Beta Readers Needed For My "Time-Travelling Soup Battles" Novel!

So as you may remember, starting Friday, I’ll be live-writing my next novel to raise funds for the Clarion Writers’ Workshop.
But here’s a Professional Writers’ Secret: You gotta juggle multiple projects.  So while I’m writing my next novel, I’ll be giving beta readers time to digest my last novel, Savor Station, so when I finish my Write-A-Thon I can launch myself directly into revisions.  And I’m looking for about seven to ten people to beta-read for me and give me feedback.
(Why seven to ten?  Because I’d like four to five people, and generally I find that you hit about 60% on getting beta readers to get back to you in time.)
Now, y’all should know that saying “I’m really good at proofreading” pretty much excludes you from a lot of writers’ beta circles, including mine.  I’m going to mangle all the prose anyway before I’m done, and assuming I sell it to a publisher when it’s done, we’ll have professional copyeditors and proofreaders sniffing this sucker like a hound dog.  Flagging misspelled words and minor grammatical errors is, actually, a hindrance.
No, what I want are the sorts of people who can tell me four separate things cogently:
•         The things that confuse you (“Why would $character do that?” or “Why did this technology not work this way?”)
•         The things that throw you out of the story (“Character wouldn’t do THAT!” or “Factually, that’s so wrong!”)
•         The things that give you ass-creep (“I got bored here”)
•         All the things that make you pump the fist (“This moment was truly awesome, and unless I tell you how awesome it is, you might cut this part out in edits”)
So if you think you can do all that in five weeks (or, preferably, way less), do me a favor and email me at theferrett@theferrett.com with the header “FERRETT, I WOULD LIKE TO BETA-READ YOUR SOUP.”  This comes with the great reward of being name-checked in the acknowledgements, if this eventually sells, and the arguable reward of knowingly going “Oh, God, I read it, that was crap” if it doesn’t sell.  I may get filled up on people, but if I do, I’ll put you on the list for the next revision, if there is one.  (I think this one’s close.)

Watch Me Live-Write My Next Novel To Raise Funds For The Clarion Write-A-Thon!

Today, I am the proud author of three books: Flex, which Barnes and Noble picked as one of their top 25 sci-fi books of 2015, its sequel The Flux, and its soon-to-be-released finale to the trilogy, Fix.  I’ve had over thirty short stories published, for cash, and I’ve been nominated for the Nebula Award for my novella Sauerkraut Station.
Yet on this day in 2008, I had been writing for twenty years and had almost nothing published.
What unlocked this potential for me? The Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop.  That’s where I (and seventeen other students) had our stories critiqued until we learned how to write at a professional level.
I’d like to thank them… but more importantly, I’d like to show you some of what the Clarion experience is like.
Because here’s the deal: Clarion needs money.  So to fund-raise, each year they hold a write-a-thon, getting authors to write to raise money.
In a week, I’ll start writing my next novel: The Song That Shapes the World, a novel I am currently describing as “Pitch Perfect with magic.”  It’s a crazy-ass tale involving the shadow world of Backstage, where the best performers in the multiverse battle to create the song that guides humanity: hope, fear, despair, anger.  It involves dragon-riding cello players, dubstep warriors, and a scrappy femme protagonist from Earth who wasn’t meant to be here.
Give Clarion ten dollars, and I’ll let you watch me write the opening chapters.
No, it’s more than that: I’ll write the chapters, and I’ll write a blog entry detailing the techniques I’m using, the things I know I’ll have to fix on the second draft, the errors I made yesterday that I’m scratching out and writing today.  I’ll do this for four weeks, and that’s the meat of it: the opening chapters are so critical, where most writers fail, so you’ll get to watch me agonize and dissect and perfect.
All for a minimum of ten bucks.
I’ll be doing this, as I’ve done for years now, at the Clarion Echo LiveJournal community – which, once you donate your shekels, I’ll give you access to.  Sorry I can’t use 2016 technology, but the Clarion Echo also has all of my past Clarion Write-a-Thons – so once you join, you can scan back to see the novels and stories I wrote and/or revised then, including the first-draft opening chapters of my novel Flex and my unpublished novel The Upterlife.
Even if you’re not interested in being a writer yourself, you’ll get a look at some wild fiction and a DVD commentary track on the author’s process, done with my usual blogly flair.  If you’re a fan of my work, you get to see a very advance preview of my next novel for $10.
I think that’s a preeeeetty good bargain.
So How’s This Work?  
Step #1: Donate at least $10 to the Clarion Foundation.  More is good if you can spare it.  You don’t have to donate in my name or anything, because honestly, their Write-a-Thon webpage forms are dreadful.
Step #2: If you don’t already have one, create a LiveJournal account.  Rejoice in this feeling of web page time-travel, as one suspects there’s not a lot of new LJ accounts created!
Step #3: Email theferrett@theferrett.com with your Clarion receipt and your LiveJournal handle, with a header of “HEY FERRETT LET ME IN.”  I’ll do the mystical LJ gestures to get you access.
Step #4: Wait until next Friday, when I start to write this novel.  Expect angsting and teeth-gnashing.  Openings are hard, mang.
Step #5: While you’re waiting, may I gently suggest sharing this blog post somewhere to spread the word?
So anyway!  Here we are!  Me, and a crazy-ass novel I’m about to unleash to keep the Clarion Workshop alive!
Join me!

