The Economics Of Fear, Or: They Told Me I Was Smart.

(This is an essay I wrote way back in 2009, back when I’d just started changing my fear distribution. Since then, I’ve published four books and I’m contracted to write two more – and though I’ve not been a bestselling success yet, I’m definitely much further on from where I am when I started back when I was more concerned about being smart.

(I’m reposting this ancient essay because a couple of my friends have stumbled across it and found it useful. I still think it’s one of the more significant essays I’ve ever written… But you can decide that for yourself.)

Scientific studies have shown that you can destroy a child by calling them “smart.” Even when they’re very young, little kids know that being “smart” is what makes them special – and so, the first time they encounter something they don’t understand immediately, it’s a threat. Their specialness is in danger of being stripped away. And if they lose that smartness, then what are they?

Kids who are called smart take fewer chances. Why risk all that glorious social acclaim for a stupid test? And if you don’t really try, then you can still be smart – you may have potential, but even a six-year-old knows that having the potential to be smart gives you more benefits than finding out that no, you’re not really smart at all.

Far better to tell a kid that they’re hard working. Hard work is something you can’t take away. Hard work is something that can always be improved. Smart can just… vanish.

I was told I was very smart.

Like many others who grew up in the Generation Of Unfettered Self-Esteem, I reacted by sandbagging my efforts. I wrote stories, but sporadically. And when I sent them out, it was to friends who’d tell me how great it was. And on the rare occasions I sent them out to actual paying markets, one or two rejections sent them right back into the drawer.

As long as they were in the drawer, they could be good. And I could be a good writer. If I worked at it. Which I wasn’t, but that potential gave me all the glory of feeling like I might be a great writer some day without all of that icky negative feedback. Sure, I had this constant underlying fear that maybe I wasn’t good enough – but I had a moderately popular journal, some folks who liked me, and wasn’t that enough?

Recently, however, I’ve started going for it. I’ve been sending out stories almost constantly, and yet I haven’t had a pro sale in a year. Eighty rejections sit on my desk, each one proof that the stories I’m writing aren’t good enough yet. And I’m writing every day, really stretching myself – and recognizing that in the end, I may write my ass off and still not be good enough. Effort doesn’t always equal success. I may push myself to my limit and discover that limit’s still well underneath where “pro writer” needs to be. Failure, as Adam from Mythbusters is so fond of saying, is always an option.

So why did I change? A friend of mine, who was also crippled by smartness, called me “brave” – but I’m not brave.

It’s just simple economics, is all.

What I realized was that I was living in constant fear. No matter what I did, no matter what success I had, I knew that I was failing. And when I did some calculations, I realized that every day I woke up and felt like I wasn’t doing well enough. And what would happen one day, when I was seventy, it would be too late to actually succeed and I’ve have to realize that I had squandered my life on fear and paralysis.

In that sense, “not really going for it” was like paying the interest on my credit card. It got me by, it was easy, it let me buy other things – but eventually, that bill would still be due and I’d be no further along.

These days, I really am putting myself on the line. And not only do I have the potential payoff that I might achieve what I want, but that underlying fear has transformed. It hasn’t vanished – no, that constant gentle sucking has been replaced by brain-melting spasms of terror. Whenever I get a rejection letter for a story I had hopes for, that panic of OMG WHAT hits me like a freight train, and Gini has to calm me down.

The rest of the time, though, it’s just not there. I’ve exchanged one constant, low-grade fear that never went away for spikes of anguish. The overall fear amount is about the same, but the spikes have one critical difference: I might, actually, turn out to be something.

What it comes down to is economics. I can have a constant, low level of fear with no payoff at the end, or I can have panic attacks and no fear elsewhere, with the additional potential of seeing whether I have the talent I think I might.

You’re going to live in fear, smarty. The question is, which fear?

So I’m going to find out. Either I’ll fail magnificently at fiction, or I’ll get to seventy and fail by default. I’m forty now, which makes my own choice easier; I only have so many years before that clock runs out. Every morning when I wake up, the danger is not that I’ll find out, but that I’ll run out of time to find out. Twenty years have already been devoured by my own insecurities. Do I want the rest of my life to be swallowed up by that?

What I’m doing is, perhaps for the first time in my life, making an informed choice about the matter. I’m still scared shitless every goddamned day. I’m still breaking down whenever I get stonewalled on a story I loved that hits the reject-o-skids.

But I think every writer – hell, every artist – will, eventually, come to a long and dry desert where there is no positive feedback, no hope of success, no way of finding that magic button that turns on the talent within you. It may last for years. And most artists don’t talk about that empty space, because there’s no way of conveying it because all anyone ever sees is the glorious, envious end product. During that time you’re Jesus, wandering in the desert, trying to find yourself and not finding a damn person in the world who’ll tell you you’re good.

