I am completely innocent. Don't listen to the old man.

I don’t want to imply that when you have a small human to take care of, you can’t get anything else done, but I (at least) tend to let non-essential systems atrophy. Navel-gazing (which, I will be honest, is often what this blog is about) drops off tremendously, twitter accumulates a cobweb or two, the elliptical machine gathers some dust, our front yard…

My god, guys; the front yard. Seriously. If it weren’t for the pallet of wine-in-a-box I sent the planning committee last Christa McAuliffe Day, I’m pretty sure I’d be able to paper our family room in letters from the HOA.

None of that implies I’ve had nothing going on. On the contrary, I’ve been a busy little beaver, even on the internet, just not here. Contracted writing gigs. The slow push towards book publication (more on that soon(tm)). Basically, since I don’t find I have the mental bandwidth for rumination and musing aloud, I focus on concrete writing tasks meant to ensure that I’m hitting the keyboard every day. For instance, I’ve been writing articles for a number of gaming sites and, when said sites are inevitably swept under by a wave of spambots and turned into the internet equivalent of a Brood Mother from Dragon Age, I come back to my gaming related blog and write stuff there.

Indirectly, that’s what I wanted to talk about.

Four months ago, as the little man started to release us from the iron grip of Infant Sleep Schedules, I took a look at what I’d been writing since his arrival and found that examples were a little thin on the ground.

“I need to get my fingers back on a keyboard,” I thought to myself. Then I sighed, because the very idea seemed kind of exhausting. What to write?

“Baby steps,” I replied to myself, then giggled madly, because… you know… ‘baby’… and I have a baby… and…

Still needed a lot more sleep at that point, I think.

Anyway, what I decided to do was just write about what I was doing in this MMO I was playing. That’s it. I found the situation I and a couple of my friends had put ourselves in to be kind of compelling and interesting and dammit even if everyone else in the world thought it was boring as hell, I didn’t.

That was the key, really; it interested me, so I wrote about it without needing to be prodded. Hell, it was something I looked forward to every day and as a result, I was putting a thousand or fifteen hundred or two thousand or sometimes three thousands words down, every day.

What I didn’t worry about at any point was is someone going to read this? Hell, I assumed that no one was reading it (except Kate, who always reads everything, because she’s wonderful). It was always kind of a surprise when anyone I knew mentioned it. One friend who didn’t play took the time to tell me that he enjoyed the stories, even if he had no intention of checking out the game. De went so far as to try to figure out why I liked the topic so much that I was writing about it every day, because it was curious.

In any case, that didn’t happen that much, and honestly, I didn’t care. Throughout the whole thing, I’ve been writing for me. Partly to remember; partly to just be writing something; mostly to entertain myself.

And a funny thing started happening.

People started leaving comments. Asking questions. Asking for more. Telling me that I wasn’t allowed to stop, and in fact needed to post more frequently.

That was kind of nice.

Then, a few days ago, I logged into a website that — if you do the sort of things that I do in that game I’ve been writing about — is pretty much the single most important website to have on speed dial.

And at the top of the page, before any of the important stuff that you actually come to the site for, there’s a note that says “Hey, if you’ve got a few minutes, you should really go read the posts being written over at this blog here,” and it was me they were linking to.

Easiest example of what that was like would be if you were really really into knitting, and you blogged about it, and one day you went to Ravelry and found a link to your little blog on the front page.

It was kinda cool.

Now, I’m not telling you any of this to brag (because that would be… incredibly ridiculous) — the point here is that I wrote the thing I wanted to write and (observing the constraints of the topic) wrote it well.

That’s it.

I didn’t network. I didn’t “promote my brand.” I didn’t “find my audience”; I did a thing I enjoyed, and an audience found me.

Are We Even in the Zipcode of your Point?

NaNoWriMo is here once again, and a lot of writers are revving up their engines for another fifty thousand word sprint. I’m watching it all happen with what is, for me, an uncharacteristic silence, because it’s an interesting thing to observe. A lot of excitement. A lot of nervous energy.

A lot of people wondering if what they’ll write is going to be marketable.

What? Really?

I feel like this is where I should mention Chuck.

Chuck Wendig will be the first to tell you that writer’s write, and that is absolutely true, but I want to point out what they don’t do, so they have time to write.

