Being Crazy Is A Skill.

You have to remember to take your don’t-go-crazy pills even when you feel perfectly fine, and it seems so inconceivable that this tiny ball of chemicals is all that stands between you and screaming breakdowns.
You have to monitor your energy levels constantly, because when you start getting tired you start breaking down in public, and so you go to parties and think, “Okay, I’ve got about forty-five minutes until I melt down, time to make my excuses,” and you say pleasant goodbyes and everyone says they’ll miss you and then you pull over on the side of the road and sob because you screwed up the timing by fifteen minutes and now you’re a mess, a fucking mess. (But at least no one saw you.)
You have to make the fine distinction between “I need this down time to recharge” and “I’m closing off the world like a mummy shutting himself in his tomb,” and if you get it wrong then you can spend three weeks in cloaked isolation, accidentally alienating all your friends and having to make seriously humiliating apologies when you finally haul yourself back into the light.
You have to fake smiles at work even when you’re dead inside, because you need the money, and maybe you’re functioning at about 60% capacity this week but you’ve learned that this 60% needs to be in the area where you earn your goddamned rent money. So you push out the energy for eight hours before you slink home numb and stare at the computer for another eight, a blank deadness before bedtime.
You have to remember that your friends lie to you. They don’t mean to. They tell you heartwarming things they want to believe about themselves, things like “I’m always there for my friends” and “I’ll always support you,” and if you’re not careful you believe them and open up this vomitous spill of anxiety inside you, and after a few months of bathing in your corrosive disability they find some excuse to not see you any more. You learn that there’s maaaaybe one or two people who really are going to get this twisted shit inside you – if you’re lucky – and not to lean on them too heavily, to save them for the really bad days.
You have to remember that your good days are other people’s bad days.
You have to internalize the idea that “emotions” and “actions” can be successfully disconnected, that you can still accomplish shit when feeling really down, and in fact this is your only real hope for survival. And then you have to swallow back an effervescent rage when other depressives tell you that you can’t really be depressed, you did things, you can’t possibly have accomplishments when you’re depressed, and you think of all the other things you weren’t able to accomplish because you had to fight this sucking tide of angst, and you try not to yell. But you might yell. Because you’re crazy, and when you’re crazy sometimes you lose it.
You have to learn to apologize properly for losing it.
You have to learn that being crazy is, in fact, a skill you learn. Nobody’s good at it, and in fact you see some supposedly “capable” people fucking lose it when they’re traumatized by grief. They don’t know how to handle these emotions that you get Denial of Service-attacked with every day, and the truth is that a lot of these so-called “capable” people would shatter under the weight of what you have to bear daily.
But they don’t have all these swirlstorms of depression and rage and anxiety roaring through their heads, and you do. And so you must learn the skills of madness, how to restructure your life so that you can keep going when lesser people would have been bogged down by all this, and some days you get buried under the crazy and yet you grab a shovel and dig yourself out and maybe you’ve lost four days to your flavor of insanity but you have kept going and YAY YOU.
It takes years to learn how to be properly mad. It’s not fun. But the good times you can have around the edges are fun, this reward of learning how to appear normal for days at a time.
You have to fight to be happy. But you can be happy, sometimes. In small bursts of joy.
Part of the skill of madness is learning to treasure those bursts, and to realize that nobody gets to be happy all the time. You just don’t get those times as easily. And so you must refine, and renew, and repurpose, until you’re as good as being crazy as you possibly can be.
I never said it was easy. I simply said it was necessary.

The Audio Book You Can Never Have… And The One You Can.

