One Year Ago, To The Moment, I Was Having A Heart Attack
I was in the emergency room, nurses hooking wires up to me, regretting the decision. They were making such a big deal of this. I was only doing this for safety’s sake. I had a date planned that night dancing, and I wanted to be rested, and oh Lord the bills.
Why had they whisked me past the glum room full of people waiting? People clutching hands with actual wounds?
They gave me nitroglycerin, which didn’t reduce the pain in my chest but instead gave me a piercing headache. Proof that this was just indigestion. My Dad had been to the ER twice with indigestion. I had a date. Gini was away on a date with her boyfriend, and I didn’t want to text her because she’d panic. The EKG-stickers tug on my chest hair, I’m in that ass-exposing gown, people are rushing in and out and I didn’t even charge my cell phone all the way. I hope I get out before the charge fades.
I wonder when Gini will wake up. She sleeps late, at her boyfriend’s house. I’ll tell her this afternoon, once I’m back at the house.
And this morning, a year later, I’m cuddled up with Gini. I asked her to make an extra-nice day of it, and so there was much laughter in our too-big bed. The day feels weird, because it’s not just a history I shouldn’t have lived to see – I was 99% blocked in three of the main arteries in my heart – but I also had flashbacks all last night.
Not heart flashbacks. Relationship flashbacks. Someone had emailed me, asking if I had the link for the essay I wrote on what it was like when Gini fell out of love with me. When I’d clung to her too close, needing reassurance for goddamned everything, and damn near splintered our marriage. When I’d learned, haltingly, to self-soothe so I didn’t have to bug her every five minutes, but I’d done irreparable damage and she returned from an eight-hour trip to Philadelphia to realize that…
…she didn’t love me. Hadn’t for several months now.
No, she didn’t want me to move out, not yet. She’d been planning a divorce, she’d realized. Not explicitly, but I’d been intolerable and the arc of our relationship was headed for splitsville – which was fine when I’d acted like an ass, but I’d actually turned myself around and she’d started to remember why she’d liked me, but love? No. That was gone.
So we spent several long months where occasionally I told Gini, “I love you,” and she responded with a still silence.
That love grew back, of course. Like my heart. But in Googling that essay I found all the other LJ hits from the early days of our marriage, seeing all the dysfunctional things that we did, the horrible ways we treated each other, the steps we had to make to somehow luckily stumble towards what we are. And we’re so happy these days that those essays seem like nightmares, letters written from the deepest circle of Hell – the times when we never forgave for old wounds, when we didn’t trust each other enough to marry our money or our possessions because on some level we wanted to keep ’em separated to make it easier for when we departed, all the lies and bad habits and awfulness that have been worn away over the years.
If it had ended on the operating table – and that would be five days from now – I would have been blessed, so blessed that I had literally forgotten all the hard work to lead to what is an idyllic marriage. (An idyllic marriage filled with an occasional blowout fight, but if you don’t have those every once in a while I’m of the opinion that you’re probably not discussing anything of worth. Our fights belie the idyll – which, as my Firefox spellchecker tells me, is an actual word.)
Last night was the clips episode of any long-running show, where you see all the drama brought back in snippets of memory. A lot of them were bad. But those memories inform who I am now. All the sacrifice and pain, both in terms of the gaping scar on my chest and the furrows in my metaphorical heart, remind me how terribly sweet things are now.
There are alternate histories littered behind me. Ones where the doctors stitched my spatchcocked dead body up so I’d be presentable at the morgue. Ones where I exist alone now, one bitter divorce in my past, living in an apartment, maybe with someone in an even more dysfunctional relationship – because without Gini to have blunted some of my sharper edges, I’d probably still be tumbling from awfulness to awfulness.
There are worse places to be. One of the points of divergence starts now, with me on that table in the ER – or me shuffling around the house, taking Advil to quell the pain, ignoring the pressure because I’m too young to be having an actual heart attack.
