Thank You For Being So Goddamned Brave.

“Are you sure you want me to come?” she wrote.
We’d been friended for years on the Internets; we started way back before the gravestone days of LiveJournal, and had played tag on just about every social network possible. We’d texted, lightly.
And she had all of my social anxiety, and more.
I knew that even writing to me to ask if I wanted her to come had caused her tizzies of anxiety.  Opening a window into her fears wide enough for me to peek in and see all of her turmoil was an act of supreme trust.  And of course I emailed her back to tell her of course I wanted her to come, I’d wanted to meet her for years, if she came I would hug her and show her just how happy I was to see her.
And I thought: I don’t know if I could come, even with that.
Because I am a severe sufferer of social anxiety.  I can just about do book signings, because there I am at least reassured that people came to see me; if they didn’t, all they had to do was stay home.  But when I imagined going to visit an online friend of mine?  Who’d immediately home in on all my physical ugliness, feel pity at my awkward jokes, would wince at my too-loud laugh?  Who might actually look at me blankly and say, “I’m sorry, who are you again?”
I’d stay home.
I would so stay home.
And so she came out to see me.  She’d had to enlist a friend to come with her, for strength.  And it was a large crowd there, all milling, and when I saw her out of the corner of my eye she trembled a little sometimes, but of course I called out and gave her the biggest, warmest hug I had it in me to give, and whispered in her ear just how glad I was, so happy that she’d come.
Nobody but me would have known how scared she was.  She looked completely normal – even beautiful.
But that’s the way we socially anxious work.  We look good on the outside, and are as tight as hand grenades on the inside.
And when the signing was over, and I was trying to round everyone up into going out for drinks afterwards, she pulled me aside and told me, with a thin smile, that it was too much.  She’d gotten overloaded.  And though oh how she wanted to stay, all of these people had drained her introvert-batteries and now it was time to be escorted home.
I didn’t know that I could, but I gave her an even bigger hug than the first one and thanked her, thanked her, thanked her.
Thing is, she’s not alone.  One of the reasons I have any audience at all is that I blog about my insane burblings of social anxiety, and how hard it is for me to go to conventions.  I’d say about one out of every five people who’ve come to see me read from Flex and sign books has that hesitant smile when they approach me, and I know that the only reason they crept out into such a whirlwind social situation is because I’ve lent them strength at some point by sharing my own tearful fears, and that they and I are intertwined with the same terrors.
They’re braver than I am.
I couldn’t come out to see me.
And so when I see them, I ask to hug them, and I thank them, and I smile, and I try to tell them how fucking proud I am that they came.  I know the cost. I know the fear.  And yet they thought somehow, I was worth it.
I hope I’m worth it.
Two stops left on this tour.  Next Saturday I sign in San Diego, and a week later I sign in San Francisco.  Some of you are thinking of coming out.  And I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t; the world is scary sometimes.
But if you do come, tell me.  Tell me how hard it was.  Because you deserve all the fucking hugs for battling that Godzilla of a terror, you deserve to see how proud someone is of you for coming out, because I know.  I know how hard this is.  I know how beautiful you are for trying.
You’re so magnificent for transcending your fears.  And you get thanked so rarely for all that effort it takes to reach the level of normal.  So tell me, and I will thank you, I will thank you endlessly, I will tell you how beautiful you are because oh my God you are.
 

