The Irony Is….

….I wrote an essay that, if I were to summarize it, went something like:
“I thought this girl cut me off without any explanation.  But when I really analyzed what happened, it turned out she’d been trying to tell me that I was doing things that hurt her, and I dismissed her concerns because I was incapable of comprehending what she told me.”
However, when someone else summarized it, their interpretation was:

He was in a relationship, or so he thought, and then rationalized it as he is wrong for feeling attached.
Male emotion doesn’t matter.
Show me where I’m wrong in that conclusion.

The irony is that this guy did a shitty job of reading the text, basically stripping out a lot of context and meaning to arrive at the conclusion that “male emotion doesn’t matter,” and…. he has exes in his past who’ve clearly, based on his outrage, cut him off without explaining to him what he did.
Dude.  They explained it to you in the way I explained it you.  And you misinterpreted it in the same crappy way you’re doing now.
I feel safe in saying the problem isn’t that she didn’t tell you, the problem is that you can’t fucking interpret words correctly.
(….But for the record, “male emotion” does matter, as much as any emotion matters.  I’m not down on masculinity, I’m down on emotion.
(I’m of the fairly firm opinion that you reach wisdom once you start recognizing that “I feel this strongly” does not necessarily mean that this is true, and much of maturity comes from being able to truly feel the roiling stew of emotions that are telling you to do all sorts of damn-fool things, and instead choosing to do the right thing.  Whether that’s putting aside your anger to be a reasonable person to someone who deserves the benefit of the doubt, or suppressing your insecurity to handle someone else’s hurt, or tucking aside fear to go do the things that will actually make your life better, or suppressing revulsion at your own wrongness to actually acknowledge that this factual argument is correct, I think “emotions” are overrated.
(We all feel emotions.  They’re useful.  I’m no Vulcan.  But though I felt justified emotionally in what I did to Allie at the time, that does not make my actions actually justifiable.  And that distinction is a critical life lesson for people to learn.)
(And no, I’m not linking to the comment; it’s in one of the cross-postings somewhere, and I don’t particularly feel like sending the flying monkeys at this dude, who has enough problems of his own to deal with.)
 

Two Deserving People Who Could Use Some Help

Regrettably, I don’t link to every GoFundMe campaign people create for personal life’s events; in a lot of cases I don’t actually know the people posting, and am uncertain of what they’d do with the money.  And in other cases, there’s a kind of “donation fatigue,” where if I ask y’all to shoot money at someone every week, it loses its effectiveness.
But here’s two people I know would use the money well, if you chose to give it to them.
The first is my friend Jeff, whose wife has cerebral palsy and a botched brain surgery that she’s recovering from.  Watching the Meyers go through what they’re enduring with my Goddaughter Rebecca, the one relief is that they’re financially well-off enough to pay the bills; Jeff and his wife, alas, are not, and they’re drowning in medical expenses.  As such, they’ve started a campaign to try to raise funds to help them keep their two kids happy and hopefully stop the searing pain that his wife feels. Well worth a few spare bucks, if you have it.
The other potentially life-saving campaign is a little more proactive: my friend Angel, who is a true badass of a woman, works in private security doing alarm responses – and she’d like a ballistics vest so if she gets got in the course of duty, she doesn’t, you know, die.  Unfortunately, most ballistics vests are fitted for men, and she needs something to go under her clothing to be plainclothes.  Donating a few dollars could keep someone I admire alive, so, you know, also worth a few spare bucks.

Things Nobody Told Me About Selling A Novel (Part 2): The Importance Of The Elevator Pitch

