What It's Like To Receive Death Threats

If I ever see Ferrett, I will punch him in the fucking face.
As a blogger, I’ve received three death threats in my time.  I think two of them might have been serious.
But that’s the problem, isn’t it?  I think.  Ego-surfing your name and finding someone who’s said they want their friends to hold you down while they kick you, well… you have to parse that.
(And that’s not even a death threat.  Just good ol’ physical violence.  I’ve gotten maybe one or two of those a year.)
You know they’re probably not serious.  Probably.  So you read the rest of the post, maybe check a couple other of their writings, just to see if they’re prone to overstatement.  If you’re lucky, you see a couple of other ha-ha things where they’ve made other oversized threats to other people, and you realize that they probably aren’t kicking people randomly, and this five minutes of your day has been rightfully spent.
But you wonder.  You have to expend a little bit of brainpower, because this stranger you’ve never heard of has just popped this mental image of you, in a hotel stairway, being held down while some furious guy kicks your ribs until they shatter.  It’s the kind of thing that makes your blood run a little cold that day, even if it turns out it’s just a big ol’ laugh, because the next time you think, “Yeah, I’m going to go to the convention and have a great time!” you flash to that image and wonder: Is that guy gonna be there?
It’s a little sliver in the skin.  It saps the fun from the convention, because now there’s this element of concern that maybe you’ve misread this dude’s sense of humor – and it’s always a dude – and he’s gonna snap and fuck you up.  It’s what I think of as “the insurance conundrum” – almost nobody buys home insurance because they think, “Aw, man, now I get to set my house on fire.”  They buy it because the consequences of not having insurance should that happen are Really Fucking Bad.  It’s not a big risk, miniscule even, and maybe you can get by without it…
…but if you’re wrong, Very Bad Shit happens.
So when you get that shock of a stranger writing in exact detail where he’d like to insert the knife into your body – yeah, you betcher fur I remember that post – you do your damndest to shake it off.  But your options are limited.  Tracking some random dude on the Internet back to his real life lair is difficult at best, and the cops won’t do shit even if they find him, and what if your attempt to get him in trouble metastasizes his anger and really pushes him over the edge?
It’s just a joke, right?  He didn’t mean it.  He was just talking shit among friends.
That’s what you tell yourself.  And you move on.
Mostly.
Look, don’t fucking tell me I don’t have thick skin.  Or that I can’t take a joke.  I’ve been involved in my own Internet shitstorms, the posts where I was the chewtoy of the day for something stupid I said, the one where hundreds of blog posts got written about what a clueless idiot I am.  I’m still posting.  I don’t mind people despising me, or mocking me, or even saying, “I don’t want this asshole near me, he’s not welcome in my spaces.”  That’s their right.
But those death threats?  I worried.  A low-grade worry, but enough that I never told Gini until now because I didn’t want her to worry.  And as a guy who’s pretty comfortable standing in the line of fire, I have to tell you that there were days my fingers hovered over the keys, and I remembered that guy with the knife… and the mental effort involved in going, “That was probably nothing” was enough to make me think, Maybe I shouldn’t blog.
I’m a dude.  That’s a privilege on the Internet, because if you’re a woman, well, in my experience you’re likely to pull far more death threats and physical violence fantasies per audience unit than guys.  And once you achieve a critical mass, chances are good you may get lovely little threats of rape, too.  It’s a game that asshole men play to try to shut uppity women down, and the sad thing is that it works.  A lot.
Which is why I was so heartened when Wizards permanently banned Lucas Florent from professional Magic events, for posting that he planned to “rape” Helene Bergeot, Director of Organized Play for Wizards, over some of the changes to the Pro Tour.  But I had a friend on Facebook who asked:
“Please don’t let anyone think I want to encourage people to say stupid things.  Did he intend to carry out his ‘threat’? Almost certainly not… Rape is a word that is charged with emotion for understandable reasons, but to give him a life ban for writing one idiotic comment in a forum seems like an over-reaction to me.”
Except it’s really not.  On the one level, you can force someone to wonder: “Is this just someone’s sense of humor?  Am I really in danger?” and then have that vague, continuing concern of “If I keep speaking up, maybe some day I’ll discover that I’m wrong, and when I do it’s going to leave lifelong scars.”
Or you can say, “You have the right to free speech; we have the right not to want to deal with you for your stupid fucking statements that make it harder for the people we like to stand up and speak.  This is not a democracy – and if you feel like threatening people even in jest, well, you don’t get to play in our reindeer games.  Because if we have to choose who’s going to be made uncomfortable, guess what?  It’s you, asshole.”
Maybe Lucas didn’t mean it.  Probably he didn’t.  But maybe it’s better for everyone else at Wizards that their employees don’t have to try to decide for themselves who meant it and who didn’t.