Not Queer. A Little Kinky. But That Doesn't Count.

Yesterday, I said this:
“Being poly and kinky, yet cis and straight, is a weird space. It’s like, I’m not QUILTBAG in any way, but I’m still on the fringe somewhere.”
I should have clarified (but then again, it was a Tweet): I’m not on the fringes of the LGBT/QUILTBAG experience, and I think it’s important to clarify that I’m not. In the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting, we had a spate of white cisdudes feeling upset for some reason that they couldn’t feel personally included in a horrific mass murder, trying to erase the gayness to make this into a universal assault that they could participate in.
One wonders if they show up at strangers’ funerals to proclaim, “This is a tragedy for me, as I was also a human!”
Look. It’s okay for you to be upset at an atrocity without having to mark yourselves as a participant. You can mourn deeply without nudging your way to the front of the procession.
(You can also argue, as I know people will, that I’m stereotyping cis white dudes, but of the fifteen or so comments/posts I saw trying to hijack the discussion, all of them were dudes, and of the ones who seemed to have an ethnicity – which is hard to tell on FB/Fet/Twitter – all were cis and white. So, you know, one has to wonder whether it’s endemic to the community, or a sampling error.
(So if you’re a frothing white cisdude, you might wanna take a moment to ponder that your stereotypical behavior is currently perceived by many minorities as “melts down the minute the conversation does not center around them,” and take a moment to ponder whether you’re actually behaving in the way that people say you’re behaving. Because one of the things that triggers white cisdudes fastest, in my experience, is labelling them as “white cisdudes,” because good Lord a lot of y’all really get angry when someone labels you – even if that description is actually, literally, factually accurate.)
Anyway. The QUILTBAG experience is one that I don’t experience, and it would be wrong to say that I do. I think part of being a decent human being is recognizing that there are certain experiences that are not truly universal, and trying to tune into those aspects are significant.
Which goes beyond QUILTBAG. I don’t know what it’s like to grow up Muslim, or Southern, or female, and I think that attempting to translate your experiences to go, “Oh, yeah, I get what you’ve been through, it’s just like what happened to me!” is like those idiots who come up to you at a funeral for your beloved relative dying and go, “I know just what it’s like to lose someone you love, my cat died.”
Sometimes, you just have to leave people to their own space and acknowledge that there are overlaps, but it’s not the same.
Yet there are overlaps.
As someone who’s polyamorous and kinky, I’m also at the fringes of society in some ways. Being openly out affects the jobs I can take. As someone who’s poly, I’m an uncomfortable representative for everyone else who’s poly in the world. (And though my relationship with my wife is rock-solid, there’s always that worry in the back of our heads that if we divorced, we’d then be held up as proof that this poly shit doesn’t work.)
As someone who’s kinky, there’s stuff I’m not comfortable talking about in public sometimes, as people tend to misunderstand, and I’m often a little nervous that some day a great spotlight will shine down upon me – in the form of greater media attention than I’ve ever received – and the stuff I do completely consensually will be reviled.
And there’s that overlap, so I feel what happened at PULSE very clearly. Kink clubs have not been the traditional targets of maniacs (mainly because they’re often the bastions of straight white folks), but if someone shot up a kink convention or a dungeon, I’d feel that so personally that it gives me shivers now. I’ve seen mothers lose their kids for liking to be tied up, even if there was nothing sexual about it. I’ve seen folks lose their jobs for being outed as dominants.
And as usual, I have two sorts of essays: those where I wrap things up neatly in a big bow and tell you about the wise conclusion I’ve come to, and those where I just sort of toss all the balls in the air and shrug.
I’m shrugging.
I’m not going to try to hijack the experience of QUILTBAG folks, but I’m also hard-pressed to say that there aren’t areas that are very similar. I don’t want to be the white cis person who comes in to make it all about me, but there are also places that poly and kinky overlaps with gay and bi and trans, and I think we can strengthen ourselves as a community by uniting those experiences properly, even if it’s only as a way to crack open the window wide enough to peer in and go, “Yeah, I get it.”
Because anything that increases empathy is good. Anything that increases solidarity is good. But anything that erases someone’s unique identity, particularly at a time of mourning, is bad, and that’s a delicate line that I’m never quite sure how to handle properly.
And it’s just out there. It’s messy. You don’t want to be that person at the funeral. But you also can acknowledge, if only internally, that this small facet of yours lines up with someone else’s, and do something good with it without inadvertently weaponizing it.
That’s all.
(And before someone complains, and I know they will – as a cis straight dude, yes, I absolutely believe there are central experiences to that experience that are unique to them… Particularly during dating, where I often feel that people don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for guys who are trying, although schmuckily, to figure out how to get intimacy in a world where frankly, so many men are trying to date women that it’s a larger problem than people often admit to stand out in the crowd. But that’s something I’ve discussed before, and will doubtless attempt to do so again.)