“You gotta work on your elevator pitch,” Michael Underwood told me in my first marketing meeting, shortly after I’d sold Flex to Angry Robot.  And then, at the next con I attended, I saw why that mattered.
I’d been on a panel with an author who’d done the thing that all struggling authors do: propped her book up in front of her, cover facing the audience, to remind them oh, I have a book. (I’ll be doing that come September.  Copiously.)  And afterwards, as we were packing up our bags and walking away, she struck gold: an audience member walked up and asked, “So what’s your book about?”
The author sort of flopped her hand on the cover, pointing to the furred person on the front.  “Well, it’s about his attempts to be normal.”
And you could see the audience member freeze in place a bit, waiting for an explanation of what his problems were (aside from being magnificently furry), and why this furry dude wanted to be normal.  But no such explanation was coming.  And so the audience member shrugged and drifted away with the rest of the crowd.
I had not read the book, but that description instilled in me zero desire to read it.  Which is a shame!  It could be a great book!  After all, the author in question was charming and funny on the panel – so insightful that a complete stranger walked up to her afterwards, curious to see what sort of fiction this personality wrote.
There had been an opportunity to make a fan there, and it dissipated like cologne spritzed into a high wind.
Now, as an author, I hate the hard sell.  (Even if I’m on a panel about writing short fiction, I fricking hate bringing up my own stories as examples because I do not want to be That Guy who only talks about His Magnificent Stories.)  But I do realize that even if you’re going the low-PR route, eventually someone will find out you’re an author, and they’ll ask, “So what do you write?”
Having an interesting, one-sentence pitch ready for these moments – and as I’ve already discovered, there’ll be more of ’em than you think – is a good thing to spend some time honing.
You want it short enough that you won’t take up minutes of conversation, but intriguing enough that someone might be lured into asking follow-up questions.  My problem is that “short” thing: I’m awful, awful, awful at condensing my novels down into synopses.  To me, everything is important – hey, that delivery guy on page 224 brought in a very important pizza! – and so when asked to summarize my book, it goes something like this:
“Well, uh, it takes place in a world where magic is created by obsession, you know, if you love something enough it wears a hole in the universe and weird shit happens.  Like, if you’re a crazy enough Crazy Cat Lady, you become a felimancer, and you can do Crazy Cat Lady-related magic.  But by then, you’re pretty nuts, so the magic you want to do is only related to getting and protecting more cats, so really magicians are kind of fucked.  And then there’s a dude in the middle of it, his name is Paul, and he’s been working in insurance for so long that he’s become a bureaucromancer, just nuts about paperwork – dude can, you know, create a lease for a fantastic apartment out of thin air, or maybe backdate an arrest warrant to have a squadron of cops showing up on your door.  But a terrorist ‘mancer burns his daughter so badly that he needs the funds to surgically reconstruct her face.  Except, oh, yeah, whenever you do magic, there’s a backlash that has a good chance of killing you, so he’s terrified he’ll fuck her up even worse by using this new magic, and so he has to team up with this kinky Nintendo-obsessed videogamemancer to brew magical drugs….”
Maybe you liked that summary.  But read it out loud.  Imagine you’ve got a table of four mostly-strangers looking at you when you say this.
Imagine trying to hold their attention through that whole rambling spiel, and you haven’t even said the name of the damn book yet.
No, for politeness’ sake, you owe it to your buddies to construct a quick pitch so you can tell them what it’s about in about twenty seconds, then let them decide if they want to ask follow-up questions.
And for this, you must not be afraid to compare yourself to other authors.  As my friend Steve noted, it seems a little squicky, but it actually does the hard work in people’s minds – they know Author X, they know whether they like Author X, and they have a decent idea of what Author X does.  And for this to work, you need a popular author, because “I write like Nir Yaniv” will score you hipster points among a small (and smart) crowd but will merely baffle most people.
So if you’re a person who writes light, humorous fiction, telling people “It’s kind of like Terry Pratchett” informs them right away whether they’re gonna be into you.  You don’t have to compare yourself, but it’s not the obscenity it seems.
(Unless Terry’s at the table with you.  Then you might wanna reconsider.  That could get embarrassing.)
For me, Michael Underwood helped me narrow it down to something close to this:
“It’s called Flex, and it’s basically Breaking Bad meets magic – a bureaucromancer has to brew magical drugs to save his burned daughter.  Some people say it’s a lot like Jim Butcher.”
There.  I just timed that on my iPhone, and I can say that in nine seconds.  Anyone can endure me talking about that for nine seconds.  And if they want to ask more, then I can blather.
(Of course, that assumes I’m not at a table with a high-powered author who I’m intimidated to be around, which happens a lot, in which case I’ll just mumble and go, “Itsabook.”  But I’m working on that.  I really am.)
(Also note that Michael Underwood has his own new hotness, described as “In a city built among the bones of a fallen giant, a small group of heroes looks to reclaim their home from the five criminal tyrants who control it,” which is available for pre-order right now.)
 