We Say "Thank You" For The Silliest Shit

I did a half-assed job cleaning the kitchen the other day.
Gini was out at court, and I had ten minutes between tasks at work, so I picked up around the kitchen.  I didn’t do any dishes, Lord, no, or even put them in the dishwasher; I just picked up the stray glasses around the house, scraped some food into the garbage can, tossed some old junk mail. The dishes were in the sink, filled to the brim with Bachelor Water, that miracle substance that all men believe will clean dishes perfectly if you just let them soak for long enough.
When she rushed in to the house, off to another meeting in an hour, she put her coat on the chair and sat down to check her email.
“Hey!” I said.
She looked up in confusion.
“Did you notice the kitchen?”
She squinted at the kitchen. Indeed, the kitchen had gone from “abominable” to “barely acceptable.”  She had not registered the change because while the old kitchen had made her wince at the mess, this new kitchen wasn’t clean enough to make her stop in wonder.  She actually had to mentally compare the two to note the difference.
Then she gave me a big, wide smile.
“Thank you,” she said, pulling me into a warm embrace.
And that was that.
Later that evening, my wife was hip-deep in a pile of work, and was drinking wine.  “Would you freshen my glass?” she asked, tapping the crystal.  “I’m swamped.”
I got up and poured her a fresh tipple.  When I brought it back, she took the glass and held it up proudly.
“Did you notice?” she asked.
I hadn’t.  I’m so used to asking for things that self-care doesn’t register.  If I’m busy refactoring a program, you bet your ass that I’ll ask for as much catering as I can get.
But Gini came from a very dysfunctional family where she played “mom” even when she was eight years old.  She did everything, and was punished when she asked her parents for help.  So Gini never ever delegates tasks, and she tries to do too much because she *will not* ask for assistance, and then she melts down.
So Gini asking me to get her a glass of wine was, in fact, a major breakthrough for her.
“Thank you!” I said, leaning down to hug her, and that was that.
And some days I think the reason we’ve been successfully married for fifteen years is that we thank each other for the dumbest goddamned things.  I mean, I’m thanking her for being allowed to bring her wine, she’s thanking me for doing the minimal amount of effort.
I thank her for not stepping on my punchline when I’m telling a story.  She thanks me for not leaving toothpaste in the sink.  I thank her for not taking it personally when I scream at a broken computer.  She thanks me for watching reruns of Say Yes To The Dress with her, even though I don’t mind it all that much.
Our days are suffused with gratitude.
And yet it is a genuine gratitude.  She’s put together my weekly regimen of pills for years now, coordinating the various prescriptions and putting them all into a single M-T-W-T-F-S-S pillbox for me.  And every time I see her do it, I hug her and thank her, because we don’t let “routine” clog our thanks.  It’s still special that she does it, even if it’s the hundredth week in a row.
It’s also a silly, specific gratitude.  Sometimes Gini thanks me for things I don’t do, remembering the stuff her ex used to take her to task for and just hugging me because I don’t blame her for stupid shit.  But she’s thankful for that difference, and I let her.
We say thank you probably eighty times a day.  For big things.  Little things.  Trivial things.  Insane things.  And we never say them because we feel we ought to, we say them because we feel this swell of love at realizing the little efforts we’ve gone to, and smile a quirky smile, and fall a little more in love.
And I wonder if there’s some study that counts the number and quality of the thank-yous.  I’ve been in relationships where expecting thanks for putting the pills together would be stupid, that’s your job here, I do the fucking laundry so you handle the pills.  I’ve been in relationships where asking for thanks for the half-a-job in the kitchen would have led to a gigantic WHY DIDN’T YOU DO ALL OF IT argument, and then in the future I would never do anything unless I had time for the whole shebang, and we’d have much dirtier kitchens.
I suspect relationships get harder where the thanks are thin.  But fortunately, our air is thick with healthy oxygen and healthy thanks, forever grateful, even grateful that we’re grateful for such absurdly stupid things.
I’m grateful Gini lets me post things like this. Gini’s grateful I gush about her.
It works out.

Just To Be Clear On This: On Flex, And Rebecca

The greatest sign of success on Flex, for me, is that I’m getting the right kind of feedback from my friends.  I’ve seen the hesitant, stiff-smiled, “Oh, yeah, your book was good!” look too many times not to know it when I see it.  Instead, I’m getting that wide-eyed, holy-shit look of “Flex was good,” followed by a pointed query as to when the sequel drops.
The reviews, too, have been kind.  My Goodreads rating still hovers between 4.1 and 4.2 stars, which is frankly amazing for a first book.  And the sales have been decent, and the first three stops in this insane book tour have been well-attended by people I love and don’t see nearly enough.
Judging it as a first novel debut, I’d put this in the top 10% of first novels.  Maybe the top 5%.  I am living a happy dream that I’ve worked for all my life, and it almost expunges the sad nights I spent stacking up rejections and writing with the sad realization that maybe nobody will ever read this.  Maybe all this effort means you’re not good enough.
But let me be clear.
Last night, I was lying in bed, planning my trip to Seattle, for a two-week book tour, having just been tagged by an old friend on Facebook to tell me that I was, and I quote, “white-hot” as an author.
I would have given every bit of that up to have my dead goddaughter Rebecca walk through my bedroom door.
Every last fucking sale.
Every last fucking review.
Every last hope of being a writer.
Rebecca is deep in the DNA of Flex.  I’m not going to say that she is Aliyah, but when I wandered lost I asked, “What would Rebecca do?” and her riotous indignation was inevitably the answer.  And I wrote her not as a tribute, but as a triumph; when I started Flex, Rebecca was four years old, and healthy, and an adorable, unstoppable little thug.
We could not have known about the tumors growing in her head.
We could not have envisioned that someone so spunky would be gone.
Look at this kid, all this compassion and snarkiness and love in ten seconds, and tell me you can imagine she’s gone.

