Three Sales In The Same Week? Crazy!
I’m a little short on short story sales these days because my writing time has been consumed by NOVELS NOVELS NOVELS, but I still manage to squeeze in a few where I can. And the good news is, I’ve (re)-sold two stories to my favorite audio markets!
If you remember “Dead Merchandise,” my story of the upcoming Singularity coopted by advertising bots, the good news is that Escape Pod has purchased the rights to do an audio presentation of it. This was a story I pretty much intended to be read out loud, and Escape Pod’s people have knocked it out of the park with their past interpretations of “Devour” and “‘Run,’ Bakri Says,” so I look forward to seeing what they do with it.
If you remember “Riding Atlas,” my hideous BDSM-themed interlacing-of-circulatory-systems-as-crazed-drug-trip-tale, then you’ll be thrilled to note that horror podcast PseudoPod has picked it up. They’ve done me right before on my tales “The Sound of Gears” and “Suicide Notes, Written By An Alien Mind,” and “Riding Atlas” may be one of the most intense things I’ve ever written… so I want to see how this comes off when you have that glorious 1940s-style Old-Time Radio readings that PseudoPod so gloriously delivers.
(There may be a special bonus on “Riding Atlas,” since I told Three-Lobed Burning Eye that I might read it myself if I could ever find my podcasting equipment… so after Pseudopod gets done with it, you may get to hear how the author thinks it should sound, which could be a fascinating comparison in professional vs. amateur readings and in author-emphasis-vs-outside-narrator-emphasis. But that’ll be many months from now, as I think Cat Valente inadvertently absconded with my microphone.)
As far as the third tale, I don’t have that many details yet, but Nayad has picked up my story “Black Swan Oracle” for her upcoming anthology, “What Fates Impose.” That’s probably my favorite tale I wrote in 2012, and it packs a wallop, so I’ll definitely keep you updated.
Why Superman Never Sells As Well As Batman: What Can Superman Learn?
Saladin Ahmed said on Twitter that Superman was more interesting than Batman: “He’s a ‘transracial’ adoptee immigrant kid, has an actual job, etc.” And you hear that defense a lot from Superman fans – no, seriously, he’s really interesting! He’s got all that backstory!
The problem is, Superman’s only interesting choice was made long before he steps on-screen. He decided not to use his powers for personal gain, but to selflessly use them to help the common man.
That’s awesome. That’s why people like Superman – as an ideal, he’s perfect. But unfortunately, having made that decision, he then never makes another interesting one again. Because the whole point of Supes is that he’s not tormented about that choice – if you have a Superman who really wants to have a billion dollars, or really needs to shed his Clark Kent identity to show the world how awesome he is, or to just tell that old lady with the cat in the tree to fuck the hell off because he’s tired from saving Peking, well, an angsty Superman is not really Superman as we understand him. Superman is comfortable with who he is, because he’s that awesome.
Which means there’s nothing significant that Superman can learn, emotionally. The only things he can learn are things that make us look bad: stories in which humans just aren’t as good as Superman, and Superman is sad about that. (But still filled with hope. Superman is always hopeful.) So the most significant Superman stories are the ones where it turns out you, you petty humans, are pretty shit-tacular. And then maybe you have a story where Superman justifies not taking over the planet to rule it as a benevolent dictator, which isn’t a terribly comforting thought either.
So most of the thousands of stories told about Superman are pure status quo: Superman saves other people from a big bad guy. What’s at stake for Superman? Well, he’d feel bad if those people died. Not a really gripping moment, and of course Superman isn’t going to lose anyway.
Oh, writers have tried to get around this limitation. Some writers do it by switching to other parties, showing how Superman transforms everyone around him… but of course, that’s not really a Superman story, but “Touched by an Angel.” Morrison did it by having Superman be the face of futurized wonder like he was in the 1960s, where Superman wasn’t really a hero but the gateway to an endless Narnia-like wonderland of alternative universes and weird shit.
But again, what’s Superman learning? Not much. He’s got a lot of tension between his Clark Kent and Superman world, which is interesting in theory, but you can’t make it interesting in practice without unravelling who Supes is.
