How Chipmunks Stung My Hands

The thing about beekeeping is, it involves bees.  Which involves being stung on occasion; not often, but more than the number one would be prefer to be stung at all, which is none.
Which is why, depending on your beekeeping style and your bees, we cloak up.  Some people go bare-chested and figure, hell, getting stung is just what happens.  Others go bare-handed but wear the suit, because the gloves are clumsy.  But after getting stung several times by a hive of very mean bees last year, Gini and I switched to gloves.  It’s just too much trouble to get stung on the hands when your job is typing and your main exercise is biking, where you rest a significant portion of your weight on your hands.
So when I got into the hive yesterday, I put on the gloves, knowing this was going to be a very quick operation.  The new hive (of much nicer bees) has expanded, and needs space.  So all I was going to do was to pop the top of the hive, put on a second deep, and leave.  Simple as that.
Except there were two problems.
First, the hive was covered in bees.  Which I wasn’t expecting.  Generally, the bees stay on the insides of the hives, but when there’s a lot of them and it’s hot outside, they congregate under the shade.  Which meant that clustered underneath the lip of the lid were several bees.
Second, because I’d cleaned up the garage and put all the beekeeping equipment where the animals could get at it, the gloves actually looked like this:

Yes, I’d seen the chipmunks running in and out of the garage before, and thought them adorable. But apparently, the propolis and honey residue on the fingertips of the gloves was very appealing,because they literally ate nothing else.  The backs of the gloves?  Perfectly fine.  And who the hell thinks to check whether their gloves had been gnawed by chipmunks?   (The glove on the left, presented for comparison of how bad it could have been, was sadly Gini’s.  I wish the chipmunks had eaten my gloves that thoroughly; this, I would have noticed.)
So when I went to lift the lid of the box, my first sign that something was wrong was a feeling like hey, I’ve been stung.  How the hell could that happen?  I’m wearing gloves!
And then I bring up my hands and see that my fingertips are swarming with bees.
This is not a moment of great pride for me, because I saw the bees that stung me, and they were all like what the hell, bro?  Bees don’t like to sting.  But here, in ignorance and confusion, I’d decided to shove my bare hands among them to crush them, and they’d stung reflexively, like a frat boy punching some kid who stole his beer.  They seemed baffled as I frantically shook them off, wondering what the hell had happened to them.
I ran into the garage, my right ring finger with at least three stingers in it, to brush it off.  And get ice.  And then, curse an awful lot.  Because this wasn’t the bees’ fault.
It was the chipmunks.  Chipmunks ripped my flesh.  I can honestly say now, “I got stung because of chipmunks.”  This is A Thing.  It is true.  And it is ineffably weird.

Can A Ferrett Build An Arcade Cabinet?

Can I build an arcade cabinet?  Honestly?  I don’t know.  But it begins, my friends.  Check out this particular birthday present to myself:

That is the X-Arcade Tankstick, hooked up to a MAME emulator on my laptop running Ms. Pac-Man.  It was a really magical moment, when I finally doped out how to get the software to work with the controller, and pressed a button to start.  It was like I’d somehow literally captured a part of my childhood, in a half-assembled laboratory spread out across the guest bed.
(Incidentally, if you ever do want to build an arcade cabinet, X-Arcade has its shit down.  The MAME Plus! software is configured by default to have all the controls work with the joystick, and their very affordable coin door is set to work with a splitter to tie right into your computer.  It’s extremely, satisfyingly, user-friendly.)
What I intend to build is, eventually, this:

As designed by the fine builders at ArcadeCab.com, and with a few tweaks suggested by my friend Todd.  But right now, all I have is this:
…which is to say two very large and heavy boards of 3/4″ cabinet-grade birch plywood.  I’ll need to find some way of mapping the small JPG I have onto that larger surface, and then use my power jigsaw for the first time.
(Fun fact: Since we have a Lowes right across the street in the mall, and the boards were too cumbersome to fit in the car easily, I simply borrowed a wood cart and pushed it the three blocks home.  Which was a good, cheap plan, except that a) it was a windy day and I was pushing two large, flat sails across the asphalt, and b) the rattle-and-bang as it hit every crack ont he sidewalk alerted Gini I was coming from half a block away.  Here I was, a wild-haired balding guy grudgingly pushing a stolen cart down the street, announced by huge hollow-tubed booms, distinctly not making eye contract with anyone.  And I’ll have to do that again.  Lord knows what the neighbors think. [And yes, I returned the cart.])
So that’s this Sunday’s work.  I hope Erin helps.  I could use some help.  Because standing at the base of those two huge sheets of wood, knowing that somehow I have to shape these into that, is intimidating as fuck.
 

