A Story Of Two Immortal Men: Why Better Call Saul Makes Other Shows Seem Lazy

Better Call Saul features two immortal men who can never die.  For the entirety of Better Call Saul’s existence, Slippin’ Jimmy and Mike are completely immune from physical trauma, because we’ve seen them in Breaking Bad and they’re okay.
The show knows that is a prequel, and more importantly, it knows that you know it’s a prequel.  The show has Mike walking into a room full of angry gangsters with guns, and he is wary – but the show, wisely, does not try to fill it with the tension of ZOMG WILL HITMAN MIKE SURVIVE, because we know he will.  Likewise, Slippin’ Jimmy is currently embroiled in legal battles, and millions are on the line, but his opponents are largely noble men who battle it out in courtrooms.  He’s not going to get shanked over an old-age home dispute.
And yet Better Call Saul is one of the tensest shows I have watched.
If you’re a writer, watching Better Call Saul highlights how fucking lazy “death” is as a threat.  What Better Call Saul is about is excruciating compromise – playing on the tension between the man Jimmy wants to be and what he wants now.  He wants to be a good lawyer because he admires his brother – but dammit, the straight and narrow path has not worked out for him.
So Better Call Saul is a master class in subtle pressures.  There is no reward for Jimmy if he follows all the rules – so he bends the rules a little, just to make way, and it gets him a better job as the kind of noble lawyer he wants to be.  But then one of three things happens:

1. One of his past foibles requires him to do something even scummier to get himself out of it, or:
2. Something good and wonderful and beautiful he’s gained by these small compromises is endangered, and the only way he can solve it is by falling back on the huckster Slippin’ Jimmy thing that he is so good at, or:
3. He does something noble, and loses ground.

That’s pretty much the plan, from a writer’s perspective.  But that tight focus really keeps Jimmy where it hurts emotionally.  Everything he gains, he’s gained because he’s born to be a slimy, double-crossing cheat.  Everything he loses, he loses because he has not been slimy enough.
What’s holding him back is his morality, and the show is about watching Jimmy desperately try to hold onto that human streak – to not betray the people he’s loved, even as they betray him.
And that’s what I find more compelling about Better Call Saul than Breaking Bad – Jimmy is redeemable.  Breaking Bad made the very wise decision early on in Season One to give Walter an out, and watch Walter throw it aside because dammit, Walter prioritized “Feeling potent” over “Fixing the actual problems.” Jimmy, though…
Better Call Saul is a complete train wreck, because you’re watching two brothers actually make each other into what they’re accusing them to be.  Jimmy does have a tendency to fall back on his con-man habits, but his brother’s relentless anger just forces him to be slimier.  Chuck wasn’t out to get Jimmy, but thanks to Jimmy’s anger he sure is now.  And if Jimmy just stopped trying to impress Kim, or Kim cared less for Jimmy, then Jimmy might not keep going to such radical lengths to “protect” her, but…
This is an entirely avoidable outcome.  Take one of these factors away and Jimmy might not become Saul Goodman, late night TV huckster, as he is predestined to become.  Yet what’s driving them is not fate but people who are each battling the tension between who they want to be and what they need now – and the show is relentless at showing them who they actually are when the lights go down.
And all of that is without a death.  (Well, not on Mike’s blood-soaked rampages, but it’s as if the show’s all but admitted there’s not much for Mike to do now.)  Too many shows raise the stakes by reaching for the literal jugular  – which is easy.  Some asshole can always come crashing through a door with a gun, and you apply pressure externally because if these characters aren’t saved, they’ll die!
But that’s so easy.
What’s hard here is watching all the characters in Better Call Saul choose to become the people they didn’t want to be. The violence is purely psychological as they realize that what they’re getting isn’t nice and who they’re becoming isn’t nice and what’s holding them back are those thin scraps of loyalty and decency – and yet they know, every last one, that those scraps mean something and they’re going to be truly damned if they just let them go.
They’re circling the drain.  They won’t die – no, not until their eyes have been truly opened.  They make choices that cost them something every time.
And that’s so much harder to write than some asshole with a knife.
Yet so much more satisfying.

