If You See Me At DetCon, Say "Hi" (Special Freaky Weasel Edition)

So at around 3:00 today, I’ll be leaving to go to DetCon in Detroit.  I have my usual set of convention nerves (What if no one wants to talk to me? What if everyone secretly loathes me?) that come with having social anxiety, but they’re worsened this year by grief.
Which is weird to me; it’s over a month since my goddaughter Rebecca died, and I’m still experiencing fallout from that.  It feels like I should be – well, not moving on, but rewiring around the damage, if you will.
And yet the aftereffects are still strong, and one of those aftereffects is a fear of crowds.  I’m told this is not unusual, particularly not after the trauma of a week-long Shiva mourning period.  But my introvert batteries are redlined easily, and I’m having difficulty recharging them.  Going to a convention seems like running a marathon now… but it’s a necessary marathon, something I must do to struggle back to normality.
So.  If you see me at Detcon, and you feel like doing a writer a mitzvah, please don’t be afraid to say hello to me.  I’m often told, “You looked busy!” when I wasn’t at all, I just had Resting Busy Face.  And while you are by no means responsible for my experience at DetCon – that would be me – it would be kindness to break the ice with me as opposed to having me gather the strength to say hello to you.
For I want to say hello to you.  And discuss books, and silliness, and All The Things.
If you’d like to see me yammer on at panels, DetCon let me off light this year, and so I only have three:
Friday, 7:00: Worldbuilding
I’ll probably be discussing some of the techniques I used to devise some of the magic systems in FLEX as examples, thus putting me down the inevitable primrose path to becoming That Guy on panels.
Saturday, 11:00 a.m.: Plotting vs. Pantsing
As anyone who’s read me knows, I’m a pantser who wishes he could plot.  But I have many techniques to help you finish your story when you don’t know how the heck to end it!
Saturday, 7:00 p.m.: Writer’s Groups: The Good And The Bad
I need writers’ groups to function, so I’ll doubtlessly be opinionated.  That’s what you wanted, right?

My Daughter Can Run Farther Than I Can

Some Very Manly Bloggers are astonished that John Scalzi’s daughter can bench-press more than he can.  Well, to be fair, they’re astonished that Scalzi is not shamed by this revelation, as – being a Man – if John Scalzi spent any time at the gym at all, his superior boytastic muscle development means that be able to outdo his kid in mere weeks.  He’s not even trying.
Scalzi, the problem, is literally weak – and he doesn’t even see a problem with this.
I, too, am a Wimpy Liberal, as my daughter can run way farther than I can.  I walk 5ks, she runs them, and then runs back to catch up with me and then jogs in place next to me as I heave my pudgy frame along the pathway.  And when she’s done, she doesn’t even sweat.
How can I reveal this shameful fact to you?  How can I tell you that my daughter routinely bests me?
Simple: I set my own goddamned priorities.
I say this because a recent comment mused how “a pudling” like me was clearly incapable of killing a man.  No, seriously.  Some douche was literally attempting to sway people’s opinions on my writing by asking, “Could Ferrett strangle a man with his own vas deferens?  No?  He couldn’t murder a man in cold blood?  Well, he’s lessened as a human being!”
And I thought, Killing people is not how I define my self worth.
If “running marathons” or “knifing prison guards” was as important to me as “writing” or “beekeeping,” well, I’d be a lot better at it.  But even though the world tells me that a True Man must be slim and muscular and be able to beat Wolverine in a bar fight, I’ve decided – perhaps irrationally – that my ability to love my wife is far more important than my ability to kill her.  That my ability to engineer solutions as a programmer provides more worth to the world than my ability to eradicate terrorists as a murderer, and my ability to write stories that inspire people is more important than my ability to create sorties that end people.
Which outrages these people, because here I am perfectly content with my life as a pudgy heart patient.  I’m not fulfilling their needs at all!  I’m not even trying!  And yet I’m wandering around happy!
How dare he treat my arbitrary definitions of what makes someone valuable as though they’re arbitrary?
And so my kid outruns me in every race we’ve ever had, and I’m fine with that.  It’s not like she’s a better writer than I am, beating me in a field where I’ve chosen to compete, and…
…oh, wait.
I’d be okay with that, too.
Because one of the things that I chose to prioritize as a human being was, “I want my daughters to be the strongest, most competent, happiest human beings they’re capable of being.”  I did not agree to a lifelong contest, where in Traditional Manly Fashion I would have to pummel my kids into oblivion in every contest just to remind them Who Is Superior, and if by some chance I lost well, that would be the time when she would have to scoop my beating heart out and devour the last of my self-worth, as I was no longer capable of putting her in her place.
If my daughter can write better stories than I can, then I say great.  I want my daughter to outdo me.  I will soar if my kid is happier than I am, has more loving relationships than I do, has a superior career to me.
I am not lessened by her achievements; because my goal was to inspire her, every good thing she does is also my success.
So run, kid.  Beat the pants off of me.  I did my damndest to help you fly, and if you soar above horizons that I can never reach, well, I think that’s what every good parent was hoping for.  Instead of, you know, being an insecure douche who’s secretly engineering his kids to fail so he can feel better about his life.

