Two Sales! "Shadow Transit" To Buzzy Mag, And "Shoebox Heaven" to ASIM!

I’m pretty weird about announcing sales; everyone else yells out their triumph when they get the email.  Me?  Paranoid, I wait for the contract.  But I’m going to try to change things up.
The first sale is an extremely happy one, as it’s a very special story about a mother trying to deal with the ramification of Cthulhu.  “Shadow Transit” is the first (and only) tale I’ve ever written that inspired a fellow workshop writer to pen a story in the same universe, with the same characters.  (And I sincerely hope George sells that story somewhere!  He did a great job!)
“Shadow Transit” bounced around for a while, getting wonderful feedback from editors who rejected it because it’s a weirdie tale – too horror-tinged for science fiction mags, too science-fictiony for the straight horror tales.  People seemed to like it (and I even got a few rewrite requests), but it never seemed to land.  Fortunately, Buzzy Mag – an up-and-coming professional zine who’s already published some great writers – has taken it.  Now, my Delta Green-inspired story about a mother trying to care for her insane child will find a home.  And I’m happy.  Even if my lead characters aren’t.
The second sale is “Shoebox Heaven,” which is a story that’s gotten some bizarre reactions.  I’ve had slush readers come up to me at cons and ask, “Hey, did you ever sell that story about the boy flying to heaven to find his dead cat?”  Not once, but twice.  Even if the editors didn’t buy it, clearly “Shoebox Heaven” made an impression.  And I actually did sell it once, to an anthology that dicked me around for a year and ultimately collapsed.  Fortunately, even though I have yet to get the contract, I trust Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine – you may remember them for publishing my time travel story “The Backdated Romance” – and they have taken it! So yay!  You will eventually get to read the tale of the kid who flies to meet some very angry angels.
 

Son, I Am Disappoint: The Terror Of OBAMACARE

If I was a kid listening to the news, I’d think OBAMACARE was some troll that lived under a bridge and ate people’s hearts.  The word gets tossed around like a football – and I mean that literally.  Have the Democrats fumbled OBAMACARE?  No, wait, the Republicans have got their hands on it!  No, wait, the Supreme Court saved OBAMACARE!  Who’s winning in the great OBAMACARE game?
And I’m pissed at Obama, because for a legislative package that’s literally got his name on it, he doesn’t seem to care that anyone understands what it does.
Look, I voted for Obama on the strength of one book: The Audacity of Hope made me think, “Man, this is a guy who knows how to communicate complicated ideas.  This is who I want in office, pushing my Democratic agenda.”
Instead, what I got was a genius politician.  Seriously.  For all of the Republican smear campaigns crying, “Why, he’s as inexperienced as a child!  He’ll paw like a confused kitten at the levers of government if elected!”, they forgot that Obama got his start in backroom-dominated Chicago, and wouldn’t have gotten as far as he had if he didn’t understand the rules of the game.  So he snuck through Obamacare in what was a magnificent act of legislative juggling, making all the right concessions to do something no other President has ever been able to do.
The problem is, he was so busy getting shit done in the halls of Congress that he forgot to speak to the streets.  And FOX News and company dominated the conversation, talking about OBAMACARE as though it was a dirty bomb someone had smuggled into a church.  Did the man on the street know what OBAMACARE did?  Fuck no.  But he DID know that Obama had pulled off kind of a sneaky trick to pass it, and Obama certainly hadn’t stumped for it in the same way he’d run for election, and he decided that OBAMACARE didn’t pass the sniff test.
So America dislikes it.  And they STILL don’t fucking know what it does.  The number of times I saw this “Explain Obamacare to me like I’m five” link passed around Twitter by people expressing surprise (“Oh, it does THAT?”) by progressives was amazing.  Here’s Twitter, where people are usually a little more politically involved, and here’s liberals, who should have a good grasp on the overall picture, and they’re still like, “What?”  To this day, when I’ve seen people polled on the individual things that Obamacare provides, and the results appear to be, “Yeah, I like that.  And I like that.  And that’s good.  But I despise OBAMACARE like it was the love child of Hitler and Sauron!”
I do not think, as many conservatives would have me believe, that the man on the street has done a complex analysis of the many contributing factors of the insurance companies and the overall economic picture and the long-term effects and come on the downside.
I believe, rather, that Obama’s done such an astonishingly shitty job of touting his plan that people don’t actually know what benefits it provides.
So now that it’s officially here to stay, why isn’t Obama taking ads out in every state talking about what OBAMACARE does?  Why aren’t there thirty-second commercials saying, “My child got cancer, and when I switched jobs the insurance company told me they wouldn’t insure him because, well, he had cancer.  Thanks to Obamacare, they can no longer deny children for pre-existing conditions.”  Or “My insurance company turned me down for treatment for my emphysema.  No reason.  They didn’t have to tell me why, and if I didn’t like it all I could do was hire a lawyer.  Now, thanks to Obamacare, there’s an appeals process I can go to without having to spend $2,000 to retain an attorney.”
Why is Obama so concerned with passing laws and so little concerned with changing hearts?  There’s a lot that people like in this bill, and he’s inextricably associated with it.  If people think better of it, they’ll think better of him.  So why is OBAMACARE still treated like a ticking time bomb that Jack Bauer needs to defuse, its innards mysterious?
That’s fucktastic long-term politics.  Yes, Obama, you passed the law and the Supreme Court, by luck more than skill, upheld it.  (I don’t think anyone saw Roberts coming down on your side, son.)  But because America’s still treating OBAMACARE like it’s a tumor in the genitals, but if they understood it, then at least they’d see that there are tradeoffs.
Obama needs to start using some of the Audacity of Hope on America, explaining the healthcare bill’s strengths in a bombardment.  Otherwise, it’ll remain so hated that legislators will have voter support in getting rid of it, without the voters even really understanding what they’re doing.
(And yes, he’ll get pushback from the Republicans on it, but at this point Obama literally can’t talk about pushups without Republicans bitching about it.  Blowback is not an excuse for inaction, because frankly there are enough stupid-crazy conservatives who feel Obama’s doing too much by drawing breath.)

