Strip Rock Band

I like naked people, and I like Rock Band.  And for years, I’ve been caught in this awful Scylla and Charybdis conundrum: Gee, I’m having fun being naked with these people, but I’d really like to be playing Rock Band. Or This Rock Band sure is entertaining, but all these clothes are too restrictive.
Hence, the need for official rules for Strip Rock Band.
Now, I have some friends in other locales who are famed for their strip Rock Band parties, but the local scuttlebutt is that the stripping proceeds asynchronously – some people have all of their clothes on, if they are not playing Rock Band.  This shall not do for me.  (And besides, it was more entertaining to try to devise them on my own.) Plus, there may be large numbers of people who’d want to attend a strip Rock Band party, and since the main goal of a strip game is to get everyone naked, doing it through the narrow gateway of one person every song seemed unduly laggardly.
In addition, some people wanted a punitive measure to allow the losers to catch up – if you were a great Rock Band player, you might never remove an item of clothing.  Some suggested that every winner should be forced to do a shot, but I’ve had bad experiences with drinking games – I turn into a real asshole if I don’t monitor my drinking carefully.  So I wanted to have an optional way where a) people who wanted to do it as a drinking game could, but b) those who chose not to drink would be forced to doff clothing.
Hence: The Official Beta-Rules Of Strip Rock Band.
1) Every person entering the house is assigned semi-randomly to one of four teams: tentatively called Paul, John, George, and Ringo.
2)  When you join a team, you must a) choose a difficulty setting (“Easy” to “Expert”), which you will play at all night, and b) decide whether you are in the “official drinkers” or not.
3) Each song must be manned by people from at least three different groups.  (So at least Paul, John, and Ringo must be playing on the song to count for strip purposes.)
4)  You “win” a song by achieving the highest percentage on the song.  If you “win,” all members of the team who are listed as “official drinkers” must do a shot.
5) You “lose” a song by achieving the lowest percentage on the song.  If you “lose,” all members of the team must remove an item of clothing.
6)  If two or more groups tie for a percentage, the wins or losses are spread across all groups.  (So if Paul and George both get 67% in a song, bottoming out, all members of Paul and George must lose an item of clothing.)
7)  You gotta at least try.  No bullshit dropping the controller to make everybody strip.  If I’m not allowing “NO FAIL” mode at my house, I’m not allowing auto-fail mode either.  🙂
The only problem we have thus far is the problem of late arrivers.  I’m still not sure whether they should just be forced to strip down on arrival, which is potentially humiliating but fair, or whether we force them to play repeatedly until they doff one at a time.  Or perhaps some other mechanism.  Certainly we’ll have an good idea of which team is the most losing team, so it should be easy to slot them on.
Also, it feels like this system is gamed fairly easily. If y’all have any improvements, I’m listening.

ABriefApology

YesterdaymyiPadDecidedToStripAllOfTheQuoteMarksFromMyEntry.
ManyPeopleCommented. TheyWonderedIfSomethingWasWrongWithMe. IEvenGotTexts. ButNoItWasJustSomeWeirdSettingOnTheIpadWordpressApp.
FortunatelyIFixedIt. AllFutureEntriesShouldAppearTotallyNormal. ItLooksLikeWe’reGoodToGo!

New Story! "Sauerkraut Station," Live At Giganotosaurus!

I bet you’ve been wondering what it would be like if Ferrett wrote a version of “Little House on the Prairie” set in space. I wouldn’t blame you.  After all, I did, so much so that I actually had to write the story.
In any case, what emerged was a long-ass story, and I think it’s the closest I’ve ever come to writing what I’d call “comfort reading.”  Lizzie’s life out on Sauerkraut Station isn’t comfortable, but there’s something about the rhythm of her existence that just made me read this one over and over again.  I like it.  I hope you do, too.

“The sauerkraut is what makes us special,” Lizzie explained as she opened up the plastic door to show Themba the hydroponic units.  She scooped a pale green head of cabbage from the moist sand and placed it gently into Themba’s cupped hands.
She held her breath as Themba cradled it in his palm, hoping: Please.  Please don’t tell me that stuff grows everywhere at home.
Themba ran a dark brown finger along the cabbage’s veins, then let loose a sigh of wonder.  “That’s marvelous,” he said.
Lizzie puffed out her chest.  Themba had passed her final test.  At ten years old, Themba was two years younger, six inches shorter, and eight shades darker than Lizzie was, and she’d known him for a record three days and nine hours.  That made him her best friend ever.

