I Am 12% Of The Best Podcast Fiction Of All Time

…at least I am according to David Steffen, who compiled his list of the Top 50 Podcast Fiction of All Time.  And I showed up six times on this list.
(My highest charting was #10, so I think that makes me like a really influential indie band.)
So in case you’re wondering (and there are many other good stories on that list to check out, if’n you like podcast fiction – check out Keffy in particular):

• #10: “Dead Merchandise” by Ferrett Steinmetz (Escape Pod)
• #24: “Hollow as the World” by Ferrett Steinmetz (Drabblecast)
• #27: “Devour” by Ferrett Steinmetz (Escape Pod)
• #29: “‘Run,’ Bakri Says” by Ferrett Steinmetz (Escape Pod)
• #40: “Suicide Notes, Written by an Alien Mind” by Ferrett Steinmetz (Pseudopod)
• #48: “As Below, So Above” by Ferrett Steinmetz (Podcastle)

On The Republican National Convention And Sex Workers.

I had a Tweet up for about twenty seconds that I then took down, which was this:
“Cleveland is hosting the National Republican Convention in 2016. I hope we have enough hookers.”
Which is funny to me, man.  I honestly don’t know if Cleveland has enough prostitutes to service all the incoming conservatives, because past conventions have shown that man, these staid-in-the-wool motherfuckers go through sex workers like nobody’s business.  We may have to import.  I’m sure several of my sex worker friends are looking at their calendars and just planning a blowout weekend.
But I took the Tweet down, not because I thought it was inaccurate, but because I thought in a shorter version it’d pass on overtones I didn’t want to create.  It seemed to degrade sex workers to me (and no, for some reason “I hope we have enough sex workers” didn’t strike me as funny in the same way).
Which is a weird thing about being careful with your communications: It’s not that what you say isn’t funny, but that it also encourages people to not question things.  To me, a hooker or a sex worker or a prostitute or whatever the fuck you call them are people, worthy of rights and protections.  But I suspect a lot of the people who might pass that gag along would be the sort of people who’d see selling sex as the incontrovertible evidence of bad morals/life decisions/etc.
The real joke here is how the Republicans try to make kinky sex illegal, and yet crave it the same way we do.  But I’m not sure that Tweet got it across without punching downwards more than I’d like.
Okay, rant break over, back to work.

You Get What You Give: How A Potato Salad Can Teach You To Run A Good Donation Drive

I had a friend who wanted very badly to go overseas.  Sadly, I can’t remember why she wanted to go overseas – we’ll get to that – but what I do remember was her disastrous donation drive.
She set up an Indiegogo account – a.k.a., “The place we go when we’re pretty sure a Kickstarter would fail” – and set up various tiers of rewards if she got enough money to go overseas: little tiny things like postcards, et al.  And what I remember was that the tier pattern went something like this:

• $30 – I will write you a personalized Tweet when I am in Czechoslovakia.

That’s where I started to feel a bit… insulted?  Overlooked?  Taken for granted?  Not a good feeling when I’m being asked to reach into my wallet.
As a writer, for me, being paid six cents a word – a word – is called “professional rates,” meaning it’s what the top-tier markets get.  And this campaign designed to induce me to give my friend money was giving them Tweet-rights of two cents per letter.
And I Tweet a lot.  I know how much time I spend composing a very thoughtful Tweet, which is at best three minutes.  So what my friend was saying to me, quite literally, was, “I think three minutes of my time is worth several hours of your paycheck while I relax on the beach in foreign lands.”
Already I was feeling a little dazed here.  And then I got to the next tier, which was something like:

• $50 – I will allow you access to the personalized blog where I detail my trip to Czechoslovakia.

