Oh, My Sweet Droogs: I Told You Not To Trust Me.

Yesterday, I wrote an essay about how I’m bringing my wife along to conventions even though it’s a little inconvenient for me.  And while the response is lovely, I had a lot of people saying, “Wow, reading through, I was worried you were going to do the wrong thing!”
Well, of course you were worried.  I wrote that essay to throw up a tornado of red flags.
If I’d wanted to justify the decision to not bring Gini along, I never would have started with the conversation about how I didn’t want her to go.  A good essay is about leading you down to my conclusion.
No, if I’d wanted to convince you that what I’d done was a good thing, I’d have started much harder with the stress of grief, and how me dealing with Gini’s fear of crowds was holding me back from going out to the people I needed to see.  I’d present a scene of sitting in the house with just her for the fourteenth night in a row, her wanting nothing more than to curl up and watch Star Wars again, me feeling itchy and isolated and not knowing what to do because she needed my help but I was dying inside.  I would have talked about how I wasn’t able to comfort her because my emotional batteries were also drained, and we just kept bumping up against each other, unable to recharge the other because there was nothing left for me to give.
And I’d have emphasized the reluctance I felt about going out to GKNE alone, how uncertain I was, so when it turned out that GKNE was awesome for me you would have been there in my triumph.
Then I would have mentioned the other arguments I’d had to get Gini to go out with me, the ones where I’d failed, to show what a good guy I was.  And I wouldn’t have just talked abstractly about what GKE did for me – I would have given you a scene where I showed you just how that first BDSM scene blew the doors off of what I knew, made you understand just how this was what I’d been seeking all along.
Then I would have talked about how Winter Wickedness gave me the strength to come back home and be better for her, that it was an oasis of healing for me to give Gini more comfort in her hour of need…
…And it wouldn’t have been quite as heart-meltingly nice but damn, I woulda sold some of y’all.  Probably a lot.
And I’m sure some of you would have gone “Um, not sure about that” if I’d written about how I needed to go out to cons alone.  Some of you are perceptive, and call me on my shit.  But a good writer can bury his red flags, and manipulate emotions so you see what we want you to see.  We’re like magicians.
Which is not to say that I don’t believe what I told you yesterday.  I do.  Thoroughly.  And I think some of that belief saturates my work and makes me a better writer.  But I also know just how I’d tweak my tale to tell you the exact opposite thing I said, and make it sound goddamned good.
That’s why I tell you not to trust me.  Or anyone.
Because predators also know this trick.  They know how to shift the mirrors to lead you deeper into the funhouse.  And they’re very good at knowing what emotional dials to tweak, which moments to amplify, to lead you to the conclusion they desire.
I do believe in what I say.  I do.  But if I didn’t, it’d be really hard for some of y’all to spot that, because I know how to shift things around to mask my intentions and make good things seem like bad ones.
A lot of people do that.  Hell, I could be doing it right now.  So read closely.  Question.  Interrogate the text.  Because there are people out there trying to mash your heart-warmed button so hard that it occludes your logic, and if you’re not careful they can lead you to some very wrong places.
So watch.

"It Would Be A Lot Easier For Me If You Didn't Come To This Convention."