Can Harriet Tubman Punch Out Cthulhu? On Poor Magic Card Templating.

So there’s been a viral post going around, showing women as Magic cards.  It looks like this:


Problem is, you play Magic at all, this card presents some serious worldbuilding challenges.
See those stats in the lower right hand of the card? 85/85? That means this card has 85 power and 85 toughness. These are numbers used to indicate how big and nasty a creature is.
An ordinary human has 1 power and 1 toughness.
A trained warrior can have 2 power and 2 toughness, sometimes.  (Sometimes it’s 2/1.  Even some low-level vampires are 2/1.)  This is good, because a “bear” in Magic terms is 2/2 – in fact, the 2/2 “Grizzly Bear” card is the classic standard for power and toughness.
A top-tier leader of an army is 3/3, who can beat a bear with ease – but at 3/3, you are literally fighting elephants and small werewolves.
At 4/4, you’re getting into the top tiers of Magic creatures, beings so powerful you sometimes don’t get the chance to cast them before you’re overrun by armies of classically 1/1 and 2/2 goblins.  You want an Angel, summoned straight from  heaven?  Here she is.  Hellion elementals are usually in the 4/4ish range as well.  Mid-sized werewolves, too.
By the time you’re getting to 5/5, well, your generic demon is 5/5.  (Don’t worry, Angels often have heavenly protections to even the odds.)  There’s no earthly creature that can hope to defeat a 5/5 on its own – no, by then you’re talking about crazy monster creatures with intimidating names like Nemesis of Mortals and Polukranos, World Eater.
You want a 6/6?
Oh, you want a dragon.  Dragons are classic 6/6s, though smaller fully-grown ones might be 5/4 if they’re clever.
What’s that?  You want the king of the dragons?  The toughest of the tough, born on a world full of dragons who’s clawed his way to the top through nothing but sheer might?
He’s an 8/8.
If you want creatures larger than 8/8, well, they’re pretty thin on the ground. Wizards spend their whole lives trying to cast them, and usually die before they can do it – which is a fancy way of saying “By the time you’ve acquired enough resources to cast this gigantic fatty, the other player’s usually beaten you.”  But they do exist!  They’re 11/11 Colossuses, or 11/11 Elder Gods summoned from beyond the pale, or a 9/9 archdemon who lords over all the other demons.
The scariest monster in all of Magic, the leader of the gang who’s been the Big Bad in two storylines, a card so potent that you’ll shell out $30 for a single copy of this ridiculously overpowered card?
Emrakul, The Aeons Torn is a 15/15 monster.
But wait?  What about lord dread Cthulhu himself?  Well, that’s basically Emrakul.  But if you want literally the largest creature in all of Constructed Magic, you go for the wrath of Marit Lage, a beast so huge it takes thirty mana to summon him.  (For the record, thirty mana is more than most people have in their entire deck.)  And that huge, terrible, flying rage?
It’s 20/20.
There is only one creature larger than that in all Magic – and it’s a joke, created for an “Un-Set,” which was never intended to be played in serious Magic.  It’s called the “Big Furry Monster,” and it’s a 99/99, and to accentuate how silly it is, it’s literally two cards that you have to draw, and cast, together.  Nobody takes it seriously.
To put it plainly:
According to this Magic card that was clearly created by someone who doesn’t play the game, Harriet Tubman is four times as powerful as Cthulhu.
And while I fully support Tubman on the $20, if she was truly this powerful, I feel frankly that Harriet Tubman, Ender of Worlds, should have done more than rescue slaves when she could have faced down the entirety of both sides of the Civil War and brought the world under her reign of freedom, because this Harriet Tubman could have eaten Gettysburg and never burped.
Which is not to say that I dislike the message.  Go women!  Go “Smash the Patriarchy,” even though that’s not a valid keyword in Magic!  Go you and your unfeasible casting cost of WWWWWUUUUU, which no sane person would ever put in a deck!
I fully admit I’m being a big ol’ wet blanket here, because I play the game.  I know it’s a lot to expect people to make Magic cards templated correctly, but to a lot of us who do know the game – it’s a lot like watching a TV show where the technical guy goes, “Yesterday, Snapchatted with my roommate on Twitter and discussed how to hotwire an IP address!”  You may like the show, but you’re like, “That’s not how that works.  That’s not how any of this works!”
Harriet Tubman, I salute you. I think you’re awesome. I think women are awesome.
I’m just not sure all women are literally ten times more powerful in hand-to-hand combat than the king of the dragons.  Call me a misogynist.