That’s when I thought, oh, no, no, you’re doing it all wrong.  My friend was thinking entirely about what she wanted, the trip, and how much work each tier would be for her, then pricing them accordingly.  Which is the wrong way to look at it.
Here’s the secret to every donation drive – and keep in mind, I’ve run quite a few – the donation drives are never about what you want.
Every donation drive is about how you make the donator feel.
That’s actually true of every piece of written communication, but is especially true when you’re asking people to give you money.  When you do a donation drive, you are not trying to go to Czechoslovakia – you are trying to make a total stranger feel excited about getting you to Czechoslovakia.  And as such, your entire focus must be answering the question, “Why would someone who doesn’t know me feel wonderful about helping me to go on this trip?”
The whole reason I’m writing this now is because there is an infamous Kickstarter for potato salad – literally, the entire point was “If this funds, I will make myself some potato salad” – and it is, as of this morning, it is funded at $37,500 with 24 days left to go.  And I had several baffled sick friends saying, “I held a donation drive to pay off my crippling doctor’s bills and stalled out at $150, and this guy gets thousands for a goddamned potato salad?”
Yes.  Because potato salad guy actually seemed like fun.  It was goofy to even ask for such a thing, and funny, and people felt like “Hey, a guy like this I feel good about throwing away $1 to.”  In other words, “He provided me with $1 worth of amusement.”  And several thousand people joined in.
And watch carefully, my friends, as to how he reacted when all this escalated: did he hunker down when his stretch goals were made?  Hell no.  When this started to go viral, the dude said, “Well, hell, if people want this, I will throw a potato salad party,” and threw open a call for anyone in the area to come on down to Columbus and make some potato salad with him and dance around in the joy of potato salad.  The potato salad guy sounds like a fun time!  Hell, he’s in Columbus, I am damn tempted to go down for his potato salad fiesta.
The question is, did your donation drive provide $1 worth of entertainment?
Look, I’ve raised somewhere in the range of $5,000-$10,000 for Rebecca Alison Meyer, my goddaughter who died of brain cancer a month ago.  And that’s not nearly as celebratory fun as a potato salad party, but the reason I was so successful – as people have told me time and time again, sometimes to my chagrin – is that “You made Rebecca come alive for me.”  Being a writer, I tugged on your heartstrings to feel empathy for a beautiful spitfire of a girl that you’d never met, and so many of you donated to CureSearch for Cancer in her name.
I hesitate to use the term “entertainment” for such an awful travesty, but the point is people felt good either way about donating.  They felt like it was worth their money, emotionally.  And too many people, like my friend, get caught up on the tiers of rewards, thinking, “What can I churn out?” and forgetting that the rewards are merely another way of making people feel more excited about donating.
And when I see these medical donation drives, what I see is often a relentless stew of pain: “I’m miserable and broke and have to buy duct tape to hold in my shattered skull.  If you donate $5, well, it won’t actually make a dent in this mountain of medical debt I have, it’s all hopeless really, but if you’ll let me weep on you for some time I’ll send you a postcard to remind you exactly how little of a difference you made.”
Then they get no traction.
No, man, if I was poor enough to need funding to, say, buy myself some new glasses, I would ask this simple question: “Why would people feel good about giving me money to buy glasses?”  And by proxy, “What could I tell them to make them feel empathy – to make them go, ‘Aw, man, I’ll feel happy if this balding dude in Cleveland gets his glasses’?”
And I’d think, “Well, I have all these books I want to read.”  And I’d start making a list of all the books I’m excited about reading but can’t, but could if you helped me, then talk about these upcoming books and the very specific reasons I’m excited about reading them – going on about my love of, say, Jo Walton or Stephen King or Robert Bennett – and make you feel excited with me.
And then I’d say, “Why, I’d be so grateful if you helped me with these glasses, for $30 I’ll buy a book that you love and read it and tell you all the lovely things about it!”
Would that work?  I don’t know.  But I do know it’d work better than, “I’m broke and I need glasses, give me the cash.”
The lesson about Kickstarter or Indiegogo or any donation drive is that you get what you give.  My friend shouldn’t have made her blog a $50 tier – the blog access should have been for donation $1, the lowest possible level, telling people, “If you sign up in any way, I will let you into my world and tell you of all the wonders I find in Czechoslovakia.”  As it is, honestly, I don’t remember why my friend wanted to go to Czechoslovakia, which is a sign of how badly the drive was presented to me – she was my friend, I cared about her, and I couldn’t tell you what it meant to her aside from a thrusting hand in my face.
And, of course, her donation drive didn’t get anywhere.  What happened was what happened with most of the donation drives: her close friends gave what they could, a handful of acquaintances pitched it, and it stopped there because if you didn’t know my friend, well, this donation page would not have told you a darned thing about her.  She was very sad, even if she was resistant to changing her donation page because she’d worked so hard on it.
The lesson: be the potato salad.  Even if you’re sick and life is terrible, find a way to get people invested in your journey.  Give them only things that make them feel more invested in your journey.  Make them feel triumph when you succeed, and I can’t guarantee you’ll get potato salad money, but you’ll get more than you would have.  For sure.
(And if you’re looking for a good couple to donate to, may I suggest helping my friends Jeff and Tracy Spangler?  It couldn’t hurt.)