They don’t seek their audience. They don’t fuck around with SEO. They don’t network.

Alright: yes they do, but not while they are writing.

I don’t want to make it sound like professional writers can ignore that kind of stuff but, in my opinion, thinking about any of that (or, god forbid, if what you’re working on it “saleable”) while you are supposed to be writing is the worst. possible. thing.

When I was a kid, I used to go fishing with my dad and granddad. (I was generally terrible at it, because I over-thought it, but if I remembered to bring a book along to read I usually ended up catching the biggest fish, because I left the line alone.) One of the things that always used to confound me about river fishing in a boat was the tie-line. It didn’t matter how I pulled that line into the boat in the morning, or how I coiled it up, or how well I’d avoid disturbing that coil during the day — when we got back to the dock in the afternoon, that fucking rope would be tangled up.

I would pull at it, and frown at it, and start to work through the knots and twists, but whenever it seemed like I was making any headway, I’d look at the parts of the pile I wasn’t working on and realize that the whole situation had only gotten worse.

The closer we got to the dock, the faster I’d work (because tying up was the one cool boat-thing I got to do), and the worse it would get.

Then we’d pull up about ten feet off the dock, and my dad would look down at this colossal fuck-up I’d managed to assemble in less than ten minutes.

“Just throw it all in the water,” he said.

“But –”

“Throw it in and let it float there for a minute,” he’d continue. “It’ll sort itself out.”

So I did.

And it did.

Every time.

That’s what I’ve found in writing. Do the thing you want to do. Do it as well as you can. But don’t get ahead of what you’re doing and start thinking about what this thing will do.

It has to be before it can do anything.

Throw it out in the water. It’ll sort itself out.

There are things I want my kids to understand about me — what I think about the Big Questions like life and death and religion and Faster Than Light Travel and why it’s important that Han shot Greedo first. I hope I get the chance to have those conversations, but maybe I won’t, so I’m going to write them some letters.

And I figure I’ll put them up here, so there are as many redundant copies as possible.

What I Think About Space and Traveling Faster than the Speed of Light

Hey kiddo,

I think you’re probably going to be around me long enough to know that I like science (and science fiction) stuff that has to do with space. There are lots of reasons for this, and many (maybe even most) of them have to do with the fact that I think space is pretty amazing. The way the planets move through the solar system, the way the solar system moves through the galaxy, and the way the galaxy moves through the universe — it’s all pretty awesome. The universe is very big — “vast” is the word that lots of people like to use — and while that can be pretty scary to some people (sort of the way it can be scary to stand on top of a really tall building and look down), it can also be exciting, because there’s so much to see. People have been on the Earth for a pretty long time and we still haven’t figured out or learned everything to there is to know about this world; and there are so many more worlds out there, full of things to learn, that we will probably never run out.

Think about that: there will always be something new to learn, for the rest of time. I think that’s a very good thing.

(I’d hate to know everything — I’d get bored.)

But there is something that comes up when people talk about space that I wanted to write about. It’s called Faster Than Light travel, which is what people call flying in a spaceship from one planet to another at a speed faster than the fastest thing we know about in the whole universe: light.

There are a couple reasons people talk about faster than light travel, and I wanted to explain them.

Reason #1: Space is Big
I know I already said this, but I think I need to give an example, because I didn’t really understand how big ‘big’ was until someone gave me an example, so let’s talk about just the solar system and how big that is.

I know you’ve probably studied it in school, and while I’m very proud of the model you made with all the planets and the sun, it might make you think that the solar system will fit onto one big piece of white cardboard, and that isn’t quite true, so we’re going to make a model of the solar system in our head.

First, we need a sun. The sun on the model you made for school was probably about the size of a baseball, so we’ll use that: take a baseball and put it out in our front yard. That’s our sun.

Now we’re going to walk out to where the Earth would be in our little model. To do that, you have to take about ten giant, dad-sized steps down the sidewalk on the way to the mailbox, then stop. Look back at the baseball. That’s how far the sun is from the earth. Now look down at the sidewalk. See if you can find a grain of sand down there. That’s how big the Earth is, compared to the baseball sun.

If we wanted to walk out to Pluto at the edge of our model solar system, we’d have to walk three blocks down the street. If you looked back, and the trees weren’t in the way, you probably couldn’t even see the baseball anymore (unless someone held it up for you, and it would be hard to see even then). While you’re all the way out there, don’t bother looking for Pluto — it’s much smaller than our sand-grain Earth.

