When The Obsession Works
I have a lot of rules around my polyamory – rules instigated mostly by my wife and long-term partner.
But they’re good rules.
See, I obsess about things and can’t stop. So when a relationship goes south, it’s all I can think about. I’m in the shower, wondering how I could have said things better. I’m at the movies, but I’m not watching, I’m contemplating my next text to her. I’m cuddled up with my wife and I love being there but she notes that crease in my forehead that signals that somewhere, I’m still wondering, how can I fix my relationship with this other woman?
So they said, “Okay, we need rules to ensure you date more stable women.” And I said “That sounds great,” because when you’re dating five women and two of those relationships are slowly disintegrating and you’re obsessive, well, it feels like running a goddamned marathon.
But.
But.
Right now, I’m in the process of revising a book, and the third act needs to be broken down and completely rewritten to take this book from “Acceptable ending” to “Awesome finish.” To properly rebreak an act, you have to be willing to slaughter every darling – yeah, these individual character moments are heartwarming, these plot twists are great, but what happens if we get rid of them? What happens if I take the entire last act, pretend it didn’t happen, and regrow a new last act like a lizard regenerating a severed limb?
I walked the dog this morning. I think. What actually happened was that the dog tugged me around the block while I examined all the elements in my book and weighed them and proposed theories, and I was back at my doorstep and barely registered the mile’s journey.
I’m unsure whether I’ll be able to fix this book properly – and please don’t tell me “You got this, Ferrett!” because I read that strongly as “If you can’t pull this off, we will come to hate you.”
But if I fail, it won’t be for lack of effort. I feel battered as a moth against a lightbulb, and I’ve only been contemplating this for two days – and I know I’ll spend the next weeks mired in this until I restructure it into something more perfect, or at least more fitting, because I don’t know how to stop.
Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can take your native neuroses and repurpose them into something productive. I won’t say I’m happy while I’m rebreaking Act Three, but if I manage to fix it then I’ll have utilized some pretty terrible instincts to create good art.
Much better than trying to repurpose a relationship. The odds are better, anyway.
What I Like About Robert Bennett's CITY OF STAIRS and CITY OF BLADES
So most of these crumbled civilizations are real shitholes, right? Years ago, there were Great Empires and everything’s gone to shit since then and there’s a bunch of farmers eking out an existence in the ruins.
Well, in Robert Jackson Bennett’s City of Stairs and City of Blades, those ancient civilizations exist. Except the today-civilizations are pretty much us, a hundred or so years ago. There are scientists who study things, and politicians who are frighteningly smart at taking advantage of situations, and nations who are fully rebuilt and functional. You wouldn’t mind living in his cities. They’re troubled, but they’re on the move.
The problem is that the Great Empires were founded by Divinities – literal Gods, who warped the flow of physics and created the impossible. One of the reasons the current nation-states are building their way out is because once the Gods died, the laws their cities ran on also vanished, and so they collapsed or sank into the sea or disintegrated in an event called The Blink.
And in both books – no real spoilers here – the heroes run across remnants of the Divine. (Usually because, like Scooby Doo investigating a haunted amusement park, the scientists of the day just can’t stop hunting for shit that does literal magic.) And when the heroes find the Divine, they have all the technology that people in the early twentieth century would have access to, they have all the cleverness that you or I would have, they are smart and insightful and clever…
And the echo of a Divinity is enough to almost destroy them, even with all of modern civilization backing them.
And I like that. I like that the past civilization is, effectively, science-fiction – and it’s not that humans are dumb or degraded, we’re still really clever, it’s that the Divinities were actually that terrifying in their heyday. And given that the Divinities were insane, you really don’t want ’em back.
They’re good books. You should check ’em out.
My New Nails! Shiny And Chrome! (Sorta)
Like all good nerds, I loved Mad Max: Fury Road. So when I asked my Mad Manicurist Ashley to do me up some Mad Max nails, we…
Ran into some issues.
She’d never seen Fury Road, and trying to explain to her “Yes, teeth spray-painted chrome is a major icon of the film and need to be on my nails” went over pretty poorly, with her going, “What? Why would that be a thing?” And in the end, thanks to some technical difficulties where she just started doing art deco (not really a Mad Max style), I got what are pretty nails – but nails I have to explain to people, because they’re not iconic:
Ashley’s nails are always amazing, but this is sadly at the bottom tier of amazing. Oh well. There’s always more nails.
And though I posted a small video, I’m not sure if I ever posted my Star Wars nails – which were very amazing, and I was ridiculously sad to have to take them off my body!
Nobody Eats Pie. I've Never Met A Person Who Eats Pie.
