Photos From The FLUX Release Party! (Specifically, My FLUX-Themed Nails!)

So last Friday, at indie Cleveland institution Loganberry Books, I held my The Flux release party!
(The sequel to Flex is out. You knew it was out, right? All right, continuing on.)
Anyway, it was a good night.  As usual, my Mad Manicurist Ashley did my nails to match my book:

(Yes, those are Xbox logos on my thumbs. Why? Because Valentine DiGriz is an Xbox girl.  Should anyone ever cosplay, it’s the Xbox controller she has on a bandolier at her hip.  Assuming that’s still a bandolier.) But I got dressed up in my usual “author” suit, which some ladies deemed as “extremely kissable”:
And Loganberry Books had me on a sign out front, like I was a real author and everything:
And I had Great Scott’s Bakery – the best cupcakes in Cleveland, and I assure you I’ve tried ’em all – do me up two sets of Flux-themed cupcakes.  The first were Boston Kreme-flavored cupcakes, which if you’ll recall Kit said were the sign of a slovenly nature and yet, strangely, were Valentine’s preference:

The second were vanilla kreme, but Scott (yes, Great Scott’s bakery is run by Great Scott) wanted flames on the cupcakes, and so made really high poofy flamey cupcakes.

I did not get photos of the event – I usually take a photo of the audience, but this time I forgot.  But I’d say about forty people showed up to hear me do an Extremely Dramatic reading, including a Surprise Sweetie Appearance from my sweetie who came all the way from Pennsylvania – which would be the drive-in record if not for another person I knew who’d driven four hours from the hell-and-gone side of Michigan to see me for an hour or two.
And I read my Dramatic Chapter, and shilled for my goddaughter Rebecca’s charity Rebecca’s Gift, and did not eat cupcakes until the next morning.  
And there was only one cupcake left over:

I devoured that sucker.  That cupcake was for me.
And it was sweet.

The Gift She Gave Me So I Could Live Alone

So Gini is now in Seattle. She’s on a cross-country trip for three weeks, leaving me at home with the dog.
It’s pretty lonely.  Not too lonely; our youngest daughter has moved back in with us for a few months while she finds her feet, but still.  I’m used to a life with Gini, and not having her sitting across from me while I work feels empty. I’m staying up hours later than I normally would, because I’m avoiding going to a bed without a Gini to snuggle in it.
But my wife loves me.
Honestly, she could have just dumped a bag of Bachelor Chow in the basement and skedaddled off, but instead she busted her ass on a project to remind me of her love.  She’d been threatening to make me an otter quilt for months, ever since we’d found some otter fabric in a store in Oregon and I squeed “ZOMG OTTERS I LOVE OTTERS OTTER FABRIC.”
Yet I didn’t understand why she’d taken to staying up late into the night, sewing and cutting and pinning and laying out, until she said to me, “I won’t be here, but my quilt will be.”
Such love.
And when she finished it, I squeed.  It was big, so I could sleep underneath it, and heavy, because I like warmth, and it was full of love.  And it looked like this:

It’s hard to see the otters from this distance, but she did a wonderful job – putting them in little swirling circles so it looks like they’re swimming. It’s a very active quilt. And it’s full of otters, my favorite mammals.
And when she presented it to me, it looked like this:

She’s gone, and she’s still gone, and she’ll be gone for another few weeks still. It’s a lonely house.
But I can go to bed a little sooner, because when I do I am wrapped in her love.
And otters.

Mastering Polyamorous Alert Notifications

So here’s something at polyamory that I flat-out suck at: transitioning into my partners’ new partners.
When I arrive on the scene, I know what’s going on: Okay, she has a husband, and a boyfriend who might as well be a second husband. But she’s affectionate to me, and clearly I am beloved despite my newness, and so I accustom myself to this stable landscape.
Then she starts dating someone new, and my neuroses eat me alive.
Why is she dating someone else when she has me? I ask, even though I date other people when I have her, but that’s different, she’s awesome and kissable and who wouldn’t love that, whereas I’m this leaking bag of DNA cluttering up the house.
I get nervous, which depending on my mood can express itself as cool distance, or irrational anger, or smothering clinginess.
I’m not unusual. The whole “Add new person, everyone loses their shit” is a reasonably common denominator in polyamorous relationships.
But you know what makes it way tougher?
Nobody agrees WHEN a new person has been added to the equation.
Most polyamorous relationships have an agreement in there somewhere that goes, “When a relationship with someone else hits critical mass, you’ll tell me about it.” (Except in don’t-ask-don’t-tell relationships and in some forms of relationship anarchy, but even the anarchists usually have a gentleman’s agreement to say, “By the way, I’ve decided to move in with Adam.”)
The problem is, “critical mass” varies *very heavily* from person to person. It’s untenable except in the paperworkiest of relationships to email someone daily, outlining every flirtation you had that might go somewhere – particularly if you’re heavily active in the kink community – meaning that it’s kind of up to you to decide when a relationship has hit the Okay, Probably Should Ping My Lovers’ Radar phase.
But when?

