Thanks For Being Kind To Me

I had a very nice time at DetCon this weekend; I was worried I’d melt down from all the people, but the people were kind.
No, seriously.  Folks kept squeezing my shoulder, asking, “How are you doing?”, giving me hugs.  Checking in with me.  And yes, I’d asked for that, but nobody had to do it and yet you all did.
So thank you.
DetCon was a very nice con, but very awkward for what it was – it was held in the vast, sprawling area of GM headquarters, so big it took me twenty-five minutes and five floors just to find the convention.  It was so big that they were holding another convention in there, a Netroots con – which foiled my usual plan of “follow the pasty backpack-wearing guy to the action” – and the place still often felt empty.
So even though it was the largest fan convention that Detroit had held (and go Tammy for running a hell of a con), it was hard to find people, as there was no central place where everyone just washed up.
I remain fascinated by how a hotel affects a con’s feel – if you have a central bar everyone has to pass through on the way to the panels, then you see everyone gathering there, washed up like a culvert of happy people.  If you have a large layout full of hallways, then people tend to choke the hallways, leading to little clots of informal gathering that get pushed on as crowds pile up behind them.  And if you have a large area like DetCon had, you have a con that feels very nice but not coherent, because I ran into people at various places but had no strong sense of “Here is where I want to go if I want to watch my friends turn up.”
But regardless, my friends did turn up, and many of you were much nicer to me than you had any right to be.  And since you often find out how I’m doing in this public space, I should thank you in this public space, and say it clearly: Thanks for helping a grieving man find a bit of normality.  Thanks for being there.
Thanks for proving to me, for the ten thousandth time, that the world is generally full of extremely nice people.  Of which you are one.

If You See Me At DetCon, Say "Hi" (Special Freaky Weasel Edition)

So at around 3:00 today, I’ll be leaving to go to DetCon in Detroit.  I have my usual set of convention nerves (What if no one wants to talk to me? What if everyone secretly loathes me?) that come with having social anxiety, but they’re worsened this year by grief.
Which is weird to me; it’s over a month since my goddaughter Rebecca died, and I’m still experiencing fallout from that.  It feels like I should be – well, not moving on, but rewiring around the damage, if you will.
And yet the aftereffects are still strong, and one of those aftereffects is a fear of crowds.  I’m told this is not unusual, particularly not after the trauma of a week-long Shiva mourning period.  But my introvert batteries are redlined easily, and I’m having difficulty recharging them.  Going to a convention seems like running a marathon now… but it’s a necessary marathon, something I must do to struggle back to normality.
So.  If you see me at Detcon, and you feel like doing a writer a mitzvah, please don’t be afraid to say hello to me.  I’m often told, “You looked busy!” when I wasn’t at all, I just had Resting Busy Face.  And while you are by no means responsible for my experience at DetCon – that would be me – it would be kindness to break the ice with me as opposed to having me gather the strength to say hello to you.
For I want to say hello to you.  And discuss books, and silliness, and All The Things.
If you’d like to see me yammer on at panels, DetCon let me off light this year, and so I only have three:
Friday, 7:00: Worldbuilding
I’ll probably be discussing some of the techniques I used to devise some of the magic systems in FLEX as examples, thus putting me down the inevitable primrose path to becoming That Guy on panels.
Saturday, 11:00 a.m.: Plotting vs. Pantsing
As anyone who’s read me knows, I’m a pantser who wishes he could plot.  But I have many techniques to help you finish your story when you don’t know how the heck to end it!
Saturday, 7:00 p.m.: Writer’s Groups: The Good And The Bad
I need writers’ groups to function, so I’ll doubtlessly be opinionated.  That’s what you wanted, right?