My East Coast Book Release Party: Word Bookstore in Brooklyn, On October 24th!

Hello, glorious mortals!
If you’ve been living under a rock, you may have missed that a) I sold a novel, and b) that novel is coming out on September 30th.  Or that I have a West Coast Release Party in San Francisco on October 11th.
But now?  I have an East Coast Release Party on October 24th at 7:00 at the Word Bookstore in Brooklyn!  I have not been to Word yet, but several people told me, “Awww, man, you have to see this store, it’s pretty amazing,” and so I shall.  And I’ll do a reading/Q&A/signing there! (And afterwards, I’ll almost certainly go out for drinks and hang out for a bit, because this is a celebration of fourteen years of work.)
So if you’re excited about my debut novel, and you’re anywhere within driving distance, I’ll say, “Hey, come on out and see me!  I’ll bring donuts – which, once you’ve read the novel, you’ll understand says something quite important about you all.” 
Remember: East Coast Release Party October 24th, West Coast Release Party October 11th.  I’ve allllmost got the details down for the too-critical Cleveland release party, and hopefully should have something for you by next week.  Also, since it’s been suggested and within driving distance, maybe a Detroit release party for all my pals out there.  But maybe that’s one too many release parties, I dunno.)
You may also ask, “Ferrett, what about a [My Neighborhood] Release Party?”  And the answer is that “Ferrett has a limited amount of vacation time, and family to visit on both coasts.  These Release Parties are tremendously exciting but also a net loss in cash, as there’s no way I’ll sell enough books to fund the driving trip and hotel stay to NYC – so alas, this is not so much ‘a book tour’ as ‘Ferrett thinks this would be fun to visit his Dad and throw this in.’”  While I’d love to visit your home town, I don’t have that kinda money to burn.
But you can still order Flex from any number of bookstores in advance.  Which would be nice.  Authors live or die on preorders, so if you’re not gonna attend a release party but wanna celebrate, you can do a little dance when Flex arrives on your doorstep.
And that, my friends, is the end of today’s marketing shill!  Move on.  Feel joy.  Walk about.

Roll For SAN.

About ten times a day, I think: “I held a six-year-old girl as she died.”
Then I think: “Roll for SAN.”
I think this without irony, or merriment.  I grew up on roleplaying games.  They formed large portions of my thought process.  And when I say “Roll for SAN,” this is a reference from Call of Cthulhu, a popular game based on the horror stories of H.P. Lovecraft.
In the game, investigators start out with a Sanity statistic.  This is ranked as a number between around 85 and 0.  As you play through the game, and unveil the eldritch horrors, you are asked to roll against your Sanity stat.  If you fail, you lose Sanity.  (Sometimes, if the horror is sufficiently large, you lose some Sanity even if the roll succeeds.) Take too large a hit to your existing Sanity, and you go temporarily insane.
And I keep wondering: What is the Sanity roll for watching a small, beloved girl die?  Literally holding her as her breath stops?  Is it 1d6, 1d8, 1d10?  I’ve gone back and looked at the Delta Green books – they have a cold-hearted government clinician, Dr. Yrjo, who does horrendous psychological experiments upon captive prisoners.  They provide samples of the experiments, along with a list of the SAN losses for each thing, and I think for me it’s somewhere between 1d8 and 1d10.
This matters to me, because I am insane on some levels.  Mildly so, but I have taken a hit.
This did not occur to me until Gini pointed out that we must have driven home at some point after Rebecca’s body was loaded into the hearse.  We must have.  We know who was staying in the house then, and there were no empty rooms.  Which means that we drove home, presumably talking on the way, went to bed with each other, got up, showered, shaved, and
I have no memory of any of that.  Portions of my mind are wiped clean with grief.
And my actions are indistinct.  Both Gini and I have acquired a mild agoraphobia, wherein the crowds at the supermarket make us both nervous.  We retreat to home, curl up on the couch, don’t speak. I forget things easily now; we have the same factual conversations over and over again, where Gini forgets when DetCon is (in two weeks) and I cannot understand what plans we’ve made.  I now have a quivering sense of dread whenever I see the Meyers’ house, a feeling of returning to the scene of the crime.
It’s not debilitating, not totally.  But our shaky minds are a constant undertow. Our thoughts rattle in the wind now, a reminder of how fragile this foundation is.
And I keep thinking: We are too far from death.  Our ancestors, they dealt with this on a regular basis.  They had to look this directly into the eye.  And were they stronger, or us weaker, or did people simply see this diffusion as the background noise of a violent and cold universe?
Tommy died in the hospital.  I didn’t see him.  They cleaned him up off-stage, brought him out for the funeral like a prop.  Same with my Grammy, and my Gramma, and my Grandpop.  In my experience, death is something that arrives via a phone call, a nurse sounding sad, a relative trying not to cry.  It’s not…
…this was different.
And again, I think, “Roll for SAN.”  This is not an experience I’ve had.  A man should be a little shaky after watching his goddaughter die, goddammit.  Not watching in the sense that I saw Tommy die, which is to say watching the slow ebb of what the diseases stole from him, but watching in the sense that I stayed until a beautiful girl became a body.  And though I’d prefer my recovery happen on my schedule, it should take a while to rewire oneself to hook yourself back into the flow of life.  The world, it doesn’t stop spinning, which helps in a way.  Things continue to happen.  Software deadlines must be met.  Books must be written.  Tours must be scheduled.
“Roll for SAN.”  It’s all harder, though.
Yet I think of the only way not to be affected by Sanity loss at all: you lose it all, at which point the GM takes your character sheet from you.  You’re not you any more, at least not as you had defined yourself.  You’re something too used to death, too bereft of hope, too estranged from this enwebbed illusion we call humanity to be a true person any more.
“Roll for SAN.”
I am marking it off on my character sheet.
I am staggering forward.
I am lucky that I still have some left to lose.