I Think I Felt My Soul Break

“Do not send money to your online interest. There are online users that earn a living by faking love and pretending to run into hard times.”
Part of me read that and went, “What an interesting fiction challenge! I bet I’d be really good at that.”
Then I started to map out the sorts of personality traits it would take to appeal to the lonely guy/gal – a good reason for a stunningly attractive person to be lonely and looking for someone on the Internet, the secret rituals that make someone feel loved, constructing the steely-eyed hard-luck story where I’d never ask for money, I have my pride, but – no. Really? You’d do that? I couldn’t. But….
Inevitably, I’d run into other professional love-fakers. We’d get together for conventions, flown to exotic locations on the dollars of sad men, exchange best practices for not being found prematurely, gossip about our best and worst conquests. We’d hold contests to see who would extract the most money, and I’d win. Other lonely-hearts extractors would whisper about me: “Have you seen his techniques? Oh, it’s a pleasure to watch him set the hook.”
In time, I’d step away from the danger of predating on sad boys in basements – they’re eager, sometimes they track you down, sometimes things get violent. Instead, I’d move into the role of paid advisor, troubleshooting sticky situations for a cut of the gross, showing up like Mister Wolf – a chain-smoking professional who barely shows his disdain for the clumsy hash you’ve made of things. Really? You let him buy airplane tickets for his mom to meet you? Oh, we’ll have to –
And then I snapped back to reality, realizing what a horrid, horrid fantasy this all was. I’d never do it.
But if I did? I’d be good at it.

The Spring Depression: Skipped

Every spring, my Seasonal Affective Disorder comes sniffing around.  It’s an insidious thing I must be watchful for; the way I discovered it is that I said, “Hey, I seem to have had an annual suicide attempt in June for the past three years, this seems to be A Thing.”  And that timeframe got bumped up a bit when I moved to Alaska – theory was, all that excess daylight triggered something odd in my body – but the fact is, every spring, I’m going to have a solid ten days crying and trying hard to stop from cutting myself.
Except this year.  Why?
There’s three theories:
1)  The catastrophic trauma from my triple-bypass surgery stopped it dead in its tracks.  It sounds strange, but the other time I had major surgery for my burst appendix, it truncated what was a pretty nasty depressive incident.  Which is a strangely heartening thought, that even my body views this depression as a sort of luxury; if there’s something seriously life-threatening, it’ll stop making me sad and concentrate on getting me to live.
2)  I’m eating far better than I was before.  More fruits, more fish, less meat and sugar.  Could be.  I’ve been on some strange diets through various iterations of SAD, which never helped before, but I’m told by some that fish oil helps.
3)  Super mega-doses of Vitamin D.  My cardiologist put me on a weekly, prescription-level dosage of 50,000 units of Vitamin D.  Which, I’m told, helps ameliorate depression – something I’d shrugged off before, because a) I drink more milk than any non-calf being in the known universe, and b) I’d already been taking a vitamin supplement. But this is the theory I stick to – lots of other people find Vitamin D helpful, and so I’ve started taking a daily supplement just in case. (As Sheldon said, it might just be “the ingredients for some very expensive urine,” but the pills are comparatively cheap.)
None of this is to say that my SAD vanished. I had a couple of days where the slightest jolt would send me into sadness – a fight with a sweetie, a rejection, a writer who said something I felt was unfair – but it was at least a triggered depression, not the kind that just enfolds you out of nowhere.  And it was a 4 out of 10 on the Crushing Depression scale, something that might destroy a non-depressive, but my depression-fighting muscles are strong.
So I dunno.  My advice to you is if you suffer, try taking 5,000 units of Vitamin D daily, and maybe a pair of fish oil caplets at night.  (Always at night.  Otherwise, you risk getting the dreaded Fish Burps during the day, which is bizarrely traumatizing.)  I think the body chemistry is what’s causing it, but it was very nice to have glided over the SAD this year instead of falling in.
Or you could try having a heart attack, followed by a chest-cracking triple bypass.  Wouldn’t advise it as a strategy, but if you give it a go, lemme know how it works out.

