Better Call Saul: Such Perfect, Perfect Fan Service

Gini and I emerge from every movie theater with the opinion that this movie could have profitably edited fifteen minutes out.  We get easily bored with the long tracking shots which mean to establish mood but actually just make it boring.  We’re not a fan of just sticking a camera on a character just to watch his expressions.
Except we love Better Call Saul, and Better Call Saul is practically nothing but watching the endless repetitions of Jimmy McGill.
Why do we love such sweet tedium when it’s Saul and hate it in other movies?
The answer is simple: Better Call Saul is a show about anguish. Reluctance.  Lament.  The truth is that Jimmy McGill would be much better off if he chucked his morality into the dumpster and embraced his role as Saul Goodman, but… Jimmy has a conscience.  A nagging, tickle-in-the-throat conscience.  One that, if he could only leave behind, would make him the man he really needs to be.
Watching him squirm on the hook is the show.
You didn’t get a lot of that in Breaking Bad, because Walter wanted to be the bad guy.  He had flecks of conscience, but the truth was, he’d decided to make meth by the end of the second act of the debut episode.  Whereas Jimmy doesn’t want trouble, but he’s in a world where trouble presents him with such opportunities, and such quandaries.
There is a bravado scene where Jimmy is negotiating a drug-crazed lunatic down from murdering a victim to simply beating him into unconsciousness.  It is an excruciating scene.  It takes forever.  But watching Jimmy ratchet down the impending bloodshed, a man who’ll say anything to keep the peace yet still makes a crazy kind of sense, is watching a man cobble together the best morality he can out of an ugly situation.  It’d be a lot easier for him, fewer witnesses, if he could just walk away and let the kid get stabbed to death.  But he’s not.  That twinge.  And so he puts his own life on the line to negotiate, even though he hates these fucking kids, because dammit he can’t do this.
And so in a sense, I’m finding it better than Breaking Bad.  We knew Walter was going to go bad.  He had that in his eyes. But while we know that Jimmy will become Saul Goodman, we also know that on some level he deeply regrets that choice.  And we never really got a chance to see who he has when Walter wasn’t dropping massive upheaval on his doorstep.
It’s hard to say after three episodes whether Better Call Saul will be a successful spinoff.  It all depends on where it’s going.  But as fan service, it’s perfect: as Breaking Bad fans, we know who that guy who just dragged Jimmy into the house is, we know who that guy at the ticket booth is, we know where some of these plotlines are headed.
And yet there are so many slow sequences where Jimmy paces and drinks, not wanting to put skin in the game.  Not yet.  He’s a lawyer, not a criminal.
But oh.  He could be such a good criminal.

Read A Chapter From My Upcoming Novel FLEX!

My upcoming urban fantasy novel Flex contains one of the wildest magic systems ever put to paper.  And so when SFSignal kindly asked for a sample chapter from the book, I thought giving something that would highlight just how odd the magic could get would be a good thing.
So here. Read Chapter 5: “Sexing Chickens.” 
Also, if you’d like some to read reviews that highlighted stuff about the book I was trying to shoot for:
I, Fat Robot: “I loved Flex.  All the thumbs up and all the stars checked.  It was really an easy book to love, for many reasons, one of which I tweeted somewhat incredulously: “This book has a female character who gets to be described as pudgy AND pretty with no BUT in between the two?!”
Michael Patrick Hicks: “It helps, too, that Steinmetz casts his characters are real people, first and foremost. These aren’t part-time models who strut around on the catwalk and then fight crime at night. Paul’s a paper-pusher for an insurance company. An ex-cop, he lost a foot in the line of duty and has a robotic prosthetic that can be a bit ungainly. Valentine is a wonderfully natural heroine, a bit chubby, a bit geeky, a bit sarcastic, and she adopts Paul’s mission as her own out of sincere compassion. They make for a dynamic team, and their relationship shows wonderful growth.”

Just finished @ferretthimself ‘s Flex. What the hell. It is so much gorgeous and heartbreak and underlining meaning and just pure JOY.
— Cassandra Khaw (@casskhaw) February 16, 2015