I only wrote the words “heart attack” at the end of 2013, in a text to a friend. Before that, it was a “heart incident,” much like I used to say that Gini and I were “having issues,” not “almost divorced.”
The terminologies change. I can acknowledge how bad it was only in light of that danger being past now.
I’m in love with a beautiful wife, and I had another year to spend with her, and I had a sharp reminder of how I might not have even had that in a parallel universe. My world is filled with goodness, so much I barely have to reach out to feel her hand in mind.
This is the good path. It is not guaranteed. But I will appreciate where my footsteps land now.
On Thomas Covenant
I’m a big fan of the Thomas Covenant series, having read them at least six times through. (Only once in the last decade, though.) Covenant is actually a huge influence on my writing, at least as big as Star Wars. And yet I feel a little afraid to hate this, as Covenant is one of those things that is hated in many circles – and hated correctly.
The things people hate about Covenant are perfectly accurate, and yet one of the things that draws me to it. (WARNING: Spoilers for a forty year-old fantasy series follow.)
Covenant is one of those stories that draws its strength from hatred, knows it’s designed to be hated, and yet somehow manages to harness that power. Because the protagonist of Thomas Covenant is a leper rapist, which should tell you how incredibly subtle this series is.
No, he does not rape lepers. Actually, Thomas Covenant used to be a bestselling author, but he got leprosy and endured a country music horror story where his wife left him lest their child catch the disease, the town he lives in wants him gone, and of course he cannot write because there is nothing good in his life. The only reason he is alive is because of his constant Visual Surveillance of Extremity checks – as a leper, with degenerating nerves, unless he checks himself daily, he will acquire scrapes he is unaware of, which will become infected and kill him.
He lives a very locked-down life, living out of spite, until the day he is hit by a car and knocked into a dream-land – called, imaginatively, The Land – where he is a) threatened by the Big Bad of the series, b) told that he is the hero and champion of the land (with a mysterious magic contained in his wedding ring), and c) healed of his leprosy, allowed to feel again.
So he rapes his teenaged healer.
The justification, if one can call it that, is that a) Thomas believes this is a dream, and b) that he is so intoxicated by the sudden resurgence of his potency that he is acting even out of his own character. Certainly he despises himself for the act. Still, The Land is so vivid that I don’t think any reader buys it as a dream, and even if it was, it’s pretty clear that a dude who, even in dreams, would go, “Hey, I’d really like to dream about raping a girl” is not someone you’d want to invite to parties.
At which point a lot of people check out. I don’t blame them. Reading involves wanting to follow someone through the next 400 pages to see what they do, and really, when a guy’s raped one person your natural inclination is to find someone less excruciating to follow.
But if you thought that was bad, the rest of the series involves everyone relentlessly and repeatedly forgiving Thomas for the worst possible sins because he’s the Chosen One. He’s prophesied. He wears the Ring. He’s even got the half-hand of legends of old. He’s going to save The Land, and so the wisest people in the place go through astounding contortions to justify why this seemingly grumpy asshole must be a hero in disguise. They don’t just court his favor, they take his assholery as evidence that they must not understand his grandeur, and feel bad for not understanding him.
And while I hate the rape, for me, what drives this series is the discomfort we’re supposed to feel, as Covenant becomes the only one who consistently holds himself accountable for what he’s done. Covenant hates himself, because he knows he’s insufficient to the task in either world. Covenant knows his sins sharper than anyone else, and a major portion of the book is him wondering whether The Land is his psychological ploy to drop his guard so he can finally – and correctly – kill himself. And yet he’s thrust into a world that has scripted him as their Big Damn Hero, and the juice I get from the saga is that underpinning knowledge that there should be a moral accountability, and nobody is willing to give his reckoning to him because he’s the Savior.
