Hey, Tommy, I Miss You: The Last Book In The 'Mancer Series.

It’s here, guys.
I did it.
(In stores September 6th.)

Why I Didn't Watch Larry Wilmore

I meant to watch The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore.  I’d always liked him on the Daily Show – not loved him, but he always had some good insights and I respected him.  Then his show switched over, and…
I forgot.
Which happens.  I’m slow to put shows on my DVR.  Jon Oliver was on HBO for a solid year before I finally remembered, “Oh, yeah, I can add him.”  I adored Samantha Bee, having linked to her videos three times in my blog, and I still haven’t put her show on record.
But Larry?
He wasn’t viral.
Which is a weird thing to say, but that’s how it worked.  I’d have forgotten about Jon Oliver except that every other week he did some fifteen-minute segment that blew up my Twitter feed and had me saying to Gini, “Oh, you gotta watch this.”  I keep meaning to put Samantha Bee on my DVR because she keeps popping up from time to time when she goes viral, albeit with less frequency than Jon “One Shot, One Kill” Oliver.
I can’t remember a viral Larry Wilmore clip.
Oh, I can remember a number of Tumblr GIFsets going around wherein Larry said something appropriately snarky, but a GIFset is basically a one-liner – which is a good thing, but there’s a difference between a good one-liner and a full set.
Whenever Jon Oliver went viral, he had a solid eight minutes of show that told me, “Okay, when he’s on, he’s worth watching for eight straight minutes.”  When I saw Larry Wilmore going around, his GIFsets told me “When he’s on, he’s good for fifteen seconds of wry exasperation.”
So I never watched.
And now he’s cancelled.
Yet virally speaking, Larry’s got it way better than Noah Trevor, who is theoretically broadcasting but I’ve never seen a friend link to anything he’s ever done.  (I’m sure one of you has, calm your jets, but compared to Larry Wilmore?  Maybe one in a hundred, if that.)  Noah is like the least viral host I can remember.
I’ve never seen a new Daily Show, either.
Those two things are connected: Virality and me watching.
Now that Larry’s cancelled, I realize the bias of preferencing TV hosts who are good at getting snippets out to Twitter and Facebook.  Not every comedian can sum up things in a pithy five-minute video.  It’s entirely possible that Larry Wilmore was really great, and I didn’t watch simply because he didn’t have mastery of a viral medium; that doesn’t necessarily reflect quality.
(It’s also possible that my Twitter and Facebook are too white-skewed – but I get a lot of RTs from Black Twitter, and I didn’t see Larry popping up all that much.  Still, could be me.  Still, if it is me, that means there’s a good chance Larry wasn’t showing through to my segment of White Twitter.)
And, I think, Larry’s handicapped by being black.  Not in the sense you might think; Larry’s angriest moments that I’ve seen on the Daily Show and in the Twitter GIFsets tended to be more eye-rollingly peevish than actually furious.  And I think of the viral videos from Jon Oliver and Samantha Bee, and they were sputtering – but that anger’s often a white privilege, because white people can get angry and cutting and crude and not be tarred as the angry incoherent black man.  Just like Trump can scream and yell, whereas Obama has to be this cool, calculating man because if he loses his crap he’ll get dragged into a lot of stereotypes that will absolutely destroy his message with white America.
(Cue Key and Peele’s “Obama anger translator” routine.  And I watched Key and Peele because they went viral with clips like that, though Key and Peele could be angry through characters they played, not the news-host personality that theoretically reflected them.)
Yet, I think, anger is a major component of virality when it comes to comedy news.  That fury is something viewers react to. And maybe it’s that Larry and Noah express their rage in a much chiller fashion and that’s their personality, not their tone-shifting – but I try to imagine a black Lewis Black, raging and spluttering and calling people idiots, and I don’t see that guy climbing the ranks at Comedy Central.
But viral videos have become one of the things that determines ratings.  It’s the assurance that says, “Hey, this person’s consistently funny, you keep seeing them all around Twitter, don’t forget they’re still here.”  And I eventually remembered Jon Oliver, and I’m gonna throw Samantha Bee on the DVR after I finish this, but Larry Wilmore?
I won’t get the chance, now. ‘Cause I didn’t see you on Facebook enough.
Sorry, Larry.
(Though honestly, I’m hoping Jessica Williams gets her own show soon.  I wonder what her virality would be.)

