A Letter To Those Who Would Write To Me
About once a week, I get an email from someone, saying, “You don’t know me, but I’m in this situation with my partner, and I don’t mean to bother you, but I wanted to ask for your advice.”
I just want to be clear: that is totally cool. Do not hesitate to contact me.
I would not write all these insights I have on having mostly drama-free relationships if I didn’t intend it to help. I’m not saying I’m an infallible guru on such matters – I’m not necessarily correct, and often I have a very narrow window into your world – but if I can be of service, I am happy to. It’s not an insult, it’s not a waste of my time, I’m happy to do what I can for you.
Now, my timeliness on this may be in doubt – I’m busy, sometimes you get spam-trapped, sometimes it takes a day or two – but if you don’t hear from me, follow up. You’re not an inconvenience. I am deeply committed to helping people be happy as best I can, and if I fail, it’s not you, it’s me. Yell at me. I’ll come around.
The only non-cool thing? I usually know who you are. If you’ve commented in here a few times, I generally have some bead on you. Don’t think you’re that forgettable, okay? Though telling me where I know you from will help, because I have no idea that Danielle Dericky Deschamps is actually LJ User=CharityWhore.
(However, I usually don’t spread links asking for monetary assistance unless I know the people in question. No offense, but if I’m asking people to donate money to a cause, that’s partially me vouching for them – so I have to believe personally. That’s a tricky thing, since I don’t like to spam. If I point folks at someone, I want it to be super-effective.)
The Ferrett's Hard Limits Of Dating
(Also, if you want to read a very good essay on why your partner isn’t going to be having better sex with someone else, Jenna writes an extremely good breakdown of why “better” sex is a silly notion here.)
A friend of mine posted a very good list on Red Flags in relationships at – the things you should realistically stop a relationship when they appear. And I think it’s interesting to list my own Red Flags in polyamorous relationships, naming the things that have gotten me into trouble in the past that I should be able to stop at these days.
There’s the obvious lying and trust issues – I mean, if you’re not honest with me, I don’t want to be with you. At all. And [NAME REDACTED]’s list serves as a basic 101 of relationships in general, demanding the usual respect that EVERYONE should have. I mean, it’s a good list, since people DO tend to forget, but it’s right up there with “humans need oxygen, food, and three-dimensional space to survive.”
But there are other subtler polyamorous patterns that don’t work FOR ME. I have a very specific polyamorous pattern with my wife, and we’ve found what does and does not work for us… And there are certain patterns that have popped up again and again to the point where it’s like, “Really, if this is an issue, we shouldn’t be together.”
- WE ARE YOUR FIRST POLY RELATIONSHIP. Honestly, we’ve done the starter polyamory thing, and it doesn’t work for us; people go in with the best intentions, but usually it winds up being a rocky road as we navigate the usual jealousies and fears that go with it, and poorly. At this point in my life, I need a relatively quiet and stable relationship, and the first time at the rodeo ain’t ever gonna be quiet.
- YOUR CORE RELATIONSHIP, IF ANY, IS IN TROUBLE. If you can’t find a way to respect your primary partner, it’s going to be extra-difficult to respect me. I’m not saying that if you’re experiencing difficulty with your lover that we can’t make it work later when all is well, and I’ll cheerfully flirt all day long… But a new relationship always adds a fresh layer of stress to any existing relationship, and the danger that I’m going to be the distraction that lets you ignore the center isn’t cool with me. Either you Tarzan-swing to me, which means that you’ll probably be swinging over with all the same problems that contributed to your last relationship, or you eventually come to blame me (in part) for breaking up the old relationship. So if you are dating someone else, make sure it’s good.
- YOU ARE IN A RELATIONSHIP WITH SOMEONE WHO’S NOT INTERESTED IN POLYAMORY, BUT IS THEORETICALLY COOL WITH WHATEVER YOU DO. It’s hard to diagnose these things remotely, but in my experience those relationships have a higher-than-usual percentage of being dysfunctional; sometimes it works beautifully, sometimes it turns out that the other partner isn’t really poly but is gritting his/her teeth to see if you work it out, sometimes it winds up being a variant on “Whatever I do better be okay with you or I’m outta here.” In any case, it’s usually at least a little awkward.
- YOU NEED LOTS OF TIME. I’m working full-time, writing at least an hour every night, doing slush-work, and a ton of other things. You’re not a bad person if you need to see me three times a week or get long daily emails from me… but I’m juggling my wife and two lovely girlfriends, in addition to some other flirtations, and if you need a lot of time, then that’s going to be an issue. When I focus on you, you’re the only thing in my life and I will give you concentrated bullets of pure affection… But I’m not going to be a full-time relationship. Can’t be.