I Apologize For Last Year's Clarion Blog-A-Thon

2012 was the Summer of Failure.
Long-term readers will know that every summer, I blog to raise funds for the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop – the workshop that literally rebirthed me as a writer.  It’s no exaggeration to say that I owe my entire career to the fine people at Clarion, and so come late June I put some effort into payback.  And 2012 was poised to be my greatest fundraiser yet – for the first time, I’d talked to ten fabulous writers, who had generously offered raffle prizes to help me.
Two weeks in, my mother told me she might have cancer.  Bone cancer.  The vicious  kind that kills you in six months.
She wouldn’t know for two weeks, until the tests came in, and I was completely unable to concentrate, as there was a very real chance I’d spend the next year of my life living in another state, giving hospice care to my Mom.  Eventually I flew out to California to hold her hand as she received the test results…. Which came back negative, thank God.  But by then, I was already behind on my commitments to Clarion (which involved live-writing a novel that would ultimately fall apart on me, too) – so I said, “All right.  Technically, the blog-a-thon ends in August, but I’ll just blog an extra three weeks to make up for it.”
Aaaaand that’s when the Clarion donations page crashed.
I was unaware of this for a week; I was directing people to donate, but the page was broken for a significant subset of donators.  Some people kindly sent donations in manually, but the end result was that I don’t have any way of assembling a coherent record of who sent what to whom.  And so, unable to consistently get donations, I stopped offering prizes, even though some authors had so very kindly offered to donate.
It was a shameful fiasco.  And I planned to repair this fiasco – you can see me promising to “unfuck this project by February 1st, 2013” in New Year’s Resolution #5, “Fix My Secret Shame” – but then I had a heart attack in early January.  Followed by a triple-bypass surgery, and months of recovery.
None of these reasons are meant to comprise an excuse, of course.  I could have, and should have, done better by Clarion. And so I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to the wonderful authors who agreed to donate to my cause – Ellen Kushner, Seanan McGuire, Holly Black, Kat Howard and Megan Kurashige, Erin Cashier, Monica Byrne, Catherynne M. Valente, Mary Robinette Kowal, Myke Cole, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tobias Buckell – who were ready and willing to donate prizes. Some of them didn’t even get called on-deck thanks to all the delays and issues.
Unfortunately, thanks to the technical snafus at the end with prize donations, I don’t have a firm record of who donated, and certainly not enough to hold what was already going to be a very complex raffle in good faith.
As such, if you donated in the hopes of a prize, please contact me at theferrett@theferrett.com and I’ll not only refund your money out of my own pocket, I will offer you a deeply personal apology.  Clarion should not suffer for my poor acts, nor should you.
I will be doing the Clarion Blog-A-Thon this year, of course; I know most of you didn’t donate for the prizes, but to help a good cause, for which I thank you.  This year’s Clarion Blog-A-Thon will consist entirely of the usual things I know I can offer – story critiques, my usual live-writing and live-revising of fiction so you can see how a professional author writers, and a lot of helpful words.
But for now? You can see how an author offers an apology.  I’m sorry.  And if I make a promise for a future Clarion Blog-A-Thon – or any charity project, really – you can bet your butt I’ll come through, regardless of cancer, heart failure, or novel failure.