• When they start flirting with you?
• When you start flirting back?
• When you start flirting back and decide that you really like the attention? (Which *is* a distinction, yes, for those of us cursed with unconscious flirting capabilities.)
• When you scene at a club?
• When you scene in private?
• When a scene’s aftercare turns unexpectedly steamy?
• When you kiss? (I mean, I kiss a lot of people. It’s like a moist handshake.)
• When you plan a date?
• When the date goes well and you decide a second one is on tap?
• When you’ve decided to have sex with them?
• When you have sex, and the sex goes so well you plan a date? (Don’t laugh, this happens to swingers.)
• When you first feel that emotional pang of “Crap, this person matters to me?”
• When you first feel that physical pang of “Crap, this person turns me on?”

The list goes on and on, and it’s filled with edge cases and weird turns because kink and polyamory and attraction gets routinely weird.
Yet the problem is, most folks agree “When this relationships hits critical mass, it’s time to tell the other partner.” Yet when one person thinks “critical mass” is “flirting” and the other thinks is “The kiss went well enough I want to pursue this,” well…
…shitstorms of insecurity arise. Because now you’ve got the scarybump of What Does Potential New Partner mean, and also your partner has just demonstrated that they don’t know when you think something is significant.
That makes everything harder.
And again, it gets more complicated when you’re dating someone, and last month you didn’t care all that much who they were sleeping with as long as they got tested, and now you’re emotionally closer to them so you want to be more inclued to their other romances.
Like a lot of miscommunications, nobody’s exactly at fault here – it was just two different definitions that you didn’t quite jine up – but things can go south really fast if you don’t believe in honest mistakes.
So I feel one of the better skills to prioritize mastering in a polyamory model that includes active dating is synchronizing notification expectations. Having discussions on when to properly ping your lover to go, “Hey, heads up, this is becoming significant” – however you define significant – can sidestep a lot of problems, even if that partner has no say over who you’re dating.
And the trick is to sit down and go, “Okay, how much do you want to know?” Like for me, “making out” is something I do with friends. Friends I trust and love, yes, but I have a lot of sexual relationships without a romantic component. Fondness, yes, but not necessarily romance…
…so my wife wants to know once I either a) have decided I actively want to sleep with someone, or b) am falling romantically for someone I’m sleeping with. (And yes, those are two separate things in my mind.)
Whereas for me, I don’t want to hear the fine details of my wife’s sex life – “good” or “bad” will do – but since she’s engaging with fewer people, if she starts flirting with someone with intent, I’d like to know. I’m okay with her smooching whoever she wants, but I want to have an idea of who she’s with.
Yet I have a sweetie who I don’t even need to know. She’s a swinger. She has a lot of sex. As long as she gets tested, I’m happy to hear great stories when we get together.
And my other partners have their own definitions of when they want to know, and what they want to know. And part of being a good partner is telling them what they want to know, when they want to know it – not out of any sense of rules, but because I love them and I recognize it can be stressful for new relationships to rewrite the established Thing we have going on here, and so I want to make them as comfortable as possible.
And looking back at a lot of my failed poly relationships, those critical existence collapses have often been directly attributable to the two of us having different ideas of when it was time to go “Okay, New Person is here!”
We freaked out about What New Person Meant, and then we freaked out over How Could You Not Know To Tell Me Before All Of This. And while less neurotic couples may do better on What New Person Meant – remember, I told you I was shit at that part of things – I still see good communication habits evolving to stop the How Could You Not Know.
So maybe have a discussion now, before New Person shows up. Ask your partners when they’d like to be informed. Because if your partner thinks “flirtation” is when the alert gets triggered, and you think it’s “after the sex turned romantic,” well, you’re gonna have a situation that can look a lot like concealment or cheating even if that’s not at all what you intended to do.
So, you know, talk now. Before you surprise anyone. In a bad way.

THE FLUX Release Party Tonight In Cleveland! With FLUX Nails! And FLUXcakes!

So the last of the Great Flux Events is tonight in Cleveland – my book release party, at Loganberry Books, at 7:00.  I got my nails done according to that fantastic cover, and my favorite cupcake maker in all of Cleveland is making donut-themed cupcakes.
All that’s needed are, well, people!  And I hope some show up!  Maybe even some of you!
(Though if not, I’ll drown my sorrows in two dozen cupcakes. So I may die. Vital that you come, then.)
Anyway, that’s the last of the event parties for this year.  (I tried to get a signing in Chicago for next weekend, but no bookstores wanted a Ferrett that weekend, and then I got an invite to a wedding, so… sorry, Chicago, get it together.)  I’ll probably do some more activity for next year’s The Fix, but that’s a long time off.
Right now, The Flux has been out for four days, and a surprising amount of people have read it in a single day, and they’ve seemed to dig it.  The book’s available if you want to order it from Amazon or Barnes and Noble or whereever, and if not, well, don’t mind me. I’ll be crying in the corner, my face smeared with delicious cupcakes.
Move along. I said move along.

