Why It's Okay To Say Nice Things To Famous People
So someone on FetLife wrote this about popular bloggers, referencing me in particular:
“These people don’t need my encouragement or my praise. They swim in a sea of it. They get more responses in a single day than I do all year long… my praise doesn’t help them through a bad day or give them courage to face the next challenge. ”
Funny story: At one point, Neil Gaiman – you know, one of the most popular writers of this generation – wrote a Doctor Who episode. And I Tweeted something along the line that “Someone of Neil Gaiman’s caliber doesn’t need to know that I loved his Doctor Who episode, but I fucking loved his Doctor Who episode.”
He wrote back with something like, “Actually, I’m really relieved to know you like it.”
There’s this perception that people who are sufficiently “big” don’t need positive feedback, but lemme tell you – that “My praise doesn’t give them the courage to face the next challenge” is a ball of purest lies.
You think it’s easy writing about my depression? It costs me, man. And there are days when I’m like, “I can’t do this, I’m just making a fool out of myself, highlighting my mental illness is costing me friends, it’s costing me my career…”
And someone will send me an email that says, “Thank you for speaking up. I don’t feel like I’m alone any more.”
And I remember: Right. That’s why I do this.
Or I’m looking at another clusterfuck of an essay, the kind of hot-button topic where I know I’ll be dealing with nasty, angry commenters dropping by all fucking week to make personal insults, and I’ll be like, “Wait, why would I want to subject myself to abuse again?”
And someone writes me to tell me to thank me for speaking up, and that helps me keep going as a blogger. It really does.
Or I had a massive rejection that day, and someone pings me on Twitter to thank me for my fiction. All this helps.
Which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t support the smaller writers that this blogger also supports! (It’s why I read Twitter a lot, finding weird essays and retweeting them when I can.) It’s wonderful to lift up new voices, encouraging them to get in there.
But this idea that “Oh, they’re big, they don’t really hear you” is not true 99% of the time. I’m sure Neil Gaiman gets more fan mail than he can read, so there’s a certain point at which you vanish – but Kameron Hurley wrote an essay recently on how “fame” used to come with a certain dollar value, and doesn’t any more, and how “famous” authors with 20,000 followers on Twitter still have to work their damn day job, and deal with the abuse that someone who has 20,000 fans on Twitter endures.
In other words, 99% of the “famous” authors you know most likely get paid mostly in pleasantries. And as someone close to the industry, I see talented writers walking away every day because their novels don’t pay their rent and they’re struggling on this manuscript that as of now no publisher wants and it feels like they’re shoveling their heart into the void.
One fan mail can still make their whole goddamned day.
The right fan mail can keep even an “established” author going.
So sure. Praise the up-and-comers, highlight the newbies, seek out new voices. That’s wonderful. Do it. But don’t write off the “successes” as “Well, they don’t care any more,” because chances are you’re probably overinflating the number of nice things they hear a day – and even if you are, they get pummelled by critics in ways that lesser writers don’t, and the nice things don’t happen as often as you’d think.
Drop ’em a nice comment, if you like what they do. For anyone, high or low.
It helps.
So I Earned Out On FLEX. Let's Celebrate!
I got my royalty check the other day, and I learned several very nice things about my debut book Flex:
I Earned Out.
This is a very happy deal, because when publishers buy your novel, they pay you an advance fee.
That up-front cash is all many authors ever see.
What happens after that is a bit like a loan – the publishers have paid you thousands of dollars when they bought the book, and every sale after that goes to paying off your advance. Once you’ve sold enough books to pay it down, you’ve “earned out,” and after that every book sold puts new money in your pocket.
Earning out is a rite of passage among authors, and I wasn’t expecting to do it on Flex, and yet yesterday I got a check for $221 – not a big royalty, to be sure, but definitely enough to pay the light bill. And that means every book I sell from today on for Flex will eventually generate another check.