Every great superhero has a couple of iconic arcs that define who he is, and usually one of them is the origin story. For Spider-Man, it’s abandoning Uncle Ben, having Gwen Stacey die, and throwing aside his costume to walk away, only to discover that he really can’t. For Iron Man, it’s his battle with the bottle. For Batman, it’s having his back broken and still coming back for more.
For Superman? His iconic moments are first of all his origin story, which makes sense. All the stuff leading up to that decision are fascinating, a look inside pure American idealism, saying a lot about what we think of our country. But after he makes that decision? His most iconic moments in comics are his death stories, one by Alan Moore and one by DC Marketing… both of which are fascinating because once Supes has made his choice, the only other interesting thing that can happen to him is that we see how he ends.
There’s one other iconic story, which the movies had to bring out: he gives up his powers, and has three Kryptonians come to town. Which, in the end, is the only story Superman can learn: giving this power up won’t make him happy, not because he wouldn’t be content with Lois Lane, but because the world will suck without him.
Superman is a great character in theory, and people like him because of what he represents. But that representation means he’s a static character, one who cannot learn because he made the proper decision before he put on the damn suit. Abandoning that means, well, he’s not actually Superman. Contrast to Batman, who can learn all sorts of lessons about how he should fight crime and his own mortality and the limits of extremism and the toll his relentless battle takes on his loved ones and how best to inspire people, all without compromising the fragile core of his concept: he fights crime because he is driven.
Superman? Great on a poster. Not so good in an ongoing saga.
The Science of the Surprise Penis
So there’s been a study on exactly what kinds of penises women prefer, and it turns out the average is around 12.8-14.2 centimeters… Flaccid. Which has caused much debate over what sort of evolutionary factors have gone into shaping the male penis.
It’s an interesting discussion, because there’s a lot of factors to consider. I mean, in primitive times we didn’t have all of this clothing shielding our willies, and so the goods were on display for any woman to see – sort of like plumage. And the question arises of whether women were selecting men not by their ability to feed their family, not their ability to protect them from carnivores, not for their ability to build useful tools or their charm or their deep skill at Foosball, but… the penis.
I dunno, man. I think that biology has a lot of influence, and certainly evolutionary traits do, too. But this particular study seems to be feeding into the male idea that COCKS ARE EVERYTHING, and that women in old cultures spent so much time weighing wang into their decision – and flaccid wang, at that – that it’s literally given us all an excuse for small cocks. “Hey, man, what I’m packing? It’s the biological imperative. Generations of horny Neanderthals thought this – ” *grabs package* – “was the perfect size for mating, baby!”
Whereas I think they were more concerned about other factors. I’m sure peen was a part of it, absolutely. But enough that their preferences actually evolved us to the shapes we have now?
Oh, I’ll cop to a lot of evolutionary pressures on penis size and shape – I found out the other day the reason the cock had a head was so it could squeegee back the other, competing sperm in preparation for ejaculating its own bunch of fresh Mini-Mes. That’s awesome. And I don’t doubt that other, similar, factors go into controlling the overall size of penis in human beings.
But is the penis such an amazing feature that women literally chose flaccid penis size over, say, nice breath and the ability to cuddle? I think not. I think that’s just scientists in a lab, going, “Aw, man, the cock changes the course of history!”
Plus, there’s all sorts of weird issues with this study – it’s only 100 Australian women, who it must be noted wear clothes and probably don’t see flaccid cock from day to day. So it’s probably a little skewed, trying to extrapolate the behavior of the pre-Sumerian hunter-gatherer mom from some Australian Starbucks barrista.
Yet let us assume that this is true. That, for generations, a significant factor in humanity’s overall fitness was that women were choosing mates based on the right shrunken cock. That means that pants are a travesty, a biological block, a horrible thing that actually weakens our species. Whoever invented the loincloth? A traitor to his cause, and probably possessed of an evolutionarily-unattractive Shvanstucker besides!
I joke, but I’ve always felt bad for women when it comes to dating. I am a fan of full lips, large breasts, and long hair. All of these are turnons for me, and I know within seconds of meeting a woman if she has these qualities. Whereas if a woman likes large penises, or small penises, or bent penises, well… every guy is a Cracker Jack box waiting to be opened. Which, as a guy, seems like yet another of a thousand disadvantages women face in getting good sex; if you need a specific kind of penis to get you off, there’s no way to know for sure until it may be awkward to break it off.
