Hey, Reviewers, Come Get My Book, Because I'm Too Sad To Bring It To Ya.
Twitter makes me do weird things.
See, technically, I think more people pay attention to me on Twitter, so it’s where I do all my announcements. Plus, it’s fast – RETWEET, SENTENCE OF SNARKY COMMENTARY, DONE – so if something big breaks, I tend to ZOMG in real time on Twitter and hey!
Problem is, Twitter has the memory of a goldfish. You are not expected to read everything that pops into your Twitter feed; Twitter is an endless IRC chat, where you scroll back as far as you feel comfortable with. Of all the social networks, Twitter is the most understanding of your busy time schedule – didn’t see what happened three hours ago? It’s okay, you weren’t supposed to. Twitter is only really active when you’re looking at it, and the rest of the time you can forget it.
That may seem odd, and somewhat alien, to many of you reading this here blog. “But I read everything here!” you say. “I feel vaguely guilty if I don’t catch up!” And yeah, that’s what happens when people spend their lunch break committing long-ass essays to WordPress instead of Twitter’s CLICK, RETWEET.
Which means that making an announcement on Twitter is like throwing a rock into a pond – a big splash at the moment of impact, but a couple of hours later nobody knows anything happened. And so for big announcements, I feel the urge to commit them to my (more permanent) blog, just so anyone who wants to keep up on the Whirlwind Life Of Ferrett can do so.
But if you saw it on Twitter already, I must seem relentlessly self-promoting. But I’m not trying to look like a dick, honest. I’m just trying to navigate two social media networks with differing concepts of permanence.
Anyway – Jesus, I run long – the sequel to my book Flex, The Flux, is now available on Netgalley, where if you are a reviewer you can go and request a digital copy. If you’re someone who has a blog of note and doesn’t have a Netgalley account, lemme know and I’ll hook you up. I’m pretty proud of this sequel, which I think is way better than Flex, so go get y’selves excited.
Also, I’m gearing up for another blog-tour, so if you’re a podcaster who wants a yappy guest, or a person with a middlin’ audience who’d be all like “Wow, I want a Ferrett on my site!” then contact me and let’s talk.
However, I should add that right now, I am dealing with a massive and very off-season bout of Seasonal Affective Disorder, where depression is hitting me very hard at an unusual time. (Long-time readers will know I usually get zapped in the spring.) This is untimely to say the least, since I should be contacting everyone to get them riled up about SEQUEL SEQUEL SEQUEL, and I have yet to muster the energy to even put a page up on my own damn site.
So apologies if I have seemed distant. I’m struggling to just get the effort up to work and then write the sequel to The Flux, and everything else is a lot of trouble. I’ll be fine, I usually am, and Gini is monitoring the situation – but if you’re excited for the impending sequel, then you can help out by mentioning a) how you liked Flex, or b) that you’re excited about The Flux, or c) both.
Or d) Do neither! I’ll be fine. You are not the arm of my Great Marketing Machine, and I only ask you to do stuff if you’re really psyched to.
But! If you are a reviewer, you can go get The Flux now. And if you’re excited, I suggest you do so.
Message ends.
Bernie Sanders Is My Quarterback, And I Hate It
I’m really starting to hate rooting for Bernie Sanders.
Not because I dislike Bernie’s politics – I do, intensely, so much so that I’m a regular donor to his campaign. Nor is it because of the way he’s getting hammered by the Black Lives Matter movement – he’s moving to try to acknowledge black people’s concerns, and if he can’t manage it properly, well, as I said before, he probably doesn’t deserve to be the Democratic candidate.
But I want Bernie to get the nomination. And as such, I’m following all the stupid headlines that tell me who’s ahead.
“Who’s ahead” should be the least interesting thing about this goddamned campaign.
I hate the way that the news (and now Twitter) treats elections like a sport – BERNIE IS AHEAD BY 4 PERCENTAGE POINTS IN THE SECOND QUARTER OF POLLING, CAN HE PULL IT OUT? Because in emphasizing the victories and defeats and “Can Bernie win?”, what gets lost are the reasons that Bernie is popular in the first place.
What’s the difference between Bernie and Hillary? Hillary has more money. Bernie has a better social network. Hillary has better numbers against Trump. Bernie has finally pulled ahead in New Hampshire.
What the fuck do any of them have to say on the issues?
Doesn’t matter. What matters is their position in the polls, not their position on today’s concerns.
And slowly, we boil away the difference until we’re more concerned with DAT VICTORY, and the story is not “Bernie Sanders is making a push to reduce student loan debts,” but “Bernie Sanders is gaining momentum!”
Which is exactly what happens in sports. As someone who doesn’t follow sports, I know Cleveland lost in basketball, heartbreakingly, at the last moment – but I don’t know why. There were doubtlessly many mechanisms that went into the reasons why Cleveland wasn’t favored in the finals, but those very important reasons why Cleveland’s skills mattered (or didn’t) got obscured by the WE WON GAME 1 ZOMG NOBODY SAW THIS COMING and NOOO WE LOST GAME 3.
And in being concerned for Bernie Sanders, I feel that victory-tide washing over me – ZOMG HE SCORED – and that emphasis on the reasons he scored being buried deep in the lede.
I wish the emphasis was on how these people’s policies differed. I wish when they discussed Bernie Sanders vs. Hillary, it’d be “Hillary wants to do this, Bernie wants to do this – which is more likely to succeed?”
Instead, what’d we get with the recent Republican debate? TRUMP WON. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN FOR TRUMP?