So, you know, thanks for buying it, talking about it, recommending it. This is a very happy day for me.
I’ve Sold Nearly Double My “Fuck You, Ferrett” Number Of Copies.
As you’ll recall, I am a relentless neurotic. You can give me any triumph, no matter how cataclysmic, and within days I’ll pull it apart.
So when I sold Flex, I made a secret bargain with myself. I chose a number of copies sold – a number that, according to nebulous sources, was the number of copies the average book sold in its lifetime – and added a thousand copies on top of that.
If I sold that many copies, I could never ever complain again about Flex’s sales. I had beaten my goal. I could only say good things about how Flex was doing. That was my “Fuck You, Ferrett,” number, the number I could use to bludgeon my brainweasels into oblivion.
As of yesterday’s royalty statement, I had sold nearly double that “Fuck You, Ferrett” number. (Well, 178%, but close enough among friends, say I.)
So: Yay!
…And That’s Only Through December 31st, 2015.
I was cheering all day yesterday, and then looked at the statement again, and realized that my “Fuck You, Ferrett” number was only tallying books sold in 2015.
…I’d somehow achieved 178% of my “Fuck You, Ferrett” number in only nine months.
The last five months of book sales hadn’t even been counted.
So, you know, this doesn’t make me a bestseller or anything – a $221 royalty check means I can buy you a beer, but not champagne – but it’s a happy personal triumph. I’ll probably sell more copies of Flex when Fix, the third and final book in the ‘Mancer series, arrives this September – and I just got my preliminary editorial notes on that, which look good. (He said “Book 3 is very good, better than Book 2, which was better than Book 1.” So hey, prepare to have hearts broken.)
So this is just a happydance. My debut book did way better than I expected. Is that an objective triumph? I don’t know. Solid mid-tier book sales numbers are hard to come by, as the public data usually reveals either Harry Potter smash bestseller numbers or nothing. I honestly don’t know whether my “Fuck You, Ferrett” number was chosen accurately.
We’ll see when I discuss exactly how many copies I made in a future post! But today? We celebrate.
"A Person Is Innocent Until Proven Guilty By Law."
So you lend Phil $20. Months go by. They don’t pay you back.
Another friend tells you he’s thinking about lending Phil $500 to tide him over until his next paycheck. And you say, “Well, I lent him $20, and I’m still waiting.”
Your friend looks you dead in the eye and goes, “Come on, man. You know I can’t accept that information. It hasn’t been proven in a court of law.”
And you go, “Oh, shit, right. I forgot. Phil’s innocent until proven guilty by law! I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
You finish your lunch, a little embarrassed. And you know, you’d thought of having Phil’s untrustworthiness put on the record – taking the day off from work to go to small claims court, paying the court fee, putting your word against his on the judge’s docket and hoping the judge sides with you – because it’d be nice to have your loss of a $20 be, you know, a fact. That you could discuss with people. And have them take it seriously.
But your lunch buddy’s right: unless the law has acknowledged this was true, it’s not actionable data. And there’s no sense discussing it, because you have a date later this evening. Rumor is she’s monogamously dating an angry boyfriend with a shotgun, but that hasn’t been proven in court either, so what are you going to do?
Obviously, that’s a crazy fucking example, but it proves my point: Whenever anyone discusses consent, people often cite variants on “A person is innocent until proven guilty by law.”
Which is true, when you’re facing the penalties of law. It’s really good to have the highest possible standard when you’re dealing with an entity that can strip you of your money and force you to live in prison for the rest of your life.
In fact, the dangers of innocents being hurt by malicious or incomplete testimony are so high that the noble principle of the court is, “We’d rather let multiple guilty men go free than mistakenly convict one innocent person.”
As happens all the time. We’ve all heard of mobsters who’ve gotten off because the testimony wasn’t enough to put them away, but that doesn’t mean that in real life these Goodfellas weren’t putting bullets in heads. We’ve all heard of incompetent corporations/doctors/cops/contractors who made massive, sometimes fatal, mistakes, where the court could not find enough evidence to put them to the full penalties of law.