The Way I See Things

So I was here earlier this week:

I suspect what most people see is a large, pretty indoor space, or perhaps a marvel of architecture.
What I see is a maintenance nightmare.  Every time I look at something like this, I go, “Those fans up there! What happens when they break? Oh my God, these poor bastards could fall to their deaths. And who the hell puts lights up over here?  They burn out, some minimum-wage schmuck has to risk his damn life to change the bulb.  And who washes these windows?  What happens when one breaks?  That’s all pretty high up, you know.”
This happens with every lighted sign I see.  Gas Station sign?  I’m looking for the access ladder, picturing poor Chuck The New Guy schlepping a bag of fragile fluorescents up to the top of a cold, windy place, cursing the day he got this job.  He has a fear of heights like I do, I’m sure of it.  Has his insurance even kicked in yet?  Did anyone train him?
There’s Chuck, hanging by a thread, all so he can pay the insurance on his ’91 Escort.  He hates life.  Why didn’t they design this shit better?

Reviews For "'Run,' Bakri Says" and "Sauerkraut Station"

I figure you only have a week or two to purchase the latest Asimov’s before my story disappears from the shelves, so let’s go over the reviews for my time-travelling terrorism story “‘Run,’ Bakri Says”:
Aaron over at Fantastic Reviews Blog made it his “Story Recommendation of the Week,” saying this:

Authors have been writing stories inspired by video games since I first began reading science fiction in the 1970’s, and for far longer than that they’ve been writing fiction to illustrate the dehumanizing effects of war. Yet in “‘Run,’ Bakri Says,” Ferrett Steinmetz manages to do both in an original and powerful way….

Aaron also very kindly contacted me to ask whether he could read my story at work – he has a cool program where periodically, he reads good stories to his co-workers, and he was kind enough to choose mine.  But he won’t be reading it right away. Apparently some hack called “Connie Willis” has agreed to show up in person and read her story.
Hrmph. What does she know about writing?  Anyway….
SFRevu erroneously thinks that the time-travelling loop that Irena is caught in is a videogame, a problem my beta readers had at first, too.  (I though I’d massaged that out. Damn.) They still kindly say, “Don’t think of this just as a game story, it has a real chiller at the end. Steinmetz puts together a perfect little story.”
(And of course, there’s still my “Recommended” review from Lois Tilton, which I’m still geeked over.)
As for “Sauerkraut Station,” my Little House On The Prairie in space novella (which you can read for free), Lois Tilton at Locus declined to give it a recommended review but said:

There are a lot of cold equations here, and hard choices: a Cautionary Tale about the idiocy of wars. But primarily it’s a coming-of-age story, and a positive one.

The phenomenal C.S.E. Cooney said, “It has that beautiful barbed quality. You like the protagonist so much you want to crawl right into her skin. And then stuff happens. And you can’t get out. And when the story ends, you emerge shaking…. Made my lunch afterward, muttering to myself, ‘Why do I even bother when there are such people writing?'” Which is funny, because I’ve said that about her. So yay for backscratching!
Asakiyume said, kindly, “This story feels so real, it’s hard to believe that Sauerkraut Station isn’t out there, somewhere. It’s a long story, but every moment is wonderful.”

In The Forest Of Flaccid Cocks

Hello!  Once again, today’s essay is over at FetLife, the Facebook of Kinksters, where I blog about the more personal sexual aspects of my life.
In this, an essay entitled “In The Forest Of Flaccid Cocks,” I talk far too much about penises.  Here’s your sample:

The first thing a man learns from watching porn is that every cock is bigger than yours.
The porn-cocks are so huge that women need to choke up on them two-handed like they were baseball bats, which in a way they are. They’re so huge that when the cock passes over someone’s face, the cock’s shadow occludes them in a penis eclipse. That’s no moon, that’s this dude’s cock.
And if you watch straight porn, then you learn that pretty much any dude can have an enormous schvanzstucker. Gay porn, all the guys have six-pack abs and a face that makes Brad Pitt look like a seven-day-old Jack o’lantern, so you figure those dudes have flown here from the Planet Of Unfeasible Fantasy anyway. But straight porn is filled with dudes who look like that creepy dude at the McDonald’s drive-through window, except here he is unrolling this fire-hose of a whanger to flop across this girl, pinning her to the mattress. Straight porn’s willingness to employ people of all attractiveness levels based on their cock size sends the secret message that everyone has submarine-sized penises, no matter what they look like.
So as a straight dude, I’ve always been worried about my own size….

The essay’s over here, the collected FetLife works can be found here.  Some of them are cross-posts from the blog, but you’ll find a couple of the evil things I’ve done to my wife and so forth, if such things are of interest.  If not, move on, citizen.