It’s available at Giganotosaurus, and is not only available in regular web page format, but in ePub format for those of you who wish to download and devour at leisure later.  (And I wouldn’t blame you – as a novella, this story takes a while to digest.)
In any case, it’s a departure from my usual writings, if I can be said to have usual writings.  Go take a look, kick the tires, lemme know what you think.

Adjusting The Algorithm

I talk to at least fifty people every day – texting with my sweeties, answering comments in my blog, solving tickets at work, social networking with editors and fellow writers.
At the end of the day, I have to summarize that in a report for my wife.
Its not an official report, of course, though that would have the satisfying ring of a blue folder being dropped on her desk, perhaps stamped with the words CONFIDENTIAL. But at some point, I have to summarize the interesting things that have happened to me, lest we have these awkward conversations like When did you become bisexual? or I rather thought youd tell me your family was killed in a chemical accident.
Which means at some point, theres an algorithm that runs through my head that separates my daily events into rough categories: SHOULD CALL RIGHT AWAY, AMUSING ANECDOTE TO BE TOLD OVER DINNER, JUICY GOSSIP, SLOW MUTATIONS IN MY THOUGHT PATTERNS. And in this algorithm, certain events are discarded as not worth mentioning, else I might as well sit down with Gini and read off every Tweet Ive sent that day.
The trick to a successful relationship, Ive decided, is in fine-tuning those algorithms.
See, a bad filtering algorithm will discard events that would be danger signals to your partner: maybe you dont think much of the fact that Cassie squeezed your ass at the Halloween party, but your partner probably wants to know. The issue is that your algorithm had written that butt-squeeze off as a drunken lark, whereas your partners been noting the way that Cassies been hanging close to you at parties, laughing a bit too loudly at every joke. To her, Cassies a step in an escalating attraction that will need to be handled one way or the other; to you, its nothing.
Hence, theres going to be a bit of a clash when this fact is revealed to her later.
Likewise, bad filtering algorithms dont necessarily take into event the little day-to-day slides in attitude that often kayo a relationship. We all know some couple where the one partner just got more and more dissatisfied with her life, quashing it all down because hey, I have a good home and a decent job and this should make me happy even though it doesnt – and then one day they explode into a flusterstorm of rebellion and run off to Indonesia to tend llamas.
Thats a bad filtering algorithm because it didnt convey the daily frustration in an effective way.
I think the reason Gini and I have thrived for so long is that weve established a set of pretty good algorithms. As a flirty poly guy, I text and email a lot of people… But I also relate any significant incidents that I think might be leading to either a ramping up or a damping down of affections. And Ginis fine-tuned her algorithms to let me know about her overall moods, so that I can monitor her to make sure shes doing well.
The end result isnt perfect, of course; if she did read through all of my mails Im sure shed find a few surprises, and shell occasionally forget to mention that something happened to our daughters today. But mostly, weve gotten a good handle on providing a daily snapshot to each other that lets us know how were feeling.
Thats the danger I worry about as I move towards more experimentation with BDSM; its a new situation the algorithm has to deal with. Since Im a novice at this sort of thing, I dont necessarily know what is significant in my evolution, leading to a weekend where I just sort of exploded at Gini about a bunch of incoherent feelings I had that she had to walk me through. Its hard for me to summarize things like top drop and the intense spillage of emotions that arise after a scene when I cant even really process them myself… And that concerns me, because Im worried I may do something that to me is insignificant, yet to Gini would be a huge billboard of NO NO DO NOT PASS, and dont let her know because my algorithm erroneously filed as DISCARD.
Yet I think that if youre gonna make it work in the long-term, you need to make sure your compacting algorithm is stable, efficient, and open. The alternative is to not translate the significant events in your day-to-day life so that your partner knows and can deal with them… and that never ends well.

