I Apologize For Last Year's Clarion Blog-A-Thon

2012 was the Summer of Failure.
Long-term readers will know that every summer, I blog to raise funds for the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop – the workshop that literally rebirthed me as a writer.  It’s no exaggeration to say that I owe my entire career to the fine people at Clarion, and so come late June I put some effort into payback.  And 2012 was poised to be my greatest fundraiser yet – for the first time, I’d talked to ten fabulous writers, who had generously offered raffle prizes to help me.
Two weeks in, my mother told me she might have cancer.  Bone cancer.  The vicious  kind that kills you in six months.
She wouldn’t know for two weeks, until the tests came in, and I was completely unable to concentrate, as there was a very real chance I’d spend the next year of my life living in another state, giving hospice care to my Mom.  Eventually I flew out to California to hold her hand as she received the test results…. Which came back negative, thank God.  But by then, I was already behind on my commitments to Clarion (which involved live-writing a novel that would ultimately fall apart on me, too) – so I said, “All right.  Technically, the blog-a-thon ends in August, but I’ll just blog an extra three weeks to make up for it.”
Aaaaand that’s when the Clarion donations page crashed.
I was unaware of this for a week; I was directing people to donate, but the page was broken for a significant subset of donators.  Some people kindly sent donations in manually, but the end result was that I don’t have any way of assembling a coherent record of who sent what to whom.  And so, unable to consistently get donations, I stopped offering prizes, even though some authors had so very kindly offered to donate.
It was a shameful fiasco.  And I planned to repair this fiasco – you can see me promising to “unfuck this project by February 1st, 2013” in New Year’s Resolution #5, “Fix My Secret Shame” – but then I had a heart attack in early January.  Followed by a triple-bypass surgery, and months of recovery.
None of these reasons are meant to comprise an excuse, of course.  I could have, and should have, done better by Clarion. And so I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to the wonderful authors who agreed to donate to my cause – Ellen Kushner, Seanan McGuire, Holly Black, Kat Howard and Megan Kurashige, Erin Cashier, Monica Byrne, Catherynne M. Valente, Mary Robinette Kowal, Myke Cole, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tobias Buckell – who were ready and willing to donate prizes. Some of them didn’t even get called on-deck thanks to all the delays and issues.
Unfortunately, thanks to the technical snafus at the end with prize donations, I don’t have a firm record of who donated, and certainly not enough to hold what was already going to be a very complex raffle in good faith.
As such, if you donated in the hopes of a prize, please contact me at theferrett@theferrett.com and I’ll not only refund your money out of my own pocket, I will offer you a deeply personal apology.  Clarion should not suffer for my poor acts, nor should you.
I will be doing the Clarion Blog-A-Thon this year, of course; I know most of you didn’t donate for the prizes, but to help a good cause, for which I thank you.  This year’s Clarion Blog-A-Thon will consist entirely of the usual things I know I can offer – story critiques, my usual live-writing and live-revising of fiction so you can see how a professional author writers, and a lot of helpful words.
But for now? You can see how an author offers an apology.  I’m sorry.  And if I make a promise for a future Clarion Blog-A-Thon – or any charity project, really – you can bet your butt I’ll come through, regardless of cancer, heart failure, or novel failure.

A Brief Follow-Up To My Abuse Post

Got a lot of extremely insightful comments on my “An Uncomfortable Reality About Abuse” post yesterday, many of which I’m still processing.  (Mostly over on LiveJournal, but that’s the way it always runs.)  And there will be a follow-up post with further thoughts that I don’t have time for today, but I just wanted to say this:
The comments yesterday did not degenerate into victim-blaming, or misogyny, or misandry, or any of the usual pitfalls that happen when you discuss abuse.  the discussions were sensible, pointed, compassionate, and thoughtful.
This proves that I have one of the best commenting bases in the world, and I’d like to thank all of you for requiring me to hardly ever swing the banhammer.  You guys are the reason I post.  For serious.
Thank you.

Buy My New Story "Black Swan Oracle," in What Fates Impose!

