How I Became A Real Writer

I get a lot of apologies, when people write to me.  They think that I’m just some blogger, and then they discover I’m actually a professional writer with a novel sold and a SFWA membership and one big-ass award nomination…
…and they cringe.  They’re not a Real Writer, they tell me.  And I am.  And they apologize for wasting my time.
It’s true, man.  I am a Real Writer.  But thankfully, having scaled that summit, I am here to give you poor nebbishes a helping hand and tell you how I, Ferrett Steinmetz, became a Real, Honest-To-God Fucking Writer:
I stopped worrying about it.
No, seriously.
That’s it.
Now, I’m not going to tell you that I didn’t have all sorts of neuroses about acquiring the right label before I made my third professional sale – five cents a word, motherfuckers, they cut me a check for $200, it paid a quarter of my mortgage bill – but looking back at it, my obsession about who was “really” writing and who wasn’t was actually a fucking handicap.  Because here’s the lesson I’ve learned in selling a shit-ton of stories:
1)  You do the best work you can possibly do.
2)  You do as much of the best work as you can possibly do.
3)  You send it out.
Again, that’s it.  That’s all there is, in my eyes, to being a Real Writer.
Because what I’ve come to realize in six years of hoo-hah Professional Writing is that nobody really knows what works.  My best stories, the ones I was positive I’d sell?  Got trunked after thirty rejections.  The story I thought was a silly waste of time?  Got me my Nebula nomination.
The truth is that if authors really had a good grip on what sold, we’d all be millionaires.
So all we can do is our best work.  And send it out.  And if we’re lucky, we connect with an audience, but I think every published author has at least one story they thought was at the bare level of acceptability that they’d put out with their name on it that became a beloved tale.  And I know they all have that one story they loved so hard and it disappeared without a trace.
The lesson of the Real Writer is that all it involves is doing your best work.  The rest?  Markets and guesswork.  You can put in a lot of effort, and not see much reward, and I think most writers have had that six-month dry period (or sixteen, or sixty) where nothing sold and they asked, “What the hell is wrong with me?”  And the answer is often – not always, but often – “You’re just not what they’re looking for.”
Looking back, my personal obsession with becoming a Real Writer back in the day was a handicap to me.  I kept reading the bones of more popular authors, wondering what I was doing wrong, wasting time trying to emulate them when really, I needed to highlight what made me unique.
I’m an awful carbon copy of Stephen King, but the more I work on honing my Ferrett Steinmetz impression, the better I do.
I pissed away a lot of time, trying to be a Real Writer, and that time sublimated away in self-analyzing and whining and panicking was time that I was not writing.  It put me farther away from my quest instead of closer to it.
Instead of being a Real Writer, I was instead spending my time being a Real Neurotic, and that was not at all helpful.
Now, there are some Busy Writers, and for them, yes, you have to understand that you’re one of a hundred people clamoring for their attention, and you might not get it.  And there are some Popular Writers, and I suspect many of them are vaguely surprised that this has worked out quite this well for them.  But a Real Writer?
You’re a Real Writer even if you’ve never had a publication.  You’re a Real Writer if nobody’s (yet) heard of you.  All you have to do is to follow the three steps: Write the best work you can possibly do, write as much of the best work as you can possibly do, and send it out.
And maybe you’re not doing that.  Maybe you’re not pushing yourself as hard as you should be, trying new techniques and new characters and new experiments.  Maybe you’re not writing as much as you could be doing, wasting your days on the X-Box and ignoring that tickle that you could be doing something more productive.  Maybe you’re keeping your work locked on your hard drive, not sharing it with anyone because my God what if they don’t like it.  (Hint: Someone will not.  If all you ever get is praise, you’re not sending it out to enough people.)
But if that’s the case, then I am the last person you should be apologizing to for not being a Real Writer. You know what you need to do to get there, and you’re only hurting yourself by not doing it.
Now get out there and write.

Birthday Musings: In Sickness And In Health

When I was young, I read an interview where Stephen King said this:

I used to tell interviewers that I wrote every day except for Christmas, the Fourth of July, and my birthday. That was a lie. I told them that because if you agree to an interview you have to say something, and it plays better if it’s something at least half-clever. Also, I didn’t want to sound like a workaholic dweeb (just a workaholic, I guess). The truth is that when I’m writing, I write every day, workaholic dweeb or not. That includes Christmas, the Fourth, and my birthday.