“I’m going to be presenting at Winter Wickedness down in Columbus,” I told my wife.  “It’s another kink convention.  It would be easier for me if you didn’t go.”
This was a conversation we had to have, but I wasn’t looking forward to having it.
See, kink conventions are a new thing in our lives, and my wife’s never been to one.  The first time I’d been asked to talk on polyamory was at the Geeky Kink Event: New England two years ago, and that marked the start of our long nightmare with our goddaughter.  I’d asked Gini along to co-present with me – and why not? if I’m talking about poly, she’s smarter than I am – and she’d happily agreed.
Literally two hours out from the convention, we got the call that our goddaughter had gone into convulsions and was being medivaced out to Philadelphia.  We cancelled.  And spent the next nine months watching brain cancer take this precious girl we loved from us.
Not a good time for sexy convention fun.
But the Geeky Kink Event asked me back the next year, and I decided that for me, a vital step in my recovery was getting out again.  Yet in the wake of our goddaughter’s death, Gini had acquired an anxiety about crowds.  So she told me to go alone, and I did…
…and I had a great time.  The kink actually led to some breakthroughs in my grief; there were moments where I was forcibly restrained so I could let loose with the huge sorrow I felt, and not feel like I could be torn apart by this infinite sadness.
But it was also fun.  I was effectively single poly at these conventions, free to do whatever I liked, not having to coordinate with anyone’s schedule.  If I wanted to do fireplay or take someone back to my room for cuddles and conversations, I could do that.  I did a lot of smooching.  I lost myself for a bit.
It was so much fun that I went and did it again at the next Geeky Kink Event, where Gini was still worried about being among hundreds of people in a noisy, potentially panicky environment.  And that event was another time for Slutty Weasel to come out and play, a safe space where I could flirt and feel unabashedly good about life, which helped my recovery process.
And as I drove back from GKE cheerfully marked up by friends, I pondered how things were getting awkward on the convention front.
It would be harder and harder to integrate Gini into this convention life I had, the longer I did it.  And that wasn’t the kinkiness of these cons that was going to be an issue, though that was a contributing factor: it was that I was creating a parallel social life that my wife was not at all involved in.
See, if you’re doing conventions right, you accrete friends as you go.  You have a great conversation in a hallway, you friend each other on Twitter, and the next thing you know you have someone you really want to catch up with the next time you see them!  The first con is usually a little lonely, but by the second con you have people greeting you in the lobby, and by the third time you hit a con you get to what I call “critical mass” – i.e., so many fun people you want to talk to that you can’t possibly schedule them all in.
This had happened at my writing-conventions before, too.  I had so many people to catch up with that I was booked solid with my friends.
And by the time Gini came along to our first big writer-con, she felt a little isolated.  I was always catching up with people I was so stoked to see, and while I introduced her as best I could, the fact was that I was at a con where I had tons of people who I had a past history with, and she was starting fresh.  She felt a bit like a third wheel, even though so many people were psyched to meet my wife (who I don’t ever stop talking about, for the record).
So she felt lonely at the first couple of cons.  Eventually, with a bunch of dinners and talks at parties, she started to form her own connections.  Now she has her own friends she sees at the sci-fi cons – and there’s a bunch of overlap with the people I know, but she has her own bonds with folks now.
It was a hurdle.
But at a kink con, well, things can get awkward.  The default mode of interaction at a sci-fi con is the group chat, where anyone can hop on-board.  And that’s present at kink conventions, too!  There’s a lot of great conversations to be had in the lobby, just like any other convention.
But the prevalent mode at a con is the scene – you and someone else doing something one-on-one.  And so at a kink con, if I just did what I’d been doing before, I’d leave Gini alone for half the day while I went off and did fireplay.
Considering she’s still working through her anxiety of crowds, that would be a spectacularly shitty experience for her.
So I sat her down for a talk.  “Look,” I said.  “When I go to a kink convention, I spend a lot of time alone with people.  And I really, really like this freedom of just being able to go off with whoever and do whatever.  It would be a lot easier, and actually more fun for me in a lot of ways, if you didn’t show up…
“…but I don’t want that.”
Because yeah, it’s fun to go to a convention and stay up until 4:00 in the morning curled up talking with a girl I just met.  It’s fun to do five straight hours of fireplay and not have to think about anyone else.  It’s fun to be super-selfish.
But the danger of that is that I build a parallel social life, one where my wife isn’t welcome to visit.
And there’s nothing wrong with building parallel lives that my wife doesn’t *want* to visit.  When I had a Magic group, my wife wanted nothing to do with that because she dislikes the complexity of Magic, and that was fine.  If Gini wants to go to quilting seminars or something, I don’t care, enjoy yourself.  If you have activities you like pursuing, you shouldn’t lop them off to fit neatly within a partner’s comfort-box.
But Gini likes conventions, and she likes sexy things – she listens avidly when I tell her of my grand adventures at these cons, amused by all the nuttiness that happens there.  And as convenient as it might be to leave her behind because she’s still processing the several great losses she had in 2014, that would create a slow schism between us.
That schism wouldn’t be her resentment.
It would be me, evolving in the absence of my wife.
Part of the reason our marriage works so fucking well is that Gini and I are on the same page.  Marriages break apart often not because people were bad for each other, but because people were great for each other when they started and then drifted apart.  If you could somehow reset them to the people they were when they made their vows, then they’d still be together.
And kink conventions are potentially life-changing situations.  It’s where you discover new forms of sexuality that you want to pursue, see other ways of approaching relationships, uncover sides of yourself that you’d never recognized before.  Going into the Kinky Geek Event I didn’t realize how cathartic being held down could be, but a rope scene helped drain some toxic grief from my wounds…
…and Gini wasn’t there for that.  She wasn’t with me in the hours afterwards to help me process that.  She wasn’t seeing all the forms my grief could take.
When something big changes in my life, I want Gini there to see it.  Because she’s a part of me, and goddammit, even if she’s not holding the rope she holds my heart.
“Yeah,” I said.  “I won’t get to fool around as much at the conventions, if you come.  And I’ll have to shepherd you around for a while until you can find your own friends there, and hopefully your own scenes.  And I’m not trying to force you – if you don’t want to go, then we’ll find some other way to work this out.  But if you’re just scared to go because crowds still flip you out, then I will find some way to bring you there, and if you have to spend the whole goddamned weekend attached to me at the hip, then I will do that.
“Because I need you to walk next to me, even if that’s not always convenient.”
She didn’t go to Winter Wickedness.  Her mother passed on in November, and she’s still grieving, and it was too soon.
But she’s coming to the next convention.  And that means I get less fireplay, I get less just running off for snuggles, I have more maintenance and concern at these cons as I ensure my wife is comfortable in this new place.
I cannot fucking wait.

