All About Where You Place The Frame: On The Sad Puppies' Hugo Victory

So let’s say you really like playing chess, so you start a chess club.  Every week, you get together with your buddies to move those black and white pieces across the chessboard.  Because you want to encourage the best chess players to thrive, you offer a valuable prize to the person who wins the most games.
Eventually, someone figures out that chess players don’t play as well when they’re distracted. These people decide to engage in psychological warfare – playing purposely slow to annoy their opponent, insulting them between moves, wearing T-shirts containing photoshopped pictures of their opponent’s mothers in pornographic positions, blaring them with foghorns when they’re deepest in concentration.
“It’s not in the rules you’ve created!” these people say, and in fact it isn’t.  You have not, in fact, created a rule stopping them from sending forged emails to their strongest opponents to tell them the tournament is cancelled today.  What happens is that soon, your chess club is filled with people who achieve victory with all sorts of creative techniques, and your club stinks of donkey dung because the latest distract-an-opponent craze is to wear a ghillie suit smeared with mule shit.
“We’re winning,” they say, when people complain, and this is true.  “You just don’t like losing.”
Yet what they’re winning at largely has nothing to do with chess.  Psychological warfare is as old as, well, warfare.  Yes, perhaps you can snag a victory by taunting your teenaged opponent until they break down in tears and resign the game, but it’s difficult to argue that this win is the result of your skills at the game of chess.  You could win any game under these rules with these tactics.
Worse, what happens is that your chess club now attracts the sort of people who don’t really give a crap about chess, but in fact just like watching people suffer.  Your club becomes filled with people who actually dislike chess, but they do very much like the idea of making those snooty chess players pay for showing up.
Week by week, this chess club becomes less and less about chess, and more and more about inflicting psychological torture.  The game is diminished by those who seek victory at all costs.  There are still wins on the books, but those wins become increasingly cheapened, because now the game’s frame has expanded from “win using the skills unique to chess” to “win using a variety of very old techniques, most of which require only a rudimentary knowledge of chess.”
The people who actually like chess drift away, not wanting to endure so much agony for a win that contains a very small amount of playing the game they love.
The chess club, if it survives, can barely be said to be called a chess club.  Perhaps an endurance club with chessboards, yes, but not a chess club.
The reason I say this is because Brad Torgerson said an astonishingly stupid thing the other day on his Sad Puppy victory at the Hugos:

Best SP3 quote yet: “I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. I am endlessly amused by people who claim to love democracy until somebody they don’t like turns out to be better at it than they are.”

Now, in case you’re not familiar with the Sad Puppies slate, here’s a brief summary I’d encourage you to read, but a briefer summary is this:

• Conservatives get very outraged because the “right people” are not winning the Hugos, and the Hugos no longer reflect the works they want to see nominated.
• They go to GamerGate – those bastions of free thought – and ask them to pony up $50 apiece to vote in the WorldCon nominations, asking them to vote for these exact works, regardless of whether they’ve read them or not.  (Brad made a vague, handwavy show of saying “You should read them,” but of course others did not and explicitly said to vote for these line items because it would piss off the liberals.)
• About 200 GamerGate folks, I’m told, rubber-stamped this ballot, and as such, of the supposedly best three Novellas published in 2014, three are from the same man.