How To Not Convince Someone

“Hey, sweetie,” I said to Gini, “Did you hear that Michael Stackpole thinks all professionally-published writers are ‘house slaves’?”
“Maybe a guy who made his name writing Star Wars and Battletech books isn’t the best judge of that,” she replied.
That said, yes, Michael Stackpole called the non-self-published writers “house slaves” in a blog post, and then doubled down in a long essay that explained that no, “slavery” is not merely the trafficking of human chattel, but also the never-ending contracts of indentured servants.  Publishers may not want to steal your body, but they do wish to steal your entire future output.  As such, he is entirely correct, or so the essay goes.
The problem is, it’s a shitty essay.  Not because Stackpole doesn’t have some valid points buried among his overstatement – he does – but because “slavery” is a hot-button comparison that’s going to alienate more than illuminate.
There are certain words that just shut down people’s minds when you start making comparisons, because the actions you’re drawing a parallel between are incredibly hurtful things.  Rape, pedophilia, being called the N-word – there’s a whole zone of actions where if you write an argument that says, “Keeping your NetFlix account is just like an abused wife staying with her husband!” you’re going to thumb a button where a lot of people who have directly experienced the fallout from those actions goes, “So when did NetFlix physically throw you down the stairs?”
You’re yanking on some of their deepest hurts to make a point.  And these people do not go, “Oh, you’re right, NetFlix charging me an extra ten bucks a month is a lot like the husband who broke my daughter’s cheek and then knocked me unconscious so I wouldn’t take her to the emergency room,” but rather roar, “How dare you trivialize my pain by making such a comparison?”
Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t have legitimate points about commonalities.  There probably are some psychological similarities between people who keep justifying their love’s behaviors, and going back based on the idea that their continued support will change them.  But by making a comparison that reaches so deep into people’s personal injury, you haul up years of buried pain and anger… And that makes them angry at you, no matter how logically correct you may be.  You’re not arguing to a stadium of Vulcans.
As a writer, Stackpole has to understand the power of words.  He knows on some level that making the comparison to slavery is going to drag up a lot of personal hatred from those people who are still suffering from the fallout of slavery in America (and yes, it’s still an ongoing wound even if nobody’s currently in chains).  He knows this is going to piss a lot of people off.
Still he says it.  Which is, in itself, a statement of his core values: Fuck your pain.  What’s important is that you know I’m right.  He even admits that he wrote it “to shock and draw attention.”
In other words, Hey, you know all of those buried aches you have?  I’m gonna tapdance on them to show you how utterly awesome self-publishing is.
It’s a bad essay because for every person it draws attention to – and note that I did link to it – it alienates nine more, having people walk away going, “Christ, if self-published authors are this insensitive and strident, why the fuck do I want to deal with them?”  The impression I come away with reading Stackpole is that he’s a smart man with a couple of relevant points buried among the muck, but his main goal is to show you how goddamned smart he is.
(Side note: Wow, the contracts he’s whining about are ones that most competent agents I know would renegotiate stat.  It’s like, dude, if you sign the first thing people put in front of you without reading it carefully, you deserve your troubles.  I’ve only published short stories thus far, and I’ve sent back contracts because I didn’t get the audio rights back after X months.)
Maybe it’s a good essay.  Maybe having so many people reading your blog is better than making a non-incendiary post that few link to.  But it strikes me like punching a stranger in the face, and then saying, “While I’ve got your attention, may I discuss the joys of self-publishing?”  I think overall, some will be swayed, but most will come away with that icky taste in their mouth where Stackpole is now the face of self-publishing, and that face is smirking, cocky, and dismissive.
As for the rest of you: if you’d like to actually convince people instead of stirring up the hornet’s nest, don’t go there.  Yeah, there may be some legitimate points to be made.  People won’t hear it.  And if your goal is to actually convince people, try something else.
If your goal is to be a compassionate human being, stand back.

