Ya Know, I Don't Get It.

I’ve never walked down the street and wondered if someone was gonna chuck a brick at my head because I looked Muslim-like.
I’ve never gone to a high school where I worried about some maniac charging in through the door to shoot me and my friends dead.
I’ve never hugged my partner in public and had to worry if I was holding them too close, because some idiot might take a baseball bat to us if he saw queers being affectionate.
I’ve never had to scan a parking lot at night before I walked to my car because some douche might rape me.  I’ve never had to measure my drinking because if I passed out, someone might rape me.
Hell, I’ve never had a bad poly experience.  My friends were all tolerant, and cool with it.  My mother and father are supportive, if a bit baffled.  I’ve never had a family member tell me what a pervert I am and how I’m going to hell.
The truth is, a lot of bad shit happens to other people that I have never experienced directly.  I can’t get it, deep down.  I can make mushy parallels, understand these things *happen*, but I can’t really understand what it’s like for the seven hundredth time to say “I’m from San Francisco” and have some person squint at my Asian features and go, “…but where are you from?”
Whole worlds are cut off from me.  I have it pretty good, in many ways.  I don’t get the full experience.
But you know what I can do?
I can fucking listen.

Seven Thoughts On Orlando, Islam, And Gun Control

If you think your assault rifle will keep you safe when the government comes for you, you have not paid attention to the drones and missile strikes in the Middle East.  Got news for you, punkie; if there’s a serious go-to-town revolution against the government, you’re not going to be the bold revolutionary, you’re going to be a satellite-targeted crater in the fucking street.
Technology’s moved on.  Your revolution will mostly consist of IEDs and hiding, if it comes to that.

People say we can’t change gun culture in America – there’s too many guns, and too many people with guns.
You know what else everybody used to do?
We fucking smoked.
America used to be a goddamned chimney, my friends, with something like 80% of people lighting up.  We had Fred Flintstone and Barney goddamned Rubble shilling Winston cigarettes to kids.  We had a massive corporation covering up the truth of what happened to smokers, a government thoroughly in Big Tobacco’s pocket.  We had a nation of addicts, literal addicts, because remember that quitting smoking is only slightly less difficult than quitting goddamned heroin.
And yet now smoking’s a small segment of American culture.  It exists – just as, I suspect and would hope, gun owners would continue to exist after some massive, effective, gun legislation – but it’s now a thing where, for good or for bad, we massively flipped the switch.
You know where that all started?
The official link between cigarettes and cancer.
If you’ll note, the Center for Disease Control doesn’t even *collect* statistics on gun use.  That’s been shut down by Senators in the hands of the NRA, so we can’t even get data on what effects guns have.
So if you want to change things, that’s where I’d start: write your Senator to tell them that you want a special wing of the CDC to collect gun data.  Make it as immunized from politics as any government agency can be, which is to say poorly, but *get the fucking data*.
And if you want to tell us we can’t change things, well, a generation of kids who have largely grown up not chain-smoking would like to inform you that big changes can happen, if you want them to happen.

While I do love Igor Volsky calling out the lame “Thoughts and prayers” from politicians who are deep in the NRA’s pocket, I really hate it when people say, “Wow, if we only raised $2,500, *we* could buy a Senator!”
It’s not just money.  The money’s the grease, but the heavy piston action is the voters the NRA can round up.
If you want to beat the NRA, the sad truth is that a significant amount of you will have to become a one-issue voter, the exact opposite of the way a lot of NRA fanatics are now.

 
So.  A gay nightclub.
It’s amazing how many conservative pundits are erasing the “gay” portion from this narrative, as though that somehow didn’t matter.
Gay clubs are safe spaces.  As a straight person, have you ever held hands with your date in public and thought, “I could be beaten to death for this?”  Well, your gay and bisexual friends have.
Walking into a club like this is telling gay people, “We can destroy your happiness anywhere.”  Don’t pretend that doesn’t fucking exist.  Don’t pretend that somehow, gay people lead a life mostly like ours because gay marriage passed.
It’s still a goddamned dangerous time to be gay in America.  It’s getting better.  But you still risk shit like this.
This wasn’t “a nightclub.”  It was a statement.  And some asshole with a gun made a counter-statement, so don’t you fucking twist the story to make it seem like it could be any straight person.