She Broke Up With Me, And Never Gave Me A Second Chance

When I was nineteen, being both depressive and insecure, I dated a girl called Allie.  Allie was perfect for me at nineteen – she was smart, more well-read than any girl I’d ever met, possessed of a wicked sense of humor, and way into Doctor Who.
This was back when Doctor Who was a hipster nerd phenomenon, with the only way to watch episodes on late-night PBS telethons and hand-recorded videotapes, so even knowing Tom Baker’s name was like a secret handshake.  We’d go to her house and watch episodes, and cuddle up, and never quite kiss.
We never quite kissed because she liked me, but thought I was a risky proposition to get intimate with.  I was prone to dramatic outbursts, fresh off of two spring suicide attempts – that was before I’d noticed my Seasonal Affective Disorder – and I had a bad habit of acting out to get attention when I felt lonely.  She wasn’t sure she could trust me.
Which, of course, I didn’t understand.  We were meant for each other!  We’d both read the complete works of Freud!  We both laughed at the same obscure jokes! I was always a phone call away when she was down!  How could she think I might be bad for her?
We dorked around like that on and off for about a year, and eventually she trusted me.  She kissed me, and I floated on air for a week.  She finally admitted that yes, we were dating, and that she loved me.
Naturally, I fucked it up within weeks.
I was insecure because she went to college in another city, and I got drunk, and back in those days I was of the dumbass opinion that if someone loved you, then they’d be happy to prove it to you at any time.  So my reaction to insecurity was to have a mental breakdown over something she’d done, gibbering about how much hurt she was causing me – expecting that she’d naturally see my pain and demonstrate her affection in all the over-the-top, Lloyd-Dobler-with-the-boom-box ways that I was prone to doing.
So I did that on a visit.
She kicked my ass to the curb.
No explanation.  No reason.  She just told me it was over, and told me to go, and next thing I knew I was taking an early train home to Connecticut, *completely baffled* as to what had happened.
I was cut off.
And it hurt a lot.
Now, the reason I’m digging up all of these painfully stupid incidents from my past is because of this much-maligned piece on “Cutoff Culture”, wherein the guy had a four-month relationship with someone who (it’s implied) is a decade younger than he is, and then was still stalkery heartbroken about it two and a half years later.
The essay is basically a long clumsy cry for help, saying, “How can I possibly heal if you won’t talk to me?  How can partners be *so mean* to cut men off without an explanation?  You owe it to me to talk to me to help me along my psychological journey!”
And let me tell you what Allie’s cut-off finally taught me, my friend:
My pain is not anyone else’s responsibility to fix.
And that is quite possibly the most valuable lesson I ever learned.
I was, thankfully, self-aware enough not to be a stalker back then… partially because I respected boundaries, which I did, but partially because my drama took the form of worshipping Allie, with me as her humble knightly servant, and the Queen had exiled me.  So I took it as a matter of pride to stay as far away from her as possible.
(Thank God.  Oh, thank God I did.  Some days I look at my nineteen-year-old self as some rabid tiger, wandering around loose and dangerous, and I wonder who the fuck ever thought letting that idiot out on the world was a good idea.  I wasn’t a good person back then, but holy shit I could have fucked up even worse.)
But I wondered.  I wondered why the heck she wouldn’t want me, when I did everything she needed.  I did all of these wonderful things for her, been her best friend, been the funniest guy she knew – she told me that! – and with all that, how could she toss that away so casually?
I analyzed Allie.  Was she cruel?  Psychopathic?  Crying out in her own way for help?  Blind to my benefits?
And Jesus fuck, after months of pondering the idea, I finally had shucked away the other options and was left with the simple, staring truth that Maybe you were bad for her, you idiot.
It seems stupidly simple, and it was, but I was so fogged by my misplaced affections that I couldn’t do the equation: If she kicked my ass out, I couldn’t have been as good as I thought.
And that thought led to a hundred other thoughts, each of which contributed to making me an actually useful partner:
“How could she not have told me?”  Well, the forensic analysis on those conversations revealed that she had told me, at least twenty times – I just wasn’t listening.
“How could she be so cruel?”  She could be so cruel because I’d been an overemotional jackass to her on multiple occasions, and though she’d been quietly trying to change my behavior, I stubbornly refused to stop.
“Why was this so sudden?”
It wasn’t.
It had been a slow burn, and I was just too self-obsessed in my own needs to see it coming.
Yet when I checked with my friends, the ones who were honest?  Holy God, they all saw it coming.  To them it was a tsunami of stupid, and they were just waiting for it to hit shore, but I didn’t even feel a drizzle.
And what finally occurred to me was that I was the villain here.
Which is not to say that Allie was without flaw.  I’m not going to make the stupid nineteen-year-old mistake of idolizing Allie, claiming she was perfect and oh God I brought down Heaven itself (which was, sadly, the self-flagellation mode I took for years afterwards).  Allie had her own flaws, and in truth we didn’t actually share the same sense of humor, and we didn’t actually love the same things about the books we’d read, and I was a Peter Davison fan when she loved Tom Baker.
Really, such a relationship could never last.
But what I started to learn with Allie (and ultimately had to finish up with my wife Gini, who thankfully I did get it right with) was that I had a really selfish MO, perhaps taught to me from years of therapists who’d been paid to listen to me: When I was upset, I thought it was someone else’s job to calm my ass down.
And it wasn’t.  I was actually a walking stickybomb, expecting everyone else to tend to my needs, and what Allie taught me – bless her – is that nobody else is responsible for my pain but me.  I can talk to other people to try to fix it, and it’s helpful if they do, but they are by no means obligated to help me in my journey.
More importantly: if I fuck up their lives to an unreasonable extent, they’re perfectly within their rights to eject me.  Nobody should be expected to tolerate someone who’s actively toxic to them.
And viewed in that light, the very least I could do to Allie after heaping psychological trauma upon her is to leave her the fuck alone and not try to get in touch with her.
Yet to this day, on the rare occasions I’ve written about Allie, I get people chirping, “Well, you should get in touch with her!  You never know!  See if she’s forgiven you!”
But hey, this is the age of interconnectivity.  My name’s a Google away.  I’ve seen her name float across my Facebook page a couple of times, which means I’m sure she’s seen mine.  I even used her real name in some early blog entries back in the year 2000, before I realized Google would actually put that data somewhere she could find it (I’ve since erased them).
I’m 100% certain that Allie knows where I am, who I am, and has no interest.  And that’s fine.  As I’ve said in my essay “How I Never Forgive Someone“:

It’s not that I don’t believe in the act of forgiveness, repentance, or growth.  It’s that for me, these people have shown me to be not worth the risk of having them around.  They weren’t perfectly toxic in the first place, or they never would have been my friends; there was something I liked about them, enough to give them multiple chances.  They probably did at least one very good thing for every two bad things they did.
Eventually, I realized that I didn’t like continually wondering what hurtful thing they might do next.  The damage of always cringing in preparation for the next blow is, in some ways, worse than the actual blow.  And as such, letting them back into my life would mean cringing on some level… and I won’t do that.
They’ve burnt their time with me.  I hope they can learn to make other people happy; I hold no malice.  But they’re not allowed back, no matter how many proclamations of change they make, no matter how many people vouch for them.  It’s not that I think they are bad, it’s that I am no longer willing to find out.

That’s who I was for Allie.  And that’s why no, I don’t get in touch with her.  She deserves a life free of cringing in expectation of the next blow.  And honestly?  Even at the age of forty-four, I’m still kinda dippy.
That wound still aches.  It’s an embarrassingly teenaged regret to reveal here, but yes – I’d feel better, on some levels, if we were friends, as it’d be proof that somehow I’d made up for my old tiger-level stupidity.
But I am friends with Allie, even if she is not friends with me.  And since I am a true friend, the best way I can show my friendship is to let her not worry I’m going to hurt her again.
I’m no longer her responsibility.  I’m my own.
It is, actually, better this way.

