The Audio Book You Can Never Have… And The One You Can.

In about 2007, my mother went legally blind.
Nothing has yet to stop her.
She has a hereditary condition called “angioid streaks” that led to emergency laser surgery that went poorly, scabbing up the center of her eye.  She now gets by entirely on peripheral vision, with what she’s described as “a big cigarette burn” blotching up the middle of her view.
Yet she’s gone parasailing since she’s lost most of her sight.  She’s gone river tubing.  She wanders fearlessly through foreign countries where she doesn’t speak the language, and she refuses to use a cane because she hates the way those things look.
She’s an inspiration.
She can read, painfully, slowly, through big magnifying lenses – but instead she’s opted to listen to audiobooks morning, noon and night.  She has to be one of Audible.com’s greatest customers, as she finishes off about five or six audiobooks a week.
And when my book Flex came out – even though Mom usually hates fantasy books – she wanted to read it.  “When’s the audio book coming out?” she asked.
“I don’t know that it will, Mom,” I told her.  “Most books don’t get audio treatments.  If I get an audio book, it’ll be months from now, and the sign that the book’s selling better than I’d hoped for.”
She sagged.   She’d seen the paperback: small type for, spread across many small pages.  No hope of her getting through it and enjoying it.
And I heard from other friends of mine who wanted the audiobook for similar reasons: they too had bad eyesight, or dyslexia, and the prevalence of the Internet had turned audiobooks from this clunky suitcase full of cassettes into a cheap MP3 file.  And I had to tell them the same thing: I can hope.
And today, the audiobook came out.  It’s about $20 and change on Amazon, and you can buy it if you want, and hear Peter Brooke tell you about videogamemancers who surf the consciousness of videogame villains, and bureaucromancers who backdate time, and the intense love a father has for his little girl – so much so that he’ll risk everything for her.
That’s the version you can buy.  Yet I’d promised another.
Because when I saw my Mom look so sad, I promised her a Christmas present: I would read Flex to her. One chapter at a time, in time for Christmas.  I’m not a professional narrator, but I have enough equipment to do the world’s most focused podcast – and so she’ll hear her son read her the story he painstakingly wrote over so many years.
I’m a little nervous about that. I don’t do voices well.  I tend to read too fast when things get exciting.  I hope I can provide the experience as my Mom wants it.
But amateurish as it’ll be, I’m pretty sure she’ll love it anyway.

A Thought On Male Privilege That Got A Little Too Long For A Tweet

I’m glad when I was starting out I hadn’t read that piece about the female using the male pseudonym on the query or I might have given up.

— Jaye Wells (@jayewells) August 6, 2015

The irony is, a lot of guys succeed based on this same ignorance of their own chances.
Now, this is not to say that we dudes don’t have privilege – because we do, we so very do, based on that article she references (and a ton of other anecdotal data I’ve picked up listening to women discussing their experience in publishing).
Yet the very privilege that trains dudes (and, yeah, usually white dudes) to expect success often trains them to be insanely persistent when other people would have given up – not because they’re more talented, but because they are completely, blitheringly unaware of the odds.  It’s not that they mean to be persistent, but rather that they’ve been conditioned to expect success as their birthright, and so they forge onwards even though they’re probably not gonna make it.
And a surprising amount of the time, they succeed – whether that’s because they kept trying until they got better (like, *cough*, some people writing blog entries) or they stumbled into lucky breaks they would not have gotten had they been rational about things.
This has been brought up before in a slightly different format, with Kelli Russell Agodon’s essay Submit Like A Man, which talks about the difference in how men and women submit stories.  Given the slightest encouragement, men will flood an editor with tales; women tend to wait longer and submit less.  (And this essay came to light after a Twitter conversation among many women and minorities who’d self-rejected by not sending to markets based on their own perception of their own work.  The general response was, “Don’t do that.”)
Jaye succeeded by not knowing how shitty things are.  (Buy her books.)  And I think redistributing privilege has two vital components: the first is doing what one can to level the playing field by making those who do discriminate aware of all the subtle ways in which they do discriminate.
Yet the other aspect, which I feel is frequently overlooked, is “How do we train people to act like a privileged person?” Because to pull a real-life example, I’ve seen my poorer relatives terrified to say “boo” to a doctor, having been convinced that Doctors Are Gods and You Don’t Sass A Doctor and Just Be Quiet And Take What They Give You, and as a result they got horrible treatment from the same doctors we went to.  Even when they were in the same places as we were, in some cases ushered in the door by us, they still self-sabotaged by not saying, “Uh, we’ve tried that drug and it did not work.”
Part of properly distributing privilege is, yes, ensuring that doctors don’t blow off poor people – but it’s also in teaching them the strength to stand up. Because the crappy thing about getting ignored all your life is that eventually you stop trying to speak – and if you’re lucky enough to find doctors who are receptive to what you have to say, you can still hurt yourself by self-censoring.
So yeah: it’s that bad for women out there. It’s shitty, and it’s terrible, and the odds are not good.  I wish they were better, and this is why I do what I can to fix those odds.
Yet a lot of men, completely unwittingly, have succeeded against terrible odds by simply being too dumb to understand just how low their chances of success were.  They took shots when saner people wouldn’t.  And having seen a bunch of dudes I would have given zero chance make it and make it big, the best I can tell you is that part of engineering success against overwhelming odds is swinging whenever you get the goddamned chance.
It’s not gonna make it even close to an even playing field for women, alas.  But don’t handicap yourself further by refusing to go for it whenever you can.  Because dumber, more privileged dudes will take that shot – it’s what they’ve been trained to do – and you might as well do your best to learn from people who are way less talented, yet way more confident, than you.
(Also, editors? Don’t fucking do that. Not cool.)
(EDIT: And in between the time I started writing this and I finished, Jaye put up this status:

Ah, who am I kidding? I wouldn't have quit. You can't change them. You just have to be so good they can't ignore you.

— Jaye Wells (@jayewells) August 6, 2015

Fuck yeah, Jaye.)

I Don't Trust You. Maybe I Shouldn't.

“You need to trust your partners,” the Generic Relationship Advice says. “If you don’t trust them enough, how can you have a good relationship?”
And the truth is, there’s a lot of partners you *shouldn’t* trust. And they’re not all abusers, either.
The problem is, people often see what they want to see in relationships. And they wind up dating a tattered ghost that has only superficial similarities with you, because the truth is that they never actually saw the flawed you-that-exists – they saw Stability, or they saw Romance, or they saw Raw Passion, and all that other stuff just got quietly screened out.
And you tell them – “Hey, I have some serious kinks but I don’t live this life 24/7, I am not the Goddess of Sexual Pleasure For You,” and they nod and go “Yeah, baby, I know,” when realistically they don’t know, they think they understand what you are but they’re actually mapping so much of their own needs onto you that they forget you have needs of your own.
And they feel so fucking betrayed when it turns out that you weren’t what they imagined you to be.
So a part of that trust comes down to trying to manage expectations. And it sucks to look at someone who’s dewy-eyed with True Love for you and go, “No, you’re not seeing Me right now, and as such I don’t trust you enough to date you.”
But that happens when you’re trying to be sane.
And the Generic Relationship Advice says, “You need to trust your partners to know what they want.” Which sounds like it’s awesome, but the truth is most people actually have zero fucking clue what they want. And if they want something from you that you don’t actually possess, then trusting them means that you’re going to ultimately disappoint them.
Because if they saw Stability when what you actually had to offer was The Ability To Keep Functioning When You’re Upset, shit’s gonna go wrong.
If they saw Romance when what you had to offer was Good Listening Skills, shit’s gonna go wrong.
If they saw Raw Passion when what you had to offer was New Relationship Energy, shit’s gonna go wrong.
And yet it is so goddamned flattering to be thought of as Stability, or Raw Passion, or Romance – to have someone take a side of you that you yourself would like to be and shower you with reassurances that no, you’re an idealized version of yourself. They tell you that you’re Wise and Strong, and the fact is that you’re seven years older than they are and all that Wisdom and Strength is just a tadge more experience, and you’ll still do dumb-ass things when someone hits you from an unexpected angle – but having someone who looks up to you is so hard to resist.  So if you’re not smart you’ll try to play the role of Wise and Strong when that is not, in fact, your native skill….
…and that’ll wreck both your lives as you try to live up to an expectation you can’t actually provide.
And that’s part of the challenge of dating: sometimes, you don’t trust your partners. Sometimes you don’t date people because they believe in the wrong things about you. Sometimes you have to look someone in the eye and go “Yeah, that is a beautiful thing to think about me, but you’re full of shit.”
Try doing that sometimes. It’s hard. It’s very fucking hard.