"The Insomniac Treehouses" Is The Name Of My Next Band

So I was going to write a big ol’ essay on The Need For Predicting The Future today, but this weekend’s insomnia killed it.  I got five hours of sleep on Friday night, three hours on Sunday, and fortunately I slept well last night but now I’m drunk on sleep and damn near falling into snoozeland on my keyboard.
So instead, I’m gonna ask you to do a thought exercise.  If you’re a member of the Clarion Echo, my Blog-A-Thon writing community where I’m plotting my current novel (join for a mere $5 donation to the cause!), you’ll know why I’m asking you, but if not, well, y’all can just wonder.  But let us posit this:
You are fourteen.  You live near some deep woods.  A friend of yours has created the most kickass tree-house you can imagine, next to a waterfall and some caves, devoting hundreds of hours to its creation: it’s not just in the trees, but a sprawling, Winchester Mansion-style home looped among the hills and open spaces.  It has no electricity (she’s opposed to hauling a generator out here on principle), but it can have anything else a dedicated teenager could haul through two miles of dense woods out to the spot.
What’s the coolest thing in it?
 

Why I Can't Tell You That I'm Mad At You (Yet)

If I’m upset with you, I’m not going to tell you right away.  This strikes many as a form of punishment.  There I am, withdrawing my attention, talking with you as little as possible, and not sharing what I’m feeling.
It’s a pain in the ass, I admit.  Were I truly together person, I’d be able to tell you right away!  “Hey, you stepped on my feelings there, that hurt.”  And we’d clasp hands in greater friendship, right?
Sadly, no.
I suffer from a disease called Only Child Syndrome, to a horrifying degree.  I was the first grandchild in my family for six years, which meant for my entire early childhood I was lavished with presents and attention in a way that no child should ever endure.  Aunts and Uncles feted me, my every accomplishment was lauded, my every quirk tolerated lovingly.
It made me a monster.
I joke about it to this day: “Oh, ha ha, I was born on July 3rd and it took me seven years to realize the fireworks weren’t actually for me.”  But no, seriously, think about the kind of mindset it would take, even as a young child, to consistently think that the entire world would get together to hold a party for him.  That was just the way the world worked for me.  People did nice things for me all the time.
As I grew up, my OCS turned into a crippling handicap.  My family was aggressive with therapy, this being the everybody-talks-it-out 1970s, and so not only was I encouraged to have emotions – but was taught that when you had a problem, no matter how small, you should go hash it out with a nice big discussion.  This shattered my hopes of having a steady girlfriend for years, because basically I had been trained two things:
1)  I should get everything I want, ever.
2)  If I’m not getting it, I should complain until I do.
What that meant in practice is that I had zero sense of self-control.  Most people would go, “Okay, she’s just come back from an eighteen-hour shift at a job she hates, she hasn’t eaten, and her mother’s in the hospital – maybe she has a right to be a little snippy.”  But no, Mister OCS here would go, “Really, you should be nicer to me,” and wham.  Huge fight.
It took me a long time to learn that my childhood had inadvertently trained me to be butt-hurt about everything.  Hey, did you read my Entertainment Weekly before I did?  That was my Entertainment Weekly!  How dare you?  And so it went, where I’d just keep barraging everyone with the slightest discomfort I had until they got sick of me and went away.
With Gini’s love and diligent training, I have learned to blunt the edges of my OCS.  Yet I still get pissy more than I should.  I’ll still get furious whenever someone takes the seat I wanted at the movie theater – but now I go, “Okay, dude, you’re one seat over from your ideal location.  And it’s not like she thought ‘Oh, that’s the best seat, I’m stealing it just to spite him!’ even though you’re sure she must have known how badly you wanted it.  This isn’t a fucking incursion, it’s you overreacting.”
So whenever I’m hurt, I have to do an OCS compensation check – yes, you’re irritated, Ferrett, but is this really worth discussing?  And particularly if it’s a deep hurt, sometimes I have to do some internal digging and figure out whether this is just me being a whiner baby.  So I’ll withdraw for a bit while I try to intellectually dissect the problem and figure out whether this is a) a valid concern that should be discussed, or b) eight-year-old me getting pissy because his birthday cake isn’t chocolate.
That takes me a while.  And yes, it’s a pain.  I’m sorry, because it means there is often a day or two where I don’t respond well to texts or emails as I hash this out.  But it’s a workaround that winds up ultimately being better, because for every absence you notice, there’s probably ten absences where OCS-boy has thought it over and gone, “Nope, that’s just you being unreasonable.  Can it.”
It’s not my brightest side, I admit.  But as a workaround for a fundamentally-flawed psyche, it’s the best I can do.  I’ve put a lot of effort into speeding up my OCS processing power, optimizing routines so that sometimes, I’m over my internal hissy-fit before you’re finished sitting down in that theater seat I wanted.  But there are times where everything slows to a crawl and I have to wait until an hour later to finally bring it up.  Even if, in many cases, you would have cheerfully altered your behavior had I told you, and the delay means that you feel bad because you hurt me needlessly.
Trust me.  While I know it’s vexing, sadly, the alternative is currently worse.

