Why I Do Drama.

The problem with “drama” is that it too often is a synonym for “This makes me uncomfortable.”
As in, “There may be something ugly lurking about here, but I don’t want to have to think about it.”
Which, you know, I get. I don’t always feel like trudging into the latest storm of accusations, nor do I have the energy to figure out who’s saying what about who. There are idiots around who get peevish about entirely ridiculous things. It’s tiring sometimes, and we should all have the right to say, “Okay, I just need to peace out.”
Yet what I don’t do is hold my unwillingness to engage with potentially ugly issues as a personal strength – as in, “I don’t do drama.”
Not doing drama occasionally, or even as a matter of course? Understandable. Never doing drama, however, is another way of saying, “I don’t care who gets fucked over, I just want peace.” And that thinking leads to all sorts of abuses being swept under the rug because, you know, we don’t want to think about who’s being violated or ignored or discriminated against, we just wanna show up and chill.
Saying you never do drama means that you’ll tolerate any harm so long as people are quiet about it.
That’s its own special form of evil. And I don’t do that.

EDIT: To clarify, when I originally posted this elsewhere, one commenter said, and I believe accurately: “I think so much of this conversation is being had around the idea that there is a simplistic view we can take on the distinction between what is drama and what is not.”
To which my response was: “Pretty much. Almost any definition in here of ‘That’s drama!’ can be applied – and *has* been applied – to someone who’s genuinely been injured by another party and is trying to cause change. I feel when that distinction is made as though it were easy, it tends to lead to dangerous shortcuts.
“I note with heavy irony that the people who are like ‘WE ARE NOT QUALIFIED TO PLAY JUDGE AND JURY’ often feel qualified to judge which people are frivolous in their intent.”

FLEX: Also $2.99 At Amazon, For The Next Eleven Days, Probably.

If you’ll recall, I’ve written a micro-Christmas-story for Barnes and Nobles’ The 12 Days Of Robot Christmas.  That magical flashfic will be out on the 15th, but until then B&N is offering my debut novel Flex for $2.99.
Amazon, apparently, scouted B&N’s sale prices and went, “Oh, helllllll no, we’re not being underpriced,” and promptly dropped their Kindle version of Flex to $2.99.
So for the next eleven days, I know for a fact Flex will be on sale at Barnes and Noble, and I suspect Amazon will price-match them in grim lockstep until the bitter end.  So take advantage of this hot clan war to purchase my book, if you see fit!  It has videogamemancers channelling Portal guns, and bureaucromancers doing kick-ass magical paperwork, and also donuts.  What else might you need?

I Wrote A Christmas Story, And So B&N Made FLEX $2.99!

Angry Robot, my publisher, has a promotion called The 12 Days Of Robot Christmas, wherein 12 Angry writers each pen a brief Christmas-themed sci-fi/fantasy story.  I finished my Christmafantastic flashfic yesterday, and it’s going up on December 15th.
But during these 12 days, you can get many fantastic Angry Robot authors’ books at a discount, and so the e-book copy of Flex is a mere $2.99.  (And if you keep going back, you’ll get to see stories from my fellow authors Patrick S. Tomlinson, my book birthday twin Carrie Patel, Rod Duncan, and, well, eight more!)
I’ll tell you when my flashfic is up – man, writing a complete story with four characters and a full character arc in 1,150 words is like bonsai writing – but if you wanted to get ahead of the curve and buy cheap copies of my debut novel, well, $2.99’s less than a coffee at Starbucks.  (And B&N has been very, very kind to me, even listing me as one of their top 25 fantasy books of the year.  I’m still blushing.)
As another Christmas reminder, if you want signed copies of my physical novels, local indie bookstore legend Loganberry Books is the place to get them.  Time’s running out, but you can find the details of how to have a personally-inscribed Ferrett-book in your stocking here.)

