion over the next two days, which sets off my exhibitionist streak.  I do plan on sexing up my wife later tonight, a fact which I will have to dutifully jot down, along with the time.  I may go for a little extra, just to try to impress the technicians with the amount of time my heart rate was elevated.
I’m already calling it “heart-core pornography.”

Not Very Good Excuses For Sexual Harassment

So my friend Monica Byrne was sexually harassed by an (unnamed) high-profile blogger and science editor.  I could summarize it for you, but instead I’ll just take a big chunk of words from her post, which you really should read in full here:

A month ago I met with a prominent science editor and blogger. He’d friended me on Facebook, and given his high profile, I was delighted, thinking he was interested in my writing. I sent him a link to my latest piece in the Independent Weekly and invited him to coffee. We met at a cafe in Chapel Hill, where I gave him another clip, this one about science and playwriting.
From the beginning, it was a difficult interaction on my end. Thinking this was a business meeting, I tried to tell him about my background and interests, but he seemed mainly interested in telling me about himself, and my input was mostly reduced to reactive responses like “wow” and “that’s so cool” and “that’s so neat.” I managed to mention that I used to write a column for The MIT Tech called “I Did It For Science,” where I did weird activities like getting my tarot read, visiting a strip club on a Tuesday afternoon, and doing MRIs for the neuroscience department. He began describing his own experience of going to a strip club. Then he described himself as “a very sexual person.” Then he told me about his wife’s sexual and mental health history. Then he began telling me about his dissatisfaction with his current sex life with his wife. Then he reminded me that he was “a very sexual person.” Then he told me, in an awful lot of detail, about how he almost had an affair with a younger woman he’d been seeing at conferences—how they’d met, how it escalated, how “close they’d come.”
None of these topics were invited by me. I tried to listen politely and nod when he paused, but otherwise not engage or encourage him. He seemed not to notice how uncomfortable I was. I was trying to mitigate the situation as it was unfolding—which I later read is a common immediate response to trauma, trying to minimize it or pretend it didn’t happen. In my head, I told myself that I could still write for him, as long as I didn’t meet with him in person ever again. At the end of the meeting, I hugged him, which may seem bizarre; but earlier he’d identified himself as a “hugging person” and so do I, generally, and I was still in shock and trying to smooth over the incident.
Later that day, I received a casual message from him on Facebook, saying that it’d been “great” to meet me and that he had “no idea how the convo veered into sex, but heck, why not.” This made me furious. The conversation had gone that way because he’d very deliberately led it there, and kept it there, despite my non-response.