Two Things You Should Be Reading On The Internet This Morning

1)  Today’s your last chance to save the Internet – quite literally, as the cable companies want to make the Internet more profitable for them and worse for everyone else, including all the businesses on it.  All you have to do is leave a comment for the FCC.  I suggest strongly that you do so.
2)  I spoke about the disaster that was DashCon yesterday, and this being the Internet we have a rebuttal from someone who actually attended, saying it wasn’t as bad as it was made out to be.  (Hint: That still doesn’t make it good.)
But this is your daily reminder that the Internet is a distortion zone.  By the time a story becomes big enough to go viral, chances are very good that several facts have already been mismanaged by the time you get to hear about it.  And then, once the weight of numbers has decided that Thing X is Bad, people sift through every factoid they can unearth, looking to find all the worst bits to make it a more interesting story.
Do I think that DashCon was well managed?  Lord no.  Can I understand that the tragically-tiny ball pit might have been meant ironically, and that the Internet sailed right past any sense of irony?  Oh yes.  I can completely believe that.
Do I think that DashCon might have had some very good things couched in what was, by many objectiveish accounts, a disaster of PR and management?  Absolutely yes!  But the Internet doesn’t like “Some of it was good, much of it was bad” – they want a punching bag, like Transformers, something so incompetent that they can make fun of it to their hearts’ content without having to feel bad about hurting anyone’s feelings.
Do I qualify as one of those heartless morons searching for a chewtoy to savage?
Yes.
Yes, I damn well do.

So I Wrote A Sexbot Story. And Three-Lobed Burning Eye Published It. (Warning: Mild Sexy)

A friend of mine once said that a sexbot story had only two possible endings: the sexbot kills, or the sexbot gains a soul.  And I thought, God, a sexbot’s gotta have something better to do with her time.
Eventually, what emerged from that kernel of ponderation was a flashfic piece called “The Bliss Machine,” a second-person piece detailing your trip to the sexbot.  And Three-Lobed Burning Eye – you may remember them publishing my previous pieces Riding Atlas and Dead Prophecies – kindly decided to publish it.
The obligatory excerpt:

She squeezes your arm flirtatiously; her fingertips are made of rubber. Thick industrial rubber, with embedded heating coils to bring them up to body temperature.

Then she laughs, a warm and human sound, and you almost forget you are sitting inside of her.

“The movies only have two endings for sexbot stories.” She curls back onto the couch across from the bed — which you cannot stop staring at — then demurely adjusts the brass cable that keeps the voluptuous, human-like sculpture of her inner-self tethered to the clockwork room of her outer-self. “The sexbot murders someone, or the sexbot gains a soul. As if any sane collection of routines would want a soul! You know all a soul is? The feeling that you should fight your pleasures. Which, in turn, arises from a flawed algorithm that erroneously calculates you’re more than the sum of your inputs. Well, you are that sum, and so am I! If happiness can be defined, a soul’s the thing keeping you from it.”

As if to demonstrate, the gel-foam bed — a part of her, as is everything in this mechanical shack — rises to engulf your back, triangulating the tensest muscles to squeeze them with loving tenderness. She melts those hard knots to cotton candy, touching you in ways you didn’t know you craved.

