I Am 12% Of The Best Podcast Fiction Of All Time

…at least I am according to David Steffen, who compiled his list of the Top 50 Podcast Fiction of All Time.  And I showed up six times on this list.
(My highest charting was #10, so I think that makes me like a really influential indie band.)
So in case you’re wondering (and there are many other good stories on that list to check out, if’n you like podcast fiction – check out Keffy in particular):

Posted by on Jul 9, 2014 in Current Ramblings | 0 comments

On The Republican National Convention And Sex Workers.

I had a Tweet up for about twenty seconds that I then took down, which was this:
“Cleveland is hosting the National Republican Convention in 2016. I hope we have enough hookers.”
Which is funny to me, man.  I honestly don’t know if Cleveland has enough prostitutes to service all the incoming conservatives, because past conventions have shown that man, these staid-in-the-wool motherfuckers go through sex workers like nobody’s business.  We may have to import.  I’m sure several of my sex worker friends are looking at their calendars and just planning a blowout weekend.
But I took the Tweet down, not because I thought it was inaccurate, but because I thought in a shorter version it’d pass on overtones I didn’t want to create.  It seemed to degrade sex workers to me (and no, for some reason “I hope we have enough sex workers” didn’t strike me as funny in the same way).
Which is a weird thing about being careful with your communications: It’s not that what you say isn’t funny, but that it also encourages people to not question things.  To me, a hooker or a sex worker or a prostitute or whatever the fuck you call them are people, worthy of rights and protections.  But I suspect a lot of the people who might pass that gag along would be the sort of people who’d see selling sex as the incontrovertible evidence of bad morals/life decisions/etc.
The real joke here is how the Republicans try to make kinky sex illegal, and yet crave it the same way we do.  But I’m not sure that Tweet got it across without punching downwards more than I’d like.
Okay, rant break over, back to work.

Posted by on Jul 8, 2014 in Current Ramblings | 3 comments

You Get What You Give: How A Potato Salad Can Teach You To Run A Good Donation Drive

I had a friend who wanted very badly to go overseas.  Sadly, I can’t remember why she wanted to go overseas – we’ll get to that – but what I do remember was her disastrous donation drive.
She set up an Indiegogo account – a.k.a., “The place we go when we’re pretty sure a Kickstarter would fail” – and set up various tiers of rewards if she got enough money to go overseas: little tiny things like postcards, et al.  And what I remember was that the tier pattern went something like this:

  • $30 – I will write you a personalized Tweet when I am in Czechoslovakia.

That’s where I started to feel a bit… insulted?  Overlooked?  Taken for granted?  Not a good feeling when I’m being asked to reach into my wallet.
As a writer, for me, being paid six cents a word – a word – is called “professional rates,” meaning it’s what the top-tier markets get.  And this campaign designed to induce me to give my friend money was giving them Tweet-rights of two cents per letter.
And I Tweet a lot.  I know how much time I spend composing a very thoughtful Tweet, which is at best three minutes.  So what my friend was saying to me, quite literally, was, “I think three minutes of my time is worth several hours of your paycheck while I relax on the beach in foreign lands.”
Already I was feeling a little dazed here.  And then I got to the next tier, which was something like:

  • $50 – I will allow you access to the personalized blog where I detail my trip to Czechoslovakia.