"What If Someone Wants To Sleep With Me When They're Drunk?"

So you wake up in the morning with a hangover, and a tattoo of Spongebob Squarepants farting on… you’re not sure who he’s farting on, actually. The tattoo is poorly enough done that you’re only certain it’s Spongebob because it says “SPANGBOB” in wavering letters above it.
Scratching the clots off your blood-sticky arm, you stagger off the couch. Your friend Micah’s there, his tattoo kit by the wayside. “What happened?” you ask.
“Wild night,” he grins. “You got hammered.”
“Obviously. Why do I have a tattoo?”
“Ah,” Micah says, shrugging it off like you’re making a joke. “You’ve been talking about getting a tattoo for months.”
“I’ve said I’ve been saving for a tattoo.”
“No need to pay! You know I need the practice. Been telling you that for months. I’ve been wanting to do it for free on that lovely forearm of yours, and last night you said ‘Eh, go ahead.'”
You’re doubtful of that. You don’t recall last night. It could be that maybe you thought that Farting Spangbob was a hoot, or maaaaybe that Micah decided to break out his newfound tattoo skills upon you when you couldn’t say no. You can’t say.
But now you’ve got a tattoo. And Micah hoping to do another later this afternoon.
————–
Now. This is obviously a “should you have sex with drunken people” metaphor, and particularly dim men will say “A tattoo isn’t the same as having sex with someone! Tattoos are permanent!” And before you say that, kindly ponder the fact that there’s people who’ve gotten HSV during drunken escapades, and there’s no laser removal for that.
(Not to mention that little risk called “pregnancy” if you’re of the female persuasion, which guys often forget about as when pondering the permanent consequences of sex. Which is a shame, as an unwanted pregnancy in a sex partner can affect a guy a hell of a lot as well.)
And this essay’s a bit of a mirror. Many people will look at it and conclude the lesson of this narrative is, “Well, the protagonist shouldn’t have gotten that drunk.”
But you know what the other lesson is?
Micah’s kind of a dick.
Micah did things of potentially permanent consequence to his buddy, fully aware that he might regret them come the next morning. Because we all know stories of people who’ve done things when they were hammered that they wouldn’t normally have done sober, and while one lesson that can be extracted is “You shouldn’t drink a lot,” the other lesson that should be extracted is, “If you’re interacting with someone who’s drunk, you shouldn’t take them at their word.”
This is well-known. Legal contracts have been voided because someone was drunk when they signed them. In many states, bartenders are legally obliged to cut customers off after a certain level of drunkenness because drunk people can’t make good decisions. In fact, reputable tattoo parlors won’t take drunk people at all because they don’t want the risk.
By sleeping with someone who’s drunk, you’re a disreputable tattoo parlor, which is to say you’re Micah.
Do you want to be Micah?
Again, this is a reflective lesson, because some folks will double down on the “The Protagonist was drunk, he deserves anything that’s coming to him,” all the while avoiding the independent issue of whether Micah should be doing things to drunk people that he’s well aware they might not want come the morning.
If we’re talking about “personal responsibility” and “the known risks of being drunk,” then at the very least Micah is being unwise by exposing himself to the hazard of taking a drunk person’s word as bond. And at the worst, Micah’s a scumbag predator waiting for someone to get drunk so he can do things he is fully aware they would dislike when sober.
Literally the best thing you can say about Micah is that he’s not quite as dumb as his friend, and that’s being kind.
So I personally feel the lesson should be, “You should avoid doing things to drunk people whenever possible.” Don’t be a Micah.
Ah, but that’s if Micah’s sober. “What if Micah himself is drunk?”, and that’s a trickier question if Micah is himself impaired.
But it’s kinda funny. When The Narrator is drunk, lots of people would say that any dangerous activity he consents to is foolish, and he deserves any consequences he gets.
But when Micah is drunk and doing things to the narrator, those same people would say that the dangerous activity that Micah has consented to – which is to say, exposing yourself to potential accusations of unwanted tattoos – is foolish, Micah shouldn’t be expected to know what’s going on then, and this all becomes the narrator’s fault.
Strange, how the script flips when you’re invested in Micah’s well-being.
Whereas I’m consistent in my beliefs: I believe that whenever possible, you shouldn’t aid drunk people in making potentially unwise decisions, even if the drunk person is really hot.
Because trying to sleep with drunk (or otherwise judgement-impaired) people is a risky goddamned business with potentially permanent side effects. If it’s a decision I know with 100% certainty that they’d be okay with in the morning, I might do it – if my wife, who has slept with me regularly for seventeen years, decides she wants to bang me shitfaced, well, I’ll take that risk.
But it is a risk. And I wouldn’t do anything new or crazy in bed with her, because the next morning she might wake up and be very mad about Spangbob.
Why take that risk, when I can ask her sober the next morning and, assuming she’s as into as she was the night before, potentially Spangbob the shit out of her the next evening with assured consent?

