I Want To Like The Xbox One. I Do.

The new Xbox One is coming out this Christmas, and everyone is asking: Do you want it?  Do you want it?
I don’t, really.  And it’s not because the Playstation 4 is better; it may be, but I’ve got a lot of investment into the Xbox at this point, and swapping would have a cost.  I don’t wanna lose all of my Achievement Gs, nor do I want to have to set up all my new apps and rejigger my Logitech Universal Remote.
It’s that I’m not seeing any games I particularly want to play.
As a gamer, I could care less about the hardware underneath.  It’s why I moved to the XBox; I got tired of having to remember what my memory was, inscribing my video card on the inside of my arm whenever I went to the store, and having to eternally upgrade.  The XBox has simpler games (I don’t think you could do Planescape: Torment or System Shock 2 on a controller), but I’ve been playing my XBox for four years now and have had to replace it only once.
What I care about is games.  Juicy, juicy games.  And I’m picky.
I don’t like sports games, because I don’t care about sports.  I am aware how huge Madden is, but that’s really not me.
I don’t like head-to-head first-person shooters like Call of Duty, because I’m not that good at shooters and I prefer unlocking bits of story anyway.  Running around on a map and shooting people for no real reason doesn’t trigger my immersion factor, and I want to lose myself in a game.
So what that leaves is a comparatively narrow band of games: a couple of rhythm games, sandbox games like Saints Row and Prototype, first-person shooters with good stories backing them like Bioshock Infinite and Half-Life.
None of those are present at launch.  Andrew Ducker squeed about the trailer for Titanfall, but what I saw was guys running in circles shooting each other.  I need context.  A game like that would make me feel empty inside, because I’d keep asking, “Why am I doing this?  What goals am I forwarding?  Why should I root for this guy, and why am I supposed to shoot that other guy in the face?”  For me, learning What Happens Next is the reward that draws me onwards.  And too many games are skipping the single-person campaign, where all the meat of the story happens, to head straight to PVP or co-op.
So XBox One’s initial lineup, and Playstation’s, look a little weak to me.  I wouldn’t want to pay $600, or even $500, for that experience.  The games I like will come, but that’s going to have to hit a tipping point for me where I see ZOMG THE AWESOME GAME, the way that Mortal Kombat brought me to the PS, or the way that Grand Theft Auto 3 convinced me to the Playstation 2.  And when that happens, I’ll whine to Gini and we’ll put the funds in and get that sucker.
For now, though, XBox One is in that weird stage where it’s literally as uninteresting as it’ll ever get.  It has the fewest games in its career, it has the most bugs, it has the most expense.  And for me, there’s no benefit in being cutting edge for cutting edge.

Putting In Your 10,000 Hours

Brad Torgersen has a great post on what rejection slips mean, which you should read, but the upshot is this: You’re going to get a lot of rejection slips as a writer.  Wear them as badges of honor.  There’s no particular trick to being published except “Writing an exceptional story” – and most of us need to write a lot of dreck before we finally start finding our inner voice.
But though Brad touches on the 10,000 hour theory, which I believe – which states that you have to put in 10,000 hours of practice before you can achieve greatness – I feel that 10,000 hours is frequently misunderstood.  It’s not just 10,000 hours of writing – shit, I put that in between 1985 and 2000 alone, and no sales.
That’s because I wasn’t getting good feedback, or being particularly ambitious.  I was writing to please my friends, and I thought that “pretty good” stories were good enough, not realizing that the slush piles are clogged with “pretty good,” and they want great.  I spent a lot of time in front of the keyboard, but I wasn’t learning much – I talked to buddies who liked what I wrote well enough, and when I got rejected I shrugged.
I wasn’t learning.
That’s why Clarion was so transformative to me.  I had eighteen people, all willing to pound my story to bits.  At Clarion, I found I had a lot of lazy writing habits – shortcuts I took because I thought no one would notice, but it turns out that pretty much everyone did.  I learned that writing was not one Big Thing, but the accumulation of a thousand tiny details, and the more of them you can get right, the better the story works.  Every detail matters, every word matters, because you’re going to mess up about a hundred things even in a very short story… and your only saving grace will be that you get more things right.
Note that Brad had his breakthrough when he started writing for him.  He tried new techniques.  And that’s what those 10,000 hours are, to me – burning away trying to imitate other writers until you find out what you do well.  No amount of effort is a guarantee, but no effort almost always is.
You’re gonna get rejected a lot.  That’s because you’re not good enough yet.  But “not good enough today” isn’t the same as “never good enough,” and if you’re honest and perceptive and hard-working, maybe one day you can start selling stories to the markets you dream of.
Then you’ll get bigger dreams.  And work even harder.

