In Which I Am Probably Too Honest About Being A Writer.

Robert Jackson Bennett says some very wise words on what it’s like to read reviews of your own stories.  I’d advise you to go read it (as I’d advise you to read RJB in general), but the first of his two gushing money shots is here:

The reading experience is 70% work done by the reader, not the writer, and when you bring your own perspective and state of mind to my stuff, you are by default changing it – giving it nuance, color, beauties,  associations, problems, and conundrums I could never hope to. The human mind is a wonderfully, tantalizingly strange thing, and it is endlessly more complicated than any book could ever be. My job is to give you fuel, and get out of your way.
So I don’t want to be included in discussions of my work. Ideally, my opinion is moot, irrelevant. I cannot tell you if your opinion of me or what I wrote was wrong, even if I feel it obviously, obviously is: what you read is what you read, and I shouldn’t have any say in that.
People think writers have power, but ideally, I think it’s quite the opposite, or should be. We aren’t even part of the equation. What you read is infinitely more powerful than what I wrote.

This sums up one of my personal paradoxes in writing: I love the feedback.  I love seeing how I put a story out into the world and what people think of it, good or bad.  That’s why I’m absolutely ridiculous about e-Googling myself; I adore watching that mutation as the words I created become absorbed, get imported, and ultimately are regurgitated in an entirely different form.
People read my stories and tell me about my subtexts.  I don’t do subtexts; I’m just not a subtexty sorta guy.  But these people are subtext fiends, and so when they read it they stumble upon subtexts all over the place, and I – the guy who summoned these words from the heavens – watch them explain my blatant subtexual undertones and I go, well, hell, I guess that could work.
Some writers are irritated by this.  I can’t look away.  Even the hatred is fascinating, as they despised what I saw as strengths of my story.  How crazy is that?  I created it, and it’s not anything I control.
That’s the love.
And yet while I hunt down every review of my works, I don’t comment.  Publishing something on Escape Pod is always a thrill, because the commentors there are active, numerous, and will rip your shit to shreds.  They will debate you with the ferocity of a nerdy English class thrown into a pit of fire and told that the best paper on this short story wins.  And yet despite these amazing analyses of my stories, I’ve never once popped in to weigh in because that’s not my place.
Why would I spoil your interpretation when you love it so much?  Or love hating it so much?
It makes me uncomfortable, when people rave about my stories around me.  I’m glad you liked it.  Really glad.  But I don’t know what to say, because while I’m glad I initiated this chemical reaction, the ultimate cause of the love is what you brought to it, and so I feel sort of like someone vigorously thanking me for this tree I planted thirty years ago.  Yes, you spent your childhood playing in its branches, and your dad made you the most amazing tree fort, but all I did was toss a seed in the ground and water for a bit.
That love is you.  I’m blatantly happy to be involved with it.  I’ll even discuss techniques on watering, and what I tried to do, as that sort of nerdery is fascinating to me.  But when you’re gushing, I don’t know what to say because “Yeah, I’m great” seems dickish and brushing that love off disrespects the passion you’re bringing to it, and “Thanks” seems inadequate and cold, so here I am simultaneously full-on thrilled and terribly, terribly embarrassed.
That may be the kind of writer that RJB and I are.  That’s purely me, but hell, it’s there, and I’m not discouraging you from telling me you liked something, but I am saying that my responses in those cases inevitably seem curt and noncommittal to me – not because I’m not appreciative, but because saying too much might ruin the illusion you created.
My story is not me.  It’s you.
I ain’t gonna ruin that.
The other money shot, which hit me so hard, was:

I want you to like my book because of what it was, not because of who I am. And if I thought readers were reading me only because they “knew” me or liked me, rather than because I wrote a good book, I’d probably be severely depressed.