The Ol' Well-Being Wallet

A thought I had after a tussle with a sweetie – one that I wanted to keep in a place where I might get back to it:
I’m a social guy. Like, a really social guy. I’ll go to a convention, and chat with people, and hug my friends and love them.
I can look like a normal person… but at a huge cost.
Which is to say, if normal people paid $1 every time they started up a conversation, for me it’d cost like $50 to say hello to someone cold. It’s not an unpayable cost – I mean, most people can spare $50 from time to time – but it’s enough that most folks don’t go out just spending $50 at a shot without budgeting.
Except it’s not cash I’m spending: it’s my well-being. If I overdraw at the Bank of Ferrett, I wind up with my emotions stretched too thin, and then I’m crying in public or stuttering weirdly or having some other embarrassing mental breakdown.
Which isn’t a big deal, on the whole. It just means I have to budget. When I go to a convention, I budget for the hotel room, I budget for the meals, and I also budget my socialization. A convention is like a big splurge for me, where if I got out to talk to hundreds of people, I need to spend the rest of the week being socially thrifty by talking to as few people as possible.
Yet because I act the same way that they do, extroverts tend to think that I pay the same costs. Which leads to a weird conversations where the extroverts are telling me “Why don’t you just go up and talk to them? That’s a trivial cost of $1! You can pay that cost all day!” And I’m telling them, “No, man, talking to someone who hasn’t initiated a conversation with me is a fancy dinner with drinks. It’s expensive as hell!”
They don’t get it. To them, striking up three conversations in a row is $3 – that’s not even a vente Starbucks. But to me, starting three conversations at $50 a pop is a pretty serious dent in the ol’ well-being wallet.
And I think introverts get that. They understand that some social interactions just cost them more than other people. It’s not that they don’t like people, but people are a comparatively pricey expenditure, and they can’t afford to have people over every night or they’ll go bankrupt.
Yet here’s the thing I learned today:
There are different costs for other things.
For me, “confronting someone” is maaaaaybe a dime. Anyone who’s seen me go after someone in my comments threads or dissect someone’s logic in a blog post knows that it’s pretty trivial for me to call someone on their shit. I could do it ten times a day, and my well-being wallet would still be brimming over.
That also applies to my relationships: if we have a problem, I’ll send you an itemized list of what’s bugging me. If you hurt me, I’ll go, “Okay, yeah, you need to cut that out.”
And what I realized is that for some of my partners, dealing with my confrontations – because honestly, it only really takes one mouthy sonuvabitch to drag someone else into a confrontation – has a much higher cost.
Me? I can get into several confrontations – albeit small ones – a day, and have it turn out to be productive for me, because the confrontation doesn’t cost me a dime.
Whereas for some of my partners, that confrontation may have just yanked a solid $100 out of their wallet, and they may not have budgeted appropriately for the day.
And that’s a large revelation, for me – that it’s not just “introvert” vs “extrovert,” but that all sorts of activities may carry a higher cost. I’m pretty sure my wife pays $30 every time she has to ask for help, which would explain why she so rarely does it, and I have a friend who shells out $10 every time she’s forced to accept a compliment.
So when I’m dealing with people from now on, I gotta remember the local inflation. Round Ferrettville, confrontation is cheap. But when I travel abroad, I gotta remember that maybe confrontation’s a pretty rare commodity, and to treat it like the precious thing it is.

Jury (Jury!) Duty (Duty!) – Brings Out The Juror In My Souuuuullllll

If I seem quiet this week, it’s because I’ve got jury duty.
…cue people telling me, “I’m sorry.” But I’m not sorry! For me, jury duty is one of the most important things an American citizen can do, and while it’s mildly inconveniencing, I’m thrilled to see how the justice system works up close.
In Cleveland, we don’t do the “one trial and you go home” model – no, a large pool of jurors hangs around for five days.  If you get called into a trial and then are rejected as a juror for some reason (in America, both sides can disqualify a juror in a process called voir dire), you get tossed back into the pool until your time of service is up.
The juror pool has a frighteningly large selection of board games and magazines.  Most people just wait for a week and never get called to trial.  It’s boredom, and the courts know it, but they need to have as many potential jurors as necessary to hold a trial, and so they stress how you’re doing your civic duty merely by showing up.
Me? I got lucky – I got called into the first trial, and am currently seeing if I get chosen to be a juror.  And beyond that, I cannot say; obviously, blogging about a trial would be idiocy.
But what strikes me about the process is how motivated my fellow jurors are.  Most of them were not looking forward to milling around for five days – but when the potential of a trial came up, they all took it very seriously.  They realized that people’s lives would be affected by this.
As I’ve been told that jurors are apathetic dullards, this is a nice change. To see people taking pride in the process.
And what also strikes me here, as a cross-section of America, is how necessary sports and children are as a glue.  You can see people making small talk, trying to connect with each other, and in all of the cases they start with either sports or children.  Which, yeah, on my kink-friendly, nerdy-ass blog would not go over well – but in mainstream America, most people like a sport, or have a child, and as a result this is a good way to smooth over the social awkwardnesses that result from a bunch of random people culled from streets all across Cleveland being forced to meet for the first time.
I don’t care for sports.   But I can see the usefulness of knowing a bit about sports, even if it’s just that the Browns are sucking (again) this year, because it’s a comparatively safe way of reaching out to other people.  And while I wish movies or cooking shows were popular enough that they could serve as the default topic of choice, I totally get why having something so monolithic in a society makes it useful as a default conversational starter.
Anyway, I gotta go see if I get chosen.  Wonder if the blog itself will come up when the lawyers question me to see whether I’m fit for the job.  Catch you on the flip side.