Living In Your Own Space When It Isn't

When I moved up to Alaska, I moved in with my wife – who’d lived there for twenty years. Which I thought was awesome: I got a pre-made house, I got the good furniture, I got the kids.
The kids weren’t the problem.
The furniture was.
Gini was as kind as she possibly could be, but the house wasn’t mine. The TV wasn’t in the place I would have wanted it. We slept in a bedroom basement, which felt dank to me. The kitchen layout was – well, it wasn’t confusing, I could find everything, but I kept reaching for a knife and discovering it was in the wrong drawer.
We moved to Cleveland two years later, and arguments ensued. She wanted the television in the basement; I fought for the living room, and won. We debated where the bed should go. Compromises were made.
Our marriage got shortly better thereafter.
That improvement wasn’t entirely due to the move, of course – but it was a big part of it. When I was in Alaska, I was living in the results of a thousand choices I’d never had a vote in. That cabinet wasn’t to my tastes, the cereal was in a different shelf, the books were arranged wrong.
Added up, it gave me a weird and constant sense of alienation – this subliminal sensation that this was not my home, that I was intruding on someone else’s turf. And it wasn’t that Gini did anything wrong, she was perfectly happy to change stuff – but it felt silly, even trivial, fighting to shift the cereal to a new shelf when really, did that matter?
Except some of it did. Some of it felt like I was living in the aftermath of an election I’d never gotten to vote in. And it was a tiny feeling, but it was there all the time, like a prickling in the skin that never went away. And when we fought, I sometimes felt like I was on her home ground and what right did I have to face her down here?
And I’ve talked to other people who’ve moved in to long-existing houses, and they often felt that “someone else has marked this place with their scent” feeling. In the case of good relationships, that feeling eventually faded as, slowly, more choices were made together and the house became the result of shared decisions. In the case of bad relationships, well, their house was theirs.
And now I tell people who are moving into a place, or people who are having loved ones move in: Make some major changes right away, if you can. Give them a space that’s theirs, think of some shifting around you can do, give them some agency.
It makes a difference. It shouldn’t. But god damn if it doesn’t.

The 2015 Annual Greed List!

Alas, I am slightly late with my Annual Greed List – the large (and, yes, uncut) list of things I desire for Christmas. Why do I do this? If you’re really interested, here’s a brief history of the Greed List.
The briefer version, however, is that I think “What you want” is a reflection of “Who you are” at this moment – your music, your hobbies, your fandoms, help define who you are as a person.  I find it fascinating as a history, watching how what I’ve desired has mutated – for example, the list used to be heavy on physical Things, which then changed slowly into digital objects as MP3s and iTunes became big, and this year thanks to the gigantic television we bought, I’m back to wanting Things again.
And while I guess I could just shove my Amazon Wishlist at you and run, why bother?  I want you to know who I am in this moment, and so I not only list what I want, but explain why I want it.
So.  Here’s what I’d like for this swirling happy holiday season.
Buy Flex or Flux or Promote Them Or Whatever.  
So if somehow you didn’t notice, 2015 was a banner year for me – because it was the year I fulfilled my lifelong dream and became a published novelist.  But those novels still need assistance! The more they sell, you know, the better for my writing career!
So if, for some reason, you wish to get me a Christmas gift and have not purchased Flex or The Flux yet (and the ebook for Flex is currently on sale for a mere $2.99 at both Barnes and Noble and Amazon), then you can do so!  And if you have purchased them, then writing a review or a blog post or a Twitter status is always a nice thing to get an author.
And if you’ve bought the book and left a review, then you have done everything you can for me and I thank you. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and a Killer Kwanzaa.
The Pyro Miniature Flamethrower. ($175)
Okay, this isn’t really a flamethrower.  I’m not completely insane.
It just throws fireballs.
No, seriously!  Check this shit out!

