So I've Loved Doctor Who For Almost Thirty Years Now

I just purchased tickets to see Doctor Who’s 50th Anniversary Special in 3D, at my local theater.  This proves the future is wilder than I can imagine, for as a teenaged boy I never could have envisioned Doctor Who being popular.
When I was fifteen, as a young American boy, almost nobody knew who Doctor Who was.  You couldn’t download the episodes, or even buy them, for nobody thought Doctor Who was big enough to be worth selling.  No, the only way you could actually watch Doctor Who was to pray that your local PBS affiliate would give you a handful of Tom Bakers during their semiannual fund drive, and even then they made you pay for it – you’d be barraged with reminders that the only reason they put Doctor Who on was because you, the fans, said you wanted it, and oh, we argued with our bosses to slot this in between operas and wholesome kids’ shows, and I guess if we don’t make this next hour’s pledge target you may never see Doctor Who again.
You had to wrap your life around being a fan, then.  You scheduled days off to catch the few marathons.  And if you were lucky – very lucky – you had a friend like Mark Goldstein, who was obsessive and had taped every episode individually on a VHS tape, with neatly-marked pen letters, and he would lend them to you if you promised to treat them well.  Watching him open that drawer full of tapes underneath his parents’ TV was like seeing the Ark of the Covenant yawning wide – that realization that you could watch all the Who you wanted.
Yet even then, Doctor Who was dwarfed by Star Trek and other wonders.  You could dress as the Doctor and most people wouldn’t even know who you were.  Those who did clasped you to their breasts, but in America?  There were no toys.  If you wanted a Sonic Screwdriver, you either ordered it from England and paid hideous shipping prices, or you built your own.
There was no Internet, or even BBSes.  I remember signing up for Xeroxed newsletters, mailed to me monthly for a small fee by crazy fans trying to cover costs, these typewritten sheets with blurred photographs taped to them – the Gallifrey One, the TARDIS Timesheet – each with little 300-word essays and blurbs on what companion Jamie was doing now, and rumors of the next Doctor.
I remember the wait.  It was almost two years after Colin Baker became Doctor before I got to see an episode.  I had the synopses of what the episodes were like, filtered through some English back-channel, but to see it with my own eyes?  A marvel.  And the whole time, PBS reminded me that they didn’t have to do this, this was very special, it’s a favor.  Send money.
And now Doctor Who is as mainstream as any fandom gets.  You can buy Doctor Who toys in any comics shop, buy the DVDs at Best Buy, and now the anniversary is something so big that we’re all going to go the theater to celebrate.
It feels strange.  I’m not upset.  Even though I don’t particularly like Matt Smith’s Doctor, it’s just so strange to see something that was once so small and huddled and flickering that it was a near-shameful fandom, something so rare that when you met another Whovian you immediately clasped hands and bore a deep friendship, because this fandom cost you.  You couldn’t stumble over it.  You had to go digging deep, to hunt for your love, to track it like a wild deer across thickets of static-filled broadcasts and poorly-spelled newsletters.
Now it’s everywhere.  Which is glorious.  But to me, I’m forever amazed that Doctor Who is common.  One of the big fandoms, maybe even eclipsing Star Trek.  And I look around and wonder what happened, because in my heart I truly feel that it is only me and one or two Companions, travelling in this tiny thing that’s much bigger on the inside, on adventures that no one else manages to notice.
God bless.

When Should I Have Sex With Him?