Herman Cain Pisses Me Off

So allegedly, when a woman asked Herman Cain how he could help her find a job, he pushed her head towards his crotch.  This claim, the fourth in a series, may be enough to sink Herman Cain’s run for President.
This pisses me off.
Look, don’t get me wrong, I’m as down on rape and sexual harassment as anyone.  If the accusations are true, Herman Cain’s a scumbag, and he’s not getting any invites to my birthday parties.
But really?  Herman Cain’s blatantly awful 9-9-9 tax code wasn’t enough to scuttle his chances?  His ignorance that China already has nuclear weapons?  The many other dumb-ass ideas he’s floated aren’t enough to take him out of the candidacy?  Look, I get everyone says something dumb from time to time, and when a million cameras are trained upon you, they’re going to catch every brain fart you have and magnify it.  But Cain’s been consistently numb-nutted enough that it should be apparent that this is a habit.
In a sane world, voters would have analyzed the 9-9-9 plan and gone, “As stated, that’s actually going to cost the average taxpayers more money, give the rich more cash, and take in less money overall than our current system.”  And the majority would have said, “A dude like that doesn’t have the brainpower to make it as President,” and would have chucked him out on his ear.
But no.  What’s killing him in the polls?  Evil sex.  Because the voters of America don’t give a good goddamned if you can’t add two numbers together as long as you’re a nice guy… But yhe minute your personal character’s in question, then you’re not fit.
Here’s the deal: I don’t want a scumbag rapist in office who takes advantage of his position to try to force women to suck his dick.  But that’s the lowest level, on a par with the obvious statement of “NO SERIAL KILLERS PLS.”  That should be our last level of filter, not our only filter.
Because I don’t want a guy who can’t do math in the Oval Office, either.  I don’t want an ignoramus there.  I don’t want a guy who is almost willfully ignorant of international issues.  I want a guy who knows what the fuck he’s doing.
But unfortunately, at this stage of the game, it doesn’t matter how fucking stupid you are.  The only way to get a definitive knock-out is to try to put your dick in the wrong place.  It’s as though we’re trying to elect not a President, but a Nicest Guy In Chief.
I know a lot of nice guys.  Many of them are incompetent.  Can I be so bold as to ask for a maybe-not-so-nice-but-not-a-rapist-either competent dude?  From either party?  Thank you.

Book Review: 7th Sigma

If you are a writer who goes to conventions, you will rapidly ascertain that there is very little correlation between how much you like someone and how much you like their work.  This gets awkward when you find someone who you adore personally, but whose fiction you cannot stand.
Steven Gould, author of Jumper, is one of the nicest guys in sci-fi cons – quietly witty, fun to talk to, perfectly willing to apologize for the wretched movie based upon his book, which he had nothing to do with.  Which is why it’s such an extra-special triumph to report that his latest novel, 7th Sigma, is as fine as his company.
The pitch for 7th Sigma is nothing like the book itself, which is good.  The pitch, designed to get you through the door, is, “Welcome to the territory. Leave your metal behind, all of it. The bugs will eat it, and they’ll go right through you to get it… Don’t carry it, don’t wear it, and for god’s sake don’t come here if you’ve got a pacemaker.”  Which makes it sound like this book is all about battling the ferocious metal-eating piranha bugs that bore through human flesh – a good hook to grab teenaged boys.
But no.  The bugs are simply an excuse to transplant modern sensibilities and knowledge into a frontier lifestyle – what would it be like if we had to live with our medical knowledge and technology, but in a world without computers and construction equipment?  This isn’t a slam-bang action adventure, but rather a series of well-told incidents that outline the cleverness and compassion with which humanity survives in a world made new.  The cleverness inherent in the worldbuilding is filled with the kind of down-home, reassuring solutions that make you go, “No matter how bad things get, we’ll find a way to get by.”
Gould wisely avoids turning 7th Sigma into a Little House on the Prairie Clone by having the lead character Kimble, a young teenaged boy running away from his father, take up a job on an apprentice dojo.  As such, there are many localized lessons on Buddhism and martial arts philosophy from his teacher Ruth, all laced in with the endless chores one has to do to stay alive.  Kimble is a smart kid, sympathetic and brave, and as he learns how to fight, he learns when to fight, and eventually gets caught up in trying to remove the drug dealers and pimps that are making life worse in the territories.
The absolutely brilliant thing about 7th Sigma is that it wisely avoids any semblance of plot.  Which is to say that part of my love of 7th Sigma comes from its sleepy rhythm; each chapter is a parable, mostly self-contained, and it would have been all too easy to knit it into a big slam-bang freight train of a plot that would have moved the story along but lost most of its charm.  No, like All Things Great and Small, each chapter’s an anecdote of Kimble having a mini-adventure, and there are themes that overlap and amplify to provide a sense of movements, but there’s no point at which the Great Bug-Generator is found and everyone must take up arms to defeat the boss monster before it explodes and destroys the world.  This is all intensely personal, at a low level.
(Not to toot my own horn too much, but if you liked the day-to-day rhythm of my Little House-inspired space station novella “Sauerkraut Station,” which came out last week, I almost guarantee you’ll love 7th Sigma.)
The only real ding about 7th Sigma is that it ends with a lot of questions unanswered – not personal questions, since Kimble’s personal journey is wrapped up, but this book is clearly sequel-bait in the sense that hey, you know those crazy metal-bugs, there’s clearly more to tell.  And that’s fine.  When a book’s this good, I don’t begrudge the sequel-baitness of it, but rather look at it as the first salvo in a series of tales I’m quite anxious to hear the rest of.
In the meantime, I’ll just say that 7th Sigma has been responsible for a lot of hot water usage around here, as I devoured a quarter of it at a time in the bathtub, then handed it off to my wife for her bath.  We’re wrinkled, but happy.