Your Writing Group Is Not A Godhead: Building Upon Some Fine Writing Advice From Ann Leckie

Yesterday, Ancillary Justice author Ann Leckie wrote a really great essay on chasing trends in fiction and why writing novels on the “next hot thing” for the sake of fame and fortune alone is a generally unwise idea.  She packs a lot of wisdom into a handful of paragraphs.  You should go read it.
But I wanted to expand on something she said, specifically this:

And if folks in your writers group or message board or whatever are telling you things like “you have to have a POV character that’s like the reader so they can sympathize with them” or “don’t write in first person” or “editors won’t buy stories with queer main characters” well, frankly, no.

One of the best pieces of advice I can give to fledgling writers is to remember you can ignore your fellow writers. And often should.
Look, if you’re serious about writing, you’re eventually going to get feedback from top-class writers.  Those writers are very good at writing their stories.  They may not necessarily be good at writing your stories, and incorporating their advice can leave you with this hamstrung half-hybrid pastiche that lacks both your strengths and theirs.
In workshops, I often write down someone’s feedback along with the notation: NMK.  That stands for “Not My Kink.” Which is to say that yes, this story could be good if I followed this person’s advice and turned the savage were-pterodactyls into genetically engineered cyber-pterodactyls, but then that story wouldn’t be a story I’d be excited to read.
(Who am I kidding? I’d read both of those stories.  But anyway.)
NMK advice is not bad advice.  It’s just advice geared towards writing a story that doesn’t hit my personal hotbuttons.  And for a lot of writers, “refining the hotbuttons” are what sell your craft.  Because a truly unique voice comes from taking all that goofy shiz that you adore and finding ways to make it work.
For example, Quentin Tarantino loves 1970s B-movies.  His work would suck without a heavy dosage of exploitation flicks and hyperaware movie references.  And a lot of writers’ workshops would have looked at early drafts of Pulp Fiction and said, “Okay, Quentin, you need to pull this back, you’re too excessive,” when the actual truth was that Quentin needed to figure out ways to take his love of crappy films, extract the goodness, and refine it until he amplified everything he adored about those films in ways that resonated with people.
And what you’ll often get at the early stages when your talent does not match execution is to pull back.  No.  Try pushing forward.
…but don’t forget that writing is about communication.  You’re trying to build a bridge out to your reader, saying, “I love this, and here’s why you should love it too.”  That takes skill, compromise, an understanding of what people expect so you can subvert and distill it.  You can’t just shout the same old thing through a foghorn and demand that your audience Get It – you have to question people closely to ask, “Okay, they didn’t love the were-pterodactyls, but why?”
Plus, you wanna lay aside that foghorn because you’re not here to regurgitate your source material, but to transform it.   Quentin Tarantino didn’t slavishly imitate the B-movies of his youth – he added his own strengths in terms of razor-sharp dialogue, shaking up the timelines to make thoroughly nonlinear stories.  Shout that love of queer characters, or second-person point of view, or despicable main characters – but do it in ways that are exciting and new!
Figure out what really thumbs that hotbutton, and amplify it.
