Turning The Corner

So I’ve spent the last four hours in the final revisions of the first five chapters of my novel.  And there’s a strange finality to this.

I mean, don’t get me wrong; I’ve still got 90,000 words to condense, edit, and rewrite.  But the first chapters of the novel are the most important – agents routinely ask for the first three chapters, and if those aren’t good, you might as well toss the rest of the novel away.

And it’s done.  I’ve got a little more to do in terms of reading it aloud to check for grievous errors… But that’s a minor thing.  I’m not going to change the content.  I’m not going to change the prose.  If the novel’s going to sell anywhere, effectively this is the part that sells it.

I’m strangely comfortable.

Look, I could make this novel a lot better if I gave another, oh, seven drafts, but I don’t have the energy for that.  What I’ve got is what I think of as “That Borders feeling.”

Because back when I worked for Borders, I was in charge of the New Media department, which meant that I was trying to sell CD-ROMs in a book store.  It didn’t go well.  Unlike books, computer software was high theft and low profit margin and required a lot of hand-holding to sell.  I poured my entire life into trying to make New Media a profitable segment of Borders, but after a year it was pretty self-evident that it was folding.

And I was okay.  Because I’d done everything I could do.  I’d given all there was to give – and wrung dry of anything left to chance, I’d be all right if it collapsed.  Not happy, but content.
That’s where I stand tonight.  This opening segment’s been rewritten probably seven times now, and if it’s not good enough, well, I don’t know how to make it better.  If I can’t get the novel published, well, it’s not for lack of trying.

So here I am, on a Friday night, looking at 9,500 words and feeling – well, “proud” is not the right term.  I’m satisfied.  And that’s not a bad place to be.

A Question That May Destroy My Sex Life Forever

In a Facebook discussion, a friend of mine said that, surprisingly enough, she didn’t want to have sex with someone who’d increased his penis size via irradiated cadaver tissue implants.  She said, and I quote, it would be “creepy to be intimate with the skin of more than one person.”  Which, hey, if you don’t want to suck the nuclear zombie cock, that’s your business.

On the other hand, my mouth is full of irradiated dead men’s bones.  They flayed my gums open and dumped in bone chips scavenged from corpses (WARNING: post full of pictures) in order to build up my gum tissue enough that they could put in implants.  And, as I noted, women are far more likely to kiss me than they are to make intimate contact with Little Elvis, more’s the pity.

So.  Because I am stupidly curious about such things, which is creepier?  Kissing a guy with dead bones in his mouth, or sexing up a guy with nuclear dead men in his cock?  State your opinion, and your justification!  I want to know.

No! I Am Not Doctor House, Nor Was Meant To Be;

“How can you not like House?” people ask.  “Or Monk?”  And it’s a chronic weakness of mine, not being able to endure the plots.

See, I love the characters House and Monk.  But to justify their screen-time, every week the writers have to have them solve a mystery of some sort.  The mystery is invariably not as interesting to me as the characters, since the mystery is usually overblown and trying too hard to be WEIRD AS YOUR CENTRAL CHARACTER, and so I get bored.

If there was a half-hour sitcom called “HOUSE IS A DICK,” then I’d watch.  But you have this so unique character, and you’re strapping him to bog-standard mystery/medical plots, and that bothers me.  So I don’t watch.

I am, however, loving Fringe.

Fringe is basically an updated X-Files, with a mad scientist thrown in for good measure.  And it’s interesting how little I’ve come to expect from J.J. Abrams.  Reading the Wikipedia summaries of each show after I’ve watched it, I see the reviews for the monster-of-the-week shows are pretty universally, “WHO CARES ABOUT THE MONSTER OF THE WEEK?  SHOW US MORE OF THE OBSERVER, OF MASSIVE DYNAMIC, OF THE SHOW’S MYTHOLOGY!”

And I’m all like, “I don’t give a shit about the show’s mythology because, just like Lost and X-Files before it, none of it will ultimately make any sense.”  I know they don’t have a master plan in place, no matter what they claim, and when Fringe ends that mythology will be revealed to be a mess of incomprehensible plotlines and unsatisfying explanations.

So for me, Fringe is the House of science-fiction shows – I turn up to watch the characters, and mostly ignore the stereotypical weird mystery of the week.  And I was wondering, “Why?  Why can I do this with Fringe, but not House?”

The reason, I realized yesterday, is Walter Bishop.

Walter is perhaps the best mad scientist in all of science-fiction – an old man who spent seventeen years in an insane asylum, but has an IQ of 196.  He can create devices that will read the minds of dead brains, but can’t remember the name of his loyal assistant Asterix or the conversation he had ten minutes ago.

