They Lied To Me About Small Talk, So I Want To Be Honest About Consent.

When I was fourteen, people talked about “breaking the ice” with strangers.  It was an appropriate metaphor.  For most folks, striking up conversations with people they didn’t know was as simple as stepping through the scrim of ice on a puddle.
For me, I was trapped under a foot of thick ice underneath a pond, drowning, hammering uselessly on that barrier with wet mittens.
I would later get a term for that fear: social anxiety.  But as a teenager, I realized that the world punished people who weren’t good at talking to new people – and so I bought several self-help books to try to master the art.
The books lived in some weird parallel world to me.  They were written from a place where every person you talked to lit up with happiness the moment you said “Hello” to them.  When you sat next to someone on a train in this world, they had nothing but spare time for you, as though they were NPCs in a videogame waiting for player input.  They were all seeking friends as badly as you were!
Everyone in this happy small-talk world had two settings: sports and weather.  They were encyclopedic experts on sports and weather in every sample conversation.
And the people who tried to talk to strangers?  They were nothing like me.  Their “Hello” never died as a whisper on their tongue.  They never mouthed their introductory sentence over and over again, trying to work up the courage to speak.  They never cleared their throat, then felt the lighthouse beacon of someone’s attention sweeping across them, then froze in that attention like a deer in the headlights.
All their conversations ended so well.  They walked away with friends.
I never did.
I think they meant it to be encouraging, creating this artificial world.  I think they wanted to show me how easy this all could be, to pluck up my courage.  But what really happened was that it made me feel that everyone else could do this, and that I was uniquely useless.
When you’re alone to begin with, feeling like you’re uniquely alone cuts like a razor.  And so for years I sat alone in my room, seeing decades worth of friendless days ahead of me, having resigned myself to the fact that I was broken.
This was nonsense, of course.  Lots of people don’t want to talk to strangers.  Over the years I’ve come to realize that small talk is rife with missed connections, awkwardnesses, grumpy men and women who’ve got no time to chat – but that’s not personal.  Most conversations fail, at least on the level that I wanted them to succeed, which was to say “Hi, I know no one here, maybe we can be friends.”
But by presenting this shiny happy world as though walking away with friendship was the norm, these cheerful tutorials dug out the quivering remains of my self-esteem and crushed it.
And that’s what I thought of when I read this Erika Moen cartoon on consent.

Click to see the full comic, as you should!

I adore Oh Joy, Sex Toy!, and this is a perfect example why: the first half of this is absolutely wonderful, talking about how consent works and how consent doesn’t, discussing badgering and drunk people in clear, perfect, and very nonjudgmental ways.  I love how Erica creates a universe where there’s no shame about sex, as that is largely the world I live in, and boy is it wonderful.
But then we get to the second half, the one where every sexual act is explicitly negotiated in advance like you’re interviewing for a job, and, well….
…I hear the cheerful voice of my self-help books postulating yet another parallel existence.
What we have here is a world where everyone sits down sanely whenever they discover an attraction, having decided via some meeting that “Yes, sex is about to happen” – and before they move forward to the kissing stage, they have coffee and plot out what will happen in the course of the evening.  I imagine schedules: 8:15 p.m, kissing starts, 8:30 the shirts come off, 8:45 unleash the oral sex.
And that’s a world I’ve certainly visited.  Just this last weekend, I exchanged several emails with a girl I was going to play with, detailing what I would do to her nipples (not much, as she’d just gotten pierced) and what sort of cuddling I’d need afterwards, and it went as planned.
But this world of consent here has nobody who just starts kissing someone and has it go from there.  It has no conflicts, where you were really getting off on doing X, and now he doesn’t want to do X, and while you’re okay with that now the sex is less interesting.  It has no surprises.
And most importantly, it’s a world where everyone knows their desires expressly and is fearless about revealing them.  It’s a world where a tentative “Uh… sure, I guess?” is seen as a lukewarm “No,” because that’s not enthusiastic consent, whereas some of my most fulfilling sexual experiments came from me being hesitant about The Thing, even maybe a couple of minutes into The Thing, but eventually discovering that The Thing was awesome.
I’ve got no problems outlining my kinks.  But I can easily envision that ice, breaking – for me telling you “Sucking my nipples will send me into orbit” is a small frozen puddle, but I know there are people trapped beneath the ice-rimed lake.
There’s power in positing a world without negatives.  I know that.  There’s all kinds of storylines that erase the microaggressions that, say, minorities face in the course of their lives, presenting a world where everyone just gets along, and those narratives often provide power.  Minorities read these worlds where they’re accepted as easily as a hug, and that lets them dream a world that they then work to create.
Unfortunately, lots of other people see that fantasy world and go, “Well, that’s how things are now!” and act as though the war has been won – and furthermore, that anyone who does get shunned or discriminated against must be somehow making that up.
Making worlds where everything Just Works has both the power to inspire, and the power to isolate.  And in this idealized version of Consent Culture, I worry we’re leaving people behind – the folks who aren’t as in touch with their sexuality as we all should be, the folks who are embarrassed to discuss what really turns them on, the folks who are more instinctive than intellectual about their sexuality.
It’s a new culture we’re creating these days, and in most ways I totally support it.  This is the first generation we’ve had where information on sexuality was easily accessible thanks to the Internet, and now we’re creating a new and exciting world where we talk about sex in great and happy and shameless new ways.  The rise of Consent Culture has created great spaces, and it’ll continue to, so I hope this brand of discussion continues.
But the world isn’t perfect, and I think that too many people go “Consent is easy!  You just say yes enthusiastically!” when really, what’s happening here is that they’re mapping their preferred method of interaction across a complex and shifting spectrum of personalities.  And since it’s easy for me to do that, it’d be easy for me to go, “Yeah, this is simple!”
Then I remember the people who were good with small talk.  I remember how the culture I grew up in expected me to be skilled at talking to strangers, and if I couldn’t do that, well, you know how not to be lonely, Ferrett.  Chat up someone at a bar.  It’s that easy!
Except it never was that easy, and it still isn’t.  And somewhere, there’s someone who’s hearing about how easy consent is except their sexual desire is this boiling cauldron of scary feelings that dries up into nothingness whenever they express it, and they’ve tried to negotiate the way that everyone says but it’s so intense that they just walk away.
You don’t deserve loneliness.  What you deserve is a culture flexible enough to accommodate multiple pathways to satisfaction.