In about 2007, my mother went legally blind.
Nothing has yet to stop her.
She has a hereditary condition called “angioid streaks” that led to emergency laser surgery that went poorly, scabbing up the center of her eye.  She now gets by entirely on peripheral vision, with what she’s described as “a big cigarette burn” blotching up the middle of her view.
Yet she’s gone parasailing since she’s lost most of her sight.  She’s gone river tubing.  She wanders fearlessly through foreign countries where she doesn’t speak the language, and she refuses to use a cane because she hates the way those things look.
She’s an inspiration.
She can read, painfully, slowly, through big magnifying lenses – but instead she’s opted to listen to audiobooks morning, noon and night.  She has to be one of Audible.com’s greatest customers, as she finishes off about five or six audiobooks a week.
And when my book Flex came out – even though Mom usually hates fantasy books – she wanted to read it.  “When’s the audio book coming out?” she asked.
“I don’t know that it will, Mom,” I told her.  “Most books don’t get audio treatments.  If I get an audio book, it’ll be months from now, and the sign that the book’s selling better than I’d hoped for.”
She sagged.   She’d seen the paperback: small type for, spread across many small pages.  No hope of her getting through it and enjoying it.
And I heard from other friends of mine who wanted the audiobook for similar reasons: they too had bad eyesight, or dyslexia, and the prevalence of the Internet had turned audiobooks from this clunky suitcase full of cassettes into a cheap MP3 file.  And I had to tell them the same thing: I can hope.
And today, the audiobook came out.  It’s about $20 and change on Amazon, and you can buy it if you want, and hear Peter Brooke tell you about videogamemancers who surf the consciousness of videogame villains, and bureaucromancers who backdate time, and the intense love a father has for his little girl – so much so that he’ll risk everything for her.
That’s the version you can buy.  Yet I’d promised another.
Because when I saw my Mom look so sad, I promised her a Christmas present: I would read Flex to her. One chapter at a time, in time for Christmas.  I’m not a professional narrator, but I have enough equipment to do the world’s most focused podcast – and so she’ll hear her son read her the story he painstakingly wrote over so many years.
I’m a little nervous about that. I don’t do voices well.  I tend to read too fast when things get exciting.  I hope I can provide the experience as my Mom wants it.
But amateurish as it’ll be, I’m pretty sure she’ll love it anyway.

A Thought On Male Privilege That Got A Little Too Long For A Tweet

I’m glad when I was starting out I hadn’t read that piece about the female using the male pseudonym on the query or I might have given up.

— Jaye Wells (@jayewells) August 6, 2015

The irony is, a lot of guys succeed based on this same ignorance of their own chances.
Now, this is not to say that we dudes don’t have privilege – because we do, we so very do, based on that article she references (and a ton of other anecdotal data I’ve picked up listening to women discussing their experience in publishing).
Yet the very privilege that trains dudes (and, yeah, usually white dudes) to expect success often trains them to be insanely persistent when other people would have given up – not because they’re more talented, but because they are completely, blitheringly unaware of the odds.  It’s not that they mean to be persistent, but rather that they’ve been conditioned to expect success as their birthright, and so they forge onwards even though they’re probably not gonna make it.
And a surprising amount of the time, they succeed – whether that’s because they kept trying until they got better (like, *cough*, some people writing blog entries) or they stumbled into lucky breaks they would not have gotten had they been rational about things.
This has been brought up before in a slightly different format, with Kelli Russell Agodon’s essay Submit Like A Man, which talks about the difference in how men and women submit stories.  Given the slightest encouragement, men will flood an editor with tales; women tend to wait longer and submit less.  (And this essay came to light after a Twitter conversation among many women and minorities who’d self-rejected by not sending to markets based on their own perception of their own work.  The general response was, “Don’t do that.”)
Jaye succeeded by not knowing how shitty things are.  (Buy her books.)  And I think redistributing privilege has two vital components: the first is doing what one can to level the playing field by making those who do discriminate aware of all the subtle ways in which they do discriminate.
Yet the other aspect, which I feel is frequently overlooked, is “How do we train people to act like a privileged person?” Because to pull a real-life example, I’ve seen my poorer relatives terrified to say “boo” to a doctor, having been convinced that Doctors Are Gods and You Don’t Sass A Doctor and Just Be Quiet And Take What They Give You, and as a result they got horrible treatment from the same doctors we went to.  Even when they were in the same places as we were, in some cases ushered in the door by us, they still self-sabotaged by not saying, “Uh, we’ve tried that drug and it did not work.”
Part of properly distributing privilege is, yes, ensuring that doctors don’t blow off poor people – but it’s also in teaching them the strength to stand up. Because the crappy thing about getting ignored all your life is that eventually you stop trying to speak – and if you’re lucky enough to find doctors who are receptive to what you have to say, you can still hurt yourself by self-censoring.
So yeah: it’s that bad for women out there. It’s shitty, and it’s terrible, and the odds are not good.  I wish they were better, and this is why I do what I can to fix those odds.
Yet a lot of men, completely unwittingly, have succeeded against terrible odds by simply being too dumb to understand just how low their chances of success were.  They took shots when saner people wouldn’t.  And having seen a bunch of dudes I would have given zero chance make it and make it big, the best I can tell you is that part of engineering success against overwhelming odds is swinging whenever you get the goddamned chance.
It’s not gonna make it even close to an even playing field for women, alas.  But don’t handicap yourself further by refusing to go for it whenever you can.  Because dumber, more privileged dudes will take that shot – it’s what they’ve been trained to do – and you might as well do your best to learn from people who are way less talented, yet way more confident, than you.
(Also, editors? Don’t fucking do that. Not cool.)
(EDIT: And in between the time I started writing this and I finished, Jaye put up this status:

Ah, who am I kidding? I wouldn't have quit. You can't change them. You just have to be so good they can't ignore you.

— Jaye Wells (@jayewells) August 6, 2015

Fuck yeah, Jaye.)

I Don't Trust You. Maybe I Shouldn't.

“You need to trust your partners,” the Generic Relationship Advice says. “If you don’t trust them enough, how can you have a good relationship?”
And the truth is, there’s a lot of partners you *shouldn’t* trust. And they’re not all abusers, either.
The problem is, people often see what they want to see in relationships. And they wind up dating a tattered ghost that has only superficial similarities with you, because the truth is that they never actually saw the flawed you-that-exists – they saw Stability, or they saw Romance, or they saw Raw Passion, and all that other stuff just got quietly screened out.
And you tell them – “Hey, I have some serious kinks but I don’t live this life 24/7, I am not the Goddess of Sexual Pleasure For You,” and they nod and go “Yeah, baby, I know,” when realistically they don’t know, they think they understand what you are but they’re actually mapping so much of their own needs onto you that they forget you have needs of your own.
And they feel so fucking betrayed when it turns out that you weren’t what they imagined you to be.
So a part of that trust comes down to trying to manage expectations. And it sucks to look at someone who’s dewy-eyed with True Love for you and go, “No, you’re not seeing Me right now, and as such I don’t trust you enough to date you.”
But that happens when you’re trying to be sane.
And the Generic Relationship Advice says, “You need to trust your partners to know what they want.” Which sounds like it’s awesome, but the truth is most people actually have zero fucking clue what they want. And if they want something from you that you don’t actually possess, then trusting them means that you’re going to ultimately disappoint them.
Because if they saw Stability when what you actually had to offer was The Ability To Keep Functioning When You’re Upset, shit’s gonna go wrong.
If they saw Romance when what you had to offer was Good Listening Skills, shit’s gonna go wrong.
If they saw Raw Passion when what you had to offer was New Relationship Energy, shit’s gonna go wrong.
And yet it is so goddamned flattering to be thought of as Stability, or Raw Passion, or Romance – to have someone take a side of you that you yourself would like to be and shower you with reassurances that no, you’re an idealized version of yourself. They tell you that you’re Wise and Strong, and the fact is that you’re seven years older than they are and all that Wisdom and Strength is just a tadge more experience, and you’ll still do dumb-ass things when someone hits you from an unexpected angle – but having someone who looks up to you is so hard to resist.  So if you’re not smart you’ll try to play the role of Wise and Strong when that is not, in fact, your native skill….
…and that’ll wreck both your lives as you try to live up to an expectation you can’t actually provide.
And that’s part of the challenge of dating: sometimes, you don’t trust your partners. Sometimes you don’t date people because they believe in the wrong things about you. Sometimes you have to look someone in the eye and go “Yeah, that is a beautiful thing to think about me, but you’re full of shit.”
Try doing that sometimes. It’s hard. It’s very fucking hard.

