Hey, Massachusetts, Come Say Hello To Me Tomorrow At Pandemonium Games!

As a reminder, I’ll be at Pandemonium Books and Games (which is an awesome store even in the absence of me) at 7:00 tomorrow to read to you, sign whatever you put in front of me, and probably go out for drinks and/or ice cream afterwards.

I hope to see you there! These donuts aren’t gonna eat themselves.

Help Shape My Next Class: So What Do YOU Want To Know About Long-Term Relationships?

So this fall I’ll be premiering my “You’re Far Away But Your Hearts Are Close” class on running successful long-distance relationships. And to make that work, I gotta ask y’all:

What would you like to see taught in a class about long-distance relationships?

Some of the questions I’m planning on answering to the best of my ability are:

• How can you tell if someone’s genuine online?
• What are the best practices for transitioning from an LDR into a “real life” relationship?
• How do you handle arguments when you’re not able to cuddle and heal properly afterwards?
• How does New Relationship Energy affect LDRs?
• What sorts of relationships can LDRs offer?

But the classes I teach are for you (especially if you’re attending The Geeky Kink Event, Beyond The Love, or Indegeo Conception this fall – so I ask you, “What issues with long-distance relationships would you like to see covered in an LDR class?” I can’t promise I’ll bring it up, but in the best case you might inspire an essay or two later on.

So. What sorts of long-distance relationship issues are you curious about?

The Archaeology Of My Posture

Salvatore doesn’t remember me.  I’d lay money on that.  I was merely one of his victims, and probably not the most interesting.

He terrorized an entire middle school, after all.

Salvatore won the adolescence lottery – while the rest of us were still waiting on deliveries of impending hormones, he got his testosterone nice and early, shooting up to six feet tall before he finished sixth grade.  He dwarfed teachers.  And he wore wifebeater shirts to show off his muscular arms and had one deep, bellowing call:

“OPEN CHEST!”

If Salvatore saw you, and you weren’t clutching books protectively to your chest, he would punch you in the chest as hard as he could.

I got hit twice.  All it took.

So I clasped my books against my chest like it was a baby, hunching my entire body around it, as did everyone else around me.  People in the halls scurried, because when Salvatore hollered his call even the teachers mysteriously disappeared.

I’m forty-eight years old.  It has literally been thirty-five years since I had to worry about Salvatore.

But my body has still not unclenched.

I know this because I’m in personal training right now, and they are panicked about my posture.  They point out all the muscles that have atrophied because I am a habitual slumper, the damage I’m doing to my spine.  They give me exercises specifically to strengthen my neck because my head hangs forward.

It’s been a month, and when I walk the dog, it’s now uncomfortable to slump.  I have too many aches in those clusters, so it’s easier to stand straight up with my spine properly aligned.

And I feel like an idiot.

I don’t have some crazy worry that Salvatore will appear out of nowhere and punch me – that’s the sort of simplistic one-to-one bullshit that bad writers think up.  No, Salvatore’s crumbled into a finer sediment.

What I feel when I walk properly straightened is foolish.  Because I grew up in a middle school where, because of Salvatore, “standing straight” was a form of pride.  Few kids stood up straight, and those that did usually got cut down something fierce by Salvatore, or had their own unique middle school qualities that made them unappealing to Salvatore’s form of bullying.

I’m not afraid of standing straight.  It feels preposterous.  I feel like people are staring at this idiot walking by with the puffed-out chest and the straight-ahead vision, this Frankenstein bodybuilder’s swagger, and who the hell does that guy think he is?

Yet when a photo of my recent book signing – which, I should add, I’m doing another one in Boston next week, and in San Francisco the week after – surfaced on Facebook, people didn’t recognize me at first.  “You’re looking a lot younger and you seem to be more comfortable standing,” said a friend who’s known me for a decade.  If people notice the way I’m standing, it’s probably a positive impression.

Yet there’s Salvatore.

And there’s all sorts of other memories churned up by walking properly.  I’m not craning my head down to see my feet, so I can’t see where I’m stepping directly, which makes me anxious because I had issues in gym class that caused me to self-identify as a clumsy kid and oh God I’m going to trip why am I walking like this.  I read while I walked on the way to school, and subconsciously I’m angling myself to read the book – or, now, the phone – that I should be looking at while I bumble along.

(Note that #2 contradicts #1.  The archaeology of my memories do not have to make sense when combined.)

And I’ve never thought about these.  It’s just ancient history silently bending me into another shape.  It’s only once I struggle to break free of this that I see how many influences I’ve quietly absorbed to make me believe that this is how I should be.

