Would You Like To See My Fall 2013 Hat?

Every Spring and Fall, I purchase a stylish new hat from Mike the Hatter’s.  It’s a slightly vain expenditure, but I’ve become a little fastidious in my old age, what with my pretty nails and gaudy Hawaiian shirts and Cuban-heeled boots.
Gini laments the expense at times, but then again she complained at me for a solid decade that she wanted me to wear something more elaborate than black jeans, black T-shirt, and sneakers.  The lesson? Careful what you wish for.
Anyway, this year’s hat was a very close call. I literally spent twenty minutes putting these two hats on and off, wandering around the store to see if there was a clearer choice to be made, wandering back, asking Gini, asking my father, asking the very knowledgeable salesmen, trying them on and off.  And the winner was not this hat, though it was damn close:

This year, I wanted to experiment with something more colorful than the usual browns and tans – alas, pale green made me look like a pillbox, and bold purple, though magnificent, would have clashed with every Hawaiian shirt I own. So wine-colored it was, though in the end it was the shape of the hat that dissuaded me; there was something about the way it sat on my head that I deemed funny.
As a side note, I am not a hat person. Gini is a hat person. I wear hats, but I have to try twenty or thirty of them on before I find one even marginally acceptable. Gini flips on any hat, and she looks as adorable as this (which she purchased for a cheap $14.99):

In any case, the end winner was this delightful little number, which was also a slightly brighter shade of maroon. (If that’s maroon. As I’ve noted before in cartoon form, men see in different spectrums.)

That, my friends, is the official Fall 2013 hat.  You can see it at all my public appearances through next Spring, at which point I’ll purchase some spiffy new Panama hat.

Two Thoughts Upon Reading The First Chapter Of Doctor Sleep

Thought #1: Jeez, no wonder Stephen King hates Stanley Kubrick.  He has to go, “Hey, you know that guy who got killed off for shock value in the third act?  Well, he’s actually alive and thriving at the end of my version of The Shining, and more than that he’s going to play a very important role right in the first chapter.”
Being Stephen King, he does this right in the second paragraph, but I’m sure as he was writing it, he hated that he had to regurgitate events for movie-but-not-book readers.  Because it’s not his best opening.  It serves, but it’s what he kind of had to do.
Thought #2: I will acknowledge that I literally squeed with happiness when I saw that Stephen had put in an explicit cross-reference to a Joe Hill book, thus knitting the Hilliverse and the Kingiverse together now and forever more.  Yes, they’re father and son, but it was kind of a pleasant way of saying, I trust my boy.  He can be in my worlds.  And since I fucking adore Joe Hill, I’m so glad to see this marriage of creativity.
(Hey may well have done this with his wife Tabitha’s book, which I didn’t care for, and maybe for Owen’s book as well – that’s on my list – but being a Joe Hill fan, it made me all squeepy inside.  YES SQUEEPY IS A WORD.)

