Love, But Verify

One of my best friends in town is pushy.  He never means to be, but he came from a household where he was encouraged to ask, enthusiastically, for everything he wanted – so when you go out to a restaurant with him, he’ll strongly suggest what you might like to order from the menu, based on what he would like to taste.
Now, before you go, “What a jerk,” keep in mind that he is also the most giving, loving friend you could possibly ask for.  Got a problem at three in the morning?  He’ll be there.  And, as a saving grace, he takes a strong “No” without complaint, so once you’re smart enough to go, “I’m not having the scallops, Ken,” he backs off without a word and never takes it personally.  He just feels – and perhaps not incorrectly – that if he wants something, it never hurts to ask.
Still.  It means you have to be aware of my friend’s foibles.  If you’re going on vacation with him (as we have), you will spend every day doing what he wants unless you speak up and go, “No, I am not interested in another wine tour.  We’re going to the docks instead.”  And then everything is wonderful, as once he gets to the docks he will be cheerful and happy and probably buy you dinner.
You might think this is an indictment of my friend, having to act differently around him.  But this kind of altered behavior is something I do for every close friend I have.  Because they’ve all got their weak spots.
D means well when he promises things, but never follows up.  K will disappear for months on end when she finds a new boyfriend.  B needs to be the smartest person in the room or he’ll get pissy.  N gets uncomfortable whenever you discuss deep emotional topics.
Hell, Gini has those warnings for me.  F gets snappy when he’s neck-deep in a tough work problem.  F has six weeks out of the year when he’s useless.  F will argue you senseless if you concentrate on the logic of your argument as opposed to discussing how his action make you feel.
To be aware of, and react accordingly to, your friends’ negative traits, is not a betrayal of friendship.  It’s reality.
Which is tough, especially for people in deeply dysfunctional families who were taught, “You never speak badly of us.”  What gets internalized is this fucked-up lesson that “If you really love someone, you won’t notice their bad points.”  Which is crazy!  Everyone has soft spots in their psyche, where trusting them to do X will lead you to ruin.  That lesson is basically saying, “You need to fall in love with an android who will never let you down.”  That’s not going to happen.
So what they do instead is shove aside reality.  They date someone who’s bad at paying the rent but act as though their partner was going to come through this time, then wonder why they’re living in squalor.
Look.  It’s a more honest act of love to look at someone and say, “Yes, she’s terrible at paying the bills, but I love her.”  Loving someone doesn’t mean slapping on blinders and running into things; it means going, “Okay, if we move in together, I’m going to have to make the sacrifice of taking control of the finances, because she can’t do it.”  Which gets even more complex if your partner really thinks she’s quite GOOD at paying the bills despite the copious evidence otherwise… But that’s part of negotiating a solid relationship.
There’s this whole attitude of love where saying bad things about your lover means you’re a bad person – and yes, if you’re bitching more than you’re adapting, then you’re probably not that nice.  But you can be realistic and be deeply in love.  You can commit, wholeheartedly, to someone who’s not perfect .  And it is not a betrayal to go, “Okay, this is something I know they won’t do, so I’ll either do it myself or find a way to get around that.”
Gini loves me more than any lover ever has.  She also knows I’ve got a lot of bad points.  Her real love comes not from ignoring those flaws, but in circumventing and reshaping them.  Because I’m human, as is everyone we’re ever going to date, and flaws don’t mean you’re unworthy of love.

