Why I Can't Tell You That I'm Mad At You (Yet)

If I’m upset with you, I’m not going to tell you right away.  This strikes many as a form of punishment.  There I am, withdrawing my attention, talking with you as little as possible, and not sharing what I’m feeling.
It’s a pain in the ass, I admit.  Were I truly together person, I’d be able to tell you right away!  “Hey, you stepped on my feelings there, that hurt.”  And we’d clasp hands in greater friendship, right?
Sadly, no.
I suffer from a disease called Only Child Syndrome, to a horrifying degree.  I was the first grandchild in my family for six years, which meant for my entire early childhood I was lavished with presents and attention in a way that no child should ever endure.  Aunts and Uncles feted me, my every accomplishment was lauded, my every quirk tolerated lovingly.
It made me a monster.
I joke about it to this day: “Oh, ha ha, I was born on July 3rd and it took me seven years to realize the fireworks weren’t actually for me.”  But no, seriously, think about the kind of mindset it would take, even as a young child, to consistently think that the entire world would get together to hold a party for him.  That was just the way the world worked for me.  People did nice things for me all the time.
As I grew up, my OCS turned into a crippling handicap.  My family was aggressive with therapy, this being the everybody-talks-it-out 1970s, and so not only was I encouraged to have emotions – but was taught that when you had a problem, no matter how small, you should go hash it out with a nice big discussion.  This shattered my hopes of having a steady girlfriend for years, because basically I had been trained two things:
1)  I should get everything I want, ever.
2)  If I’m not getting it, I should complain until I do.
What that meant in practice is that I had zero sense of self-control.  Most people would go, “Okay, she’s just come back from an eighteen-hour shift at a job she hates, she hasn’t eaten, and her mother’s in the hospital – maybe she has a right to be a little snippy.”  But no, Mister OCS here would go, “Really, you should be nicer to me,” and wham.  Huge fight.
It took me a long time to learn that my childhood had inadvertently trained me to be butt-hurt about everything.  Hey, did you read my Entertainment Weekly before I did?  That was my Entertainment Weekly!  How dare you?  And so it went, where I’d just keep barraging everyone with the slightest discomfort I had until they got sick of me and went away.
With Gini’s love and diligent training, I have learned to blunt the edges of my OCS.  Yet I still get pissy more than I should.  I’ll still get furious whenever someone takes the seat I wanted at the movie theater – but now I go, “Okay, dude, you’re one seat over from your ideal location.  And it’s not like she thought ‘Oh, that’s the best seat, I’m stealing it just to spite him!’ even though you’re sure she must have known how badly you wanted it.  This isn’t a fucking incursion, it’s you overreacting.”
So whenever I’m hurt, I have to do an OCS compensation check – yes, you’re irritated, Ferrett, but is this really worth discussing?  And particularly if it’s a deep hurt, sometimes I have to do some internal digging and figure out whether this is just me being a whiner baby.  So I’ll withdraw for a bit while I try to intellectually dissect the problem and figure out whether this is a) a valid concern that should be discussed, or b) eight-year-old me getting pissy because his birthday cake isn’t chocolate.
That takes me a while.  And yes, it’s a pain.  I’m sorry, because it means there is often a day or two where I don’t respond well to texts or emails as I hash this out.  But it’s a workaround that winds up ultimately being better, because for every absence you notice, there’s probably ten absences where OCS-boy has thought it over and gone, “Nope, that’s just you being unreasonable.  Can it.”
It’s not my brightest side, I admit.  But as a workaround for a fundamentally-flawed psyche, it’s the best I can do.  I’ve put a lot of effort into speeding up my OCS processing power, optimizing routines so that sometimes, I’m over my internal hissy-fit before you’re finished sitting down in that theater seat I wanted.  But there are times where everything slows to a crawl and I have to wait until an hour later to finally bring it up.  Even if, in many cases, you would have cheerfully altered your behavior had I told you, and the delay means that you feel bad because you hurt me needlessly.
Trust me.  While I know it’s vexing, sadly, the alternative is currently worse.

How Would You Like To Be A Part Of The Supernatural Ops Core?