Why My Drugs Are Fucked Up

“You’re not on a statin right now?” my cardiologist said, distressed.  “Oh no. Oh no no no. You’re a heart patient, you have to be on a statin.”
“I thought I was on a statin: Bystolic.”
“No, that’s a beta blocker. It’s intended to prevent heart attacks. The statin lowers your cholesterol.”
“Isn’t that what Welchol does?”
“It does, a little, but that’s mostly to prevent you slipping into pre-diabetic numbers.  Here, I’ll show you how bad you are: we’re going to run some blood tests to show you what your cholesterol is now, and in four months we’ll show you how much you need the statins.”
Why couldn’t we have had that before?
It would have been a lot easier for me if the doctor had sat down with me and said, “You need to be on four medications: a statin to lower your cholesterol, a beta blocker to prevent your heart from seizing up, a medication to keep you from tipping into diabetes, and Vitamin D to keep the healthy oils in your blood.  If you’re not on one of those at any given time, then my treatment isn’t working.”
Instead – like a lot of doctors – he gives me a bunch of confusing names and assumes I’m following, and I thought I was following, but I’m not.  When I went down to three medications, I thought that was a conscious choice on his part, not a clerical error.  And because doctors are often too damned busy to monitor me as closely as they should, I didn’t have the tools to monitor myself.
I now know: I need statins, or things go boom in my chest. (I’ll be fine, but this could have been disastrous long-term.)  And I apparently need beta blockers.  And Welchol for some reason I’m still nebulous on.
But when doctors fail to educate clearly, it’s their patients who suffer. And I’ve tried to educate myself, but the problem is that the doctor – like, again, many doctors – focuses on the individual segments and not the overall plan.  It’s like telling a soldier, “Go attack that guy” – useful in the short term, but if something goes wrong and the soldier doesn’t understand that her ultimate goal is take this hill and keep it, she may charge off after another enemy.
For me, the medications I’m on are a constant shuffling game, as the doctor brings in new medications and the insurance company denies some and others still go into generic form, and it’s hard to keep up.  What would be nice is if I had a chart:

• Your Beta Blocker: Bystolic.
• Your Diabetic Prevention Medication: Welchol.
• Your Good Cholesterol-Retention Medication: Megadoses of Vitamin D.
• Your Statin: ???

And that way, when things switched up, as they inevitably do, I could know which was which.
And I? Am healthy, and in good mental condition. I can’t imagine how complicated this gets for people who are on don’t-go-crazy medications combined with chronic conditions. It’s a part-time job just keeping my prescriptions constant, and I suspect a lot of people are harmed when doctors think they’re being clear but the patients aren’t understanding as well as they’d thought.

The Lessons Of Dead Children.

This doesn’t end well.
I had a supremely good day today; slept in until 10:30, programmed my first real project in C# (and discovered that though it was a new language, I still had some tricks to teach the native programmers), went out and sanded and stained a bookcase, and then wrote a good 900 words on my new book.
Then Gini and I went out to our backyard, lit up a fine cigar, and drank some exquisite bourbon as the sun set and the fireflies crept out across the yard and shooting stars streaked across a cloud-filled sky.
This still doesn’t end well.
It’s been about fourteen months since Rebecca died, and the world still doesn’t make much sense some days. She was six years old. She died on her birthday. She got brain cancer, and it swelled and grew in her skull until she stopped breathing while I knelt at her bedside, my hand on her ankle.
This doesn’t end well.  None of it does.
And I know the end is coming.  Gini is eleven years older than I am.  Chances are good she’ll die before I will, and what will I do when the love of my life is gone?  I’m a heart patient; I feel a twinge in my chest and there’s my mortality, raw and throbbing, that clammy reminder that one day I will be back on the ventilator – or worse, condemned to the backwaters of some old-age home, helpless and weak as overworked nurses ignore me for hours at a time.
It doesn’t end well.
These sun-touched clouds are so beautiful.
And Rebecca is dead, and with it my last hopes of a just universe. I suppose I should have learned that lesson from my own triple bypass, but I was already forty-two, and that’s a good age for someone to die – a little premature, but I’d lived a lot of life.
Here I am, bourbon in my hand, and Rebecca never got to taste alcohol.
None of this ends well.
And yet that is the lesson: None of this ends well.  The end game for all of us is death, and yet this day I feel oddly cheerful.  I cannot hope to cling to any of this.  Our bodies will fail, and this will all be ripped away from me, and yet…
This cigar is beautiful.
My wife’s hand is warm in mine.
We made wishes upon the stars.
I will not get to keep this.  But that is not the goal.  The goal is to appreciate what we have, in this slim instant between birth and the void, and today I lived every minute of my life to the best of my ability.  I savored that cigar.  I poured my heart into those 900 words.  I wrestled that program into submission.
(I stained the bookcase terribly, but even in that, I learned wonderful new crafts techniques.)
This cannot last.  But it’s been good, as long as it’s been.  And my goal is not to hold onto these moments forever, but to cherish them while they are here.  I have been married to the love of my life for fifteen good years, and maybe that ends tomorrow, but every day of that has been something to appreciate, and even if it goes away that’s more than most people got.
The dog rolls in the grass.  The cigar ember smolders.  My wife smiles as she plans her next trip to Seattle.  And when it is done, we will pour another glass of fine bourbon, and put on Battlebots, and cheer as robots smash each other to flinders.
Rebecca is gone.  But we are here.  And it would be a disservice to the bright streak of Rebecca’s life if we lost that future happiness to darkness, and we do not forget the darkness but tonight we celebrate the life we have left, and huddle tight around a dwindling fire.
She is gone.
This does not end well.
That does not mean the story is not worth telling.

