"Yes, Of Course."

So my sweetie C. is going in for surgery tomorrow. She’s shit-scared of hospitals, uncertain of what the surgery means, and terrified.
I’ll be driving down to hold her hand in the hospital.
And the sole pleasant thing about this ugly turn of events is that this is a twinned decision. My wife Gini and I had a weekend planned together at home after a bunch of visits and travel, the long slow weekend where we’d curl up and reconnect. We’d both been looking forward to that.
Yet when C. texted me with her medical results, and it was clear that surgery was the only option for removal, I shared them with Gini. And she said, “Yes, of course you have to be down there. She’ll be terrified.”
That’s because our partners aren’t partners, but our friends.
This is a consistent pattern. When one of my sweeties was – and is – experiencing legal trouble with their visa to America, Gini kept asking what she could do to help reduce F’s anxiety about possibly having to leave the country. “Yes, of course we must help them.” When another sweetie needed some emergency supplies sent to her, Gini authorized the expenditure without a second thought – “Yes, of course she needs that, send it to her now.”
I should note that Gini is not dating any of these people. They’re my partners alone. Yet Gini’s had dinner with them, hung out, heard me talk about them. She cares.
And that goes both ways. When Gini’s partner wound up in the hospital, I asked her whether she needed to go to him. As it turns out, she didn’t; every partner is different, and her boyfriend was suitably stoic that he neither needed nor wanted hand-holding.
(For the record, when I had my heart attack, I told Gini to stay at her boyfriend’s place that night and catch up with me in the morning, there was nothing she could do in the ER except sleep shittily in a crappy bucket seat and the nurses were taking care of me. I panic about many things, but hospitals are not one of them; we all have our individual times when we need someone to hug us.)
But when her partner was in trouble, I said, “Yes, of course.” Just that the “of course” was Gini slightly spent more time texting him.
What I’m grateful for in our relationships is that we don’t endure each others’ partners, we embrace them.
And part of that is me changing my dating habits. I used to have a lot of churn in my love life, having torrid two-month relationships with scores of partners. Those partners were of varying levels of compatibility with me, and I wasn’t good at filtering out the good people whose needs just didn’t mesh with mine, so Gini was pleasant but she didn’t get attached. How could she? If she really liked someone, the average time I spent dating was about four months!
But as I’ve honed the concept of my polyamorous Justice League, my partners are much better suited for me; everyone I’ve been dating now, I’ve been seeing for at least a year. And Gini’s had time to see how they’re good for me, and to know them well enough to understand why I love them (even if she doesn’t necessarily have the time or inclination to date them herself), and so when something bad comes up….
Her natural reaction is “Yes, of course.”
I’ll be driving tonight to see C. And Gini and I have already rescheduled our reconnection date for next weekend, when hopefully we’ll see movies and snuggle and catch up.
But tomorrow, there’s someone who is terrified of doctors who’ll be in a cold hospital bed. And she’ll have her family there, and she’ll have her friends there.
She’ll also have me.
Of course.

If You Feel Like Buying Fan Art of Valentine….

My friend Bill is now selling prints of his fantastic Valentine fan art.  Which, if you’ll recall, looks like this:

I told him I didn’t think he’d sell that many prints, but he was free to do so. (I don’t get a dime; that’s beautiful art, so I told him he could keep the profits.)  So there it is, gorgeous as always!  Check it out if you wanna.

So What's A Post With 24,000 Facebook "Likes" Get You?