And if, on your three-block walk, you spotted a fairly small marble lying in the gutter, that would be Jupiter, but you probably won’t see it, because that marble could be two-and-a-half blocks from our baseball sun in any direction — not just the direction we walked.

Space is REALLY Big

If you wanted to stay in this model of the solar system that we made and walk to the closest star from our sun, that would be Alpha Centauri. To keep everything kind of close to the right distance away, we would have to get another baseball and mail it to Aunt Barbara out in New York, and then you’d have to walk from our house to hers. (That’s actually not quite far enough away, but to make it far enough away we’d have to swim out into the ocean after our baseball for about a hundred miles, and I don’t want to do that, so let’s just say it’s at Aunt Barbara’s.)

Reason #2: We Travel Really Slow

Let’s say we actually wanted to walk all the way to Aunt Barbara’s house to visit the Alpha Centauri baseball. People all walk different speeds, but if you’re a grown up, and you’re in pretty good shape, and you have enough food, and the weather stays nice, it would probably take you about two and a half months to walk that distance. That’s something like 15 or 20 miles of walking a day.

And that might seem like it would take a really long time, but if we actually could fly to Alpha Centauri in two-and-a-half months, scientists would be pretty amazed, because that’s MUCH faster than it takes light to get to the real Alpha Centauri, and light is the fastest thing we know about. If you were traveling at the same speed as the speed of light, it would take you about four and a half years to walk to Aunt Barbara’s house, because you could only walk a little less than two miles every day. (And that doesn’t mean that light is slow — light is not just fast, it’s fastest — it’s that space is so big.)

And four and a half years is how long it would take light.

We aren’t nearly as fast as light.

In fact, if we walked to the Alpha Centauri baseball at Aunt Barbara’s house at the same speed as the fastest ship we’ve ever sent out into space, it would take us seventy thousand years to get there, which would be like only taking about nine giant, dad-sized steps every day. It would hardly seem like moving at all.

Reason #3: We Really Want to Go to Other Worlds

I kind of tricked you — I said there were only two reasons, but this one is also pretty important. The thing about other worlds and other stars is that when we get to thinking about them, we get really excited and we want to go see them. Humans like to touch things, to make sure that they’re real and see how they feel, and there’s probably always going to be a part of us that won’t really believe in something until we can hold it.

And that’s probably the biggest thing that makes science fiction writers (and scientists) write things about faster than light travel: we really want it to be possible, because if it isn’t (and it probably isn’t), that means we will never get to go visit other stars in person.

That’s the important thing I hope you understand, because it’s easy to get confused about this if you see me reading a book or watching a movie or playing a game where the heroes are flying from planet to planet in a few seconds; you might think that something like that is possible, or at least that I believe it’s possible.

I don’t.

I think that for as many lifetimes as our brains can really imagine, humans are going to live on Earth (and maybe a few of the other planets and moons in our solar system), simply because it’s impossible for us to get anywhere else. I think faster than light travel is kind of like fairies and ghosts and dragons — something that’s fun to read about, or something I’ll use in a story when I need something kind of special or magical to happen, but not something that exists in any kind of useful or useable way.

Now I’m going to tell you why that doesn’t matter to me, and why I think it’s important for scientists to keep studying space and other stars and planets.

Staring at the Stars

There are a lot of stars in the galaxy that are close enough for us to get a pretty good look at with the telescopes we have today, and every couple years our ability to look out into the galaxy gets better — we get better at seeing things, we get better at figuring out what it is we’re looking at, and that tells us more and more about the galaxy, which turns around and tells us more about our own world, and about us.

Right now, we’re getting to the point where we can really start to tell if there are any planets around other stars that are like Earth; the kind of planets that the life that we understand would grow. In a few years, we’ll probably even be able to tell that about the moons around big planets like our own Jupiter. That’s going to be an incredibly interesting and exciting time.

But what do I mean when I say it will tell us something about us?

Well, I live on Earth. If I want to, I can tell you how the air smells, and how bright the sky is today, and how cloudy it is; how warm, how cold, and how windy. I can tell you about the birds I see flying around, or the prairie dogs looking at me out of their burrows as I drive home, or how great it is to see you smile when I pick you up from school. I’m not a scientist, but I’m kind of an expert on some parts of the Earth.

