Jerry Seinfeld Could Be Talking About Writing

Speaking of “Ask Me Anything,” I love what Jerry Seinfeld had to say here, which was in response to a question on comedy but could be about writing:

I chose comedy because I thought it seemed much easier than work. And more fun than work. It turned out to be much harder than work, and not easy at all. But you still don’t have to ever really grow up. And that’s the best thing of all.

Jerry’s answers create perhaps the greatest Ask Me Anything I’ve ever read – consistently interesting and articulate.  Check it out.

Head Colds Inspire The Usual Brain Death: Ask Me Anything!

I’m staring at a screen trying to make sense of things, my head swimming with disease.  My concentration is shot.  I’ve somehow got to try to program things today, but that involves actually comprehending systems, and that is not going to go well.
(I also owe a couple of short story reviews, as I read two of them last night but cannot put my head into order yet to sift out my thoughts upon them.  Though spurred by a thought from a friend, I may try to write an urban fantasy story in a Patrick Rothfuss/Quentin Tarantino mashup later tonight, which may just be the head cold talking.)
So let’s do the usual “Ferrett needs distraction” post, which is to say:
Ask me a real question. On any topic. I’ll do my best to answer honestly. 
(Fake questions like “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck?” are neither clever nor useful.  You can do it; it marks you as the kind of person who doesn’t realize the joke is so obvious it’s been done a hundred times before, and I’ll think less of you for being tedious.  Hey, I told you I’d answer honestly.)
All other questions will be answered politely, and to the best of my ability.  Go, if you please.

Ferrett, At Various Places About The Internets

I wrote an essay for The Good Men Project the other day on Penny Arcade, called Why @Cwgabriel Will Keep Being A Jerk (And That’s Okay).  The excerpt is:

If you’re at all inclined towards women’s rights, the name “Gabe from Penny Arcade” (a.k.a. @CwGabriel) should inspire an instant face-palm.  Not only has he been magnificently intransigent on the Dickwolves controversy (top tip: if you’re going to apologize, don’t take it back), but his belligerent statements on transgendered women were cringeworthy.  Which, given that his bawdy humor has made him an idol to millions, is a little terrifying.
Then, on January first, a heartfelt blog post.  He admitted he had become the kind of bully he loathed, and vowed to change.  It’s a magnificent blog-post, full of honest self-introspection and a merciless examination of his behavior.
I’m here to tell you that Gabe still has a few feet left to stick in his mouth.
Before 2014 ends, I’m pretty sure we’ll see at least one more collective Internet head-desk, courtesy of an insensitive statement by Mr. Krahulik.  Which is not to say that Gabe doesn’t mean well, but… well, he’s had the epiphany.
The epiphany is not the solution.

Also, if you’re a fan of my fiction writing (or are attempting to, in which case I laud you), I had an essay up on the process of writing my story The Sturdy Bookshelves of Pawel Olizewski, which was published at Intergalactic Medicine Show last month.  The essay, which can be found here, has some bits like:

The hardest thing to get about this story was, weirdly enough, the voice. Because the initial draft was 2,800 words, very tight, and almost character-free – more like a news report than a story, focusing on Pawel. I soon realized a tale with no character arc is really hard to do unless you’re Ted Chiang, and so I wrote a 5,000-word version of this which focused on the Nameless Narrator (or, as I took to calling him, the NN) but lost a lot of the oddball details that people found compelling. It felt bloated, and the NN really isn’t interesting enough to carry the tale.
Yet I loved the internal arc of this – and why wouldn’t I? If you think about it, the tale is really about me spending twenty pre-Clarion years writing and making the same old mistakes over and over again, hoping like heck that I’d somehow ignite my inner spark. Yet I struggled to find a narrative tone that matched. People loved this one, asking about it more than any other Clarion Echo story that I’ve written – “Did you finish it? Did that one sell?” – but I didn’t feel I’d really nailed it yet.

The story itself (still available to read) got a nice review from Tangent Online, which said, “[His story] leads to some interesting thoughts on the nature of work and art and is a fine story in its own right.”  Which was nice.

