“Sorry! I Don’t Want To Interrupt Your Sweetie Time.”

“I’m sorry I sent you a text!” someone I have a crush on will tell me. “I know your girlfriend is in town. I don’t want to interrupt your time with her.”

First off, it’s a text. I have a pretty simple solution for that: if I’m in the middle of sweetie-time, I put the phone down. Are people leaping up mid-coitus to answer their buzzing phone?

When the wine’s on the table and we’re holding hands and the stars are beaming down romance, if the phone buzzes, it stays in my pocket.

Second, the people I date are all mature enough to understand that communication with the outside world does not stop when they walk through the door. They’re my primary focus, sure, but if I see something cool and think of a friend I’ll text a picture to my friend. If a friend has just gotten bad news, I’ll sympathize.

I’m not going to enter into a sexting session or an extensive text-counselling session (unless you’ve got a huge emergency), but I’m still going to talk to folks.

Third, I won’t waste my hours with them texting other people – see the first point – but texting doesn’t take a lot of time. I can catch up on my texts while they’re in the shower, or sending a picture takes like ten seconds max.

And fourth, and most importantly, the people I date realize that they’re part of an ecosystem of people I adore, of friends and lovers and family. If I smile at someone else’s text because they sent something that made me laugh, chances are I’ll share that funny with them. Because those other people are a part of my life, just like they are, and I don’t try to firewall off the knowledge of other people but to share the information of who they all are.

That, I admit, is not for everybody. But me personally, I find that I tend to get less jealous of SCARY UNKNOWN PARTNER when I get an idea of their sense of humor, when I know what fears they have, when I know the goofy things they do. I’m not just tolerant of the other people in my partners’ lives – I’m invested in them to an extent, as I want them to thrive and be happy and enjoy so long as they’re boosting my partners’ happiness.

Like I said. If I was doing something critical with them, you’d not hear from me until we were in down-time again. And if I was in a position where I was paying more attention to you than to them, well, I’d put the phone down.

But if I pick up the phone, I’ve got a few seconds to read your text, and reply, and let you know “Hi, I’m thinking of you.” Maybe that sounds like a horrible imposition when you’re on a date with me.  And if so, well, the solution is simple: don’t date me.

Yet I find they like getting those little “Howdy!”s when I’m on a date with someone else. It’s proof that you’re not occluded when I’m out with another person – if I like you enough to text you on a regular basis, friend or smoochy-person, you’re always on my mind at strange little times, you’re threaded into the weave of my life, and a text shows that.

You’re not the only color in my tapestry. But you’re important enough that I still want to say “hi” at little moments. Because everyone I’m friends with matters.

Even on, and perhaps especially on, times when I’m out with my sweetie.

Professional Writers’ Secrets That’ll Help You With National Novel Writing Month.

So today, you’re going to start writing A Novel for National Novel Writing Month.

Don’t forget that it can suck.

Lots of novels suck on the first draft.  Mine do!  (And some even say my novels suck after the sixth draft and they’re in bookstores and shiz.  That happens.)  The Viable Paradise Writers’ Workshop mantra is “It’s a draft, it can suck.”  Sucking is part of the process, and that’s awesome!

Quite often, when someone’s writing a novel, forward momentum is their goal.  I know I screwed the pooch in Chapter 3, but if I go back to fix that then I’ll never get to the stuff I’m excited about in Chapter 4.  I have friends with award-nominated books who have entire segments that go {INSERT AWESOME MAGICAL BATTLE HERE} or {HEARTBREAKING BACKSTORY GOES HERE} in their first drafts because, well, ya gotta keep going.

Fun fact: In the latest book I wrote, I kept getting feedback from my beta readers that went, “This entire book winds up being about the lead character’s religion, but his religion is barely mentioned in the first six chapters.”  That’s because I realized my protagonist was religious in Chapter 6.  I eventually had to go back and rewrite those chapters heavily, but I didn’t at the time because this whole “religion” angle really made the character come alive for me. I wanted to follow him down this new path, not churn up backstory – and that new path kept me excited enough to write all the way to those delightful words “THE END.”

(Why didn’t I rewrite those early chapters heavier before sending it out for feedback?  Because honestly, I’d hoped that I could get away with religion suddenly popping up in Chapter 6.  I couldn’t.  That’s what beta readers will tell you!)