He is correct, because I was severely depressed for a long time.  For the first eight years of this blog, people mostly read the little fiction I could publish because I cajoled them into it, and they read my fiction with the obligation one feels when a friend thrusts a manuscript into your hand and says, “Read this, and lemme know what you think?”
(Hint: “Lemme know what you think” is near-invariably “Please tell me it’s good.”)
And people loved my blog-entries on my personal life, and my puns, and my insights into human nature, but I just could not translate that into readable fiction for almost a decade.  I had to go to a writers’ intensive to show me why my fiction was fucking terrible (and how the many effective shortcuts you can take in a blog entry will destroy your fiction).  And for all that time, I had people loving me but not the stories I wrote, and that was soul-eroding.
It was nice to be loved.  But my fiction needs to stand on its own, and not be the kind of adjunct where hey, you really get off on Pete Townsend’s guitar playing, so you feel like you should read his poetry too.  Just to be complete.  And because, on some level, you know it’d make Pete happy.
(Assuming anything really makes Pete Townsend happy.)
My entire blogging career since 2006 has been, “Can Ferrett convert his blog-loving audience into fans of his fiction?”  And that’s been a sloowwwwww process.  I’ve been read by literally millions as a blogging personality, and thousands as a fiction writer.  Even today, I’d say 80% of y’all think of me primarily as this blogger who writes fiction, and maybe 20% think of me as “a fiction writer who happens to blog copiously.”  Which is what I hope to be.  Whenever someone says, “Hey, I finally went to your short stories today and read a few and they were amazing,” that makes my day a total win.
The fact that I have fans of my fiction?  Amazing.
Which is not to crap on your enjoyment of me.  Obviously, I blog so you can come here and be entertained.  There’s nothing wrong with you experiencing me primarily as Crazy Poly Blogger or whatever, because – as noted in the first part – watching people inhale my words and exhale all these different interpretations is part of why I write anything.  I adore that, and again, I’m loathe to write this lest I pop your bubble of enjoyment. (See?  It really is not fun when the author tells you what he wanted to do.)
Yet what I really crave is for people to see the mega-blogging as an adjunct to that body of amazing fiction – which it is.  I spend maybe twenty minutes a day blogging.  I spend hours writing fiction, which is much harder, and yet much less interactive.  And my whole goal is to make you crave that fiction as much as you crave the next Pseudo-Wise Essay On Human Foibles, and have I done that?
I’ve done better at that.  I still have a way to go.  And if I fail in that, that is my failure and not yours, because heck, what I just said is that feeling like you’re guilting people into reading your stuff as some personal favor to you is the shittiest feeling imaginable for an honest creator.  I want you to carry on a sloppy love affair with my fictional worlds, not my real me.  And maybe you go over to click that short story link because you’ve read me long enough to grow curious, but in the end if you’re middling on what you read then I want you to embrace that “meh” and not feel some sort of obligation to cross-link the love of blogging-me with love of fiction-me.
Anything else is a sort of handout.  I don’t want handouts.  I want to earn it, and I’m comfortable saying I’ve earned your love or hate as a blogger because I’ve been doing this for thirteen years and my audience is narrow but devoted, and I want to earn your love of my stories the same way.
Which is a really weird place to be.  I came up backwards.  Most fiction writers have people fall in love with their fiction, then discover the person.  I’m getting more of that as I progress down the Writers’ Career Path, but for me it’s mostly inverted where I’m a personality first and a writer of tales second, and that’s even odder than fiction in general is.
I’m working hard on a novel.  If I ever get it published, I hope to fuck you like it.  Not me; it.
We’ll see when that day comes.

Fourteen Years.

We’ve no time for poetry these days.
Medical issues keep swamping us; my cousin, my grandmother, little Rebecca, Gini’s grandniece, and now Gini’s mother.  Even Shasta our dog is fresh out of surgery from getting spayed.  And we have guests arriving this afternoon and Gini has to go visit Detroit for a meeting and my novel demands to be revised.
But fourteen years.
Fourteen years ago, we got married.
I’ll repeat, as I always do in such circumstances: I never thought I’d get married in the first place.  Like so many punky twenty-somethings, I thought I’d die before I hit thirty, and if I did live, well, I was too unlovable and chaotic to find someone who I’d settle down with and be happy.  And if I did settle down, I’d doubtlessly be a miserable, cheating fuck.
Yet no.  What I have with Gini is an amazing life, where she makes me smarter and kinder and more empathetic, and I can’t believe that my filthy past has been rewarded with something as grand as this.  We’re stuck hip-deep in life now, and we don’t have time for flowers or romance, but what we have is a ton of affection and a ton of cuddles.
That’ll do.