No. What I’d like to know is, “If Trump wins, what’s that mean for us?” And I don’t see enough of that analysis on any candidate.
I Need A Different Phrase To Describe A Different "Jump The Shark."
Basically, I want a phrase that indicates “the moment I stop automatically buying things from this creator, and start waiting for reviews.”
I asked this question on Twitter yesterday, and got a wide variety of responses: “M. Night’d” was a popular one, except that I don’t feel M. Night was ever someone who built up a base of solid movies to begin with. He had one great movie, and then Unbreakable had some serious flaws, and that was it. And I’m not talking the sort of hype that comes from ZOMG TRUE DETECTIVE SEASON 1 WAS SO GOOD WAIT WHAT HAPPENED, but rather someone who was on the top of their game for several years, and now is starting to falter.
Likewise, “Crystal Skulled” came up a lot – but I have yet to be convinced that there will be any good Indiana Jones movies ever again. And this phrase should encapsulate the fact that the creator is still capable of producing magnificent work – it’s just that now, after a long string of unbroken beauty, they’re creating crappy stuff along with the good ones.
The phrase that comes to mind is “Pixar,” because Inside/Out was really magnificent after the mediocrity of Brave and the absolute face-shocker of Cars 2. But saying “They got Pixared” doesn’t quite convey it, because a lot of people love Pixar, and “They Cars 2ed” sounds like they’re producing absolute crap for all eternity.
So. Suggestions?
In Case You Missed It, Here's My New Book Cover, And It Is FABULOUS.
So yesterday afternoon, Barnes and Noble called my book Flex “one of the year’s best fantasy debuts” and revealed the cover for the The Flux – the new book in the series, dropping on October 6th. I’m not going to show you the cover, because it is a B&N exclusive reveal, but the pretty is only a click away.
(And extra kudos to Angry Robot for not weight-washing Valentine, my overweight videogamemancer hero – this may be the first time in urban fantasy cover history that Photoshop was used to add some pounds to a model.)
In addition, they have the official announcement for Book Three in the ‘Mancer Chronicles over there, complete with a teaser summary for Book Two. Go take a look.
“One of the year’s best fantasy debuts.” Squeeee.
Being Crazy Is A Skill.
You have to remember to take your don’t-go-crazy pills even when you feel perfectly fine, and it seems so inconceivable that this tiny ball of chemicals is all that stands between you and screaming breakdowns.
You have to monitor your energy levels constantly, because when you start getting tired you start breaking down in public, and so you go to parties and think, “Okay, I’ve got about forty-five minutes until I melt down, time to make my excuses,” and you say pleasant goodbyes and everyone says they’ll miss you and then you pull over on the side of the road and sob because you screwed up the timing by fifteen minutes and now you’re a mess, a fucking mess. (But at least no one saw you.)
You have to make the fine distinction between “I need this down time to recharge” and “I’m closing off the world like a mummy shutting himself in his tomb,” and if you get it wrong then you can spend three weeks in cloaked isolation, accidentally alienating all your friends and having to make seriously humiliating apologies when you finally haul yourself back into the light.
You have to fake smiles at work even when you’re dead inside, because you need the money, and maybe you’re functioning at about 60% capacity this week but you’ve learned that this 60% needs to be in the area where you earn your goddamned rent money. So you push out the energy for eight hours before you slink home numb and stare at the computer for another eight, a blank deadness before bedtime.
You have to remember that your friends lie to you. They don’t mean to. They tell you heartwarming things they want to believe about themselves, things like “I’m always there for my friends” and “I’ll always support you,” and if you’re not careful you believe them and open up this vomitous spill of anxiety inside you, and after a few months of bathing in your corrosive disability they find some excuse to not see you any more. You learn that there’s maaaaybe one or two people who really are going to get this twisted shit inside you – if you’re lucky – and not to lean on them too heavily, to save them for the really bad days.
You have to remember that your good days are other people’s bad days.
You have to internalize the idea that “emotions” and “actions” can be successfully disconnected, that you can still accomplish shit when feeling really down, and in fact this is your only real hope for survival. And then you have to swallow back an effervescent rage when other depressives tell you that you can’t really be depressed, you did things, you can’t possibly have accomplishments when you’re depressed, and you think of all the other things you weren’t able to accomplish because you had to fight this sucking tide of angst, and you try not to yell. But you might yell. Because you’re crazy, and when you’re crazy sometimes you lose it.
You have to learn to apologize properly for losing it.
You have to learn that being crazy is, in fact, a skill you learn. Nobody’s good at it, and in fact you see some supposedly “capable” people fucking lose it when they’re traumatized by grief. They don’t know how to handle these emotions that you get Denial of Service-attacked with every day, and the truth is that a lot of these so-called “capable” people would shatter under the weight of what you have to bear daily.
But they don’t have all these swirlstorms of depression and rage and anxiety roaring through their heads, and you do. And so you must learn the skills of madness, how to restructure your life so that you can keep going when lesser people would have been bogged down by all this, and some days you get buried under the crazy and yet you grab a shovel and dig yourself out and maybe you’ve lost four days to your flavor of insanity but you have kept going and YAY YOU.
It takes years to learn how to be properly mad. It’s not fun. But the good times you can have around the edges are fun, this reward of learning how to appear normal for days at a time.
You have to fight to be happy. But you can be happy, sometimes. In small bursts of joy.
Part of the skill of madness is learning to treasure those bursts, and to realize that nobody gets to be happy all the time. You just don’t get those times as easily. And so you must refine, and renew, and repurpose, until you’re as good as being crazy as you possibly can be.
I never said it was easy. I simply said it was necessary.