Understanding the Nerd Mentality

“They’re doing a reboot of my favorite comic?  That’s awesome.  I love seeing new creative takes on things!
“They’re making it grim and gritty? Super.  The old comics were too childish, with all those happy endings and nice people.  That’s not the way the real world works. Make it with a lot of scowling people, filled with angst and alcoholism and real-world issues.  Turn old friends into rivals?  Make everyone a little more self-centered?  That is awesome.
“And they’re making it extra-violent, too? Holy fuck, that’s great!  The old comic books were from a simpler time – you never saw the hero sweat.  Let’s throw some fountains of blood in there, a couple of women stuffed in refrigerators to show the bad guy is really bad, and when the hero fights he should have, like, I dunno, guts oozing out his ribs.  And people should die in buckets around them as they collapse buildings.  That’s making things match today’s modern society!
“Whoa!  Of course they’re putting in sex.  This isn’t the namby-pamby days of old where the hero and heroine kissed chastely! Naw, they gotta get down and dirty!  Show some tits!  Have them clawing at each other on a bed!  And when the girl comes out, she should be dressed real slutty – all leather and sado-masochistic, desperate to fuck the men she hates, wanting to hurt herself!  Yeah, that’s the way women work!
“What?  Making the lead character black?  What bullshit is this? Nobody’s black.  Or gay.  Or female.  It’s horrible that they’re making these pandering changes just to get sales!  Why do they have to mess with the status quo?”

Grumpy-Man, Grumpy-Man, Does Whatever A Grumpy Can

The new Spider-Man is going to be black. Well, half-black and half-Hispanic.
The comics blogosphere is in an uproar about this, because apparently some people are all like SPIDER-MAN IS NOT A BLACK GUY and everyone else is like HELLO, RACIST? (Although, I should note, the opinion of anyone blogging about “Spiderman” and not “Spider-Man” can be summarily discounted.  True fans know.)
So there’s a lot of fury being thrown around right now.  But I must be old, because I’m pre-furious about a situation that hasn’t even come to pass.
Here’s the deal: the quote-unquote “real” Spider-Man is going to remain caucasian. (And there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.)  This is the Ultimate Spider-Man, the Spider-Man of a parallel Marvel universe, who died last month in what turned out to be a pretty heartbreaking comic.  (The actual final face-off against the Green Goblin was underwhelming, but Brian Michael Bendis nailed Peter Parker’s last words so perfectly that it still brings tears to my eyes.)  So the “official” Spider-Man remains as minty fresh as ever – alas, the only Spider-Man that’s getting the makeout is the out-of-standard-continuity one, the one designed for bold and crazy experiments such as this.
The good news is that this is the only Spider-Man that’s consistently written well these days, so it has a good shot at succeeding.  And I absolutely adore that Brian Michael Bendis wanted to do a Spider-Man comic starring a non-white lead character after seeing Troy in Community dressed up in a Spider-Man outfit.  (The actor, Donald Glover, is a huge Spider-Man fan and actively campaigned to get the role.)  If Peter Parker must be dead, and the Ultimates universe must continue, then this isn’t a bad choice.
But I’m upset about what’s going to happen ten years down the line.
Here’s the deal: all this shit over the black Spider-Man?  It’ll pass.  Comic nerds are notoriously angry about changes to anything – remember the vast letter-writing campaign that erupted when Michael Keaton was cast as Batman?  Remember the comics furor over the fact that the new movie Spider-Man had organic web-shooters instead of designing them?  Remember Bootgate, the eruption of anger that spilled over when it turned out the new movie Superman had different boots?
I’m not saying there’s not racism in comics-land – there is – but you have to also account for the fact that comics fans are cranky old guys who get furious about any change.  Some of that fury is because comics fans grew up on comics, and the primary urge is EVERYTHING SHOULD STAY EXACTLY THE WAY IT WAS WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN YEARS OLD AND JUST DISCOVERED COMICS AND EVERYTHING WAS COOL.
No, what’s going to happen is that the actual comic will come out, and because it’s written by one of the most consistently good writers in the industry it will probably be much better than the accusations of “stunt casting” would merit, and you know what will happen?  We will fall, slowly, in love with this new Spider-Man.  We’ll find that he has his own charms, and he’ll have adventures where we root for him – and in the beginning, yes, he’ll be heavily under the shadow of old Peter Parker, but over the course of years he’ll crawl out and make his own pathway. We’ll look back at this criticism and be amazed we made such a mountain out of a molehill.
This, if the comics field doesn’t collapse in the meantime, will last for about five to eight years.
Then someone at Marvel will get a great idea: What if Peter Parker comes back?  That’s a stunning plot twist!  And then they’ll arrange it so that Peter WHOOOO RISES FROM THE DEAD and then suddenly the character they’ve spent so much effort to get us to fall in love with will be a second banana for life.
Don’t believe me?  Hey, ask James Rhodes. Ask Kyle Rayner. Ask Wally West.
And I’m outraged, because hey, years from now, a black Spider-Man can’t catch a break – he’ll be the hero as long as the white guy ain’t around, but the minute the white dude comes swinging back in, we’ll be all like, “HEY, PETER, HOW YOU DOING?  OH, DON’T MIND HIM THERE, HE’S JUST NOT AS COOL AS YOU.”  And the black guy will be forgotten, and what started out as an attempt to be hearteningly progressive will actually wind up a sort of unconsciously racist sort of thing as the minority character gets shoved aside.  It’s not entirely racist, since both Kyle and Wally were white as well and the primogeniture of comics means that the “real” character eventually returns to center stage – but it’s gonna have some real uncomfortable overtones when it happens.
So yeah.  Here I am, Old Bitter Comics Fan, not worried at all about the current scandal, looking forward to seeing this new take on Spider-Man, but actually angry now about what’s going to happen a decade down the line, assuming the comic is successful and comics don’t tumble into a black hole.
I need to get a life.
(Also, I find myself wandering around the house, singing an altered version of the Spider-Man theme song: “Spider-Man, Spider-Man, now he’s half black and mex-i-can…”  I’m more excited about this casting change than I’d like to let on.  [And yes, I know, Hispanic doesn’t equal Mexican, but “Hispanic” just doesn’t swing in the song, baby.])