So you go to a party so packed tight with burly men it’s hard to make your way to the exit. When they bellow a laugh, they clap you on the back hard enough to leave bruises. Their merry handshakes compress your bones, leave you shaking your hand to get the blood flow back.
On a table in the center of the room, set prominently, is a cake.
The men joke a lot, debate a lot, engage in shoving matches at the slightest provocations. And when one of them oversteps the line, the other shouts, “Shut your piehole!”
Except when they say “piehole,” the other guy has to be held back by his friends. “He’s just jokin’, Phil,” they whisper. “Nobody thinks you eat pie.”
The other dudes go out of their way to mention that they’ve never seen a pie in real life. Just pictures. They looked disgusting.
At the height of the party, the dudes slice up the cake reverently. “This is the only dessert a person needs, you know? Cake.” And after they eat the cake, sitting back and relaxing blissfully at the table, Phil – fuckin’ Phil – brings up the time he went to visit his brother in Minneapolis (“Pie central,” they grunt knowingly), and opened up the fridge and what did that sick fuck have inside?
“Pie,” they say, and a couple of ’em crack their knuckles like they wish Phil’s brother was here right now.
They ask if you’ve eaten pie, except it’s an easy out – the very idea is presented as a joke, ’cause they like you, they know you wouldn’t. They jab you in the ribs with their elbows hard enough to almost knock you off your seat.
Somebody mentions this survey people took in the media the other day – “The media,” they groan – and these fuckers report that 21% of Americans have eaten pie in the last month.
“Gotta be a lie,” Phil says. “I don’t know anyone who eats pie.”
Everyone agrees, their lips smeared blue with frosting.
———————-
Now, my FetLife feed has been ablaze over the last few days over one single word – and it’s not “pie.”
It’s “they.”
As in, “If someone wants to be called ‘they’ instead of ‘he’ or ‘she,’ you should call them ‘they’ as a courtesy.”
And a lot of male doms – because it’s pretty much exclusively male dominants suckin’ up the oxygen in this particular flame war – have said that this whole argument is dumb anyway, because they’ve never met a person who was uncomfortable being called “he” or “she,” and even if they had then those people are so rare as to not exist, so why bother forging a new pronoun for them?
Except one idiot who claimed “I’ve never met anyone who wanted to be called ‘they’ in real life!” had in fact met at least one person at a club who did want a gender-neutral pronoun – and that gender-neutral person remembered them explicitly because the idiot in question had harrumphed and walked away when they expressed a preference.
You gotta remember the pie.
If you create a culture that is actively hostile to a certain type of person, then you have to remember that you don’t actually know how many of that people exist.
Has Phil never met a person who’s eaten pie? Phil – fuckin’ Phil – thinks that’s because those people don’t exist.
But in truth, it’s because Phil swims in a cake-positive culture where the idea of eating pie is so repellent that you literally risk getting your ass beaten for mentioning “America” and “apple pie” in the same sentence. Or if the cakeheads are feeling mercilful, you’ll just get razzed for your love of pie forever until it feels shameful.
Right now, yeah, we’ve got a whole culture of people who accept “he” and “she,” because honestly, you’re gonna get a lot of Phils – fuckin Phils – who are going to go, “What the fuck? I’m not calling you ‘they’. You’re a ‘he.’ Go the fuck home.”
And when Phil’s your employer or your parent or someone else you need to function in life, that’s hard to get by without. You accept this gendering not because you like it, but because you’ve done the hard math and determined that it’s less troublesome to be called “she” than to battle every Phil – fuckin’ Phil – in your path.
But Phil can’t say, “Nobody wants to be called ‘they’! It’s freakish!” Because by *stigmatizing* it, you *suppress* it.
Look. I don’t know how many people would be comfortable with gender-neutral terms – and like homosexuality, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a minority. But I am certain that the number of people who desire gender-neutral terms are a lot bigger than the number of people facing down Phil in a big burly party.
Only after we remove the stigma can we know what people actually want.
And look, if you’re gonna be some anti-pie activist, then be honest. Tell people you think pie is harmful and will ruin your kids and giving them alternatives to cake will ruin their lives forever.
But what too many Phils do – fuckin’ Phils – is to conflate the argument, to go, “Look, people who eat pie are freakishly rare, and we don’t have to pay attention to them because nobody eats pie.”
Bullshit. You’ve made the people who eat pie rarer through shame and intimidation and the inertia of a cake-positive culture. There’d be a lot more people eating pie if you didn’t make retching noises every time someone opened up a Marie Callender’s and quietly dumped the pies at the banquet into the garbage.