My friend Bart was talking about some women friends of his who were very confused about when to have sex with the guys they liked.  They want a relationship, but if they have sex too soon, then the guy doesn’t call, and if they waited to have sex too long, then the guy stopped calling after a couple of dates.  So what’s the sweet spot?  When should you move to the boudoir?
So to help you women, and men, I will now tell you when you should have sex with someone.  Or how soon you should call after the first date.  Or when you should ask to move in with them:
When you feel like it.
Note here that these women aren’t asking, “When do I want to do this?” but rather, “When should I do this in order to best emotionally manipulate them into staying with me?”  And as with most things that attempt to manipulate people into falling in love with you, that usually doesn’t work out that well.  If you’re not actually doing what you like when you’re with a partner, then you’re going out of your way to court someone who actually doesn’t like the things you do.
Which means, essentially, that they’re falling in love with a lie, and you’re falling in love with someone who’s unsuited to you.
This isn’t a woman thing, by the way: you see it all the time with needy guys trying to figure out how to get the hot blonde to fall in love with them.  I say, abandon the idea of entrancing them into love with you, and be who you are.  If you really want to call someone the day after the first date, and they find this so needy that they would never speak to you again, well… I hate to tell you, but they’d probably be shit at supporting you emotionally.  The best relationships occur where you naturally sync up, discovering to your delight that hey, I really wanted to hear from you now, two days in, and here we are!
Treating your potential lover like they’re a puzzle to be cracked doesn’t work out well for anyone.  The good news about gaming your partners is that you do, in fact, get more dates, as you’re suppressing all your desires to try to match theirs.  The bad news is that when you win, your prize is someone who doesn’t actually like you.  They like this imaginary construct that you actually hated being.  And as Christina Lavin so wisely sung, “It’s a good thing he can’t read my mind.”
Now, doing what you want to do often means you get dumped a lot.  That sucks.  It’s painful when you like people and they don’t like you back.  But you know what’s more painful?  Waking up one morning four years from now and realizing you’ve wasted several years of your life dating someone who you actually never liked all that much.
I’m not saying not to spruce up a little for your first date.  I’m not saying not to try new things.  But if you don’t want to have sex yet, and they leaves, then you’ve got a jerk who only cared about sex… and if you’re looking for a long-term relationship, then trying to retrain them using some Pavlovian sex-reconditioning usually gets you two unhappy people.
Do what makes you happy.  Eventually, you’ll find someone who likes doing that, too.  And you’ll be able to be happy together without some heavy compromise spackling your mess of a relationship together.
My two cents.

What Have I Found Myself Writing Now? Numenera Roleplaying Modules?

I started a perfectly nice little time-travel story last week: Ambitious, funny, well-characterized.  Yet when I sat down to write last night, what did I wind up doing?
Writing 1,000 words of a Numenera roleplaying module.
Looks like my brain wants to drag me into The Ninth World, kicking and screaming, and I suppose it’s a form of fiction so I’ll keep writing.  The question is, what the hell do I do with a Numenera module when I’m done writing it?  Shanna Germain generously informed me that I could sell my own module if I paid the $50 licensing fee, which seems about right, and it turns out that you can upload a PDF to DriveThruRPG.com and rake in 70% of the profit.  (At least until you make $2,000 at it, at which point you have to get a full Numenera license.)
The problem is, that I feel a good PDF should involve art, so I’d want to pay an artist to do at least some spot illustrations, and then I’d have to lay it out in a PDF in some sort of semi-professional way.  And while Numenera is hot right now – RPG’s Top 10 list is mostly Numenera at this point – I don’t know what “hot” means.  The Devil’s Spine (a Numenera adventure) is the #1 seller at DriveThru right now, and Vortex is #7, but what’s that mean in terms of sales?
So my mind is all like, “If I pay an artist a couple of hundred bucks to do some black-and-white illustrations, maybe offer them 20% of whatever profits gleaned, I can make it look passable.  And then… do I break even?  Can I sell this?  How quickly can I get this to market, while people are still hungry for Numenera?  Can I be, you know, the Activision of Numenera modules?”
Because I’d want to get this out within the next month, tops, and maybe within the next two to three weeks.  And then, I dunno what kind of sales one could expect to get on these.  Might be a net loss.  Might be impossible to find an artist.
The problem is, I’m writing it.  I can’t not write it.  Like the way my short stories bubble to the surface of my psyche, it’s arriving whether I monetize it or not, and Numenera isn’t accepting outside submissions.  So come a week or two from now I’m gonna have like 7,000 words of roleplaying adventure sitting on my hard drive, and I feel like I should be trying to make a profit off of it… but I want it to look nice and be clean as well.  I don’t want to sell dreck with my name on it – no, goddammit, I want this to be like The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues, a damned fine module that’s fun to read even if you never play it.
What’s the short, spoiler-free pitch (for I’m running my players through this starting next Monday, and don’t dare let them know what they’re in for)?  It’s this:

Nothing truly dies in the Ninth World; the technology of old civilizations was so advanced that mere time cannot stop them from carrying out their purpose.  The great wonders of the past may crumble, may degrade and function erratically, but the massive networks that held together star-spanning empires keep working long after people have long forgotten their purpose.
Unfortunately, the past’s more trivial works are just as enduring.

Anyway, I don’t know.  If you’re a good, quick artist and feel like drawing some crazy-ass roleplaying things for a mild amount of money – for I’d never ask anyone to work for the exposure, just for “not enough cash as you’re worth” – then contact me.  If not, well, eventually I’m gonna finish this damn Numenera module, and then if anyone has any advice or thoughts on it, I’m willin’ to listen.