The Label Is Not The Package. The Map Is Not The Road.

An online acquaintance of mine was recently complaining that “nobody uses labels correctly.” Which is absolutely correct.
I mean, seriously, what does “submissive” mean? What does “polyamorous” mean? Hell, what do “liberal” and “sports fan” and “Jewish” mean, aside from a too-nebulous set of traits? Hell, I’m buddies with a number of atheist bacon-lovin’ Jews – so how the hell can the term “Jewish” be utilized well when it can encompass my reject-the-faith pals and the new zealous convert with no Jewish relatives?
The solution my friend suggested, however, was completely off: Let’s all utilize labels properly, with each label meaning a specific and concrete thing. Or, barring that, abandon labels entirely to look at each person as a unique individual.
…That’s not gonna work, said I.
The first step, defining correctly, would fail because large numbers of people are absolute shit at understanding who they are. Ever sit down with someone at your job and say to a co-worker, “Look, I need someone who’s responsible, comes in on time, and does their job?”
And your slacker co-worker, who routinely shows up ten minutes late, gets lousy performance reviews, and sticks you with all his leftover work, goes, “Yeah, that’s totally me”?
The problem is that that co-worker genuinely thinks that they are responsible, on-time, and does their job…. even when the definition is exact and they are wrong. Sure, the job description says “Be in at 9:00 a.m.,” but to them, 9:08 is like9:00 a.m. – and even once you convince them that you staying on-board an extra eight minutes to cover for them while they deign to show up is fucking with your schedule, they’ll then claim that everyone’s late sometimes, they’re not late all that often, and when they are they’ve got really good excuses.
They genuinely believe they’re punctual.
They will apply this definition, incorrectly, to themselves.
And if they are left unchecked, as they meet new employees at this job and trainthose fresh fish that “on time” means “plus or minus ten minutes, usually plus,” they will mutate the definition as it’s used in this environment. Eventually, as other people come to learn the culture from the slacker, his definition will replace the “book” definition….
…and so chaos begins.
So even if we all agreed that “love” meant “valuing your partner’s goals more than your own,” some dude would be all like, “Yeah! I totally value her goals!” even as he made her feel guilty for having them and never offered to do the housework while she was out pursuing them.
This is why we can’t have nice things. Because humans are awful, awful, awful at knowing who they are.
So why don’t we just take everyone as individuals instead? That’s the better plan, amiright? We’re all unique, don’t categorize anyone, just have no expectations except that person!
Labels are utilized so poorly, so often, that we never think of all the benefits of labels.
Because really, evolutionarily speaking, you probably know more celebrities than most Stone-Age people knew in person. We’re just not equipped to deal with the thousands of people we run into over the course of a lifetime – our brains are actually really inefficient little machines, in their own strange way. We do a lot with them, which is amazing only because the world is even more complex, but we only function because the brain takes a thousand shortcuts.
We don’t actually see a whole object. We see bits of it at a time as the focal point of our eye wanders over portions, then stitch it together.
We don’t remember well. We condense it down to something memorable, which is often not the same as “what’s accurate.”
Our whole life is actually one big magician’s trick.
And the awful thing is that if we never used labels, most of us would probably find it impossible to remember much about people we never knew. Asking people to meet hundreds of folks and saying, “Well, none of them can be lumped together by any similar qualities!” is asking a lot of folks.
We’re just hard-wired to think of people as redheads or Republicans or what-have-you. I’m not saying that’s great, but that’s the shortcut we use to cope.
And in many cases, that shortcut is fucking awesome. I’m polyamorous. What does that mean on its surface? Well, hell, a lot of people I’d call swingers refer to themselves as polyamorous. And a lot of people I’d refer to as “callous psychopaths” also call themselves polyamorous. And a lot of people who live perfectly nice poly lifestyles without my wife-as-quote-unquote-“primary” or my rules on who I have sex with or any of my permissions systems call themselves polyamorous.
As a label, it’s kind of a mess.
But then again, how much do you really need to know?
When you get down to it, if you’re making chit-chat at a party, do you really wantme to give you a forty-minute lecture on all the aspects of how I date women in my polyamory and the agreements and the emotional bonds we have, so you can see me as a truly unique individual? Or do you just want the overview so we go on to talk about Star Trek?
Trick is, labels are not the end point, they’re the start of the negotiation.
If someone tells me they’re a submissive, I can generally assume that they prefer to be acted upon rather than to act within a sexual relationship, and maybe more so. That’s really vague.
That vagueness may be all I need if I’m just making small talk.
If I intend to play with them at a club, however, “Submissive” is a wide starting point that gives me some information as to whether I’d enjoy playing with them or not. If I choose to pursue them, then I need to drill deeper to determine how that particular person’s submissive approach affects my scene.
And if I intend to date them? “Submissive” can mean a bunch of things, and now it is my duty to descend from the general to the person-specific, determining whether their unique interpretation of “Submissive” is compatible with the kind of submissiveness I’d want in my day-to-day life. (It often isn’t. I like bratty spitfires who submit, a comparatively small subset of the “Submissive” label. Still, they’re Submissives, too.)
But really, I don’t need to know someone’s Gorean history if I’m just here for the checkers tournament.
These labels are nebulous and inexact – which is a bug, not a feature. Poly probably means someone’s all right with fucking multiple people. Liberals usually mean a distrust of government control when it comes to violence, a trust of government control when it comes to economics. Programmers generally work with computer languages.
The trick is to remember that the label is not the person. Even if the person self-applies that label. There are poly-fidelitous folks, liberals who like the right kind of governmental war, programmers who don’t use languages. A label is a general place to start, and that’s wonderful, but you commit some ghastly fallacies when you decide that all Republicans are anti-abortion or all Liberals love Che Guevara or all Doms crave pretty young things.
Labels are useful tools to categorize, a shortcut that minds take. When you start believing the map is the landscape, you make critical errors.
Don’t do that. And don’t think that labels are bad, either. They’re a helpful way to condense a pretty confusing universe, and the more you contemplate the need for them, the humbler you’ll be.
Ain’t a bad thing, really.