So.  Islam.
A bunch of my conservative friends have reminded me, quite cogently, that a lot of Islam virulently hates homosexuality, and if we let everyone in from the Middle East into America then we’d be back to stoning, and how can we claim to be acting wisely and compassionately towards gays when Islam itself hates the homosexual?
Which is true.  You look at polls, and Muslims are largely intolerant of gay culture.
Non-American Muslims.
Open up the polls for American Muslims, and it turns out they’re more likely to be in favor of gay marriage than Evangelist Christians.
It’s almost like, I dunno, being a part of American culture influences people’s viewpoints or something.
And if that was true, then maaaaaybe the worst thing you could do would be to stigmatize Muslims so that they *didn’t* feel like a part of American culture, to conflate every Muslim as “foreign,” and alienate them so that they don’t feel any attachment to the country they live in.
Huh.  Maybe it’s your attitude that’s fostering terrorism.

And while I’m at it, my worst conservative friends only bring up Islam when they’re talking about what homo-hating bastards these folks are, selling the “THEY’RE ALL OUT TO KILL YOUUUUU!” line as though literally every Muslim would slit a gay’s throat and rape a woman whenever they could.
And keep in mind: I don’t deny there are serious fucking cultural issues going on.  If you, say, take in thousands of refugees from a culture that doesn’t respect women or the QUILTBAG train, well, you’re going to have some serious issues getting these people on-board.  It’s not going to go smoothly, and one of the serious liberal critiques I will aim is the way that liberals hand-wave those issues.  Integration’s a serious bitch, my friends, and it’s often a messy compromise you make to save the lives of innocent people who’d otherwise get ground to meat in a war zone.
That said, here’s the thing:
I’ll accept Islam as a monstrous, monotone religion of purest hatred…
If you claim all of these untagged Christian shooters and apply the same logic to Christianity.
Because that’s the magic, you know.  White guy does it?  Unhinged.  We don’t own him.  He was acting on his own, no matter how many friends he talked to online.  White religious guy does it?  Well, that’s not Christianity, how dare you label us!
The great thing about being white and of the dominant religion is that your shooters never count.  Those guys?  Well, we know they’re unhinged.  Were they talking to other hateful people?  A splinter sect, they aren’t real.  No matter how many Biblical nutbags run and gun, that never touches the core religion that we like.
So a brown guy shot up a crowd.  That is, and continues to be, and will never not be, terrible.  But he’s 2% of all mass shootings.
The other 98% are white guys, some percentage of whom were seriously religious.  Claim them.  Apply the same logic to the religions you think are acceptable.  Then we’ll talk.
Until then, well, yeah, ISIS is a huge fucking problem, but Islam is a huge fucking religion, and every huge fucking religion has its fringe elements that you have to deal with.
(And if you want to talk about what Islam does globally, go back to the last point about what it does in America.)

Lastly, as someone who suffers from mental health issues, please remember that not every bipolar or depressed person shoots people.  In fact, most of us don’t.
I’m not one of those people who’ll tell you that a guy who shoots up a club isn’t crazy.  He is.  But like Islam and Christianity, “crazy” covers a wide variety of issues, and conflating insanity with mass shooting is a bad thing to do for those who do suffer.

My Mother's Awful Secret, Kept For Thirty-Eight Years

So the wise among you will remember this tattoo from December:


That, my friends, is a Star Wars tattoo, which my wife and I got because we met in a Star Wars chat room.
We met in a Star Wars chat room because I had seen Star Wars well over seventy times in the theater.  In fact, I saw Star Wars fifty-seven and a half times before I was thirteen.
And that was, you youngsters, in the days before your fancy-schmancy DVDs or VHS tapes or even reruns existed.  Back in the day, if you wanted to see a movie and you were a young kid, you had to bug a relative into taking you.
I bugged my relatives fifty-seven and a half times.
The half was, I am only semi-ashamed to say, when I got my grandparents to take me.  They’d misread the matinee as 12:30 instead of 1:30, so we showed up an hour early, so Little Ferrett somehow convinced them to go into the theater early, watch the Death Star Trench Run, and then watch the entire movie again.
It is safe to say that Teeny Ferrett was a relative-bugging machine.  Imagine the challenge of convincing a relative, who has almost certainly seen Star Wars with you at least once because, well, hardly anyone has that big a family, and then saying, “Uh, hey, I know we’ve done this twice before and you know I’ve seen this movie forty times, but…
“…could we do it again?”
So my Star Wars bugging game was on fleek.
But the title of this entry was about my Mom’s horrible secret, which I only discovered when she arrived this Thursday and she told me how much she’d enjoyed The Force Awakens, and…
She should probably see Star Wars.
MY MOTHER HAD NEVER SEEN STAR WARS.
Let me repeat that:

My mother

had never seen

Star Wars.