While we’re speaking about beta readers, you may need them for Your Great NaNoWriMo novel.  But I wouldn’t worry about them now.  I’ve watched lots of people go through NaNoWriMo over the years, and the people who treat it like “THIS IS MY GREAT NOVEL WHICH I WILL PUBLISH AND BECOME FAMOUS OFF OF” usually melt down over the pressure.  Whereas the folks who say, “I’m gonna have fun with this and see what happens” have a greater chance of getting through it.

Because it’s hard enough to write to please yourself.  Writing to please others, specifically publishers, is going to just have you questioning every decision with, “Is this commercial enough?”  And the honest fact is that if any writer knew what was commercial, by God, we would all write bestsellers.

(Maybe James Patterson knows.  If so, he’s not telling us.)

I’m a little biased, because I’m well-known for having written six novels of varying quality, each of which was designed to appeal to a Market.  And after six novels that got roundly rejected, I finally gave up and wrote a story a story about donuts and magical drugs and videogame magic, and that novel sold.

So don’t worry about Your Grand Future.  Write a novel you’d enjoy.  It doesn’t have to make much sense; if you want to, you can run it past beta readers and fix the incoherent parts in edits.  NaNoWriMo should be about writing something you’d want to read, because I guarantee you that with some time, nobody will be able to write the type of novel you’d want to read better than you can…

Which is to say “with some time.”

My last bit of advice is that if you’re new to writing, you should watch this video by Ira Glass.  It’s literally the best thing I’ve ever heard said about why you get disappointed at your own writing, and why that disappointment is actually a good thing, and it all takes about ninety seconds. I’m not even going to paraphrase here; let the man talk directly to you.

Now.  Get in there!  Write your heart out!  And remember: if you’re not finished by the end of November and you’re still writing a story you love, you haven’t lost; you’ve actually become a real novelist!

Finish!

Westworld’s Bullets Are Bullshit: Weird Worldbuilding Questions

So I’ve been watching Westworld, and the bullets are where it starts, as usual.

Because the Westworld guns have two modes of fire: if they fire at a host, which is to say one of the poor android bastards whose job it is to be raped and murdered by the guests, they fire an actual goddamned bullet.  That bullet smashes through glass, punches through rock, and also through the pinata-bloody guts of the hosts.

But if the gun is fired at a human guest, it instead fires a pellet of some sort.  If you’re the Man In Black, then you’re badass enough that the pellet bounces off of you.  If you’re a wimpy noob, that pellet hits you hard enough to knock you back flat on your ass.  But it doesn’t draw blood.

….presumably.

Though:

But okay. So even assuming they’ve come up with a pellet that can hit someone hard enough to knock them back on their ass without hurting them (and assuming that backwards tumble doesn’t, say, send the back of the guest’s skull crunching against an oak table, thus crippling them Million Dollar Baby-style), and we’ve established that the guns won’t let you shoot a guest in the face, what about the bullets?

It’s shown that the bullets shatter glass.  Pretty sure having someone shoot a bottle three feet away from your face without eye protection is pretty dangerous, son.

Pretty sure bullets ricochet off of metal sometimes.  Not often.  But with all those bullets flying, chaos theory’s gotta come in at some point and whoops, a bullet bounces off something it shouldn’t have and hits a guest in the heart.

This doesn’t seem like it’s a safe park at all.

And wait: how does the gun know when to shoot? It can’t be a bunch of fancy electronics hidden inside the gun, because a) the gun is the most iconic part of the gunslinger, and having a lightweight gun you break open to reveal a bunch of circuitry would be no fun, and b) you can apparently bury these guns for thirty years and nobody notices they’re missing and they can still function perfectly when dug up, which seems unlikely.

So maybe the gun’s “guest or host” mechanism is in the bullet.  Also unlikely.  A bullet is pretty efficient; it needs most of its space for powder and tip.  You can, I guess, replace some of the mass of the less-efficient bullets of yesteryear with circuitry – but then you’d have the monstrous challenge of trying to determine what’s a guest and what’s a host by watching through the bottom of the gun’s barrel.  It’d be like watching the action through a rapidly-swinging telescope – even with computer speeds, you wouldn’t have enough information to guarantee that the barrel wouldn’t have shifted between the time the hammer started falling and the fire.  I mean, what if there’s a guest hidden behind that bar and you fire a bullet by mistake?

Or maybe the Westworld network is wired into the bullet, with external sensors studded into every wall continually tracking the trajectory of each gun, and only allowing fire when their live-updated three-D models of the place show that it wouldn’t hit a guest, or travel through anything that would hit a guest, or ricochet off of anything that would hit a guest.

