Just Happy Moments I Wish To Record
I had quite a few people yesterday telling me, “Well, I haven’t read your novel Flex yet, but…” To which I responded, “That’s good, because it’s not due out until 2015.” Angry Robot has yet to even reveal the cover yet, though I’m told that awesomeness is coming soon.
But I did slip a copy to a good friend of mine, because he asked. And because frankly, Jeremiah has been having a tremendously shitty year, as he’s recovering from multiple brain surgeries, and had a pretty traumatic experience in at least one of them. So I sent him a copy of Flex – not even a cool ePub version, just the raw Word document I edited it in – figuring that I’d hear back from him in a few weeks.
Or not. I mean, when I was recovering from my open-heart surgery, it took me months to read again between the painkillers and the bodily trauma. I figured brain surgery was worse. It was only my ribs and my heart that got cut up, not my essential sweetmeats.
Then, three hours after I sent him the document, I got this email:
“Over the course of the last month or two I haven’t been able to read anything longer than 5 pages in one sitting. My brain just fluttered away from anything I was supposed to be concentrating on.
“I’m on page 107 of Flex. I will probably finish the book before tonight.”
And at 8:00 that evening, I got a text from him telling me that he had, in fact, read the entire damn book in one sitting.
That makes me deeply happy.
Not because he thinks the book is good, though obviously he does. But because I remember my own frustration in the months after the triple-bypass, trying so hard to read, feeling my gaze just drift away from the page, knowing that one of my old delights had been stolen from me. And then, one night, I sat down to read Robert Jackson Bennett’s American Elsewhere, which remains one of my favorite books – partially because it’s a kick-ass book, but partially because that was the post-surgery book that took me by the hand and showed me yes, you’ll still find joys in reading.
I remember sliding through the first hundred pages of that, enthralled by how easy it was, and enthralled by my enthrallment, thinking Oh my God, I’m back. Normality was now in sight again. And when you’re recuperating from full-body trauma, having an experience that reminds you of what normal is can be so fucking powerful.
And for me to be able to pass that on to someone else feels good.
I don’t know if Flex will sell well. I don’t know if it’ll be reviewed well. I don’t know if any of you will actually like it on any level, once it’s out.
But this is a moment that I’ll cherish, even if everything else collapses. I was That Book for someone. And that feels good.
(Incidentally, still sorting through crit requests on the road, on a pretty spotty connection. You’ll hear from me before next week, and thank you if you offered.)
Would You Like To Critique The Sequel To My Novel?
So I’ve finished the sequel to my upcoming novel Flex, and now is the time that I send it to my usual group of beta readers.
The problem: I need four or five beta readers who haven’t read the first book. Because inevitably, someone who hasn’t read the first book will pick up this one, and I want to know whether it’ll make any sense to them.
So! If you’re willing to read for me, contact me at theferrett@theferrett.com. (Don’t expect to hear back immediately; I’m driving to New Jersey to present at a conference, but I’ll get to ya.) Priority will be given to published writers and/or people who’ve critiqued my stories before. (And if you have read Flex already, either because you blurbed it or reviewed it or whatever, you automatically can beta-read for me if you want. I just didn’t wanna bug you.)
What I am not looking for is an proofreader. When a story’s in this early a draft, entire scenes will be dropped, characters may be re-motivated, whole plotlines may be shifted like writhing anacondas – and so I couldn’t care less whether there’s a misspelled word in a chapter that I’m going to rewrite from scratch. What beta readers give are usually not line-edits, but overall impressions – does this person act like such an idiot that you stop rooting for them? Did the Big Plot Twist feel cheesy? Do these relentless references to Fight Club (hint: there are relentless references to Fight Club) make any sense if you haven’t seen the film?
Turnaround time is 6-8 weeks; I’d like to start redrafting come Christmas. And thanks for thinking of me.
Whatever Happened To Salvatore?
I dreamed about Salvatore last night.
Salvatore was one of those freakish kids who’d achieved his full height in seventh grade – a muscular, bodybuilder’s height, complete with shaved head and wifebeater T-shirt. He got away with bullying because he intimidated the teachers.