How I Write Novels: Choosing The Foundation Song

One of the weird things about learning to write is that habits just crop up organically.  Your power’s out, so you write something by longhand, and determine that you’re the writer who works best writing in pen.  A few years later, you have discovered that your best works come out of a Moleskine notebook, with a blue fountain pen, in the atrium of the library.
It seems vaguely silly, and perhaps a bit pretentious at times, but you don’t question when the stories start flowing.  So you bow to the muse and hope you do not eventually break underneath an accreted layer of accumulated quirks.
For me, I need a song to write a novel.
I discovered this when I was writing my (as yet unpublished) novel The Upterlife.  I don’t usually have music on when I’m writing; as a musician, I find myself drawn to the beat of the drums, and then I’m paying attention to “What drum fills would I have used here?” than my story.  But when I was driving and plotting, Rise Against’s Re-Education (Through Labor) came on:

And when I heard that raw rage pouring out of my speakers, it seemed to summarize the dystopic future I was envisioning: rusted, built upon the backs of kids who didn’t have a choice, passionate in all the ways that the establishment wasn’t.  I put it on repeat.
Later on in the drive, when I got stuck on “What would my hero Amichai do?” I put on that song again.  And somehow, Rise Against put me into his head, and those plot problems unknotted themselves spontaneously.  It was like the soundtrack to my personal movie, except only that one song worked.
Then, later on, when I was writing my (upcoming) novel Flex, I had similar problems on a cross-country drive.  The novel opens with the apartment of a middle-aged Dad catching fire, so the Talking Heads’ “Burning Down The House” caught my attention.  And sure enough, when I listened to David Byrne’s plaintive voice, I got into Paul’s confusion and bewilderment that his life was now crashing down around his shoulders because he’d become a magician:

You’d think it was just the title that inspired me, but I listened to all my other songs about fire and middle-aged disaster: nothing. Only this song and this one song would recenter me whenever I got lost in my discovery draft.
The mechanics of it don’t make sense to me.  When I wrote the sequel, I was all like, “Okay, the original was a 1980s song, the next song will be some other 1980s hit.”  But no.  The next novel in the series is all about the chaos and destruction caused by the events in the first novel and how that falls out among the family, so what song caught my ear when I was driving and plotting?

The lyrics to that don’t even make sense. But it summarized desperation in a way that I couldn’t engage with otherwise. When I wrote the battle sequences, with ‘mancers taking down cops in gouts of fire, this is what I listened to about 200 times.
So this time, I gave in. Tomorrow I’ll be starting my next novel in a delayed attempt to hop on the NaNoWriMo bandwagon, and I realized this weekend that I hadn’t found the song that was a sort of bastardized theme song for it. And this novel is going to be about the quest for fine cuisine in a space opera setting, based on all my deep love of cooking shows and Michelin restaurants and Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and I needed a song that expressed some inchoate version of beauty – an ethereal hopefulness that among the hardscrabble death and destruction, there was still something worth fighting for.
I drove, auditioning songs on my iPod, flicking through the 1300 songs one by one, discarding each in turn. I came close a couple of times – weirdly enough, Dar Williams’ “As Cool As I Am” summarized a lot of the romance – but eventually I found that swelling idea of everything I needed to write this:

And as I drove, that plucking of a banjo reminding me a little of Firefly, I envisioned driven chefs and rich madmen carving a trail through the void, and the plot unspooled into my head as though it were being beamed in from some distant star.
It’s beauty. It’s inexplicable.
It’s process, and you don’t question it.