What you’re doing is purposely suppressing pie-eating, and then using that suppression as proof that nobody normal does it. And to you, I say, “Fuck that, and fuck your piehole.”
In the meantime, how many people don’t like “he” or “she” and would prefer a “they”? We’ve got no concept. The idea’s still so new to American culture that people are having negative reactions to it just because it’s unfamiliar. With luck, we’ll come to see how many people desire an alternative, and then we’ll get a concept of how many folks have secretly longed for this all along.
Life’s full of weird closets. But it’s the height of dumbness to stuff people into closets and then claim you never see them around.
How A Lamp Took Away My Reading And A Box Brought It Back
So here’s a dumb thing: I read only a handful of books in 2015.
But I played a loooooot of phone games.
Which felt like the moral equivalent of subsisting on Pop Tarts and McDonald’s breakfasts. But if I had an hour to kill in the evening, I’d play Ascension until I fell asleep. And people kept talking about all these great books they were reading, and I’d read maybe 15 books in the last year – which sounds like a lot to people who don’t read a lot, but I usually read about 60.
When I finish a book, I feel like I’ve expanded my life – I have learned new things about writing from watching some woman’s techniques, I’ve got a new conversation-starter with other people who’ve read it, I’ve inhaled a couple of interesting ideas. When I finish a phone game, I feel sort of vaguely disappointed.
And I thought that it was that the phone was too distracting – which, yes, it was. But it was also too small for me to read comfortably on, with my age-blurred eyes, so between that and the constant stream of texts, I just sort of gave up reading on it.
Yet I got a Kindle Paperwhite earlier this week, and last night was glorious. Instead of killing time with my phone, I slipped into bed and read 15% of Traitor Baru Cormorant, which I’m sure will be on all the awards ballots that I’m not this year. And when I got tired, I put it down and fell asleep…
…and in the morning, I realized why I’d stopped reading.
The lamp was too high.
When I’d read a lot as a kid, I had a nightstand at bed-height – I reached over and darkened the room. (I can’t fall asleep with the lights on.) But in our bedroom, I had a big torch-style light that was five feet high. I had to get out of bed to turn it off.
And God forbid I wanted to read when Gini was trying to sleep – I’d flood her face with luminescence. So I’d just learned to live in darkness.
Time had been, if I wanted to read, I went off to my reading room – but both of my daughters had moved back in with me over the past two years while they hunted for new jobs, and they both moved into the room I used to go and read in. So I had nowhere I was comfortable reading.
It was all little things. A lamp. An unavailable bed. A TV in the living room that made me think “Living room is for television.” And if you’d tried to tell me any one of those things would have caused massive changes to my lifestyle, I’d have laughed. But all those little things nudged me into Not Reading.
A larger screen with a backlight turned that back on.
And I think that as humans, we often dismiss the idea that little environmental stimuli can alter our behavior. “We’re big people,” we say. “I’d know if I was being affected!”
But the world is full of little tweaks like this. I never consciously thought, “God, that light is up too high” – or if I did, I never connected it with my reluctance to read. I was, and am, an animal of low instincts, where I now realize I read best lying down and if I can’t lie down then some small switch in my brain tells me it’s not time to read.
And there’s all these other things that control my behavior that I doubtlessly don’t think about, but other people do. I know the dish size in a restaurant can control my portions. I know colors can affect my mood. I know that smells can make me hungrier or calmer.
And the frightening thing is, I don’t notice these nudges. They just happen. And then my reading is cut by 75% in a year.
And I think about racism and sexism, and how much of that is kind of like a too-tall lamp or a blocked bedroom. Hardly anyone means to be racist, but maybe we look at a black face and that’s another environmental stimuli. Hardly anyone means to be sexist, but maybe a woman speaks up and that’s another environmental stimuli.
And that sort of sedimentary discrimination is hard to battle, because not only do people not notice it happening, but when you do notice it there’s no bravery in overcoming it. You don’t get to go, “Well, my parents taught me a woman’s place was in the kitchen, but I overcame that with logic and my own opinions!” Instead, you have to go, “My subconscious makes me react more negatively to a woman interrupting me, and, uh, that’s something nobody ever taught me, I just sort of picked it up like lead in the water.”
That acknowledgement feels stupid. It reduces you to some lab mouse. It makes you a dumb sea anemone, tossed about by currents you don’t fully control, and that’s the same terror of We’re bound by our biology that makes people deny evolution and put off seeing the doctor about that mole on their breast because this can’t be cancer.
I dunno. I do know that last night, I read for ninety minutes straight, and it was lovely. And now that I’m aware, I know that I need a) a larger box that’s b) backlit, and c) doesn’t bombard me with messages, so I can read in the dark while my wife sleeps.