- YOU ARE DISRESPECTFUL OR DISDAINFUL OF MY PARTNERS. You do not always have to like them. I’m in the middle of a fairly complex web that has its own problems; it’s tougher to negotiate things that in some relationships come without question, even when the trade-off is stability. I can see being irritated by having to deal with someone else’s issues, and my Poly Paperwork Patrol.
But I love my partners. I won’t hear of them being insulted, belittled, or disdained. And if you think they’re that useless, then you clearly can’t think all that much of me for wanting to be with them. I won’t be a party to that.
- YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THAT I MAKE DECISIONS BASED ON PERCEIVED MERIT. I’ll often say that I won’t do X because it would hurt Gini’s feelings… But that doesn’t mean that I’m held hostage by Gini. It means that I’ve looked at Gini’s feelings, decided that if our positions were reversed I might be hurt, and said, “Well, even though I’d like to do that, it’s not worth taking a chunk out of Gini’s self-esteem.”
Yet for every time that happens, there are three times where I look at Gini’s feelings, go “Okay, sweetie, I think you’re being completely irrational here.” And we’ll have a long discussion, where the most likely outcome is that a) Gini convinces me that she’s right, or b) I convince Gini she’s not, and X happens.
The thing is, if I tell you, “Well, Gini wants X, so I’m doing X” and you respond with, “You’re just saying that because you’ve been married to Gini for eleven years,” then you fail. Hard. I don’t make decisions based on seniority; I make them because I think Gini’s actually CORRECT.
Anything else is a way of saying, “You’re taking her side because you’ve known her longer.” Fuck that; anyone who knows me knows that I’ll argue ANY case I find to be unfair. If I feel any of my partners are out of line, rest assured I’m going to bring it up with them. (And I expect them to do the same with me.) I’m not the sort of person who takes people’s sides automatically just because they’re my partner – Gini is the love of my life because she has a long history of having good instincts, and I’m with her because I think that she’s a very smart cookie, but I can’t ever imagine being with someone where I give them the right of blind trust.
There may be couples who blindly take each others’ side. That’s fine. I’m not one of them, because they’re fucking stupid. Rest assured that if I think you have a point and one of my partners doesn’t, I’m going to be going hammer and tongs with them to prove your point.
Writing The Wrong Scene
I spent three hours on Sunday writing a scene that didn’t work at all. My hero-protagonist Amichai was in prison after smuggling a pony into a hospital (don’t ask), and the antagonist paid him a visit to try to talk Amichai out of his rebellious, destructive, and self-harming ways. And though I technically added everything I wanted into the scene – MOAR CONFLICT! PHILOSOPHY! FINER-GRAINED CHARACTERIZATION! – in the end, it was still lifeless.
That novel had been rocketing along until this scene. Suddenly, two interesting characters sat down for a chat, and it all cruised to a stop like a car with a blown tire.
I brought my new chapter to Gini, hoping that she’d tell me that it wasn’t as lifeless and uninteresting as I thought it was – but no. She gave me the headshake, that little embarrassed lip-purse that means, “Yeah, you gotta fix this.”
I did not hold my breath until I turned blue. Wanted to. Didn’t.
When you spend three hours revising a 1,500 word scene – which is not a lot, it should be said, barely bigger than flash fiction – then that scene should be magnificent. But though I’d fixed everything in that scene that I set out to do, it didn’t serve the purpose it needed to, which was to keep the ball rolling. It contained all the things that should be necessary to make it good, but it was like throwing raw meat, chopped carrots, and a whole onion into a cold pot of water and calling it stew.
I had to remind myself that this was a good thing.
When you’re a writer, you’re gonna have to toss out scenes from time to time. That’s a positive thing, because it’s way better than the alternative, which is to keep a scene that you think is good but isn’t.
For me, the dead scenes are a boon and a curse – they’re a curse, obviously, because I’ve just spent my writing-time producing absolute dreck that needs to be thrown out. But they’re also the place where I learn the most. Figuring out why a scene is flat and lifeless is the clean-and-jerk of the writing process – I can’t just throw more words at it, I’ve already done that. Something’s fundamentally wrong with the idea behind this scene. And rather than endlessly tweaking the prose, I now have to get under the hood and figure out what, narratively, is wrong with the setup.
In the end, that’s what makes you a better writer. You can dazzle them with prose, you can wow them with fun characters, but in the end the core unit of writing is the scene – what happens between these characters in this space. The scene can be tilted towards action, or emotional growth, or self-reflection, but learning how to focus and refocus the scene for maximum effectiveness is a fine tool – and you can’t improve it by fiddling with some words. You’ve gotta get under the deck, pry up some floorboards, ask the hard questions.