Why My Drugs Are Fucked Up

“You’re not on a statin right now?” my cardiologist said, distressed.  “Oh no. Oh no no no. You’re a heart patient, you have to be on a statin.”
“I thought I was on a statin: Bystolic.”
“No, that’s a beta blocker. It’s intended to prevent heart attacks. The statin lowers your cholesterol.”
“Isn’t that what Welchol does?”
“It does, a little, but that’s mostly to prevent you slipping into pre-diabetic numbers.  Here, I’ll show you how bad you are: we’re going to run some blood tests to show you what your cholesterol is now, and in four months we’ll show you how much you need the statins.”
Why couldn’t we have had that before?
It would have been a lot easier for me if the doctor had sat down with me and said, “You need to be on four medications: a statin to lower your cholesterol, a beta blocker to prevent your heart from seizing up, a medication to keep you from tipping into diabetes, and Vitamin D to keep the healthy oils in your blood.  If you’re not on one of those at any given time, then my treatment isn’t working.”
Instead – like a lot of doctors – he gives me a bunch of confusing names and assumes I’m following, and I thought I was following, but I’m not.  When I went down to three medications, I thought that was a conscious choice on his part, not a clerical error.  And because doctors are often too damned busy to monitor me as closely as they should, I didn’t have the tools to monitor myself.
I now know: I need statins, or things go boom in my chest. (I’ll be fine, but this could have been disastrous long-term.)  And I apparently need beta blockers.  And Welchol for some reason I’m still nebulous on.
But when doctors fail to educate clearly, it’s their patients who suffer. And I’ve tried to educate myself, but the problem is that the doctor – like, again, many doctors – focuses on the individual segments and not the overall plan.  It’s like telling a soldier, “Go attack that guy” – useful in the short term, but if something goes wrong and the soldier doesn’t understand that her ultimate goal is take this hill and keep it, she may charge off after another enemy.
For me, the medications I’m on are a constant shuffling game, as the doctor brings in new medications and the insurance company denies some and others still go into generic form, and it’s hard to keep up.  What would be nice is if I had a chart:

• Your Beta Blocker: Bystolic.
• Your Diabetic Prevention Medication: Welchol.
• Your Good Cholesterol-Retention Medication: Megadoses of Vitamin D.
• Your Statin: ???

And that way, when things switched up, as they inevitably do, I could know which was which.
And I? Am healthy, and in good mental condition. I can’t imagine how complicated this gets for people who are on don’t-go-crazy medications combined with chronic conditions. It’s a part-time job just keeping my prescriptions constant, and I suspect a lot of people are harmed when doctors think they’re being clear but the patients aren’t understanding as well as they’d thought.

The Lessons Of Dead Children.

This doesn’t end well.
I had a supremely good day today; slept in until 10:30, programmed my first real project in C# (and discovered that though it was a new language, I still had some tricks to teach the native programmers), went out and sanded and stained a bookcase, and then wrote a good 900 words on my new book.
Then Gini and I went out to our backyard, lit up a fine cigar, and drank some exquisite bourbon as the sun set and the fireflies crept out across the yard and shooting stars streaked across a cloud-filled sky.
This still doesn’t end well.
It’s been about fourteen months since Rebecca died, and the world still doesn’t make much sense some days. She was six years old. She died on her birthday. She got brain cancer, and it swelled and grew in her skull until she stopped breathing while I knelt at her bedside, my hand on her ankle.
This doesn’t end well.  None of it does.
And I know the end is coming.  Gini is eleven years older than I am.  Chances are good she’ll die before I will, and what will I do when the love of my life is gone?  I’m a heart patient; I feel a twinge in my chest and there’s my mortality, raw and throbbing, that clammy reminder that one day I will be back on the ventilator – or worse, condemned to the backwaters of some old-age home, helpless and weak as overworked nurses ignore me for hours at a time.
It doesn’t end well.
These sun-touched clouds are so beautiful.
And Rebecca is dead, and with it my last hopes of a just universe. I suppose I should have learned that lesson from my own triple bypass, but I was already forty-two, and that’s a good age for someone to die – a little premature, but I’d lived a lot of life.
Here I am, bourbon in my hand, and Rebecca never got to taste alcohol.
None of this ends well.
And yet that is the lesson: None of this ends well.  The end game for all of us is death, and yet this day I feel oddly cheerful.  I cannot hope to cling to any of this.  Our bodies will fail, and this will all be ripped away from me, and yet…
This cigar is beautiful.
My wife’s hand is warm in mine.
We made wishes upon the stars.
I will not get to keep this.  But that is not the goal.  The goal is to appreciate what we have, in this slim instant between birth and the void, and today I lived every minute of my life to the best of my ability.  I savored that cigar.  I poured my heart into those 900 words.  I wrestled that program into submission.
(I stained the bookcase terribly, but even in that, I learned wonderful new crafts techniques.)
This cannot last.  But it’s been good, as long as it’s been.  And my goal is not to hold onto these moments forever, but to cherish them while they are here.  I have been married to the love of my life for fifteen good years, and maybe that ends tomorrow, but every day of that has been something to appreciate, and even if it goes away that’s more than most people got.
The dog rolls in the grass.  The cigar ember smolders.  My wife smiles as she plans her next trip to Seattle.  And when it is done, we will pour another glass of fine bourbon, and put on Battlebots, and cheer as robots smash each other to flinders.
Rebecca is gone.  But we are here.  And it would be a disservice to the bright streak of Rebecca’s life if we lost that future happiness to darkness, and we do not forget the darkness but tonight we celebrate the life we have left, and huddle tight around a dwindling fire.
She is gone.
This does not end well.
That does not mean the story is not worth telling.