And like the home-grown chess club I’ve discussed, this is a victory in the sense that yes, you put your shit-smeared ghillie suit and drove other competitors out of the field.  “Voting blocs” are an old tradition, one of the earliest methods to gain victory when you’re not actually that popular, and it’s not that hard to game an open field.
And yet the point of the Hugos is to have the most deserving works voted in.  If you legitimately believed that of all the novellas you read in 2014, John C. Wright wrote the best of them, then great! Nominate! I think your tastes are hopelessly narrow, in the same sense I despair whenever some Neil Gaiman fanboy auto-nominates whatever Neil does because ZOMGNEIL, but you’ve got your vote.
But how many GamerGate members do you think read all the novellas and judged them, and how many just voted for whatever Vox Day and company told them to vote for because it’d piss off the liberals?
If you’re voting for the Hugos to “stick it to the Social Justice Warriors,” then, well, you’re not actually achieving victory at the intended purpose.  Just as in chess, you have shifted the frame from “Let us nominate the best writings we loved most and think we deserve it” to “Let’s nominate whatever will send a message to liberals that this award is ours.”
Which is, like wearing Photoshopped pictures of someone’s mother to a game to get them to lose, a form of victory.  But it’s not victory in the field originally intended.  Sure, maybe you didn’t like what got nominated before, but mostly what won was because people you didn’t like were enthusiastic about the work.  Brad is claiming, facetiously and erroneously, that Scalzi and Stross somehow stuffed the ballot box by dint of being popular people – and it’s always been a flaw in the system that a popular person can sway the vote by bringing certain works to greater visibility – but until this point in the Hugo Awards, nobody had specifically gone and fetched people who specifically had not read science fiction at all in order to make a point in the sci-fi community.
(Or maybe they’d tried before, but now Brad and Larry have the dubious honor of succeeding at it by encouraging Vox Day.)
It’s rather like hiring a bunch of thugs to form a threatening crowd outside your chess club to scare away the other players, and claiming you won this shrunken tournament because of your love of chess.  You didn’t.  This wasn’t you doing “democracy” better, this was you exploiting rules to change the very nature of what the game consists of.
If you’re stupid enough to conflate “doing democracy better” with “winning,” then gerrymandering and making it illegal for people to vote and all sorts of techniques designed to reduce the number of active voters becomes victory, and you’re “doing democracy better” by reducing the number of people involved, which involves some craniorectal contortion in order to see that as a victory at democracy.
However.  There’s a reason you don’t see chess clubs inflicted with these sorts of over-the-top antics.  That’s because most chess clubs have a general rule prohibiting Unsportsmanlike Conduct – an often-subjective, umbrella-like rule that says, “Anything that’s not in the rulebook but would pull focus from ‘this is about chess’ to ‘this is about victory at all costs’ is, in fact, illegal as well.”
This is why chess clubs remain, largely, about chess.
(As a side note: before anyone accuses me of being against psychological warfare in games, you may do well to look up my long history of writing about Magic: the Gathering, where I rose to prominence by specifically discussing psychological tactics to manipulate other players into supporting you in multiplayer games. I love using sneaky techniques to steal victories; it’s just that as an experienced player at doing these sorts of things, it doesn’t have much to do with your skill at Magic, which I am at best mediocre at.)

Three Ways You Can Help FLEX Be Successful

So!  Some of you have read my novel Flex by now. Many of you even like it!  And if you’d like to help me along, there’s three things you can do to help me out.
(I will owe you one (1) hug for helping me out, collectable on demand at our next in-person appearance.  Offer does not apply to garbagemen and sewer workers fresh off their shift.)
HELPING #1: WRITE A REVIEW ON AMAZON.  EVEN IF IT’S NOT A NICE REVIEW. 
Apparently, Amazon is much more likely to sell my book for me if there are over fifty honest reviews.  That’s some breakpoint in the mysterious Amazonian algorithms.  I’m up to 47 now, so if you’ve read it and you have an opinion, and you have five minutes to spare, writing an Amazon review wouldn’t hurt.
(And I will remind you, it’s okay not to like Flex.  Some don’t.  They are still cool with me, and honest reviews help drive honest sales.  Thanks for giving it a try!)
HELPING #2: IF YOU’RE JOINING ME IN SAN FRANCISCO THIS SATURDAY, CHECK IN AT THE FACEBOOK EVENT.
My gives-no-fucks friend Amy Sundberg created a Facebook event for my Borderlands signing at 3:00 on Saturday, and the more y’all sign up, the better Facebook bugs other people.  Also, you can put in requests for donuts.  Everyone likes donuts.
HELPING #3: IF YOU HAVE NOT BOUGHT FLEX, GET A COPY FROM B&N. 
Barnes and Noble has many copies of Flex hanging about, and they’d like to sell more.  So if you feel like getting a copy but have yet to, and it’s not too much trouble, B&N is my mildly-preferred place of purchase.  (But really, anywhere you buy it?  I’m grateful.)
MARKETING SCHEMATA ENDS.  RETURN TO YOUR NORMAL LIFE, O MORTALS.
 

How To Write Jokes That People Will Laugh At (But You Won't)