Which worked for the first few episodes, where we were mostly inside, but as we go on we see that Westworld is enormous.  There’s empty spaces that rival entire deserts.  They either have satellite-level scans that are accurate down to the micrometer, or they have studded every rock in the desert with unflagging sensors.

But that’s assuming guests use knives!  Remember, the whole point of this show is that you can’t tell guests from hosts – the androids are perfect human-level accurate.

What happens if a guest just flat out decides to stab another guest?

Oh, sure, we’ve seen a mild safeguard in a host snatching a knife away – but that involved everyone seated conveniently around a table.  There are times when the guests are alone in the desert, or yards apart from each other.  When you pick up a knife, does a safety host just start trailing you silently, standing two feet away like the thing in It Follows?

What happens if the guest stabs the safety host, then stabs another guest?  Do the dead rise up to protect the living?

How easy would it be to commit accidental murder here because you didn’t know that the guy you just smashed a chair over was a living, breathing human and you just accidentally caved in his skull?

How easy would it be to bring someone you hated here with the idea that maybe you wanted to murder them by accident, knowing Delos corporation would cover it up?

Speaking of which, we’ve taken to shouting “Pour one out for the construction crew!” every time there’s a shootout.  I mean, how many repairmen does it take to restore this world?  With literally daily shootouts, do they jail the guests in at night so they don’t hear the sound of electric drills and pneumatic nailguns fixing up the place?  Do they have an entire window factory in there somewhere, dedicated to doing nothing but replacing the glass?

Speaking of quality control, people fuck these robots, which leads to the absurd realization that somewhere in Delos there’s a Vaginal Secretions and Semen tasting lab, where very slutty people sip the latest Western Whore Formula and decide whether the oral sex is appropriately flavored.  Imagine a young Anthony Hopkins and Arnold having a studious debate about that.

And, like, the women need to dispense lube.  They have some kind of organs, sure, but eventually they must run out. They’re fucking all the time.  Are the host technicians also bringing in a vat of K-Y Jelly and just topping them off like the guys at the Jiffy Lube?

It’s been established the hosts can get MRSA, which is why the technicians wear those swanky Outbreak outfits.  But… how do STIs work?  It’s also established that the guests have orgies with each other sometimes.  Do they ask the guests to wear condoms?  Or do the hosts have some sort of internal Purell that just miraculously wipes away HSV?

What happens if two guests fuck unprotected and pick up something from each other?  How’s that…

Okay, the point is that I like Westworld.  A lot.  I’m reading up on all the theories, and digging the characters, and I love the scientific trappings.

But every science-fiction story has a couple of threads where, if you tug, you’ll find that really you can’t answer them well.  And it’s fun to try if you’re a fanfic author (or a professional author who decides to write his own rebuttal), but really, a lot of what science fiction runs on is thin ice where you’re better off skating past as the narrative asks, rather than crouching down to look closely at the cracks.

Westworld’s cracks, unfortunately, are right at the top in those damn guns.  And I can’t. Stop. Asking. Questions.

Nothing wrong with it.  At some point you just go, “It’s magic!” and sliiiiiiide past.

(EDIT: My pal Bart points out that in Episode 2, they mention that the future is free of disease. Which doesn’t quite explain how MRSA is germinating inside of these robots if everything’s sterile, but maybe they give everyone an STI shot before entering.)

A Reminder: You’re Being Nice By Saying “Hi” To Me At Conventions

I’ll be attending three conventions over the next three weekends, so this seems as good a time as any to say it:

When I’m at a convention, I am convinced that nobody attending actually wants me to be there. So I stand around in silence, feeling like an awkward imposition – occasionally I’ll find someone I sorta-know through the Internets and work up the bravery to say “hello,” but just as often I’ll take too long to work up that bravery and they’ll leave twenty minutes later without me having said a thing.

And I hear people afterwards saying, “I saw you at the convention, but I didn’t want to bother you!”

Bother me?

Saying hello would be the nicest favor you could do for me.

As a socially anxious person, even a merry “Hey, I just like your work” followed by a quick exit can calm me down like you wouldn’t believe. Making a new friend at the convention, or transforming an online-only relationship into a “Hey I know that person” relationship, or catching up again with someone I had met before was too shy but didn’t think we were “Let’s say hello to each other without a reintroduction”?

Oh, it’s glorious. I’m good if you introduce me. My horror is “not being wanted,” and alas, thanks to years of terrible high school I’ve never recovered from, that’s how I feel all the time.