While I was on my book tour this weekend, hitting New York and Boston, some far braver people than I were shaving their heads for Saint Baldrick’s charity to raise funds in Rebecca’s memory.  To stop other families from going through what we did.  To find, as best as is possible, an end to cancer.
They are teetering on the edge of raising $100,000 in funds.  At $98,273 as I write this.
I ask you: if you bought Flex and loved it, I am grateful. I am.  But I would be more grateful still if you could reach deeper into your pockets and donate what you can to help assist the people who tried their best to save my little burning girl, my hope, my love, my loss.
I would throw my own book onto the bonfire, if God would let me, to bring her back; since I cannot, I will throw money into science to bar others from putting another child’s body into a tiny, tiny coffin.
Thank you.

How The New Star Wars Should Work

I haven’t read anything about the new Star Wars, nor do I really intend to; I’m going to be getting enough spoilers incidentally without seeking them out.  But I have a sneaking suspicion of how Star Wars is going to handle the introduction of Luke, Leia, and Han – which is to say, given JJ Abrams’ fondness for ancient gravitas and some of the teaser images from the trailer, I suspect we’ll have them hauled out of carbonite.
Not literal carbonite, of course, but script-carbonite – which is to say that after all their adventures, Han, Luke and Leia will have done precisely bupkiss since the films ended.  Some spunky younglings will have to haul their inert asses out of the ancient desert – just like Luke found Obi-Wan – where they’ll have curled up in isolation for years and have to be brought back out for one great adventure. Kinda like Spock in the Star Trek films.
That’ll be deeply disappointing.
For me, I want active old geezers – the kind of spunky folks who are smart enough to recruit a new generation when they realize they need fresh blood to handle to this challenge.  I don’t want hoary old guys being noble – I want Luke, Leia and Han as the cool uncles and aunts we all secretly wanted to have as a kid, the kind of people who grab us by the arm and go, “You’re more awesome than you think! Come on, let’s save the damn world!”
You know, like a squadron of lightsaber-wielding Doctor Whos.
And what I really want is the implication that Luke, Leia, and Han continued to have really cool adventures after the films.  The greatness of Star Wars is its implied backstory – remember when nobody knew what the Clone Wars were, but really wanted to? – making a movie seem like a snippet of some grand history.
So I think there should be plenty of conversations like this:
HAN, LUKE, AND NEW KIDS FACE DOWN UNTHINKABLE DANGER
HAN: This is just like when we had to wrangle Gundarks back on Ceta Tau!
NEW KID: What?
HAN: Long story.
And then, later, facing some other crazy Star Wars action sequence:
LEIA: Doesn’t this remind you of the starwheels of Apocrypha Seven?
NEW KID: The what?
LEIA (waving her hand): Old history. Not relevant.
And that becomes a running gag throughout the film, that Han and Luke and Leia have seen it all before but still need these new kids because these new kids are awesome, culminating in a scene where, I dunno, they have to swing across a chasm:
LUKE: Whoa, this is just like when we had to swing across that chasm in the Death Star!
NEW KID: Death Star?  Who the heck would name something as bombastic as “The Death Star”? Now I know you’re just making stuff up.
LUKE: You got me.
(NOTE: Yes, I know there will be like twenty novels documenting the adventures of Luke and company between the end of ROTJ and these new films.  If you’ve been paying attention at all, you know the films never give a rat’s ass about the novelizations, so no, those aren’t going to be referenced unless Abrams has really upped his game.)
 

Wanna Hear Me Discuss Flex? Wanna Hear An Advance Preview Of The Flux?

So the most excellent podcaster Brent Bowen interviewed me for his podcast Adventures In Sci-Fi Publishing.  If you liked my novel Flex, we get into an awful lot of discussion on how (and why) that was created – and in discussing the magic system, we get into a new branch of ‘mancy that pops up in The Flux, Flex’s sequel (due out in October), which may be the craziest magic I’ve devised as of yet.  (It’s not super-spoiler territory as far as I’m concerned, but it is spoiler-ish.)
There is about fifteen minutes’ worth of talk prefacing my appearance, discussing the “Sad Puppies” slate of the Hugo Awards, which may or may not be of interest to a general audience.  But considering that he asks me my take on the Sad Puppies – and it’s an interesting story to my mind, of a bunch of right-wing authors attempting to change the composition of one of science fiction’s most prestigious awards – it’s almost certainly worth listening to.
Anyway, as usual, I crack jokes, I say things I regret, and I use the term “basically” way too much.  Check it out.

So What's With All The Boot Camps In Military Fiction?