And I thought that sounded very badass.  A Real Writer wrote every day, hauling that laptop down to the coffee shop as some sort of show of how Hardcore you were.  A Real Writer was always cranking out new words because that’s how you wrote, like, seventy novels a year.  A Real Writer mashed keys.
So when I was young, I set out to write on My Birthday.  The most special day of the year.
Because writing was special.
And today is my birthday, and it’s not very special at all. I am laid up with an ear infection.  I got up at 9:45, went to the doctor for ninety minutes, then came back and slept until 2:30.  I am sapped with grief after Rebecca’s death, and I am sapped with energy with the own roiling mass of angry flesh throbbing inside my ear, and I have just asked my good friend Angie – not that I want to – whether she wants to reconsider coming down for the weekend, since I don’t know if I’ll be up.
I will also write.
Writing is not special.
I write every day, now, and most days I don’t go, “Oh, what inspiration will I unwrap from this golden-foil package hidden within my mind?”  I remember back to my old days, writing only when I was truly In The Zone, when I had a great idea that just burned within me to be unleashed, going fallow for weeks at a time and then cranking out several short stories in a feverish day.
And that process works for some people, don’t get me wrong.
But I write when I’m sick.  I write when I’m tired.  I write when I don’t have time.  I write when I’m uninspired.  I write when I have no good ideas.  I write when I have no hope that this story will ever be any good.  I write when I hate myself.  I write when I’ve failed.
No matter what happens in my life, I sit down, and I write.  The day after Rebecca’s death?  I wrote.  Three weeks after they cracked open my chest to operate on my heart?  A few months ago, I found a flashfic that I’d totally forgotten about, which I’d written deep in Ativan haze, over what turned out to be the course of a couple of days.  Because I write.
And it’s not magic.  It’s not badass.  It’s just what I do, relentless as stone, and…
That is magic.
The magic is a slow process, you don’t see it forming.  It’s a grim procession, knowing that no matter what happens, you must make the words.  But those words then come from every part of you.
Back when I wrote only when I was inspired, I wrote only of a manic energy.  Now I write from all colors of my spectrum – from despair, from exhaustion, from strength, from weakness.  I write from more creative places, because if I am coming up with bad idea after bad idea, then I will begin to think of things I never would have thought of had it been easy.  I write from more tones, because if I write in joy and edit in despair then I have not one me, but two mes looking over my words, and I am wiser in all my moods than in one.
And I work miracles.
I write things and move people in ways I never could have before, when I gave only the shiniest parts of me to my book.
And I am exhausted, now.  My ear throbs, my heart aches.  But after I finish this, I will write on my birthday.  Because this day is not special, and writing is not special, and me writing today is not special.
What I write is special.  And all things serve the beam.

Goddammit, STOP WITH THE LAZY GORDON RAMSAY ANALYSES

WARNING: I’m going to swear a lot in this essay, because that’s what Gordon wants me to do.
Here is a very stupid pet peeve, but it’s actually highlighting shitty data analysis everywhere.
For the fourth time that I’ve seen, someone has gone over the seasons of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, where he storms in and “saves” a failing restaurant, only to show that – shocker – most of these restaurants have gone out of business.  So people go, “Only 40% of the businesses survived, hurr hurr, Gordon must be terrible at this.”
Except a flea’s amount of insight would show you these are terrible fucking numbers, and you should know better.
First off, restaurants are a bad goddamned business.  Most of the restaurants in existence, Gordon Ramsay-enabled or not, don’t make it three years.  So you have to deal with a pretty high fatality rate to begin with.
And then you have to deal with the fact that these restaurants were financially shitholed when Gordon Ramsay showed up.  They weren’t just your “average” restaurant, they were a restaurant that is usually around a hundred thousand in debt.
And then Gordon Ramsay came in.  Was he effective?  I don’t know.  I’m a huge Gordon Ramsay fan, so I like to think he’s effective – but if you’re going to show me an analysis, you can’t just compare against the restaurants themselves.  These aren’t businesses – they’re terminal cancer patients, pretty much doomed to be gone soon without any intervention, so treating them like Gordon should have a 100% win rate is fucking stupid.
What you should do, if you’re trying to do a proper fucking analysis, is find a bunch of restaurants in similar bad shape – say, a over a threshold amount in debt with falling revenue – and track their survival rate over eight years.  Then compare those to Gordon’s assisted restaurants.  The difference is the actual amount Gordon helps.  Yes, Kitchen Nightmares’ save-rate is pretty poor, but one suspects that if you were to examine the “no Ramsay help” vs. “Ramsay help” you’d find that hey, actually there’s a huge gap.
But that would require journalists to do some actual goddamned work as opposed to checking Wikipedia and Yelp, and who can be expected to work that hard?
(And even then, you’d still have the issues that some restaurant owners completely ignored Gordon’s advice and reverted to their old ways weeks afterwards, and still others were so in debt they closed before the show even aired.  Yet even without removing those factors, I still suspect you want a Gordon Ramsay in your failing chefery, not that you can get it any more because goddammit Gordon get back here, I need your Kitchen Nightmares on my reality TV, this is the unkindest closing of all.)