Literally the second humor essay I ever wrote was a homophobic, slut-shaming piece of shit.
It was also pretty popular.
I was nineteen, and in college, and had decided to write for the college paper.  I loved George Carlin and Lenny Bruce and all of those groundbreaking comedians, so I decided to work as edgy as I could.  My first essay, “Religiously Handicapped,” was about how I didn’t know what to do in Church, and to this day I’m still weirdly proud of it – it’s not funny, but it mines a vein of comedy that wasn’t too common back then.
I forget what the second essay was about, but it was where I betrayed myself.
In that essay, I remember mocking the men who offered “relief” to college students in the papers – a proto-Craigslist personals, where dudes sought out other dudes to do dudely things upon.  And I mused upon what sorts of reliefs might be offered by dudes to dudes, and made a sketchy comment that was something like, “Ugh, who’d want that kind of relief?  No thanks!”
I got a lot of positive responses, because particularly in the late 1980s, making fun of gay men was still pretty fucking funny to most people.  Especially to sexually-terrified college dudebros.
Thankfully, I had a handful of gay friends.  And they took me aside and told me that the personals were the only way for a lot of gay men to connect in a town like ours that really looked down on homosexual sex, and they had to talk in code like “relief” because most of what they did was borderline illegal, and honestly, Ferrett, that was a pretty dickish joke.
Thing is, I knew all that.  Heck, the reason I knew about those personals is that I was tempted by the idea of loose, anonymous sex myself.  In truth, my reaction to those ads wasn’t revulsion, but a sort of terrified fascination, a desire to know just what sort of things might happen if I went over to a stranger’s apartment and let him have his way with me.
But you know what played better on campus?
Eeeeyew.  That’s what got bigger laughs.
So I made the unfortunate choice to prioritize what I thought people would laugh at over what I personally believed.
This is not an unusual thing, for anyone working in humor.  Anyone who wants to be a comedian or a funny writer doubtlessly does so because they’re a fan, and they’ve listened to every album/watched every standup/seen every funny show they can.  Comedians have memorized other comedians’ routines, because they dissect them, know what makes them tick.
And they remember vividly where people laughed.
So when you’re just starting out, you often are so desperate to please that you drift into autopilot and make a gag that you don’t believe in that’ll go over well.  Fat chicks and sluts get laughs.  Up North, a cheap “Oh, those stupid redneck Southerners!” draws inevitable chuckles, just as I suspect there’s some boilerplate dumb prissy yankees jokes going on down South.
It’s the moral equivalent of making the “What’s with the airline meals?” jokes – you can get laughs because a lot of the audience shares that experience, but is that really what you’re amused by?  And you see that in a lot of the earliest known works of famous comedians – Louie CK’s first special is pretty mundane.  He’s making gags that are kinda funny, because he’s gotten talented enough to make jokes, but they are not yet his jokes.
A good comedian can get laughs with their material.  A great comedian makes jokes that only they could make.
For many, it takes a while to learn that you don’t have to go for the laugh.
Early on, a lot of people are just happy to get a positive reaction.  And it’s only later, when you take that positive reaction for mostly granted, that you start to look at what kind of audience you’re amusing, and wonder what the fuck you’re doing.  And that’s not just whitebread yok-a-blocks like me; ask Dave Chappelle why he doesn’t like touring any more.
And if you’re skilled, eventually you start to find your voice.  I realized that even though everyone else thought fat chicks were a solid target, including my audience, I didn’t have to use them as a punchline because I personally thought BBW women were beautiful.  (Hence the reason I put an attractive pudgy woman front-and-center in my book Flex.)  I realized that it’d be a lot more interesting if instead of condemning anonymous gay sex, I actually faced it honestly. (And then, growing even wiser, realizing that I had no personal experience with the topic and maybe I should discuss something I had actually done.)
I started to set my own boundaries on what I thought was funny – and I’m no Louie CK, but I have gotten a mild audience that often laughs at my weird-ass jokes.  And when you do that, you don’t have to have some sort of come-to-Jesus moment where you beg forgiveness from the audience – you just stop making certain kinds of jokes (and wince a little when That Dude tells you that was the funniest shit, man) and quietly move into new territories, evolving.
The reason I say this is because right now, the new Daily Show host Trevor Noah is taking a lot of beatings for some pretty dumb-ass jokes he did on Twitter, which have been exhumed and are now being trotted about as proof that he’s unfit for the job.  And Trevor hammers the “Jew” and “fat chicks” realm embarrassingly well, here.  (Though we must also remember that Jon Stewart made some pretty anti-women jokes in early seasons of The Daily Show – almost certainly stemming from that automatic reflex of “They’ll get a laugh.”)
So what’s Trevor actually think these days?  I have no idea, actually.  I’d never heard of him before the announcement, so I can’t tell you he’s evolved.  (The fact that some of these gags are from 2012 doesn’t fill me with extreme hope.)  He’s Schrodinger’s host – maybe he’s evolved beyond these crutches of guaranteed laugh-getters, maybe they’re part of his voice.  (Because sometimes, you find your actual voice and it’s repellent – something that happens in comedy a lot, too.)
What I am saying is in response to this:

