The Great San Diego Donut War

I never thought it was possible to breathe sugar.  Yet each exhale had the sweet scent of powdered sucrose, I had overdosed on pastries, my heart thumping, and yet people were bringing me slices of donuts as I signed books, asking me to judge which was better, asking me to eat more sugar.

This was San Diego.

It started out innocently enough – I wasn’t sure where to go out to eat, and a dear friend of mine said, “Go eat at Extraordinary Desserts so I can live vicariously through you!”  Some Googling revealed they also had meals – we had a sandwich – but the desserts.  Oh my God, the desserts.

So we ate as much as we could of these delicious, delicious cakes, and then set out to…

Buy donuts?

Yeah. I was pretty full already, but it’s a tradition for my book tours – when I come, I bring donuts. (Because donuts represent all that is good and right in my ‘Mancer series. There’s even a guy who reads your personality through your choice of donut. Yeah, it’s a weird series.)

So I had asked my readers, “Where’s the best donuts in San Diego?” and a fight had broken out. Some said The Donut Bar had the best donuts in town – hell, they were routinely judged the best donuts in the country, they’d been written up on The Food Network, you gotta try them. But of course there was the locals’ pushback, saying Donut Bar was overrated, everybody goes there, why would you go there when there were such better donuts?

I sympathized.  (Cleveland has a famous grilled cheese bar called Melt that I find similarly overrated, and I keep having out-of-town guests who want to try it.)  Still, I figured trying the world-famous donuts would be what I wanted, so I set out there.

Except these donuts weren’t world-famous.  They were world-sized.  Check out how big these donuts were compared to my hand:

So my friends and I tried the donuts, drinking the delicious chocolate milk they also had, and I was full to brimming but hey, there was a signing. We packed up the donuts.

A dozen Donut Bar donuts were like carrying freight cargo. They couldn’t fit a dozen of these bloated donuts into a single box – we had to haul three boxes, balanced precariously, more pastry than a man had a right to.

I hoped attendance was brisk.

Yet as I was on my way to the signing, I checked into my donut thread and discovered that a reader was so enraged by my going to The Donut Bar that she was going to bring donuts from the better donut place, VG Donuts, the working-man’s donut of San Diego.

And then I had forgotten what town it was, this was San Diego, and there was a tradition of my internet friends Frito_Kal and Technophobia bringing homemade cupcakes to the signing – and these cupcakes were ‘mancer-themed, with green rock candy designed to imitate Flex, and last time the cupcakes I’d stored away had melted in the trunk so I had to try them –

– and they were delicious cupcakes but I was getting a little overdosed on sugar now between the stomach full of delicious cake and big thick Donut Bar donuts and delicious fried VG donuts and now the cupcakes and I couldn’t not have them, that would be rude and also when do I pass up donuts, but it was getting to the point of either passing up donuts or passing out and also Mysterious Galaxy, the bookstore, was getting very worried because they were running out of table space to put all these goddamned donuts –

Then came the reading. That was good! I could do nothing but listen to J. Patrick Black read from his new book Ninth City Burning, and read from my new book Fix, and I didn’t have to eat any donuts –

– except as I was starting my signing, someone burst through the door with two bags’ full of donuts, saying, “I HEARD THERE WAS A DONUT COMPETITION, AND I AM HERE TO PROVE THAT {LOCAL DONUT COMPANY} IS THE BEST!”

I wish I could tell you which donut store it was. They were pretty good. But at that point my pancreas was melting.

And when we were done – done – here is a picture of all the donuts we had left over, after about thirty people showed up and ate voluminously:

(The best donut was, predictably, VG Donuts. Hipster donuts like The Donut Bar are good, but yeah, once again, the working man’s donut won out.)

And don’t get me wrong: I was grateful for everyone who brought their own donuts to champion their cause. People should be passionate about donuts. Donuts are life. Donuts are joy. Donuts are a beauty to behold, and there’s a reason donuts save lives in my ‘Mancer series.

But that night, I ate a turkey sandwich and skipped dessert.

Trump Isn’t Ready To Be President, And Neither Was John Kerry

A commenter was complaining – with some right – that this election would determine the course of the economy, and for the last two week’s it’s been a constant stream of TRUMP GROPES.  How can we tell which candidate is qualified to, you know, be President?