You Know, It's Almost Like I'm A Real Writer

In case you hadn’t heard: on Sunday, I finished the first draft of my first post-Clarion novel.  This took me nine months of effort to write, and I was surprisingly drained afterwards.  It was like I’d birthed a baby.  A really ugly baby.
(Unlike babies, thankfully, I can do a lot of plastic surgery on this one until he’s beautiful.  I’m never a first-draft kinda guy.  Though don’t get me wrong, the novel is readable, and entertaining, even in this nascent and flawed form.)
This is both good news and bad news for the Clarion Blog-A-Thon.  It’s good news because, if you’ll recall, a $10 donation will get you access to the full first draft of the novel, posted a chapter a day, complete with commentary on what works and what needs to be fixed and why.  I’d already posted 23 chapters (along with almost 20,000 words on various essays on the techniques I use in the novel), but I was concerned that I might get to the end of the Blog-A-Thon and go, “Sorry, couldn’t find an ending for you, just pretend it’s like The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”
No!  The ending’s there, and it largely works!  This is a joy.
The bad news is that the Blog-A-Thon is over this week, and LJ being fucked for a week means that I’m very behind on chapters.  So now I’m posting two, three chapters a day in order to finish it all up in time! So what I have is a completed novel that will be published to a select group of people this week – won’t you be one of them?  I know the economy sucks, but it’s for a good cause, and the beta version of the novel (plus mega-doses of writer advice!) is worth at least $10.
In other news, my divorce-through-a-magic-portal story “A Window, Clear As A Mirror” got a “Recommended” review from Rich Horton over at Locus this month!  This is my first “Recommended” review from them ever; they’re pretty hard to get.  Rich said this:

The 13th outing for Shimmer includes a very nice offering from Ferrett Steinmetz, ‘‘A Window, Clear as a Mirror’’, in which a man loses his wife to a portal to the Sunlit Lands, and finds himself in an odd way – first through a relationship with a refugee from those lands, and then by traveling there to find his wife. I suppose one might call it bittersweet, though that’s not quite right: resignedly true, I suppose.