Prometheus, Viewed As A Roleplaying Game

GM RIDLEY SCOTT: So you’ve all been in cryosleep for two years now, on a mysterious mission to the stars.  Your bodies lie in capsules, tended to by –
MICHAEL FASSBENDER: I’M A ROBOT!!!!!
SCOTT: What?
FASSBENDER: I’M A ROBOT OH BOY!  I never need to sleep.  I’m gonna spend the whole trip watching movies, and running around the ship, and playing X-Box… It’s so cool!  Wait!  Does the ship have a gym?
SCOTT: …I guess.
FASSBENDER: I’m gonna ride a bike and shoot hoops!  Because I’M A ROBOT!  How do I do when I shoot?  Huh?  Tell me how I did.  I bet I did awesome!!!!!
SCOTT (rolls some dice): Sure.  You get it through the net.
FASSBENDER: I do it again!  Look at these stats on my character sheet!  They’re through the roof!  Being a robot is awesome.  I bet you wish YOU guys were all robots…
CHARLIZE THERON (whispering to fellow player STRINGER BELL): Hey, am I a robot?  I can never make sense of these character sheets.
SCOTT: Okay, yeah, Fassbender, you make a lot of hoops.  Then the ship shudders to a stop and everyone wakes up.  Your bodies cry out for nutrients…
STRINGER BELL: I smoke a cigar and set up a Christmas tree.
SCOTT: …what?  This is an enclosed spaceship!  Where the hell did you get a Christmas tree?
STRINGER BELL: Right on my inventory sheet.  I come prepared.  You’ll also see I have three freeze-dried Chihuahuas, a can of shark repellent, a case full of silly string, and a tin full of Mexican jumping beans in my left pocket.
SCOTT: Okay.  You set up a Christmas tree.
FASSBENDER: I’M A ROBOT!
————————————
SCOTT: So you all meet inside the gymnasium.
FASSBENDER: I SHOOT A HOOP!
SCOTT: No, you do not.  You’ve never met these people before.  Now you have to introduce yourself.
SCARY TATTOOED GUY FIFIELD: Wait a minute, we’ve never met each other?  Weren’t we all in cryosleep on a multimillion dollar mission into space?  Didn’t we at least have some kind of pre-ship meeting?
SCOTT: No.
FIFIELD: What, did they wheel us onto the ship in cryosleep?
FASSBENDER: I DID IT WITH MY ROBOT ARMS!
SCOTT: See?  Mikey wheeled you all.  That’s how it works.  In space.
THERON: Christ, Ridley, it’s a roleplaying cliché if we all meet at the inn when the plot-coupon guy hands us an adventure… but at least that makes sense.  As adventurers, we’d be drinking at the Inn.  We didn’t take some techno-roofies and lay down in a vaccubed to be shanghaied seventy million lightyears into space, only THEN to be told what the fuck we’re up to.
SCOTT (grumbling): Like you girls know anything about roleplaying.  Girls don’t do anything.  They don’t even give birth in this campaign.
THERON: What?
SCOTT: Nothing.  So you’re all at the Inn…. I mean the gym….
————————————
MILLBURN: Whafuck, there are DEAD ALIENS here in the compound?  That shit’s bad news.  I’m leaving.
THERON (facepalming): Millburn, you’re a biologist.  This is the first non-Earth biological structure you’ve ever laid eyes on.  This should be your holy fucking grail.  Why do you want to leave?
MILLBURN (waving character sheets): Look at this guy!  I’ve got no combat stats at all!  I’m toast in combat.
FIFIELD: Holy crap, you’re right.  Who the hell gave me 90% skill level in – what the hell is geology?
SCOTT (facepalming): The study of rocks.
FIFIELD: Why the hell would anyone wanna look at pebbles?  I wanted to bring weapons here!  I’m all bad-ass!  I have tattoos and a scraggly beard, and you’re telling me I’m not ju-jitsu expert, just the master of dirt?
MILLBURN: Yeah, screw this noise, let’s go back to the ship.  I’m not gonna get myself killed.
SCOTT: Fine.  You go back to the ship.
FIFIELD: So what’s happening there?
SCOTT: Nothing.  It’s the ship.  All the adventure’s over in the, you know, deeply alien complex I made this gigantic map of.
MILLBURN: You’re telling me there’s nothing to do back here?
FASSBENDER: YOU CAN SHOOT SOME AWESOME HOOPS!
MILLBURN: Shut UP, Mikey.  All right, fine.  We go back to the alien complex and wander around.
THERON (horrified): Do you… Want to tell anyone where you go?  Radio in?  So people know what happened to you after you left?
MILLBURN: Nah, we’re cool.
FASSBENDER: HEY YOU GUYS THIS ALIEN CHAMBER SLIME TASTES AWESOME IF YOU’RE A ROBOT.
————————————
STRINGER BELL: So, you wanna have sex?
THERON: You know, I think this is what passes for character development in this game.  Why not.
FASSBENDER: THIS SLIME IS SO COOL.  What happens if I feed it to Holloway?