Random Notes From World Fantasy Con

1)  My reading at World Fantasy went much better than I’d expected.  I read to a pretty good-sized crowd – as witness this photo I took a couple of minutes before I started (even more people showed up after this):

I gave a pretty emotional performance of “‘Run,’ Bakri Says,” which is in itself a pretty intense story.  I got what seemed like a really long wave of applause afterwards, so long that I had to thank people three times before it stopped, and afterwards Gini said that someone told her that she had to keep remembering to breathe.
I mean, pretty much everyone who showed up knew me on some level, which is the way it works when you’re starting your career, but I think that reading converted a couple of folks from friends into fans, which is nice.
The best part, however, was when Keffy took me aside after the performance and said, “I hope you realize how much I hate you in this moment.”  Keffy and I are Clarion-brothers, and intensely loving-competitive, and we a) do everything we can to help each other out, and b) seethe with envy over the other’s talents.  His hatred was the sign I’d written a good story.
2)  Speaking of Clarion, we had a rather monstrous reunion of my 2008 class, with thirteen of the eighteen students converging on San Diego, and two teachers.  Of course I didn’t get nearly enough time catching up with everybody, but that would require another six weeks.
Still, I did room with my Clarion-sister Dana, who I miss more than Internet-hearts can say, and had a luxuriously long dinner with my teacher Nalo Hopkinson, who has a YA book coming out that you all really ought to read.
My favorite Clarion moment was, however, courtesy of Neil Gaiman, who we didn’t expect to see much at World Fantasy, him being the guest of honor and all.  And we didn’t, really.  But at around 11 o’clock on Saturday night, he ran into me and Emily Jiang and said, “This has been crazy, but I do want to catch up with all of you – can we get together tomorrow morning for breakfast?”  And we said yes, and set a time and a place.
He took half a step away, then paused.  “You’ll tell the others, won’t you?”
Now, the thing you need to understand was that at Clarion, we were a hive-mind.  Tell one student, “We’re going to the beach tonight” and the information transparently disseminated throughout the group so that within an hour, everyone understood.  There was no explicit mechanism that made this happen; we were just all committed to getting the word out.  It was something teachers got actively used to, telling Monica there was a 4:00 lecture and having it just get around.
Neil’s pause was that moment of, “Oh, wait, perhaps I shouldn’t assume that telling Emily and Ferrett will automatically inform everyone else.”  But no.  As it turns out, I texted everyone who I had their number, who alerted the people they were partying with, and Emily did her social butterfly thing, and an hour later every Clarion 2008 member knew about tomorrow’s get-together.
Three years later, we’re still networked.  Go 2008.
3)  Yes, I also met Amanda Palmer briefly.  No, I doubt she’d remember me.  Yes, she’s actually much prettier in real life.
4)  Gini was also there, which made Clarion feel more complete.
See, my Clarionmates obviously heard a lot about Gini, because I do tend to go on about my awesome wife… but they’ve never met her.  And I realized at World Fantasy Con that to a very real extent, you can’t know me all the way unless you’ve met Gini.
So having them meet Gini was a relief to me, a sense of closure.  And it was delightful when many of them came up to me afterwards and said, “She really is that awesome.”  Damn straight.  But it feels like they’re fully engaged with me now, which is a little odd.
Unfortunately, that sense of completeness made the con a little harder for Gini.  Normally, I try to shepherd Gini through new places, but I kept seeing her talking with people who I knew liked me, and went, “Oh, well, if they like me, they’ll like Gini” and would wander off as I talked to other people.  All the while forgetting that a) Gini had just met these people and felt the low strain of making new friends, and b) forgetting that if I wandered off, Gini might have to wander around and make even newer friends once this current conversation ended.
Fortunately, Gini is charming and vivacious and swanned quite nicely through the con, but around midnight on Saturday I realized that hey, maybe I shouldn’t have this assumption of me === her.  Silly weasels.
5)  I got a secret beer at World Fantasy, because I’d had a story published at the fantasy fiction podcast PodCastle.  The beer?

In addition, I apparently got name-checked on a panel for that story as an example of “sympathetic monsters done right.”  Apparently people like monsters who unashamedly eat humans.
6)  I finished my next-to-final draft of my novel while at World Fantasy, because I’m a tireless git who writes for at least an hour a day, even at conventions.  Next up: send to trusted beta readers, get do final draft and 10% Solutionize, and start seeing if 2012 can become The Year I Sell A Novel.