Ya Know, I Don't Get It.

I’ve never walked down the street and wondered if someone was gonna chuck a brick at my head because I looked Muslim-like.
I’ve never gone to a high school where I worried about some maniac charging in through the door to shoot me and my friends dead.
I’ve never hugged my partner in public and had to worry if I was holding them too close, because some idiot might take a baseball bat to us if he saw queers being affectionate.
I’ve never had to scan a parking lot at night before I walked to my car because some douche might rape me.  I’ve never had to measure my drinking because if I passed out, someone might rape me.
Hell, I’ve never had a bad poly experience.  My friends were all tolerant, and cool with it.  My mother and father are supportive, if a bit baffled.  I’ve never had a family member tell me what a pervert I am and how I’m going to hell.
The truth is, a lot of bad shit happens to other people that I have never experienced directly.  I can’t get it, deep down.  I can make mushy parallels, understand these things *happen*, but I can’t really understand what it’s like for the seven hundredth time to say “I’m from San Francisco” and have some person squint at my Asian features and go, “…but where are you from?”
Whole worlds are cut off from me.  I have it pretty good, in many ways.  I don’t get the full experience.
But you know what I can do?
I can fucking listen.

Seven Thoughts On Orlando, Islam, And Gun Control

If you think your assault rifle will keep you safe when the government comes for you, you have not paid attention to the drones and missile strikes in the Middle East.  Got news for you, punkie; if there’s a serious go-to-town revolution against the government, you’re not going to be the bold revolutionary, you’re going to be a satellite-targeted crater in the fucking street.
Technology’s moved on.  Your revolution will mostly consist of IEDs and hiding, if it comes to that.

People say we can’t change gun culture in America – there’s too many guns, and too many people with guns.
You know what else everybody used to do?
We fucking smoked.
America used to be a goddamned chimney, my friends, with something like 80% of people lighting up.  We had Fred Flintstone and Barney goddamned Rubble shilling Winston cigarettes to kids.  We had a massive corporation covering up the truth of what happened to smokers, a government thoroughly in Big Tobacco’s pocket.  We had a nation of addicts, literal addicts, because remember that quitting smoking is only slightly less difficult than quitting goddamned heroin.
And yet now smoking’s a small segment of American culture.  It exists – just as, I suspect and would hope, gun owners would continue to exist after some massive, effective, gun legislation – but it’s now a thing where, for good or for bad, we massively flipped the switch.
You know where that all started?
The official link between cigarettes and cancer.
If you’ll note, the Center for Disease Control doesn’t even *collect* statistics on gun use.  That’s been shut down by Senators in the hands of the NRA, so we can’t even get data on what effects guns have.
So if you want to change things, that’s where I’d start: write your Senator to tell them that you want a special wing of the CDC to collect gun data.  Make it as immunized from politics as any government agency can be, which is to say poorly, but *get the fucking data*.
And if you want to tell us we can’t change things, well, a generation of kids who have largely grown up not chain-smoking would like to inform you that big changes can happen, if you want them to happen.