A Brief Follow-Up To My Abuse Post

Got a lot of extremely insightful comments on my “An Uncomfortable Reality About Abuse” post yesterday, many of which I’m still processing.  (Mostly over on LiveJournal, but that’s the way it always runs.)  And there will be a follow-up post with further thoughts that I don’t have time for today, but I just wanted to say this:
The comments yesterday did not degenerate into victim-blaming, or misogyny, or misandry, or any of the usual pitfalls that happen when you discuss abuse.  the discussions were sensible, pointed, compassionate, and thoughtful.
This proves that I have one of the best commenting bases in the world, and I’d like to thank all of you for requiring me to hardly ever swing the banhammer.  You guys are the reason I post.  For serious.
Thank you.

Buy My New Story "Black Swan Oracle," in What Fates Impose!

Last week, I told you about my tale in the upcoming fortune-teller anthology What Fates Impose, citing it as my favorite story I’ve written in the last year.  Today, to hopefully encourage you to contribute to the Kickstarter, I give you a slightly larger-than-normal excerpt to wet your whistle:

The crowd waiting below The Oracle’s bulletproof bay window is a mathematically predictable entity.  Still, the Oracle relishes any illusion of chaos – and so, every morning, just before she allows herself one single prayer, she sweeps open her curtains to gaze over the crowd.
Her supplicants look up from their shivered huddling as fluorescent light spills out from The Oracle’s bay window; poor women in smudged hoodies squat next to Armani-clad stockbrokers.  The Oracle’s hundreds of supplicants put up tents faster than the policemen can tear them down, burn garbage to ward off the Seine’s chill winds, buy gristled chicken hunks from illegal street vendors.  The wait can take weeks, so long that people fall in love and fuck and have violently dramatic breakups before The Oracle’s guards fish these poor souls from the crowd to escort them towards an answer made pure with data.
The Oracle’s tide of supplicants is so constant that, like any shantytown, it has developed its own economy… an economy which pulses perfectly in time with the rhythms The Oracle predicted.  She’d spent hours developing algorithms to anticipate the crowd you would get if you charged $25,000 for a single question, answers guaranteed (but not to please), in this geographic and demographic cluster.  She’d analyzed the local politicians, and the bribes she pays remain within .03% of initial estimates.  She’d tracked the movements of the most influential reporters, ascertaining they would pass by here 2.4 times a week, guaranteeing unending press for “The Statistic Mystic,” a name the Oracle loathes.  She even predicted the number of e. coli outbreaks from undercooked chicken.
Yet every morning, before The Oracle orders her guards to escort the first supplicant in, The Oracle kneels.  She above all people knows how irrational prayers are — multigenerational analyses of billions of lives has allowed The Oracle to thoroughly disprove the effects of prayers, bioharmonics, Zener cards, craniometry, reiki, feng shui, astral projection, the existence of God himself as an active entity, and those laundry balls they sell on late-night TV — but when the data models don’t support the desired results, sometimes all that’s left is hope.
Please, she begs, looking wearily out over the young lovers holding hands, the despairing businessmen, the fretting young mothers; transparent clichés, all.  Please let someone bring me the Black Swan Question.
There is, naturally, no answer.  So she grabs the microphone and slips on her persona, her voice booming out over the crowd.
“The Oracle will answer one boring question for $25,000!”  The Oracle talks about herself in the third person because studies have shown this makes the Oracle’s name stick in your mind.  “Yet The Oracle does not need your fucking money.  The Oracle did this to draw attention to the way commercial entities buy and sell your data, hoping you’d recognize how thoroughly businesses manipulate you.  Instead, The Oracle has made millions from extrapolating your futures based on publically-available data.  Now?  The Oracle finds you tedious.  So come to me with an interesting question, or I will release the hounds.”
The Oracle does not actually have hounds.  The Oracle finds it distressing that 76.4% of people don’t get the joke.  Yet the Oracle refuses, on principle, to have a FAQ….

If you’re interested, you can actually hear me read this story at the $15 pledge level.  I always think it’s neat to hear authors read their stories.  You get to hear the inflections they had in their minds, feel their own personal rhythm for the tales, all that.  And I’m gonna go full-on for drama here, given my love of old-time radio.
As an added bonus, one person who donates to the Kickstarter before this Thursday will receive this lovely artwork created by the editor, the talented Nayad Monroe:

Lots of good stuff in here, including a story by Keffy I’m really looking forward to seeing.  So donate, if you like, you know, stories.