The Cost Of Social Anxiety

So my car’s battery had died two-tenths of a mile away from my house. Why had I stopped to get that sandwich before heading out on my date?
The car was the concern.  Me, I could walk home.  But leaving an unattended vehicle in the mall parking lot overnight meant that it would be towed.
I turned the key again: rrr rrr rrr.  Dead battery.  Chilled to submission from the subarctic temperatures, no doubt.  A jump would get me on my way.
I called American Express, thinking I was still on their automated car-service plan; I was not. It would cost me $100 to have a car come out and jump-start my battery.
Or I could do it for free by asking people in the parking lot.
No I couldn’t.  The idea of asking a random stranger for assistance chilled me more than any battery.  I watched the people going by for a good fifteen minutes, mouthed conversations silently to myself, trying to figure out what to say to them.  Sometimes I even put my hand on the car door handle, ready to fling open the door and just talk to them…
But that hand sat on the door, paralyzed.  Like me.  My words died in my throat.
I called Gini, seeing if she might call a friend to come help me.  Gini gave me the numbers of three people on this side of town I could call.  These were long friends of mine; we’d chatted at parties, gone to movies, attended weddings together.
But calling them up?  Solo?  To ask for a favor?
Another twenty minutes passed as I tried to dial up.  I thought about calling American Express again.  $100 isn’t so much.  Even if it was a three-hour wait.  And the shops would be closed by then.  And I was already starting to shiver as the car lost heat.
That $100 seemed so easy.  It was so worth a hundred bucks and three hours not to have to call someone and feel that terror of fumbling my way through a phone call.
And I thought: This is just because you’re middle class now, right?  You have a decent job as a programmer.  You can afford $100.
But no; I remembered back when I’d just moved to Detroit for a new job. I was living in an apartment that cost way too much because I didn’t understand money, and my credit card debts were sky-high because I couldn’t afford groceries consistently, and the only people I knew were a handful of work acquaintances.
My car battery died in the parking lot where literally everyone at work parked, I could have walked in and asked any number of people in the cubicles next to me, asked my trainer at the job.
I put it on my credit card.
And I would have paid that $100 again, too, except for the pressure of my wife.  She knew she’d given me the numbers.  She’d think I was incredibly stupid for wasting $100 when I had friends to call.
I contemplated lying, saying I’d called and no one was home.
I contemplated how foolish that thought was: lying about talking to three friends of mine so I could pay $100 and freeze in my car in isolation.
I still wanted to pay $100.
And I’m lying to you, actually.  Gini gave me four numbers.  But one of the friends was notably grouchy, hated being pulled out of bed specifically because she had a hard time turning down requests for help, and she’d bitched to me any number of times of how damned needy all her friends were, and even though I knew she was home I could not call her because I trembled at the idea of her secretly loathing me for it.
I wanted to pay $100.
I thought about asking Gini to call for me, but that would be even worse – I imagined conversations where Gini would be saying, “Why am I calling you and not Ferrett?  I don’t know.  He’s… timid, or something.  Anyway, can you go rescue my rabbit of a husband?  Yeah, I know he’s weird.  He’s always weird.”  And that was even worse, knowing she might actually do that for me.
Eventually – too long – I did call around. Mostly because I was pretty sure that I couldn’t get away with lying to Gini.  And the irony was that I did get some good friends to come out (thanks, Karla and Anil!) and it turns out the battery was so dead that no friend could save it, and in the end we just phoned the mall and told them we’d get our mechanic on it in the morning.
Now, all that is pitable, and pathetic, and this is me having improved at this after twenty-five years of practice and therapy.  Ten years ago I probably couldn’t even have called my friends.  I’m getting better, even if I know the problem will never go away.
But when I think of the cost of social anxiety, I think of $100.  I would be willing to pay $100 not to talk to people, when I feel scared.  I probably could be negotiated up to $150, under the right circumstances.
Money is so much easier to deal with than people, sometimes, and I wish it was otherwise.  But there you have it.

So The World Is Gonna Be FLEX-y For A Bit….

“So, uh,” Angry Robot’s PR department said to me.  “What sort of push are you willing to give this book?”
“The full Kameron Hurley,” said I.  “I’ll go all-out. Throw it all at me, I’ll do it.  I’m ready, coach, put me in.”
Silence.
“You do realize,” they said, “That Kameron wrote over forty blog posts to support her book.  Did like seven podcasts.  By the time she was done, she could literally put together a book of her essays touting The Mirror Empire.”
“…have you seen my blog?”
“Point.  Okay, fine.  You get the Full Hurley.”
And immediately after hanging up on that phone call, I thought: Am I in over my head?
And then I thought: That’s Future-Ferrett’s problem.
But as my paper-baby impends, I’m finding that indeed, this promotion stuff is a lot of work.  Just this weekend, I wrote five essays for other sites on  various aspects of Flex, and I had to write the new book I’m first-drafting now, and change my website around to reflect the book tour, and by the time I sat down on Sunday night to write my usual Monday-morning-perk-me-up, I was out of juice.
So I apologize, dear readers: y’all knew this blog would become a first-novel repository at some point, just as I went bee-crazy at one point and straight-razor-shaving-crazy and webcomic-crazy.  I’ve always been a man who blogs about his passions.  (Don’t ask about the bees. I’ll tell you if they survive this bitter winter, alas.)
But what I did not anticipate is that doing all this work for other sites would leave me dry on the main blog, thus robbing you of non-book-related entries and making this even more of a promo shill than I intended it to be.   And I’m not quite apologetic, because hey, my first book is coming out and y’all knew that was The Dream, but I do feel bad because were things not so flummoxy I’d probably be poking affectionate fun at Jupiter Rising or raving about The Flash or how Better Call Saul is awesome fan-service, but…
Instead, I’m just gonna refresh my GoodReads rating numbly and say that I won’t go totally dim, but it’ll be less than I’d like.  Which is a mild sadness for me; I enjoy the blog, I enjoy the feedback, and it’s sad when I don’t have time to nourish this lovely connection that you and I share.
So I’ll be a little marketroidy for a while. I promise that when I visit Seattle and Portland and (hopefully!) San Francisco and LA on my book tour, I will talk about my impressions of those cities.
In the meantime, here!  If you feel like going over to FetLife, I’m discussing how a Men’s Rights Advocate is harming male culture, but that’s not an essay I feel I could port over here without significant rewriting to give it out-of-Fet context.