I’ll be reading a lot more. That’s good.
I’ll be wondering about what other subliminal things affect me a lot more. That’s unsettling.
The Case For Rey Palpatine
NOTE: It has now been five weeks since the new Star Wars came out, and I’m finally gonna discuss the movie. There will be spoilers here; not big spoilers, but enough to make theories as to what would be interesting to happen in the next movie. If you’re still trying to avoid incidental spoilers, well, at this point you should see the movie.
So everyone has theories as to who Rey’s parents are. They’re combing through the film, looking for evidence, deciding whether Rey is a Skywalker or a Kenobi or the reincarnation of Anakin Skywalker or whatever.
And let’s be honest: there’s just not enough facts on the ground here. If she turns out to be Luke Skywalker’s kid, well, nothing in the film contradicts that narrative. And if she’s Obi-Wan’s granddaughter, well, nothing in the film would contradict that, either. “Looking for evidence” is a mug’s game, because if they gave you enough evidence to decisively determine “Who Rey’s parents” were, the crowdsourced wisdom of billions of fans would conclude.
And then Episode 8 would be predictable.
However, I am a writer. And when I write, I am notorious for Not Plotting. I never know what happens next; what I do do is find the maximum point of havoc, trigger it, and then ask, “…so how do my characters get out of this mess?” As such, I am extremely skilled at determining what the most catastrophic and interesting change would be.
(If you’d like to disagree with that statement, please buy my books first, read them in their entirety, review them on Goodreads, and then come back to argue. Thank you!)
Anyway, I’m not asking, “What evidence leads me to believe that Rey is $CHARACTER’s kid?” There’s not evidence, or at least not enough of it.
I am instead asking, “If I had to choose her father/grandfather*, what decision would create the most interesting set of character reactions?”
And the most interesting reactions comes from Rey being the granddaughter of that Big Baddie, Emperor Palpatine.
See, right now, if she’s anyone else, Luke’s default mode is “Sure, I’ll train you.” You can fling some plot in the way to create tension, probably PTSD from watching his last set of students die – but Luke’s always believed in the best in people.
If Rey is Emperor Palpatine’s kid, and she just went toe-to-toe with Kylo Ren untrained and beat him, well… Luke’s gotta wonder whether training someone so unimaginably potent in the force is a good idea. The only time he beat his father is when he turned to the Dark Side, and he had a lot more training. (And remember, Luke didn’t see the battle, so he has no reason to take Rey’s word for it that she was calm.) So does he really want to take a chance on Rey, especially after what went wrong when he trained a kid with good heritage like Ben?
“I am a Jedi. Like my father before me.” That lesson gets inverted when her father was not a good man at all, ever.
So that sets up a natural tension between Luke and Rey, and it gives a reason for Luke not to be so open with Rey. The counterbalancing reasons why he should trust Rey comes down to plot, which you can manufacture easily; here, um, “Luke gave up his saber, knowing through Mysterious Force Powers that it would land in the hands of the person who needed it most, and he’s surprised to find that worthy person is Rey Palpatine.”
There. Creating plot to justify your interesting decisions is the least of an author’s powers.
The Rey Palpatine plot-take also explains why Rey’s been dumped on the ass-end of a planet in the middle of nowhere; if the First Order knew that the Emperor’s Granddaughter existed/had survived, then they would stop at nothing to find her. And they wanted to dump her in a place with no hope, because it turns out the Force is strong in this family and they do not want her to get trained. At all.
And Rey, who has always longed for her parents, waited endlessly for them, is suddenly torn to shreds. Her father, like Luke’s, is a monster – but unlike Luke, they didn’t put her on dumb-ass Sand Planet for her benefit, they put her there specifically to neuter her. All those hours toiling away for portions can be placed at the feet of whoever made that decision. She’s got a right to be angry, they told her her family was coming back and instead she was going to rot there, turn into that old lady scrubbing parts….
We don’t know who made that decision – but oh wait, we’re plotting! We can just say who it is! And we’d choose the most interesting person to make that decision, at least in terms of “Whose relationships that person making the decision would change the most,” and thaaaaaat’d be Luke.
But wait; what’s that do to her relationship with Vader-hipster Kylo Ren?
Oh, my friends, that’s the sweet sauce.
Suddenly, Kylo – who worships the ground his grandfather walked on – sees the Emperor’s granddaughter, and they are clearly Meant To Be. The irony! Goddamned Luke swayed his father back from the Dark Side just long enough for a rebellion; wouldn’t it be so luscious if he rescued Rey from Luke’s wussy Light Side tendencies to show her true heritage?