"How Do You Function During Your Depression?"

My Seasonal Affective Disorder’s got me by the scruff of the neck, which means I am staring at screens for an hour, unable to function. My wife finds me curled up in odd places around the house, trying not to cry loudly enough to be heard.
This time of year sucks.
Yet on Monday, I finished off the final draft of my upcoming book FIX to hand to my editor, and last night I switched back to continuing the work on my spiritual sequel to Sauerkraut Station, SAVOR STATION (105k words in, hope to finish the first draft before the 15th). And people ask, how do I do that?
Lots and lots of bourbon.
No, seriously, functioning during depression is a real thing. Too many people let everything go to hell when they’re down, and when their body stops pummeling them with feel-bad hormones they wake up to discover themselves jobless and friendless. A lot of depressions are chemically induced, but you can get yourself depressed by not maintaining the shit you need to do in your life.
And here’s the trick I use to keep functioning during depression:
I don’t expect to feel joy from what I need to do.
I just do it.
Which sounds really dumb, but a lot of people seem to feel as though everything they do should bring them immediate satisfaction – they pay the bills, and hey! They feel like a grownup, that’s awesome. They mop the floor and ding! They got a chore done, check that off the list!
Which works right up until you’re mired in anhedonia and unable to envision any joy from anything.
Worse, when you’re in depression, envisioning doing Things You Need To Do may make you feel worse – “I’m a shitty writer, I’m going to fuck up this novel.” “I’m a hot mess, everyone at that party’s going to hate me.” So if you’re a joy-driven person, depression makes you a sailboat without wind – you can’t go anywhere because the energy that motivated you has vanished.
And I hate to quote Nike, but ponder the “Just Do It” lifestyle. Grit your teeth and say “This will bring me no satisfaction in any way at all, but I need to do it because this is a maintenance task. If I let this slide, it will make things worse later on.”
I’m not normally a Dark Side guy, but let your hatred flow. Sure, you’re a terrible fucking writer. Sure, you don’t want to mop this floor. Sure, you fucking loathe the idea of going to friendly get-together where your buddies will probably ignore you.
Do it anyway. It’ll probably take you a while – my current run-up to a task is about half an hour of me staring, breathing raggedly, remembering that it doesn’t matter if I feel functional, if I don’t do this then my life will be worse than when I started out the day.
You know you can talk yourself out of shit. Trick is, you can also talk yourself into shit.
Do it crappily, if you have to. Write 200 words and erase them all, go to the party and pretend you’re coming down with an illness after half an hour, mop sloppily.
Get it done when you can.
You won’t, always. Depression means you’re never going to do 100% of what you needed to do – note my “curling up on the bed and crying” times. There will be days you just can’t function, and beating yourself up because of what you’re supposed to do will only make it worse.  But if you make a habit out of separating “satisfaction” from “do it,” you’ll wind up with a fairly rigid habit-structure of Doing The Bare Minimum that’ll get you by until you can actually feel happiness again.
At which point you’ll be in a place to feel happiness. I’ve seen it time and time again where someone emerges from a months-long depressive state where they’ve holed themselves inside a cave and blown off all their deadlines, only to wake up to a post-apocalyptic world that knocks them back into Sadness Villa again. It sucks. If you can avoid it, do so.
And if you’re thinking of using this technique as proof that depression doesn’t really exist, or that willpower can solve every problem, please set your head on fire and shove your face into a pan filled with bacon grease. Some days the black dog wins. Hell, some weeks the black dog wins. That doesn’t mean you don’t fight the dog, but for Christ’s sake don’t peddle that sickening lie that the dog’s just an illusion and if you believed in Tinkerbell hard enough then that rabid Doberman would stop chewing your genitals.
But the thing is, when you’re depressed you cannot rely on “happiness” to make you productive. You can, and should, consider drugs and therapy to help. But you can also get there by removing happiness from the equation.
As clinically as possible, analyze the Shit That’s Gotta Get Done Or Everything Will Get Worse. (Let go of all the stuff you can let go; don’t try to be a superhero now, man.) Then do those things and don’t expect to feel better for doing them or anticipate a burst of joy or even think that you’ll do them well. None of those are necessarily true.
But what is true is that depression lies, and though I’ve written a lot of shitty words during my Seasonal Affective Disorder, I’ve also written some gems. I’ve not enjoyed going to many parties, but my friends were happy to see me and they kept inviting me to more parties which I was thrilled to attend when I wasn’t sad. The house wasn’t filled with cockroaches.
That maintenance helps. The more you do it, the more you manage to accomplish on automatic pilot, and lemme tell you, when you can successfully automate yourself to Just Do Things like Work and Friendship during a catastrophic depression, then you are way ahead of the curve.
I don’t necessarily feel good about submitting FIX to the publisher – right now it’s a hot mess and I took big chances with the characters and you’re all going to hate it and my editor is going to savage it and tell me I have to spend months frantically repairing its manifest flaws.
But I didn’t do it for the happiness.
I did it because if I blew my deadline, I would feel a lot worse when June came and Happy-Ferrett looked at the smoking ruins of the fall launch he’d planned.
And so I staved off much more sadness by not trying to foment happiness in my time. It worked for me. And if you’ve not been getting much done, then maybe try it for you.
It won’t feel good. But what does?