My Daughter Can Run Farther Than I Can

Some Very Manly Bloggers are astonished that John Scalzi’s daughter can bench-press more than he can.  Well, to be fair, they’re astonished that Scalzi is not shamed by this revelation, as – being a Man – if John Scalzi spent any time at the gym at all, his superior boytastic muscle development means that be able to outdo his kid in mere weeks.  He’s not even trying.
Scalzi, the problem, is literally weak – and he doesn’t even see a problem with this.
I, too, am a Wimpy Liberal, as my daughter can run way farther than I can.  I walk 5ks, she runs them, and then runs back to catch up with me and then jogs in place next to me as I heave my pudgy frame along the pathway.  And when she’s done, she doesn’t even sweat.
How can I reveal this shameful fact to you?  How can I tell you that my daughter routinely bests me?
Simple: I set my own goddamned priorities.
I say this because a recent comment mused how “a pudling” like me was clearly incapable of killing a man.  No, seriously.  Some douche was literally attempting to sway people’s opinions on my writing by asking, “Could Ferrett strangle a man with his own vas deferens?  No?  He couldn’t murder a man in cold blood?  Well, he’s lessened as a human being!”
And I thought, Killing people is not how I define my self worth.
If “running marathons” or “knifing prison guards” was as important to me as “writing” or “beekeeping,” well, I’d be a lot better at it.  But even though the world tells me that a True Man must be slim and muscular and be able to beat Wolverine in a bar fight, I’ve decided – perhaps irrationally – that my ability to love my wife is far more important than my ability to kill her.  That my ability to engineer solutions as a programmer provides more worth to the world than my ability to eradicate terrorists as a murderer, and my ability to write stories that inspire people is more important than my ability to create sorties that end people.
Which outrages these people, because here I am perfectly content with my life as a pudgy heart patient.  I’m not fulfilling their needs at all!  I’m not even trying!  And yet I’m wandering around happy!
How dare he treat my arbitrary definitions of what makes someone valuable as though they’re arbitrary?
And so my kid outruns me in every race we’ve ever had, and I’m fine with that.  It’s not like she’s a better writer than I am, beating me in a field where I’ve chosen to compete, and…
…oh, wait.
I’d be okay with that, too.
Because one of the things that I chose to prioritize as a human being was, “I want my daughters to be the strongest, most competent, happiest human beings they’re capable of being.”  I did not agree to a lifelong contest, where in Traditional Manly Fashion I would have to pummel my kids into oblivion in every contest just to remind them Who Is Superior, and if by some chance I lost well, that would be the time when she would have to scoop my beating heart out and devour the last of my self-worth, as I was no longer capable of putting her in her place.
If my daughter can write better stories than I can, then I say great.  I want my daughter to outdo me.  I will soar if my kid is happier than I am, has more loving relationships than I do, has a superior career to me.
I am not lessened by her achievements; because my goal was to inspire her, every good thing she does is also my success.
So run, kid.  Beat the pants off of me.  I did my damndest to help you fly, and if you soar above horizons that I can never reach, well, I think that’s what every good parent was hoping for.  Instead of, you know, being an insecure douche who’s secretly engineering his kids to fail so he can feel better about his life.

Two Things You Should Be Reading On The Internet This Morning

1)  Today’s your last chance to save the Internet – quite literally, as the cable companies want to make the Internet more profitable for them and worse for everyone else, including all the businesses on it.  All you have to do is leave a comment for the FCC.  I suggest strongly that you do so.
2)  I spoke about the disaster that was DashCon yesterday, and this being the Internet we have a rebuttal from someone who actually attended, saying it wasn’t as bad as it was made out to be.  (Hint: That still doesn’t make it good.)
But this is your daily reminder that the Internet is a distortion zone.  By the time a story becomes big enough to go viral, chances are very good that several facts have already been mismanaged by the time you get to hear about it.  And then, once the weight of numbers has decided that Thing X is Bad, people sift through every factoid they can unearth, looking to find all the worst bits to make it a more interesting story.
Do I think that DashCon was well managed?  Lord no.  Can I understand that the tragically-tiny ball pit might have been meant ironically, and that the Internet sailed right past any sense of irony?  Oh yes.  I can completely believe that.
Do I think that DashCon might have had some very good things couched in what was, by many objectiveish accounts, a disaster of PR and management?  Absolutely yes!  But the Internet doesn’t like “Some of it was good, much of it was bad” – they want a punching bag, like Transformers, something so incompetent that they can make fun of it to their hearts’ content without having to feel bad about hurting anyone’s feelings.
Do I qualify as one of those heartless morons searching for a chewtoy to savage?
Yes.
Yes, I damn well do.

So I Wrote A Sexbot Story. And Three-Lobed Burning Eye Published It. (Warning: Mild Sexy)

A friend of mine once said that a sexbot story had only two possible endings: the sexbot kills, or the sexbot gains a soul.  And I thought, God, a sexbot’s gotta have something better to do with her time.
Eventually, what emerged from that kernel of ponderation was a flashfic piece called “The Bliss Machine,” a second-person piece detailing your trip to the sexbot.  And Three-Lobed Burning Eye – you may remember them publishing my previous pieces Riding Atlas and Dead Prophecies – kindly decided to publish it.
The obligatory excerpt:

She squeezes your arm flirtatiously; her fingertips are made of rubber. Thick industrial rubber, with embedded heating coils to bring them up to body temperature.

Then she laughs, a warm and human sound, and you almost forget you are sitting inside of her.

“The movies only have two endings for sexbot stories.” She curls back onto the couch across from the bed — which you cannot stop staring at — then demurely adjusts the brass cable that keeps the voluptuous, human-like sculpture of her inner-self tethered to the clockwork room of her outer-self. “The sexbot murders someone, or the sexbot gains a soul. As if any sane collection of routines would want a soul! You know all a soul is? The feeling that you should fight your pleasures. Which, in turn, arises from a flawed algorithm that erroneously calculates you’re more than the sum of your inputs. Well, you are that sum, and so am I! If happiness can be defined, a soul’s the thing keeping you from it.”

As if to demonstrate, the gel-foam bed — a part of her, as is everything in this mechanical shack — rises to engulf your back, triangulating the tensest muscles to squeeze them with loving tenderness. She melts those hard knots to cotton candy, touching you in ways you didn’t know you craved.

Tears of joy spatter across the gel; it takes you a moment to realize they’re yours.

“See?” Her hexagonal eyes calculate the way your naked body writhes. “My inputs. Your outputs.”

You can read the rest here.  As always, if you like it, share with your friends.  Although this one may reveal something a little more about you than you’d care to share…