And it gets even worse – after three whole books of being bathed in ridiculous amounts of unearned forgiveness, Covenant starts to believe in the Land. He’s an asshole, he knows that, but by God someone should fight for this place – and if the only one who can do it effectively is him, then he has to step up. And then, after abandoning all his hopes and dreams in the quote-unquote “real” world, he actually saves The Land.
So what’s that make Covenant? He’s never forgotten his sins, in fact the Land is littered with the wreckage of all the stupid decisions he made… but on one occasion, for the One Thing he was prophesied to do, he came through.
So what’s Covenant? Is he a hero? Or is he a jerk who managed?
I like that moral complexity. I’ve never forgiven Covenant for that central sin of rape (or all the horrifically Godawful stuff he does later, like practically dating the adoring daughter of the woman he raped in a later book). Yet to this day I oscillate between rooting for Covenant or against him, because on one level he’s scum and yet on another level the fundamental question is whether if a bad man is swamped with enough kindness, maybe he can accomplish something more than evil. He does manage to develop a love he never had before, and he does manage to purge the Land of Lord Foul’s influence.
But really, was the saving of one man worth the cost of all the other damage he had to do? Should The Land have had to suffer, having been seemingly created explicitly for the redemption of one man? Does Covenant’s self-awareness of his own toxicity mean anything compared to the corrosive effects of his self-hatred?
I don’t know that it should.
The magnificence of Thomas Covenant is that all of the accusations leveled against the book are absolutely true, and yet it knows this; in fact, I’d argue that’s why it was written. And the later books, which attempt to cast Covenant in more of the heroic mold (but never a Big Damn Hero, oh no), are less successful.
If you hate it, I see absolutely why. If you couldn’t read it, I’m totally with you. Covenant is the train wreck that I probably shouldn’t be watching, but can’t look away from. Because it plays with a really hideously dangerous morality, and to this day I still wonder about Covenant more than I do any other book. Donaldson made Covenant the anti-hero, someone beyond redemption, and put him in a place where he got as close to redemption as was possible – yet still raised questions of whether this was a good thing.
I dunno. Maybe it’s because I read it when I was fourteen, and it was my first real shot of moral ambiguity. Yet I’m up in the air about it, and that ambiguity of blurring oscillation about what’s actually the right course – whether some things can ever be justified – is what drives a lot of my fiction.
Though Lord knows I’m never writing about rape. Because at this point, it’s become too much of a shorthand, and I think there are far more interesting tales to be told without it.
Shelf Awareness
Like many devoted readers, I had a shelf in my room dedicated to “books I wanted to read.” Whenever I got a book that I was ZOMG EXCITED about, I’d put it on the To-Read Bookshelf, because otherwise my books had a habit of wandering away.
So every time I was tempted to purchase a new book, I’d go to the To-Read Bookshelf and ask, “Is it more interesting than these?” Often? It was. Or I’d go, “Ooh, that’s right, I wanted to read that Robert Bennett book” and take it down.
As the time went on, though, my To-Read Bookshelf expanded to two shelves, then three, then an entire bookcase. And I noted that some books had been there since I instigated the To-Read Bookshelf, stubbornly remaining even as I devoured new and more exciting books.
I eventually realized that they were not books I wanted to read.
They were books I wanted to have read.
And there is a distinction there, since the “Best Of Gene Wolfe” sits there, the favorite of many authors who I adore, a smart series of dense stories I don’t actually enjoy but would be very smart if I had read them. That’s right next to the series of faerie-tale-inspired authors who my friends love, and I would have much better conversations with them if I’d read them. Which is next to that dreary fantasy series I feel I should finish, and would feel like I’d checked off a task when I’d finished the last two books.
But boy, did I not look forward to picking them off the shelf.
Once I started making that distinction between “want to do” and “want to have done,” it seemed to be everywhere. I don’t want to exercise; I want the satisfaction of having done it. I don’t want to eat healthy foods; I want the satisfaction of having eaten them. The “have done” chores feel good after completion, but there is no joy in the process – not the way I feel about writing, which is a “want to do” activity.