On Monday, I posted my essay “Oh, For Fuck’s Sake: A Gentle Talk With My Republican, Democrat, And Undecided Friends.”  By this morning, it’s up to 24,000 Facebook “likes” in a viral politigasm.
Which is weird. I’ve gone viral before, most notably for my essays “Dear Daughter: I Hope You Have Awesome Sex” and “Can I Buy You A Coffee?”  And I’ve found that those who haven’t gone viral have the wrong impressions about how this works, so let’s bust a few impressions:
1)  You Don’t Get Famous.  The Essay Does.  
The next day, I wrote a followup to the “For Fuck’s Sake” essay called “Why Your Presidential Protest Vote Is A Wretched Idea,” and as of now that essay’s got 170 likes on Facebook total.
That demonstrates that when you go viral, 99.9% of the people show up for that essay, read, and leave.  Hardly anyone goes, “Oh, I’ll read what else this fellow had to say!” and proceeds to trawl your blog.  You’re a one-stop entertainment, worthy because someone’s friends linked them there, and then you go.
It’s nice to have that level of attention for a while, but people tend to think, “Oh, you’re famous!”  No.  That essay has been widely read.  I doubt most of its readers could pick me out of a lineup.
2)  A Viral Post Doesn’t Sell Your Books.
You may note I have my three books for sale, and I didn’t notice any significant bump in sales on the Amazon sales rankings.  (Well, okay, I saw a bump, but that’s because my book Flex is on sale for $2.99 this week.)  Again, people liked what I had to say, but most of them ghosted afterwards.  Which is normal.  (And fine with me.  I don’t write essays to sell books, as a rule.)
Now, sometimes, if a post blows up huge, you’ll get offers related to that post.  When “Dear Daughter” passed half a million likes – still my high-water mark! – on the Good Men Project and the Huffington post, I got an agent asking me if I wanted to turn that essay into a book, because they had a publisher who’d expressed interest.  I told them “No, but I have this novel” and they went, “Nah” and disappeared.
3)  …But It Kinda Does.  
If you’re looking to sell books, blogging is the long con.
See, when I published my webcomic “Home on the Strange,” I noticed a weird pattern: I’d have a huge hit, with 10,000 people linking to our Doctor-Who-As-Jesus strip or our alternate ending to Harry Potter, and then the next comic would be bare-bones normal in terms of traffic.
But the overall numbers kept creeping up.
Eventually, I came up with my “Pepsi machine” theory – which is to say that a fan is like a big, cumbersome Pepsi machine that you’re looking to tip over.  Hardly anyone tips over a Pepsi machine in one muscular push.  No, you gotta rock them, a little at a time, until eventually they sorta wobble over.
Likewise, most people – me included! – have established habits.  I hit the same six webcomics every morning.  Adding a new webcomic to my list?  For no apparent reason, that seems like an effort.  But if a webcomic keeps getting linked to by my friends, with each visit I’ll think, “Oh, I should come here more often!” and then I don’t.
Eventually, I accrete enough good will that all right, I’ll add this to my regular trawl, and suddenly I’m a fan.
Likewise, I have a lot of fans (comparative to the normal person, not at all comparative to a true celebrity), but they’ve all arrived in dribs and drabs; some liked Home on the Strange, others liked my essays, others liked my books.  Most of them had to see me around a lot before they eventually started reading me regularly, for whatever definition of “regularly” counts.
I’m not going to have 24,000 fans tomorrow.  But I’ll probably walk away from this with maybe fifty people who now read me regularly.  Maybe five will read my book, maybe two will like it enough to recommend it to other people.
That’s actually a decent ratio.
Which is why I wouldn’t recommend this method if you don’t actually enjoy blogging. It works, but it’s like panning for gold; lots of time knee-deep in mud, a few flecks.
Better enjoy the outdoors.
4)  Hardly Anyone Knows What Goes Viral.  
There’s a couple of people who know how to go viral easily – I see Chuck Wendig churning out essays once a month that everyone seems to link to, and I go, “Man, even accounting for his larger audience, that guy knows how to connect.”
The rest of us have no idea what connects, or why.
Look.  “Dear Daughter” was an angry essay I wrote in fifteen minutes on my lunch hour, and that writing will probably be referenced in my obituary.   “For Fuck’s Sake” was a Sunday evening writing which I put a lot of thought into, but I’ve written a lot of thoughtful pieces and I still don’t quite know why that one took off.
I just write a lot, and about once every eighteen months, one catches fire.  And I assure you, if I knew how to craft essays that consistently drew 24,000 Facebook “likes,” I would.  Even now, I have no clue why that “For Fuck’s Sake” essay launched into the stratosphere versus my usual political rantings – it feels about the same to me, but it resonated with others.
Every so often on FetLife, some moe without an audience will get a wild hair up their ass, belligerently bumping chests with people who do have an audience to say, “Why don’tcha write an essay anonymously, HANH?  Why don’tcha prove that it’s the WORDS that make you popular, but your AUDIENCE?”
Well, first off, why the fuck do you think my audience – such as it is – sticks around?  Because I’m writing things they think are shitty?  Come on.
But secondly, if you think “writing an essay” is “one shot, one kill,” then you’re wrong.  I’ve written probably ten thousand essays.  Of them, three have gone viral enough to spread across the Internet.  The Venn diagram between “What I consider quality” and “What resonates with people” is a mystery indeed.
Oh, I’m confident that if I wrote a lot of essays under a pseudonym, I’d eventually regain my current levels of notoriety.  But expecting one essay to be as popular as, say, “Dear Daughter”?
The only person who could say that is someone who doesn’t fucking write.
5)  Your Reputation Sticks With You, Though.  
As mentioned, maybe people couldn’t pick you out of a lineup, but they get a rough impression about who you are.  There’s a lot of people who don’t read me who know that I’m loudly polyamorous and sex-positive, I’m left-of-center even though I’d like to be considered center, that I’m depressive and occasionally psychodramatic.
Lots of people really don’t like me for any of those.
So when I meet people at conventions, I sometimes have folks doing the stop-and-stare moment of “Do I want to talk to this asshole?”  They have formed an opinion of me from my writings, and they do not like me.  Sometimes they make excuses and GTFO.
Which is why I’m always baffled when people are like, “Oh, Ferrett just makes up shit to start controversy!”  No, man. I get enough side-eye for the things I believe.  There are real-world consequences to my writing, and as a dude with social anxiety I assure you I feel every one.
There are doubtlessly people who do start up controversies for “fun” – I’ve met them, scrappy assholes who want to start “a feud” to “get traffic” – and they’re usually people with small audiences.  And I wonder whether they’re so enthused over these mock-fights because they’re never planning on going out in public where their rep is attached to their face.  And after a couple of thoroughly faked essays, I wonder if they’ve lost any friends.
But me?  I put my face and my books on these essays, because if one goes viral and I wind up getting shit on by a thousand people for some opinion I’ve opined, I want that shit to be from people I actually don’t like.  I’ve got enthusiastic Trump supporters leaving insulting comments, but hey, I’m okay pissing off those people.
Like I said: most people can’t tell what’s going to be a hit or not.  So pretending to be an asshole in the hopes that someone pays attention to you?  Seems like small pay for idiotic work.  You probably won’t go viral, but you’ll have real-life people who read you – if you have real-life people – believing you’re either a genuine asshole, or a manipulative fake asshole, and I’m not sure what’s worse.
You may think I’m an asshole, but at least it’s for things I believe.
 