How I Became A Real Writer

I get a lot of apologies, when people write to me.  They think that I’m just some blogger, and then they discover I’m actually a professional writer with a novel sold and a SFWA membership and one big-ass award nomination…
…and they cringe.  They’re not a Real Writer, they tell me.  And I am.  And they apologize for wasting my time.
It’s true, man.  I am a Real Writer.  But thankfully, having scaled that summit, I am here to give you poor nebbishes a helping hand and tell you how I, Ferrett Steinmetz, became a Real, Honest-To-God Fucking Writer:
I stopped worrying about it.
No, seriously.
That’s it.
Now, I’m not going to tell you that I didn’t have all sorts of neuroses about acquiring the right label before I made my third professional sale – five cents a word, motherfuckers, they cut me a check for $200, it paid a quarter of my mortgage bill – but looking back at it, my obsession about who was “really” writing and who wasn’t was actually a fucking handicap.  Because here’s the lesson I’ve learned in selling a shit-ton of stories:
1)  You do the best work you can possibly do.
2)  You do as much of the best work as you can possibly do.
3)  You send it out.
Again, that’s it.  That’s all there is, in my eyes, to being a Real Writer.
Because what I’ve come to realize in six years of hoo-hah Professional Writing is that nobody really knows what works.  My best stories, the ones I was positive I’d sell?  Got trunked after thirty rejections.  The story I thought was a silly waste of time?  Got me my Nebula nomination.
The truth is that if authors really had a good grip on what sold, we’d all be millionaires.
So all we can do is our best work.  And send it out.  And if we’re lucky, we connect with an audience, but I think every published author has at least one story they thought was at the bare level of acceptability that they’d put out with their name on it that became a beloved tale.  And I know they all have that one story they loved so hard and it disappeared without a trace.
The lesson of the Real Writer is that all it involves is doing your best work.  The rest?  Markets and guesswork.  You can put in a lot of effort, and not see much reward, and I think most writers have had that six-month dry period (or sixteen, or sixty) where nothing sold and they asked, “What the hell is wrong with me?”  And the answer is often – not always, but often – “You’re just not what they’re looking for.”
Looking back, my personal obsession with becoming a Real Writer back in the day was a handicap to me.  I kept reading the bones of more popular authors, wondering what I was doing wrong, wasting time trying to emulate them when really, I needed to highlight what made me unique.
I’m an awful carbon copy of Stephen King, but the more I work on honing my Ferrett Steinmetz impression, the better I do.
I pissed away a lot of time, trying to be a Real Writer, and that time sublimated away in self-analyzing and whining and panicking was time that I was not writing.  It put me farther away from my quest instead of closer to it.
Instead of being a Real Writer, I was instead spending my time being a Real Neurotic, and that was not at all helpful.
Now, there are some Busy Writers, and for them, yes, you have to understand that you’re one of a hundred people clamoring for their attention, and you might not get it.  And there are some Popular Writers, and I suspect many of them are vaguely surprised that this has worked out quite this well for them.  But a Real Writer?
You’re a Real Writer even if you’ve never had a publication.  You’re a Real Writer if nobody’s (yet) heard of you.  All you have to do is to follow the three steps: Write the best work you can possibly do, write as much of the best work as you can possibly do, and send it out.
And maybe you’re not doing that.  Maybe you’re not pushing yourself as hard as you should be, trying new techniques and new characters and new experiments.  Maybe you’re not writing as much as you could be doing, wasting your days on the X-Box and ignoring that tickle that you could be doing something more productive.  Maybe you’re keeping your work locked on your hard drive, not sharing it with anyone because my God what if they don’t like it.  (Hint: Someone will not.  If all you ever get is praise, you’re not sending it out to enough people.)
But if that’s the case, then I am the last person you should be apologizing to for not being a Real Writer. You know what you need to do to get there, and you’re only hurting yourself by not doing it.
Now get out there and write.