You’re not smart. You’re hard working. That’s all you have.

Lessons Learned From Personal Training: The Zangief Principle.

So we were at our personal training session the other day when Zangief walked in.

If you’ve ever played Street Fighter, you know Zangief: he’s the big, burly Russian dude. This local had a bit more of a hipster vibe about him, and was certainly friendlier, but he had that bodybuilder look about him: the arms so filled with steely muscles that his veins bulged out, the shoulders-in hunch of the guy who lifts a lot.

I immediately felt outclassed. We’ve got some beefy guys attending our tiny gym, but they’re mostly ordinary guys who look really good in a T-shirt. It’s like, “Okay, I’d have to go full-time workout to get that physique,” and I worried he’d judge me, the flabby middle-aged dude who’s a lot better but is still not, what you’d say, “in shape.”

(He didn’t judge me, of course. Everyone at our gym is super-nice and considerate, and though I’ve never seen anyone being mean, I think the trainers would yell at ’em if they weren’t. That’s pretty much my own neuroses coming to the fore here.)

Yet all those fears evaporated when my trainer had me lie down on the ground and start doing reaching exercises designed to bulk up the muscles between my shoulderblades. It’s what I call a “dangerous nothing” exercise – she demonstrates it, I go, “That looks like nothing!” and then I do it.

Reader, the nothing exercises are never nothing.

But they don’t look impressive – and in front of this burly weightlifter, I kind of wanted to be yanking heavy iron, not lying down on my belly and stretching in circles.

He chuckled good-naturedly. “God, I hate those,” he said.

I laughed. Told him how I feared Rachel’s three-pound weights more than her fifty-pound dumbbells because she homes in on your weakest muscles.

“Don’t I know it,” he said.

And as I watched, Rachel handed him three-pound dumbbells. She had him do the exercises that she literally gave me on my first week – and he was struggling. Struggling with that immense willpower that every bodybuilder has, but I realized:

The muscles between his shoulderblades, because he hadn’t worked out there, weren’t much better than mine. Which Rachel confirmed later – it was a chronic problem among bodybuilders because their muscles tend to pull their traps out of place, and they’re so strong in other areas that their body compensates and the shoulderblade muscles atrophy.

(Much like my overbearing quads had completely nullified any activity my glutes had to do. I know the names of these muscles now. I did not before Rachel.)

And I realized two things at the gym that day:

1) It’s hard. It’s always hard. Watching this muscled guy grunting as he lifted those small weights was proof that there’s nobody who’s gifted with fitness. Everyone starts from zero. And moving the needle from zero is always hard.

Hell, moving the needle is hard period.

2) We’re all in this together. Maybe that’s not true at other gyms, but it is at ours. They run a good shop, and I feel good about being there.

Zangief and me, man. We’re two points on the same curve. I don’t think I’ll ever get to his physique.

But we both sweat to get where we are, wherever that is. And so we both cheer for each other.

That’s good stuff.

Beta Readers Needed For My Poly Narnia Book!

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know that last Tuesday, I finished the first draft of my latest novel: a bisexual, polyamorous portal fantasy that’s basically, Narnia with the serial numbers scuffed up.  (I celebrated by buying Horizon: Zero Dawn, which turns out to be a great reward.)

Now I’m looking for about ten to twelve people to beta-read for me and give me feedback in the next six weeks.

(Why ten to twelve?  Because I’d like about eight people, and generally I find that you hit about 60% on getting beta readers to get back to you in time.  And six weeks is a tight deadline, man.)

I am specifically looking for three types of people to beta read this time around:

• LGBTQ people, as this story deals heavily with LGBTQ issues and I’m a cis-mostly-straight-white-dude who’s concerned about tone here.
• Completely vanilla, non-polyamorous readers, because I’m curious to know how someone who’s not polyamorous reacts to three characters who are fully polyamorous but also human with emotions.  (For poly people: trying not to collapse a V relationship into a romantic triangle is hard, yo.)
• Romance fans, because I’m preeeeeeeetty sure I’ve written a romance here and yet know nothing about the genre, so I’d like to know how this appeals to romance folks.

What am I not looking for?  Well, telling me “I’m really good at proofreading” pretty much excludes you from a lot of writers’ beta circles, including mine.  I’m going to take out 15% of the words and read everything aloud to check the flow of the prose before I’m done – and assuming I sell it to a publisher, we’ll have professional copyeditors and proofreaders sniffing this sucker like a bloodhound.  So I need no copyeditors at this stage.

No, what I want are the sorts of people who can tell me four separate things cogently:

•         The things that confuse you (“Why would $character do that?” or “Why did this magic not work this way?”)
•         The things that throw you out of the story (“$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 six weeks (or, preferably, way less), do me a favor and email me at theferrett@gmail.com with the header “FERRETT, I WOULD LIKE TO BETA-READ YOUR NARNIA.”  (People who cannot follow these simple instructions will probably not be entrusted with the novel.)