I’m reading Brad Torgerson’s The Chaplain’s War right now, which is currently half of a helluva book.
The opening half had a start that dragged me right in – huge, mechano-mantis creatures had effortlessly destroyed our invading armada, and a handful of prisoners were trapped on an alien planet.  The chaplain’s assistant, who is not particularly religious but is the only man left to comfort these POWs after the chaplain was killed in battle, is approached by one of the mantis-overlords: they’ve decided to exterminate humanity, but first they want to try to understand this foolish concept humans have called “God.”
Problem is, the chaplain’s assistant isn’t quite sure he understands it.  But he does understand that teaching them something is the only hope humanity has.
Things don’t go quite where you expected from there.
The problem is that this narrative has serious drive – the stakes are great, there’s huge battles, there’s desperate moves from needy people on both sides.  I can’t wait to see what happens next…
…but unfortunately, at least thus far in the book (I’m about a quarter of the way through), every other chapter is a flashback to the chaplain at bootcamp.
There’s a lot of bootcamp narratives in military fiction.  And I feel, at this point, like I’ve seen most of them.  The recruit arrives at the boot camp as saggy sack of potatoes.  The upper echelons insult them gratuitously, give them impossible tasks and then punish them for not doing it.  Because we can’t demean the officers, there is of course a local villain – either a slacker who’s going to take other good soldiers out with him, or a nasty piece of work who has it in for Our Hero, or both.  And eventually, Our Hero learns more responsibility and camaraderie and becomes tougher than he’s ever been before.
It’s a lot like the Cop Narrative, in that I feel I’ve seen it too many times to get excited about it.  And I love it when there are twists – I think Ender’s Game did a great job in twisting it so that the boot camp created isolation and not brotherhood, I think Old Man’s War had the joy of seeing elderly people given new genetically engineered bodies lusting for a second life, and The Forever War had a boot camp in icy space that was almost more fatal than the war.
Yet I keep seeing that boot camp narrative show up in novels without much of a twist, and I wonder: what’s appealing about it?
I thought initially it was that soldiers love to relive that time period and will read anything that triggers that experience, and maybe it is, but I posted a status update yesterday and three ex-military friends of mine expressed the same bafflement.  I suspect I may be friended to outliers, but still.
And I myself am an outlier myself in that I don’t comfort-read.  I know there are people who read, say, romances merely because they’re predictable, taking comfort in hearing all the narrative tropes click into place, and I’m not one of them.  (People keep saying my novel Flex is wildly unpredictable, and that’s because if I got bored when I was writing it I tore up that chapter and wrote something weirder.)  So maybe it’s that military fiction readers like having variants on the same story, and they’d get itchy if the boot camp didn’t make its obligatory appearance.
And Brad’s a smart writer.  By alternating boot camp with ZOMG MANTIS WARS, he’s telling me implicitly that the audience he’s trying to court would find both halves equally compelling.  I don’t.  For me, it’s kind of like “These chapters are about an eight-year-old boy trying to fight off his murderous stepfather with a steak knife, and these alternating chapters are about his friend’s struggle to fix his ant farm.” I’m all like WTF MANTIS and find myself skimming the boot camp chapters like blazes to GET TO THE BUGS.
And maybe the boot camp pays off.  It may be a narrative choice to have something with the boot camp resound firmly down the pike – again, Brad’s smart, I wouldn’t put that off of him.  But I’ve seen so many fictional boot camps that don’t really pay off at this stage that I find myself wondering where the appeal of boot camp in general stems from.  There’s nothing wrong with it, I’m just trying to figure it out.
Any ideas?

So What Universal Human Experiences Were You Missing Without Realizing It?

So Xuenay posted a really excellent comment the other day, linking me to this essay “What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?” Which, if you look to the comments, lists common human feelings that people didn’t realize they lacked.
The best example is from someone who had no sense of smell, yet because of social conditioning mocked her sister’s stinky feet and held her nose when she ate Brussels sprouts, just because she was supposed to.  It took this person years to realize that people actually smelled things.
Then there are other weirdies of “Wait, other people are not like me at all”:

• Realizing that some people actually like their jobs;
• Realizing that yes, some people actually get so physically stressed that it affects their emotions;
• Realizing that “not getting pumped up by being among big crowds of excited people” makes them an outlier;
• Realizing that some people really do care about the taste of food, and aren’t just ordering fancy meals to show off.

And I’m curious as to when y’all had that moment of realization of “Huh.  People really are that way, and I’m not.”
Here, I’ll share mine: I was in my mid-twenties when I realized that, bizarrely, putting the words “I feel” in front of sentences actually affected people’s reactions to an opinion.  Until then, it was super-obvious to me that everything I said was my opinion, it came out of my mouth, it’s created by a potentially-flawed brain, why should I have to put “I feel” in front of it to remind people that this opinion is an opinion?  To me, it’s like prefacing every sentence you speak with “I say that,” because shit, it’s that obvious.
But no.  Around my mid-twenties, I came to realize that merely shimming two words – “I feel” – in front of the exact same sentence radically changed how people reacted to my speech.  Which is something I still have issues with today, if you’ve seen my writings.  It’s something I struggle with, this idea that people feel that what they say is objectively correct until they specifically flip a switch otherwise.
So.  When did you have your moment of “Wait, I’m different from most people,” and what is the thing that sets you apart?