SCOTT: Wait a minute, you find the alien muck that you don’t know what it does, on the same ship with your ailing master who you’re programmed to protect at all costs, and you’re just going to… Feed it to someone?  In the hopes of what?
FASSBENDER: I’m a ROBOT, man! I don’t think human!
HOLLOWAY: Wait a minute, I don’t want to eat alien slime.
FASSBENDER: LOOK AT THAT TWENTY GUYS I ROLLED A TWENTY ON MY CHARISMA CHECK!  CRITICAL!  EAT A BUG HOLLOWAY!
SCOTT: Yep.  He bamboozles you.  Down your hatch the alien slime goes.
HOLLOWAY:  What?  I don’t even get a save?
SCOTT: It was a very good roll.
HOLLOWAY: Oh, for Christ’s sake.  Charlize is right.  Hey, Noomi, you wanna have sex?
NOOMI RAPACE: Baby, let’s make character development all night long.
————————————
FIFIELD: GOD, this game’s boring.  So they went back to the ship and didn’t tell us?
THERON: You didn’t tell us where you went!
FIFIELD: At least you’re having sex.  If I’d known I could have had sex with you, I would have totally spammed that attack, if you get my drift.
MILLBURN: Okay, we found some more dead bodies, and there was some kind of blip over there, and so now what?
SCOTT:  It’s an abandoned alien complex.  It’s been dormant for two thousand years.  There’s not that much to do.
MILLBURN:  Fuck, man, throw us a bone.  Make a roll on the wandering monster table or something!
SCOTT: Fine.  Fine.  You want random fucking monsters?  Okay, a… A deadly alien snake rises from the muck.  It looks like a cobra, flaring its hood at you and swaying back and forth.
MILLBURN: I POKE IT!
SCOTT: It eats you.
MILLBURN: Man, that is so UNFAIR.
————————————
SCOTT: All right, Noomi, that was some pretty amazing work.  You exit the autodoc, stomach stapled, alien extracted.  I totally thought you were hosed.
NOOMI: I find Mikey.  Fucking Mikey.
FASSBENDER: HI NOOMI!  YOU’RE AWESOME!  That was so cool, the whole “zip” and “snap” and “slurp” thing!
NOOMI: Now I’m going to kill you.
FASSBENDER: But why?
NOOMI: Because you just tried to kill me.  By implanting an alien baby inside of me.  I assume you’re either trying to destroy me personally, or are generating aliens as part of an elaborate biowarfare program.
FASSBENDER: …no.
NOOMI: No?
FASSBENDER: I just wanted to see what would happen.  Dude, it’s cool, you’re alive, I’m alive, now let’s go meet a alien!  I found a frozen one.
NOOMI: …how did you wake it up?
FASSBENDER: I pressed a LOT of buttons.  They went beep!
NOOMI: What are you going to do when you meet the alien?
FASSBENDER: I’m going to tell it that my dad wants to lick it.  ‘CAUSE I’M A ROBOT.
NOOMI: This I gotta see.
————————————
SCOTT: So you kneel in front of Weyland, in service, and clasp his hand.
THERON: I’ll do what you want…. (pauses dramatically) …father.
(Entire group GROANS in anguish.)
FIFIELD: You really went there, Charlize?  Calling him Dad?
THERON: SOMEBODY has to roleplay here, you ass!
SCOTT: You shut up.  I think it’s cool.  Fine, Charlie, he’s your dad.
FIFIELD: 1979 just called, man.  It wants its plot twist back.
SCOTT: Will you shut your pie-hole?  You’re ruining my game!
FIFIELD: I’M ruining it?!?  Dude, I’ve been dead for an hour now!  I’m bored!  Way to DM, lameface.
SCOTT: What do you want me to do?  You fell in acid and DIED.  There’s not much to do after you’re dead.
FIFIELD: …what if I came back as an alien zombie, revengeous for blood, and attacked the ship?
SCOTT: That makes no sense.  On the other hand, I did stat all of these NPCs who I never gave names to.  Okay, fine, roll it up.
————————————
SCOTT: All right, Charlize and Noomi!  The alien ship is tumbling from the sky, landing on you.  It’s falling in a completely straight line.
NOOMI: I juke left.
THERON: So do I.
FASSBENDER: RUN WITH YOUR ROBOT LEGS, CHARLIZE!
THERON: …what?
FASSBENDER: You’re probably a robot, too!  That’s how you find out!  I bet you run real super-fast, like a rocket, when your life is in danger!
THERON: But the ship will crush me.
FASSBENDER: DON’T LET THAT SHIP BE THE BOSS OF YOU.
THERON: …fine.  It’s not like I’m missing out on all the excellent plot twists if I die.  Ridley, what happens if I run in a straight line?
SCOTT: You get squished.
FASSBENDER:  YOU’RE A FLAT ROBOT, CHARLIE!
————————————
SCOTT: Okay, so the pilot and his two friends killed themselves out of boredom, Fifield and Millburn killed themselves out of boredom, and the only people left are Noomi, and –
FASSBENDER: I’M A ROBOT!
SCOTT: Noomi, you wanna play again?
NOOMI: Can I stuff Mikey’s head in a bag so he shuts up?
SCOTT: God yes.
NOOMI: I’ll be here next week.