She Didn't Leave You For Another Guy

I know a woman who left her husband for another man. I know a woman who left her husband for another man. I know a woman who left her husband for another man.
None of these three women actually left their husband for another man.
Now, if you were to ask the husbands in question, each of them would tell you more-or-less the same story: they opened up their marriage to someone else for some crazy-sexy reason – sometimes they went poly, and their wife dated some new guy. Sometimes they got into BDSM, and the husbands generously agreed to be the vanilla sex while some other dude played Big Daddy.
Then these guys bewitched their wives with crazy sex-stuff, and their wives left.
And it’s sad, watching these abandoned husbands. They loved their wives deeply, enough to go by the old maxim “If you love something, set it free,” and then watched as their love spread their wings, flapped their way over the horizon, and never looked back.
Each of these men are scarred, because they just went head-to-head with another man, often sexually, and were judged wanting. That’s a hard weight to carry. You feel like you must be terrible in bed. Sometimes you see those guys dating afterwards, and they date cringing, almost apologetically. They’re waiting for the next girl to tell them that yeah, this was fun, but Big Swangin’ Dick over here offers a better ride.
Thing is, more often than not, that’s not actually what happened to these poor bastards.
What these guys frequently forget is the spasms of jealousy that overtook them once the marriage opened up, the way they were threatened by the other guy. And the wives probably didn’t act in the best ways, because shit, New Relationship Energy is a toxic drug, and they were falling deep In Lurve and probably spending a little too much time with Too-New-To-Have-Shaken-Out-The-Real-Problems and ignoring Mister Old-And-Assumed.
But what was really happening was that their wives were not falling in love with another guy.
They were falling in love with a new lifestyle.
The new guy (or, hell, girl) is merely a gateway drug. Sure, they’re having knee-blisteringly awesome sex with ’em, but that’s actually a side effect: what the wives are discovering is that they weren’t ever really monogamous, or they weren’t ever really only vanilla, and this guy is showing them that they can have something they never thought they could before… and that something is really good.
And in that sense, it’s like discovering you love heavy metal. It doesn’t mean you can’t turn up the radio now and then and enjoy the hell out of some Taylor Swift. But once you’ve actually felt those guitar riffs surging through you, it’s hard to be told that you can’t listen to those metal songs ever again.
So what happens is that the wife goes a little crazy, the husband gets nervous, and eventually he’s so unhappy that he makes the ultimatum: It’s him or me.Except it’s usually not “him or me”: it’s “abandon this lifestyle you’ve just discovered that makes you whole, or keep me.”
When you dump that ultimatum on the table – “It’s him or me” – then you’ve just crystallized this into a clear choice. Maybe she still loves herself some Taylor Swift, but goddamn she’s gotta catch the Metallica show every once in a while.
And she leaves.
Which isn’t entirely fair, I admit. The husband, as I’ve noted in the past, didn’t necessarily sign up for the Big World O’ Beatings, or the All-Dates, All-The-Time lifestyle. What actually happens in a lot of these cases is that sort of terrible, no-fault issue where the wife discovers that what she needs to be happy is incompatible with what the husband needs to be happy… and really, those sorts of dealbreakers will kill any relationship, sure as the “I want kids”/”I hate kids” issue will often tear a happy couple apart.
You’re not necessarily wrong to want to never listen to Metallica again. But it does sure mean that you can’t live with the Heavy Metal Queen Reborn.
And the wife often does go off with the new guy and sticks with him, because sometimes that new relationship works out. But often it lasts for a year or two until the blood is off the rose and she realizes that New Guy is even more dysfunctional than Old Guy, and she has to abandon him to have the lifestyle she needs to lead.
But I look at all these husbands, and all they can focus in on is the guy. The guy’s an easy target. The guy swooped in, stole his wife, and left. There was some contest they’d inadvertently entered with the guy, and they lost, and they’re constantly turning that struggle over in their mind. They’re wondering, “How could I have been better in bed? How could I have beaten that guy?”
Truth is, my friend, the only way you could have beaten that guy was to either swallow all your happiness, or to be an entirely different guy. What you ran into was a dealbreaker, where your wife had a revelation you never saw coming – maybe couldn’t have seen coming – and discovered she needed something you couldn’t give.
It’s sad. But I’m not sure there was anything you could have done.

The Most Valuable Lesson I Learned At Viable Paradise, Available Online

If you go to Viable Paradise, the week-long writers’ intensive, you’ll get feedback from some of the best authors in the biz.  It’s well worth it if you can go, as many are this very week, as you’ll get some critical feedback to boost you to the next level.
Now, the most valuable technique I learned was courtesy of Teresa Nielsen-Hayden, a great editor, who I asked to edit my manuscript.  Instead of sitting down with me to discuss the strengths and weaknesses in my manuscript, as the other teachers did, Teresa and I sat in silence while she got out her red pen and yanked useless words out of my story.  It was like watching a literary game of Jenga – she was striking out sentences I was certain were necessary, so many that my story appeared to be gunshot, but when it was done I found my story to be a third lighter and twice as strong.
It was a lesson in how few words are actually necessary.   I sold a lot more stories after that.  I would encourage all you current members of VP to flock about Teresa like birds and ask her to edit you.
But if you’re not at Viable Paradise – and a preliminary survey suggests that you aren’t – then you can get the most valuable lesson I got from Viable Paradise at a web page.
Which is to say that when you go to Viable Paradise, at least six good authors check over your story and tell you what they think.  (That’s significantly different from the Clarion experience, where usually one teacher reads one story.)  And when I had my tale critiqued – which was Riding Atlas, later bought by Three-Lobed Burning Eye and then re-sold for an audio production at Pseudopod – I got the following feedback:

• This story’s pretty much perfect. Ship it out.
• This isn’t actually a story.  I don’t know what it is, but it’s unsatisfying.
• This is a travelogue, a kind of weird trip through the universe, but your language isn’t up to par.  Your prose has to be much more descriptive towards the end.
• I was repelled by the characters.
• This is a bloody story, but the character arc is really small and it needs to be expanded.
• I’d buy this in a heartbeat. (Get it?)