Salvatore was not a particularly subtle bully. His favorite technique was to watch the way you held your books. If you did not clasp them to your chest – you know, like a girl was supposed to do – then he would bellow “OPEN CHEST!” and punch you, as hard as he could, in your stomach. Pretty soon all the smaller guys in school were clasping their books to their chest, at which point Salvatore would make fun of you for holding your books like a giiirrrrul.
Though he was definitely a mixed-media bully. Sometimes he’d rough you up in the locker room, just for a change-up.
I wasn’t one of Salvatore’s favorite targets, thankfully, but he was widespread enough that I caught a couple of suffocating hits to the gut. I remember creeping around the hallways of middle school, forever on the lookout, paranoid for the next blow. And last night, I dreamed I was locking the windows of my house against Salvatore, defending against his eventual incursion, only to discover that he was already in the house.
There’s probably a good solid Freudian interpretation of that dream, of course, given all the death we’ve suffered as of late.
But what I wondered was, What was Salvatore doing now?
For in my dream, Salvatore had grown, a colossal and angry and still-muscled man, still a bully, still relishing his physical power. He was frozen in the moment I knew him, almost thirty years ago. Which is unreasonable . Past a certain point, a man who yells “OPEN CHEST!” and punches random strangers on the bus ceases to be a bully and becomes a convict. And he’d be pushing forty-five now, the age when men of physical strength start to feel it ebb, and that certainly would cause him to warp and change in different ways. A bully like Salvatore wouldn’t have been able to be king of the middle school, he’d have to have gotten a job working for someone else, and certainly working as a hired hand would have taken the edge of his kingly violent demeanor.
That’s assuming, of course, that what he lived for was the thrill of the open chest. He showed great glee whenever he punched me, of course, but that was my sole interaction with him. It wasn’t like we hung out reading the newspapers and watching movies and discussing our dreams at the malt shop after the show, and then he buried his knuckles in my abdomen. No, I didn’t know Salvatore in any way beyond thinking of him as a lurking menace.
Who the fuck was Salvatore?
Would Salvatore even remember me? I doubt it. Would he remember those days as his good old days, or – somehow worse – would he have forgotten who he was, having become a loving father and family man? Were there grandchildren who loved their Grampops, never knowing there were men who had nightmares about him thirty years later? It could be. The past has a way of falling like snow over the worst of crimes, and by the time a man is old and feeble, a lot of complexity has been eroded. Salvatore didn’t strike me as being the brightest bulb in the pack. But some of my other bullies went on to become millionaire entrepreneurs (I know this because they apologized to me later for what they’d done in a truly bizarre high school reunion), and if I look back at my own past and go, “God, what an asshole I was back then,” then I have to think of Salvatore and allow for the possibility – not the certainty, but the possibility – that maybe he was going through his own stupid phase, egged on by other dumb kids to play a role that didn’t particularly suit him.
It’s possible Salvatore wakes up, dreaming of punching harmless boys in the chest, and wonders with a sort of existential terror, What was I doing?
People say Once a bully, always a bully, and of course there’s some truth to that. But people also do tremendously stupid things as a teenager that they later regret tremendously, as they’re trying on all sorts of faces to see who they might be when they grow up – certainly I ran a lot of dumb pranks in my time, fuelled by the sort of relentlessly grim Howard Stern-inspired masculinity (which later mutated into 4-chan) that tells people that the only way to be strong is to dish out the strongest insults, and to endure them in exchange. There were certainly people who saw me when I was 19 who thought that I was a bully, albeit a verbally abusive one, but…
…I’m not that guy any more.
Maybe Salvatore isn’t, either.
And maybe he is. Some people never grow out of middle school. But I always allow for the possibility of enlightenment, even if I wouldn’t necessarily invite Salvatore to a convention.
It’s one of the things we don’t like thinking about as humans, but it’s true regardless: Salvatore could have made some dumb mistakes that scarred people for life. And those mistakes were made because Salvatore was like every kid at that age, relentlessly experimenting with personalities and traits, and he did irreparable damage even though who Salvatore eventually came to be was not a bully, but perhaps a kind and clever man.
But in my dreams, he still is. And can never be anything but.