Basically, you load little bits of flash paper into a nozzle, which then shoots miniature fireballs out at will.  You can’t really set the house on fire with this, because the flashes are so small – note the sample where the guy explodes one under his hand.
However, I will note that in every videogame RPG I’ve ever played, I play the guy who flings fireballs.  Every time.  And if I had this, I promise not to fling fireballs in your house, but I will be a legendary hoot at other people’s parties and oh god it’s probably not the best idea but just get it for me anyway.
A Dewar To Hold Liquid Nitrogen.  ($249)
What’s that, you say?  You don’t want me flinging bits of fire at random passerby?  No problem.
How ’bout buying me a container to store toxically frigid fluids in?
See, liquid nitrogen is the funnest substance on earth. It’s so cold you can dip a rose in and bring out a rose icicle.  Stir a cup or two into milk and stir, and you make instant ice cream.  And if you like flinging it on people, well, it goes up in these great fwooshes of icy clouds, because your body is so hot that, comparatively, flinging little droplets of it at you has much the same effect as dropping water on a hot pan.
You’re the pan, comparatively speaking. You don’t get wet.  You just have little droplets skitter off you.  Unless you pour a lot of liquid nitrogen on you, at which point it freezes your skin gray and dead in an act of instant frostbite, but you probably shouldn’t do that.  I wouldn’t.
Anyway, I want to store liquid nitrogen, which is actually pretty cheap! It’s like $3 a gallon.  But storing it, well, glass would crack, plastic shatters, and the offgassing might cause a thermos to explode.  So for my safety, I think you should spend $249 to put this crazily subzero fluid in so I don’t hurt myself.
No, seriously, I want this.
Walk On Earth A Stranger, by Rae Carson ($12)
This book is filled with poisonous cockroaches, which skitter out to –
No, seriously.  It’s just a book.  This is the first nonfatal item on this list, and it’s a bit of a letdown – except it isn’t!  Because Rae Carson wrote the most awesome “Girl of Fire and Thorns” trilogy, which was like a princess Game of Thrones except the fat girl kicked ass in a thousand ways to Sunday, and she’s written another book I desire out of blind faith.
Holy Shit, Why Are All These Blu-Rays On Here?
This Christmas, Gini and I are only getting each other the smallest of gifts.  Why?
Because we bought a 70″ Ultra-HD television that is a fucking monolith.  And that was a large expenditure that was totally worth it, because with the HD we can see details that we never saw before.  We watched the Blu-Ray of Star Wars and paused it occasionally to watch the soot on a door.  A door.
So there’s a lot of DVDs this year, because there are movies I want to see in this glorious detail.  We had a fuzzy projection screen for a long time, but this level of fine picture is amazing.
Stanley Kubrick Triple Feature: 2001 / The Shining / A Clockwork Orange ($49.99)
Gini hates Stanley Kubrick films.  She finds them boring.  They are.
What I find incredible is that the boringness is part of what makes them effective.  He holds a shot for so long that you’re forced to look for more meaning in the scene, scouring for details – and you do, because he put them there.  And so while I have these movies on regular DVD, I’d like to see them in the Ultra-HD quality picture shot of a restored version – one can only imagine how amazing the space-trip sequence of 2001 is.
Corner Gas: The Movie ($15)
The visuals on this film will not be amazing. In fact, I’m not even sure I need to see Brent Butt’s face in high definition.  But Corner Gas is one of my all-time favorite sitcoms – a delightful little Canadian piece of absurdity set in a small town where quirky folks turn dull pasttimes into high-stakes confrontations.  It’s like a live-action Simpsons that was smart enough to stop when it ran out of things to say.  And I won’t say that this sitcom needed an ending, as it ran on negative continuity, but they gave it one, and so heck, here it is.
And I want to know what it is.
The Other Paris, By Luc Sante ($22)
Luc Sante wrote one of my favorite books of all time – Low Life, a look at what it was like to live in the slums of New York.  And he spent years researching this low-level history of Paris – a city I don’t know much about, but I know Luc Sante will show me its underbelly in all the best of ways.
Crazy-Ass Star Wars Socks (???)
Seriously.  Look at those socks.  I mean, I love crazy socks, and these are great.  So if anyone wants to buy me crazy socks, go ahead – thanks, Heather! – but crazy Star Wars socks are even better.
Just keep in mind we’re a Rebel faction here, sir. None of your Darth Vader or Boba Fett socks.
(Also, yes, crazy Hawaiian shirts are always happy gifts here at La Casa McJuddMetz, but the sizings are so weird on them it’s gone poorly in the past. I’m apparently a difficult kind of pudgy.)
Rocky: The Heavyweight Collection ($30)
Watching Creed this weekend, I was amazed at how absolutely perfect that movie was – it was not a sequel to Rocky, but effortlessly turned Rocky Balboa into a supporting player in someone else’s story. And the thing was, Creed was not Rocky Balboa – they gave him a great motivation that was unique.
But I grew up on Rocky, and I love the lunkhead.  He was never bright.  But he was complex, in his own way, and I loved the way each movie told a new part of his story, always treating his quiet heroism with respect.  He was a dumb boxer, but he cared for his friends, and seeing his tail end help kickstart someone else’s tale was marvelous.  And I’d like all six of the movies in this Blu-Ray box set, because four of them (Rocky, Rocky II, Rocky III, and – unbelievably – Rocky Balboa) are good.
Songs of a Dead Dreamer/Grimscribe, by Thomas Ligotti ($14)
He’s supposedly one of the best horror short story writers since Clive Barker.  (Clive Barker was good.)  And people keep telling me I gotta read this guy, he’s insane, he does things with tone and structure that nobody else has –
All right, fine, I’ll put it on my list.
Whiplash ($15)
This is not a great visual movie, but was one of my favorite stories of 2014.  I’m drawn to tales of people staking their sanity on outlandish trials (also see: Jiro Dreams of Sushi, The King of Kong), and Whiplash is an absolutely electrifying take on what happens when a sadistic-yet-skilled teacher finds a drummer who’s willing to do anything to be the best.
This got nominated for Oscars. It deserved every nomination, and then some.
Gone With The Wind Anniversary Edition ($14)
Remember when I said, “Whoah, that gigantic honkin’ screen makes everything look amazeballs?”
Now imagine the burning of Atlanta sequence in that kind of detail, and then imagine that magnificent camera pullback over the casualties of the war, and you’ll know why I want this Blu-Ray DVD.
Westworld ($15)
Yes, this is a cheesy 1970s science-fiction movie.  I have a serious, serious love for these.  And I have a serious, serious love for dystopias that go horribly wrong, and this one features Yul Brynner as someone who goes horribly wrong.
“Draw.”
Alfred Hitchcock: The Essentials Collection ($45)
You’ve got Vertigo.  You’ve got Rear Window. You’ve got North by Northwest. You’ve got Psycho, and you’ve got The Birds.  That’s five fucking awesome movies, in one bundle.