One thing I don’t know, though, is if there’s anything else out there in the whole universe like us, and that would be a kind of amazing thing to know, I think, no matter what the answer is.

Imagine if you and your family lived on an island in the middle of the ocean, too far away to travel to any other islands. Now imagine if you knew for sure that you were the only people on any of the islands in the whole ocean — think about how special and amazing you would feel — also, think about how much better you might treat that island that you’re on if you knew that it was the only island you were ever going to get, and if you screwed up your island there wouldn’t be anyone else on any other island to keep going. You might feel kind of lonely in the great big ocean, all by yourself, but at least (maybe) you’d have a purpose.

Now imagine the other answer: if you knew for sure that lots of other islands had people on them. Maybe not people (at all) like you, but still living people who are going through the same kind of island-experiences as you. You will never meet them, and you’ll probably never really even get to talk to them, but just knowing that they’re out there would make you (well, me) feel like part of a much bigger Thing than anything we (I) have ever been a part of. People aren’t so good at being part of all the living things on Earth, but maybe we’d be better at being part of the living things Everywhere. For me, at least, that would be a pretty amazing feeling too. Maybe we’d feel less ‘special’, but we might not feel so alone.

(Also, maybe we’d act better if we knew other people were watching. I know that works on me when I’m at the movies.)

But of Course That Isn’t All of It

Even if we weren’t able to find out about other living things on other worlds, and even knowing that we’ll never travel anywhere but here, I still think that studying the stars and planets beyond our own is important simply because right now, it is one of the only ways in which we (people) look for knowledge just because it’s out there.  No company is going to make a billion dollars if we find out there’s life on one of Jupiter’s moons; no one is going to win an election if we find an underground lake on Mars. When we look out at the stars, we are (almost always) looking just to look; just to learn.

We are looking just because there is Stuff We Don’t Know out there, and We Want to Know It.

That wanting to know things — that desire to understand everything that isn’t us — is (I think) one of the best parts about people. I think it’s the thing that makes us people, and it’s maybe the thing that helps make us better people.

It’s noble.

You probably won’t hear me use that word very often, so I’ll tell you that it means “better than we usually are”, which is a pretty good thing to be.

We will probably never fly to another star at speeds faster than the speed of light — doing that is probably impossible, and even if it isn’t, it’s so far past the science that we understand today that the only way we can even imagine it happening is with silly-but-fun things like warp drives and hyperspace drives and jump drives and all kinds of magic wands that people like me bolt lights and buttons onto until they look like machinery — but that doesn’t matter.

I don’t think it’s about traveling to other stars. It’s about understanding them (and us) better.

And that’s always worth it.

Love you, kiddo.

Dad

Where am I? What day is it? Who're you?

My life has been roughly analogous to that tired duck cliche: churning madly beneath the surface, but kind of boring and not blogging very much up above. Let’s see if I can’t provide you with a clear view of my feathery, web-footed underside.

Daddy

Obviously, this is the most important news. Sean Douglas was born on January 25th, which mostly explains my lack of internetting during February.

Adorable. Helpless. Determined to destroy your work/life balance (in a good way).

I’ve walked the Daddy Road once before, and while much of it is familiar, every kid is different, and there are all kinds of Sean-shaped cul-de-sacs and loops and trails and dead-ends that I’ve got no previous experience with whatsoever. Still, Kate seems to think I know useful tricks and baby-optimized kung-fu, and I hate disappointing her, so I soldier on.

I’m tired, obviously. Neither Kate or I can really work on anything for extended periods of time without interruptions unless our counterpart takes one for the team for awhile.

And it’s undeniably awesome.

In a nod to parent nerd solidarity, I’ll mention that I was very disappointed that I really had no record (or clear memory) of the first few months of Kaylee’s life, other than a few crappy cellphone pictures, so I’ve endeavored to find a better way to outsource my exhaustion-depleted brain for Sean’s early days. I’d originally bought a nice calendar/notebook to use as a journal (because who doesn’t love to have an excuse to buy another nice notebook?), but in the end the solution we’re actually using is the nerdiest: a private Twitter account on which Kate and I both post notes about our day-to-day challenges (and retweet relevant stuff from our main accounts to capture that information as well), which is then compiled and archived in a blog (again, private).