This is a wonderful system. It means that corrupt cops can’t just manufacture evidence to toss people into jail at will.
But you start making foolish, foolish mistakes when you believe that the lofty, purposely-difficult standards the court has set to acknowledge something as true before they are willing to jail a person for life are the same as “This is what actually happened in real life.”
Most people, when confronted with “This doctor has been sued seventeen times by different patients for fatal malpractice, but never successfully,” would not go, “Oh, well, I’m psyched he’s doing my appendectomy tomorrow!” even though by every standard of court, he is completely innocent.
Why? Because the stakes for your personal safety are now higher. Now that your life is on the line, you might want to explore using alternative standards of “I’d rather penalize an innocent doctor than risk being harmed” instead using of the court’s standard of “I’d rather let a guilty person continue to operate than convict an innocent doctor.”
It’s all about what standards you hold yourself to – and as I demonstrated in the opening discussion, the court’s standards are pretty damn high for real life. In fact, they’re supposed to be high, as I’ll mention for the third time, because if the court gets it wrong, we’re talking the full force of the government being brought to bear upon you.
Which is entirely different than the standard of evidence you might want to apply if the penalty is, say, “Phil doesn’t get the $20 he wants to borrow.”
The standards for court are high, because the penalties are high. But literally any lawyer will acknowledge that what you can prove in court is not the same as “What actually happened.” There’s always a distinction. And idiots who conflate “A person is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law” without adding the “because the penalties inflicted are very high” is either thoroughly foolish or purposely omitting stuff to try to fool you.
Which is not to say that Phil is always wrong. Maybe Phil needs the $500 because his wife died and he can’t pay the rent without her income. Okay, fine, in that case the penalty for Phil is pretty stiff. Maybe Phil paid you back and you forgot. Maybe you have a grudge against Phil, which is why you’re mentioning this $20 when you’ve never mentioned all the other loans that have never been paid back. All sorts of shit happens, because life is complex.
And all the complexity comes to a boil when we’re discussing how to handle missing stairs in a community – potentially dangerous people who have gossip swirling about them, but no definitive proof. (Because most consent violators are smart enough not to do terrible stuff in public with witnesses.) And what do you do to keep your parties free of dangerous players when the only proof you have is the equivalent of “She said Phil didn’t pay her back”? Do you ban people on someone’s word?
Maybe you think the court’s standards are worthy for any institution, which is a noble goal. There is a strong case to be made for “I will hold the people who would spread rumors to the highest of standards,” because yeah, the ugly truth is that there are corrupt cops and there are people who’ll trash folks they don’t like. Having standards for evidence is good, and though there’s no single True goal, having high standards when the penalty is “Banning someone from a party” is not necessarily a bad thing.
But stop extending that to the idiotic argument of “If something someone says has not been proven in a court of law, it is automatically untrue.” No. If that happens, you are adopting the court’s standard of, “We would rather have someone guilty attending our parties than risk ejecting an innocent person.”
And because nobody’s devised a 100% safe method of keeping rapists, molesters, and otherwise people-hurting people from parties with an arbitrary number of attendees, that’s a legitimate call to make. But stop pretending that “unless someone can prove it in a court of law, it’s not true,” which carries the heavy implication that that every rumor is malicious and that your parties are safe.
No. It means your parties are as safe as the real world, which is to say occasionally you’ll have malpracticing doctors and mobsters – doctors and mobsters who exist in part because the people they’ve hurt know how much effort it takes to prove someone wrong in court may be more than they have the energy to expend right now.
(Before you start complaining, by the way, I had my wife the bankruptcy lawyer vet this for factual accuracy. She said “Yup. Why would this statement be controversial at all?”, though mentioned I was utilizing the standards of a criminal case.)
The Lost Love Letters Of Modern Writers.