Also: One of you is sitting there sniffing, “I hate Quentin Tarantino, why is Ferrett talking like Quentin Tarantino is such a great director?”  And that’s the final point: with great love comes great hate.  I adored Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice because it does fascinating things with viewpoint and gender, but it has inspired a tidal wave of hatred from people who are like, “THIS IS TURGID CRAP.”  Yet both Ann Leckie and Quentin Tarantino are fantastically successful at what they do, despite critics who loathe them!
When you receive a critique from a Very Important Author who is telling you that your story Does Not Work, question whether that person would enjoy your story if you’d perfected it.  That guy may be the person who hates Quentin Tarantino movies.  And he’s not wrong to hate them!  Repeat after me: Tastes are subjective.  But if you’re Quentin Tarantino, taking his feedback to heart is going to leave you working in the video rental store, not putting you on the path to World-Famous Director.
The rule of thumb is this: If three people tell you your story has a problem, it’s a problem.  You need to listen when beta readers get bored, or confused, or revolted.  But the way to fix that problem has to come uniquely from you.  Sometimes, the solution is not to cut, but to double down.
And sometimes, the problem is that these writers providing feedback are not an all-knowing Godhead, dispensing objective wisdom from above, but a bunch of nerds stumbling around in a bookstore – loving books you hate, hating books you love.  Sometimes, the bad feedback comes from someone saying, “Hey, George Martin, I love your characters but I’m not down with all this violence and nihilism, you need to get rid of that.”  Except getting rid of that will defang your books from the thing that makes you unique.
You can still get good feedback from those folks.  They can clue you into pacing issues, or enlighten you as to why your love of 1980s horror movies isn’t stirring people who don’t give a dry turd about 80s horror movies, or point out character decisions that make no sense.
But as a professional writer, you have to mark the difference between critiques that point out problems and critiques that are trying to rewrite your book into something you don’t want it to be.
One critique is worth incorporating.
The other needs to be chucked away, fast, and hard and fearlessly.  Because that’s what professional writers do.  And don’t forget the need to protect your own special brand of weirdness.

Random Events In My Life, Or: Ferrett's Too Tired To Think

So just to keep y’all up on the events in the McJuddMetz Household:
1) I’m Getting Handier.  
Folks on Twitter will recall my Woodworking Wednesday photos, wherein I get together with two friends and build stuff in my garage.
And I’ve hit a tipping point: I can just build stuff.
Which is to say that Gini and I have an informal collection of Blanton’s corkstoppers.  Blanton’s is a (delicious) small-batch bourbon that has eight different bottle tops, one for each letter in their name, each showing a horse at different stages of a race.  And we had six bottles up there, and I thought, Hey, I could build a shelf for the stoppers.
So, this Sunday, I spent about two hours and devised a shelftop to hold the corks:

Which is weird.  I didn’t wait for my Woodworking Wednesdays crew to help me; it was just a trivial thing I did, like programming a web page.  I can just build minor stuff, which means I’ve acquired a raw level of skill.
And when I was out in the back yard having drinks and a cigar with Gini, I looked at the workshop we’ve built over the last year, and it’s actually looking like a real woodworking shop:

And I’ve also figured out the way to finish my projects, which was a huge issue.  The first time I stained a bookcase, it looked like a diarrhetic mess.  But thanks to my sweetie C’s father, who is a Master Wood Finisher, I figured out that a spraygun is the way to go when finishing wood, and so the table I’ve built for my friend Heather actually looks pretty decent:

So yeah.  I’m a guy who can build simple furniture.  Had I a character sheet, this skill would now be listed as a reasonably solid percentage.  It’s a good feeling, but a bit weird – “building things” is not what I consider to be a core talent, and in fact I’ve considered it a literal weakness for three decades, so it’s a pleasant feeling to go, “Oh, yeah, I can do that now.”
2)  I Am Bereft Of Bees. 
I mentioned this on Twitter, but I don’t think I mentioned it here: Shasta got stung, and had a seizure, and almost died.  Turns out she’s allergic to bees.  So we had to get rid of them in the spring, which was probably for the best, as we hadn’t really taken care of them in years – Rebecca’s sickness really took the wind out of our beekeeping, and we never recovered.
We gave them away to a guy on Craigslist, who seemed very happy to have his new bees.  He promised he’d take good care of them.  I hope he does.  I’m a little worried because the last thing he told us before he left was how Big Pharma was causing cancer and we needed all-natural solutions, but he was taking our bees and he seemed friendly so I let it slide.
I think of them periodically.  I’m sure they’re fine.  They were hardy little suckers.
3)  Counting Calories Is Weird.
On Saturday, I said, “Fuck it, I’m going to eat whatever I want this evening, just go berserk on Chinese food and sweets.”
Then, because I’d been eating so much less, I got bloated, and I went for a long Pokewalk with Gini to gear down, and wound up only 200 calories over my limit.  Which would be offset by the day before, where I’d wound up 400 calories under without thinking.
I’ve been doing this for two weeks as of today, and we’ll see how it goes when I get to WorldCon, which is not the home of healthy eating.  But speaking of which….
4)  I Am In Slow, Continual Panic. 
So I’m going to WorldCon this week, arriving on Thursday night, and I’m in my usual pre-convention mode of “This will be a disaster.”  I’m sure it’ll be okay, but my brainweasels are telling me that this will be three days of me wandering through an endless lunchroom, looking fruitlessly for people to sit at a table with.  Which is ridiculous; I’ve had some folks offer to buy me drinks, and I still have to shoot my number to a couple of folks who’ve offered to hang out, but still.
(Also, if you wanna hear a sneak preview of the new ‘Mancer book, show up to my reading on Friday.)
And oh yeah, my book is coming out and I’m having the usual heebie-jeebies about it being a huge failure where, paradoxically, nobody will read it and yet everyone will hate it, which is my broken brain shouting, but it’s hard to tamp it down.
I remember going to my doctor before the book release last March and saying, “I need a large prescription of Ativan to alleviate stress.”
“Well,” said my doctor, “I don’t like prescribing pills like that randomly.  Can you do anything else about your stress?”
“I have made this the best book I am capable of writing.  Everything that has been done can be done, the book is typeset, it’s printed, and now all I can do is wait for the reviews and the sales numbers.  There is literally nothing I can do except stress the fuck out.”
“Maybe you could try…” he said, before discussing various stress-reduction techniques I’d tried.
“Look,” I said politely.  “I’m coming to you because I want someone professional to track my usage of anti-stress medication, because addiction runs in my family. If you don’t prescribe me Ativan, I will go down to the liquor store where I can get all the legal, free stress relief I need, and no one will be tracking that, so I’d really prefer your method.”
“I’ll get you some Ativan,” he said.
So these next few weeks will be an Ativan-frenzy, as the book looms closer and the book tour impends and the conventions loom and the impostor syndrome goes crazy.  I’ll handle it, I always do – but I have this weird dance between “Not revealing my mental health issues,” which makes me look really cool and leaves people who suffer from stress thinking “Nobody else goes through this, I’m a freak,” or putting it out in public and letting other people see how a neurotic, socially-anxious person functions and looking like a freak to some people.
So I repeat: I’ll be fine.  But if you wanna hug me at WorldCon, or say hello, or come to the book tour when I visit Seattle, Portland, San Diego, and San Francisco (or even Cleveland), well, I’m happy to see you.
And I will be so happy when the book is out for a few weeks and I know whether it’s a success or a failure, because god damn, the worst thing about the book industry is uncertainty.  I dislike failure.  But I can at least look that in the eye.  Unknowns are like a strobe light, flickering between GREAT HOPE and DISMAL FEARS that induces seizures.
Anyway.  I’ll be cool.  But yeah, some people have tremendous anxiety and still do this stuff.  Somehow.
I handle it by building shelves.