Shut Up For Social Justice: Adjusting Women's Percentages

I was recording a podcast with the fabulous Monica Byrne last night – and as I always do when I’m talking with a woman, I worry about percentages.
Because if you put a woman in a conversation with a dude, studies show she’ll get less time talking.  Like, way less time.  Because men are far more likely to interrupt a woman (often specifically to assert dominance) – and according to some unsourced studies that jine up with my personal experience, women are perceived to dominate a conversation when they occupy as little as 25% of it.
So whenever I listen to a panel or a podcast composed of mixed genders, I want to keep a very elaborate shot-clock that tracks the amount of time each person speaks.  Take Writing Excuses, for instance – one of my favorite podcasts on writing, fifteen minutes long and addictive as popcorn.  The sole female host of the show is Mary Robinette Kowal, one of four hosts – and even accounting for the fact that Brandon Sanderson does the intros and outros, I’m pretty sure that were I do to a lot of annoying record-keeping, I’d find that Mary doesn’t get 25% of the air time.
The problem is that this is not actually a problem.  Howard, Brandon, and Dan are all fascinating hosts.  Everyone on that show has something interesting to say.  Even if Mary is, say, 19% of the conversation, her 19% is still pure gold, and a little less Mary is balanced out in some way because Brandon’s got some relevant insights.
And there are always good excuses as to why a given woman may not speak up as much on a panel.  Some people are quiet.  Some people don’t have much to say on this particular take on the topic.  Some people are more introverted, and may cede ground quicker when someone interrupts to take the floor.
That’s some people, not women – all of these factors apply to men as well.   I’ve done tons of panels and seen laconic dudes, confused dudes, and easily-spooked dudes.
Yet at the end of the day, I’m pretty sure that as a percentage, the guys have managed to outspeak the women once again.
And I like Monica.  I want to hear what Monica has to say.  I’m excited by Monica’s big ol’ brain, because when she drops her mad wisdom she inspires all these other cool thoughts in me, and if I’m on a podcast with her I want to tell her what just occurred to me.  And I have stories I want to unveil, and insights I came up with….
…and if I’m not careful, I’m like a big ol’ overexcited puppy.  I won’t mean to dominate the conversation, but it’s like trying to talk when a Golden Retriever wants your attention.  You’ll be in the middle of outlining some exotic thought, and I’ll just roll over and show my furry belly and whoops, I’ve derailed you out of sheer playfulness.
That innocent intent does not, however, make it cool.
So when I talk, I try to be aware of time.  I try to be an enabler for the women’s conversation – if I know their books, I will take the anecdote I’m telling and end it with a question for them that’s custom-designed for them to tee off of.  I set a little mental confirmation window before I interrupt – “ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO LESSEN HER TIME? Y/N.”  I wait a little longer at the end of their stories, just to see if that two seconds’ of silence draws out anything more.  If I’m on a panel and some other dude interrupts, I will allow him to finish and then say, pointedly, “But getting back to what Virginia was saying…”
There are all these techniques you can do to ensure that you do not dominate the conversation.  And I am not doing this because I believe I am uninteresting!  Hell, I think I’m fascinating.  If I didn’t have that confidence, I wouldn’t go on a podcast.  But I also think that my fellow guests are fascinating, and if I’m being mindful of the circumstances then I make room for them.
That’s just a courtesy on panels and podcasts in general.  But in specific, given that women are frequently curb-stomped when it comes to getting their percentage of the conversation, me learning to mute and enable feels like justice.
(TWO NOTES: One, if you wanna hear this talk it’ll be live in about two weeks.  I’ll letcha know.  Monica and I may giggle a lot.
(Two, if you’d like me on your podcast, I am in Severe Book-Flogging Mode, as the Book Of Doom is due out in three weeks, and I’ll cheerfully yammer away for your entertainment.  I do not promise to be good.  But hoo boy, I can be enthusiastic.)