I'll Be At Penguicon This Weekend! And Reading From FIX.

As is tradition, I’ll be at Penguicon in Michigan this weekend.  And on Saturday, I’ll be on several panels, as is also tradition – but more importantly, I’ll be reading the first excerpt from my upcoming book FIX, in which our brave heroes accidentally break up a teenaged soccer game.
They interrupt the Morehead soccer league by inadvertently annihilating the town of Morehead, so it’s a little more exciting than I first promised.
Anyway, if you want a taste of FIX (due out in September), then drop on by.
(SIDE WARNING: I am in severe Seasonal Affective Disorder mode, which is why I’m not quite capable of putting together times and panels on Saturday, but I will be happy to see you.  Feel free to dispense hugs and cuddles at will.)

They're Not Wrong To Want This.

My word is often used to settle debates. Complete strangers will email me with intimate details of their love lives to say, “My girlfriend wants to have bareback sex with Cheer Bear during her Care Bear Stare Cosplay Orgy, is that wrong?” – and, terrifyingly, they’ll wait for my Judge Wapner-like decision to tell them who’s done polyamory wrong.
My answer’s always the same, though:
They’re not wrong.
They may be wrong to want this from you.
Which is to say that I personally would never be involved in a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” relationship, because for me, it’d be a way of hiding my affections from people who deserve to know who I am. But that doesn’t mean DADT can’t work for specific couples.
I personally would never enter a relationship where my partner dated whoever they wanted with no input from me, but Relationship Anarchy is a thing and many people thrive in it.
I personally would never let my girl hook up with Cheer Bear when Grumpy Bear needs the love more, but hey, a true Care Bear orgy is open to everyone except Professor Coldheart.
Is it wrong? Well, who’s involved? If you asked most people, “Is it wrong to lock your partner in a box at night while they sleep?” the answer would be HELL YES IT IS, but there’s BDSM relationships where the Mistress locks her pet inside their cage and they’re perfectly content.
It’s wrong to ask Overly Attached Girlfriend for an open relationship, but there’s plenty of people out there who want that. It’s wrong to ask pretty much anyone on FetLife for an monogamous fundamentalist “No sex before marriage” relationship, but thousands of people have had such a relationship and have done so happily.
“Wrong” is all about who you’re asking.
Yet that’s not what’s being asked. The question actually asked here is, “I’m upset by what they’re doing. Is it okay that I’m upset?”
And the answer to that is, “Yes. It’s okay that you’re upset. Your demands may be unreasonable for this partner, but you’re allowed to seek what you need.”
Or to put it another way:
You’re not wrong.
You may be wrong to want this from them.