It’s unclear what Kylo Ren would want, after acquiring this information. Maybe he’s looking for an apprentice to break out from under General Gollum’s control, which would be a bit depressingly cookie-cutter; maybe he’s looking for someone stronger than him to lead. But in either case, Rey Palpatine would push every one of that kid’s “I’ve gotta out-Vader Vader” buttons hard.
…and it also provides a deeper and darker resonance for Rey shouting “You’re afraid that you will never be as strong as Darth Vader!”
(EDIT: And Holy crap, I just realized the most catastrophic plot development in this Rey-Ren-Snoke triangle:
(Envision Kylo Ren saying, “I found the Emperor’s Granddaughter, we have to protect her.” Envision Supreme Leader Snoke thinking, This chick is way too bull-headed to convert, and she’s the only real threat to my Force domination, we need to bump her off. There’s instant conflict there.
(Now imagine what happens when Kylo Ren starts a civil war in the First Order to protect the last heritage of the Great Empire. Kylo’s not a guy who thinks ahead, so he’d only recognize what he’s done to the First Order only after Snoke’s lifeless body hits the floor – and you think he hates Rey now? Oh, God, getting her and converting her would become so personal.)
Now, you’re asking, “What evidence in that movie says that Rey is Palpatine’s daughter?” And again, you’re looking in the wrong place. After the fact is made, we will retrofit every action in the movie to fit whoever Rey’s parents turn out to be – just like we now assign so much more meaning to Obi-Wan’s hesitations and sadnesses in Episode IV. But if you must…
I mean, she’s got her grandpa’s technological skills; do you think the old man built something as complex as the Death Star without understanding machines himself? And Han Solo, the way he looks at her; note that he’s adventuring with her, but is very reticent to do anything for her, until he sees the way she loves that lush green planet. After that, he asks if she’ll come with him – and in the post-Palpatine decision, that’d be viewed as a clear move to keep an eye on this kid, he likes her, now it’s time to see what she’s made of. The fact that Chewie likes her – and Chewie’s instincts are far better than his – is a sign.
In that sense, Han watching Kylo Ren walk away from Maz Kanata’s palace takes on a new light; he’s debating whether to potentially kill his son in order to save the Emperor’s granddaughter.
Leia, on the other hand, may or may not know; one would suspect she doesn’t. Or she could have been against this decision from the get-go, and instead wants her to find her destiny with Luke. Either way, if Rey turns out to be Palpatine’s kid, we’ll manufacture plot to support the decision, and viewed in retrospect we’ll all buy it.
As for Luke, well, if we go with the simple version of “His saber found the worthiest student,” well, he pulled that pseudo-mystical stuff with Artoo and can do it again. He’s a Jedi Master, and my hope is that Episode VIII will show us more than the haggard old tripartite Force powers of mind trick/telekinesis/force lightning. I’d like Luke to have some really crazy powers – and I mean, Luke did crash blindly in the one spot where Yoda was waiting, so it’s not like Yoda didn’t have some planet-scale fuckery at his disposal.
(And while we’re at it, here’s my dream Luke-plot for Episode VIII: He’s at the first Jedi Temple, where he trains Rey in all the mystical ways of the Jedi order, and it doesn’t frickin’ work. He’s teaching her just like Obi-Wan and Yoda taught him, utilizing the millennium of old Jedi teachings, and he’s baffled by why he did all that and wound up with Kylo Ren…
(Until Rey points out that hey, Luke, you’re mindlessly emulating teaching techniques that created Vader and Kylo Ren, and the only time you broke the cycle was when you ignored Obi-Wan and Yoda to go do the right thing – so maybe, just maaaaybe Luke, you should stop trying to teach me like these old blinkered fuddy-duddies and teach me like Luke Fucking Skywalker would.
(Cue Luke’s enlightenment. Cue Luke becoming an actually good teacher.)
Anyway. The point is that yeah, Rey could be a Skywalker and could be a Kenobi (my personal hope), but you have to work harder to make those alternatives interesting. Rey as Palpatine is like the old films, but like the new films it also inverts it – the difference that Rey was not sent away for her protection, but to purposely isolate her, is a huge difference, as would the relationship with Kylo Ren.
There’s no firm evidence either way. It’s just more interesting. And alas, in the ever-incestuous Star Wars universe she’s gotta be some player’s kid, because as my friend Richard noted the most shocking plot twist of all would be to have Rey’s ancestry be nobody we’ve ever seen before.
* – Alas, it has to be her father/grandfather and not her mother, as Star Wars takes place in an alternate-universe scenario where the lead roles are actually sentient insects. Don’t blame me for this theory, blame Max Gladstone.