If you’ll recall, this is my favorite story that I’ve ever written – and my money-back guarantee is still open on it.  If you buy it from Shimmer (the .PDF version’s a mere $4), and you don’t like it, I’ll refund your money, no questions asked.   I really love this story, and if you’ve liked any of my other stories, I think you’ll really dig this one.
And finally, my story “My Father’s Wounds” is due out in Beneath Ceaseless Skies next week – and it turns out it’s getting the full podcast treatment as well!  So I’m totally psyched.  I love hearing competent people read my stuff.  (I’m still learning how to read competently.  It takes a long while.)
 

Surviving Your Post-Clarion Experience

So.  You’ve been through six weeks of the most intense, most educational, most stressful writers’ boot camp around.  And in a week, as of this Saturday… it will all be over.
How do you survive that transition?
There are eighteen students leaving this year’s Clarion in a week — and as it turns out, happily, the advice I’d give them upon leaving the pressure cooker is pretty much the same advice I’d give to writers in general.  And that advice is this:
Advice #1: You’re Gonna Have That Gap, And That’s Okay.
The best advice I have to give is not from me: it’s from Ira Glass, talking about the Creative Gap.  Sit down, spend five minutes, and watch it.

If you’re not in a place where you can watch this right now —and you should find the time later — this is the relevant quote:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you…
 
Everybody goes through that. For you to go through it—if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase, or if you’re just starting off and you’re entering into that phase—you’ve got to know that’s totally normal. The most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work.

