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.

Citizen Pie: Pizza Brought To You By The Creator Of The Velvet Tango Room

Long-time readers will have heard me rhapsodize about the Velvet Tango Room’s cocktails on any number of occasions – and I’m not alone!  When America’s Top Ten bars are tallied up, the VTR frequently makes the list.
(In Cleveland? you may scoff.  As it turns out, Cleveland is where New York chefs go when they want a cheaper rent and an equally appreciative audience, so over the last eight years or so there’s been a culinary renaissance in the land of Cleve.  We’ve got quality restaurants and drinking up the wazoo, in part due to groundbreakers like the VTR.)
The VTR, lest you need a refresher course, does everything by hand – squeezing, shaking, and pouring only top-tier ingredients.  They spent $10,000 in a quest to find the perfect ice cubes.  They once tried to find a restaurant to do paired tastings with, until they realized their drinks were so complex that the whole point was each taste was a separate experience.  They have a Bourbon Daisy with a fifteen-second outbreath, a constantly mutating mixture of sweetness and bourbon and ginger that tingles on your tongue.
So when Paulius, the owner of the VTR, told me he was opening up a pizza shop, you bet your ass I listened.
And on Friday, we got an invite to a preview of Citizen Pie.  So you bet your ass we went.
While the Velvet Tango Room is a destination place, where you sit down and savor, Citizen Pie is more of an informal area – across the street from the Beachland Ballroom, it’s where you snag a ‘za before or after the band plays. Yet  Paulius and his pizza chef V have paid attention to details: using only four ingredients in the bread dough because they want the purest experience, spending weeks slowly heating up the great wood-heated pizza oven so it’s seasoned properly, getting the freshest ingredients.

We sat down. I ordered a classic, the Marinara – only four ingredients, because I needed to be able to compare this to other pizzas. What I got was this, the third pizza Citizen Pie ever sold:

These are small pizzas, with light dough, meant to be eaten in one serving. (The chef critiqued the pizza as slightly burned on one side, and had a word with the staff.)
And as I bit into it, I got a strong blast of perfectly seasoned tomato layered thinly across crispy/chewy dough – so much flavor contained in a millimeter of topping that I actually froze for a moment at all the deliciousness in my mouth. I’m usually into thicker, Chicago-style pizzas, but this one was so light and airy and yet satisfying to the tooth that I immediately wanted slice #2.
Then I got a garlic clove on the next bite, and the whole thing turned electric. If I ordered this one the next time, I’d get extra garlic, because that zing of the garlic and the intensity of the tomato made my whole mouth resonate. There was only a hint of cheese taste – the tomato was definitely the star of the dish.
Gini got the caponata, a mishmash of all sorts of ingredients ranging from eggplant to gaeta olives to pinenuts and currents and basil. And I was distressed at first, because the ingredients were so poorly distributed, until it was explained to me that the chef made them that way on purpose, so every bite would be a new experience. Which is great, unless your wife will only let you have one slice!

What I got had pine nuts and olives, and the olives were the best I’ve ever had on pizza. I generally don’t like olives, as the canned ones are too salty, but these olives sank into the taste of the cheese, providing a rich satiny mouthfeel. The cheeses seemed to meld with the dough, becoming an integral part, as opposed to too many restaurants that glop on a layer of cheese that slides off the minute you pick up the pizza.
(The only ding I’d have here is the cherry tomatoes, which were supposed to be cooked to the consistency of stewed, dripped a lot of water over the dough and made it prematurely soggy. But hey, that was literally the second pizza they served to a customer, if I recall correctly.)
And soon, our pizza looked like this:

To finish off, I tried their ricotta cheesecake, which was rich and had a soft grainy texture that made the ricotta obvious, with hints of floral and citrus throughout it. It was maybe a touch too cold from the fridge, but on the whole, delicious.

Citizen Pie is a small place, just big enough for a handful of customers to sit down, grab a pizza, and get out. It’s pleasant enough, but the food is the star, and one suspects Beachland Ballroom folks will be planning trips to Citizen Pie before the show to tank up on some pretty friggin’ awesome authentic Italian pizza.
They’re opening today. If you’re in Cleveland, check ’em out.

My Experimental Film: Why My Plotting Is Ahead Of My Understanding

So last night, I walked around the block with Gini and plotted out the last third of the last book* in the ‘Mancer series, Fix.  I knew what the characters had to do.
Tonight, I spent two hours downstairs, knowing what they would do, trying to understand why they’d do it.
Which sounds really fucking bizarre if you’re not a writer – and maybe bizarre if you are.  But I’m a gardener, and whenever I write I think of this song from They Might Be Giants:

Specifically the line, “I already know the ending, it’s the part that makes your face implode. I don’t know what makes your face implode, but that’s the way the movie ends.”
And seriously, that’s the way I work.  I have long realized to trust my subconscious – it doesn’t plot that far in advance.  I only see a chapter or two ahead of me.  And around midway through the book, it’ll say something like, “The invasion triggers a broach, and Paul heals the broach.  Now write that chapter.”
If you’ve read Flex, you’ll understand that that moment is one of the central points of the entire series.  It’s where we see that Paul’s powers are beyond what we thought they were – and, more importantly, that Paul’s worldview is fundamentally one of justice.
Thing is, Paul’s world view when I started to write that scene was not justice.
When I wrote Flex initially, Paul was a scheming politician whose ambitions were thwarted when he lost his foot in a magical battle.  And he used bureaucracy as a way to subvert the system, and – actually, hell, it was a first draft, I didn’t actually know why he had bureaucromancy as a power, I just knew he did.  And when a confluence of magic punched a hole clean through to the demon dimensions, I went, “Paul can clean this up.”
At which point I went, “Wait, why can he clean this up?”
And my subconscious went, you know.
And I went into that chapter completely blind as to why Paul would heal the broach or even why he’d think he could do it, given that Paul was sort of a greedy jerk at this stage of the manuscript.  And the broach got triggered, and the buzzsects started to gnaw their way through the laws of physics, and I went, “Why does Paul heal this?”
And I realized:
Paul was offended.
The broach was scary, but Paul was fastidious enough that watching the laws of physics gnawed away offended his sense of order.  And I realized: Paul was not a greedy politician, as I had somehow thought for the last 50,000 words – Paul was the kind of guy who straightened library shelves in his spare time, because he believed things should be set right.
He was not a greedy politician, but a supercharged Radar O’Reilly.
My subconscious knew that having Paul heal that broach was absolutely what Paul had to do, but I did not know why he did it until I walked around for two hours in my basement, pacing madly, muttering, “I don’t know what makes his face implode, but that’s the way the movie ends.”  I had leapt out into the void over a great stadium with the absolute faith that my subconscious was swinging a trapeze at me, and I clutched my fingers in the dark until I caught wood.
Once I understood what my subconscious was trying to get me to do, the rest of that novel snapped into focus.
And this evening, I knew exactly what Aliyah and Valentine had to do.  But I had no idea why they had to do it. I knew Valentine had to call her boyfriend, and Aliyah had to sit by [REDACTED]’s bedside where she’d do [REDACTED] magic –
But none of the motivations I’d given them at the end of Act II made any sense.
So I kept trying on various rationales. Okay, maybe Aliyah would do this because she was sad.  No, that didn’t work.  Maybe Aliyah was just fooling around with this newfound magic and stumbles by [REDACTED]’s bedside.  No, that doesn’t work.  Maybe Aliyah was trying to heal that character –
And I spent two hours pacing the basement again, trusting that my subconscious was right, and that no, Aliyah had to sit by the bedside and do magic.
I just had to find the right reason for that, and when I did, I would know why the rest of the plot made sense.  And I took seven pages of notes, scribbling frantically, notes that often included heavy-hitters like Boy, you don’t make it easy, Steinmetz and No, that doesn’t make sense and How is this an expression of love, or is it?
And I would think I was insane, except I heard Brandon Sanderson say on a panel that he plotted his books beginning to end before he started – but he couldn’t write his chapters out of order, because sometimes he didn’t know why his characters were doing the things they were doing until he got there.
I wrote seven pages of notes, and eventually the notes stopped being why would they do this and mutated into wouldn’t it be cool if this happened as a result of them doing this, and I got to understand Valentine and Aliyah a little more because yes, I know why Valentine is calling her boyfriend and it’s going to break your heart, and Aliyah is sitting by that bedside because what she does there will cause a misunderstanding that gets someone killed.
But I know now.
And I don’t know how I knew, but I know.
You’re all gonna be in this experimental film
And even though I can’t explain it
I already know how great it is

* – If you’d asked me when I was writing Flex, I’d have said it was a solo book – yet when I got to the end, I thought, “Well, maybe there’s more here.”  When I wrote The Flux, I said, “This is it, I’m putting everything I have into it, there will be nothing left,” yet when I got about 90% done, I thought, “Crap, there’s some threads I could explore.”
I am about 70% through Fix, and I swear to God this is all I have to say about the Tsabo-Dawson family, but I’ve thought that twice before so who fucking knows?

Witness My FLEX-Themed Cookies!

So when I attended the Geeky Kink Event to give some seminars on holding effective polyamory, organizer Jeff Mach offered to hold a The Flux-themed book release party.
And because all my book release parties have to be special, I had some Flex-themed cookies made at Sparkles Bake Shop – which, if you’re anywhere near New Jersey and need some kick-ass cookies, I would highly recommend.
But seriously!  Check out these fuckin’ cookies!

Of course I wore my Fine Italian Suit:

The amusing thing was that people who’d read the books were happy to eat the cookies called Flex, but they had concerned about eating The Flux cookies. Wise people. They know what happens when you absorb a flux load.
The cookies were tasty, although (as also happened with my Flex-themed cake) the black frosting would do horrible things to your teeth. WARNING TO AUTHORS: If you have a dark cover, your book-themed sucrose interpretations will give people a blemished smile! Now that’s the kind of pro tips y’all are showing up here for.
One last bit: I always tell people at conventions that I am so happy to be an author I’ll sign anything you put in front of me. Because this was a kink convention, three people went, “ANYthing?” and I reiterated anything.
Man, if you wanna feel like a goddamned rock star, try signing, er, anything. It’s a good feeling.