Birthday Musings: In Sickness And In Health

When I was young, I read an interview where Stephen King said this:

I used to tell interviewers that I wrote every day except for Christmas, the Fourth of July, and my birthday. That was a lie. I told them that because if you agree to an interview you have to say something, and it plays better if it’s something at least half-clever. Also, I didn’t want to sound like a workaholic dweeb (just a workaholic, I guess). The truth is that when I’m writing, I write every day, workaholic dweeb or not. That includes Christmas, the Fourth, and my birthday.

And I thought that sounded very badass.  A Real Writer wrote every day, hauling that laptop down to the coffee shop as some sort of show of how Hardcore you were.  A Real Writer was always cranking out new words because that’s how you wrote, like, seventy novels a year.  A Real Writer mashed keys.
So when I was young, I set out to write on My Birthday.  The most special day of the year.
Because writing was special.
And today is my birthday, and it’s not very special at all. I am laid up with an ear infection.  I got up at 9:45, went to the doctor for ninety minutes, then came back and slept until 2:30.  I am sapped with grief after Rebecca’s death, and I am sapped with energy with the own roiling mass of angry flesh throbbing inside my ear, and I have just asked my good friend Angie – not that I want to – whether she wants to reconsider coming down for the weekend, since I don’t know if I’ll be up.
I will also write.
Writing is not special.
I write every day, now, and most days I don’t go, “Oh, what inspiration will I unwrap from this golden-foil package hidden within my mind?”  I remember back to my old days, writing only when I was truly In The Zone, when I had a great idea that just burned within me to be unleashed, going fallow for weeks at a time and then cranking out several short stories in a feverish day.
And that process works for some people, don’t get me wrong.
But I write when I’m sick.  I write when I’m tired.  I write when I don’t have time.  I write when I’m uninspired.  I write when I have no good ideas.  I write when I have no hope that this story will ever be any good.  I write when I hate myself.  I write when I’ve failed.
No matter what happens in my life, I sit down, and I write.  The day after Rebecca’s death?  I wrote.  Three weeks after they cracked open my chest to operate on my heart?  A few months ago, I found a flashfic that I’d totally forgotten about, which I’d written deep in Ativan haze, over what turned out to be the course of a couple of days.  Because I write.
And it’s not magic.  It’s not badass.  It’s just what I do, relentless as stone, and…
That is magic.
The magic is a slow process, you don’t see it forming.  It’s a grim procession, knowing that no matter what happens, you must make the words.  But those words then come from every part of you.
Back when I wrote only when I was inspired, I wrote only of a manic energy.  Now I write from all colors of my spectrum – from despair, from exhaustion, from strength, from weakness.  I write from more creative places, because if I am coming up with bad idea after bad idea, then I will begin to think of things I never would have thought of had it been easy.  I write from more tones, because if I write in joy and edit in despair then I have not one me, but two mes looking over my words, and I am wiser in all my moods than in one.
And I work miracles.
I write things and move people in ways I never could have before, when I gave only the shiniest parts of me to my book.
And I am exhausted, now.  My ear throbs, my heart aches.  But after I finish this, I will write on my birthday.  Because this day is not special, and writing is not special, and me writing today is not special.
What I write is special.  And all things serve the beam.