32. Most of us don’t say things like this on twitter because we don’t fundamentally believe them, or aren’t stupid enough to admit it.
— Morgan Leigh Davies (@MLDavies) March 31, 2015

And I think there’s a third option for why someone posted dumb shit like this beyond “We fundamentally believe in the trope” or “Are stupid enough to admit it” – it’s “We knew it’d get a laugh, and thought the laugh was harmless.”
But laughter isn’t harmless.  Laughter, directed in the wrong direction, can cripple the weak, rub their face in their own impotence, destroy their sense of self-esteem.  That’s why you try to punch up with your jokes – making gags at the expense of people who, frankly, have enough confidence and overweening sense of self that it’s probably a public service to take the piss out of them.
Again, I can’t speak to Trevor myself.  But I’ve watched a lot of comedians grow, and by the time they came to my attention they first made some ugly jokes they later dispensed with.  And note that was “by the time they came to my attention,” which is to say after enough years working in the field that they got that television appearance they’d hoped for (or that YouTube video that went viral enough).  They probably made lots more bad jokes.
I’m not saying everyone does this, of course.  Some are lucky enough to refuse to make jokes just for the sake of laughs.  They’re usually more compelling voices from the get-go.  But a lot of us have to have that moment – several moments – where we go, “Okay, wow, people laughed, but I didn’t.  Is that the sort of person I want to be?”
If you’re lucky, you become someone else entirely as part of the process.  Someone stronger, more thoughtful, and more moral.
You know.  Like the sort of dude Jon Stewart became.

The Definitive Story Of My Uncle Tommy

Some of you have been around long enough to know about my Uncle Tommy, who was my best friend as a kid. Others know him only as one-half of a dedication in my book.
But I have one story that sums up my Uncle Tommy, and was glad to get an excuse to tell it at one of my favorite blogs: Lawrence Schoen’s Eating Authors, which each week asks a different author “What is the best meal you ever had?”
For me, my Uncle Tommy brought me to the best meal that I ever ate – a definitive meal, one that made me a gourmand.
But he didn’t mean to.  He did it by mistake.
And then he made that mistake legend.
You can read about that story over at Eating Authors right now, and I pretty much guarantee you’ll enjoy it.  Go take a look.

The Most Exciting Flex Preview I Have To Offer: A PodCastle Audio Production!

So of the many events I created to preview my novel Flex for you, what I am finally happy to announce to you today is the most exciting thing.  Literally every morning I have woken up and gone, “Is it up yet?  Is it up yet?”
And it’s up now!  And yes, this is even more exciting than the book tour.
This is a special audio production of Flex, done by the greatest audio short story podcast in the whole wide world.
And you can win a copy of Flex, if you somehow haven’t purchased it by now!
If you’re not familiar with the ‘pod network – that’s PodCastle for fantasy tales, Escape Pod for science fiction, and PseudoPod for horror – they are a loosely-run cabal of sites that find the most brilliant tales and have even more brilliant people read them out loud.  I have been honored to have over ten of my stories appear on their site, which is no mean feat – try “‘Run,’ Bakri Says” on Escape Pod, “A Window, Clear as a Mirror” for PodCastle, or “Riding Atlas” for PseudoPod – and so when I asked them to work up a super-special promotion for Flex, well…
Dave and Anna delivered.
There is, as of now, no news of a Flex audiobook, sadly.  But you can hear Dave read a chapter of it (along with discussion of said book) over on PodCastle right now, and Dave does some excellent goddamned emoting.  (If you’re curious, this is also the chapter I’m reading on my book tour, specially edited for audio productions.)
I have always been a fan of old-time radio.  To hear my words in someone else’s mouth has always been a special kind of magic.  And now it’s here, so please!  Go hear them do it!  It’s the fun chapter where they brew magical drugs in a seedy basement, and things go horribly wrong!
ZOMG ZOMG LOOK!

So What's It Like To Go On A Book Tour?