The thing is, unlike most mad scientists, who laugh manically a lot but seem to function well otherwise, Walter is genuinely damaged.  He has these absolute moments of brilliance, but can’t live in normal society without the help of his son.  There’s a heartbreaking episode where Walter, sick of being coddled, runs out to investigate the mystery of the week by himself – then gets lost after talking to a few shopkeepers, can’t remember his son’s phone number to call, loses his money for the bus, and eventually winds up weeping on a bus stop until some poor Chinese lady takes pity on him.

That’s when it occurred to me: I am Walter Bishop.

I’m not as smart or as damaged as Walter, but I feel every inch of his condition.  I am absolutely brilliant at some moments and then hopelessly dysfunctional at the things everyone else takes for granted.  I understand on some levels how deeply damaged I am, and get by only thanks to the kindness and love of the people around me – a love I don’t fully deserve, but they recognize the shattered bits inside me and try to help out.  And the moments I’m really on my game don’t quite balance out the gigantic pain in the ass I am, but you can at least see why people would stick around.

And like Walter, I’m semi-lovable now, but you probably don’t want to dig too deeply into my past.

So I’m not watching Fringe because of the mystery of the week, or the show mythology – I’m watching it because in some strange and parallel universe, there’s a copy of my soul working through difficulties, and I have to find out how it turns out.  For Walter, I’ll endure the nonsense travails of ZOMG OTHER DIMENSIONS to find out how he’s doing.

I hope it’s well.  But I know it’s not going to be easy, Walter.  It never is for us.

(NOTE: I am halfway through Season 2, and if you spoil me in any way as to what happens I WILL CUT YOU.  If you’re unfamiliar with Walter Bishop, well, have some choice quotes.)

How To Run A Successful RPG: Some Tips

Thinking about gaming, I’m just sort of putting down some random rules I have as a GM that make for better play:

Make Sure Each Player Will Have Something To Do.  
Some of the most frustrating games I’ve been in were where I told the GM, “I want to play a sniper,” and all of the combat turned out to be in hallways, leaving all my skills to atrophy.

As a GM, I’d be loathe to let someone play a sniper – it’s the kind of role that invariably involves splitting the party, and it’s hard (not impossible, just hard) to come up with consistently interesting combat challenges for someone who works best from half a mile off.  But if you’re going to tell someone, “Okay, put all of your points into ranged attacks and a weapon with a slow reload skill,” then you owe it to them to put them in a situation where they’re often going to be useful.

It’s way better to veto a player’s choice than to get them all jazzed up for playing a ninja, only to discover this isn’t really a stealth game.  If you give someone a skill, make sure they have regular opportunities to use it.

Give Each Player A Clear and Unique Role.
There’s a reason the classic D&D party is a Fighter, a Mage, a Cleric, and a Thief.  It sounds good, having two sword-swingers around, but the danger of imbalance becomes clear very quickly.

See, if one of the swordsmen gets notably better at something (due to levelling up faster, or better weaponry, or better stat-whoring or whatever), then suddenly as a GM you have this situation where you’re stuck with one of two challenges:

* Make it challenging for the big tough guy, at which point the weaker character is helpless.
* Make it something the weaker guy can handle, at which point the big tough guy eats his lunch.

Plus, when you run into the inevitable “Ah ha!  This monster is invulnerable to swords!” then suddenly half your party’s sitting around with their thumb up their ass, completely helpless, which is frustrating.

This is not to say you can’t have multiple fighters – but have them serve different roles.  Maybe it’s Mace-Man and Sword-Woman.  Maybe it’s Crazy Barbarian and Nimble Fencer.  But find some way so that their roles in combat are different, and that they fight the enemy in very different ways.

Avoid The Roll-Fest.  
The most boring combats I’ve ever been in involved the times where I realized I had no other tactical choices but to keep attacking with my main weapon and hope I didn’t die before he ran out of hit points.  At which point the excitement of combat boiled down to this:

“I roll an 16.”
“You hit and do 8 damage.”
“I roll a 7.”
“You miss.”
“I roll a 14.”
“You hit and do 12 damage this round.”

That’s not roleplaying, that’s math.  What you want is to provide characters with multiple workable options in combat, where taunting the bear to draw its attention or trying to trip it into a pit or rolling a boulder onto it are all options.  Once your players realize that there’s precisely one way of doing damage, then it’s all about the dice.  And the dice are the most boring things about your game.

The best way you can avoid the roll-fest is to:

Treat The Environment As Another Enemy.  
DMs spend a lot of time statting their enemies, but with every session you should think of the terrain they’re fighting on as another potential villain.  Fighting on a flat plain with nothing in sight is not only visually dull, but it’s tactically barren.  When you’re in the arena, your only choice is to close in and fight.