That’s when I thought, oh, no, no, you’re doing it all wrong.  My friend was thinking entirely about what she wanted, the trip, and how much work each tier would be for her, then pricing them accordingly.  Which is the wrong way to look at it.
Here’s the secret to every donation drive – and keep in mind, I’ve run quite a few – the donation drives are never about what you want.
Every donation drive is about how you make the donator feel.
That’s actually true of every piece of written communication, but is especially true when you’re asking people to give you money.  When you do a donation drive, you are not trying to go to Czechoslovakia – you are trying to make a total stranger feel excited about getting you to Czechoslovakia.  And as such, your entire focus must be answering the question, “Why would someone who doesn’t know me feel wonderful about helping me to go on this trip?”
The whole reason I’m writing this now is because there is an infamous Kickstarter for potato salad – literally, the entire point was “If this funds, I will make myself some potato salad” – and it is, as of this morning, it is funded at $37,500 with 24 days left to go.  And I had several baffled sick friends saying, “I held a donation drive to pay off my crippling doctor’s bills and stalled out at $150, and this guy gets thousands for a goddamned potato salad?”
Yes.  Because potato salad guy actually seemed like fun.  It was goofy to even ask for such a thing, and funny, and people felt like “Hey, a guy like this I feel good about throwing away $1 to.”  In other words, “He provided me with $1 worth of amusement.”  And several thousand people joined in.
And watch carefully, my friends, as to how he reacted when all this escalated: did he hunker down when his stretch goals were made?  Hell no.  When this started to go viral, the dude said, “Well, hell, if people want this, I will throw a potato salad party,” and threw open a call for anyone in the area to come on down to Columbus and make some potato salad with him and dance around in the joy of potato salad.  The potato salad guy sounds like a fun time!  Hell, he’s in Columbus, I am damn tempted to go down for his potato salad fiesta.
The question is, did your donation drive provide $1 worth of entertainment?
Look, I’ve raised somewhere in the range of $5,000-$10,000 for Rebecca Alison Meyer, my goddaughter who died of brain cancer a month ago.  And that’s not nearly as celebratory fun as a potato salad party, but the reason I was so successful – as people have told me time and time again, sometimes to my chagrin – is that “You made Rebecca come alive for me.”  Being a writer, I tugged on your heartstrings to feel empathy for a beautiful spitfire of a girl that you’d never met, and so many of you donated to CureSearch for Cancer in her name.
I hesitate to use the term “entertainment” for such an awful travesty, but the point is people felt good either way about donating.  They felt like it was worth their money, emotionally.  And too many people, like my friend, get caught up on the tiers of rewards, thinking, “What can I churn out?” and forgetting that the rewards are merely another way of making people feel more excited about donating.
And when I see these medical donation drives, what I see is often a relentless stew of pain: “I’m miserable and broke and have to buy duct tape to hold in my shattered skull.  If you donate $5, well, it won’t actually make a dent in this mountain of medical debt I have, it’s all hopeless really, but if you’ll let me weep on you for some time I’ll send you a postcard to remind you exactly how little of a difference you made.”
Then they get no traction.
No, man, if I was poor enough to need funding to, say, buy myself some new glasses, I would ask this simple question: “Why would people feel good about giving me money to buy glasses?”  And by proxy, “What could I tell them to make them feel empathy – to make them go, ‘Aw, man, I’ll feel happy if this balding dude in Cleveland gets his glasses’?”
And I’d think, “Well, I have all these books I want to read.”  And I’d start making a list of all the books I’m excited about reading but can’t, but could if you helped me, then talk about these upcoming books and the very specific reasons I’m excited about reading them – going on about my love of, say, Jo Walton or Stephen King or Robert Bennett – and make you feel excited with me.
And then I’d say, “Why, I’d be so grateful if you helped me with these glasses, for $30 I’ll buy a book that you love and read it and tell you all the lovely things about it!”
Would that work?  I don’t know.  But I do know it’d work better than, “I’m broke and I need glasses, give me the cash.”
The lesson about Kickstarter or Indiegogo or any donation drive is that you get what you give.  My friend shouldn’t have made her blog a $50 tier – the blog access should have been for donation $1, the lowest possible level, telling people, “If you sign up in any way, I will let you into my world and tell you of all the wonders I find in Czechoslovakia.”  As it is, honestly, I don’t remember why my friend wanted to go to Czechoslovakia, which is a sign of how badly the drive was presented to me – she was my friend, I cared about her, and I couldn’t tell you what it meant to her aside from a thrusting hand in my face.
And, of course, her donation drive didn’t get anywhere.  What happened was what happened with most of the donation drives: her close friends gave what they could, a handful of acquaintances pitched it, and it stopped there because if you didn’t know my friend, well, this donation page would not have told you a darned thing about her.  She was very sad, even if she was resistant to changing her donation page because she’d worked so hard on it.
The lesson: be the potato salad.  Even if you’re sick and life is terrible, find a way to get people invested in your journey.  Give them only things that make them feel more invested in your journey.  Make them feel triumph when you succeed, and I can’t guarantee you’ll get potato salad money, but you’ll get more than you would have.  For sure.
(And if you’re looking for a good couple to donate to, may I suggest helping my friends Jeff and Tracy Spangler?  It couldn’t hurt.)

Posted by on Jul 8, 2014 in Current Ramblings | 3 comments

My East Coast Book Release Party: Word Bookstore in Brooklyn, On October 24th!

Hello, glorious mortals!
If you’ve been living under a rock, you may have missed that a) I sold a novel, and b) that novel is coming out on September 30th.  Or that I have a West Coast Release Party in San Francisco on October 11th.
But now?  I have an East Coast Release Party on October 24th at 7:00 at the Word Bookstore in Brooklyn!  I have not been to Word yet, but several people told me, “Awww, man, you have to see this store, it’s pretty amazing,” and so I shall.  And I’ll do a reading/Q&A/signing there! (And afterwards, I’ll almost certainly go out for drinks and hang out for a bit, because this is a celebration of fourteen years of work.)
So if you’re excited about my debut novel, and you’re anywhere within driving distance, I’ll say, “Hey, come on out and see me!  I’ll bring donuts – which, once you’ve read the novel, you’ll understand says something quite important about you all.” 
Remember: East Coast Release Party October 24th, West Coast Release Party October 11th.  I’ve allllmost got the details down for the too-critical Cleveland release party, and hopefully should have something for you by next week.  Also, since it’s been suggested and within driving distance, maybe a Detroit release party for all my pals out there.  But maybe that’s one too many release parties, I dunno.)
You may also ask, “Ferrett, what about a [My Neighborhood] Release Party?”  And the answer is that “Ferrett has a limited amount of vacation time, and family to visit on both coasts.  These Release Parties are tremendously exciting but also a net loss in cash, as there’s no way I’ll sell enough books to fund the driving trip and hotel stay to NYC – so alas, this is not so much ‘a book tour’ as ‘Ferrett thinks this would be fun to visit his Dad and throw this in.’”  While I’d love to visit your home town, I don’t have that kinda money to burn.
But you can still order Flex from any number of bookstores in advance.  Which would be nice.  Authors live or die on preorders, so if you’re not gonna attend a release party but wanna celebrate, you can do a little dance when Flex arrives on your doorstep.
And that, my friends, is the end of today’s marketing shill!  Move on.  Feel joy.  Walk about.