And that’s the thing about Clarion: when you come out, you often feel this huge pressure.  You’ve spent six weeks among the best in the business, and now you have to deliver.  And if these next words aren’t golden, you’re a failure, you suck, my God how did anyone think anything of you?
Relax.  Take a deep breath. Let it go.
This feeling of “not-good” is healthy.  It’s the sign that you’re taking the craft seriously.  Yet if you allow that feeling to seize you, holding back because if I can’t produce brilliance, it’s worth nothing, then you’re not helping yourself.
Keep writing.  Elizabeth Bear taught me a wonderful mantra at Viable Paradise, and there are times I chant it repeatedly: It’s a draft, it can suck.  Let that suck seep from your pores, get it all out, because stressing over Your Grand Career is just going to hinder you.
There are so many unknowns.  So many.  All you can do is get better, and you do that by continuing to write.
And speaking of that…
Advice #2: You Are A Writer…
At Clarion, you had a vastly empowering thing: for six weeks, not one person doubted you were a writer.  Your teachers agreed you were a writer, your peers all agreed that you were a writer, and you had all this wondrous time to write.  That made it easy to be a writer.
Then you leave Clarion, and you discover that maybe you’re not.
In the outside world, you run into all these distressing people who don’t know you’re a writer and don’t care.  They will make requests of you that suck away your writing-time.  They will see you not as A Writer, but as A Student or A Parent or A Barista…
…and that erodes your confidence, especially when those rejections start to flow in.  Every rejection feels like a little “Nah, maybe you’re not.”  And outside of that helpful Clarion bubble-culture, it can be hard to retain that necessary feeling of writer-ness.
But there’s two things about writers.  First is, they make space to be writers. When the world crushes in with its deadlines and fun times and work, real writers push back.  They realize that the world is a big sponge that will suck up every last minute of your time, unless you stop that world and say, “This hour is for my writing.”
You need to have the confidence to say “Yes, that’s my time.”  That’s part of being a writer; taking that space by yourself, even when Clarion doesn’t give it to you.
(And if you’re lazy one day and fail to write, don’t use that as an excuse to fail a second day.  It’s okay to fall off the horse; it’s not okay to lay in the mud for a couple of days because hey, I already fell, maybe I should just take a vacation while I’m down here.)
The second thing about writers is that they get rejections.  Do not look at a rejection as a sign that you’re not a writer, but rather that you are.  You know who doesn’t get rejections?  The people who keep all their manuscripts on their hard drive and never send them out.  The only way to not get rejected is to not actually try to get published.
If you’re a writer at all, you’re going to pile up tons of rejections.  So wear them with pride.  Every writer has a box full of “No”s, and your goal is to get as many of them as you can.
It’s okay.  Remember.  You’re a writer, and this is what writers do.  Sometimes that feels a little weird, standing amidst the piles of laundry and proclaiming, “I AM A WRITER” – but writers also do laundry.
Advice #3: …If You Want To Be. 
You know what’s okay?  Not being a writer.
You might want to try it for a while.
Some people find that the post-Clarion pressure is too much, and it destroys them.  But while it helps if you write a lot to flush all those terrible, terrible words from your system, you have to find what works for you.
And sometimes, what works is giving up.
Thing is, if you view it as “I’m going to stop writing for a week, but then I have to get back to this,” that’s just going to make you feel guilty and stressed the whole damn time.  Your creative batteries may not be charged by that diamond-hard pressure of MAKE A STORY NOW, MONKEY-BOY.  And if you keep trying to force it through, then you may crack.
So seriously.  Give up.  A lot of people came out of Clarion and discovered that this writing thing involves a lot of agita and one too many doors slammed in their face, and realized that while they had the native talent, it was just too much of an effort to turn this raw materials into finalized career.  And that was a very useful thing to know.
You don’t have to do this.
And for a lot of those people, once they gave it up for six months or a year or whatever, their subconsciousnesses started churning and soon enough, like green shoots poking through cracked concrete, they found the stories welling up again.
Others found out that they had no need — that they were happier not making the attempt.  And that’s okay.  Spending six weeks to find out that this is not a path that’s going to make you happy?  That’s cheap.  Some people wander in the wrong careers for years.
Life is hard enough without holding a gun to your head.  Be free to choose another path if writing doesn’t make you happy; it’s equally valid.
Advice #4: This Feeling Will Never Fail You.
When Cat Valente told me I needed to go to Clarion, she mentioned how “the Clarion kids” were at conventions.  “It’s like they all know each other,” she said.  “And they have these happy reunions, even if they’ve never met.”
Which is true.  When I see you at a con, you tell me what year you are, and I will clasp your hand and give you the big secret Clarion grin.  Because I know you’ve been there with me.  We’ve done this together.
But your classmates?  You’ll stay in touch — through Twitter, through private mail lists, through chats.  And I know what you’re wondering:
Will this feeling of togetherness last?
And I am here to tell you: Yes.
God yes.
Whenever I see my old classmates, it’s like I’ve found my secret family again.  We pick up right from where we left off, and it’s some of the old tensions, all of the old love — that beautiful realization that we shared this moment, and in some part of our brains we’re always sharing it, and now we’ve synced up again in real-time to do it again.
Space will divide you.  Time will divide you.  Differing paths will divide you.
But you’ll always be one.
(Hey, come on – you think I’m doing all this writing for the Clarion Blog-A-Thon just for kicks?  I do it to honor the Clarion experience.)

LJ's Back, So Let's Talk About Google+

About a year ago, I wrote a brief essay on the death of the user name. Even for me, I got a lot of unusually stupid responses.
Now, admittedly, I wasn’t as clear as I should have been – and I think part of the problem was the terminology of “user name” (i.e., “theferrett”) and “real name” (i.e. “Ferrett Steinmetz”), wherein even though I pointed out that Ferrett Steinmetz is not my “real” name, it’s certainly the handle I go by. The death of the user name does mean the death of pseudonymity, since you can still choose any damn made-up name you please to identify yourself. I certainly did.
Now, I’m against user names for two reasons. The first is that whenever any username-usin’ social network starts up, there’s a gold rush where you either get the name you hoped for or you do not. For example, let’s look at my user names across the net:

• theferrett on LiveJournal.com
• Ferretthimself on Twitter
• The_ferrett on OKCupid
• iamferrettsannoyance on Yahoo.com
• TheFerrett on FetLife