And I remember a friend of mine, when I told him, “We’re all controlled in part by subliminal impulses we don’t quite understand” and he said, confidently, “No.  Oh, no.  I know every reason I do everything.”  And I thought, even then, that this was a comforting lie he told himself in order to maintain the illusion that he was a being of pure rationality, because the alternative – that much of what we unconsciously decide is shaped by forces we had no control over – was terrifying to him.

But the truth is, we do have our own archaeologies.  Even something as simple as standing is the sum total of a thousand memories, and a few wrong inputs at the right time can change your position forever.

Imagine how complex it gets when it comes to relationships.  Or sex.  Or sex in relationships.

And that’s not to say that you’re powerless to fight these forces.  You’re only powerless if you deny their existence.  I’ve watched my rational, knows-everything friend make exactly the same mistakes across two divorces now, headed towards a third, in part because he can never see how his unconscious habits are undercutting his stated desires.

I’m not saying I’ll learn to stand properly.  This may be a lifelong battle, as it is with my weight, as it is with my mental health, as it is with my writing.  But it’s another tool I can use to battle back something harmful.

And I keep watch. I wonder what other aspects of myself got concretized without my ever knowing it.

I wonder what parts of me I get to dig up tomorrow and replant.

See Me In Cleveland Tonight! Hear Me On A Podcast Now!

Kink and BDSM Podcast Off The Cuffs had me on to discuss what it’s like writing on FetLife, but somehow I wound up talking about the time I dumpster dove for porn.

Okay. Yeah. That’s on-brand.

But there’s some good meaty conversations involving questions like “How do you accept negative feedback when people are screaming at you?” and “What is the value of engaging with people who are clearly beyond being convinced?” and “How did you get into kink?” And there’s also a great Patreon level where for every dollar you donate, they hit their in-house masochist with a new toy.

So anyway. I’m rambling over here, perhaps too honestly. You can go listen.

And if you live in Cleveland, don’t forget I’m signing my new book The Uploaded at Loganberry books tonight! Show up and get free donuts! HOW COULD YOU GET A BETTER DEAL

Please Don’t Blackmail Me Into Happiness.

I told my daughter there was only one skill you needed to perfect in life: Doing shit you don’t want to do.

“You get that one skill down, and you can master all the rest easily,” I told her.

Because it’s true. I don’t wanna exercise… but I’m doing the shit I don’t want to do. This novel’s a pain to write… but I’m doing the shit I don’t want to do. Work’s a bug-filled helltangle snarl this week…. but I’m doing the shit I don’t want to do.

I do those unwanted things because they make my life better: work gets me money to live well, writing gets me the career as a novelist I’ve longed for (hey did I mention I had a book come out yesterday?), and exercising keeps me from falling face-first dead into my minestrone soup.

I don’t have to necessarily like doing any of those things. Life’s full of maintenance tasks, little uncomfortable bits you need to do to keep the genuinely fun ones rolling.

I don’t have to want to do them, I just have to recognize that I need to do them.

“Working through jealousy” is a thing I do not want to do.

Now, I could remove the jealousy by removing all competition. We’re polyamorous, so I could tell my wife not to have any other lovers – but monogamous people often conveniently forget that dysfunctional relationships get jealous of anyone with a close emotional bond. I could start bumping her friends out of the way.  Hell, I know folks who are jealous of their spouse’s mother, and man, is that a fun place to be.

But I could trim all that down. I could have that Mike Pence rule where we agree not to ever be alone with anyone of a gender we could potentially be attracted to. I could guilt my wife into calling her daughters less often, punish her by sulkings and silence when she dared to call them. I could do my best to trim out the competition…

And life would suck in new and different ways, because my wife would be a lot unhappier and less willing to be generous to me and there we’d be, locked in a cage of our self-making.

No. My wife having a vibrant social life with close friends and lovers and relatives means that she brings back all sorts of interesting gossip and new movies to watch and just genuine happiness from seeing people she loves. And in turn, that makes her willing to let me go hang with the people I love.

So time to do the shit I don’t wanna do, and handle the jealousy when she’s out on a date with someone else. Maybe I go for a long walk. Maybe I flirt with someone else. Maybe I need to find a friend with a shoulder I can sob into.

Yet I’ve had well-meaning partners who’ve witnessed my mopiness and blackmailed me.

“I can’t stand seeing you unhappy,” they say. “So unless you can manage to become ecstatic about this, I’m going to lop off all the portions of my life that inconvenience you.”

Don’t you fucking dare.

Look. Part of who I am is “occasionally insecure.” And the partners who try to blackmail me into joy mean well – because they don’t feel jealousy, and they genuinely believe that if they did everything right then I’d dissolve into a cloud of brightly-colored butterflies and do the dance of the galactic unison.