While I do love Igor Volsky calling out the lame “Thoughts and prayers” from politicians who are deep in the NRA’s pocket, I really hate it when people say, “Wow, if we only raised $2,500, *we* could buy a Senator!”
It’s not just money.  The money’s the grease, but the heavy piston action is the voters the NRA can round up.
If you want to beat the NRA, the sad truth is that a significant amount of you will have to become a one-issue voter, the exact opposite of the way a lot of NRA fanatics are now.

 
So.  A gay nightclub.
It’s amazing how many conservative pundits are erasing the “gay” portion from this narrative, as though that somehow didn’t matter.
Gay clubs are safe spaces.  As a straight person, have you ever held hands with your date in public and thought, “I could be beaten to death for this?”  Well, your gay and bisexual friends have.
Walking into a club like this is telling gay people, “We can destroy your happiness anywhere.”  Don’t pretend that doesn’t fucking exist.  Don’t pretend that somehow, gay people lead a life mostly like ours because gay marriage passed.
It’s still a goddamned dangerous time to be gay in America.  It’s getting better.  But you still risk shit like this.
This wasn’t “a nightclub.”  It was a statement.  And some asshole with a gun made a counter-statement, so don’t you fucking twist the story to make it seem like it could be any straight person.

So.  Islam.
A bunch of my conservative friends have reminded me, quite cogently, that a lot of Islam virulently hates homosexuality, and if we let everyone in from the Middle East into America then we’d be back to stoning, and how can we claim to be acting wisely and compassionately towards gays when Islam itself hates the homosexual?
Which is true.  You look at polls, and Muslims are largely intolerant of gay culture.
Non-American Muslims.
Open up the polls for American Muslims, and it turns out they’re more likely to be in favor of gay marriage than Evangelist Christians.
It’s almost like, I dunno, being a part of American culture influences people’s viewpoints or something.
And if that was true, then maaaaaybe the worst thing you could do would be to stigmatize Muslims so that they *didn’t* feel like a part of American culture, to conflate every Muslim as “foreign,” and alienate them so that they don’t feel any attachment to the country they live in.
Huh.  Maybe it’s your attitude that’s fostering terrorism.

And while I’m at it, my worst conservative friends only bring up Islam when they’re talking about what homo-hating bastards these folks are, selling the “THEY’RE ALL OUT TO KILL YOUUUUU!” line as though literally every Muslim would slit a gay’s throat and rape a woman whenever they could.
And keep in mind: I don’t deny there are serious fucking cultural issues going on.  If you, say, take in thousands of refugees from a culture that doesn’t respect women or the QUILTBAG train, well, you’re going to have some serious issues getting these people on-board.  It’s not going to go smoothly, and one of the serious liberal critiques I will aim is the way that liberals hand-wave those issues.  Integration’s a serious bitch, my friends, and it’s often a messy compromise you make to save the lives of innocent people who’d otherwise get ground to meat in a war zone.
That said, here’s the thing:
I’ll accept Islam as a monstrous, monotone religion of purest hatred…
If you claim all of these untagged Christian shooters and apply the same logic to Christianity.
Because that’s the magic, you know.  White guy does it?  Unhinged.  We don’t own him.  He was acting on his own, no matter how many friends he talked to online.  White religious guy does it?  Well, that’s not Christianity, how dare you label us!
The great thing about being white and of the dominant religion is that your shooters never count.  Those guys?  Well, we know they’re unhinged.  Were they talking to other hateful people?  A splinter sect, they aren’t real.  No matter how many Biblical nutbags run and gun, that never touches the core religion that we like.
So a brown guy shot up a crowd.  That is, and continues to be, and will never not be, terrible.  But he’s 2% of all mass shootings.
The other 98% are white guys, some percentage of whom were seriously religious.  Claim them.  Apply the same logic to the religions you think are acceptable.  Then we’ll talk.
Until then, well, yeah, ISIS is a huge fucking problem, but Islam is a huge fucking religion, and every huge fucking religion has its fringe elements that you have to deal with.
(And if you want to talk about what Islam does globally, go back to the last point about what it does in America.)

Lastly, as someone who suffers from mental health issues, please remember that not every bipolar or depressed person shoots people.  In fact, most of us don’t.
I’m not one of those people who’ll tell you that a guy who shoots up a club isn’t crazy.  He is.  But like Islam and Christianity, “crazy” covers a wide variety of issues, and conflating insanity with mass shooting is a bad thing to do for those who do suffer.