The Clarion Blog-A-Thon: In Which I Try To Show You How Writers Think

The public side of me as a writer is that I’m a Nebula nominee, with nineteen short stories published in less than four years, seven of them in professional venues.  (And I just sold my eighth story this weekend.)  By most standards, for a writer still in his early-career stage, I’ve done pretty well.
The secret is that I spent the twenty years before that struggling, selling practically nothing.  My stories, though copiously written, never sold.  My novels never got so much as a nibble of interest.
What turned me around?  The Clarion Writers’ Workshop.  Six weeks of intensive writer boot-camp that shoved me, kicking and screaming, up to the next level.  Now that they need funds to keep operating, I’m blogging for six weeks to help raise money for them… And I’m making your donations worth your while by providing interesting writing, prizes, and genuine fun.
But this year’s blogging is going to be a little different.
Two years ago, in an attempt to show what the Clarion experience is like, I wrote three-and-a-half short stories during the blog-a-thon.  Last year, I live-wrote the first draft of my novel during the blog-a-thon.  Neither were particularly interactive, as I just wrote a lot and then discussed what worked (and didn’t work) about the story in progress, and maybe I got a few comments.  It was what I intended – a look into how a professional writer views stories – but there wasn’t much for anyone to do.
This year, I’m going to live-plot my novel.  If you’ll recall from a previous entry, the novel I was writing fell apart and needed to be started over from the beginning.  Well, what I’m going to do is to spend the next six weeks sketching characters and plotting the novel… Which means that you can ask questions, suggest ideas, and basically have your say!
Which, I think, will be a much more interesting look into the writing mind.  Because things will be suggested and I’ll have to explain why they don’t serve the central functions of the plot or character – which will be closer to how a writer approaches things, since the endless churn of my mind is pretty much “Why don’t I….? …nah, that doesn’t work.”  Which will, in turn, provide a deeper look into how I work a story, because it’ll be literally like you’re inside my head.
That said, just in case that doesn’t sell you, I’ll also have fabulous prizes!  Right now, I have twelve authors lined up with prizes you can win – including some fabulous stuff from Neil Gaiman, Mary Robinette Kowal, Cat Valente, and many more awesome names who I’m sandbagging until later in the hopes of generating more funds and excitement!  If you donate $5, you’ll get a shot at these awesome writing-related things.
And if you’re a writer, there are six slots available to have your short stories/opening chapters critiqued by me, who’s been nominated for a Nebula and has a decent idea of how a story ticks.  These usually go fast, as I can only do one a week, so sign up now if you’re interested!
So how is that going to work?