Why I Do Drama.

The problem with “drama” is that it too often is a synonym for “This makes me uncomfortable.”
As in, “There may be something ugly lurking about here, but I don’t want to have to think about it.”
Which, you know, I get. I don’t always feel like trudging into the latest storm of accusations, nor do I have the energy to figure out who’s saying what about who. There are idiots around who get peevish about entirely ridiculous things. It’s tiring sometimes, and we should all have the right to say, “Okay, I just need to peace out.”
Yet what I don’t do is hold my unwillingness to engage with potentially ugly issues as a personal strength – as in, “I don’t do drama.”
Not doing drama occasionally, or even as a matter of course? Understandable. Never doing drama, however, is another way of saying, “I don’t care who gets fucked over, I just want peace.” And that thinking leads to all sorts of abuses being swept under the rug because, you know, we don’t want to think about who’s being violated or ignored or discriminated against, we just wanna show up and chill.
Saying you never do drama means that you’ll tolerate any harm so long as people are quiet about it.
That’s its own special form of evil. And I don’t do that.

EDIT: To clarify, when I originally posted this elsewhere, one commenter said, and I believe accurately: “I think so much of this conversation is being had around the idea that there is a simplistic view we can take on the distinction between what is drama and what is not.”
To which my response was: “Pretty much. Almost any definition in here of ‘That’s drama!’ can be applied – and *has* been applied – to someone who’s genuinely been injured by another party and is trying to cause change. I feel when that distinction is made as though it were easy, it tends to lead to dangerous shortcuts.
“I note with heavy irony that the people who are like ‘WE ARE NOT QUALIFIED TO PLAY JUDGE AND JURY’ often feel qualified to judge which people are frivolous in their intent.”

FLEX: Also $2.99 At Amazon, For The Next Eleven Days, Probably.

If you’ll recall, I’ve written a micro-Christmas-story for Barnes and Nobles’ The 12 Days Of Robot Christmas.  That magical flashfic will be out on the 15th, but until then B&N is offering my debut novel Flex for $2.99.
Amazon, apparently, scouted B&N’s sale prices and went, “Oh, helllllll no, we’re not being underpriced,” and promptly dropped their Kindle version of Flex to $2.99.
So for the next eleven days, I know for a fact Flex will be on sale at Barnes and Noble, and I suspect Amazon will price-match them in grim lockstep until the bitter end.  So take advantage of this hot clan war to purchase my book, if you see fit!  It has videogamemancers channelling Portal guns, and bureaucromancers doing kick-ass magical paperwork, and also donuts.  What else might you need?

I Wrote A Christmas Story, And So B&N Made FLEX $2.99!