I dunno. It’s all food for thought, and if you think I’m going to wrap this meandering up with some unifying theory on the evolutionary advantages of penis size, well, I got nothing. I just think that while there may be advantages to various sizes when it comes to producing children, I’m doubting that penis size was significantly altered by mere aesthetic preference. I could be wrong.
But though it bears investigation – SCIENCE! – I don’t think 105 Australian women are enough to say one way or another. And I think our obsession with penis size is something that’s not totally ahistorical, but the increasing focus on it is a modern reaction to some dysfunctionality we have yet to address as a global society. It smells a bit of taking our modern values and trying to apply them to the past, to make it a universal thing across all humanity as opposed to a small subset of people. Which, as Westerners, is something we do on a disturbingly often basis.
Thoughts On Disability From A Guy Who Should Be On It
When I first read NPR’s “Unfit for Work: the startling rise of disability in America,” it told me something I did not know: we haven’t actually reduced welfare costs in America.
Yes, we’ve managed to give less money via welfare to people who aren’t working… but disability costs have skyrocketed in recent years. And if you add the two together, it looks like a lot of people who were once on welfare have shifted to disability. And, so NPR argues, there’s a lot of cahoots among the folks who grant disability payments to only give those payments to the poorest and most deserving.
This fact has, crazily enough, created a backlash among liberals, who are furious that NPR – NPR! – would join the “liberal attacks” on the disabled. To quote Tiger Beatdown, “…she contributed to familiar hateful rhetoric about disability in the United States, and what it means to be disabled. Scroungers. Sucking off the government teat. Fakers. Lazy. Slackers.”
But I read that same story a week or two ago, and I saw none of that. And perhaps that’s because at this point in time, I should be (temporarily) disabled.
For those who are new here, I am a forty-three-old programmer who had a heart attack, and a triple-bypass surgery, about ten weeks back. Having a triple bypass is tough on the body; they crack your chest open like crab, breaking every single rib in the process, and then shove your lungs up and around so it takes about six weeks to get your breathing back. Even now, I still have problems lifting heavy objects (lest I strain the still-fragile ribs, which may not fully heal for another three months) and experience chronic exhaustion from the beta blockers.
And when I was in the Cardiac ICU, one of the case workers came up to me and said, “You’re going to need to take three months off from work. File the paperwork now. Get it in before they can deny you.”
Three months? I thought, being a fairly healthy person before that. What the hell could possibly render me unable to work for three months? And I trusted my job, who had done right by me for the thirteen (!) years I’d been working for them, and failed to file.
I thought I’d be back working full-time in three weeks. And while I was working part-time at four weeks, it took me until six weeks out until I’d say I was really back on the clock.
So those foolish, greedy bastards at the hospital just wanted me to suck at the teat of my employer, right? They were encouraging lazy slackers everywhere! Forcing my job to subsidize lazy wretches like me!
Wrong.
My job consists of sitting at a keyboard and thinking. That’s because I was lucky enough to have some connections and some college, and I lucked into a white-collar desk job. But before that, for a good eight years, my job consisted of working retail – which, inevitably, consists of standing on my feet for eight hours a day and lifting heavy boxes.
I still could not do that. I’ve recovered astonishingly quickly by heart patient standards, but if my job depended on me heaving around thirty-pound boxes of the latest Tom Clancy hardback? I’d be fucked. I’d be lying in front of the television, sweating the countdown, because at this point I’d have two weeks to go and if I couldn’t manage it by then, what the fuck would happen to me?
Now, admittedly, that’s just my temporary sojourn into the Land of the Disabled, and I’m lucky enough to get to walk out after a while. But that was a constant worry, even when I was young and hale and twenty-five: what if I threw out my back? Working for Borders, there were a lot of older guys with braces, chewing Advil like it was their last chance, wincing. And management, who was kind back in those days of well-managed Borders stores, found ways to work the system – shifting these less-physically able folks to slower-paced jobs when they didn’t have to, moving them to the cash register while the rest of us hauled hundreds of pounds of books back and forth. We all silently agreed we’d pick up the slack, if we could.