For me, after going for a long walk with Gini, what I realized was that the reason this scene didn’t work is that, at its core, it was two guys walking into a room and saying what was on their minds. There was no subtext, because it was a straight-up appeal to save Amichai’s soul; there was no action, because Amichai was in prison and neither of them could move; there was no possibility of change, because the antagonist’s failure state was to leave Amichai alone to his own devices. There was no sense of forward motion because, although there was a lot of back-and-forth, the two guys entered the room in one emotional state and left it in that same state.
I could add all the words I wanted to this, but I’d be polishing a turd. The problem was that I’d set the characters up wrong.
This led to a long and damp (it had begun to rain) conversation about what we needed to do to have the antagonist and the protagonist doing something interesting, something that could actually fail. And how could we create not just conflict in words, but conflict in action? What emerged was the bones of an entirely new scene that had Amichai interacting with a third party while in prison, and the stakes are now what the antagonist will do to the people who are trying to help Amichai.
Will this scene work? I don’t know. What I do know is that by breaking it down this discretely, I’ve learned something more about the building blocks of writing.
Viewed in terms of progress, I’ve spent four days working on a tiny block of words and produced nothing writable. That’s depressing.
Viewed in the long term, I’ve spent four days discovering more about how to do this properly. That’s encouraging.
I’m gonna look at this as encouraging.
Netflix: What The Fuck, Man?
In discussing my twelve-year marriage, I referred to it as “The best decision I ever made” and “nothing can derail us but for an external force.” So it’s kind of funny to look over at NetFlix and see a separation that appears to be the result of bad decisions and derailings a-plenty.
If you’re not familiar with Netflix’s new separation announcement into NetFlix and Qwikster and Chapter 13, I think Blergeatkitty sums up my initial reaction pretty damned well. Why the fuck is splitting into two separate companies somehow better?
One suspects that Netflix is not quite as dumb as this, or at least one hopes; I know the movie companies (who hate this “intarwebz” thing and are doing their damndest to destroy any legal usage of it) are all pissy at Netflix for being better at it than they are, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all to discover that there was some complex set of hidden pressures that’s forcing Netflix to separate into two companies or subtly have their business model destroyed.
But if that’s the case, then Netflix can never say anything about it, because in the end when they moved to streaming video, they became dependent on the good will of the movie studios. When they were sending out physical DVDs, they could say, “Yeah, Starz, go fuck yourselves. See that? We’re buying 10,000 of your DVDs through Ingram, so take your profit and eat a big one.” Now they have to cultivate relationships to ask, “Please, sir, may I stream the latest Michael Bay movie today?” and the movie companies can tell them to eat a big one themselves.
That means whatever elephant dung they get handed by the studios, they have to smile and pretend it’s candy. And never mention how badly they’re screwing themselves. Kind of like Apple and iTunes.
It’s a weird business model, one that none of us fully understands (and, one suspects, neither does NetFlix themselves). There were probably some rather heated behind-the-scenes meetings that I’d love to hear, because this separation of business models can’t be easy, and they must have been forced into by something. Lord knows what.
In the meantime, a Tweet from Wonderella sums it up for me: I just got an email from Netflix’s CEO telling me to – and I’m paraphrasing – “Please start torrenting.”
Your predictions as to how long NetFlix lasts start…. Now.
A Sleepy Monday
Just as an FYI, I planned to post a clarification/retraction of some of my statements in my Gay In YA post this morning – but a) I was up until 5:30 last night importing the new Magic set (stupid double-faced cards), and b) when I make an error in terms of how I present an issue so that the essay doesn’t truly reflect where I stand, I’m doubly cautious when it comes to clarifying. So that’ll be later in the week when I recover.
Also, if I’m going to make one post today, it’s going to be referencing the fact that it’s International Talk Like A Pirate Day – which, to those paying attention, means that it’s my anniversary! I never really thought I’d be married at all, so to be married for a dozen years is somewhat amazing.
When you’re married and get divorced, you get differing reactions from people based on how long it took you to separate. If you get divorced in the first year, well, you just didn’t think it through. Two to five years, and you were too fundamentally incompatible on some level to make it work in the long run – but you gave it a rum go. Five to ten years, and people chalk it up to the usual combinations of neglect and differing goals.
At twelve years, it amuses me to note that I’m now approaching the stage of marriage where if Gini and I separated – which we’re in zero danger of – the public reaction would be that something had to have happened. An affair. An untreated psychosis. Meteorites. Something. We’ve been together for long enough that we’ve become an institution, and nothing can derail us but for an external force.
I often refer to Gini as “The best decision I ever made.” She’s the smartest, funniest, and sexiest woman I know. If I ever give the illusion that I have any wisdom, grace, or charm, understand that a significant portion of that is my wife, quietly bolstering me up behind the scenes. She’s amazing, she’s led me to a much happier place in life, she bears with me when that black dog depression comes biting, and I literally could not ask for a better partner.
I love you, sweetie. Twelve more YARRRS.