Now that I know this, I can draw the task. I have to make room in my life for the “have done” tasks, like exercise, because left to my own devices I’m never going to drift towards them naturally. I have to set aside time and say, “This is what you will do” and drag myself towards it, then feel vaguely triumphant when complete. And I have reorganized my books so that the “want to reads” are all on that top shelf, and I put the “want to have reads” on the bottom shelf, where they acquire a fascinating patina of dust as I tell myself that yes, some day I will have done that.
I don’t want to throw them away. There’s a value in doing things that are good to have done. I learn more, and often get greater results out of the things I should have done.
But not today. Today I’m reading the things I want to. And that’s a lovely distinction to understand why these books get finished and others do not.
Can Science Tell Us How To Write A Bestseller?
That’s a bullshit Buzzfeed headline. I’m sorry I led you on. Of course science can tell us how to write a bestseller… or it will. I’m pretty sure I’ll see a written-literally-by-the-numbers bestselling book arrive within my lifetime as we throw increasingly-sophisticated analyses at plot structure at prose.
Writers think that writing is special, that no machine could ever do it as well. The same could be said of wine experts and sommeliers; computers don’t have noses or tongues. Except as it turns out, if you do analyses of weather patterns and soil samples, computers can predict which years will be the “good” years with increasing – and terrifying – accuracy.
Assuming computational processes continue at their current rate, humans may well find that they have become inferior at every task they do. (And yes, there’s a novel in there about what happens when humans have built a world where they are both the focus of, and simultaneously the least talented thing within, all creation.)
Writing will take a while to crack, but there’s been what’s claimed to be the first computational study of “What makes a bestseller?” The paper can be found here. They claim to be able to predict the bestseller-like nature of a book with as much as 84% accuracy from prose stylings alone.
Which makes sense. Bestselling books would have certain characteristics in common, and prose would be among them. Prose is, also, the easiest thing for computers to hash out, as prose is merely an assemblage of word choices and sentence lengths.
I’m just not convinced this study did it.
The study took about 2,000 works from Project Gutenberg – i.e., books in the public domain – and broke them down. (I wish I could see the list of books, but clicking on the link in the footnote gives me an error, and copying and pasting the URL merely does a Google search for me in both Firefox and Chrome.) Then they used “the formula” against a bunch of random Gutenberg books and a handful of public-domain books, matching the prediction against the actual bestsellerhood.
But I dunno. It’s a really good start (and some of the discussions on readability vs. success are fascinating – seriously, the paper’s pretty readable when you screen out the mathiness) – but I’m not convinced Gutenberg is the place to start, or that even 2,000 books is a good enough sample size.
Which is to say that for me, I think the definition of “bestseller” prose has changed in my lifetime – Ernest Hemingway used to be a crazy outlier, where even pulpish escape books tended to have denser prose, whereas now authors like James Patterson with his infamously-short 800-word chapters clutter the lists. Which is not to say that there aren’t dense tomes charting to this day – some love the thicket of escapism – but I do think that using Project Gutenberg tends to skew analysis towards “What made a bestseller in 1940?” as opposed to today’s trends.
And I also think there’s a subtle bias in Gutenberg, in that while some dead-selling books get entered out of the thankful diligence of its volunteers, the books that make it in generally have some distinction – which is to say, a stickiness that marks them in some way memorable. We’re generally not seeing the pulped failures lumped in. So it’s not quite a fair contest.
No, what I’d like to see – and I know the writers of the analysis were handicapped by not having access to this data – would be, say an analysis of, 5,000 random manuscripts submitted to various publishers, showing what prose-trends were useful in a) getting published, and b) becoming a bestseller. Or an analysis of 2,000 books taken randomly from the “thriller” section of Amazon published in the last five years, so we can see what prose styles modern readers appeal to. Or an analysis of the distinctions in prose styles and how they work – as in clearly James Patterson and Tom Wolfe appeal to different audiences, but how can we break down those styles to see the hallmark elements of each?