The end result is a dated journal of thoughts and notes that we can access and update from pretty much any device we own, including our kindles. There may have also been some early use of Google Docs spreadsheets to track feedings while we performed them, but I’m not saying.

Dayjob

Kate was sure that as soon as Sean was born I’d get a non-contract, long-term job offer, simply because that would be the point were it would finally be convenient for me to be home.

I call this "specialworkdrink".

Kate’s very smart. I did in fact get an offer the day after Sean was born — a proper job at a place I’d done some short contract work in the past, so that’s kinda cool.

Health

I hit an age milestone in February, took stock of my condition, found it moderately functional, but in need of a tune-up, so I’m back to tracking my calories using Livestrong and hitting the elliptical whenever the very idea doesn’t make me weep. I don’t know if it’s doing anything other than make me feel better — I’m fairly certain that’s enough.

Gaming and Entertainment

Pretty much none of the gaming we did prior to 1/25 has survived impact with the diaper genie. Basically, most of those activities required (or benefited from) larger chunks of mutual uninterrupted time than we currently have available; other things have swept in to fill that void for a time — things that can be enjoyed in snatches, abandoned in mid-play without serious consequence, and still produce the dopamine kick I rely on such things to generate. Solutions for this include EVE Online, Parallel Kingdom, and (just lately) a crash course in the wonderful comedy television stylings of Community — oh my god that show is funny. If you’ve ever played Dungeons and Dragon (it’s Advanced!) or know someone who has, you owe it to yourself to at least watch the AD&D episode (do it soon before it falls off their ‘recent’ list).

(Speaking of AD&D: I don’t know if I have an immediate solution for the current lack of face to face gaming, but I have high hopes for Yikerz. We shall see.)

Unfortunately, we have time to watch Community DVDs because our DVR harddrive died and took with it entire unwatched seasons of Fringe, Walking Dead, Leverage, Chuck, and… I dunno. More.

Online/Writing

I’m not entirely (or even mostly) silent on the internet. I’m writing regular columns for MMO Reporter and somewhat less regular things for Green Dragon Inn. Of course I tend to do most of my casual online chatter on Twitter, which is one of those go-to places to visit during a 2am feeding.

There continues to be book-related news that I can’t really talk about yet.

I’ve got a pile — an actual pile — of things I want to write about, including more Letters to My Kids, but right now… well, while I certainly could find the time to write them, I choose to spend time on other equally-important things for a little while longer.

That’s it?

That may be it — I’m more than a bit hazy in the graymeat-memory-head-area thing, so I’m sure I’ll remember something else soon. Until then, let’s revisit this nerdrage-inducing image that never fails to make me snicker.

You're welcome.

There are things I want my kids to understand about me — what I think about the Big Questions like life and death and religion and Faster Than Light Travel and why it’s important that Han shot Greedo first. I hope I get the chance to have those conversations, but maybe I won’t, so I’m going to write them some letters.

And I figure I’ll put them up here, so there are as many redundant copies as possible.

What I Think Happens When We Die

Hey kiddo,

Wow. I started out with a pretty big topic, didn’t I? Pretty scary one. There’s a whole lot of STUFF wrapped up in this kind of subject; things like religion and people’s belief systems and lots of things that make people get very emotional, because thinking about dying is pretty scary stuff for a lot of folks.

I think that’s what most of it boils down to, though: fear. Dying is scary. For the people still standing around after someone dies it’s pretty sad, too. We look at this person who died and think “They aren’t doing anything anymore. They aren’t breathing or talking or laughing or crying or playing or reading or writing or anything.” Those are all very nice things to do, and not being able to do them anymore seems very sad to those of us who can still do them, so death seems sad and scary, because it seems to us that dying takes those things away. (Plus, we’re sad because we liked the person who died, or loved them, and we don’t get to do things with them anymore: in that case, we’re sad for us, because we lost someone we love, which is probably a pretty good reason to be sad.)

Now, is it sad for the person who died? I’m not an expert in every kind of belief out there in the world, but based on the ones I am familiar with, and what I think myself, I believe the answer is “no.” The reason that it’s ‘no’ depends a lot on what you think happens after you die, but the answer itself is usually the same, and generally when pretty much everyone who believes different things about something scary like death can agree on something (or anything), the thing they agree on is probably pretty close to the right answer. So let’s say no, the person who died is not sad anymore.