 

My Book's On Sale For $2.99 At Barnes and Noble This Week!

If for some reason you have not read my book Flex – which features snortable magic drugs, a paperwork magician who turns his filing cabinet into an FBI hacking device, and a chubby videogamemancer who enjoys pegging – then you can get it at Barnes and Noble for $2.99 this week!
(NOTE: Amazon usually matches B&N’s prices, but I’m not checking there because B&N instigated this sale, and you should throw ’em the cash if you’ve got a Nook.  But wherever you buy it is good.)
As an extra-special reminder, the finale to the ‘Mancer trilogy is coming out in six weeks, and you can preorder Fix.  (In fact, if you want to support an author, you should always preorder their books.)  If you’re a fan of the series, @Gaileyfrey Twitter-reviewed it last night, and she had this to say:
Y’all have read FLEX and FLUX right
Hell yeah you have, you love great speculative fiction
WELL FERRETT DID IT AGODDAMNGAIN with FIX
Here’s what I will tell you: BADASS SUPERMAGIC TWEEN GIRL ON A MISSION TO FIND HERSELF AND SAVE THE WORLD AND SAVE HER FAMILY
I’m just going to be over here changing how I write young characters because @ferretthimself RUINED IT by showing how BEST to write a tween
[grumping] like it wasn’t bad enough he schooled us all in worldbuilding now he’s gotta go and raise the bar for young female characters too
TL;DR: – @ferretthimself is a jerk – go preorder FIX immediately
I’ll be a jerk for that.  So in short:

• If you haven’t read Flex yet, you can get ahead of the impending sequel at a cheap price by going to Barnes and Noble now.
• If you have read Flex and you want to know what happens to everybody in the series – because everyone gets an ending – then go pre-order Fix now.

Message ends.