And probably, he pays absolutely no price for this. Like I said, it’s unlikely that he remembers me at all. He may not even remember his “OPEN CHEST!” beatings, having shrugged them off as just a thing he did once and now has no recollection of, a phase he had that amused him for a brief time and then was set aside, like the time I tried playing violin and discovered it hurt my fingers.
The past recedes in the rear-view mirror. Only some people get to remember, and usually the ones who got hurt.
The others drive on, oblivious to that thumping beneath the wheels, not seeing the crumpled body left behind them.
We Say Stupid Things In The Freakout Tree
So my mother-in-law died last night.
The death was, as we are wont to say around here, “Unwelcome but not unexpected.” She’d gone off dialysis because she was in incredible pain, and her husband had died earlier in the year, and she was done with life. Still, the doctors had told us Tuesday or Wednesday, and strangely enough we believed them when they said we had that much time.
So I spent much of last night holding my wife as she sobbed in only the way someone who’s lost their mother can, stroking her hair, muttering all the nonsense things you do when someone’s passed on.
And in the middle of all this, she stopped and said, “This must be hard for you. Knowing there’s nothing you can say to comfort me.”
That was a pretty stupid thing to say, really. She was, as we are also wont to say around here, up in the tree.
We here at La Casa McJuddMetz hew closely to the “tree theory” of relationships, which is to say that any couple lives on a small island with one tree. When things get bad, one person – and only one person – climbs into the tree to have their freakout, while it’s the other person’s job to stay on the ground and talk them down.
Very Bad Things arise when both people need to be in the freakout tree at once. So we have a strict tree protocol in that we may alternate positions in the tree *very rapidly*, but we never both shimmy up that trunk simultaneously.
And so when Gini said, “This must be hard for you,” that was stupid because if there’s any time when someone gets reserved VIP privileges in the tree for the rest of the week, it’s after their goddamned mother’s just died.
But it was sweet, her checking in on me.
And I think of my friend Kat, the mother of my now-deceased goddaughter Rebecca, when we went over to their house to help hand out Halloween candy for the first time since Rebecca had passed. That was an alternately happy and painful event – there would be all the normal joys of handing out candy and seeing the kids in their costumes and handing out warmed spiked cider to the grownups as “grownup candy” –
– and then we’d remember that Rebecca wasn’t here, and wonder what costume she would have worn, and thought of all the candy that kid would have devoured, and then we’d each slip off alone to sneak a private bit of mourning.
And Kat came up to me and said, “I know your introvert batteries are drained. I know all you wanted was to to curl up at home tonight.”
Stupid. Of course I wouldn’t stay at home. Of course I wouldn’t make it more apparent that things had changed this Halloween. Of course I wouldn’t leave another absence for them to notice.
Sweet.
And I think one of the reasons that we function so well, my friends and my family and I, is because we make it pretty damn easy to do the things required of us. It would be easy for us to use our deepest sorrow to climb high into the tree, so high we can’t even see the ground any more, so high we forget the rest of the world exists –
– and yet we take care of our caretakers. We acknowledge the difficulty in being there for someone when there’s not much to say. We thank each other for helping, even when we’d have a damned fine excuse to forget their existence.
We love each other. We mark each other’s sacrifice. And even in the middle of such overlapping sorrows that some days we feel like we will be borne away by cascading waves of tears, we appreciate those who try to hold us tight to shore.
There’s more sorrow coming. More grief. And there’s nothing I can do, and I am so very tired of condolences, and I am so very tired of holding people while they cry and muttering all the usual stupid things one says in the face of death.
But for one moment, in an hour so dark it struck us all blind, Gini reached a hand down from the freakout tree and asked if I needed to come up.
I didn’t. But it lent me strength to know that I could.
Heart Update
So as some y’all may recall, I was spatchcocked about two years ago in emergency triple-bypass surgery to prevent me from dying. And as a heart patient, I now have to go in every six months for blood tests and checkings and all.
I will admit that I have not been eating particularly well; in Rebecca’s (literal) wake, I have gained about ten pounds. Though my “bad” eating habits post-attack are still way better than my “good” eating habits pre-attack, as I eat fewer fatty foods and less sugar. My blood levels look okay – not as good as we’d like for a heart patient, which should be super-good, but still below what normal people have.