That’s not me.

I’m insecure, but I do my best to own it. And over years of dating, I’ve learned that for me, the choice is “Swallow back some insecurity from time to time” or “Wall off my partner’s options until they’re so miserably captive they break out and leave me.”

I choose to swallow back some insecurity because it’s objectively the better call. I spend a few mopey nights, but in return I get a jazzed-up partner who adores me and comes bouncing back into the room to squirt love all over me and who doesn’t want that?

And I know you mean well, but telling me “I can’t do anything until you’re not just willing, but rhapsodic about it” is a form of emotional blackmail. I mean, sure, if I’m so constantly miserable that our relationship dynamic becomes entirely about reassuring my insecurities? Then maybe it’s time to go, because that shiz is unhealthy. You can’t have all misery.

But I can’t have all happiness, myself. Life can be fulfilling for me and I can still have those nights of “You go have a date, I’ll find some way to compensate for my loneliness this evening.” Because that’s normal, man. Nobody likes sitting at home alone when there’s fun times that you can’t attend.

(And that subtle “YOU MUST BE HAPPY” emotional blackmail often extends into the twisted logic of “WELL THEN MY PARTNERS ARE INVITED TO ALL THE FUN TIMES” and the concomitant “We only date as a couple” shitfall that often leads to forcing attractions that don’t actually work and third-wheel syndrome and the terror of disappointing your partner by not being into someone… but that’s a whole other essay for another time.)

But no. Look. My life is filled with shit I don’t want to do, that I do do because the payoff’s greater than the grump. I don’t like being frumpy and jealous, but the reward for handling the occasional discomfiting emotion responsibly is way better than creating a relationship that rests entirely on a thin crescent of our Least Common Denominator.

And I know you mean well. But don’t try to armwrestle my emotional maintenance into unfettered joy. It’ll just make me more miserable because now I’ll feel like something’s broken within me as opposed to this grungy task I gotta do to clear the pipes.

I would instead suggest, tentatively, that perhaps your learning to not require paroxysms of euphoria with my every acceptance is the shit you gotta do that you don’t wanna.

Maybe get to work on that.

THE UPLOADED Is Out Today, Competing For Your Merciless Book Bucks! CONSUME AND OBEY

I’ve never been sure how to promote my book The Uploaded.

Is it a tale of immortal brain-Gods, all your craziest Facebook relatives uploaded to the Internet as alt-living people where they will vote forever and never die?

Is it a family drama about what happens when half your family is dead but won’t stop making excuses for why they’re still making your life miserable?

Is it a book about Amichai, a living kid struggling to find a place in a world where uploading consciousnesses has become so habitual that “being alive” has fallen out of fashion?

Is it a book with a kick-ass super-pony named Therapy who loves carrots and sick sisters?

No matter. All my months of dithering have led us to this moment where The Uploaded is now available for release in North America.  (You Brits, for unknown reasons, have to wait two days.)  And so I ask you to do the things for me that you would do for any author you love, in the order in which they help:

1. Purchase.  Buying the author’s books is the greatest thing you can always do for them, since it encourages publishers to buy more books and keep their careers going.  The Uploaded is available at pretty much any bookstore – Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powells, and various Indie booksellers.  (I don’t care where you buy it, as long as you did, and thank you.)
2. Promote.  There’s a lot of books out there, and a single Tweet or Facebook update saying, “Hey, {$Author} has a book out today!” helps a lot.  People mostly buy books recommended by their friends.  You even mentioning it is a stealth recommendation, so your social push helps more than you can know.
3. Review.  Retailers push books that have more reviews.  They say that 50+ reviews on Amazon is the magic number.  So even if you don’t like the book and leave a negative review, that helps the book.  (And of course to my mind, you’re not obligated to like it, although most of the people who liked Flex/et al seem to also like this book.) So when you’re done, figure out how many stars it’s worth and type up a sentence or two.  It really helps.
4. See The Author On His Book Tour.  This year I’ll be attending Cleveland (this Thursday!), Boston, and San Francisco.  Showing up to say hello convinces book stores that hey, it’s worth having this person out here.  Also it makes a socially anxious author like, you know, me feel less anxious knowing you’re coming.

Anyway.  Here’s all the links for The Uploaded.  Thank you if you choose to mention it anywhere.  If you purchase it, I hope it prods your brain and then breaks your heart in all the ways I intended, because it’s a dystopia, but it’s a dystopia with a weird hopefulness.

Or so I hope.

Excerpt of the first two chapters for your perusal

Buy The Uploaded at B&N

Buy The Uploaded at Amazon

Buy The Uploaded at Powells

Buy The Uploaded at Indie bookshops