Which, if you think about it, showcases my mother’s sheer manipulative genius.  Can you imagine what it took to not only withstand the pleadings of an iron-willed kid who would not shut up about this movie, but quietly maneuver every other relative to see this damn movie without once having to go yourself?
Jesus Christ, Machiavelli probably would have broken down at some point and said, “All right, I’ll go.”
Yet my Mom danced among the requests for my entire childhood, only now thinking, “Maybe it’s time.”
So we showed her last night.  She was sleepy, and having an allergic attack, but we got to the Death Star escape and she said, “PAUSE THIS MOVIE, I GOTTA PEE.”
She didn’t wanna miss a minute.
So she liked it.  Which is good.  Because as my friend Angie said, it’s so hard to rehome mothers once they get to that age.

Authors! How Many Books Did You Sell? A Survey.

So when I get back from Greece, I’m going to talk frankly about how many units my books Flex and The Flux sold.
There’s just one problem:
I don’t know whether that number is actually an impressive number.
The problem with publishing is that a) nobody wants to share their failures, and b) the successes push the top of the scale so much that it skews your vision.  Okay, if you sell 100,000 copies of your novel, you’ve done pretty well.
Yet what do good midlist sales numbers look like?
…somewhere between 100,000 copies and zero.   I guess.  Hardly anyone discusses the mid-range numbers, making it difficult to say what an author can, or should, expect.
So here’s where I ask my fellow authors: how many copies of your book did you sell?  If you made a blog post, or know of a blog post that discusses units (and not total dollars made), point me to that blog post.  (I know about Kameron Hurley’s brave revelation of her own sales numbers, but everyone else I’m happy to listen to.)
If you’re willing to share your numbers personally, identifying yourself and your book sales in public, email me at theferrett@theferrett.com.  (Telling me when it was published, if you’re self-published, and the average prices you sold it for will be a part of the equation, if’n you could share.)
And even if you’re not willing to say on the record, email me what you’ve sold and I’ll put you as an anonymous data point.
(And yes, I know you can look up Nielsen BookScan ratings, but that’s not an accurate total because it leaves out all ebooks and many many bookstores.  Everyone’s numbers on there are off by at least a third these days, maybe more.  Currently, BookScan is planted firmly in the “better’n nothing” camp.)
As a former book buyer, numbers always fascinate me.  This is a lot like Tobias Buckell’s author advance survey in that it’s a starting point for authors to know what the business is actually like.  Ultimately, I’ll compile a Google Sheets of numbers so there’s some better idea of what unit sales look like…
With the caveat that, having talked to several industry professionals, what matters for traditional publishers is not raw units, but beating your projections.  Smaller publishers are profitable on smaller print-runs, and what’s a big hit at a mid-level press might be a disappointment at a major press.  If you sold 100,000 units but the publisher printed 500,000 copies, you’re in the doghouse.
In any case, we’ve had some good studies on author advances and writing income, but raw book unit sales haven’t  been something I’ve seen talked about – at least when we’re not talking JK Rowling numbers.
If you want to share, let’s see how much data we can compile.

So If I Was Going After Donald Trump….