So what did we figure out so far? Dying scares a lot of people, and it’s sad for a lot of people (though probably not for the person who died), and because it’s sad and scary, people usually have very strong feelings and beliefs about what happens when we die.

But I’m kind of dancing around the question a little bit, aren’t I? The question is, what do I think happens when we die, and I’m kind of avoiding the answer. I’m sorry about that: I’ll stop.

The short answer, kiddo, is that I don’t think anything happens when we die.

To get your hands around the longer answer, you need to understand what other people think happens. There are a lot of religions in the world, and every one of them has an Official Answer to this question. (In fact, I think it’s probably fair to say that the main reason any religion exists is just to give people an answer this one question — they just tend to branch out into other areas over time.)

Many folks think that when you die, if you’ve been good, your spirit (or soul) gets to go to heaven, which is supposed to be a very nice place where (eventually) pretty much everyone you love also ends up (if they’ve been good too). The person who decides if you’ve been good enough to get into Heaven is usually given a name that translates to ‘God’ in whatever language people speak in that part of the world. The general idea is that you want to be good while you’re alive, so that you can go to heaven after you die.

Other pretty large groups believe in reincarnation, which means that when you die, you get to come back to the world as some new living thing. If you were good in this life, in your next life you get an even better life to work with, and if you were bad, you come back as something worse (like a spider or a beetle or something like that).

And as I already said, I don’t personally think either of those things; I think nothing happens. I think that when you’re born, you grow into a complete person over time, and you develop your own personality and you do all the things that you decide to do, and you live your life, and when your body eventually fails (or you choke on a ham sandwich), you die, and the personality that was alive in your brain is gone.

Now, I don’t necessarily think anyone else who thinks something different from me is wrong — or at least, if I do, I keep it to myself, because it doesn’t necessarily matter if they’re wrong, so long as whatever it is that they believe isn’t hurting other people. That’s my first criteria: is their belief hurting anyone else? No? Then we’re cool.

Not everyone feels that way. Some folks think that if you don’t believe the same thing they believe, that that’s the same as hurting other people, or the same thing as being a bad person. I don’t agree with that.

Some people (sometimes the same people) believe that if you don’t have an award at the end of your life (like getting to Heaven or getting to reincarnate as something even better), then there will be no reason — no motivation — to be a good person in this life, so when someone like me says “I don’t think anything happens after we die,” they sort of assume that I’m a bad person, or that I can’t be a very good person if I don’t have a religion (what people sometimes call a ‘belief system’) that tells me how to be good.

I disagree with them, and maybe that’s because I do have a belief system. I learned it from Abraham Lincoln (someone I hope I lived long enough to tell you about — and brag that I have the same birthday). The system works like this:

If I do good, I feel good.
If I do bad, I feel bad.

That’s it. What it means is that, when I go through the one life I get, I want to do good, because that makes me feel good. Maybe it’s something big, like giving someone something they really need, or something really small, like shoveling someone else’s walk in the morning when I go out to do mine. It doesn’t matter: my life — the only one I think I get — is better if I do more good with it.

So: here’s what it means to me when I say “I don’t think anything happens after we die.”

I don’t think we get a second try. I don’t believe that I’m going to get a second (or third, or fourth) lifetime to do and say all the things that I’d like to do and say that I never got a chance to this time around. So if there’s something I want to do, or a story I want to tell, or someone I want to say something to, I try very hard to do that thing, because this is the only life I’m going to get. (Making sure I say everything I meant to say is one of the reasons I’m writing you this letter.)

I think that the memories that other people keep of us are the only way in which we will continue after our death. For instance, I love my Grandpa very much, and I miss him every day, but I don’t personally think that he’s looking down on me from heaven to see how I’m doing — I believe he’s gone.

Except in my memories of him and the stories I tell about him, that is. In that way, I think that his personality will last far beyond his own life, and (if I’m very lucky, or a very good storyteller) maybe he’ll be remembered for a much longer time. There are people who lived thousands and thousands of years ago who told their stories (and the stories of other people) so well that people still tell them today. That’s a wonderful way to be remembered. I suppose it’s important for me to be remembered well, especially by my family.