They're Not Dumb, They're Just Not Where You Are Now

I got a comment the other day sneering at my so-called “genius” for writing a post full of super-obvious advice for dumb people.
And it’s true: what I wrote wasn’t rocket science.  If you’re experienced with relationships, “Talk extensively with your partner before making major changes to your relationship” is Dating 101.
But someone’s gotta teach the introductory classes.
This is not me hoisting my banner high and shouting, “It’s me!  I have to teach the n00bs!”  Rather, it’s me noting that constant irritation emanating from more experienced people at the mere existence of the n00bs – when I go to Linux forums to look up an answer, I see beardy admins sneering at these clueless kids.  Whenever I see writing advice for first-time National Novel Writing Month participants, I also see haters bitching about HOW COULD THEY NOT KNOW.  And yeah, every time I write a Poly 101 thing, I attract folks who say, “They don’t know this by now?  What idiots!  They don’t deserve to be taught!”
But chances are good you’re not smarter than they are: you just got an education elsewhere.  A lot of what I see as “dumb” can be written off as “inexperienced.”
The good news is, “Inexperienced” can be fixed with a bit of teaching.
Dumb may be an inherent state, depending on the person.
Which is why I try not to sneer at the newbies too much.  Yeah, they’re often inconvenient, clogging my Linux feed with questions like “How do I move a directory?” They often embarrass me, because I see so-called “poly” newbies wrapping themselves in the name of a lifestyle I love and being the worst and most psychodramatic ambassadors of it I could imagine.  And they’re sometimes an out-and-out harm to the community, when new dudes to Fet assume that every woman on a dating site just wants to get fucked and propositions a million women crudely, thus degrading not just the women but their positive experience on that social network, actually driving them away.
(And then they have the gall to go, “Why is it so hard to find a date?”  But that’s another essay.)
Newbies can warp a community in weird ways.  It’s not wrong to have rules that rein their puppy-dog tendencies in, or even to have communities that exclude folks without a certain level of skill in the topic.
Yet none of that means that a newbie is necessarily stupid.  It means they’re starting out, and when you start out you make mistakes, and if you’re not making embarrassing mistakes you’re not growing.  I’m willing to bet if we could pull up the history of these newbie haters, many of them made similar mistakes years back when they were first learning the ropes.  (Or if they didn’t screw up, they had circumstances where they got valuable lessons handed to them – a form of privilege – well before they could make the mistakes.)
Point is, yeah, I think a lot of my essays don’t say anything new – they’re rehashing old topics in a folksy way that’s easy to read.  I don’t see that as a flaw in my writing, though.  Like a lot of writing, it’s not meant for you.  If you’ve done a lot of poly, you can probably skip over 80% of my writings, because this is shit you know.
But someone doesn’t.  I know this because sometimes they email me to thank me.  And I write because I wish to God I’d had this great repository of knowledge of all these blogs when I was in my early twenties learning about sexuality, and I see all the other people writing awesome fucking advice that would have saved me so much humiliation, and I’m proud to contribute to that body of knowledge.
You know this stuff already?  Good for you.
Pass it on.