Last week, I told you about my tale in the upcoming fortune-teller anthology What Fates Impose, citing it as my favorite story I’ve written in the last year.  Today, to hopefully encourage you to contribute to the Kickstarter, I give you a slightly larger-than-normal excerpt to wet your whistle:

The crowd waiting below The Oracle’s bulletproof bay window is a mathematically predictable entity.  Still, the Oracle relishes any illusion of chaos – and so, every morning, just before she allows herself one single prayer, she sweeps open her curtains to gaze over the crowd.
Her supplicants look up from their shivered huddling as fluorescent light spills out from The Oracle’s bay window; poor women in smudged hoodies squat next to Armani-clad stockbrokers.  The Oracle’s hundreds of supplicants put up tents faster than the policemen can tear them down, burn garbage to ward off the Seine’s chill winds, buy gristled chicken hunks from illegal street vendors.  The wait can take weeks, so long that people fall in love and fuck and have violently dramatic breakups before The Oracle’s guards fish these poor souls from the crowd to escort them towards an answer made pure with data.
The Oracle’s tide of supplicants is so constant that, like any shantytown, it has developed its own economy… an economy which pulses perfectly in time with the rhythms The Oracle predicted.  She’d spent hours developing algorithms to anticipate the crowd you would get if you charged $25,000 for a single question, answers guaranteed (but not to please), in this geographic and demographic cluster.  She’d analyzed the local politicians, and the bribes she pays remain within .03% of initial estimates.  She’d tracked the movements of the most influential reporters, ascertaining they would pass by here 2.4 times a week, guaranteeing unending press for “The Statistic Mystic,” a name the Oracle loathes.  She even predicted the number of e. coli outbreaks from undercooked chicken.
Yet every morning, before The Oracle orders her guards to escort the first supplicant in, The Oracle kneels.  She above all people knows how irrational prayers are — multigenerational analyses of billions of lives has allowed The Oracle to thoroughly disprove the effects of prayers, bioharmonics, Zener cards, craniometry, reiki, feng shui, astral projection, the existence of God himself as an active entity, and those laundry balls they sell on late-night TV — but when the data models don’t support the desired results, sometimes all that’s left is hope.
Please, she begs, looking wearily out over the young lovers holding hands, the despairing businessmen, the fretting young mothers; transparent clichés, all.  Please let someone bring me the Black Swan Question.
There is, naturally, no answer.  So she grabs the microphone and slips on her persona, her voice booming out over the crowd.
“The Oracle will answer one boring question for $25,000!”  The Oracle talks about herself in the third person because studies have shown this makes the Oracle’s name stick in your mind.  “Yet The Oracle does not need your fucking money.  The Oracle did this to draw attention to the way commercial entities buy and sell your data, hoping you’d recognize how thoroughly businesses manipulate you.  Instead, The Oracle has made millions from extrapolating your futures based on publically-available data.  Now?  The Oracle finds you tedious.  So come to me with an interesting question, or I will release the hounds.”
The Oracle does not actually have hounds.  The Oracle finds it distressing that 76.4% of people don’t get the joke.  Yet the Oracle refuses, on principle, to have a FAQ….

If you’re interested, you can actually hear me read this story at the $15 pledge level.  I always think it’s neat to hear authors read their stories.  You get to hear the inflections they had in their minds, feel their own personal rhythm for the tales, all that.  And I’m gonna go full-on for drama here, given my love of old-time radio.
As an added bonus, one person who donates to the Kickstarter before this Thursday will receive this lovely artwork created by the editor, the talented Nayad Monroe:

Lots of good stuff in here, including a story by Keffy I’m really looking forward to seeing.  So donate, if you like, you know, stories.

"She Must Have Deserved It": An Uncomfortable Reality About Abuse, And Reporting It