I have one life, so every moment is important. When you come in and ask if you can talk, or sit on my lap, or read you a story, or read me a story, you may see me hesitate. Maybe I was already doing something, or maybe I’m working; it doesn’t really matter. The reason I’m hesitating is because I’m deciding how I’m going to spend That Moment. There will be more moments after that one, but of That Moment, there is only one, and I will never get it back, so how will I spend it?

Give me that second to hesitate and think it over, because when I do that, I almost always decide that I’d rather spend that moment with you. (It took me a long time learn this, but lucky for me, I had it mostly worked out before you were born.)

And that’s it, kiddo: that’s my answer to one of the Big Questions. Because of what I think, I try to do the best I can with the life I get, and I hope that when I’m gone, the memories I helped create and the stories I made (or lived through) will help you, or give you some kind of hint about the best thing to do when things get tough, or at least make you laugh.

Love you,

Dad

Those of you who see what I see on Twitter and in GReader might be aware that I’m writing stuff for MMO Reporter now. It’s a newish gig, but a topic I enjoy, and I’m learning a lot about the industry in the process. I’ve also been sharing a less newsy rant or two with their sister site, the Green Dragon Inn, though that’s a bit more intermittent, since I have other ports through which to vent my spleen.

In related writing-for-other-people’s-internets stuff, I’ve been asked aboard a new webzine project targeted towards gamer women ages 25+ with families and/or careers. You might ask why me, since I’m am not a woman aged 25+ and very likely never will be, but that’s OKAY, since I will in fact be providing a weekly column from the point of view of a dad+gamer, something I’ve got some experience with. The title of the column has been determined, though not by me, and it’s not something I’d have suggested, so we’ll just forget to mention it for now, shall we? Title notwithstanding, I’m excited about this project.

There has been some bookish news that I can’t really talk about yet, but I will say: when I got it, it did not ruin my day. So there’s that.

What am I working on? Well, it's not steampunk.

Speaking of writing, I neglected to save my work and lost several key and painfully constructed scenes in my current novel to power failure. There may have been a lot of primal roars and some swearing. I’m quite angry with myself over the whole stupid thing, and have assigned myself nothing but apples and porridge until the scenes in question have been rewritten to everyone’s satisfaction. (Not much of a punishment, since my porridge is actually oatmeal with honey and raisins in it, but it’s the best I’ve got.)

In any case, learn from my mistakes and make sure your autosave function is actually ENGAGED, and not simply adorning your options panel like a quaint but dusty cameo necklace.

Anything else? Oh yes, I’ll be a father (again) in a few short weeks, and we (read: our contractors) are racing to finish Kaylee’s new bedroom in time to get all her stuff moved and all of the bear cub’s stuff in place. Permit delays are a killer. (As is the stress of finding out one of your foundation walls is not so much a “foundation” as a vague suggestion of stability.)

Have I found a “regular” job? No I have not. The market is so terrible it can hardly be dignified with the name; it’s really just ten million people wandering the aisles of eight million empty stalls — bit more of a maze than a market — a maze with no entrance or exit. Cheerful!

And that’s it — now you know where I’ve been, and I’ve blown the dust off this particular window enough to realize I’d like to clean it off properly and do some work here.

Happy new year and all that; talk to soon.

From that, I’ve projected things like the demise of chain bookstores; their failure slowed but not stopped by stubborn publishers clinging to DRM in a vain effort to make digital books work like paper books, and as a result making ebooks not more ‘secure’, but less attractive for early adoption by the casual consumers who (understandably) prefer to actually own the shit they buy.

It’s just fucking math, guys.

In 2001, we got the iPod. Three million iPods were sold in two and a half years.
Nine years later, the number of employees of music stores has dropped from 80,000 people to 20,000.

Three million iPods were sold in two and a half years.

Three million Kindles were sold in two years.

Three million iPads were sold in eighty days.

Three million iPhones were sold in three weeks.

Just do the fucking math.

As electronic distribution (and web-based shopping) becomes more and more prevalent, and the percentage of electronic vs. analog versions of the same products continues to move toward electronic, brick-and-mortar stores will become progressively obsolete. Physical bookstores already account for less than a third of all book sales — in ten years Barnes and Noble will be the publishing equivalent of Sam Goody and Blockbuster.