Nexus, Crux, Apex: Some Damn Fine Books Y'All Should Read.

Most new technological achievements in fiction are presented in one of two ways:

• This new thing will save mankind! And some evil people are trying to stop it!
• This new thing will doom mankind! And some evil people are trying to make it popular!

Truth is, every technological achievement comes with benefits and negatives. The Internet made it easier for isolated people to find friends, but it also allows pedophiles to band together. The same algorithms that helpfully suggest your next Netflix show can be hijacked by the government to predict your behavior.  There’s never been a technological revolution that didn’t come with a few bodies in the basement, but fiction tends to not have time to deal with complexity.
Ramez Naam’s Nexus/Crux/Apex trilogy sure as fuck has time to look at both sides of the coin, though.
Nexus is a nano-drug that acts as an operating system in your brain, letting you network with others in real time and hack portions of your consciousness.  It’s been open-sourced, and it is also completely illegal, because the US government is – rightfully – concerned that an interconnected operating system that allows people to rearrange their memories at will and to load Bruce Lee fighting programs into their brain is a security issue that will cause massive breaches.
The book sets up a “massive government vs. spunky hackers” plot, but the issue is that the government’s concerns are very real.  The ramifications of Nexus are as huge to this world as the Internet was to us about forty years back, and whereas the hackers are right that the ability to connect with other people and share experiences is empowering, they are also overlooking the many negative ways that bad people can – and, in fact, will – use this experience to fuck other people over.
In this, the Nexus series is wonderfully complex, because everybody has a point.  The government is clinging to the status quo, yes, but that’s because it’s totally unclear whether the government’s citizens would survive the transition to a transhuman future.  The hackers are occasionally a little cocksure.  This is a Pandora, and Ramez Naam treats it  appropriately as a global issue, starting in the US but soon branching to India and China and, well, everywhere.
And more importantly, the technology feels real.  The black-ops tech the government has will absolutely smash the spunky hackers’ limited resources every time unless they can hook up with other, greater, forces. As such, alliances become a huge issue, and the alliances only work as long as everyone’s on the same page – which doesn’t happen for long as the ramifications of what people can use Nexus to do spreads.
Not to mention the fact that “transhuman” is a real concern – what a bunch of Nexus-enabled people can do outstrips normal people’s abilities, even as it leaves them open to hacking attempts and trojan viruses.  And when the governments clash, and the civil wars break out, and the terrorists start playing their hands…
Well, things get delightfully messy.
The book has a couple of minor flaws – to me, the “renegade hacker” syndrome where one man can rewrite major portions of an OS in days was a break from reality, but an acceptable one – but what I loved about the Nexus series was the sense of enlightenment.  The book has intraconnected Buddhist monks providing serenity, and what’s delightful about the series is that sense of transcendence’s ephemerality.
Because the characters each achieve these moments of perfect grace, a time when everything is made clear to them – and then they have to deal with the grimy details of the real world and forget portions of what they’ve learned, but they are on an upwards climb.
Yet what I love about the Nexus series is that the governments have these moments of perfect grace. There are times when everyone in the chain of command is illuminated, seeing everything as it is – and then some of them retain that knowledge and work to forward the future, while others fall back on old patterns and reject it.  There are several moments where we see clearly what should be done, and we also see the counterweighting forces to understand why it’s not done.
This is a marvelous achievement.  And when the trilogy ends, the characters’ storylines are wrapped up, but the politics do not end.  Nobody finishes on the same page.  They can’t.  That is the very point of the Nexus trilogy: that good people can disagree on how to push forward, and this conflict we see in the real world isn’t good vs. evil, just different priorities weighted.
All that happens with a good crunchy action sequence every fifty pages or so.  Pick it up. Discover the future.