Now, the critical bit here is that Monica obviously thought this was a professional opportunity, while the blogger-in-question obviously thought it was a hot date.  There are doubtlessly some people who will go, “Well, that’s an honest mistake that anyone could make,” but really, it isn’t.  As someone who blogs reasonably prominently himself,  and often about intensely sexual matters, I can tell you that I meet a lot of new online friends for coffee at places, and I view none of them as hot dates unless the person specifically tells me it is in advance. (Which – and I’ll vouch for Monica personally here – she most certainly did not, either explicitly or through implication.)
So what we have here is a guy meeting up with fellow writers he met on his blog, and assuming that they’re all bangable until told otherwise.  That’s a problem, approaching a pattern.
There will also doubtlessly be people who will say, “Well, why didn’t she just get up and leave?  That’s what she should have done.  She even hugged the guy!”  And I agree, in a perfect world, that in fact the best reaction on the spot would have been to coldly say, “I’m finding this very unprofessional, can we stop talking about this?” and handle the situation right there.
But – and this is an important but – assuming that people should all handle unexpected shocks in a perfect, scripted manner is in itself fostering sexual harassment.
I remember getting gypped out of five pounds in England – and you may take issues with the word “gypped,” but I was in fact bamboozled out of a fiver by what I was later told was a gypsy.  I was fresh off the plane, still amazed by the fact that I was in another country, and as we viewed the London Eye in amazement, a woman came up to me to welcome me wholeheartedly to her country, slapping a flower on me, offering to welcome me around, speaking so fast I didn’t have much of a chance to think or speak – plus, in this new place, I wasn’t quite sure what to say.  And I don’t remember quite how things went, but she wound up talking me into donating a five-pound note for some useless set of poppies for, and I quote, “war veterans.”
The shameful thing is that I’ve also fallen for a similar line of patter in the Cayman Islands.  It’s a quite common thing to do to fresh-off-the-boat tourists, and it works because people feel too flummoxed by this friendly, fast-talking person to say “No, that’s too much money.”
I know perfectly well what I should have done.  I should have said, “These poppies aren’t worth that much, and I don’t want them anyway.”  But baffled – I don’t even remember what I was thinking – I got jarred off course by what I’d normally do.
So when someone you admire, someone who you think may offer you some writing work or at least a friendly discussion on writing, starts telling you in-depth about their affairs, it throws you off-balance.  This isn’t how things are supposed to go.  And you keep trying to be polite, to steer the course back on track without being so rude as to alienate this person, since you’re not thinking, “Oh, this guy’s scum, fire the cannons,” you’re thinking, “What am I doing wrong that I’m encouraging this?  What’s wrong with me?” And to expect a perfect reaction to a jarring and discomforting situation on the spot is to side with the harasser.  Because the emphasis is not on “That guy should not be doing that,” but rather “How stupid you were for being thrown off-balance by a completely unexpected event!  You should endlessly be on your guard against too-friendly people in foreign lands!”
Which, yes, you probably should be, which is why that line of advice sticks so much.  But putting the emphasis on the victim helps harassers to gain social cover – they’re not scummy, they’re just an environmental hazard, like hurricanes! You can’t expect them to act any different. Except you can, and should, and berating someone for a non-perfect reaction to this fails to take into account that people who do this often plan to take people by surprise, springing unreasonable requests and counting on folks to trust to their good nature.
So yes, there’s that.
But what I find deeply shaming for me personally is how I reacted when I first saw this guy’s response – for I was part of a group Monica asked for advice, and when I saw his excuse, I went, “Oh, poor guy.  He’s been having personal issues, no wonder he went off the beam.  These kinds of things are hard on people.”
Then I went: Wait a minute.  That’s exactly what any harasser would say.
That’s the problem with lying in general: maybe this is a one-off issue, a man deeply wounded by marital strife or something, and he had one deeply embarrassing evening before getting back on the train.  But it’s the exact same thing a serial harasser would make up to get out of trouble, the kind of excuse designed to evoke pity and cause people to walk away believing it was an isolated incident.
And I had bought it.
Is there a way to tell what this particular dude is like without corroborating evidence?  No.  So we have to put these things out in public, to see whether others have had the same problem. Which involves Monica putting herself, rather bravely, in the line of fire.  (And even if it was a one-off incident, again, I’m a polyamorous and reasonably slutty dude who meets up with a wide variety of women from the Internet, and I don’t try to lead them into lines of sexual exposure.  I know how seduction works.  You try to get people to mirror your behaviors.  When you mention affairs that explicitly, and later unabashedly, you’re trying to get your target to reveal some hot affair she had in an attempt to make affairs seem like a Not So Bad Thing To Do.  If it was sporadic, it’s the sort of thing that seems to have a firm grasp on the mechanisms of having affairs.)
So yeah.  Monica went through that, and I’m sorry she did.  And I feel shamed that for a moment, I was ready to let this guy just go.
To be fair, the guy seems to have known he was out of line, which is a credit we should extent however reluctantly.  Many don’t.  Many see women as just a sort of global bank to be drawn upon for sex, and feel no shame whatsoever in using them that way.  Even if it’s just a fear of social harm, we have here a man who at least acknowledges that Bad Things Were Done.  And credit should definitely be given to his superiors, who seemed to take it seriously.
I don’t think I have much more to say than that.

"You Have To Write Every Day"

That’s the most critical piece of writing advice, amiright?  Write every damn day.  If your mother died?  Write at the funeral.  Boyfriend dumped you?  Splash those tears on your keyboard, missy.  Lost both arms in a wrestling match with an alligator?  You can type with your toes!
Just write!  Write!  Write, until you uncork that best-seller from within!
But let’s get serious.  I do write pretty much every day, and I attribute that dedication to the success I’ve had as a fiction writer.  Neil Gaiman once famously told me, “Ferrett, you just need to write,” and after blowing through fifty wretched stories I started to get to some decent ones. I treat my writing career as if my boss were Ebeneezer Scrooge; I show up every day, no vacations, and toil well past the time I’d scheduled.
That’s what works for me, but every writer uses a different method to harness the muse.  Some people must plot in advance; I have to make it up with each sentence.  My friend Kat has to write it all down in longhand; I need a keyboard.  I have to revise a story five times minimum before it’s ready for publication, whereas redrafting for others is like shoveling ashes on top of a burning fire, damping all the energy of that first burst of creativity.
Some people, no, they can’t write every day.  They need to take a week off from fiction to refresh their creativity, wandering and dreaming before returning to the Land Of Difficult Words, and there’s nothing wrong with that. They’re not slackers; this is part of their creative process, and they know this is how they make their best work.
Still, the reason this “Write every day” schtick is so schticky is because every professional writer I know has one talent in common: they write when they don’t really want to.  Because as a writer, while it feels better to write while inspired, most of us soon discover that there’s not much of a difference in terms of what you actually create.  Some of my best writing has come from days where I felt like I was trudging through broken glass, and some of my worst writing has flown effortlessly from my fingertips to land on the page like fresh cat droppings.  For most – not all, but most – what we create has little to do with how we feel about it while creating it.  So most of us learn not to wait for inspiration, but rather to squeeze it out of ourselves like toothpaste from a wrung tube.
You may not write every day, but the world is busy and does not care if you’re a writer.  If you do not make time for the act of creation, then laundry and children and lovers and work will swallow your ambitions whole.  So you need to create time. The more often, the better. Because the number-one enemy that eats talented writers for breakfast, devouring millions of words of beautiful prose that we’ll never get to see, is Real Life.
…And yes, revising stories and critiquing stories all counts for this time.  If you’re thoroughly analyzing fiction, this counts.  You’ve set your brain to work on the big question, which is “How can I make this better?”
Which is the other problem with the “write every day” thinking: it assumes that merely writing is enough.  I know people who churn out 10,000 words every day, and they’re just as terrible when they began.  It’s not enough to just vomit words onto the screen – it has to be a focused writing, thinking about the details, bolstering your strengths, asking, “How can I do this better?” If you’re endlessly enamored of your own work, convinced it’s beautiful and not a word could be improved, you’re not writing, you’re masturbating.  And there is absolutely nothing wrong with masturbation, but it’s not improving anything except your ability to pleasure yourself.
When you sit down to write, do so in a focused manner.  Think, “How am I going to make this the best story in the damn world?”  You probably won’t, but asking the question and analyzing will lead you to better and better techniques.  And one day – even if that’s a day you did not necessarily write – you’ll find that you’ve become the sort of writer you’d hoped to be.
Good luck.

