Breakups Aren't Necessarily A Sign That Something Went Wrong.
I’m holding a party this November to commemorate my victory over my wife’s ex-husband. They were married for seventeen years – and on November 22nd, I’ll have been married to her for longer than he was.
And you know why I love my wife?
She doesn’t regret her first marriage.
She regrets a lot of the things that happened in the marriage – she wouldn’t have divorced him if there weren’t issues, natch. But at the time she met her husband, what she needed was stability to counteract the dysfunctionality of her broken family, and someone who matched her work ethic, and someone who was nicer than her family.
He was perfect for her when she was twenty.
But years later, when he wanted a stay-at-home, trophy wife who’d help advance his career and she wanted to be a little goofy and explore life, well, the fights started. And never stopped.
She’d become something different, and he hadn’t. And that divergence was heartbreaking, but it happens.
And when she went to the Catholic Church to have the marriage annulled, they told her that she would have to claim the marriage “was never a valid relationship.” And she refused. She’d had two strong, smart children with him. She’d had a lot of good times. He’d been good for her in a lot of ways.
To this day, she’s still not remarried in the Church. She left that behind rather than telling people her marriage had never been good.
It just… wasn’t good now.
And yeah. There are abusive relationships and dysfunctional mismatches and all sorts of breakups that happened because two people were never meant to be with each other and probably shouldn’t have tried. I don’t deny those.
But there’s also relationships where people were good for each other at the start, nourishing each other to grow. But the problem with growth is that you can’t always control where it goes, and sometimes all that love poured into each other has you discovering different things about each other.
You become transformed into someone else. And that new person – or people – aren’t healthy for each other any more.
Which sounds terrifying, and on some levels it is. People aren’t robots you can program, and sometimes you help someone to take flight and they discover they need more sky than you can offer.
Yet I think you can control that growth to some extent by showing an interest in what your partner does – you don’t have to fling yourself hip-deep into their every new passion, but listen when they talk. Be attentive, keep your insecurities reasonable, and make their new hobby – be that kink, or quilting, or football – something that they can come to you and feel good about sharing at the end of the day.
Too many people shrug off new interests with “I don’t care about that, let them do what they want.” The more you can keep yourself organically entwined in all the aspects of their lives, the more likely it is that that growth will continue to include you even if you’re not a part of the Kinky Quilters’ Football League.
Me? I’ve got lots of ex-girlfriends. Some of them were just bad for me. Yet others, well, it didn’t end well – but like my wife, I can’t say the relationship wasn’t valid. They helped me to become someone newer, and better, and ill-suited for what they could offer then – or I helped them to learn something that made them realize that I couldn’t get them to the next level.
Painful? Yep.
Discouraging? You betcha.
“Never valid”?
Not in a thousand years.
(Inspired by a post by @Brittunculi over on FetLife: Breakups Are Often The Gift We Never Knew We Needed.)
Where Are The Best Donuts In San Francisco? Plus A Donut Rant.
Hey, San Franciscoans! I’ll be doing a reading at Borderlands Books this Saturday – and as always, when I arrive, I bring donuts. For donuts represent all that is good and compassionate in my ‘Mancer series.
The question is, “Where are San Francisco’s best donuts?”
And here, my friends, I must speak an unfortunate truth to power:
Keep your hipster donuts in your pockets.
Under most circumstances, I have no quarrel with hipsters. Hipster ice cream? The best. (Try Jeni’s in Columbus, with their Intelligentsia Black Cat Espresso and their Rieseling Poached Pear Sorbet – as hipstery as you can get.) Hipster booze? Delicious. Hipsters have filled my belly full on many delectable occasions.
But hipster donuts, God, what the fuck do you think you’re doing, hipsters?
Every time I’ve been to a city, I hear people going, “Hey, try these donuts, they’re artisanal.” And I don’t know why artisanal, when translated to donuts, means “Tastes like floor sweepings at the eraser factory,” but fuck that noise. I had hipster donuts in Boston, and they were dry and had too-bitter chocolate. I had hipster donuts in Portland – not Voodoo, let us not talk of Voodoo donuts, which are perfection – and I might have well bitten into sawdust-flaked corkboard.