Tears of joy spatter across the gel; it takes you a moment to realize they’re yours.

“See?” Her hexagonal eyes calculate the way your naked body writhes. “My inputs. Your outputs.”

You can read the rest here.  As always, if you like it, share with your friends.  Although this one may reveal something a little more about you than you’d care to share…

On Dashcon And Creepers

I enjoy watching train wrecks in slow motion, and so have been watching the Tumblr-based Dashcon unfurl in all its glorious psychosis this weekend.
Highlights include:

• An “emergency fundraiser” at the con where they went around asking fans for $20,000 in cash or the hotel would shut them down…
• …but the hotel claims they know nothing about this $20,000 charge…
• …and while there’s YouTube videos of fans thrusting dollar bills into the staff’s hands and yelling High School Musical quotes, nobody’s sure if they actually got $17,000 or not.
• Also, one of the featured guests (Nightvale) pulled out, and the other discovered that their rooms weren’t comped.
• 5,000 were supposed to have attended; 1,000 did.

Read all about it here.  And the behind-the-scenes look from an ex-organizer here.
Dashcon looks to have been poorly-managed, run by teenagers with more dreams than sense, and it collapsed in ugly ways.  Which goes back to what I said on Friday about conventions seeming like monolithic, competent entities, but really being composed of volunteers with various levels of competence.  There was a lot of hype about Dashcon, so it looked huge, but “Having good press” does not equal “Actually getting the job done,” so watching this fiasco unroll should be educational.
Yeah, ReaderCon and Wiscon and Arisia are all great conventions.  But they’re all run by volunteers, and some of those volunteers are… well, not good at what they do.  And when a con burns through its top-tier management, as it inevitably will, they can only hope that wiser people will replace them, or else it can all fall apart like this.
This is why some cons thrive – they know who to promote – and other cons, like Dashcon, run on a bubbling stew of “Wouldn’t this be cool if…” that doesn’t actually get anchored in reality.

My New And Bittersweet Nails

I pass the seasons by scraping old nail polish off.
I first realized this when I had my first post-heart attack manicure.  I was still very weak, having been cut open for a triple bypass, but I had recovered enough to stagger into the Venetian nail shop to regain some semblance of normality.
And I had lucked out; under normal circumstances, I would have gone into open-chest surgery with no pretty nails.  The oximeters they use to check the oxygen levels in your blood – mission-critical in a man with three arteries clogged at 99% – clip onto a finger, and read oxygen through your nails.  Almost any color will block it.
But in my case, I had a super-girly princess nail cut that faded to transparent sparkles at the fingertips, so the oximeter worked.  And the hospital staff, sensing I needed comfort, kindly left it on.
I had those nails for the better part of four months.  And when I went to my manicurist and they scraped them off, I looked at a tiny pink pile of glitter and thought, Well, that’s it.  That’s that era of my life gone.
And so when I sat at the manicurist’s this Sunday, with her scraping off my Art Deco nails, I thought: Well, that’s it.  All the pain of Rebecca’s final days, all the numb trauma of Shiva, all the shivering recovery – that time is over.
Except I wasn’t ready.
And fireflies have been tied to Rebecca this summer.  Fireflies are always my favorite part of the season, those glorious specks of bioluminescence winging about the lawn, appearing for a few weeks.  But this year, I literally saw the first firefly of the summer next to the hearse on the night of Rebecca’s death.  We’ve lived in this house for almost fourteen years, but we’ve never had a firefly loose and inside and blinking around, but that happened this summer.
I keep thinking: fireflies come, and they leave too soon.  But they burn bright.  And there is nothing, nothing else like them.
So I had Ashley my mad manicurist make me some firefly nails.

There are many tiny fireflies on my fingernails, and her craft shines here: the triple-fade, the hand-painted grass, the dots glow in the dark.
But on my nails, among the hundreds of fireflies, there is one that I told her to put on over the top coat.  That one is Rebecca.  And over the course of the next few weeks, the Rebecca on my nails will fade and vanish into the night sky, lost from sight.
But never forgotten.
(Nails by Ashley, who is on Instagram as La_belle_etrangere, who can be booked at the Venetian Nail Salon in Rocky River, Ohio.)