A Grand Adventure: Dining At Michelin-Starred Restaurants?

Because we’re addicted to MasterChef, Gini and I have always wanted to taste the judges’ food: yes, we’ve heard Gordon Ramsey, Graham Elliott, and Joe Bastianich critique foods, and we’ve been told they’re awesome at it, but how do we know?
So I’m pondering whether one of my 2014 goals shoud be taking some trips out to visit their restaurants.  Graham Elliott is in Chicago, a pretty easy weekend trip; Joe Bastianich’s Babbo is in New York, a little trickier, but that also gives us a taste of what Mario Batali can do.  Both are Michelin-starred – Graham got his rating last year, whereas it looks like Joe’s dropped a star or two but that’s still pretty good.
(And it’d be nice to plan weekends alone with Gini.  We love spending time with friends and family, but here it is six weeks after our anniversary and we still haven’t managed to get away for it, and I doubt we will.)
The problem is that Michelin’s snooty.  They only seem to cover New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.  (There’s idle rumors of Cleveland getting its own Michelin Guide, but never having dined at a Michelin-starred restaurant, I literally can’t say how we’d stack up.)  And if Gini and I want to drive out to eat at snooty restaurants, we’d like to hit some of the best within driving distance.
The question is, how do we determine the absolute finest dining experiences within an eight-hour driving range?  Michelin stars are a nice, easy thing to shoot for.  And Yelp reviews or friends’ recommendations seem a little low-scale for a meal we’d be basically treating as a mini-vacation.  Is there a better guide than Michelin that top-tier cooks treat as, essentially, a little Oscar, or is Michelin it?
 

I Want To Like The Xbox One. I Do.

The new Xbox One is coming out this Christmas, and everyone is asking: Do you want it?  Do you want it?
I don’t, really.  And it’s not because the Playstation 4 is better; it may be, but I’ve got a lot of investment into the Xbox at this point, and swapping would have a cost.  I don’t wanna lose all of my Achievement Gs, nor do I want to have to set up all my new apps and rejigger my Logitech Universal Remote.
It’s that I’m not seeing any games I particularly want to play.
As a gamer, I could care less about the hardware underneath.  It’s why I moved to the XBox; I got tired of having to remember what my memory was, inscribing my video card on the inside of my arm whenever I went to the store, and having to eternally upgrade.  The XBox has simpler games (I don’t think you could do Planescape: Torment or System Shock 2 on a controller), but I’ve been playing my XBox for four years now and have had to replace it only once.
What I care about is games.  Juicy, juicy games.  And I’m picky.
I don’t like sports games, because I don’t care about sports.  I am aware how huge Madden is, but that’s really not me.
I don’t like head-to-head first-person shooters like Call of Duty, because I’m not that good at shooters and I prefer unlocking bits of story anyway.  Running around on a map and shooting people for no real reason doesn’t trigger my immersion factor, and I want to lose myself in a game.
So what that leaves is a comparatively narrow band of games: a couple of rhythm games, sandbox games like Saints Row and Prototype, first-person shooters with good stories backing them like Bioshock Infinite and Half-Life.
None of those are present at launch.  Andrew Ducker squeed about the trailer for Titanfall, but what I saw was guys running in circles shooting each other.  I need context.  A game like that would make me feel empty inside, because I’d keep asking, “Why am I doing this?  What goals am I forwarding?  Why should I root for this guy, and why am I supposed to shoot that other guy in the face?”  For me, learning What Happens Next is the reward that draws me onwards.  And too many games are skipping the single-person campaign, where all the meat of the story happens, to head straight to PVP or co-op.
So XBox One’s initial lineup, and Playstation’s, look a little weak to me.  I wouldn’t want to pay $600, or even $500, for that experience.  The games I like will come, but that’s going to have to hit a tipping point for me where I see ZOMG THE AWESOME GAME, the way that Mortal Kombat brought me to the PS, or the way that Grand Theft Auto 3 convinced me to the Playstation 2.  And when that happens, I’ll whine to Gini and we’ll put the funds in and get that sucker.
For now, though, XBox One is in that weird stage where it’s literally as uninteresting as it’ll ever get.  It has the fewest games in its career, it has the most bugs, it has the most expense.  And for me, there’s no benefit in being cutting edge for cutting edge.