Still, I’ve been having some problems drifting off to sleep at night because my heart is going BOOM BOOM BOOM in my chest (and not in that cool “Solsbury Hill” way), and so I asked the doctor. He thinks it may be some post-surgery arrhythmia, which can be corrected with medication, but he’d like to get more data.
So I’ll be wearing a chest harness for three weeks.
I’m told they’ve made great strides in chest harnesses since I wore one three years ago – more of a FitBit than the huge thing I wore that I couldn’t quite bathe in – but it still means I’m back to shaving my chest so my Robin Williams thatch of chest hair doesn’t cause me agony, and trying to sleep with a stupid thing on again. Which was not fun.
Also, I’m getting genetically tested to see why statins drain all my energy. More fun. Lots of blood.
But this is all in the service of ensuring I live a little longer, so I suppose it’s all good. Though I have a convention to attend this weekend. I don’t think I’m gonna wear it to that.
Maybe Your Message Just Sucks
Yesterday, a miracle happened: I read an article in THE WEEK that was universally negative.
In case you’re not familiar, THE WEEK is a magazine that summarizes editorials around the world, usually taking four or five takes on a given news story and boiling them down into a half-page “He thinks/she thinks.” It’s a great way of getting news you wouldn’t normally get – especially the International pages, where I get to see Indonesian takes on their new leader, or hear what the Pakistani take on Malala Yousafzai is.
And invariably, those boiled-down essays disagree with each other, because that’s the format THE WEEK has chosen.
Except for Gamergate. The Gamergate essays culled from mainstream media couldn’t find one person in favor of Gamergate, so instead THE WEEK’s essay was “Well, why are they so fucking terrible?” It was like watching an essay on the problem with ISIS – everyone agreed they had to be stopped, but how? Not one major newssource really thought that Gamergate was, as they claim, actually about ethics in games journalism.
And what Gamergaters are doing is huddling back in their basements and muttering, “The news media have turned against us.”
Lemme suggest something else: maybe your story fucking sucks.
Look, as a Democrat who’s watched the media constantly overlook and misrepresent things that were vitally important to me, I get how frustrating it is when Your Top News Headline gets buried. But the central truth about any journalism is that they generally don’t report news, they report stories. Human beings have a deep-seated, monkey urge for narrative – who’s winning? Who’s the good guy? – and a chronic allergy to dry facts.
But the traditional narrative you folks peddle whenever your take on the world fails to make world headlines is that the media have been “co-opted,” that they’re “turning against us,” that you can’t trust them because they have been infiltrated by people at every level.
Whereas the truth is simpler: Every news outlet is dependent on the good will of its audience to survive. If people don’t like what they’re hearing, they won’t tune in. And then, lacking either advertiser dollars or (in the case of outlets like the BBC) voter clout to keep the money flowing, they will close down.
So every news outlet – including the Breitbarts and the Huffington Posts – has to present stories in a way that pleases their audience. If you present them with a take that’s too far outside their reality – CNN blaring 24/7 headlines that ISIS are bold freedom fighters, the Drudge Report touting the successes of Obamacare – people tune out, and they lose money.
That requires no far-reaching conspiracy. That’s the hand of the market, and that hand is on your neck. The journalists aren’t controlling the message: the audience is.
And that’s not new. Your Gamergate take isn’t hitting the headlines? Shit, man, ask gay people who lived through the 1950s how their pro-gay takes played on CBS news. Ask the Afghanis who are getting mauled by erroneous drone strikes how they feel about things. The filter of the culture that we live in causes all sorts of biases, and that’s inevitable.
But what you’re gonna tell me is that the media is run by elites who want blah blah blah and fuck that. What’s happening is that your story, the one you’re trying to sell to the media right now, is not popular. You’re like the asshole who shows up at black-tie fundraiser in a “NO FAT CHICKS” T-shirt and a beer funnel hat, then concludes that because you weren’t well-liked there, everyone must have conspired to ensure your personal demise.
Maybe your story fucking sucks.
