What Will The Outside World Think?
It occurred to me today that I have a burnt circuit. I do not care what people on the outside think about the things I love.
This is partially from Magic’s recent #crackgate, wherein a douche went around photographing fat people’s ass-cracks at a Magic tournament, and partially from fandom’s reaction to Jonathan Ross being rejected as the Hugo nominee. Both precipitated hand-flutterings from people – “Man, this makes us look bad to Those People.” Those People, of course, are the millions of folks not really invested in the Hugo or Magic or whatever, to whom this ugly introduction may make us look bad.
I don’t give a shit about Those People.
And maybe that’s not fair. But I got bullied a lot by people who looked like Those People, and at some point a switch cut off: I really don’t care what Those People think, ever. My hobbies were always weird, like walking lead figurines around a pencilled dungeon and pretending to be a wizard, and so I gave up on the concept of legitimacy.
I love what I love. People may think it’s funny – will think it’s funny, in fact. They may paint me as an asocial nerd, or some fat dude with an asscrack, or whatever, as they have since I was twelve. And I spent a lot of time trying to convince people that “No, my crazy hobby isn’t that way!” before shrugging and moving on.
Because the truth is, what I do is a little weird. And if you’re not inclined to like it, well, it’s pretty easy to make fun of. And if you want to do that…
…fuck it. Do it. I mean, it’d be nice if the entire world thought of Magic players as well-groomed smart guys going on adventures (for many of them are!), or science fiction fandom as a vanguard of approaching world culture, but… it’s not necessary to me. I’ve given up seeking approval from random groups of people – many of whom are just looking for an excuse to laugh at strangers anyway.
Which is not to say I don’t worry about being inviting. If Magic’s full of mouth-breathing douches who constantly make jokes about women and gays, well, I’m concerned, because if someone wants to play Magic I think they should feel welcomed here. I’ll work to muffle those dorks best I can. And if some idiot is walking around with a camera at a tournament with the specific intent of mocking people there, then that makes the people at the tournament feel bad, and so fuck him, kick that douche out, he’s hurting my people.
But in general, I don’t care if we’re presenting a good or a bad image to the world at large. I’m a man of ridiculous endeavors – polyamory seems bizarre to people, science fiction seems bizarre to people, Magic seems bizarre to people, and hell, even my love of fireplay is pretty damned weird. I’m not going to spend a lot of time as an ambassador to the mainland from the Archipelago Of Marginal Pastimes, pressing the flesh and trying to convince them that this is a perfectly lovely thing to do.
No. Either you get it instinctively. Or you’re open-minded enough that you try it and love it. If you’re the sort of person who’s going to slot me into a pre-fitted box, I’m not going to spend time engaging with you, I’m going to walk in and out of the goddamned box at will to show you that it’s a mime’s construction made of thin air and intent.
Some of my hobbies have gone mainstream – hey, I can play Dragon Age on my XBox and have that be perfectly okay for a middle-aged man, mostly! – and that’s great. But I don’t think that happened because videogames made a conscious effort to dress up nice and be cool – videogames stayed videogames, and eventually enough people played them that force of sheer numbers bowled them over into the “mostly acceptable” column.
Maybe that’ll happen with Magic. Maybe it won’t.
Either way, I’ll still be playing.
So I Got An Agent, And He's A Good One
While hunting for an agent, I would occasionally ponder just how ludicrous this whole “traditional publishing” thing was.
“Selling a book isn’t your first major milestone,” I told Gini. “So you’d think that ‘getting an agent’ would be your first major milestone, but no! It isn’t! ‘Having an agent ask to look at your book’ is. And think about that! There’s sad authors who go whole careers without even having an agent ask to look at their work.
“Only in this business, man,” I muttered. “Only in this business is getting someone to read the first three chapters of your book considered to be a major triumph.”
But it is, really. Authors speak in hushed tones of “the partial” – and, God willing, “She asked for the full manuscript.” Now, this is usually code for “The agent will spend four months pondering it, only to tell you very kindly that it’s not for them,” but that’s not the point. The point is that getting someone to look at your book means that you’ve escalated your game to a certain level! Lots of people don’t get that far.
Sad? True. The two go together, like peanut butter and chocolate.
So when I got the contract in the mail announcing that Evan Gregory of the Ethan Ellenberg Agency had indeed signed me as his client, thus vaulting me to the next step of the trad-pub game, I couldn’t have been happier. Actually, that’s a lie. As y’all know, I’d been in a depressive slump, so while I was super-happy, I also approached the happiness like a distrustful stray cat, waiting for a boot to be chucked at me. Even today, I keep re-reading those emails with a wary eye, as though on further examination they might turn out to be from some helpful Nigerian prince who will help me transfer his fortune into my bank account.