Oh, For Fuck's Sake: Why Your Presidential Protest Vote Is A Wretched Idea

Pop Quiz: What do you think when I say “President Bill Clinton”?
All right, your first thought is probably “the bawdy things you can do with a cigar.”  (Ah, Billy.)  But then your mind likely wanders to Clinton’s Presidential accomplishments; if you’re a conservative, you fret at all the damage he did, if you’re a liberal you think of the economic prosperity he wrought.  Eight years in office is a long time.
Now: How many of you thought of Bill Clinton and thought, “He was elected because voters were sick of the two-party system?”
Ah, but that’s arguably true!  People forget that Ross Perot was the third-party candidate in that election, acquiring 18.9% of the popular vote – more than any independent candidate in modern history.  And while mostly Perot held relatively even support between conservatives and liberals, conventional wisdom is that Perot siphoned away votes away from Bush – the first Bush – to help tilt the race in Clinton’s favor.*
Did you remember that?
Or did you remember “EIGHT YEARS OF DEMOCRAT IN OFFICE”?
See, that’s the problem with Presidential protest voting.  You think you’re sending a message, but the guy who wins the Presidency hears “I won, I get to do what I think is best.”  The guy who loses maybe hears a message, but that guy lost.  And after two years of President-in-office, all those Presidential protest votes evaporate in people’s memories to become, well, another Democrat or a Republican won.
Note that I’m saying Presidential protest votes.  Because here’s the thing: if you want to make legitimate change in what is and has always been a corrupt system, placing a single vote in the ultimate winner-take-all race is the worst fucking idea ever.
You want to change that system because it’s corrupt or nonrepresentative or what-have-you?  Well, there’s a sliding scale here:
Voting in Presidential races to change the two-party system?  You might as well poop your vote onto toilet paper.
Voting in Congressional races?  Better.  You have a chance of being heard.
Voting in midterm Congressional races?  Now you’re getting golden.  Midterm races are where only the ancient and entrenched vote, and a fresh face showing up when there’s not the Presidential dog-and-pony-race has an actual chance at producing change.
Writing letters and emails to Congressmen while they’re still in office, telling them what you will or will not support?  Oh, you’re approaching the beatifics now, my friends.  The truth is that most corruption isn’t actually hidden. It’s out in the open.  We all know how much the NRA is paying politicians, we know how much the Koch brothers are pouring into races.  But no one cares.  If you care, well, that’s one politician who has to worry about losing your vote.
Voting smartly for local candidates?  Oh my God, that’s right, your state governor and mayor and other officials exist, and chances are really good a few hundred votes can make a difference.  Hell, mayors have gotten flung out of office because some old fart didn’t like the way the trash collectors left their cans on the lawn and mounted a crusade, so if you want to make a change, hey, start here.
And the absolute thing that will guarantee a change insofar as any one person can make a change?
Volunteer.  Get out there and canvas.  Get the local politicians indebted to you.  Get voters on your side.
That’s how you make a difference.
I’m not saying not to vote in the Presidential elections.  I am saying that the Presidential elections are the accumulated corruption of literally the entire country funneled through an avalanche of votes, and if you think you can change the system by showing up once every four years and spending ten minutes standing in line, then fuck are you egotistic.
Look, if you’re a disenfranchised Democrat who was disappointed with what Obama could accomplish, let Samantha Bee remind you how the 2010 election – where you young spitfire Democrats didn’t show up – completely fucked Obama by ushering in a new tide of crazies:

If you think you’re “fighting corruption” and “sending a message” by one third-party vote in the biggest campaign ever and then going home for half a decade, you done fucked up.  Because the government is not just the President – you may note Obama struggling to pass laws through a Congress who hates him.  And that Congress, in turn, is beholden to politicians in their home states.
Want change?  I support change.  But I don’t support it through the weaksauce mechanism of a single Presidential vote.  You’re not going to get Jill Stein or Gary Johnson elected – which isn’t to say you shouldn’t vote for them if you believe in their candidacy, because if that’s the case you should.  But if you’re voting for someone else to “send a message” to Hillary and/or Trump, well, a lot of people sent messages care of Ross Perot and yet somehow that package never got forwarded.
You can’t get Jill Stein or Gary Johnson elected – but with hard work you do stand a reasonable chance of getting a third-party option onto your city council, or into the mayor’s office, which may demonstrate that your neither-Democratic-nor-Republican policies are effective, which is the only way you’re going to actually send a message for the necessity of a third party.  You need to work from the ground up, paying attention when the news headlines are not shoved into your face daily, actively participating in democracy as opposed to passively sitting back and having CNN stuff you full of poll results.
The Presidential Election makes it easy to know what’s going on.  But the elections that you can use to change the system in are small, undocumented, often overlooked.  The corruption is endemic, but part of the reason that corruption is endemic is because people don’t bother to show up – at the ballot boxes, at the volunteer office, at their politician’s mailbox.
Corruption sails by because people like you aren’t watching.
So yeah.  If you’re pissed off about how Bernie got screwed by the DNC, voting for someone else in one election is a positively dumb way to fix that complaint.  Former Bernie staffers have rallied to create Brand New Congress, which has as its goal electing, well, a brand-new Congress. Volunteer for them, donate to them, do something other than dorking up the ballot box with your single vote and going back to Netflix.
Or if Bernie’s not your guy, there’s plenty of other options out there!  Google them!  Find the local levers of change and start tugging those fuckers.  If you’re furious, use that rage productively.  I want you to go make permanent alterations to the fabric of our society.  I want you to fight corruption, and entrenched interests, and politicians who no longer give a crap about you.
But you will not do that with your crappy Presidential protest vote.  You’ll have to put more skin in the game.
Good luck.  Because I damn well hope you do.
 
* – Not that he needed much help, honestly.  Bush was a weak candidate.