Just Happy Moments I Wish To Record

I had quite a few people yesterday telling me, “Well, I haven’t read your novel Flex yet, but…”  To which I responded, “That’s good, because it’s not due out until 2015.”  Angry Robot has yet to even reveal the cover yet, though I’m told that awesomeness is coming soon.
But I did slip a copy to a good friend of mine, because he asked.  And because frankly, Jeremiah has been having a tremendously shitty year, as he’s recovering from multiple brain surgeries, and had a pretty traumatic experience in at least one of them.  So I sent him a copy of Flex – not even a cool ePub version, just the raw Word document I edited it in – figuring that I’d hear back from him in a few weeks.
Or not.  I mean, when I was recovering from my open-heart surgery, it took me months to read again between the painkillers and the bodily trauma. I figured brain surgery was worse.  It was only my ribs and my heart that got cut up, not my essential sweetmeats.
Then, three hours after I sent him the document, I got this email:
“Over the course of the last month or two I haven’t been able to read anything longer than 5 pages in one sitting. My brain just fluttered away from anything I was supposed to be concentrating on.
“I’m on page 107 of Flex. I will probably finish the book before tonight.”
And at 8:00 that evening, I got a text from him telling me that he had, in fact, read the entire damn book in one sitting.
That makes me deeply happy.
Not because he thinks the book is good, though obviously he does.  But because I remember my own frustration in the months after the triple-bypass, trying so hard to read, feeling my gaze just drift away from the page, knowing that one of my old delights had been stolen from me. And then, one night, I sat down to read Robert Jackson Bennett’s American Elsewhere, which remains one of my favorite books – partially because it’s a kick-ass book, but partially because that was the post-surgery book that took me by the hand and showed me yes, you’ll still find joys in reading.
I remember sliding through the first hundred pages of that, enthralled by how easy it was, and enthralled by my enthrallment, thinking Oh my God, I’m back.  Normality was now in sight again.  And when you’re recuperating from full-body trauma, having an experience that reminds you of what normal is can be so fucking powerful.
And for me to be able to pass that on to someone else feels good.
I don’t know if Flex will sell well.  I don’t know if it’ll be reviewed well.  I don’t know if any of you will actually like it on any level, once it’s out.
But this is a moment that I’ll cherish, even if everything else collapses.  I was That Book for someone.  And that feels good.
(Incidentally, still sorting through crit requests on the road, on a pretty spotty connection.  You’ll hear from me before next week, and thank you if you offered.)

Would You Like To Critique The Sequel To My Novel?

So I’ve finished the sequel to my upcoming novel Flex, and now is the time that I send it to my usual group of beta readers.
The problem: I need four or five beta readers who haven’t read the first book.  Because inevitably, someone who hasn’t read the first book will pick up this one, and I want to know whether it’ll make any sense to them.
So!  If you’re willing to read for me, contact me at theferrett@theferrett.com.  (Don’t expect to hear back immediately; I’m driving to New Jersey to present at a conference, but I’ll get to ya.)  Priority will be given to published writers and/or people who’ve critiqued my stories before.  (And if you have read Flex already, either because you blurbed it or reviewed it or whatever, you automatically can beta-read for me if you want.  I just didn’t wanna bug you.)
What I am not looking for is an proofreader.  When a story’s in this early a draft, entire scenes will be dropped, characters may be re-motivated, whole plotlines may be shifted like writhing anacondas – and so I couldn’t care less whether there’s a misspelled word in a chapter that I’m going to rewrite from scratch.  What beta readers give are usually not line-edits, but overall impressions – does this person act like such an idiot that you stop rooting for them?  Did the Big Plot Twist feel cheesy?  Do these relentless references to Fight Club (hint: there are relentless references to Fight Club) make any sense if you haven’t seen the film?
Turnaround time is 6-8 weeks; I’d like to start redrafting come Christmas.  And thanks for thinking of me.

Whatever Happened To Salvatore?