There was a writing on FetLife recently that lamented the loss of the love letters men wrote to their wives in the Civil War. Oh, the instant message has all but destroyed romance! she cried. And I felt that writing overly romanticized the past and disabused the future; there are thousands of passionate love texts and emails being written daily.
You just don’t see them.
The world is still full of romance, but it hasn’t been boiled down neatly into a selection of the finest texts for your enjoyment. You think the Civil War is a florid selection of romance because historians sifted through the thousands of surviving letters and picked the most heart-wrenching for your enjoyment; they didn’t leave in the curt letters to “take care of my estate properly,” and they probably fixed the spelling, and the old-timey language makes it seem more beautiful to you because, well, what once was common speech now seems formal and elegaic.
But I guarantee you: I write beautiful texts of love, as do my lovers. There are always soldiers, and when they send emails home, some of them are writing beauty. The world still snaps and hums with romance, and if I could boil them all down to a selection of the finest texts, you’d walk away with the impression that the 2010s weren’t dick pics ‘n’ Tinder, but a great woven romance to put Shakespeare to shame.
And what worries me is not that we’ve somehow become less romantic as a society, but that we are losing that record of modern romance.
All those beautiful texts to my partners will be lost to AT&T when this is all done. There are long-distance lovers writing passionate emails to each other, but unless Gmail’s records are thrown open at the end of the day then those too will disappear.
I don’t think texts have made us worse, as a whole; they’ve exposed more portions of who we are, now that communication is so trivial. Yet 150 years from now, what will we have to remember of this? Authors used to exchange letters, which were scooped off their desks and archived into the complete correspondences of so we could see friendships develop, stories be built, the artist’s struggle.
Now it’s all done via text and Gchat. That’s almost gone as soon as it’s done. And the reason we remember these great romantic Civil War letters is because they were stored in someone’s attic to be pulled down, but now all these glorious emotions will dissolve into meaningless electrons once someone pulls the plug.
There is magic in the world, still, great beauty that deserves to be collected. So it was; so it will always be. But now that we’ve shifted everything onto electronics, what happens when the file formats change and the [http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/04/26/307041846/stopping-link-rot-aiming-to-end-a-virtual-epidemic][link-rot] sets in?
And I write this, knowing fully that it’s not as permanent as a letter. Once I die, my site will go dark. Eventually LiveJournal and Dreamwidth and Facebook and Twitter and FetLife will fade. I write this knowing that it is ephemeral, that more of our society is migrating our personal history to platforms that won’t stand the test of time, and what will be left to say about us when 150 years have passed?
This writing is for you. And it will never speak to the future.
"How In Hell Do You Date Five Women? I Mean, Happily?"
“I get tired dating just one person,” the comments say. “How the hell do you date five women at once? You know, and keep them happy? And also work full-time, and spend two hours an evening writing?”
It’s actually pretty simple:
1. Our Physical Dates Are Few And Far Between.
If you’re dating me, at best you’ll see me every two months or so. And that’s a pretty dense schedule. Usually, it’s more like three or four times a year.
This is because currently, all my partners are long-distance – but even if you live in town, seeing The Wily Ferrett is a comparatively rare sight. As mentioned, I’m working a minimum of 10 hours a day, and usually my workweek is something like 55-60 hours when you factor in writing and exercise.
And I might travel to see you, but I’m a writer – and most of my vacation days are committed to conventions or book tours. (I’ll be doing one for the final ‘Mancer series book Fix this autumn! Mark your calendars, reserve your copies!)
So that’s one filter: If you need regular actual Ferrett, well, I am not the mustelid for you.
2. No Phone Time.
For me, phone or Skype time is like a physical date in that it’s a long block of time I reserve for you, and that’s really tricky with the work hours I’m setting already. One of my “DANGER WILL ROBINSON” signs is when a partner says, “It’s great texting and all, but I’d feel sooooo much better if we could just Skype periodically…”
It’s not wrong to ask for that, but it is wrong to ask for it from me. I fucking hate the phone anyway, generally tossing it away like a grenade whenever it rings, so that’s another filter.