In Which A New Razor Makes All The Difference

This is what Gini bought me for Christmas:

Look at the beauty of that razor!  The lush wood handle.  The gold(ish) filigree on the blade.  And the feel of it is different than the starter razor I got, which has a plastic handle that wobbles more; this has a heft and stability to it that’s just breathtaking, if you like using raw blades to push hairs off your face.
And my God, does it shave.  On the old razor, I was up to four passes to try to get a good close shave – one down towards the jaw, one up towards the ear, and one each going east and west.  With this new blade, one up, one down, and it’s smoother in two passes.
The interesting thing is that I’m not sure if that’s the blade, or me.  If you’ll recall, I started shaving only last Christmas, so when I set out I was horribly inefficient at it.  I’d cut myself all the damn time and wasn’t using the right kind of shaving cream (Jack Black Supreme for me), and wasted about two months learning how to do an efficient shave.
I’ve since purchased a razor-sharpening kit, but it’s entirely possible I suck at razor-sharpening.  So it may well be that the old cheap plastic-handled blade was just fine; I didn’t know how to use it, and it’s dulled to a face-grinding bleed.  Whereas this newly-purchased blade is superior because it’s off the shelf, and will slowly turn awful over the next few months.
The other interesting bit is that I shave less with a straight razor.  Part of that’s my job; I get a half-hour for lunch, which I use to bathe and read, and so shaving has moved to a separate activity – whereas it used to be part of the bathing process.  (I am not getting naked in a tub with a straight-razor near me jimmies.)  And it’s a ritual, not a habit, so I shave maybe every four days now – when I’m about to go out.  I’m actually stubblier on average than I was before the straight razor, with intervals of purest clean-shavenness.  I’m not sure how Gini feels about this, and don’t quite want to ask.
And before you ask – I shovelled the bees out from under the snowpocalypse the other day, and heard them buzzing in the box.  I hope this doesn’t mean I accidentally knocked them loose, which would indicate a fatality (breaking the cluster of body warmth they use to generate heat would be a Bad Thing), but we did see them making cleansing flights on a warm day in December, so they’ve lived for now.  Let us hope for survival.
That should bring you up to date on all the outstanding questions of my bizarre hobbies, but feel free to ask if I’ve left anything open.

On Jealousy

I’ve often said that jealousy is like pain in that it’s not bad in and of itself. Any leper will tell you that if you break your ankle, you want pain; otherwise, you ruin your leg walking as though everything’s all right.
Jealousy is the sign of something that needs to be corrected. In sane relationships, that correction usually takes the form of “I need to feel more valued, so what can we do to get us the kind of one-on-one time that we need?” In insane relationships trying to better themselves, that correction takes the form of “I need to be less neurotic about demanding my partner shows me love, so what can I do to self-soothe in more efficient ways?”
But Rain Degrey retweeted something I disagreed with:
“Jealousy is what you get when you mix low self esteem with the delusion of thinking you should be able to control another person’s feelings.”
Usually, I haven’t seen jealous people trying to control feelings. They’re controlling actions. “Don’t spend time with her.” “Don’t sleep overnight at his place.” “You have to see that movie with me.”
That’s actually not always bad.
The problem with jealousy is that it often stems from someone doing a thing that makes you feel totally unwanted. You were specifically not going to see The Hobbit despite all the offers from friends, because for you The Hobbit was something special that you did with your lover – and then you find, quite stingingly, that s/he doesn’t share this ritual. You think of them when The Hobbit comes around, but they do not think of you.
That’s a legitimate pain. That’s a broken ankle for sure, mang.
You feel stupid for not going earlier, and you feel robbed of a romantic experience that you’d set up, and you feel deeply envious because someone elsegot that time that you wanted.
That’s not necessarily low esteem. That’s often high esteem, saying, “Hey, I reserved that space in my heart for you, and I value my coronary real estate enough to not reserve it willy-nilly. Either this is A Thing We Do, in which case you owe me the respect of not forgetting that, or it’s something that’s completely irrelevant and I see Lord of the Rings movies whenever I damn well feel like.”
That’s good jealousy. Bad jealousy is where you say, “Well, you can’t see her any more!” – a hot-patch that may solve the issue now, but is guaranteed to cause resentment and will certainly come up next December when wander off to see The Hobbit 3 with someone else.
Too many people treat jealousy like it’s some sort of foot fungus, a thing that enlightened people don’t have. I’m of the opinion that most people who’ve never experienced jealousy do so because they’ve had no real attachments to their partner.
It’s not wrong to want a unique space in your partner’s heart. It’s not wrong to be hurt when that space gets violated – even if you may not necessarily have communicated the uniqueness of that space properly. (In poly, you run into surprise pockets of assumed “I thought that was for us alone” behavior, which you only discover once someone’s off to Rivendell.)
What’s wrong is when you use that pain as an excuse to wall yourself off from competition instead of using it to build a stronger relationship.
Funneling jealousy in a healthy way isn’t about controlling other people’s emotions. It’s about controlling expectations so that people act in consistent ways that you can structure a relationship around. If someone tells you that of course The Hobbit is Your Thing, and then wanders off to the premiere with someone else, that makes it hard to know what to believe. Which, in turn, makes it hard to know whether you’re valued in the ways you need to be valued in a relationship.
Which is why you should be honest, and consistent. Even if your response is “I am not restricting myself in any movie that I see with anyone, because I don’t buy into movie monogamy,” then that lets someone know where they stand.
But not all jealousy is poor self-esteem, nor is it about controlling emotions. Jealousy is like pain – sometimes it’s just a silly ache, sometimes it’s cancer. You can’t tell what it really means until you diagnose it.
(Cross-posted, after consideration, from a FetLife essay.)