Four Things I Learned About Sequels From Watching The Empire Strikes Back A Billion Times

Hey there! I’m on a big, whizzing blog tour right now to support my new book The Flux, writing about twenty entries and interviews – and I still want more!  If you have a Literary Blog Of Note or a podcast you’d like me to be on, let’s talk!
But as y’all know, I’m a big Star Wars fan, and when it came time to write the sequel to Flex, I cribbed from the best.  Over at Sci Fi Bulletin, I wrote the Four Things I Learned About Sequels From The Empire Strikes Back (and how I applied them to writing The Flux). So if you want to know what Empire did right in following up Star Wars, go read!

Rock Band 4: The Best Party In A While

When Rock Band was ascendant, we used to have Rock Band parties every week. People would come to La Casa McJuddMetz from all over to play fake plastic instruments and sing at full volume.
But that dwindled as the game did, and then Rock Band died after the stupendous effort of Rock Band 3.
Yet when I discovered that Rock Band 4 was releasing on the same day that my book The Flux did, well… that was kismet.  Left to my own devices, I’d refresh Amazon sales ranks obsessively and check for new reviews.  Having friends over, drinking cider and fumbling at the drums was the best distraction I could hope for!
So how was it?
Preliminary feedback on Rock Band 4 is… not good.  We bought it for the XBox One, and none of our old plastic instruments worked – including, annoyingly, our Ion Drum kit, the badge of how truly obsessed we were at the height of it –  so we had to buy all new plastic instruments.  (And let’s be honest – Rock Band has the better gameplay, but their guitars have always been mushy and awful. I want to use my old Guitar Hero guitars.)  They said we could import all our old favorite songs purchased on the XBox 360 platform, but as of last night only about a third of the songs we’d bought were actually marked as “purchased.”
They’re working on all of that, but what a rough start.
The game itself is… weirdly mixed.  If you like Rock Band, well, it’s more Rock Band.  But it feels unpolished thus far.  Gini and I started, with the game not knowing us from Adam, and when we played our first song (B.o.B’s “Airplanes,” a very easy one), it said, “Hey do you want to do an encore?” and gave us a selection of four song types (“A song from the 2000s,” “A Devo song”) to vote for.
Pretty cool.  So we selected “An alternative song.”  And on our second song ever – again, not knowing our intrepid skill level – it chucked us straight into the five-star difficulty of Muse’s “Hysteria,” a song that no beginner would ever be able to complete.
So yeah. Not so great.
But the core of Rock Band is pretty untouchable, and pretty soon we were all arguing who got to be on drums and choosing songs and being baffled by the (still extremely large) selection we’d cultivated.  We sang at full volume regardless of talent, and bombed out a couple of times, and the people who weren’t playing were off by the snacks yakking it up, and we made new and awesome friends and saw people we hadn’t seen in months.
So that was good.
And that’s why Rock Band keeps chugging along; the central gameplay brings people together. You all work to surpass this song, and it brings people together.  They may have better things in store – they had “freestyle” guitar solos, where you weedle away needlessly and the program creates appropriately okay guitar solo guitar noises, but it was mostly confusing for people.
So is it a great game? I’ll let you know when I’ve put in some more hours.  But for now, it gave me a great party with some of my crushes and friends all coalescing, and that was what I needed.  So I’ll give it a shot.
(SIDE NOTE: Nathan asked me, “So are we ever going to find out what happened with your webcomic My Name Is Might Have Been?  And the answer is, I actually tried to find the old plot notes for that to sync with the Rock Band premiere, going into my basement and searching through my last three laptops to see if I could locate the overview Cat Valente and I wrote.  No dice on two laptops, and could not locate a charger for the the last and oldest laptop.  If it ain’t there, I may try to recreate it, but I’d rather have what Cat and I agreed to.  So some day.  Assuming I can find a charger for an ancient Toshiba.)

THE FLUX Is Out Today!

If you are an author, you understand the importance of Tuesday.
Tuesday is when new books release in the USA.
And every Tuesday is a new “book birthday” for a host of authors – that day when their baby is shoved out a window, and there’s either a teeming crowd of people cheering in the street to catch it, or bouncing baby boy hits the pavement.
And with that cheery thought, it’s all done! This book I have been talking about for months is now in the public’s hands, and either y’all will like it or you won’t!
If you’re interested, well, it’s out.  At Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell’s, or, well, just about everywhere.  And it’s getting some nice reviews on Goodreads!
And Ken Liu – one of the most honored writers in modern science fiction – had this to say:
“The Flux is the best kind of sequel: bigger, deeper, scarier, funner. The emotional journey it takes the reader on is just as thrilling as the jaw-dropping wonders of videogamemancy and bureaucramancy. With the ‘Mancer series, Ferrett Steinmetz has achieved something rare in contemporary fantasy: a world that feels both truer and more magical than our own.”
So… yeah.  If you feel like promoting this sucker further, I told you how last week.  (Hint: Talking about it on social media and reviews are the life’s blood of any nascent author.)
Fly free, little book!  Now fail or succeed on your own damn merits!