But dudes. Done deal. And now Evan begins the haul of schlepping my books about to publishers, which means God willing I will have news for you at some point. This stuff takes weeks, months, years. And even more luck.
And I schmeared this news all over Twitter yesterday, but that felt too ephemeral. I know some day I’ll want to look through my archives so I can ask, “When did I first get an agent?” And here will be this blog post, telling me. Reassuring me that shit actually happened.
As a first step, it’s a pretty darned good one.
A Very Brave Girl Shaving Her Head For Her Sister
So my goddaughter Rebecca. Still has brain cancer. Still on chemotherapy. Still sucks.
However, my other goddaughter, Carolyn, is shaving her head to help raise funds for her sister. If you know Carolyn, you know the kid’s a born performer, has been doing song and dance routines at parties practically since she’s been born. She’s in plays every other week, with her long brown hair.
So for a young girl to shave her head to help raise funds and her sister’s spirits is pretty amazing.
The Meyer family has always been a little magical, if you ask me. They’ve been loving and supportive through some amazing things. And I’m really proud of Carolyn for volunteering to do this.
If you want to help Carolyn out, you can donate to St. Baldrick’s to help her team. She’s trying to get to $6,000, and she’s currently at $5,114. As is usual with these sorts of donations, any amount will help (and we’ll take prayers if you have no cash). We love Rebecca, we love Carolyn, and we love all the Meyers in their time of need, and it’s little silly things like this that help cheer us up.
(Rebecca is doing as well as can be expected, by the way. The MRI shows no sign of regrowth as of yet, but the chemotherapy is hard, particularly on a little girl. So given that a large part of her issues are psychological now, donating helps show her that she’s at least doing some good in between all of the chemotherapy poisoning.)
The Medicine Of Sand And Heart
Now that they have Roto-Rootered my heart, I must be on medications to reduce my cholesterol. (Ideally, you’d do that via diet alone, but my cholesterol levels were record-high despite my diet not being all that bad – my body loves to manufacture tiny globules of artery-clogging stickiness.)
They have switched my medication from Crestor (a pill) to a packet called Welchor, which supposedly is heavy-duty stuff that helps to reduce the risk of diabetes. And Welchor is fascinating, because it’s a suspension.
Essentially, you open a packet and dump some white powder into eight ounces of fluid – they suggest water, or diet soda. And mix it well. And drink it.
And it is entertainingly disgusting.
Thing is, Welchor is almost tasteless – a hint of lemon flavoring, but that’s it. The problem is, it lurks in the drink, hovering in it like a flavored octopus, never dissolving but hanging menacingly in the liquid. And you drink the fluid, and you think, “Oh, that’s not bad,” and then a pile of silt forms at the back of your throat and chokes you.
No shit. Silt. This fine sand that clings to the back of your tongue. A pile of it.
Now me, I take this as evidence that it’s working – I imagine Welchor as like an cleanup chemical dumped on an oil-stricken beach, and when it gets into my veins it’ll stick to fat globules in the same way it stuck to my mouth, and destroy them. But as far as making this palatable, it’s hard, because unlike other medicines taste is not the problem. It’s pure, plaster-dust mouthfeel, and I don’t think there’s a liquid that will solve that problem because it’s a suspension.
I’m going to experiment further, but the packet doesn’t suggest hot drinks, so I suspect that dropping this in tea will make it worse. Maybe the smoothies. But that adds smoothie preparation time, because Gini sure doesn’t want this shit.
Two Stories With The Same Ending
“The problem is, there’s one of two stories here,” I said. “And I don’t know which one I’m in.”
Gini kept a respectful distance, close enough to hug if I needed it, far enough that I could speak.
“In the one story,” I continued, “All of this pain and frustration and heartache I’m going through is the low point in the third act. And if that’s the case, it’s like Clarion, where I had a complete breakdown in Week Five, yet in Week Six I wrote the first story that I ever sold to Asimov’s. So maybe this wretched failure is just me breaking through to something greater.
“But the other story – which is equally possible – is far sadder. That’s the story where the old mediocre guy keeps trying over and over again, and never realizes when he should quit. And that’s the one where he spends the next twenty years flailing, chasing a dream that he’s totally ill-equipped for, wasting all of this time and effort on something that he’s not very good at and yet is too obsessive to let go of. And then all those evenings devoted to the craft become sad, wasted, a mountain of lost time.
“I don’t know what story I’m in,” I concluded, spreading my hands. “And it’s killing me.”
Gini looked at me seriously, weighing the options, debating how to present the truth.
“I don’t know which story you’re in, either,” she finally admitted. “But I know your story always ends with the wife who loves you more than anything.”
And I melt.