Saying “hello” to me is actually telling me “You’re not a bother, you’re welcome here, at least somebody wants to talk to you.” And even if I happen to have people I’m with, I always love talking to new folks, or old acquaintances. It’s not an imposition, even though I may sometimes be rushing to a presentation.

So if you see me: say howdy. And if you’re at Sensuosity, or The Geeky Kink Event, or Beyond the Love in the next three weeks, definitely say hi.

You’d be doing me a favor like you wouldn’t believe.

The Late-Night, Double Feature Picture Show: Life At Rocky Horror

The Rocky Horror Picture Show isn’t a movie to me. For me, it’s the feeling of moist rice sticking to the soles of my pantyhosed feet. It’s remembering not to wipe away that crustiness around my eyes because that’s mascara, you dolt, you need to look pretty for the audience. It’s eating french fries and gravy at three in the morning with a bunch of wasted-out weirdos down at the Athena Diner, wondering who I’m going home with that night.

I was Frank. I was the first Frank. And let me tell you, in the town of Norwalk, Connecticut – a place that didn’t have a single nightclub – that was an honor.

Because there was a single art house cinema in Norwalk, and it was a rattletrap organization called the Sono Cinema – headed by a stubborn man with no head for money and a frantic love for beautiful films. Brian would book the theater with the obscure foreign films he liked, and on a good night you’d get five people showing up. Sometimes he ran out of popcorn.

But he’d been told that running the Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight was a money-maker, and though Brian loathed the idea of “popular” cinema, he realized he needed some cash. So he ran it once, and filled the theater, but…

Nobody was doing anything.

He realized there was supposed to be shouting, and audience participation, but this was in the days before YouTube and online tutorials. The Rocky Horror was a purely hand-me-down tradition: you could only learn the rituals of flinging rice and wet newspapers by going to a raucous show and being taught.

What he had was an audience of virgins.

So he asked around. He needed someone stupid enough to dress up in women’s clothing, who would rouse an audience on, who would be shameless.

I wasn’t sure if I could be shameless before a theater full of people, but I was the only one who volunteered. I’d seen a few shows, had the tape soundtrack.

And so there was a pit crew at my house at 9:00 on a Saturday. The Rocky Horror lovers in town wanted this to work – it was a lot easier than driving an hour up to the other show in New Haven – and so I had four people in my room making me look pretty.

My mother had no idea what was going on. “Hey, mom, do you have a fake pearl necklace I can borrow?” I asked. “Crap – do you have any mascara? Oh, yeah, could I borrow some pantyhose?”

She stormed into my room, holding a set of L’eggs at arm’s length, and deposited it in my lap. “Here,” she said curtly. “This is the last thing you ask for. And I don’t want to know what you’re doing.”

And I drove to the Sono, and there was a crowd that I remember as being like a rock star audience but was probably fifty wasted college kids – and I sauntered in, flipping effortlessly to working the room, and when the show started I got up to the front of the stage in a bustierre and silk underwear and yelled, “ALL RIGHT, PEOPLE, HERE’S HOW THIS GOES. WHO BROUGHT THEIR SQUIRT GUNS?”

I became a star. Or at least a star in Norwalk, Connecticut.

I was The Rocky Horror Guy.

And there were other Rocky Horror people, a great cast of folks who I came to love, and they were also vital – but I was the person introducing the audience to the show on Fridays and Saturdays, and so I became the face of the Rocky Horror.

(…Which Brian fucking hated. He hated the gaudiness of the show, he hated the cleanup, he hated the freaks showing up all the time because this wasn’t cinema, it was spectacle, but the money let him play Un Chien Andalou again, so he let me do what I wanted.)

And to me, the Rocky Horror is barely a film. It’s a backdrop. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a flickering blue light where I run up and down the aisles, scoping the cutest girls in the show so I can be sure to plop onto their laps at the appropriate show moment when Frank falls.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a set of crowded bathrooms where we put on makeup and come out to each other, that first time I really understood how complex sexuality was as I saw the straight guy with the broomhandle mustache who wasn’t a woman but this was the only place he would wear a dress, and guys going gay for a weekend to see how it felt, and women switching roles in the show as they tried on butchiness and femme to see how it felt.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a parking lot, where we’d all gather at 10:30 and start drinking lavishly, noting the old crew and welcoming the newcomers, we loved fresh blood because they were either folks travelling from distant Rocky shows to see ours – and they had new lines to shout at the screen, their rituals blending with ours – or they were people who’d never been here before and oh God you gotta see this it’s so wonderful have a hug this is your community fit in.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is my own sexuality blossoming because I discovered that when you’re shameless you will find an audience, and so there were blowjobs in the back of the theater and women fucking me in hearses and sometimes taking someone’s hand and bringing them to the backstage (“Fuck the backstage!”) and discovering that someone else was already making out in there and God, were we all going to kiss each other eventually?