How Would You Like To Be A Part Of The Supernatural Ops Core?

Myke Cole is one of the up-and-coming superstars of the military sci-fi world.  And I was excited to read his debut novel Shadow Ops #1: Control Point, as basically it’s the X-Men told from the army’s point of view – what happens when you put superpowered wizards under military discipline and training, complete with the usual bureaucracy and bullshit, and then turn them loose on the world?
And lo!  Control Point turned out to be one of those helter-skelter novels you chew through in two days.  It was the equivalent of an intelligent summer blockbuster – full of exciting and creative action sequences (what kind of force multiplier do you get in combat when you have a man who can open up teleportation portals that cut through anything?), with brutal and blunt truths about what happens when terrorists can get their hands on living flamethrowers.  (Hint: when backed against the wall, the United States does not always take the high moral ground.  Though the question is also correctly framed as “But can they really afford to?”).
It also doesn’t hurt that as a veteran, Mike’s blogging provides an interesting point of view in the mostly-pudgy-and-combatless-liberals-like-me world of sci-fi.  In particular, his essay “Uniform in the Closet: Why Military SF’s Popularity Worries Me,” which details how veterans are becoming an increasingly foreign culture to most Americans, raised some points about the military that have been troubling me for some time.  (Seriously.  I’d advise you to read it, because it’s a good look at a problem I know I’m not certain how to solve.)
So when it came time for the Clarion Blog-A-Thon, I said to Myke, “Dude, can you donate anything?  I know you’re not connected with Clarion, but I just wanted an excuse to pimp your book.”
But oh my, did Myke come shining through.
What Myke has to donate is the Challenge Coins from his world.  As Myke describes them, “They’re somewhere between a medal and a shinier, cooler version of business cards.”  And so he had some very pretty versions of the coins for his own supernatural ops divisions – and if you donate $5 to my Clarion Blog-a-Thon, you have the opportunity to win one of them!  (And if you haven’t read Shadow Ops, I’ll throw in a copy of the novel at my own expense.)

Seriously.  Look at that!  It’s pretty spiffing.  (Even if I’m not sure Myke would be thrilled by me describing the coin as “pretty,” but what the heck.)
And even if you don’t win Myke’s challenge coins, there’s still going to be twelve prizes for the Clarion Blog-A-Thon, which you have an opportunity to win!  Here’s how it works: Every $5 donated to the Clarion Write-A-thon gets you one entry into the raffle, which will be held at the beginning of August.  When the raffle is drawn, the first winner will have first choice of all the fabulous prizes to offer, and the second winner will have second choice, and so on.
The thus-announced Clarion prizes are:

• The challenge coin from Myke Cole’s Shadow Point series (plus a copy of the book, if you haven’t read it!)
• An ARC of Catherynne Valente’s “The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led The Revels There.”
• The book detailing the making of my Clarion classmates’ fencing-and-dance fusion “A Thousand Natural Shocks” (premiering tonight if you’re in San Francisco! Go!)

And what you get for your donations:

• Every $5 donation gets you an entry into our raffle pool
• $10 total donations will get you access to the Clarion Echo community, where I am live-plotting my novel in progress in an attempt to teach some of what I have learned at Clarion.  (You’ll need a LiveJournal account to join, so email me with your name and I’ll make sure you get in.)
• $25 will get you a story critique, if there are slots available.  You’ve got three left!  Go!

As a reminder, the Clarion Blog-A-Thon helps keep one of the shining traditions of sci-fi writing alive.  I was blocked for twenty years before I went, writing a lot but with no sales to speak of; four years after graduating, I’ve sold twenty-two stories and snagged a Nebula nomination.  It changed my life, which is why I kill myself blogging every summer to help keep it alive.  So please!  Donate!