3. But I Will Text You A Lot.
So do I ignore someone when we’re dating? No! I am a writer. I write at you. And generally, that consists of me texting you a couple of times a day to see how you’re doing, and sending you goofy photos of wherever I’m roaming that day, and forwarding on jokes.
I’m not with you physically, but my natural tendency when I’m with someone I love is to say howdy and share what’s going on. I’m there checking in, telling you what I’m up to, sending pictures of butterflies.
Basically, the communication flow is through texts, not phone or physical contact. And that works for me.
4. And I Will Want To See You.
One of my sweeties sent me a text the other day, saying, “Do you know how good it feels to know you WANT to be with me?”
That was the sign I was doing things okay.
The trick to dating a Ferrett is to realize that I always want to be with you – I just have a busy goddamned life, because I have a job to pay the bills and I have a career of writing I’m fanning the flames on and I have a wife, and that’s like twelve hours a day minimum. Seeing you three times a year is not my ideal situation – it’s just the reality on the ground after all the work is done. I mean, even if you were my only girlfriend, that “Let’s visit” time would still be maybe once a month. Maybe.
But I send texts because I think about you, and I wonder how you are. I do little happy-dances when I get the texts and you tell me what’s happening in your life. I mark the day on the calendar and I count down.
But a sad filter is that if you feel inadequate because text is what we have, well, that’s just what I’ve got to work on. Physical time is rare. I’ve always loathed the phone. I can do emails, but text is more immediate.
So… lots of texts.
5. And If You’re Sad, I’m There.
Emotional support’s also on the agenda here, because if you’re having a bad day I’ll be texting the shit out of you to see what I can try to do to help. If someone dumps you or you’ve got family issues, I am on call.
This should be part of the Standard Partner Package for anyone, but it often isn’t, so I found time to say it.
6. They Do Not Need To Date Public Ferrett.
One of my most frequent breakup issues is, “Someone needs me to acknowledge them in blog-space on a regular basis.” I have found, through rather painful trial and error, that the person who needs me to put “In a relationship with” on my Fet page is usually the sort of person who won’t do well with me in the long run.
The reason why is subtle: It’s not that I’m unhappy to mention the thrills of dating you when it’s an interesting post for the day. But generally, whenever someone needs to have me grabbing my bullhorn and shouting, “I AM DATING YOU!” that means they are, on some fundamental level, uncertain about the relationship we do have and needing public proclamations to feel better.
Look. If I can’t make you feel good about dating me through private methods, taking to the rafters does not help. Yes, I get a lot of attention sometimes. Yes, sometimes women flirt with me. (Sometimes they even mean it.)
But in the end, another and vital filter is understanding that “dating other people” does not mean “you are replaceable,” and if that can’t be addressed without blog-public acts of affection, then we’re not going to work out.
What you get is the real me. That has overlap, but it is substantially different from, the persona on my blog. (He’s smarter. He only gets to write about things after time has passed and he’s come to conclusions.)
So In Conclusion….
How I date five people and keep them happy is by finding the kind of partner who is genuinely happy with the kind of attention I have to offer. Which is why I have such a long-term dating process: Lots of people say they’re fine with all of this, which lasts until the NRE runs out. Then they start getting itchy, and that’s when the subtle requests for Skype dates or maybe a public post creep in.
But I think that’s all dating, really: finding someone who’s content with what you can realistically offer. And I think most dating disasters come when you try to become something that you’re not in an attempt to make someone else happy, and discover that you can’t do it.
And I think if you’re reading this and going, “God, I could never be happy like that!” then that’s awesome. I’m not trying to date someone like you. I’m trying to date someone who I mesh with, whose neuroses and needs fit with me, and that’s not you.
The question is, as it ever is, are you finding the people who mesh with what you have to offer?