Probably. And we dated, and we broke up, and we cheated, and that was all right because Rocky Horror was the hub. We could be pissed at each other, but this was where we came and this was who we are and maybe I was aching because Bari and I had broken up again but there was the Time Warp and we could always dance to the Time Warp no matter how mad we were.

And people would say, “Oh, I saw Rocky Horror on VHS!” And I tried not to be snobbish, but… you gotta see it live, I’d whisper.

I did that for about four years. And eventually, the RHPS got encrusted – I ran a very loose show, where “fun” was more important than the details, and hell, if you’d seen the show three times and wanted to go nuts as Eddie roaming about the theater, well, does this jacket fit?

But eventually folks who were Very Concerned about the correct costuming wormed their way in, which led to a stage show that was about mimicking the movie perfectly, which led to a hierarchy where you had to train in the ways of Rocky Horror before you could be on stage, which created this barrier between the audience and the show that eventually strangled it.

At that point, I was more like the Rocky Horror godfather. I was an emeritus; I’d show up, do the intro, and then go hang out in the backstage or goof around in the lobby. And eventually it dissolved, along with the Sono Cinema itself.

And when people say, “Oh, Rocky Horror was on TV last night!”, well, I couldn’t watch. I’m sure it’s fine. But I’ve gone to see Rocky Horror in the theaters since, and I’ve discovered that I lied.

Because I go to see the Rocky Horror in the theaters, and it’s not Norwalk in 1989. It’s these other kids, people I don’t know, and for me Rocky Horror is walking into a room full of freaks and knowing every single one. For me, Rocky Horror is that community…

…and the community is gone.

It’s not a bad thing. Bright lights fade. I wasn’t going to be dressed as Frank forever, nor would I want to.

But there’s a film, and there’s a show, and there are remakes. They’re all good. I want you to love them.

Yet there’s no remaking that crappy theater. There’s no getting all my friends back in the same room with that same feeling of hope that tonight is gonna be awesome, we’re gonna cheer, we’re gonna make new friends, we’re gonna kiss in secret and nurture crushes and maybe touch a genital that we didn’t think we’d like except oh I kinda like that.

There’s no going back.

It’s never been the same. It’s been better. Rocky Horror catapulted me into new realms of bravery – I can give talks to rooms because shit, after you’ve faced down a hundred drunken frat boys, “giving a speech” is nothing. Rocky Horror taught me about sex, and fluidity, and tolerance. Rocky Horror taught me how to handle microfame, because I was a star for six hours a week and then I went back to work at the record shop.

All those have built me into something marvelous, and I’ve thought about going back to some theater and seeing if I could become a member of the crew again, but….

That’s trying to recreate a past.

I have a glorious future to head to.

The longing will kill you if you let it.

Whatever happened to Saturday night?
When you dressed up sharp and you felt alright
It don’t seem the same since cosmic light
Came into my life

It’s National “Don’t Be Nice To Me” Day

Yesterday, I posted a sad status that said:

“Feeling isolated and alone today. Nobody did anything wrong. I just woke up this morning wreathed in failure. #brainweasels”

And I was beswarmed in kind comments. Something like twenty people replied, others sent kind messages, and still others texted me to send love. Which is all wonderful, and I appreciate that, but…

I’ve got a good support system. I have my bad days, but when I have them, I also have thousands of people on my social networks who are willing to sympathize.

Others don’t.

So I am declaring today “National ‘Don’t Be Nice To Me’ Day – and what I’d like you to do today is to reach out to someone who doesn’t necessarily have a great support network and tell them you’re thinking of them. Or reach out to someone who’s having a hard time and hasn’t, for whatever reason, been able to post online to get the support they deserve.

Basically, take the kindness you were willing to show to me yesterday and use that to surprise someone else with love. Don’t tell ’em why you did it, don’t explain what today is – just text them or @ them or DM them to tell them “Hey, you know what? I’m here for you.”

And if you feel like posting this elsewhere on your blog/social media/whatever, thus converting the latent kindness people feel for you into active kindness for other people? Awesome.

Because any excuse to be nice to someone else is a great excuse.

Don’t be nice to me today.

Be great to someone else.