If we’d had a dickier management, those guys might have lost their jobs. I might have. My family has a history of bad backs.
And so, when NPR pointed out that more people than ever were on disability, that made total sense to me. In my white-collar phase of employment, a bad back was trivial; my work was all in my head and hands. But as a blue-collar or lower worker, you’re pretty much judged by your body… and if that can’t function, you can’t get a job. That bad back may be a permanent lockout from any job available to you, ever.
That’s a problem, because the growing class divide in America means that more people can only get work based on their physical output. There was a time when Americans could get good, white-collar, office jobs without a college diploma; those days are no more. There was a time when America’s manufacturing was robust enough to support hierarchies of management, so you might move up from the factory floor; again, that’s mostly dead.
What we as Americans don’t want to face is that our concept that “Anyone can make it in America!” is mostly a lie at this point. We have all of the social mobility of France or Britain. And the truth is, if you’re stuck in the lower tier of jobs, your ability to provide for your family is dependent on health. That flags, and you can’t bus tables for eight hours, mise well pack it in.
So to me, what Tiger Beatdown proclaimed was an article where NPR gave into the welfare-beating hatred of America, I saw as acknowledging a critical reality: we can’t make people work when we, as a society, have quietly engineered it so that the only jobs they can get are physical labor. Tiger Beatdown makes the grievous error of thinking that stating the fact of “Disability payments on the rise” is the same as “…and that’s a sign that we’re pandering to lazy assholes!”
No. What I read was an article where judges were desperately trying to be merciful to people in dire circumstances, tacitly acknowledging that there were two levels of existence in America and trying like hell to find the money for these bastards somewhere. I saw a hellish process that took forever to get onto, the kind of thing you could only get onto if you were both desperate and persistent. I saw NPR outlining a fiend’s bargain where you agreed to give up the rest of your working potential for a poverty-level $13,000 a year, forever, never getting a raise unless the government unlikely gave you one, forever condemned to living in poverty… and having that be the only sane option because you had some part of your body give out prematurely.
The problem I have with this “liberal attack” is that Tiger Beatdown let it be a liberal attack. I didn’t see slackers, or scroungers, in that article, and I think you’d have to hunt to find them. What I saw were people getting fucked over by a country that’s slowly grown callous to these folks, and a hard reality that despite years of conservative poor-bashing, there’s a lot of folks who would like to work who utterly cannot, because the system has failed them, and no amount of so-called “fiscal responsibility” can avoid the truth that we have to help them or things are going to get a lot worse.
What I saw was the most stinging indictment of conservative thought I’d seen in a while… And if conservatives saw that evidence as “scroungers,” then I think it’s high time to raise that banner high and say, “No, these people aren’t suckling on your teat, they’re relegated to terror, poverty, and disease because you’ve robbed them of low-cost health care, jobs with benefits, and education. Now you’re paying the bill, and that payment, as it turns out, cannot be avoided. So how do we actually fix America and stop demonizing these folks?”
Which is why I’m disappointed. Some people read a pretty goddamned sympathetic article and called them “slackers,” presumably because they had their heads up their asses. And rather than refuting those points and saying, “No, actually, this is how bad it is for poor folks that these limited options look good to them,” some liberals chose to yell at…. NPR.
I’m in the top 20% of America. I’ve got a lawyer for my wife and a highly technical job. And after I post this, I’ll go back to my job, laying on my couch for the next eight hours and refactoring some programs that need reworking. And I’ll think about how it might be if my wife worked at Denny’s, and my job was the stock room at Target, and shit, how the hell are we going to pay the bills when I’m falling asleep after eight hours of just sitting down?
I wouldn’t be a slacker, then. I’d be an ailing man in a dire situation. And by God, I hope someone would devise some better way of helping me than what we have now.
Catching The Right Life Preserver: Some Sloppy Writing Advice For Pantsers
So I just wrote 20,000 words that I had to throw away. Those words were the start of the third act of the novel I’m working on – and I woke up as if from a dream to realize that the villain for the third act was wrong, the ending didn’t answer any of the questions I’d raised in the first third, and my most interesting characters had disappeared from view.
So I literally had to erase the final third of my book and start afresh, asking: All right, given all that’s happened up until now, how should it end?