Love, The Weak And Fragile

Most people talk of love as though it were as strong as girders, this hurricane-like force that can lift you high into the sky.  If a relationship fails, it’s because we puny humans failed Love by not believing in it hard enough: Love can rescue everyone, knit the world together, even surpass death.
And, I think, people are continually surprised when they plummet through the paper-thin lacing of Love and fall hard onto the rocks below.
Love is fragile.  Love is weak.
Love, to me, is like an emaciated refugee that shows up at your door in the middle of the night during a storm.  You’re not sure how she had the strength to get here, but here she is regardless, her thumb on your doorbell until you let her in.
You take her inside, give her a bed and a bowl of soup.  She’s thankful, but can’t contribute to the house much.  She stays in bed and is absolutely wonderful company, but having Love in the house doesn’t pay the bills, doesn’t sweep the floors, doesn’t feed the cat.  She just sits there tucked into the covers, not complaining.
All these other things in life seem far more pressing than Love, who doesn’t ask much, if anything.  Money certainly makes demands of you, showing up at your door and shaking you down.  Chores arrives and he kicks dust around the house.  Old Habits has been living in your house all your life, and he’s quite insistent that things must be done his way.
And  if you’re not careful to feed her, you spend so much time dealing with Money and Chores and Habits that poor Love starves to death in the corner, so kind she never says a word before she expires.
Love can be strong.  If you feed her good things, get her up and out of bed, take her for walks and get her exercise in, she can do some things that put Money and Chores and Habits to shame.  Given the proper treatment, she can grow to be stronger than all of them put together.  But she’s a delicate flower who requires a lot of attention to thrive, and she doesn’t like causing a fuss.
(Not like Sex.  Sex shrieks in the night, and causes a lot of fuss, and looks much like Love when they’re both in bed together.  I wouldn’t confuse them, though.)
You have to tend to Love constantly.  She’s a tough old bird and will stick around through a lot of neglect, but eventually she will pass on.  The trick is to realize that this mysterious and unannounced visitor needs your care, and God forbid you assume that she’s just naturally stronger than Money and Chores and Habits and you just throw her in to fight with them before you’ve given her a good set of boxing gloves and a training montage.
Love is weak, and delicate, and all the more special because of that.  She’s injured daily by the smallest of things: a uncapped tube of toothpaste, a sneer when you’re in a bad mood, the forgetting of a special day.  Enough nicks and bumps, and one day she’ll pass on, so quiet you may not even hear her die.  You may not even notice with all the other visitors jostling for your attention.
Love is weak as an orchid, and powerful as an oak tree.  In both cases, you’d better get to watering.

A Story Snippet, Or: When Stories Attack

I woke up with this paragraph running through my head:

It all starts with The Book: a gaudy red paperback filled with mostly-blank pages.  The first thing you do on the train ride to Fontanelle is to inscribe your name and address on its front page, so people will be able to find you.  It is said that if you are murdered in Fontanelle – a likely possibility – your killer will mail The Book back to your relatives.

Beyond that, I know nothing.  I have a vague sense of a pile of discarded, filled-out books from disappointed seekers on their way back home clogging the trashcans of the train station at Fontanelle – but I have no idea what Fontanelle looks like, nor what exactly it is that you’re supposed to write in the book (aside from a vague feeling that it comes from talking to people, but that’s the writer in me demanding scenes), nor what kind of culture prizes the quest and not the people, nor what sort of mechanism causes people to find you from writing your name in a book.
Used to be, I plotted my stories in advance, and wouldn’t start until I knew the ending.  Turns out that doesn’t work for me.  What does work is when I’m presented with a mystery and I have to work hard to find out what happens next; that tension of not knowing until you do, dear reader, fills my tales with whatever strength they have.
Now the only way I’ll know what happens is Fontanelle is to write the damn story.  I hope I do.  It sounds like an interesting place.

Help Keep One Of The Best Science Fiction Sites Running!

[Troy McClure voice on]
Hi! I’m Ferrett Steinmetz.  You might remember me from such audio productions as:

• “‘Run,’ Bakri Says,” over at Escape Pod
• “Devour,” also at Escape Pod
• “Dead Merchandise,” even also at Escape Pod
• “Riding Atlas,” at Pseudopod
• “As Below, So Above,” at PodCastle
• “A Window, Clear As A Mirror,” at PodCastle
• “The Sound of Gears,” at Pseudopod
• “Suicide Notes, Written By An Alien Mind,” at Pseudopod

…if you can’t tell, I love audio productions of my stories.  I was raised on old-time radio, sitting huddled next to cassette tapes while I heard Arch Oboler’s Lights Out (fear the Chicken Heart) and Inner Sanctum and Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds.  There’s something magical about turning out the lights and letting someone tell you the story.  That first sentence, the surety of the narrator, the having someone take ink on paper and transform it into rhythm and pitch… a good narrator can take you swirling into the depths of a story, slowing down when you’re breathless, punching holes in your heart with a perfect delivery.
And the ‘Pod network has delivered on my stories, time and time again.  They’ve carried my voice as an author out to thousands of people, doing my stories more justice than I could have with my reedy, untrained pipes, taking slender ideas from my head and transforming them into mythology.
‘Pod stories have heft.  They have heart.  And they choose wisely.
And they’re in trouble.
Basically, they’ve gotten so popular that bandwidth has outstripped their donations – a problem some would say they’re lucky to have, but that’s hard to justify when their money’s going to web servers and not the artists.  Unless they get some help, they’re going to be dead in two months.  And to keep themselves alive, they are reminding you that hey, these stories cost cash, and they need some donations.
You can read all about it here.  As for me, I immediately turned around and donated a hefty chunk of cash.  Short fiction’s a tough gig for publishers, and the Pods have published some magnificent stories in their time, and I don’t want to see them strangled by their own success.  You can donate here, if you have the cash – any amount helps.  (Scroll down a bit and click the “Donate” button on the right-hand side.) 
These guys do good work.  They’ve bettered themselves, time and again.  And this isn’t the thrash of a market that hasn’t worked out, it’s the growing pains of something that’s worked maybe a little too well… and I myself would like to watch them accelerate past this awkward adolescence and into the next stage of magnificence.
They’re good.  Give whatcha can.