• A $5 donation gets you an entry in the raffle prize!
• A $10 donation will get you access to clarion_echo, the members-only community where I’m live-blogging the novel.
• A $25 donation given in time will give you a slot at one of the six story critiques, assuming you want one. I’m kindly brutal. Or perhaps brutally kind.

So donate today!  And go nuts!
Frequently Asked Questions:
Q: How do I join the Clarion_echo community?
A: Just click this link and donate at least $10. Then forward the receipt for your donation to theferrett@theferrett.com, along with your LJ user name – and I’ll make you a member of this friends-only community.
Q:  Do I have to have a LiveJournal account?
A:  Sorry, but yes.  It’s the only way I can manage all these members easily.  I know this is one step up from creating a mySpace account, but I promise the plotting will be cool.
Q:  How will this plotting work?
A:  I’ve got some ideas, but am still finalizing.  It’ll be interactive, though, in that I’ll be looking for questions to see how you approach a given story problem.  The only thing I’ll say is that my own ideas only have about a 5% chance of getting through, so please, look at this as an interactive exercise and don’t take any rejection personally.  Which is a pretty good approach to the whole writing business in any case!
Q:  Last year, I signed up for the $100 level of donation, and you haven’t written my story yet!
A:  Sorry about that.  I write slow.  If you look at the four stories I wrote during the Clarion 2010 blog-a-thon, two are still unfinished.  I have trunkfuls of story ideas, and I’d be published in many more anthologies if I could write to spec.
Which is not to say that I won’t do it – it just may take a while.  By way of recompense, I’ll offer a Tuckerization into this latest novel of mine in addition to the eventual story.  Contact me for details.
Q:  What’s that link for donating again?
A:  Go do it now!

A Meme I Find Kind Of Interesting

So Ken Schneyer posted his take on the “Lucky Seven” meme, which is as follows:
“Go to page 7 or 77 of your latest work. Read down to the seventh line and then post online the next seven lines or sentences. Then head off and tag seven more writers.”
I’m not gonna tag seven writers, because, well, I always hate tagging people.  But I like this one, so I’m gonna play – and actually, the snippet is damn near perfect as an excerpt.

That’s where the jumper had infected him; he’d been looking aimlessly at the Chrysler building as though taking a picture of it might have healed him, and I’d gone inside to get us some coffee.
Once the Toxoplasma Decumba organism wormed its way into your bloodstream, it created cascades of subtle brain chemistry changes that made you obsessed with climbing — the higher you went, the better you felt.  And when you leapt off, as your body smashed onto the pavement in the middle of a crowded lunch hour, you splattered everyone with your infected blood.  To reproduce.
Not so good in small country towns.  In rougher lands you’d find some infected way up in trees, leaping awkwardly as the postman walked by, breaking bones and tree limbs alike.  They didn’t get close to infecting anyone, but the parasite had evolved to live in a very specific environment.