Now, each of them gave me more detailed feedback about how they might fix the story, but the end result is this: Six really smart writers looked at my manuscript.  Two of them would have purchased it, two thought it needed more work, and two wouldn’t have bought it no matter what.
Which is when I finally internalized the lesson about submitting.  I’d been told all my life that editors reject things for different reasons, and there’s no such thing as a universal story… but after Viable Paradise, where I basically got to sit live next to six reactions, I realized that a rejection from any market doesn’t mean it’s a bad story, it means I haven’t found a good home.  Some part of me always internalized “a rejection” as “you’re a bad writer,” but seeing the variance at Viable Paradise made me realize I’m an editor, and I frequently reject published stories.  I do it when I read an anthology and find half the stories “meh.”
That editor’s rejection email often isn’t a “guh!” where they’re pushing it away from the table, repelled – it’s often a shrug, as they find it okay but they need to bring the awesome.
If you’d like to see that kind of editor’s round-table in action, you can go to Wonderbook’s Editor’s Roundtable, where eight of the most respected editors in the business all read the same story and give their feedback on why they would (or wouldn’t) reject it.  You can see the same forces at work: a couple think it just needs a touch of cleanup, others wouldn’t get beyond the third paragraph.  (I didn’t, but I have a tragically low tolerance for dialect.)
If you’d like to be a professional writer, you’re gonna get rejected.  A lot.  I do, and so do the writers I know. But it helps to know exactly how variable a sale is – just because a story got rejected six times doesn’t mean it’s a bad story, it means you hit the wrong seat at that round table.
One of the battle cries of Viable Paradise is Uncle Jim shouting, “Keep submitting ’til hell won’t have it!”  This is why you keep submitting.
This is why you persevere.

A Stranger World, A Frailer World

I feel absolutely fine, most of the time.  I’m just a person, walking around, nothing particularly wrong.
Then I get in the tub, and see my scars turn an angry red in the hot water, and I remember that I’m a patient.
I go to the supermarket, and see all the foods I can no longer eat, and feel the tremendous swell of guilt at all the foods I should be eating but am not, and I remember that I am a patient.
I go to the doctor, who is very concerned about how I’m doing, and he prescribes all sorts of new medicines to get my blood back to where it should be because my heart, my heart could go again, you don’t want that, do you?  And I am a patient.
Patients aren’t people.  They’re problems to be solved, and are expected to be compliant – let us poke you with needles, fill you with medicines, summon you to doctors’ offices at our convenience.  You’re not human on some vital level until you’re well again.
I’ll never be well again.  I’ll always have some heart issues.  I’ll always be a fragile status until, well, my life ends.
Which is not to say that things aren’t good, most of the time.  I have it better than other more serious heart patients like Tobias Buckell, who can’t even go for a run should he desire.  But nine months after my open-heart surgery, I’m still wading through a shock that really, you’re not well, you’re possessed of a body that will kill you unless you constantly monitor and maintain it.  Life isn’t a given now, it’s a thing that must be cultivated, and I’m probably not doing half as well at that as I should because frankly, looking into that abyss terrifies me.
Yet I do.  I eat better, if not a life turned vegetarian.  I get more exercise, though admittedly all of it is with the four-times-a-day pup-walk at this stage.  I take all my medicines diligently.  Yet underneath everything is a lurking convalescence, the realization that all of this is an illusion that could be ripped aside at any time, that one bad reading could send me back to the days when I couldn’t get out of my bed to pee.
It’s an oscillation, because I can’t quite get all the sides of it.  After watching everyone’s reaction to Rebecca’s cancer, I have come to the conclusion that maybe a few bold humans can look the death of a loved one in the eye and process it, but for most of us it’s a horror that we skid off of; we can deny it, we can work around bits of it, we can concentrate over here and kind of slide towards it sideways, but looking it dead-on is something that would destroy us.  And so it is with me, guiltily gobbling a Pop Tart.
I have been instructed that I must go to cardiac rehab therapy, which terrifies the bejesus out of me.  I’ve had the prescription since Monday, but haven’t called, because I know what awaits me: cold tile floors, things hooked to my chest, readings that tell me exactly how sick I am.  And if I avoid them, I can pretend I’m not sick even if I am, I really am.
I’m calling now.  Because I know this is an illusion: I can pretend to be well and get sick, or look at my sickness and get well.
I just wish getting well felt as good as pretending to be well.