Here's Why I'm An Introvert

A comment from Chess pointed out something interesting about my introversion: online communication doesn’t drain my introvert-batteries.  After a big party, I need to go somewhere quiet to recharge, but during that “quiet” time I’m replying to emails, I’m texting, I’m chatting.
And I realized: it’s because with online communications, I don’t need to monitor body language.
As a teenager, I was a very lonely kid because I didn’t really know how to talk to people.  And what you see here, in this journal, is the moral equivalent of some nerdy teen getting into Monty Python and memorizing every one of their routines – except instead of memorizing all of Monty Python, analyzing How People Work became my nerdy hobby.  So I spent a lot of time really thinking about how conversations worked, manually picking up on all the cues that tell you when someone’s interested and when they’re not, managing the flow and ebbs of conversations.
(Okay, I also memorized all of Monty Python.  BUT REGARDLESS.)
Yet for all of that effort I put in, when I am in public, it’s not a natural habit.  It’s like conducting an orchestra – I’m always glancing from person to person, going Oh, she’s drifting off and He looks like he wants to say something and Good, she laughed at my joke.  I’m weighing and conducting my potential responses, running everything through some algorithm to ensure that I’m not dominating the conversation.
Storytelling is natural to me.  But managing the responses of everyone?  That’s an effort.
I can do it almost subconsciously at this point, thankfully.  But even if I don’t have to explicitly consider all the elements any more, face-to-face socializing is a drain on my resources – to constantly be looking at all those faces and arms and bodies, calculating and recalculating what’s appropriate in this situation – and so after a while I get tired and need to rest.
Which is not every introvert!  My wife, when she’s feeling people-burnt, comes back home and doesn’t want to text, doesn’t want to email, doesn’t want to talk.  To her, I suspect, it’s the act of shaping thoughts into communications that drains her, whereas Mr. Blog here obviously does that without a second thought.
Yet every introvert, I suspect, has some aspect of social interaction which they can do well, but not subconsciously.  You don’t have to think about, say, brushing your teeth in the morning, but you do have to think about tying some new knot you’ve just learned.  And when you expend that kind of energy in something you’ve never quite managed to pick up by rote, it becomes a thing that you need time to recharge from.
For me, I think, if I was less thoughtful then I’d probably be an extrovert.  If I could just charge in and assume that everything was going well, then I’d never need to go home!  I’d be happy to spend time with people!  I like people!  I love people!  And I’d probably be less beloved, because I’d just assume everyone was happy if I was, but what the hell.  I’d be more comfortable in my own skin, instead of constantly thinking of parties as some complex biological organism that must be maintained through an elaborate series of feedback.
Which I do.  But they’re still fun for me.  I promise.

New Story! Totes By Me! "Four Scenes…" At Fantasy Scroll!

Today, you can read one of my beloved stories – it’s set in Cleveland, a little down the street from me, and it features one of my favorite protagonists.  It’s about time passing by new technologies, and friendships that form and never quite reset again.
This is an Ohio story all the way through, as it was inspired by a visit to a bed-and-breakfast where the owner was one of the first doctors to own an X-Ray.  It was an incredible, miracle machine when it all started, something that nobody could have imagined, and by the end of his career the X-Ray was barely even noticable in the welter of changes that had happened since then.  And Blockbuster was closing at the time, and I realized the little video shops were the same thing: this technological spasm that had started on a ground level as hobbyists, enabled a brief cottage industry of do-it-yourselfers, and then consumed.
So I wrote “Four Scenes From Wieczniak’s Whisk-U-Away, And One Not.”  The obligatory sample:

Have a seat, the two of you, and your little girl. You took a taxi here, as I requested? Oh, good. The mall owner, Mrs. Tiffin, she’s always hounding the police to tow away everyone’s cars. I tell her you’re my customers, travelers, you need a place to park overnight — but no, she claims you’re stealing spaces from the Hallmark store. That’s a valid complaint, I guess, since sometimes people are gone for weeks… but I’d like it to be more convenient for you. When you return, you should just step out of the dimensional gate from Perth, Australia, and into your car and whoosh, you’re home! Not sit around this old place waiting for a cab. But I have a taxi driver — a friend of mine, Gregor. He’ll get you back in a jiffy if you call ahead. He’s a good man. Reliable.
I’ll just put in the adjustments here — it takes a good fifteen minutes for the computer to figure out the mathematics of folding space correctly, even with the assistance of the computer on the other side of the gate….

You can read the rest of the story at Fantasy Scroll Magazine, an exciting new startup that, on its second issue, has already published tales by Mike Resnick, Ken Liu, Alex Shvartsman, and now me.  Watch out for these guys.  And now, read a tale of a small business owner who’s going to watch the world literally move for him…