And it might fucking suck that your story sucks, because as I just said, “stories” are not “the truth.” The George Bush take that “Those terrorists attacked us, so we’ll take the fight to them!” was a great story, right out of the Hollywood playbooks, and it barely had a scrap of truth in it – but by God, the media fuckin’ loved it. (That turned out to bite Bush in the ass when his promises of bold quick-access freedom didn’t pan out, and then the story became “Loser can’t swing a victory,” but that’s the danger of peddling stories – if you can’t make the facts fit your narrative, the media will devise their own narrative to fit your facts.)
But Jesus, man, don’t mutter “The Colbert Report has turned on us.” No. You had a shitty story that wasn’t actually that compelling – yes, I know, you are positive that Zoe Quinn seduced all the judges in the world with her Pied Piper vag, but most people have looked at the evidence and not bought your take on things. And I know, we didn’t look at all the facts, we didn’t investigate every nook and crevice of email the way that you have, but…
…nobody fucking does that, man. If “Let’s look over the details” was popular, we’d have a prime-time show on NBC called “This Week’s Paragraph Of Obamacare,” where we’d investigate all the ramifications of each of one of the most complex laws ever.
You’re fighting the fucking tide of human nature, son.
And when I lost my big victory in 2004, when I wanted Kerry to kick Dubya’s ass, I didn’t go, “THE MEDIA STOPPED ME.” I looked at it and went, “Well, shit, the guy did vacillate, he ran a poor campaign, he wasn’t inspiring at all – he was a bad candidate. Who can we get to do better?” So when Obama, for all his flaws, showed up, I went, “Dude can make a great speech!” and voted. And I won.
But I wouldn’t have won if I took your whiny-ass take of “They’re out to get me! They suppressed the truth!” No. The media is a conglomerate of factors, and there’s little conspiracy aside from “People don’t like to be told things they don’t want to hear.” You told them something they didn’t want to hear. Maybe that’s because you’re boiling over with bullshit – don’t rule that out, buddy – or maybe it’s because, like 1950s gays and dismembered Afghani citizens, your truth tells us something that society isn’t ready to listen to yet.
And for all you whine about us Social Justice Warriors, what we did was to change society so that it did listen. More. There’s still a lot of stuff that we don’t get through. But we’re probably more effective because we recognize that hey, the media isn’t oppressing us, it’s simply as biased as the people who listen to it, and how do we change the minds of the listeners?
That’s how we win.
And that, Gamergate, is why we are currently kicking your ass.
Learn the lesson, or not.
You Will Always Be Depressed.
Every day, on Twitter and Facebook, I see people saying things like, “Depression is like cancer, man! It’s a disease. You can’t just will yourself to be happy.”
And as someone who has to trot out his goddamned bona fides every time I discuss depression (two suicide attempts, annual Seasonal Affective Disorder, a decades-long history of self-harm), I agree: depression is a disease that kills.
But what I hear every time I discuss techniques to battle depression is this:
“Oh, your ‘cancer’ went into remission? I guess you don’t really have cancer. Because if you had real cancer, you’d know there’s nothing you can do about cancer except wait around to die.”
I get that depression tells you that nothing you do will have any effect on your life. But so much of the culture that has sprung up around depression seems to mirror the lies that depression tells you – an inherently defeatist story that screens out any successes. People often seem far more willing to talk about what doesn’t work, sharing endless webcomics about people with awful lives and going, “See? That’s how it is! You just don’t understand me!” than they are to share stories of what therapies are effective for them.
Don’t get me wrong: as a depressive, I get the irritation when someone goes, “Just buck up!” and “You should be happy, your life is great!” because frankly, that doesn’t work. And I even get the irritation of the “You should try craniofeline therapy, it involves gluing a cat to your head, it totally works for everybody I know!” thing where someone takes one approach that helped them battle their disease, and extrapolates that out to “This is the universal cure.”
But depression is an insidious and deeply personal disease. And there’s often no one thing that solves it – you need a multifaceted arsenal of coping tools, including medications, therapy, routines, friendships, better diets, more exercise, whatever will hand you a weapon to fend off these hideous thoughts flowing into your head.
And I worry that a lot of the culture that arises around depression online basically tells people, “You shouldn’t want to do anything now because that’s the natural response to this disease, that’s the reaction you should have” sends the message: Don’t look too hard for answers. “Being depressed” is the answer.