A Change To This Blog (Or, Rather, A Reversion)

Jokes do not go over well on the Internet.
“What do you mean, Ferrett?” you cry. “The Internet is full of LOLcats and Doges and rage comics!  Of course jokes go over well on the Internet!”
And my reply to that is that silliness thrives on the Internet – and while that’s lovely, to my mind that’s not quite the same as a joke.  (Not that it’ll stop me from muttering “Much Vaticans” when I’m planning a trip to Italy and read about the Doge Palace.)  Simple jokes thrive as well, silly stories without much of a point.  To me, a joke has a bit of a bite to it, a little context that requires the reader to understand that a joke is being made.
And quite often, a joke’s context-free failure mode is pure outrage.
Take Kim Stafford, who made a costume lampooning Tea Party members, and then got taken seriously.  100,000 comments later and the shunning of her friends’ group, she has learned that context is very very important.  And I’m pretty sure that Justine “Hope I don’t get AIDS!” Sacco was actually trying to make a subtle point about how we’re perfectly happy to ignore black tragedy because, as white people, we don’t really think that shit can ever happen to us, and stepped on her pantyhose something fierce.  (An interpretation her long-time friend believes as well.)
Now, you can make an argument that those were bad jokes that went over poorly, which I’d totes agree with.  The problem is that, as any comedian can tell you, you’re never quite sure how a joke will go over until you fling it out into the world.  What you see as a funny joke about a Frobozzian carpenter turns out to be offensive to Frobozzians.  What you see as a funny joke highlighting the plight of Frobozzian carpenters can be offensive to Frobozzians. And as Scalzi has pointed out on several occasions, the failure mode of “sarcasm” is “asshole.”
Jokes are explosives.  Done the right way, they can knock down dusty institutions.  Done poorly, they blow off your hand.
That’s why I haven’t made a lot of ’em here lately.
Which isn’t to say I’ve been humorless, but treatises on politics and polyamory and other sober stuff can be wrapped up tight.  I can figure out where people are gonna get offended and head that off at the pass.  Whereas if you overexplain a joke, it’s no longer a joke.
So my blog-me has become a little bloated, lately, and I don’t think it reflects the real me.  Which is a habit you see bloggers tending towards in this modern era, I think.  You squee, “OH MY GOD, I LOVE MOVIE X!” and then someone tells you that Movie X sucks, and other people point out all the problematic feminist overtones in Movie X, and by the time it’s over you’re not rejoicing in the good bits of Movie X but are watching while other people dismantle it.  So you don’t squee as much, unless it’s something you know can’t be argued with.  (This is why things like the Muppets are universally loved on the Internets, I think – they’re so childish and harmless that you’re kind of an asshole if you pick on Jim Henson, who conveniently died before he could say something stupid.)
And then you make a silly joke, and someone misunderstands the joke or is hurt by it, and suddenly the joke isn’t funny, and you feel bad.
And then you make a blustering, entertaining rant on something you hate, only to find out your friend really loves that thing, and then you realize you’re that asshole hating on Movie X.
So what’s left?  Sober meditations on politics.  Discussions that if people get offended by, well, you’re happy to offend them.  And your blog withers to this small thing where you only talk on certain topics.  Topics where you know what the response will be.
And you become someone who’s not you.  The you you giggles and tells bad puns and delights in animated GIF fails.  The blog-you is a politician, expounding only when things are sufficiently troublesome to take them to task, and to people who don’t know the you you, you sound like this crabby old blustery doof.
I think that’s why Twitter is so popular among authors. The inability to form a whole thought is a feature, not a bug.  It’s freeing to have people just assume that wasn’t all you meant to say, and so authors often appear so much happier on Twitter, saying “ZOMG I LOVED MOVIE X!” and getting a response mostly of “ME TOO!” because people realize that you might have more to say but can’t fit it in.
The default context on Twitter is “incomplete.”  Which means it’s far easier to make jokes and gush about the things you love.
So I think if you’ve followed me on Twitter – and why not? – you’ve been seeing something closer to the real me, where I make goofy jokes and observations in a freer space.  But that’s left my journal feeling a bit moribund.  I feel statesmanly on here, and that’s not a good feeling – and I’ve quietly vowed to tell more tales of things like The Boob Tree and yesterday’s Ask Culture debacle.
I vow to be funnier in 2014.  I’ll still discuss serious issues, natch, but I want to leaven that with a little more of who I am – and take the time to not just dash off the 140-character version of things but commit it to Ye Blogge.  Because of all the spaces on the Internet, this is uniquely mine, and I want to decorate it a bit.
Jokes are dangerous.  Sarcasm especially so.
I should take a few more risks.