In discussing the resistance most victims of domestic violence face when trying to explain things to their friends, someone raised an uncomfortable question about dissecting the abuser’s motivations:
“Is it that hard to believe he hit her for no reason at all?”
Yes.
Yes, it is.
It’s hard to understand because most people, I’d argue, don’t emotionally understand that other people are different than they are.  Oh, they get that there are differences – Coke vs. Pepsi, Stones vs. Beatles, Romney vs. Obama – but 90% of the people I met view their neighbor as basically a reflection of their own morality, and get confused whenever they witness significant distinctions.  Naturally, they’re frequently confronted with evidence that people aren’t pretty much all “just folks” under the hood – but when they see this, the dissonance is confusing and painful, so they either withdraw, simplify, or forget.
(This is why people tend to withdraw into echo chambers on the Internet, where everyone thinks like they do.  It’s easier than reformatting your entire universe.)
And the good news that emerges from this particular bad response is that most people would never hit their partner.  When told, “He hit her,” most people run this information through a I-am-the-world filter that goes something like this:
“Gosh, hitting the person I love? I can’t imagine myself doing that.  But that did happen, apparently, so how would that have come to be if I was in the driver’s seat?  Well, I suppose if she constantly did something designed to hurt me, all the time, on purpose, maybe – eventually – I might snap and feel horribly guilty afterwards.  But what the hell kind of actions would someone take to drive me to that monstrous behavior?  Because I/other people wouldn’t just beat someone for no good reason.  So what did she do?  She must have done something.”
In other words, their failure here is their inability to put themselves in the shoes of a sociopath. And so they focus on the reasons as opposed to the action.  Which creates a toxic resistance to the idea that the abused partner wasn’t at fault.
Their central fault is that they assume, erroneously, that there must be some large driving force behind this disproportionate response.  But there isn’t.  The truth is that a lot of domestic violence comes from men – and women – who are eager to display power by punching powerless folks in the face.  Where most people would only resort to brutality when backed into a corner, knowing the emotional damage a beating does, the abuser views physical pain as just another tool to be used in a relationship, mundane as arguing and chore-swapping.*
As such, I think the best way to fight this insidious idea that the abused brought this abuse upon themselves** is to change the narrative.
What we need to get across in the case of domestic abuse is that this is a different breed of person.  This is not you and me, this is a man or woman who views the world in a way that thinks of hurting someone as just another method of control.  He may be friendly, he may have made you laugh over a beer – but underneath, if he thought pain would be a better way of getting you to do what he wanted than humor, he’d drop the beer and tear your fucking hair out.
They’re not you.  And you gotta fight to get that one across, but when you do you’ve opened up a tool that gets a lot more societal justices created.  Because once you get – really, fundamentally accept – that the world is not full of Mini-Mes and in fact some people’s experiences has led them to something catastrophically different from you, whole worlds open up that you can begin to shape to better ends.
Because the women who got hit? They didn’t do anything that warranted an ass-kicking. They just are with someone who thinks ass-kickings are a-okay, and the problem lies with him, not her.***
* – And when you’re unfortunate enough to run into another sociopath with an easy out to violence, that sociopath genuinely sees the situation as “She deserved it,” giving a similar end. It could be argued that most people are then sociopaths. But given the comparative – comparative – rarity of domestic violence in the Western cultures I’m familiar with, I don’t think that’s the case.
** – The kernel of truth within this otherwise-scurrilous claim, I think, is that if you’re a victim of abuse, you need to be very careful as to who you date.  Children of abusing parents are fifteen times – fifteen times! – as likely to wind up married to an abuser as so-called “normal” people, which means that your abuser broke some vital instincts within you.  If you’ve got that kind of background, date slowly, trust carefully, because your parents have wired you to be drawn to other abusers.  This is no different than anyone else’s bad instincts in relationships, of course – except that if I go on autopilot, I wind up with a psychodramatic relationship, and if you do it you wind up broke and desperate with a woman kicking you in the ribs.  So if you’ve been abused? Be vigilant. Be careful in who you choose to love.  Because goddammit, you deserve better than that.
*** – Or with her, not him. Domestic violence isn’t man vs. woman, it’s abuser vs. abusee. Please remember that.

A Much-Needed Skill, For Writing or Woodworking.

Yesterday morning, I put up this pegboard. I did not do a good job.

Now, this pegboard is a surprisingly large deal, as it’s the first time I’ve physically altered my environment with my own hands. This was the first time I ever went, “This thing is insufficient,” then went, “So why not change that?” and then ripped down part of a wall and put up another part.  In terms of worldview, it’s quite the large change.
In terms of actual work?  Shoddy.
If you look closely at the picture, you’ll notice that I cut the pegboards wrong.  There are two boards, and one juts out a little to the left, creating an unsightly gap.  If I’d done a better job, I would have noticed this before I started screwing things in.  I would have cut the boards to fit, measured them in advance properly. It’s something I’ll probably be deeply embarrassed by, when I get to be good at this.
Yet I can still take pride.
I’m lucky enough to hold those contradictory thoughts of “This could use improvement” and “I’m glad I made this.”  And when I look at the pegboard I’ll neither be tempted to rip it all down in disgust, nor wander away thinking this flawed work is brilliant.  I can be content that I’ve done something I’ve never been able to pull off before, yet make notes for future betterment.
Which is the way I write: I’m highly critical of my stories.  I can show you the soft points in every story I’ve published, even the ones I’ve been paid hundreds of dollars for; they’re riddled with errors I just couldn’t fix properly.  But at the same time, those flaws don’t negate the work put into it.  Like the peg board, it’s enough to hang some tools on.  Like the peg board, it’s taught me something about how to do this.  Like the peg board, ultimately it’s useful.
When you write.  When you work wood.  When you create.  Note your errors, fix what you can this time around, vow to do better the next time. Yet be proud; you did a fuck of a lot more than the people who created nothing, and you’ve leveled up in some small way.
You don’t have to be perfect. You shouldn’t be casual.  And you should never, ever stop.