During a depressive state, it’s hard to muster the energy to do anything. Willpower dwindles; it takes a Herculean effort to go grocery shopping, let alone transform your life. And when someone has as little willpower to spare as a depressive does, I think that telling them, “Well, anyone who copes with this better than you do just doesn’t have it as bad” instead of “Maybe there are better ways of coping you could find?” hands that demon liar in their brain a darned good excuse for them not to seek the treatments that would help them on the days they have the strength.
And the sad thing is, of course, that some people are so depressed that some treatments won’t work upon them. That’s like terminal cancer, something I have a little bit too much personal experience with these days. But depression is not like cancer in that for many – not all – an adjusted attitude can be one of an array of effective approaches, and why do we spend so much time shrieking “Too bad you don’t have it as terrible as I do!” instead of “Maybe that person knows something I don’t, let me see if that works for me”?
Oh, right: because of assholes who think that depression is just a modified form of laziness. And a lot of assholes do act as though you failing to break through depression and be a shiny happy person is some personal flaw on your part.
It isn’t. My God, it isn’t. You’ve been stuck with a horrible, eroding disease, one that kills on a staggeringly regular basis, and you are super brave for having the energy to venture out the door to try to fix this. And what I am saying is that though there are some days the depression will win and you won’t get anything done – that’s what depression is – on other days you’ll hopefully feel well enough to seek help.
And I hope on those days, you’ll keep seeking out newer and better ways to function during your depression.
Because let’s be honest: functioning during depression is a hell of a lot better than not functioning during depression. If in the depths of your woe, you can find some trick that lets you go to work, pay the bills, get your medications refilled, then your life will be a lot better than letting all that slide. So it should be a goal to try to keep up that necessary work during the bad times so that you don’t emerge from a long and crippling depressive bout to go, “I FEEL HAPPY! HAPPY!” and then discover you’re out of work, in collections court, and have no medications.
(That principle still applies even if you only have bad times. Perhaps especially so.)
Ultimately, while I get the need to connect with that power of knowing that others are going through what you’re going through – it’s why I blog about my depression – I think it can be toxic to fall back on, “Well, if they’re coping better than I am, I must have it worse than they do.” What I’m asking you to consider is that someone coping better than you may have a skill – a skill that you can learn. That skill that won’t vanquish all the sadness in your life – but it may knock today’s black-dog depression down from being 100% debilitating to 95% debilitating. And though your depression tells you that 5% won’t make any difference, over the years that and a couple of other 5% improvements can improve the quality of your life drastically.
And yes, most treatments and approaches won’t work. That’s the way of things. But some do, and they work for somebody, and that somebody might be you. And I know what’ll happen is that if it doesn’t work, then your depressive brain will take other people’s successes as a club and beat you down with it to tell you “SEE? YOU FAIL AT THERAPY, WHY DON’T YOU JUST GIVE UP?” And some days the depression will win, and you’ll believe it’s hopeless.
But remember: depression lies. Depression tells you that you can’t get help. And yes, maybe you’re one of the terminal ones who no treatment will help – but depression would tell you that you’re a terminal case, even if that’s not true.
Depression is hard. And I believe it gets harder in the long run when you look at everyone who has managed to keep functioning and decided they just got lucky. Some of them did, of course, but chances are good that some of them had it as hard as you do and found better ways to cope – which means that you might be able to get there from here.
Hope often sounds trivial or silly in the face of such a withering disease as depression. Yet hope is a power that you can use to harness, sometimes even on days you don’t believe in it. Perseverance is not an inherent trait; it can be trained, though it takes years. And while depression will consume an uncanny portion of your productivity, keeping an open mind that there may still be things to learn to help you with this awful fight can sometimes help you find better coping skills. Even after three decades of battling soul-crushing sadness, I still find new ways of dealing with things.
Because, as I stated, there are no wrong answers. Therapy. Medications. Diet. Friendship. Changed lifestyles. Whatever fucking works for you is beautiful, because lemme tell you – I do suffer from depression. I want you to have ALL THE TECHNIQUES. Because as someone who’s stood at the very least pretty damned close to where you are now, all I want is for you to feel as good as you possibly can.