Don't Go Breaking My Heart

So as a brief medical update:
When I started my seventh run in an endless series of “Couch to 5K” programs, as I get in shape and then fall off the wagon, this time I felt a sharpish pain in the left side of my chest when I got up to “OMG I’M BREATHING VERY HARD” territory.  This wasn’t a usual pain, but it wasn’t enough to bring me to my knees, either.  Still, I’m fastidious about my health when it comes to everything but teeth.
Then I was in the tub, reading in hot water as I do, and when I stood up my heart started pounding like a gorilla trying to get out of the cage. Gini didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary, nor did I turn gray as supposedly heart attack victims to, but I take this shit seriously.
So I went to the doctor, who took an EKG that showed I had potential Q waves.  (If you wanna look at the EKG, here ya go.  Don’t say I never shared anything with you.)  The Q waves mean not that my heart is beating to the rhythm of John Delancie, but rather that there’s an outside shot that I’ve had some sort of heart event in the past.  Might.  Maybe. But my cholesterol levels are high, even as my blood pressure is low.
So I went to the cardiologist today, who did what doctors do when you show up with mild symptoms that sound dangerous, which is to throw EVERY TEST IN THE BOOK at you.  So in the next two weeks I’ll be taking a stress test, an echocardiogram, a sleep test, and wear a fucking harness for two days straight.  All for what will, in most likelihood, be not much at all.  But that’s medicine for you.  Rule it out.
For this, I’ll probably pay in excess of a thousand dollars.  But we don’t need any socialized health care.  That’s crazy talk.  (And yes, having talked to friends abroad who’ve had similar issues, their doctors also recommended such ridiculous workups.  They then waited for seventeen months and died.  Ha ha!  Just kidding, they got workups within a few weeks and went on about their lives. THE HORROR THEY LIVED.)
 
 

New Story! By Me! "Dead Merchandise," At Kaleidotrope!

I was talking to Ted Chiang at World Fantasy, and we were discussing The Singularity – or, as I call it, the Nerd Rapture.
If you’re not familiar with The Singularity, it’s the point where computers become ZOMG SO POWERFUL that it ushers us into a new paradise, where super-powerful AIs will tend to our every whim.  Ted was skeptical of The Singularity, as was I, and I said, “When the Singularity comes, it’s going to be a fucking madhouse of advertisement-bots enslaving us to their whim.  Mark my words.  I even wrote a story about that.”
I felt a little bad about mentioning my story in front of Ted fucking Chiang, master of the sci-fi form – but I also thought it was a good story, and thankfully Kaleidotrope agreed.  So today, you can wander into the world of struggling Sheryl Winstead, as she fights for her sanity:

The ad-faeries danced around Sheryl, flickering cartoon holograms with fluoride-white smiles. They told her the gasoline that sloshed in the red plastic canister she held was high-octane, perfect for any vehicle, did she want to go for a drive?
She did not. That gasoline was for burning. Sheryl patted her pockets to make sure the matches were still there and kept moving forward, blinking away the videostreams. Her legs ached.
She squinted past a flurry of hair-coloring ads (“Sheryl, wash your gray away today!”), scanning the neon roads to find the breast-shaped marble dome of River Edge’s central collation unit. River’s Edge had been a sleepy Midwestern town when she was a girl, a place just big enough for a diner and a department store. Now River’s Edge had been given a mall-over like every other town — every wall lit up with billboards, colorful buildings topped with projectors to burn logos into the clouds. She was grateful for the dark patches that marked where garish shop-fronts had been bombed into ash-streaked metal tangles.
The smoke gave her hope. Others were trying to bring it all down — and if they were succeeding, maybe no one was left to stop her.

I also note that my critique-mate Mary Turzillo has a story in the same issue, “Someone Is Eating America’s Chess Masters,” which I intend to devour at lunch.