If This New Year Incident Sums Up 2014, It's Gonna Be A Good Year

At last night’s New Year’s party, we were discussing a rather – aggressive – friend of ours.  He’s a wonderful man, but he pretty much asks for everything he wants, which causes people to feel pressured sometimes… Even though he’s perfectly fine with being refused.
“Oh, that’s part of a wonderful article I read yesterday!” I gushed.  “It’s about Ask Culture!”
“…what?”
“Ask Culture,” I repeated.  “In many families, you’re trained to ask for all your needs… but there’s no stigma to being told ‘no.’  So you’re trained to ask, constantly, for even trivial desires.”
“Oookayyyy…” they said, squinting at me.
“And there’s – I think it’s called Guess Culture, where you never ask unless you’re sure you’ll get a positive response.  So rather than saying ‘Hey, can I crash on your couch next weekend?’ you feel the waters with a thousand questions like ‘So what are you doing on Saturday?’ and ‘So you’re not going out?'”
“That’s good.  This culture,” Gini said, starting to giggle – and then everyone around me giggled.
“But no, this is a thing!” I insisted, propelled by perhaps one too many glasses of Scotchka. “Because if you’re in Guess Culture and not Ask Culture – ”
More giggling.
” – then even the answer might not be for real!  Because people hate to say ‘no’ in Guess Culture, you can’t be certain if that’s a real yes!  So you have to figure out whether they actually want you!”  I put the glass down.  “That’s why I prefer Ask Culture.”
Snorts.  Active howling.
“Why the hell are you all laughing at me?” I cried.
“…’Ass Culture,'” they snickered, and then clutched their bellies and laughed – and I did, too, as I realized that to them, I’d been touting the benefits of what, in fact, sounded exactly like “Ass Culture” over and over again.
We laughed about that until about three in the morning.  So, you know, a good night.