So why do I have all of these subtly different usernames, you ask? Is it because I wanted an inconsistent nomenclature? So, it’s because with a singleton user name, someone else snatched up the name I wanted first and I had to choose something else.
Hell, you think I wanted “theferrett,” the name you probably know me by? I did not. But Jessica had already taken ferrett, so I had to put a “the” in front of it. And that’s not even the end of it; my nickname, way back in the day, was actually “Weasel.” But “weasel” was taken on every BBS I wanted to be on, as was “ferret,” so I had to misspell a version of my nickname in order to get something I could remember.
I’m not alone in this quest for the right name. A lot of the people reading this blog are super-users of the Internet, the first in to any social network – but if you get in late in the game, that means you have to choose another name. In turn, that leads to a problem of not being able to identify yourself consistently – I’ve seen the jumble where I “know” someone really well on LiveJournal and yet have had no idea for months that they were following me on Twitter because their handle was completely different. In fact, it happens all the time.
In other words, I effectively lost their identity because of something they had zero control over. That’s bad.
That gold-rush, one-to-a-customer makes it hell to find people you want. If I want to find you on a given social network, I’m often not able to. That’s the first bad thing about usernames.
The second reason, as I can tell you, is that people never remember them. My site, StarCityGames.com just switched from usernames to emails after years of usernames, because our customer service department was bombarded with requests for “I forgot my username…” Why? Because the username was, for many, a completely arbitrary thing, and if they couldn’t get their “default” username, then they had no idea what it actually was.
Hence, my cry for the death of the user name. As andrewducker pointed out, part of the reason Facebook is so popular can almost certainly be attributed to its usage of what I’ll call “full” names – if I’m looking for Marcus Osdoba, I can find him. And if there’s more than one Marcus Osdoba, then I can look at user pictures until I find the guy who matches up with what I know of him.
Now, this is not to say that “full” names are a perfect solution: I feel for Bill Smith, I really do. And I think that if you’ve started with user names on a social network where people can search for you, you owe it to your base to keep using user names until the end of time, for reasons I’ll discuss shortly. And I do see the mystique of having a user name you chose that has deep meaning to you, like “PearlJewel” – but, as noted, there’s no guarantee you’re going to have that beautiful user name if someone else gets there first. (And if you have such a one-word username that you have issues appending a last name to it, even a made-up one, then I agree that a social network should have a place for you to put that user name.)
Hence, I think “full names,” where you can have multiples and user the name on your driver’s license if you wish, are the way to go. That didn’t stop people from claiming that I wanted to force everyone to use their real name (when I, as noted, clearly do not), or that clearly I was so ashamed of my past behavior that I wanted to change the architecture of the Internet in order to obscure my identity (when my main gripe was that I couldn’t have my identity be consistently recognized), or even that “The Ferrett” hated pseudonyms (what?). (Most of this dumbness wasn’t in the comments, never fear – you’re as witty and insightful as usual – it was in other blogs’ reactions to mine.)
Apparently Google+ agrees with me, though – they’ve used full names.
Unfortunately, though they implemented full names, they’re forcing people to use their “real” names. They’re locking accounts that don’t have “real” names, at least according to a set of ill-defined criteria that nobody seems to understand, but seems to be random people tagging folks as “not real.” (The Gmail accounts or calendars aren’t frozen, thank God, but you’re not allowed on Google+ again.)
This is both stupid, and dangerous.
Here’s the deal with pseudonymity: we need it. There are people being stalked by exes who really can’t be on the Internet under their real name, lest their stalker find and hurt them again. And there are people who have sucktacular jobs who do not want their bosses and potential bosses to find them ever, no matter how many privacy circles you implement. And there are just people who don’t like the name on their birth certificate and want to go by something else.
Bill Smith, you poor overused bastard, I can completely dig if you want to be the more-unique Pony McRainbow.
Forcing people to use their “real” name gets tricky, because what is a real name? The name on my driver’s license is William. So is “Bill” my “real” name, which is what people called me before I transitioned to “Ferrett”? Or is “Ferrett” my real name, since it’s what my wife, kids, friends, and boss all call me? Not only is forcing people to use a “real” name potentially harmful, but it’s impossible to define properly. Is the real name the birth name, a societally-approved nickname, the name your boss calls you, the name your friends call you?
Google cannot decide that. I’m not saying they shouldn’t; I’m saying they can’t. No matter what legal definition they use, it won’t match up with the real world to a significant amount somewhere.
The problems with usernames aside, people have such a deep need for pseudonymity ingrained in their system that it is foolish to fight this need. Google+, I suspect, wants everyone to have their real names so they can, like Facebook, use these names behind the scenes to provide better advertising. (Or, as my wife points out, they want definable “real” names to fight the creation of spammer accounts like “Xyzzy Mxyzptlk.”)
I’m not down on advertising – I dig they gotta pay the bills – but this is like America’s War on Drugs. All you’re going to do is piss a significant percentage of people off, have inconsistently-applied laws that blow up in your face periodically, and tag innocents. Except those of us in America kind of have to live with the War on Drugs, whereas people who get hurt by your quest for the Real Name will leave Google+. And they’re often some of the most influential net-bloggers there are.
So yes, developers – implement full names, wherein people can use their real names if they so desire. And if not, allow them to create an alternate persona – like, say, “Ferrett Steinmetz” – which can be transported whole to any other site that also implements full names. But don’t try to force folks to use some bastardized version of their legal name, because it won’t work, it’ll put people in danger, and it’ll piss people off.
If Rachel Rizzuto wants to be Lovemuffin Starshine, let her. If she decides that’s who she wants to be, she’ll have the same friends and the same blog posts and generate the same traffic to your site, because she’ll stay there. She won’t have to live in fear of her hateful ex-husband finding her journal, she won’t have to worry about her religious relatives stumbling across that one poly-friendly musing she left in the wrong circle, she won’t have to worry about her future employer finding her pictures of her at Burning Man. And if she gets comfortable enough in that identity that she decides to put that on her resume, then good. She’s built strength, and made a choice.
Don’t you make it for her.