Putting In Your 10,000 Hours

Brad Torgersen has a great post on what rejection slips mean, which you should read, but the upshot is this: You’re going to get a lot of rejection slips as a writer.  Wear them as badges of honor.  There’s no particular trick to being published except “Writing an exceptional story” – and most of us need to write a lot of dreck before we finally start finding our inner voice.
But though Brad touches on the 10,000 hour theory, which I believe – which states that you have to put in 10,000 hours of practice before you can achieve greatness – I feel that 10,000 hours is frequently misunderstood.  It’s not just 10,000 hours of writing – shit, I put that in between 1985 and 2000 alone, and no sales.
That’s because I wasn’t getting good feedback, or being particularly ambitious.  I was writing to please my friends, and I thought that “pretty good” stories were good enough, not realizing that the slush piles are clogged with “pretty good,” and they want great.  I spent a lot of time in front of the keyboard, but I wasn’t learning much – I talked to buddies who liked what I wrote well enough, and when I got rejected I shrugged.
I wasn’t learning.
That’s why Clarion was so transformative to me.  I had eighteen people, all willing to pound my story to bits.  At Clarion, I found I had a lot of lazy writing habits – shortcuts I took because I thought no one would notice, but it turns out that pretty much everyone did.  I learned that writing was not one Big Thing, but the accumulation of a thousand tiny details, and the more of them you can get right, the better the story works.  Every detail matters, every word matters, because you’re going to mess up about a hundred things even in a very short story… and your only saving grace will be that you get more things right.
Note that Brad had his breakthrough when he started writing for him.  He tried new techniques.  And that’s what those 10,000 hours are, to me – burning away trying to imitate other writers until you find out what you do well.  No amount of effort is a guarantee, but no effort almost always is.
You’re gonna get rejected a lot.  That’s because you’re not good enough yet.  But “not good enough today” isn’t the same as “never good enough,” and if you’re honest and perceptive and hard-working, maybe one day you can start selling stories to the markets you dream of.
Then you’ll get bigger dreams.  And work even harder.

Love, The Weak And Fragile

Most people talk of love as though it were as strong as girders, this hurricane-like force that can lift you high into the sky.  If a relationship fails, it’s because we puny humans failed Love by not believing in it hard enough: Love can rescue everyone, knit the world together, even surpass death.
And, I think, people are continually surprised when they plummet through the paper-thin lacing of Love and fall hard onto the rocks below.
Love is fragile.  Love is weak.
Love, to me, is like an emaciated refugee that shows up at your door in the middle of the night during a storm.  You’re not sure how she had the strength to get here, but here she is regardless, her thumb on your doorbell until you let her in.
You take her inside, give her a bed and a bowl of soup.  She’s thankful, but can’t contribute to the house much.  She stays in bed and is absolutely wonderful company, but having Love in the house doesn’t pay the bills, doesn’t sweep the floors, doesn’t feed the cat.  She just sits there tucked into the covers, not complaining.
All these other things in life seem far more pressing than Love, who doesn’t ask much, if anything.  Money certainly makes demands of you, showing up at your door and shaking you down.  Chores arrives and he kicks dust around the house.  Old Habits has been living in your house all your life, and he’s quite insistent that things must be done his way.
And  if you’re not careful to feed her, you spend so much time dealing with Money and Chores and Habits that poor Love starves to death in the corner, so kind she never says a word before she expires.
Love can be strong.  If you feed her good things, get her up and out of bed, take her for walks and get her exercise in, she can do some things that put Money and Chores and Habits to shame.  Given the proper treatment, she can grow to be stronger than all of them put together.  But she’s a delicate flower who requires a lot of attention to thrive, and she doesn’t like causing a fuss.
(Not like Sex.  Sex shrieks in the night, and causes a lot of fuss, and looks much like Love when they’re both in bed together.  I wouldn’t confuse them, though.)
You have to tend to Love constantly.  She’s a tough old bird and will stick around through a lot of neglect, but eventually she will pass on.  The trick is to realize that this mysterious and unannounced visitor needs your care, and God forbid you assume that she’s just naturally stronger than Money and Chores and Habits and you just throw her in to fight with them before you’ve given her a good set of boxing gloves and a training montage.
Love is weak, and delicate, and all the more special because of that.  She’s injured daily by the smallest of things: a uncapped tube of toothpaste, a sneer when you’re in a bad mood, the forgetting of a special day.  Enough nicks and bumps, and one day she’ll pass on, so quiet you may not even hear her die.  You may not even notice with all the other visitors jostling for your attention.
Love is weak as an orchid, and powerful as an oak tree.  In both cases, you’d better get to watering.