The Supreme Linkbait

Want to make a page that gets thousands of hits from enraged liberals?
Step 1: Find a recent event where a minority has done something notable.
Step 2: Search Twitter to find, among literally millions of Tweets, the lowest idiots on the planet.  They exist.  They will always exist.
Step 3:  Haul up those Tweets as evidence that “a lot” of people feel this way.
Step 4: Profit.
Next up: Use the same technique to prove that “a lot” of dumb liberals believe stupid shit published in The Daily Currant!  As long as you keep your numbers vague and trawl for the worst behavior in humanity, you will always, always find it.  And then people can believe that this is a serious world view as opposed to a handful of morons.
(Which is not to say that a case could not be made that “a lot” of people are racist about the new Miss America.  Finding fifteen random Tweets does not make that case.  And believing that fifteen Tweets on any topic proves a silent majority just shows a bias in your own thinking – a bias other sites are perfectly happy to exploit for outrage and clickbait.)

How Do You Win The Dog Poop Lottery?

I don’t think it will surprise anyone to find out our dog poops.  And we take her for three daily walks, during which she poops twice.
I refer to being on a poop-laden walk as “Winning the Dog Poop Lottery.”
Gini disagrees.  What you have won on the trip, she claims, is a bag of warm dog shit, and really that’s no prize.  She claims she has won the lottery when she returns empty-handed.
What kind of lottery is that, say I?  There’s no sane lottery where “not winning” is considered a prize.  Sure, you have the occasional outliers like Shirley Jackson and the Vietnam drafts, but those are sufficient exceptions that nobody thinks of them.  No, lotteries involve prizes, and you win them.  This is a pretty crappy lottery – sorry – but you can’t claim victory when you don’t get a prize.
We’re at odds.  I’ll say I won and she thinks that Shasta didn’t poop.  She’ll say she lost and I think that Shasta didn’t poop.
So I turn to you, dear reader: What conditions define victory in the Dog Poop Lottery?  Please phrase all answers in the form of an essay.