And when people who recommend these donuts to me go, “I don’t normally like donuts, but these donuts are good,” well, I say this with all kindness. But the most wretched recommendations I’ve ever gotten have been “Well, I don’t generally like horror movies, but I liked this one horror movie” or “I generally don’t like punk, but I love this punk music,” and you know why they liked that punk horror movie?
Because it wasn’t actually punk horror.
Look. I too have my “generally don’t like The Thing, but I loved this”es. You know who I recommend those thises to?
Other people who also don’t like The Thing.
If I have a friend who loves The Thing, I assume that I’m not fit to recommend anything to them. I don’t like romance novels! So when I stumble upon a romance novel I enjoy, I’m usually better off assuming that it contains none of the things that romance readers love, and that the factors I enjoy about it have nothing to do with why humans love romance novels, and that in fact what I am enjoying is the opposite of a romance novel.
As a rule, if you don’t generally like A Thing but love this one exception, don’t recommend it whole-heartedly to people who do like The Thing. Because let’s be honest: not all recommendations are equal.
Anyway. The point is, I’m coming to San Francisco to promote my new novel, which is out, and I love both my novel and donuts. And I want donuts made by people who make good old-fashioned, gooey, ridiculously nutty donuts made for ordinary joes who love donuts. I don’t mind fancy flavors, but you can’t try to disguise your crappy donutteration under a sedimentary layer of hickory-smoked bourbon aniseed.
No. Ya gotta do the basics right, and then build.
So. San Francisco. I wanna buy you good donuts, and I’ll be delivering them to Borderlands Books this Saturday.
Where do I go to get my donuts?
State Of The Weasel: September 2016
I’m exhausted, is what it is.
I counted the hours, and I spent 32 hours in a single week putting the finishing touches on my novel Savor Station. (No, it’s not sold. That was just to see if my agent could get it into shape to sell it quickly.) I pushed myself hard to get that done by September, and then Angry Robot said, “Hey, I know you had Labor Day weekend planned to relax, but Boston would like you to do a signing, can you go?”
Cue twenty-four hours of driving over a weekend. And too little sleep as I talked with delightful people. And then a release party on Tuesday.
Normally I bounce back from these things, but this strain of exhaustion is strangely sticky. Those of you who know my “write every day” habits will be shocked to learn that I’ve only written about 1,000 words over the last two weeks. And I have a story I want to write! It’s just that losing myself in Deus Ex seems a lot better.
(Though I’m not sure whether I’m playing Deus Ex properly, as I have 8 surplus Praxis points and I have no idea how to spend them. Once I’ve maxed out the Invisibility Cloak and the hacking modules, I have yet to find a challenge so big I can’t sneak past it. Anyway.)
So I need to write a summary of Savor Station, and I need to write essays for the Fix Blog Tour, and I need to get back to various people who have been kind to me, and I need to figure out who wants to do lunch when I’m in San Francisco, and Portland, and Seattle, and San Diego. I should probably even reserve hotels. But I am so burnt out right now that decisions are anathema to me, and so I’m checking Twitter too much and trying to force my brainfogged programmer-person to crank out needed code.
So. If I seem distant lately, it’s that I’m exhausted. If you feel like it, send pets and cuddles. Or just keep your distance until I perk up again. This too shall pass; I have a weekend planned showing Steven Universe to a friend, and hopefully that’ll get me enough recuperation to launch into the four dates of the book tour.
(I am very excited about the book tour. I get to see you guys. That’s always awesome.)
But Fix seems to be getting good reviews from the people who liked the series, saying it’s a really solid finale. Which is a nice reward, given that Fix is the most difficult book I’ve ever written – the ending got torn up and redone not once, but twice. So to have all of that effort come to fruition is nice; I didn’t want to leave a sour taste in people’s mouths.
But here I am. Breathing. Eating. Not responding to emails.
Doesn’t mean I don’t love you. Just means I’m turtling. Bear with me if you can, but you’re not obliged to.
How Many Fucks Are In FIX?
As you’ll no doubt recall, my favorite review of all time is, was, and will always be from my goddaughter Carolyn, who said:
“I would recommend this book to people ages 15+ because f*** is in the book on almost every page.”
Further investigation turned up that Flex contained the word “fuck” 95 times, or roughly once every three pages. (Most of that is from Valentine. She swears a lot.)
People then demanded to know how many fucks were in The Flux (a phrase I still find distinctly satisfying) – and we discovered that it contained 101 fucks. Which seemed superior, honestly – a 6.3% improvement in fucks! – but The Flux was also a longer book, and so once again we had about one fuck every three pages.