What Makes A Roleplaying Game Interesting: Lessons For DMs

The problem with roleplaying games is that we dungeonmasters steal all of our best plot points from books and movies.  And no wonder!  We loved seeing Frodo sneak his way to Mordor, loved seeing Luke flying down the trench of the Death Star.
The problem is, “Luke flying down the trench of the Death Star” can make for a terribly boring gaming session.
“Okay, you’re flying down the trench.  Darth is behind you.”
“I fly up and out of the trench so he doesn’t kill me.”
“You can’t.  You need to fly in a straight line to keep your target in sight.”
“I… shoot at Darth?”
“You have no rearward facing cannons.”
“I… dodge?”
“That’s a good idea!  He shoots at you… (rolls)  He misses.  The force is strong with you!”
“I shoot at the exhaust port.”
“You’re not in range yet.”
“Well, I guess I fly forward.”
“Okay, Darth shoots at you… (rolls)  This time he hits!  Artoo goes up!”
“Are there any tactics I can use in this situation?  Any way of bettering my position?  Any relevant choices I can make aside from keep flying in a straight line and get shot at?”
“Um…. no.  You’ll be at the exhaust port in five rounds.  Hang on, and Darth rolls to hit…”
“Wake me up when I can do something.”
See, too many novice dungeonmasters think that exciting roleplaying is generated from situations and stakes. Which is a natural mistake; if you’re not paying attention too closely, that’s what the best stories look like they’re about.
So a lot of dungeonmasters steal from a movie and say, “Well, the Dark Overlord is rising from his pit!  The world is at stake!  He’s surrounded by a hundred of his minions, and the players must kill the minions before he wakes!”
Then the characters play whack-a-mole for twenty rounds, endlessly rolling the same dice to “kill another minion, kill another minion, kill another minion” and the game is now reduced to what the dice say instead of what the characters do.
The trick to DMing is realizing that situations are only useful so long as they set up interesting choices – then fast-forwarding past all the parts that don’t involve the characters making interesting choices.
Because when a character in a movie has no interesting options, that creates tension, because we’re not that character.  We worry because the character is helpless, and we want them to get out.  But when we are the character, and we have no interesting options, that creates a mixture of frustration and boredom, because we want to do something to propel our character to safety, and yet we’re told that we are helpless.
People don’t like going to games to be helpless.
Likewise, having big firefights in a movie looks like fun, because it passes quickly and the character is stylish.  But if it’s a curb-stomp battle where the DM will not say “Okay, it’s clear you’re winning, so you mop up the remaining five mooks,” then eventually the characters realize “Oh, yeah, I have to roll an 8 or above to kill a mook with my best attack to end this tedium,” and the game degenerates into rewarding dice rolls over creative roleplay.
(Some mooks will argue that a good player will always find a way to make the game interesting. This is partially true. However, a DM’s job is to make the game entertaining for everyone, not just the top-tier players, and why should I work that hard to have fun when the DM should be on my side?)
From a player’s perspective, the trench run is interesting when Luke decides to turn off his targeting computer and trusts to the force.  It’s interesting if Han (the character) decides to fight his way to the Death Star and save Luke’s ass.
It’s not interesting when Luke is locked into a single tactic – fly straight and pray – and we have to endure that for five rounds of dice-rolling.
Your players show up because they want to make interesting choices.  So:

• Do not present them with false choices: “Oh, I guess you can sneak into this castle!  But I don’t like the idea of you sneaking, so I’m going to punish you for not talking your way in like I’d planned.”
• Do reward them for making interesting choices.  You don’t have to have them succeed.  But interesting failures can be more entertaining – see also, Han charging after the small group of stormtroopers, only to run into an entire squadron of them.  Don’t fail; escalate.
• Do not give them combats where the most effective tactic is “use this weapon again.”  Mix it up!  Find a way to make them devise new tactics!  (And if the only tactic that will work is “the tactic you had in mind,” refer back to “Don’t present them with false choices.”)
• Do fast-forward whenever possible.  If the characters would make no interesting choices here, summarize.  Yes, Luke has to fly another 140 kilometers in this trench, which would technically be five rounds, but what’s better – five boring rounds, or one totally exciting one?