I have now been doing the Flex West Coast Book Tour for nine days.
It feels like nine hundred.
I do not know how other authors do book tours.  My book tour is a ragtag set of signings stitched together out of sheer will and a determination to say “hello” to people, and so it’s probably different.  I suspect other book authors don’t say “Hey, you’re all awesome people, I can vouch for your most of your good natures personally, so let’s all go out to a bar afterwards and hang out!”
But I do.  So the tour is like a series of mini FerrettCons, where every Saturday I haul twenty people out to a bar with me and I get to know some of them and others I get to hug people I’ve known on the Internets for years and they all meet and mix.  I know friends have been made at my book signings already.  That’s awesome.
And every time, before the signing, I have the exact same three fears, as predictable as Alexander Dane before the Galaxy Quest signings:
Nobody’s going to show up.  Thus far, I have yet to play to an empty house.  People are wonderful.  I keep calling this the Chekov’s Gun Tour, because honestly?  It’s going well only thanks to things I did years before this tour, with no understanding that it would help this tour.  I’ve been blogging for years, so people show up to meet me because my words have touched them.  I’ve gone to cons for years, so writers show up to show their support for me.  Basically, when I look out over the crowds of people, I don’t see An Audience, but rather ZOMG, that’s my LJ friend from 2007, and that’s someone I haven’t seen since World Fantasy in 2010, and that’s that FetLife girl I have such the crush on, and who is that person? I bet I know them.
I usually know them.
Wearing this suit is so ridiculous.  I change into The Italian Suit in the bathroom, which should feel like a superhero… but The Suit is awkward to put on, and requires not dropping The Suit in the toilet while I try to put my boots on, and when I stride out people go, “Oh, that’s Ferrett!” and so it’s like a superhero outfit.  If you aren’t sure that’s Ferrett, look for the nails and the electric blue suit and the hat.  You can always talk to me when I have this suit on.  Promise.
This tour is fucking absurd.  It’s an ego trip.  You had one novel published, and who the hell do you think you are to go out on this tour for that?  And it is, really.  It’s a four-week celebration of Me, and by God how fucked up is that?
Yet how fucked up is it that people actually want to celebrate me?
People are happily picking up my novel, shaking my hand, eager to have me sign their books – I number every book I’ve signed, and I am at #196 now – and while I’d expect an indulgent smile, some of them are even more psyched than I am.  They’re going out of their way to drive to me to say hello, and what kind of a schmuck would I be if I didn’t look ’em in the eye and tell ’em just how awesome this is?
Still, I remember Ian coming up to me at my first book signing.  “Lemme see your hand,” he said.  I held it out. “Yup,” he told me.  “It’s trembling.”
My hands are always trembling, but somehow it never gets easier, and it never gets less awesome.
All this terror and happy confusion.
And yet I’m never quite anchored, on tour.  I show up, crash at a friend’s house for a few days, learn how to work their shower, put in a new Wi-Fi password, buy them dinner.  We’re always doing dinner.  Or lunch.  Or breakfast.  Because there’s someone in town who we just gotta see, a friend or a writer or a friend who’s a writer who I need to steal a few hours from, so our bellies are always full.  We’re gaining weight, such weight.
But it means that every day is like a three-act play, sometimes four acts.  We do breakfast with someone in one side of town, drive madly to another side of town to meet up with another dear friend, meet a third person for dinner.  Sometimes they come back to our hotel room and we talk until two in the morning.  Then we do this again.
Did I say the events were like a FerrettCon?  Hell, every day is a FerrettCon on the road.
And all the while, I keep getting notifications that Flex is doing pretty well.  Not bestseller well.  Not even well enough to pay off the meal expenses we’re incurring in one day on this damn thing.  But for a debut novel from a nobody, it’s exceeding expectations…
…and most people who read it are digging it.  Not all; a couple of people have legit complaints.  But the signings, well, I expected them to be “people showing up to have The Ferrett sign a book,” and in fact some of them are “people who’ve loved the book who want Ferrett to sign it,” which is an entirely different experience.  I’m getting questions about Valentine, about Aliyah, about what the hell happened to Europe, and you’re going to tell us all what happened to Europe in the next book, aren’t you?
….sure, he says, looking over the next manuscript, which doesn’t really.
(The third book does deal with Europe.  Let’s see if Angry Robot wants it.  But right now, Paul’s got bigger problems right here in New York City.)
And Gini and I will return to normal.  Eventually.  But I’m so glad she’s here.  I hate meeting people without her.  She’s such a part of my life that I don’t feel like people really know me until they’ve met her, and now they can meet her too and have her laugh at them and be all sexy and clever and smart in that Gini-way that Gini-does.  And you’ll know exactly what portion of my smarts comes from her.
And this Saturday, is another signing in San Diego, and then San Francisco, and I go home.  Which is fine.  But the busy stuff starts now – I have so many friends in the Sans of California, and I’ll try to see them all, and some I’ll fanboy squee at and others I’ll just hug and ZOMG.
It’s good.
It’s so fucking good.
I can’t wait to see you.