So why not have them fight in a maze of steam-filled pipes, Empire Strikes Back-style?  How about fighting in the middle of an avalanche, or on a set of rocks teetering over a pit of lava?  One of the most memorable games I ever ran involved a castle that got teleported into the upper atmosphere, and the characters had to fight in free-fall as the hallway plummeted to the earth.

Always have something interesting at hand during combat – innocents to protect, things to grab in combat as impromptu weapons, places to hide, items to blow up.  The reason Raiders of the Lost Ark is so fucking awesome is because every action sequence follows this rule.  You do likewise.

Conversation Is Combat.
If you’re going to have NPCs talking to players, give them a goal to accomplish that they get in and get out on.  Hands-down, the most boring games I’ve been in were where the GM had dudes come in and ramble at us for an hour at a time while we tried to guide the conversation in the right direction, only to learn that there was really no point in running into this yahoo.

Which is not to say that conversations should be quick – you can have some really fun things going – but in combat, the villains have a clear goal: kill the intruders, drive them from their temple, escape with the foozle.  Your conversations should have a similar goal: get the PCs to help them, deliver a piece of much-needed gossip, try to seduce a player in five minutes or less.

Give them a clear goal so that you can have a sense of rhythm and ramping to each discussion.  Also see: The King’s Speech, which has some delightful fiery interplay between characters who want very different things in every scene.

How I Deal With It

I just got a chain email  – “PLEASE FORWARD WITHOUT COMMENT,” it says, or thinking presumably, because it details a thoroughly fictional Meet The Press on September 7, 2008 where Obama claims the flag “conveys a war-like message” and heartily promises, if elected, to try to change the National Anthem to “I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing”  and then admits that he and Michelle have attended “several” flag-burning ceremonies.

I could argue with this dude, I guess.  Explain that two months before the election, this certainly would have made headlines. Or that despite this faux-concern, Obama has yet to attempt to legislate our National Anthem to “Good Vibrations.”

Or I could just send him this:

Dear Random Dude:

I thought you should know that some spam program has evidently compromised your account and is sending out moronic, factless dribble like this to millions of people who couldn’t care less.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/stance.asp

But What About Bees?

The most-asked question I get is “Ferrett, you hungry stud-muffin, I hear you’re hung with the brobdingnagian proportions of a Germanic heroic saga, will you whisk me off to a bathroom stall and take me now before my panties explode in anticipation?”

But after that, people ask about the bees.

Problem is, we don’t know how the bees are doing.

See, at some point in late August, Gini and I decided not to harvest any honey this year so the bees could have all the food they could get to supply them through Cleveland’s notoriously harsh winters.  And after listening to all the debates of what you should do to prepare your bees for the winter – you should douse them with chemicals! you should use these natural supplements! you should stand on your head! – we panicked and actually did nothing at all.

So the hive has gone untouched since September.  And we hold out little hope.  We remember a conversation we had with a noted Michigan beekeeper, who said, “It’s your first year as a beekeeper?  Yeah, they’re gonna die.”

He said it with such knowledge and resignation, like a gypsy pronouncing a horrid fate for a greedy businessowner.  It kind of disheartened us.

We’ve watched, and luckily, there are some signs of life.  There are dead bee corpses at the front, which indicates that there’s some activity in the hive (the bees are clearing out their dead).  And yesterday, when the temperature hit fifty, Gini said she saw some bees taking cleansing flights.

(Bees do not poop all winter.  They wait until it’s warm, and then go outside and poop in one massive bee-dump that looks a little like brown bird splatter.  I won’t say it’s endearing, but it’s kind of neat, as apiary-related things are.)

So there are still bees.  In a week or two, on a warm day, we’ll crack the hive to see how they’re doing – enough of them may have died that there’s not enough critical mass to keep the hive together.  Or they may have eaten through their supplies of honey and need to be fed sugar water, which would require the purchasing of new equipment to put the sugar water near them.  (Our current feeders would require them to break off from the huddled mass, which they won’t do since their massed body heat is all that’s keeping them alive.)

So yeah.  We have bees.  Some bees.  Let’s see how this works in a few weeks.

A Very Atypical ConFusion Report

The con reports at ConFusion were almost unanimously glowing – people reporting having glorious times.  And I think it was, in the objective, a pretty damned fine convention.

I, unfortunately, had a really wobbly time at it.