Attacking Trump has a lot of problems, but one of the main one is that Donald’s wrong for the Presidency in so many ways that watching the media go after him is like watching a small kid chasing chickens – he runs after one, notices another getting away, runs after that.  He says too many outrageous things, and it destroys the news cycle because they’re just getting hooked on one when something else too delicious to leave on the ground comes up.
So if I was in charge of the Democratic “Take Down Donald” Campaign, I’d announce a schedule:
Every two weeks, from now until the election, we will be discussing a new and entirely different way that Donald Trump is unfit for the Presidency.
And I’d focus on that with a series of commercials, the same commercials, aired as many times as humanly possible, homing in on just one of Donald’s many flaws.  (I’d also call him Donald.)   That would be what Hillary discusses in her campaign speeches, what I’d instruct other Democrats to focus in on, our social media targets.
So for two weeks, all we’d talk about is Trump University and what a rip-off it was, bringing out all the knives to bear, and discussing the delicious paradox of whether Donald knew he was extorting people for a degree that he knew was worthless, or whether he was just happy to walk away from it when it wasn’t what he wanted, and if so, is that what he’ll do to America when he plasters the Trump brand over the Oval Office?
Two weeks of shots.  Get that in there as much as possible.  Like a little television arc.
Then switch.  Don’t map out the schedule in advance; be flexible.  But if you do it right, people will wonder what’s coming next.  It’ll be like spoilers for a movie – “I heard the next Donald Doofiness will be his lack of international knowledge.”  “No, I hear it’s the accusations of him abusing his wife!” “No, I hear it’s his shameful treatment of veterans!” “It’s that he’s not even really a billionaire!” – with forums lighting up and suggestions made and his opponents getting furious.
Donald’s really good at pivoting away whenever someone starts to gain ground.  So nail him down.  Play his own game.  Make it all about what he can’t do, and refuse to be lured away from that.
It’s what Democrats have been traditionally crappy at anyway, so might as well learn on a big target, amiright?

So I'm Going To Greece. Here's The Books I'm Taking. Suggest One More.

On Friday, I’m going on vacation to Greece and Turkey and Italy for ten days. This will be a lovely cruise, and if it’s anything like last time, I’m going to get a lot of reading done.
So thanks to my new Kindle, I’ve stockpiled lots of books!  In case you’re wondering what I’ve been hearing good things about, here’s the list of books I’m taking with me:

• Joe Hill’s THE FIREMAN, which I am currently 65% through and thoroughly enjoying, as I have all of Joe Hill’s books;
• Will McIntosh’s LOVE MINUS EIGHTY, because his DEFENDERS was one of the best books I read in 2015 and SOFT APOCALYPSE was sad  and moving (even if it didn’t really have much of an ending), and I’m told this is his best work;
• Seanan McGuire’s EVERY HEART A DOORWAY, as I love the idea of a grown-up Narnia and I love Seanan’s works;
• Ransom Riggs’ MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN, as Bart Calendar won’t shut up about it and people have kept comparing bits of it to my own book THE FLUX (which, no, the Peregrine Institute was pure coincidental naming);
• Cassie Alexander’s DARK INK TATTOO, because she writes good smut and she has promised me tattoo smut in this tome;
• Claudia Gray’s LOST STARS, as everyone tells me it’s the best new Star Wars book, and also my daughter won’t shut up about it;
• Delilah Dawson’s HIT, because I enjoy a female hitman paying off her credit cards as much as anyone else;
• Richard Hacker’s THE ULTIMATE CIGAR BOOK, since if I’m smoking them occasionally I feel I should know the history, and the only other book I read a) talked about the hurricanes of 1994 as though they were recent history, and b) taught me lies that the guys at the cigar store easily dismissed;
• Siddharta Mukherjee’s THE GENE: AN INTIMATE HISTORY, which Ken Liu recommended and the opening chapter detailing a man’s struggle with his entire family going insane hooked me.

Now.  Despite all that, there’s room for one more book here.  I read fast, and I’ll be trapped on a plane for hours, and cruise ship expeditions involve a lot of travel time as we drive endlessly to my destination.  (Not that I expect to read all of these books – though I read five on my Italy trip – but I want a wide variety in what I do read.)
So.  What I’m looking for is one final book recommendation.  Something published in the last two years, something that’s not the first book in a series, and something light.  (No dense books; time has proven I can’t read them on vacation.)
The books I’ve raved about to people lately have been Scott Hawkin’s LIBRARY AT MOUNT CHAR, Charlie Jane Anders’ ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY, Dan Wells’ JOHN CLEAVER series, and of course Rae Carson’s THE GIRL OF FIRE AND THORNS.
If you have a book that fits all those criteria, suggest away!  I may have read it.  But then we can geek out about it!