What does beta-reading get you?  Well, it 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 will most likely get filled up on people, but if I do, I’ll put you on the list for the next revision, if there is one, which there will probably be.

Buy My Book “The Uploaded” For Two Bucks Today!

If you may recall, my novel The Uploaded is about what happens four hundred years after the singularity, where we perfect brain uploading – and living has become distinctly uncool.  And it’s now on sale for a measly two bucks.

Now, maybe you’re not looking for a book featuring a genetically engineered superpony, or tales of a digital heaven that’s run like the best World of Warcraft game you ever played, or discussions of the philosophy of consciousness, or just wild adventures through a world where living physically has become a drawback, but come on!  It’s two bucks.  Less than the cost of your Starbucks coffee, and it’ll last you longer.  And if you do like cyberpunk action books, well, it’s even a better bargain.

Plus, you get to look at the Uploaded’s awesome cover on your electronic reading device of choice, and ponder how you have chosen a digital item over a physical one, and have you already taken your first step into the world of The Uploaded?

(Hint: You’re reading this online.  Oh yes you have.)

Anyway, The Uploaded is on sale at Bookbub, which has links to all the places it’s on sale – which is currently Amazon, B&N, Apple, Google, and Kobo.

So go get you some!  Or don’t.  But if you don’t, I literally don’t know how long this sale lasts because I am scatterbrained.  So go soon, or live with eternal regret!

Mind The Age Gap In Dating: One Older Guy’s Perspective On Doing The Math

When I was eighteen, I was sure I’d know when I was forty. Some switch would click on in my head and I’d feel old, some perception of my status as a forty-year-old-man saturating my everyday experience. I’d wake up with a little internal time clock going You’re forty now, you know that, get up.

In reality, my perception of my age is a surprisingly erratic experience.

Because when I was twenty, my memories of myself ten years ago were foggy, and strange; everyone spoke to me in an entirely different way, and I understood so little of the world that my memories of me as a ten-year-old kid were clearly timestamped. And if that wasn’t enough, every year I was placed into a new environment with new teachers and new classes that was also timestamped – third grade, fifth grade, seventh grade.

Every year my world was reset, so I could clearly say: There I was ten. There I was thirteen.

Why wouldn’t my future memories be that clearly regimented?

And so I thought when I was forty, every memory I had would be striated: I would remember my twenty-seventy birthday with the dull, smeared comprehension of an event that took place thirteen years ago, my every recollection placing me firmly in a timeline that centered me at forty now, as it did when I was twenty.

Here’s the secret, though:

Past a certain point, all your memories become equally vivid.

Both my wife and I have become unstuck in time, because we’ve been married for eighteen years and we’ll recall something that happened last year, except it wasn’t last year, we’ll do math and realize that it was fifteen years ago and oh shit mentally that feels like yesterday. I’ll be talking about my old job at Borders Books and Music, which closed down in 2008 and I haven’t worked there since 1998 and how the fuck was that twenty years ago when I recall it like the trip to Italy I took in 2015?

I don’t feel younger in those memories. I still feel like me – partially because I never feel like I’ve quite mastered being a grownup. I thought at some point I’d graduate from “fumbling teen” to “mature, educated adult,” wherein the knowledge of things like “how to file an insurance claim” would be downloaded directly into my brain and I would know all things.

But here I am, older, and I know nothing about insurance claims. If my house burned down, you know what I’d do?

I’d fake it.

That’s all being a grownup is.

So yes, there are days where I have a twinge in my knee and feel old, but most days my internal clock is set to around my mid-twenties, when I got out of college and entered the free-form world of jobs. I talk to my wife and my other forties friends and we all could swear we’re sorta-twenties most days until we do the math and realize that whoah, it’s been decades since then and how did that happen?

Which brings me, very roundabout, to my point.

Galia Godel has an excellent, nuanced post called It’s Time to Talk About Age Gaps – and they make some excellent points in how the dynamics of older men with younger women often don’t benefit the younger women in the long run.

But I think there’s a subtle pressure they missed, because it’s a concept that only an older person can get viscerally.

Because I was literally sitting around with friends the other day, and we were discussing dating, and they were looking at OKCupid for new partners and mentally checked the “30s and up” range for acceptable dating rounds.

Except we did math. Because we thought people in their early thirties were our age.

We’re in our late forties, creeping into fifty. There’s almost a twenty-year difference between us and people in their early thirties.

But we had to stop and do the math to make that happen, because we fucking forgot. Internally, that seems unreal to us because it took fucking forever for us to get to thirty, and here we are in our fifties, and it doesn’t seem that long ago.

(Or, in the case of my wife – because I married a woman eleven years older than I am – someone who’s turning sixty this year.)