Your whole goal as a DM is to give the characters interesting choices.  You want to have a battle with eight mooks?  Great!  Do that!  But don’t have the characters stand in an empty hallway, trusting to dice over tactics.  Take a hint from Raiders of the Lost Ark and have the battle take place in a bar, which starts burning, with lots of cover and lots of creative things to use.
Because remember: “Being surrounded by 1,000 goblins” sounds like it should be fun, but you don’t have a lot of choices here.  “Having to stand on the bridge and tell the Balrog that he shall not pass”?
That’s the choice.

So Harper Lee Is Probably Old And Doesn't Want Her Book Released

So Harper Lee has a new book coming out – one she wrote way back in the 1950s.  The book she actually wrote before “To Kill A Mockingbird.”
And they’re probably publishing it because Harper Lee is a) so infamously reclusive that “We didn’t ask her” is actually something we’ve come to expect of Harper Lee-related topics, and b) so old and out-of-it that people can easily take advantage of her.
I’m sort of appalled, sort of not. This is, of course, colored by the fact that I want to read it.
But Lee’s famous reclusivity doesn’t seem to stem from fear of the quality of the novel – rather, that she hated the PR and intrusions that came from the novel.  Her name isn’t even Harper Lee – she just didn’t want anyone to mispronounce her name.  And she really hated dealing with the damned press.
So for me, this is a fucking hideous and soulless land grab – kind of like the way the Dr. Seuss estate started selling movie rights the instant that the good Doctor died.  It’s just that in this rare and bizarre set of circumstances, they didn’t have the good grace to wait for Ms. Lee to pass on so they could start looting the body.
But I dunno.  I suspect Ms. Lee is sufficiently in her dotage that she won’t get what she feared.  She’ll need to give no interviews, and she may not even be aware of what’s happening.  The most hideous thing about senility is that, in a way, it’s like being dead – I’ve watched too many relatives quietly slip away from this world long before they left it – and if what Harper feared most about her second novel was dealing with the embarrassment of having her personal life probed and dissected, well, she’ll be hauled into the limelight again but I suspect she won’t be troubled by it.  If she’s signing contracts like this out of some sort of befuddlement, chances are good she won’t be aware of the freshly-printed newspaper stories about her.
It’s distasteful.  It’s wretched.  And I loathe myself for still wanting to know what she wrote, even if I acknowledge it’s a lot like those nude Jennifer Lawrence pictures in that consent matters.
It’s not right.  And I wish I was a good enough person to assure you that I’d never read this book, but alas, at this point, I cannot.  I didn’t go look at J-Law, but on the other hand, man, Atticus Finch was vital to how I formed my morals.
Though I suspect Atticus would disapprove.  That’s something I have months to struggle with.

"Should We Go Polyamorous?"