That day is coming when science can really do it. I wouldn’t be surprised to have some slush-reading done by computers in the future. And have that slush-reading be done well. But I’m not convinced this study is more than a good first step.
So. How would you analyze it, techie people?
On Promoting Your Works During Awards Season
If you’ve got a bunch of science fiction-writin’ friends, you know this is That Time Of Year: it’s when all the nominations for the Hugo and Nebula awards are coming up. So every author is putting up the obligatory post reminding you what they wrote this year, just in case you feel like nominating it for the ballot.
I’m not doing it this year.
Partially, it’s because 2013 feels like a loss to me as a writer. I lost several months due to my triple-bypass, and then mostly spent the year working on novels that are, as of now, unrepresented. (I’m flogging those to agents, I assure you, but it’s a slow process.) All my good stuff feels locked away.
But mostly it’s because I don’t see the point this year. I used to flog copiously, gratuitously, and never got nominated for anything. Then I did some flogging in the right places (putting copies of Sauerkraut Station and “Run,” Bakri Says in the SFWA Boards and in Codex for the first time ever), and got nominated for Sauerkraut Station in 2012 for both the Nebula and BFSA.
That sort of flogging is, I think, is the right level to do it at. (Which is not to say that this is a magic guarantee, as hundreds of other people did the exact same thing to lesser results, but rather that SFWA and Codex are the places where the highest concentrations of Nebula nominators lurk and as such it’s the proper place to start to be seen. You still need a lot of quality, and the years I was blogginfloggin most vaingloriously was when I was at my weakest as a writer.)
Yet this year’s been a difficult year. My best story, Black Swan Oracle, was in a Kickstarted anthology – which, though the anthology was of high quality, comparatively few people read. My second-best story, The Sturdy Bookshelves of Pawel Olizewski (which did wind up on Tangent’s “Recommended” list as a two-star story) was behind a paywall. Of all my original stories this year, only Shadow Transit was freely available (and if you like creepy kids fighting Cthulhu, by all means, take a look – I’m quite proud of that one).
I’m pretty sure that a big factor in the reason Sauerkraut Station got nominated was because it was easily passed around – it was, as it still is, available for everyone to read it, and so it could be read with a link. Which was a significant advantage that put it ahead of better tales that were locked in books that people had to pay to read. Sauerkraut Station was stickier because if someone loved it, they could post that love on Facebook or Goodreads or Twitter, and there was no barrier for someone to go directly from someone’s “I loved that!” to “Well, why did they love it so much? Oh!”
Which is not to say that works behind paywalls can’t get nominated – obviously they can, and do! But I think to a certain extent, reminding people of those paywall works is a thankless exercise – either the stories were good enough to stick in your head, or they weren’t. You have to be that much more above the curve when you’re behind that paywall to get the nomination.
So I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that it’s worth doing the “Heya, try this!” during awards season when the works out in the open, where you can just point people at ’em and say “Go,” but it’s of less worth for things where you have to personally send people PDFs of your stories over and over again. I think the web-published works benefit from having people link to them so that they achieve a greater mass of love shot towards them.
Note: I could well be wrong.
Now, what some people get upset about is the idea of promotion, as if authors – particularly girl authors – shouldn’t be so tacky as to remind the world that they’d like to be nominated. To which I say, fuck that. An author’s job is to promote their work, and if you get bent out of shape by a blog post and an accompanying Tweet, the author is probably better off without you as a fan. Nebula and Hugo nominations help them sell more books, and I say yippee to that.
But for me? Perhaps it’s a year I feel I’ve spent hibernating, banking away words in the hopes of a strong 2015. But I’m not sending tales out this year. If I get nominated, I’d be thrilled, but I don’t feel like investing the hope this time around. Perhaps next year.