Book Review: The Girl In The Road, By Monica Byrne

My friend Sarah first introduced me to the concept of the “sacred text” – a book that’s such a headlong rush of philosophies wrapped up in vivid characters that fans of the book run around pushing the book at people like some sort of strange Jehova’s Witness program.  They do this because the book reflected some vital part of their soul, saying the secret things that lurked so deeply within their hearts that they didn’t even realize they felt that way until they found this author speaking for them.
The example given was Cat Valente, who taps into people’s veins deeply with The Orphan’s Tales and Palimpsest.
But with The Girl In The Road, Monica Byrne hits another vein – a close one to Cat’s, but different enough that I think she’s gonna be one of the debut authors of the year.   As does Neil Gaiman, who called this sucker, “Glorious. . . . So sharp, so focused and so human.”
Now, full disclosure: Monica was a Clarion classmate of mine, so of course I love her dearly.  But her book pulls off a mightily difficult trick that few authors manage, and does it with such transparency you might not even realize it’s going on: she writes about a manic-depressive so that you utterly see the world through her eyes.
Truth is, I’m not sure what Meena is, because there’s not an official diagnosis of her troubles.  But Meena is vibrantly and impulsively alive, bisexual, sleeping with who she chooses, running after her dreams with vigor and perhaps not nearly enough forethought.  She wakes at the beginning of the novel to find that a snake has bitten her in an assassination attempt engineered by her enemies, and so must flee India.  She chooses, unwisely, to escape via The Trail – a 500 mile-long series of narrow floating platforms crossing the Arabian Sea, which harvest energy from the wave movements.  So begins her harrowing journey.
But The Girl In The Road isn’t really about plot.  It’s about living in the moment with Meena, whose relentless enthusiasm and certainty makes her one of the most flawed characters I’ve ever seen – and yet all of Meena’s decisions make perfect sense when filtered through Monica’s manic, delightful, and compelling prose.  You watch as Meena decides that this is what she must do, then discards it effortlessly because she’s been wrong all along, this is what she must do.  She sleeps with men and women and then leaves them, she opens up then hides, she goes from sunny to sullen in a heartbeat.
Yet for all of that, you can’t help but admire Meena, because Meena is unashamed of who she is.  She’s the perfect example of an active character, one who makes decisions – and she’s making them in a gloriously multicultural world, rich and detailed, one where the complex overspill of all the cultures in the Indian regions mesh and Meena must navigate all the languages and embedded cultural privileges that make this feel like a genuine, battered-yet-functional future.  There’s a lot of new technology floating around here, but it certainly hasn’t solved all the world’s problems.  If anything, it’s just complicated them.
Intertwined with this is the tale of Mariama, a young girl in Africa who’s forced to flee her home and takes up with a caravan of smugglers.  Meena’s and Marima’s fates are, of course, intertwined.
Thing is, this isn’t a perfect novel.  Then again, the sacred texts rarely are – they’re outpourings from the heart, jumbled and complicated as life, a thousand philosophies spilled onto the page.  And I rocketed through The Girl in the Road because I wanted to follow these characters, who didn’t think at all like I did and made terrible decisions, but hoo boy did I know a lot of people just like them, and I felt as though it explained something to me about them that I didn’t understand at the time.  This isn’t my sacred text, but I think there’s going to be a lot of women who pick this up and feel the pull of Meena and Mariama, who are so thoroughly and perfectly themselves that you have to wonder if they’re broken or yet completely functional in alternative ways that can’t be properly described.
What you get with The Girl In The Road are characters who feel more human than I’ve felt from any mere novel in a long time.  It’s a novel with a pulse.  And since it’s her debut novel, I’d suggest taking a look at it as soon as possible, either by downloading the preview or preordering the book – I think you want to get on-board Monica’s vibe as soon as possible.