And here’s my take on the issues:

Running a Presidential campaign is a lot like being the President.  It’s full of constant, unexpected vectors, you are required to make decisions that will alienate portions of the voter base, you are required to make decisions that will infuriate your own supporters.  A Presidential campaign is a hugely complicated thing to get right.

And if you bobble the campaign, you’d make a sucktacular President.

I’m not saying that winning makes you a great President by any means.  But if you watch someone’s campaign dissolve into disaster, that’s the first sign that they couldn’t get the job done.

And in particular, if you can’t handle the obvious attack ads that people will air, you’re not gonna do well in office.

Like, you know, John Kerry.  Everyone knew they were going to come after his war record.  The guys running Bush’s campaign had gone after Max Clenand’s war record in a Senate race, and that guy had lost limbs fighting for his country.  They might as well have sent him an engraved invitation saying, “WE ARE GOING AFTER YOUR STRENGTH IN THIS ELECTION IT’S WHAT WE DO RSVP ROVE AND COMPANY”

…and the attack ads came.

And Kerry spent five days dithering about how to respond.

And I thought, “God, I really don’t like Bush, but seriously, if it takes Kerry five days to respond to something every political pundit saw coming, how well is this man going to do when there’s an unexpected emergency?”

I liked a lot of what Kerry stood for.  But when the obvious attacks came, man wasn’t prepared.   And having a President who either doesn’t prepare for the obvious or can’t see the obvious or, God forbid, both?  Not so good.

Likewise, Trump’s groping comments, well, he knows what he said – or should have.  He should have prepared for the certainty that some of his tapes would have emerged at the worst possible times.  And instead, he’s blaming everyone else but himself and his campaign for not having a good answer prepared.

On a personality level, I still don’t like Hillary all that much.  But she’s that policy wonk who’s got a plan for everything.  Maybe she’s scheming, yes – but you want a schemer in the White House, because the alternative is having some dope like Kerry or Trump who are completely bollixed by the world’s most predictable events, and God damn you do not want that at the helm regardless of political stripe.

(Now only if Bush’s staff had applied the same rigor they did during his campaigns to, I dunno, predicting and boxing off the negative outcomes of the Iraq War, and we might have an entirely different country today.  Which is proof that running a successful Presidential campaign is your first hurdle to prove you’re worthy of office, but by God it is not the last.)

On Men Getting Raped. And Abused. And More. (Trigger Warning)

So Joe Scarborough said that if he had been sexually harassed by Donald Trump, he would have come forward earlier.

To which I ask:

Would you?

Would you really?

Because I’m pretty sure if Donald Trump, Alpha Male, had successfully pinned you – a dude – against a wall and grabbed your cock and maybe even, God forbid, raped you, you would have had a very difficult equation on your plate.

Because if you’re paying attention at all, you know the standard playbook people trot out against rape accusers is:

She’s a liar
* She secretly wanted it
* She’s crazy
* She should have fought harder

So what happens when you, a dude, accuse a known big-time dude of sexually assaulting you?

Well, the first three get melded into, “You’re secretly gay, and you want Donald Trump to fuck you with his huge alpha cock, and it’s a shame you’re so crazy you made all that up.”

So the story is not going to be, “BRAVE MAN STANDS UP AGAINST SEXUAL ASSAULT.”

The story is going to be, “CLOSETED HOMOSEXUAL MAYBE WANTED DONALD? WE DON’T KNOW.” From that moment on, even if you’re straight, you’re going to have a lot of questions swirling about your sexuality. What other cocks have you secretly sucked? You’re gonna have people debating how manly you are…

…which feeds straight into point #4, “You should have fought harder.” You think female rape victims get Monday-morning quarterbacked? Well, you’re gonna see every homophobic guy in existence talking about how they would have cold-cocked The Donald in a hot second, they wouldn’t have been frozen with shock or confused as to what was happening or even a little scared that Donald Trump was a guy who might scotch this $20 million business deal –

Every one of those guys are certain they would have decked Trump the minute any assault happened. You didn’t. So let’s go back to the question of whether you secretly wanted it, huh? Maybe you’re a gay dude. And in the mouths of these guys, “Gay dude” seems like a terminal insult instead of, you know, just something it’s okay to be.  (TOP TIP: It’s totally okay to be.)