Angry Robot, my publisher, has a promotion called The 12 Days Of Robot Christmas, wherein 12 Angry writers each pen a brief Christmas-themed sci-fi/fantasy story.  I finished my Christmafantastic flashfic yesterday, and it’s going up on December 15th.
But during these 12 days, you can get many fantastic Angry Robot authors’ books at a discount, and so the e-book copy of Flex is a mere $2.99.  (And if you keep going back, you’ll get to see stories from my fellow authors Patrick S. Tomlinson, my book birthday twin Carrie Patel, Rod Duncan, and, well, eight more!)
I’ll tell you when my flashfic is up – man, writing a complete story with four characters and a full character arc in 1,150 words is like bonsai writing – but if you wanted to get ahead of the curve and buy cheap copies of my debut novel, well, $2.99’s less than a coffee at Starbucks.  (And B&N has been very, very kind to me, even listing me as one of their top 25 fantasy books of the year.  I’m still blushing.)
As another Christmas reminder, if you want signed copies of my physical novels, local indie bookstore legend Loganberry Books is the place to get them.  Time’s running out, but you can find the details of how to have a personally-inscribed Ferrett-book in your stocking here.)

The Ol' Well-Being Wallet

A thought I had after a tussle with a sweetie – one that I wanted to keep in a place where I might get back to it:
I’m a social guy. Like, a really social guy. I’ll go to a convention, and chat with people, and hug my friends and love them.
I can look like a normal person… but at a huge cost.
Which is to say, if normal people paid $1 every time they started up a conversation, for me it’d cost like $50 to say hello to someone cold. It’s not an unpayable cost – I mean, most people can spare $50 from time to time – but it’s enough that most folks don’t go out just spending $50 at a shot without budgeting.
Except it’s not cash I’m spending: it’s my well-being. If I overdraw at the Bank of Ferrett, I wind up with my emotions stretched too thin, and then I’m crying in public or stuttering weirdly or having some other embarrassing mental breakdown.
Which isn’t a big deal, on the whole. It just means I have to budget. When I go to a convention, I budget for the hotel room, I budget for the meals, and I also budget my socialization. A convention is like a big splurge for me, where if I got out to talk to hundreds of people, I need to spend the rest of the week being socially thrifty by talking to as few people as possible.
Yet because I act the same way that they do, extroverts tend to think that I pay the same costs. Which leads to a weird conversations where the extroverts are telling me “Why don’t you just go up and talk to them? That’s a trivial cost of $1! You can pay that cost all day!” And I’m telling them, “No, man, talking to someone who hasn’t initiated a conversation with me is a fancy dinner with drinks. It’s expensive as hell!”
They don’t get it. To them, striking up three conversations in a row is $3 – that’s not even a vente Starbucks. But to me, starting three conversations at $50 a pop is a pretty serious dent in the ol’ well-being wallet.
And I think introverts get that. They understand that some social interactions just cost them more than other people. It’s not that they don’t like people, but people are a comparatively pricey expenditure, and they can’t afford to have people over every night or they’ll go bankrupt.
Yet here’s the thing I learned today:
There are different costs for other things.
For me, “confronting someone” is maaaaaybe a dime. Anyone who’s seen me go after someone in my comments threads or dissect someone’s logic in a blog post knows that it’s pretty trivial for me to call someone on their shit. I could do it ten times a day, and my well-being wallet would still be brimming over.
That also applies to my relationships: if we have a problem, I’ll send you an itemized list of what’s bugging me. If you hurt me, I’ll go, “Okay, yeah, you need to cut that out.”
And what I realized is that for some of my partners, dealing with my confrontations – because honestly, it only really takes one mouthy sonuvabitch to drag someone else into a confrontation – has a much higher cost.
Me? I can get into several confrontations – albeit small ones – a day, and have it turn out to be productive for me, because the confrontation doesn’t cost me a dime.
Whereas for some of my partners, that confrontation may have just yanked a solid $100 out of their wallet, and they may not have budgeted appropriately for the day.
And that’s a large revelation, for me – that it’s not just “introvert” vs “extrovert,” but that all sorts of activities may carry a higher cost. I’m pretty sure my wife pays $30 every time she has to ask for help, which would explain why she so rarely does it, and I have a friend who shells out $10 every time she’s forced to accept a compliment.
So when I’m dealing with people from now on, I gotta remember the local inflation. Round Ferrettville, confrontation is cheap. But when I travel abroad, I gotta remember that maybe confrontation’s a pretty rare commodity, and to treat it like the precious thing it is.