This is the way of the pantser. You don’t have an end goal in mind, or at least not a clear one; you just write, sentence after sentence, and let the story surprise you. Except sometimes the surprise is “Oh, this isn’t working.” As a result, pantsers spend a lot of time throwing away dead ends. I have one infamous story that I’ve written 23,000 words for, and the finalized story was 4,000 words.
There’s a lot of advice on plotting, but not that much advice on pantsing, because pantsing is like trying to find your personal dowsing rod. There are signs that you’re going down the wrong path, but it’s like dating the wrong girl in that it’s all terribly obvious in retrospect that this would never work out, but you were in love at the time. And I think part of the successful pantser process involves three critical things:
1) Learning to spot the difference between when you’re just writing words because it’s a thing you can write, and when you’re honestly excited because it’s the thing you should be writing.
2) Realizing when you’ve gone astray, and being honest enough to do the necessary amputation.
3) Once you’ve done the painful cutting, figuring out which areas of the first half of the story you can mine to determine how the last half should end.
But that’s all really personal. For example, I’m slowly learning my personal Danger Signs of Poor Pantsing, which include:
1) All my ideas for what could happen next, which usually flow like champagne, dry up.
2) I’m spending my time devising ideas for why a character wouldn’t simply do X, when X is the thing that would make sense and derail my intended story.
3) I’m very concerned about sticking to the original idea that got me interested in this story – “This is like Boardwalk Empire, but with magicians!” – and waste time writing a pastiche of other people’s ideas when it’s time for my ideas to start flowing.
4) I don’t like my characters very much. This is usually because they’re doing things that I feel they should do, instead of the things they secretly are mad to do.
For me, the biggest danger of pantsing is that I do what I feel I should do, instead of what I want to do. Which sounds very silly, but it’s kind of like getting an invite to a very exclusive, fancy costume ball. And the day of it comes, and all you want to do is dance in your apartment in your socks. And maybe that dancing would be more joyous, but you’ve already bought the costume, and how many grand balls do you have a chance to go to, and so rather than doing the thing that would satisfy you, you instead do the thing that you believe you ought to do because, well it’s there.
So many of my 20,000-word castoffs were, well, just there. They were an idea I could write about, and so, like a person flailing for a life preserver, I grabbed at it and wrote. And it wasn’t until much later that I realized, drowning as I was, I needed to be snobby and wait for the right life preserver.
That’s the trick, though. It’s not that you’re not writing; you are. But you’re not paying attention to that little tickle in the back of your head that asks, “Is this really the most awesome thing that could happen?” because SHUT UP I’M GETTING CLOSER TO THE END, BRAIN. And then you get to the end and you read it all with a dispassionate eye and sadly mutter, “…oh.”
That’s when you have the hard work of going back to the last good point and asking all the questions you need to in order to re-pants. What questions did you ask in the first part of the story that are, as yet, unanswered? Each character has a lesson about life he or she needs to learn over the course of the tale – what is that lesson, and have you brought them closer to learning it? What random elements and/or themes in the first part of the story can be brought up again in the end, for closure?
All of that is very hard work; it is knitting, because you have all of these threads you’ve unwittingly knotted together in the first part of the tale, and now you have to tie them all together into something that looks like an attractive scarf. Sometimes you even go back to the beginning and add more threads, now that you’ve discovered what the story is actually about.
(It sounds terribly stupid, but in the book I’m writing? I didn’t know who my lead character was until I wrote a scene 50,000 words in where I went, Oh, that’s really who he’s about. And then I had to go back through every scene he was in – which is to say, all of them – to rewrite them with a subtly new person in the lead, reacting in subtly different ways.)
That’s pantsing. And I wish I had better advice to give, but really it’s about listening to your own inner voice. Some days you get desperate for ideas, and you’re so happy to have met anyone to dance with that you don’t notice the mustard stains on his lapel, his clumsy feet, his lack of rhythm. You’re just happy to be dancing again. And it takes some personal experience to realize that no, you can’t just dance with anyone, you must stay vigilant and decline graciously and watch the incoming dancers until you find that right person.
Or else you’ll be in the middle of a very elaborate and physically straining dance when you realize: this is crap. And it’s so awkward to walk away then. Yet it’s your only choice. 