Your masculinity is stripped. Because a real man doesn’t get himself into situations like that. A real man always knows what to do. A real man doesn’t let anyone take control of his life.

By losing control of your life, even for a moment, you lost your label as a real man.

Your whole contextual gender is now in question.

It’s gonna get discussed whether men can get raped. You’re gonna get asked whether you were hard when Donald touched you. God forbid you were, because even if you just happened to have an erection when a dude pawed you, that too is proof you wanted it.

And you know what happens on top of that? There’s enough assholes who think rape accusations are funny when it’s a girl. When it’s a guy? Well, there’s prison rape jokes going on alllll the time – don’t drop the soap in the shower! – and once this bombshell hits the news, every shockjock comedian is going to be making laaaaughing jokes about how you got Trumped, making you into some pansy who’s whining about a grope.

Rush Limbaugh’s gonna make fun of you. No question. Not if it hits national news. And then all of Trump’s friends will join in, saying how Trump is a nice guy and he would never do that….

And if you’re wondering where the anger at what Trump did to you is, well, it’s in there, but it’s mixed in with all this skepticism and doubt and moral judgments on you and whether you’re really a man and by the time it’s all out you have a bunch of people going, “Well, we don’t really know what happened, I can’t judge. It seems like everyone involved is a drama queen.”

Welcome to the wonderful world of rape accusations.

And here’s the thing about men being abused by their spouses, or gaslighted in relationships, or even raped by friends:

You exist.

The world will tell you that you don’t exist, because real men don’t get themselves into situations like that and guys who aren’t real men don’t exist.

But plenty of real men wind up abused. We just don’t hear you talking about it in public because, well, all the reasons I described above. There’s a lot of real men who’ve been abused, and survived, and even thrived – but they don’t talk about it because if you think it’s bad for women (AND IT IS), holy crap is it worse for a guy coming forward in American culture.

But you exist.

I see you.

And I understand why you haven’t come out to tell your story yet. I understand why it might take years. I understand why it might never happen, because it’s terrible enough when you’ve been beaten by your wife or raped as an act of vengeance or even just assaulted by a friend when you were drunk…

…but what happens after you start speaking can be so much worse.

So no, Joe Scarborough, if you had been assaulted by Donald Trump, I don’t think you would have come forward sooner. I think you’d be sitting quietly backstage, watching the headlines pile up, knowing what a firestorm your accusation would cause about Donald’s sexuality, and yours. I think you’d still be wondering whether you want to pay the cost of revelation, knowing that all that opened pain might not even do anything to the man who hurt you.

Then you’d wonder how many others were like you.

And you’d realize you’d never know because silence. Silence is so much easier.

—————–

You exist.

I see you.

The Most Beautiful Gift I Got On My FIX Book Tour

“What’s your favorite Magic card?” she asked me, a month before I arrived in Seattle.

I used to play a lot of Magic.  I edited one of the best independent Magic sites, and I wrote hundreds of articles on strategy in Magic multiplayer, and there’s still a lot of people who only know “The Ferrett” as that Magic writer.

But I didn’t have a favorite Magic card.  I just sort of missed playing.

And when I showed up at my signing, before anyone else got to my table, she placed this wooden box before me:

That’s a wooden box with a foil Anathemancer on the cover – a minor sideboard card from Alara Reborn – and a quote from Anathema, the villain from my book Flex.  Who is a ‘mancer.

“You didn’t know this card existed, did you?” she asked.  Yet I did, as I have a mildly encyclopedic knowledge of Magic cards because if a card’s for sale at StarCityGames.com – and it is – there’s a 97% chance I entered it into the database. I knew about Anathemancer, but she made me realize that my mind must have made a subconscious connection somewhere – another secret tribute to Magic wired into my books, as Paul Tsabo has always been a subtle nod to one of my most-played Magic cards back in the day.

It was perfect, and I was breathless.

“Open the box,” she urged me.  And I did.

It was even more perfect.

What you’re seeing there is an art form pioneered by Master Ookubo – taking several cards and stacking them, with each successive layer more cut out.  I’ve thought about buying a Master Ookubo card for years, but they were pricey and I wouldn’t quite know where in the house I could do such beautiful work justice.

But this is even better.  She took a card that was perfect – Archaeomancer is a Limited staple card that actually does a lot of what Paul does in the books – and melded it with artwork painstakingly cut from the cover of my book to create a fusion of my two writing worlds.