One of the emails I get over and over again is a variant on this one:
“My partner has just told me they’d like to see other people.  Should we go polyamorous?”
And that question always carries the assumption that there’s one answer.
Look: polyamory is not for everybody.  For a lot of people – and maybe even most people – monogamy is what’s going to maximize their happiness.  There’s no “HEY YEAH GO POLY,” and anyone who tells you that everyone should be polyamorous is selling you something, Princess.  (NOTE: they are most likely attempting to sell you on the vast benefits of their genitals.)
Should you guys go poly?  I dunno.  How are you at dealing with jealousy?  Can you own your own insecurities?  Can you communicate properly?  Will you self-destruct if you have to spend a night alone, knowing they’re in someone else’s arms?  Are you guys stable enough that it’s a good time to start experimenting?
(Don’t start poly as a last-ditch resort, man.  I hear couples going, “Well, we fight so often that I almost stabbed him with a steak knife at the Sizzler last night – but having a baby will bring us together!”  Maybe, but probably not, and if it doesn’t you’ve just made things a lot more complex.  So it goes with polyamory.)
So the question is, “Was your relationship good enough that you should be staying regardless?” is the looming question that too few people ask when trying to fix their love life.
What’s your partner looking to get out of this polyamory?  Are they hard-wired for the polyamory lifestyle – and if so, why hasn’t this been addressed before?  Have you been walking around this massive elephant in your living room for months now, and only now are having to address it?  (If so, “blithely ignoring the potential dealbreakers until they threaten to crush us” usually isn’t a great dynamic for a flexible, healthy relationships.)  Is your partner wanting to sleep with one particular person?  Do they want sex, or emotional relationships?  Do they want to experiment for a time, or is this a hard-core surety that this is the way it must be?  The question of “What is someone getting out of polyamory?” is one that a lot of people overlook, thinking that polyamory all stems from some universal and easily-parsed desire, and you can do great harm with the wrong assumptions.
Do you trust your partner?  Do they love you, or are they just hoping to do the bare minimum of placation while they run out and get their rocks off?  Do you trust them to care for you, even in the throes of NRE?  Do they respect you, or are you making too many excuses for their bad behavior because you fear losing them?  The question of “Is your partner someone worth handing the keys to your heart?” is one that every couple faces, and polyamory only exacerbates that.
And are you willing to watch this relationship crash and burn?  Any time you make a major adjustment to a relationship – moving to a different state, moving in together, moving in with your family – you risk changing a comfortable dynamic.  Is it worth losing everything you have now for something that might be nice but not vital?  The question of “How much comfortable stability are we willing to gamble in the hopes of positive change?” is a muddy, ever-shifting question.
And what if this is a dealbreaker for them?  Then the answer isn’t “Should I go polyamorous,” but rather “Should I stay with them, or try to see whether I can live with this thing they need?”  That’s another separate question – and again, one that gets asked by lovers who’ve discovered their partners need more of a life outside of the house, have discovered their partners need more kink in their lives, their partners need to have less sex.  The question of “How much suck is worth tolerating in this relationship?” is something that again, there’s no singular clear answer to that fits everyone.
Thing is, when this is all said and done, “Should we go poly?” is not just one question, but a hundred of them, and there’s no possible way I could give you an answer from a two-line email.  Monogamy isn’t bad.  Desiring polyamory isn’t bad.
What you gotta do is ask the right questions, and that starts with realizing that “Should we go poly?” is in fact the starter topic to a large discussion that’s only gonna be solved by you two, working together, honestly.
I wish you luck.

Meet A Weasel In Portland!

Seriously. How have you not heard that I have a book coming out? I promise, I’ll settle down once the last of the tour dates are up.
But for now, I’ll be in Portland on Saturday March 21st!
My entire impression of Portland is from a) my wife rhapsodizing about her youth in Eugene, which isn’t quite Portland but she made stops there, and b) Portlandia. Which is, depending on who I talk to, either complete balderdash or entirely accurate.
Regardless, I’ll be signing/speaking at In Other Words, a feminist bookstore, and I am totally psyched to be there. (There’s even a discussion group on the book’s feminist topics, which I confess fills me with a twinge of worry as to how well I executed the inverse tropes, but no matter. This is what it’s like to have a book. First world problems indeed.)
In any case, if you wanna stop by, it’s:
Saturday, March 21st: In Other Words, in Portland, Oregon
14 NE Killingsworth Street, Portland, OR 97211
4p.m. – 6p.m.
And in case you’re going “Aw, man, I wanted to hang out Ferrett!” and you live in New York, Boston, Seattle or – strangely – Cleveland – then remember these dates:
Friday, March 6th: Loganberry Books, in Cleveland
13015 Larchmere Blvd., Shaker Heights, Ohio 44120
7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Friday, March 13th: WORD Bookstore Brooklyn
126 Franklin St, Brooklyn, NY 11222
7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Saturday, March 14th: Annie’s Book Stop Of Worcester
65 James Street, Worcester MA 01603
5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Friday, March 20th: University Book Store, in Seattle
4326 University Way NE Seattle WA 981105
7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.