Myke Cole is one of the up-and-coming superstars of the military sci-fi world.  And I was excited to read his debut novel Shadow Ops #1: Control Point, as basically it’s the X-Men told from the army’s point of view – what happens when you put superpowered wizards under military discipline and training, complete with the usual bureaucracy and bullshit, and then turn them loose on the world?
And lo!  Control Point turned out to be one of those helter-skelter novels you chew through in two days.  It was the equivalent of an intelligent summer blockbuster – full of exciting and creative action sequences (what kind of force multiplier do you get in combat when you have a man who can open up teleportation portals that cut through anything?), with brutal and blunt truths about what happens when terrorists can get their hands on living flamethrowers.  (Hint: when backed against the wall, the United States does not always take the high moral ground.  Though the question is also correctly framed as “But can they really afford to?”).
It also doesn’t hurt that as a veteran, Mike’s blogging provides an interesting point of view in the mostly-pudgy-and-combatless-liberals-like-me world of sci-fi.  In particular, his essay “Uniform in the Closet: Why Military SF’s Popularity Worries Me,” which details how veterans are becoming an increasingly foreign culture to most Americans, raised some points about the military that have been troubling me for some time.  (Seriously.  I’d advise you to read it, because it’s a good look at a problem I know I’m not certain how to solve.)
So when it came time for the Clarion Blog-A-Thon, I said to Myke, “Dude, can you donate anything?  I know you’re not connected with Clarion, but I just wanted an excuse to pimp your book.”
But oh my, did Myke come shining through.
What Myke has to donate is the Challenge Coins from his world.  As Myke describes them, “They’re somewhere between a medal and a shinier, cooler version of business cards.”  And so he had some very pretty versions of the coins for his own supernatural ops divisions – and if you donate $5 to my Clarion Blog-a-Thon, you have the opportunity to win one of them!  (And if you haven’t read Shadow Ops, I’ll throw in a copy of the novel at my own expense.)

Seriously.  Look at that!  It’s pretty spiffing.  (Even if I’m not sure Myke would be thrilled by me describing the coin as “pretty,” but what the heck.)
And even if you don’t win Myke’s challenge coins, there’s still going to be twelve prizes for the Clarion Blog-A-Thon, which you have an opportunity to win!  Here’s how it works: Every $5 donated to the Clarion Write-A-thon gets you one entry into the raffle, which will be held at the beginning of August.  When the raffle is drawn, the first winner will have first choice of all the fabulous prizes to offer, and the second winner will have second choice, and so on.
The thus-announced Clarion prizes are:

• The challenge coin from Myke Cole’s Shadow Point series (plus a copy of the book, if you haven’t read it!)
• An ARC of Catherynne Valente’s “The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led The Revels There.”
• The book detailing the making of my Clarion classmates’ fencing-and-dance fusion “A Thousand Natural Shocks” (premiering tonight if you’re in San Francisco! Go!)

And what you get for your donations:

• Every $5 donation gets you an entry into our raffle pool
• $10 total donations will get you access to the Clarion Echo community, where I am live-plotting my novel in progress in an attempt to teach some of what I have learned at Clarion.  (You’ll need a LiveJournal account to join, so email me with your name and I’ll make sure you get in.)
• $25 will get you a story critique, if there are slots available.  You’ve got three left!  Go!

As a reminder, the Clarion Blog-A-Thon helps keep one of the shining traditions of sci-fi writing alive.  I was blocked for twenty years before I went, writing a lot but with no sales to speak of; four years after graduating, I’ve sold twenty-two stories and snagged a Nebula nomination.  It changed my life, which is why I kill myself blogging every summer to help keep it alive.  So please!  Donate!

Meet the New Spider-Man, Same As The Old Spider-Man. Mostly.