I dreamed about Salvatore last night.
Salvatore was one of those freakish kids who’d achieved his full height in seventh grade – a muscular, bodybuilder’s height, complete with shaved head and wifebeater T-shirt.  He got away with bullying because he intimidated the teachers.
Salvatore was not a particularly subtle bully. His favorite technique was to watch the way you held your books.  If you did not clasp them to your chest – you know, like a girl was supposed to do – then he would bellow “OPEN CHEST!” and punch you, as hard as he could, in your stomach.  Pretty soon all the smaller guys in school were clasping their books to their chest, at which point Salvatore would make fun of you for holding your books like a giiirrrrul.
Though he was definitely a mixed-media bully.  Sometimes he’d rough you up in the locker room, just for a change-up.
I wasn’t one of Salvatore’s favorite targets, thankfully, but he was widespread enough that I caught a couple of suffocating hits to the gut.  I remember creeping around the hallways of middle school, forever on the lookout, paranoid for the next blow.  And last night, I dreamed I was locking the windows of my house against Salvatore, defending against his eventual incursion, only to discover that he was already in the house.
There’s probably a good solid Freudian interpretation of that dream, of course, given all the death we’ve suffered as of late.
But what I wondered was, What was Salvatore doing now?
For in my dream, Salvatore had grown, a colossal and angry and still-muscled man, still a bully, still relishing his physical power. He was frozen in the moment I knew him, almost thirty years ago.  Which is unreasonable .  Past a certain point, a man who yells “OPEN CHEST!” and punches random strangers on the bus ceases to be a bully and becomes a convict.  And he’d be pushing forty-five now, the age when men of physical strength start to feel it ebb, and that certainly would cause him to warp and change in different ways.  A bully like Salvatore wouldn’t have been able to be king of the middle school, he’d have to have gotten a job working for someone else, and certainly working as a hired hand would have taken the edge of his kingly violent demeanor.
That’s assuming, of course, that what he lived for was the thrill of the open chest.  He showed great glee whenever he punched me, of course, but that was my sole interaction with him.  It wasn’t like we hung out reading the newspapers and watching movies and discussing our dreams at the malt shop after the show, and then he buried his knuckles in my abdomen.  No, I didn’t know Salvatore in any way beyond thinking of him as a lurking menace.
Who the fuck was Salvatore?
Would Salvatore even remember me?  I doubt it.  Would he remember those days as his good old days, or – somehow worse – would he have forgotten who he was, having become a loving father and family man?  Were there grandchildren who loved their Grampops, never knowing there were men who had nightmares about him thirty years later?  It could be.  The past has a way of falling like snow over the worst of crimes, and by the time a man is old and feeble, a lot of complexity has been eroded.  Salvatore didn’t strike me as being the brightest bulb in the pack.  But some of my other bullies went on to become millionaire entrepreneurs (I know this because they apologized to me later for what they’d done in a truly bizarre high school reunion), and if I look back at my own past and go, “God, what an asshole I was back then,” then I have to think of Salvatore and allow for the possibility – not the certainty, but the possibility – that maybe he was going through his own stupid phase, egged on by other dumb kids to play a role that didn’t particularly suit him.
It’s possible Salvatore wakes up, dreaming of punching harmless boys in the chest, and wonders with a sort of existential terror, What was I doing?
People say Once a bully, always a bully, and of course there’s some truth to that.  But people also do tremendously stupid things as a teenager that they later regret tremendously, as they’re trying on all sorts of faces to see who they might be when they grow up – certainly I ran a lot of dumb pranks in my time, fuelled by the sort of relentlessly grim Howard Stern-inspired masculinity (which later mutated into 4-chan) that tells people that the only way to be strong is to dish out the strongest insults, and to endure them in exchange.  There were certainly people who saw me when I was 19 who thought that I was a bully, albeit a verbally abusive one, but…
…I’m not that guy any more.
Maybe Salvatore isn’t, either.
And maybe he is.  Some people never grow out of middle school.  But I always allow for the possibility of enlightenment, even if I wouldn’t necessarily invite Salvatore to a convention.
It’s one of the things we don’t like thinking about as humans, but it’s true regardless: Salvatore could have made some dumb mistakes that scarred people for life.  And those mistakes were made because Salvatore was like every kid at that age, relentlessly experimenting with personalities and traits, and he did irreparable damage even though who Salvatore eventually came to be was not a bully, but perhaps a kind and clever man.
But in my dreams, he still is.  And can never be anything but.
And probably, he pays absolutely no price for this.  Like I said, it’s unlikely that he remembers me at all.  He may not even remember his “OPEN CHEST!” beatings, having shrugged them off as just a thing he did once and now has no recollection of, a phase he had that amused him for a brief time and then was set aside, like the time I tried playing violin and discovered it hurt my fingers.
The past recedes in the rear-view mirror.  Only some people get to remember, and usually the ones who got hurt.
The others drive on, oblivious to that thumping beneath the wheels, not seeing the crumpled body left behind them.