Less Vitriol, More Empathy: A Word To Complaining Fans

Whenever someone bitches about how stupid the creators are for producing a terrible movie, I think of Star Wars.  Not Star Wars, the global sensation that’s been around for thirty years – but Star Wars, the over-budget mess in mid-production, staffed by no-name actors, directed by the guy who’d had only one decent movie in the can.
If you read the interviews with the actors, they all went out after filming every day and got hammered.  And why not?  By day, you’re reading terrible, stilted dialog while the director screams at you: “Faster!  And more intense!”  You don’t see the special effects; you’re on a wooden screen, knowing the studio wants to shut this production down.  You don’t hear the John Williams music doing half the emotional work for you.  All you know is that this crazy maniac is telling you that all your attempts to emote lines like “How could I be so stupid? He’s nowhere in sight. Blast it!” aren’t sufficient while idiots in white plated armor are firing imaginary guns at you.
Why wouldn’t you drink?
Why wouldn’t you think this movie was the end of your career?
And even then, you’re wrong.  I know you’re thinking, “Well, it was all a success after that,” but… The movie that George Lucas directed did bomb.  The unsung hero of Star Wars is the film editor, who realized the initial cut was about twenty minutes too long, and went back and sped up the film to helter-skelter speeds – because the minute you had a second to pause and think about things, the whole thing fell apart.  The initial few cuts were legendary failures, and everyone in Hollywood was kissing George Lucas’ career goodbye.
The reason I say this is because I work in a couple of creative fields – I write stories, and I handle Magic: the Gathering cards as my day job.  And whenever something isn’t particularly, there’s this entitled, sneering reaction from the fans.  They leave comments over and over again with the same basic premise: “God, you’re so fucking stupid.  Fixing it’s so easy.  Why didn’t you just do X?”
Because it’s not that simple when you’re in the middle of the damn thing, that’s why.
Look, if we could all write glorious stories of magnificent heartbreak every time, we would.  But the creative process is really very complicated.  You’re complaining with the fresh sight of retrospect.  Scott Kurtz, author of webcomic PVP, once said that you couldn’t really critique a webcomic until you’d done one.  At the time, I disagreed strongly.  Once I had a year of producing a webcomic under my belt, well, I wasn’t so certain.
It’s not that you can’t critique – hell, you absolutely should.  I spent this week slamming Prometheus for failing absolutely on all but an allegorical level.  But when you critique, you shouldn’t take the attitude that the creative process is simple… And particularly not if you’ve never made anything and thrown your darling out to a crowd of angry, ungrateful people to be savaged.
When the project is done, it’s easy to look back and see what could have done better.  But in the middle of things, when you’re looking at a half-blank slate and the world is full of ten thousand choices, it’s hard to fathom that this one choice is the critical one.  Or perhaps – and this is the thing that the people who think “it’s simple” never get – that you made a hundred very good choices, more than most people ever do, enough to catapult your film/book/card game/music past the realms of “stuff that no one pays attention to” and into the realm of “good enough to for many people to like” – and in the process of making those hundred choices absolutely correctly, the one that stopped it from being pure genius got by you.
And maybe – just maybe – it’s possible that as a creator, you make a film/book/card game/music that absolutely satisfies you, but doesn’t hit anyone else’s good points.  That happens.  A lot.  And if you’re sitting there squalling because the creator should have “known better,” then maybe you should try creating stuff that’s perfect for you, and see the horrifying variance in reactions when your “perfect” product hits the shelves.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t criticize.  If Promethus sucks, well, it failed.  If something I write doesn’t win every award, well, it’s worthwhile to point out why my stories didn’t pan out.  But what you should not do is to treat the whole thing as a big ball of rage, as if we purposely set out to annoy you when making it.
We didn’t.  We wanted to make beauty.  Something got in the way, and we’re sorry… But if this was as easy as you think, then everyone would do it.

Two Videos You Need To See. Now.

Okay, I’ve gone off on my love of Epic Rap Battles of History before, but this Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs is approaching Weird Al levels of magnificence. Nice Peter is totally on his game here, and this is actually just a damned good rap.

Then really, this is one of the best goddamned mashups I’ve heard in quite some time – Third Eye Blind vs. Carly Rae Jepsen. It’s actually kind of eerie how well this works.