And we are baffled because what the fuck, when did that age gap creep in?

Now, don’t get me wrong. There are people who have had their lives clearly demarcated by life, particularly people who got out of school and then promptly had children so their entire lives have been marked by one grade or another. And there are definitely dudes who feel the specter of gray coming on, and decide to find a younger woman to convince them that they’re not old.

And oh my God are there are dudes who seek out younger partners who are inexperienced in order to take advantage of them. That’s endemic (and not confined to age, because there’s fortysomething novices coming into the scene who have also been manipulated).

There are definitely people who feel that distance, and seek it out for various reasons, most of which can be negative.

But for me, and for a lot of my older friends, sometimes we’ll be at a convention and we’ll be flirting and we’ll just connect with someone. And we won’t realize there is a significant age gap because this person and I are getting each other’s jokes and there’s a pretty person touching our arm and internally, we’re not looking at a grizzled dude with a salt-and-pepper mustache, we’re looking at someone we find attractive.

(Just as my wife and I – again, eleven years separated – don’t feel that distance until we do the math.)

And it all feels very natural to us because internally, we don’t feel that this is An Almost Fifty-Year-Old Guy flirting with Someone Who Is Under Half His Age, but two people connecting in a natural and organic way.

Except.

Except.

It’s your job to do the math, man.

Because just because you’re not aware of the dynamics doesn’t mean they don’t exist, and Galia (whose piece you really should read) outlines the reasons why an older man in particular can often be appealing to someone who’s younger. You’re often benefiting from things that only life experience can give you, but that also means you can transparently, and accidentally, give people the wrong impression about what you can deliver.

If you’re a caring and considerate person, it’s your job to do the math. To be aware of those invisible dynamics, and to think about what sorts of harm those dynamics might do to someone.

This isn’t to say that you don’t flirt, of course, or that you never have a relationship with someone younger. As both I and Galia have stressed, it’s not automatically bad to have an age gap. Some of those dynamics work out fine.

(In part because age does not equal experience; there’s some fifty-five year old “mistresses” who have been making the same mistake for forty years, and some twenty-three year old submissives whose instincts make them inherently smarter than I am. As mentioned, the primary skill of “being a grownup” involves “faking it when you don’t know better,” and some so-called “grownups” never mastered the relevant skills. So anyone who says that a fifty-year-old man automatically knows more than a twenty-five-year-old man has consistently met all the wrong men.)

But I like to think that these dynamics work because the people went into it thoughtfully, and pondered on some level how to counteract the negative influences that can result, and not to just LEEEEROY JENKINS charge their way into every cute thing that crosses their path.

Because if they are attracted to you in part because you’re the more experienced one, then be the more experienced one. Be responsible. Be considerate. Be knowledgeable about what taking this flirtation to the next level might mean in the long run.

You may not feel that age gap internally, not consistently. But you don’t consistently notice gravity, either, until you trip and fall.

Try not to let anyone fall through that gap, is all I’m saying here.

You Helped Me Raise $750 For Children’s Cancer. Now Will You Help Rebecca’s Brother?

I don’t talk much about my godson Josh, because, well, he’s a kid. He deserves to tell his own story, and doesn’t need his crazy Uncle Ferrett spewing tales of his adventures out to the Internet. (As I’ve discovered to my dismay, my one-off essays can follow people around for a long time if I name them.)

But Josh is pretty typical for his age. He loves Pokemon, and lightsaber battles, and he paints his nails bright colors in part because his Uncle Ferrett has pretty pretty princess nails so that’s normal to him.

Where he’s not usual is his sister. She died of brain cancer. All he has is memories of his older sister Rebecca.

He instituted little rituals to keep her alive – saying goodnight to her, keeping some of her things in his bedroom. But he doesn’t have Rebecca any more, and I often wonder what he’ll remember of her when he’s a teenager.

He was young when it all happened, so young, and the trauma of living through a family that has to focus its efforts on a sick sister is difficult at best. The toll cancer takes is not just on the child and the parents, but often on the other children – who have their life revolve around their sibling as the family takes on the rhythm of medical care, who struggle to understand the seriousness of death, who can’t fathom why their older sister can’t play with them any more.

Now. As you may remember, I set out to raise $750 to fight children’s cancer, and thanks to all of you – thanks so much – I got there, and a little beyond.

Josh was hoping to raise $500 in his sister’s memory. As of now, it looks like he’s not going to get there.

And so, once again, I ask if you have the spare cash, please donate to Josh. He’ll be shaving his head in Rebecca’s memory, as he’s done for the past three years, as I hope he does for a long time. He’s a good kid. I won’t write about him much, because, well, with luck, he’s going to write about himself some day.

I wish Rebecca had gotten that chance.

So please. If you can. Donate.