Partially, that’s because I think ConFusion is starting to gel in a really nice way as a literary convention, slowly metamorphosizing into the ReaderCon of Michigan.  The con was packed with more authors than ever before, coming from a wider range (I think in part due to last year’s attendance of Cat Rambo and the relocation to Michigan of up-and-coming author Saladin Ahmed, which spread the word), and the literary track was good enough that I kept getting annoyed that I had to go to my own panels.  Why should I be on my boring ol’ panel when there were more interesting ones to see?

(No worries.  I did what I could to make my panels lively and interesting and full of zombie whale jokes.)

That’s good – for ConFusion, for Michigan, for pretty much everyone involved.  The problem was, for me, that I felt like I was doing a spectacularly bad job of balancing career and personal life.

See, the thing about ConFusion is that I’ve been going there for five years and have achieved what I refer to as Con Critical Mass – when you can’t walk across the hotel lobby without running into at least two people who you need to catch up with.  These are often con-buddies, which is to say that you see them twice a year and follow ‘em on Twitter the rest of the time, and you want to say hello because – cons being what they are – if you miss this ten-minute conversation now, you won’t see them for another six months.

So there’s a ton of beloved pals I want to hug and say “hi” to and see how they’re doing.  That’s one end.

On the other end, we have a bunch of new writers I’ve never spoken to before.  And not only is there the whole “You should network with writers!” pressure in my brain as an author – I’m not saying this is what I should do, but it’s what every fucking writer-blog tells me I’m at a con to do – but I find writers fascinating.  I don’t get a whole lot of time in my real life to spend with people who get jazzed about debating the future of publishing, or who can give me gossip on what it’s really like to hang with The Legends of Science Fiction, or who’ll just understand what it’s like when you know how this story is going to go but you’ve taken five stabs at the opening scene and you just don’t know where to fucking start the ball rolling.

Problem is, since ConFusion is, as I mentioned, packed with newer writers, I don’t necessarily know them that well.  And I’m stupidly fucking shy at cons; if I’m introduced or greeted, I’ll chat your goddamned ear off.  But even if I have met you seven times over, if I see you sitting at a booth with two other strangers and you’re not waving me over, I’ll go, “No, she won’t remember me, and even if she does she won’t want to talk to me” and I’ll sit in the corner and meep.  So that’s a form of con-stress.

(An example of how bad I am: There’s one Very Famous Writer who, even though I have met him several times and he’s perfectly nice to everyone and he’s even been my mentor at a fucking writing workshop, I cannot approach him.  I’m convinced he doesn’t want to hear from me every time… right until he says hello.  This is how stupidly freezing I am about such things.)

So the pattern of ConFusion was this:

* Spend ten minutes working myself up to actually go over and hang with the one person I know, who is surrounded by a group of two to three new writers who I’d like to meet.
* After too much sweat, insert myself sideways into said conversation.
* Just as I start to get involved in some interesting discussion of writing, an old con friend sees me across the room and runs over to hug me.
* Try to insert old con friend into current discussion of writing.  Fail magnificently.
* Now must choose between blowing off old con friend or walking lamely away in mid-discussion that I’ve inserted myself into.

So the whole con, I felt this strange tension wherein I was either dismantling old friendships or walking away from create new ones, and I didn’t feel like I was ever making the correct choice or understanding how to manage this properly.  Essentially, ConFusion was a perfect storm of social anxieties all colliding.

This doesn’t happen at, say, WorldCon, because everyone who’s there is a writer and if I happen to see you, well, we’re gonna be discussing what the fuck Twitter means for writers.  And it didn’t happen at PenguiCon, because PenguiCon is not really a lit-con and as such I could just hang and doof out.  But at ConFusion, I felt very caught between two worlds.

Worse, I kind of needed to hang with the writers to hang with the writers.  As it turns out, many of the folks I’d hoped to get to know better with gathered on Saturday night in an impromptu hotel room party, which I didn’t know about because I was off snuggling my sweetie for two hours and thus missed the information-train.

So I dunno.  Jim Hines was writing about his Post-Con Neuroses, and not only do I share his issues, this is one of my own.  I felt bad at ConFusion because I wasn’t bonding with new people and I wasn’t spending the right amount of time with the old people, and as a result it led to a rather stressful time where I just had to spend all of Sunday trying to recover.

(Though I’m told by people who’ve seen me that I looked fine.  One person said I even looked “relaxed.”  I can fake it, man, when I have to.)

Even now, I’m a little worried about posting this in public, because as regular readers will know, I’m in a state of heavy depression and flux in my personal life, and trying to work out some new anti-depression meds (which I usually eschew, but hey, it’s bad this time) and therapy – all of which certainly didn’t help the con any.

But I dunno.  I hope Penguicon will be better.  And I don’t know whether anyone else deals with this, or how they do, but man, I know I do experience it and I need to work it out.