Posted by on Jul 7, 2014 in Current Ramblings | 0 comments

Roll For SAN.

About ten times a day, I think: “I held a six-year-old girl as she died.”
Then I think: “Roll for SAN.”
I think this without irony, or merriment.  I grew up on roleplaying games.  They formed large portions of my thought process.  And when I say “Roll for SAN,” this is a reference from Call of Cthulhu, a popular game based on the horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft.
In the game, investigators start out with a Sanity statistic.  This is ranked as a number between around 85 and 0.  As you play through the game, and unveil the eldritch horrors, you are asked to roll against your Sanity stat.  If you fail, you lose Sanity.  (Sometimes, if the horror is sufficiently large, you lose some Sanity even if the roll succeeds.) Take too large a hit to your existing Sanity, and you go temporarily insane.
And I keep wondering: What is the Sanity roll for watching a small, beloved girl die?  Literally holding her as her breath stops?  Is it 1d6, 1d8, 1d10?  I’ve gone back and looked at the Delta Green books – they have a cold-hearted government clinician, Dr. Yrjo, who does horrendous psychological experiments upon captive prisoners.  They provide samples of the experiments, along with a list of the SAN losses for each thing, and I think for me it’s somewhere between 1d8 and 1d10.
This matters to me, because I am insane on some levels.  Mildly so, but I have taken a hit.
This did not occur to me until Gini pointed out that we must have driven home at some point after Rebecca’s body was loaded into the hearse.  We must have.  We know who was staying in the house then, and there were no empty rooms.  Which means that we drove home, presumably talking on the way, went to bed with each other, got up, showered, shaved, and
I have no memory of any of that.  Portions of my mind are wiped clean with grief.
And my actions are indistinct.  Both Gini and I have acquired a mild agoraphobia, wherein the crowds at the supermarket make us both nervous.  We retreat to home, curl up on the couch, don’t speak. I forget things easily now; we have the same factual conversations over and over again, where Gini forgets when DetCon is (in two weeks) and I cannot understand what plans we’ve made.  I now have a quivering sense of dread whenever I see the Meyers’ house, a feeling of returning to the scene of the crime.
It’s not debilitating, not totally.  But our shaky minds are a constant undertow. Our thoughts rattle in the wind now, a reminder of how fragile this foundation is.
And I keep thinking: We are too far from death.  Our ancestors, they dealt with this on a regular basis.  They had to look this directly into the eye.  And were they stronger, or us weaker, or did people simply see this diffusion as the background noise of a violent and cold universe?
Tommy died in the hospital.  I didn’t see him.  They cleaned him up off-stage, brought him out for the funeral like a prop.  Same with my Grammy, and my Gramma, and my Grandpop.  In my experience, death is something that arrives via a phone call, a nurse sounding sad, a relative trying not to cry.  It’s not…
…this was different.
And again, I think, “Roll for SAN.”  This is not an experience I’ve had.  A man should be a little shaky after watching his goddaughter die, goddammit.  Not watching in the sense that I saw Tommy die, which is to say watching the slow ebb of what the diseases stole from him, but watching in the sense that I stayed until a beautiful girl became a body.  And though I’d prefer my recovery happen on my schedule, it should take a while to rewire oneself to hook yourself back into the flow of life.  The world, it doesn’t stop spinning, which helps in a way.  Things continue to happen.  Software deadlines must be met.  Books must be written.  Tours must be scheduled.
“Roll for SAN.”  It’s all harder, though.
Yet I think of the only way not to be affected by Sanity loss at all: you lose it all, at which point the GM takes your character sheet from you.  You’re not you any more, at least not as you had defined yourself.  You’re something too used to death, too bereft of hope, too estranged from this enwebbed illusion we call humanity to be a true person any more.
“Roll for SAN.”
I am marking it off on my character sheet.
I am staggering forward.
I am lucky that I still have some left to lose.

Posted by on Jul 6, 2014 in Current Ramblings | 4 comments