My New Website – With New Stories For You To Read!

I completely redid my website because I needed new business cards.  This is not quite as stupid as it sounds.
See, when I went to World Fantasy Con last year, I came home with a sheaf of colorful business cards, not unlike a bag of very large confetti.  People had all sorts of magnificent cards extolling their virtues (“Wandering Mad Scientist And Author”) – and they’d hand them to me with pride, then give me a blandly expectant look.
“…so?” they asked.
“I, uh, didn’t know we needed business cards.”
“Of course you need business cards!” they assured me.  “How else will I remember who you are?”
Okay.  Business cards: needed. But what site would I put on my business card?  LiveJournal looked like it was going tits-up – and even so, it always looks a little low-rent to say, “You can find me at this social network, because I’m too lazy to get a real website.” (It’s the moral equivalent of asking for someone’s address and finding out they live in a motel next to a strip club.)  When the real truth was that I had a real website – I was just too lazy to actually update it.
So.  Convention in five weeks, website from 2005 – time to get serious.  So this weekend, I completely revamped theferrett.com to be more fitting with my stature as an author.
No, seriously, go take a look.  It’s all pretty and professional now!  And there’s an added bonus:
Every since I became a writer, people have been asking me, “So where can I read your stories?” Even when I pointed them to my WriterTopia page, they always came back disappointed, since only a few of those links pointed to actual, y’know, stories.  A lot of my tales have been published in print-only and paywall magazines, which means that really, you have no idea what I write like unless you’re willing to shell out $4.50 – and in this economy, it’s always a little scary taking a risk on some unknown entertainment value.
The good news, however, is that for most magazines, after a time period has passed, rights revert to the author.
Which means I can reprint them on my site.
So behold!  Here is a page with all of my stories.  And many of these stories have never been available for free reading before, including:

• My “What if I travelled back in time and tried to rekindle a romance with a Gini I’d never met?” story “The Backdated Romance” (originally in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine)
• My “Homeless girl in a junkyard” story “In The Garden of Rust and Salt” (originally in GUD Magazine Issue #6)
• My two older Asimov’s stories, “Camera Obscured” and “Under the Thumb of the Brain Patrol“

I’ll put the newer stories up as they become available.  But for now, have some happy Monday reading.
As for my posts, I’ll cross-post to LiveJournal for as long as possible – but like a lot of authors, my “primary” blogging will be at that site.  I don’t know how much longer LJ will be an entity (I mean, I’d like it to be forever), so this is not only moving traffic to my site, but also hedging my bets.  You know, just in case.