She took the days of me being one of Magic’s most popular writers and fused it with the days of me being a nascent novelist, and I lost it right there in the store, my eyes welling over with tears.

I hugged her, and thanked her, and she said she didn’t want to be referenced publicly or else I would be shouting her name to the heavens.  (It doesn’t hurt that the person who did this is someone I’ve also been a fan of for quite some time.)

This is the most wonderful surprise I can ever remember being given, and so it is now on my mantlepiece, where I smile every time I look at it.

And lest I leave you with too much of an impression that I am a noble and dignified author, I would like you to recall that the entire time this was happening, I was wearing this outfit because I lost a bet to raise funds for my goddaughter’s charity:

But yeah. That was the surprise I was not expecting on my tour to close out the ‘Mancer series, and it was a beautiful way to finish off the tour.

And if you haven’t bought Fix yet, either at Amazon or Barnes and Noble or just your local shop, Angry Robot has put the first three chapters online for free so you can read it and, presumably, get hooked on the adventures.

Go check it out. I’ll be over here smiling at my beautiful artwork.

“All The Women Flirted With Me. That’s To Be Expected.” (Trigger Warning)

Here’s the lens to view things though: Every woman is flirting with you because you’re powerful.

The problem is, you remove that lens, and the truth is that some of those women aren’t flirting with you. Let’s be generous and say that most of them are, but 10% are just being nice.

When you expect to see flirting, everything becomes flirting. Someone making eye contact becomes their bold way of seducing you. Someone’s looking away when you stare at them becomes their shy way of leading you deeper into their boudoir.

When what you expect to see is women wanting to fuck you, well, you can always find evidence that someone’s trying.

And if you are a powerful man, with the ability to make or break their career, and you have this lens that everyone’s secretly trying to fuck you, then there’s a good chance you start trying to fuck them. Which, again, maybe a lot of the women there want you.

But the ones that don’t suddenly wind up with a tongue in their mouth, or your hand on their intimate parts.

And some of them freeze. They freeze because they’re reliving some former trauma, or they freeze because they’re trying to figure out how to tell you “no” without losing the career they so desperately need, or they even freeze just because this is so far out of the line of what they expected that they don’t even know how to react to this.

And if you expect every woman to be into fucking you, you’ll see that very still and silent moment of them, breathlessly savoring what they always wanted.

Except it wasn’t that.

It wasn’t that at all.

Even if, reluctantly, they let you keep their hands there in that intimate place because they do that awful math and decide that “getting assaulted” is better than “being beaten up and assaulted.”

But you don’t see that, because you expected them to fuck you, and that lens transforms a trembling, sobbing woman into a girl who was so very nervous about revealing how much she wanted you.

And that’s the thing: you can be right 95% of the time. Maybe you are that attractive, maybe you are that sexy.

But as a human being with any kind of compassion – are you really okay with raping or molesting one out of every twenty women you’re with?

Or do you double down on the lens because you really want those nineteen women, and that twentieth becomes someone who you’d rather lose behind the distorting fog of the lens of “EVERYONE wants me,” and slowly sell your humanity off one 5% risk at a time?

Look. I get a lot of women flirting with me, and I don’t even vaguely qualify as a celebrity – I’m a sex-blogger with a few thousand fans. I can believe that when you’re on national television, you’d get offers that would blow my mind.

But I keep that firm idea in my head: FLIRTING IS NOT NECESSARILY DESIRE. Even though a lot of the times, honestly, it is.

Because that “not necessarily” becomes vital when you start moving into other equations, such as ACQUIESCENCE IS NOT NECESSARILY ENTHUSIASM and SILENCE IS NOT NECESSARILY APPROVAL.

That “not necessarily” is where the remainder of your humanity lives, when temptation comes knocking. That “not necessarily” is where you avoid that 5% exception, or that 1% exception, or even that .01% exception, because holy fuck, what percentage of women are you comfortable assaulting, shouldn’t it be zero, God I hope it’s zero, please Lord let it be zero.

All the women flirted. And maybe they did.

But it’s what you do with that interpretation that makes you either a human, or a monster.

(Title taken from a quote by Donald Trump, but it could apply to any number of people who wind up getting more fame than they counted on.)