So. What about Fix, the final book in the series?
Fix has an astonishing 128 fucks! That’s because things are getting bad enough that Paul and Imani are now swearing, too!
But what about the all-important ratio, you ask? Have I kept Fix to the quality of Flex and The Flux, delivering a solid “fuck” about once every three pages?
….it’s close.
Because Fix is longer, we now have:
One fuck every 3.625 pages.
Alas, I could do the cowardly thing of rounding down – but honestly? I’d have to say that Fix has one “fuck” every four pages, approximately, though if you wanna tilt your head it could be three. Ish.
If you were tuning in solely for the illicit thrill of having someone rattle off a “fuck” every three pages, well, I’ve let you down. But on the other hand, if you were buying the book to see how Unimancy works, or to watch what happens when Aliyah finds her own special magic, or to see what happens as Valentine figures out how to have a stable relationship (or, you know, not), then buy it now! (People are calling it “the perfect end to the best series of books I’ve ever read.“)
But for the rest of you, there’s still plenty of fucks there. Just… not as many.
I’m sorry.
My Novel FIX Is Out Today! Here's How You Can Help Me… Or Any Author You Like!
Hey, my novel Fix is out today! You can all now all begin hating me for the horrible things I do to characters you have come to love! Here’s all the wonderful places you can buy the final book in the ‘Mancer series:
North American Print & Ebook
Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | BarnesandNoble.com | IndieBound.org
UK Print & Ebook
Amazon.co.uk | Book Depository | Waterstones | WHSmith
Global DRM-Free Epub & Mobi Ebook
The Robot Trading Company
But that’s irrelevant, believe it or not! I figure if you’re interested in buying the sucker and you read this blog, you already have decided to buy Fix (or not!) by now. So let’s talk about what you can do to help an author’s book, if you’re so inclined:
1. Talking About The Book To Your Friends Helps.
One notable couple loved Flex so much, they bought copies of Flex for all their friends at Christmas. You do not have to go this far. But still, the fundamental truth of books is that publishers can pour millions of dollars into ads and endcap buys, and every book’s success comes down to one conversation:
“Hey, did you read Ferrett’s book? It’s pretty good.”
Without that conversation, books die. Which is why I talk about books I love on Twitter and my blog – partially it’s just that I tend to squee about things I adore, but it’s also that discussing books helps them.
Which leads me to my next point…
2. Mentioning The Book On Social Media Helps.
I woke this morning to lots of wonderful people who’d mentioned how excited they were that Fix was out. And thank every one of you who did that. Mentioning it on your Twitter or Facebook or Instasnap or Kik or Pokemon Go or whatever you crazy kids are using these days to talk? It helps people be aware the book exists. And in a cold callous universe packed tight with entertaining books, anything you do to shine the spotlight on a specific book helps.
3. Writing Reviews Of The Book Helps.
Even if they’re tiny reviews like “I liked it, four stars,” putting information into Big Data’s hopper helps the massive computers feel better about recommending that book to other people. Amazon’s far more likely to display and/or promote a book if it has lots of reviews behind it. Publishers notice the number of reviews.
So review a book from an author you’d like to support, even if you don’t like it. It’s far better for authors to have lots of honest reviews – that allows their recommendation engines to know who not to recommend the book to. And honestly? I don’t want people to buy any book they’re unlikely to enjoy.
(Though, you know, I hope you do enjoy it!)
4. Seeing The Author When They Come To Town Helps.
Remember, I’m doing another crazy book tour, hitting up Cleveland (obvs), San Francisco, San Diego, Portland, and Seattle. Showing up at the book store helps pump the book store’s sales, convinces local booksellers I might be worth reading, and helps an author feel like Not A Loser.
I mean, look at all these wonderful people who showed up in Boston! THANK YOU, PEOPLE!
And yes. My book is out today. But always remember that these steps are comparatively trivial bits you can do to help out any author you’d like to support. Write reviews, talk about them, see the author when they’re around. That helps anyone in publishing, and publishing is hard, yo.
Anyway. I’m going to delve into work today and emerge at my Cleveland release party. Some of you will be reading what happens to Paul, Valentine, Aliyah, and the rest in Fix.
I hope y’all love the ending as much as I do.