So they rebooted Spider-Man.  Some people think this is stupid, having a new Spider-Man this soon after the last movie.  To which I say, “Did you see the last movie?”  No offense, man, but better to leave that in the wreckage and start over than trying to venture into IV territory.
There has never been a really good fourth movie in a series.  Ever.  Burn it to the ground.
Anyway, so this new Spider-Man is pretty much the same as the old Spider-Man – young boy learns about responsibility through a gunshot wound, fights crime, does not get the girl.  And it’s satisfying.  It’s not quite as good as Spider-Man 2 – what could be? – but it’s better than the first first Spider-Man.  Should you go see it?  Do you like people swinging from rooftops, beating up muggers?
Well then.  Your answer’s clear.
The difference is really all about nuances, and the nuance here is that Toby Macguire was a nerdy-looking kid who became smooth when the time came.  His upside-down kiss with Mary Jane?  Smokin’.  When he put on the suit, he became someone who was actually kinda cool.
Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man is never cool.  He moves like a spastic bug – no, seriously, he’s trying to move like a spider, all gawky.  When he kisses Gwen Stacey, it’s almost wince-inducing, because he’s not quite sure where his mouth goes, and neither is she, and though he later proclaims her a good kisser, one senses a bit of rightful hesitation before she returns the favor.  He has the haircut of a modern emo star, but if there’s an opposite to “Moves like Jagger,” well, Andrew nails it.
However, Garfield’s Spider-Man makes up for it by being clever.  Toby’s Spidey lucked into things, evincing no particular brightness, whereas this new Spider-Man knows science!  He reads books!  He uses tricks in combat, bouncing all sorts of things with his webbing to dazzle his enemy!  Which, in a way, makes him more of a hero.  You had problems buying Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man as being someone hated by the crowd, but Garfield’s Spider-Man?  He moves like an untrained kid with super-speed flailing about.  You believe he could hurt someone by accident.  He looks a little out-of-control.
Which is kind of nice.  Both Gwen Stacey (Spidey’s TRUE love, he says sneeringly) and Peter are incoherent, trailing off in Seinfeld-ish riffs as they’re both a little too flustered to finish their thoughts.  Neither of them are cool.  You wind up rooting for them because, hell, who else would they date?
Obvious plot is obvious, but this is a comic book movie and we know that President Josiah Bartlett must die.  Unfortunately, the stunt casting of Martin Sheen and Sally Field as Uncle Ben and Aunt May is distracting, because I kept going, “Why is Forrest Gump’s Mom raising Peter Parker?”  And Martin Sheen is trying a little too hard to give big speeches, and not quite hard enough to connect with Peter on a human level.  Ben’s death, however, is exceptionally painful because it’s not the usual comics death where he gets to gasp out the classic speech about “With great power comes great responsibility” before he dies – no, he just gets shot.  And his legacy is a voicemail Peter can’t quite bear to listen to.
The weakest part of this Spider-Man is, sadly, the villain.  The Green Goblin was possessed of all of Willem Dafoe’s inherent looniness, and Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock was the warm, supportive uncle you’d always wanted to have.  Curt Connors, however, is pretty much a vacant space on screen.  He stares longingly at his missing arm, as though it’s where his screen presence used to be.  When he becomes the Lizard, the initial scene is very compelling as he’s trying to be the hero, but then he degenerates into monologuing as he starts wanting to CHANGE TEH WORLD in a way that’s not really driven by his character all that much.
And Denis Leary does a fine job playing Denis Leary.  If you’ve always wanted to see Denis Leary in a Spider-Man film, well, here he is.  If you expect to see him act as Captain Stacey, well, let us just say that his last major scene in the film is perhaps the most laid-back approach to tragedy one will ever witness.  In a moment of what must be personal anguish, he looks as though he’s about to eat a sandwich.
Still, hey, it’s Spider-Man.  It’s a good riff on an old favorite.  Well worth seeing, if not nearly as exciting as the first time you saw Spidey bouncing around.  They do a good job with the 3-D, but there’s only so many ways you can make a web-slinger crawl.  Still, it made my birthday celebrations grand.

Lo! My Natal Anniversary Is This Very Day!

At 10:13 this evening, I will turn 43.  That’s right; at least for this year, I’ll be in the primes of my life.
That sound you hear is the next “tick” counting towards my inevitable demise – a situation that might well cause you to go, “Shouldn’t I give this poor old man a present of some sort, perhaps with candles atop?  That seems like some sort of tradition.” And lo!  There are two things you can do!
First off, if y’haven’t noticed, I’m blogging my butt off for the Clarion Blog-A-Thon.  I’m doing my usual Clarion Echo schtick, writing live fiction for a secret community of donors, which is both wonderful and sad; the wonderful thing is that I think this is the best Clarion Echo I’ve ever had.  Since I’m plotting a novel, this is really getting into the nitty gritty of “How do you balance creativity with achieving the goals you want for this story?” – and as I develop character profiles and themes and explain why things do or do not work, I’m really displaying a lot of how the writers’ process goes.  I wish I’d had access to this kind of thing back when I was still struggling.
The sad thing is that this is my lowest-attended Clarion Echo ever.  Oh, the people in there are talky and vibrant, but several of my usual writer-buddies from part Echos are missing.  I’m left wondering whether “plotting” just isn’t as big a draw as “pure writing,” even if I find this detail more fascinating.
In any case, if you wanna make a weasel feel happier as he crawls his way towards the grave, then donate $5 and join the community!  More people in there make me happy.  That’s the way this works.
Failing that, if you’d like to get me an inexpensive gift that will nevertheless make me do little happydances of joy, feel free to post cheesecake pictures of yourself in the comments here. (Alternatively, if they’re spicy or you’re shy, mail ’em to me at theferrett@theferrett.com.)
If you do not know what cheesecake pictures are, they are not pictures of desserts. According to Wikipedia, which is always correct and never in error, “For ‘Cheesecake’ in the sense of female glamour photograph, often sensual, see Pin-up girl.” A slightly antiquated term, but hey – if Justin Timberlake can bring sexy back, I can bring cheesecake back.  (And I’m antiquated at this point, so I can use antiquated terms!)
(As always, every year I do this, some guy goes, “Oh ho, here I am! You didn’t expect this!” and posts a picture of himself. And it’s true that I’m straight, but a) I like seeing pictures of people anyway, b) I’m never shocked by photos of guys, and c) as far as I’m concerned, posting cute pictures of yourself where women can see them is always a good idea. So it’s like whoah, you sure have put one on me, sirrah.)

How Would You Like To Read the Fairyland Sequel Before Anyone Else Does?

I’m going to tell you how you can read The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland And Led The Revels There long before almost anyone else does.  But first, you have to understand why “Catherynne M. Valente” and “Clarion” go together in my mind.
My friend Cat Valente was instrumental in getting me to the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop.  She knew I was stalled in my writing, and needed a breakthrough.  She told me about it, she bugged me weekly about applying for until all right, Cat, I’ll submit a damn story, and when I got accepted she was my biggest cheerleader. And in the four years since Clarion, I’ve sold twenty-two stories and got nominated for a Nebula, so it certainly got me over the hump.
Which is why it’s nice, you understand, to see that she’s had some success herself since I went to Clarion.
At the time, she was breaking out with her Orphan’s Tales series, but Cat Valente has since become a genuine superstar with her YA book The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making, which became a New York Times Bestseller.   She’s been nominated for just about any major award you can imagine.  Her lush prose was famed before, but now she’s inspiring young girls everywhere with her bold, sensible protagonists.  And I couldn’t be prouder.
But good Cat Valente fans know that she’s written a sequel: The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland And Led The Revels There.  Most people can’t get their hands on it until October.  But you have a chance to win an Advanced Reading Copy, signed by Ms. Valente, and read it early!  And how do you do that?
By donating to the Clarion Write-A-Thon Fund, which helps get people scholarships to future classes.
Here’s how it works: Every $5 donated to the Clarion Write-A-thon gets you one entry into the raffle, which will be held at the beginning of August.  Cat’s book is the second of twelve planned prizes.  When the raffle is drawn, the first winner will have first choice of all the fabulous prizes to offer, and the second winner will have second choice, and so on.  (I have no guarantee on when exactly Cat will send it, but one assumes “Some point before the book is out.”)
The current prizes are:

• An ARC of The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led The Revels There.
• The book detailing the making of my Clarion classmates’ fencing-and-dance fusion “A Thousand Natural Shocks” (premiering tonight if you’re in San Francisco! Go!)

And what you get for your donations:

• Every $5 donation gets you an entry into our raffle pool
• $10 total donations will get you access to the Clarion Echo community, where I am live-plotting my novel in progress in an attempt to teach some of what I have learned at Clarion.  (You’ll need a LiveJournal account to join, so email me with your name and I’ll make sure you get in.)
• $25 will get you a story critique, if there are slots available.  You’ve got three left!  Go!