God, I’m so crazy. Where would I come up with something like that?

Well, like every other ‘prediction’, I’m just creating publishing-industry ‘events’ by taking things — excuse me, that should read “easily observable, fairly recent, stupid fucking mistakes” — that already happened in the movie and music industries and coloring them with a publishing brush.

For instance, in the case of that ‘prediction’ up above, I simply looked at the history of Musicland swallowing Sam Goody before it, too, succumbed to obsolescence.

And I think to myself: “well, there are two major brick and mortar chain bookstores left in the US today — I expect we’ll see them go through similar death throes.

As my dad has been known to say, “Wellwhaddayafuckinknow…”

[...] a $960 million merger of Borders Group and its larger rival, Barnes & Noble [...] could help both companies pare back the number of stores they run, as well as cut costs in their back-office and distribution operations.

But any deal would face a formidable hurdle: sales at the bookstores of both chains have declined and the competition on the digital front is intense.

That’s not a ‘formidable hurdle’. That’s death.

And don’t fucking tell me that chain bookstores are some kind of inevitable creature that must exist, like a gelatinous cube in a ten foot wide hallway — music stores and brick and mortar video rental chains were inevitable creatures too.

Preliminary graphic representation of the merger details. I call the piece 'Fighting over End-Cap Placement'.

I’m thankful there’s a fifteen foot trench in the floor of my basement, because it means we’re truly committed to making Kaylee’s new bedroom a reality.

I’m thankful there are no proper supports for the wall that trench is next too, even though there should be, because it means that this bedroom project, once a simple frame-in, will also make our house (which I love) about fifty times more structurally sound… simply so we can cut a bigger window in the wall.

I’m thankful this revelation about the foundation support for our house is interrupting our bedroom project. We could be finding out about it due to some kind of serious structural failure, and nothing could be further from the truth.

I’m thankful my back hurts, because that usually only happens when I sleep a really long time, and I totally slept a really long time this morning.

I’m thankful I don’t have a regular job right now, because it’s given me time to work on more writing projects and most importantly be around Kate a whole lot more just before we hit a stretch where time (and sleep) will be in short supply.

I’m thankful my family lives too far away to visit easily, because it makes me realize how much I miss them, which makes me call them and appreciate my memories of them more (it’s all I have to work with right now).

I’m thankful my throat is sore and swollen, and my sinuses are full of crap, because it means I remembered to get my flu vaccination a couple days ago.

I’m thankful my dad is a cancer survivor, because his experience has made me take much better care of myself than I would have, otherwise. Also, you know, cancer survivor.

I’m thankful I’m at ninety thousand words on my current story, but still nowhere near the end. It’s exciting to be writing something so big. It’s already bigger than anything I’ve ever done before, and still seems to be holding together.

I’m thankful that my wife has no idea what she’s gotten herself in for with this ‘baby’ thing. The best part about going on a ride you love is taking someone who’s never been.

How about you? Anyone out there thankful for a ‘bad’ thing?

“Now that’s bullshit.”  She gave me one of her ‘you’re being stupid right now’ looks, then hit me with a “Duuuuude.” You have to know De to really understand how she says this, but I will try to convey it by explaining that the word, as spoken by her, sometimes has three syllables.

I said nothing, but probably had one of those purposely-not-getting-it expressions on. She rolled her eyes. “You know better than that.”

(And she was right, of course. I did, but it’s not something one generally talks about.)

“In fact,” she leveled a finger at me, “I dare you. I double dog dare you to write a midwestern paranormal for you next story.”

So I did. More than a few years later, that story has an agent, and that agent is shopping it around with a couple publishers, and I have De and her double-dog dare to thank. And blame.

When I think of De, I think of her unflinching, untrammeled sight into the heart of a thing. She is an excellent critic, but equally able to see a magical, whimsical, childish truth that grownups try to ignore.

I asked her to drop in today and share her memories of growing up in that magically non-magical place (because I like hearing her say the stuff that’s in my head) and then I made her talk about how that background led to her writing a zombie outbreak book set in her current home town.

(She says it doesn’t at all, to which I can only reply “Duuuuude.”)

We both grew up in the Weird West, really, although we grew up in slightly different areas.  He grew up near a small town called Miller, South Dakota, and you can pick up other entries about it on his blog.  I know that it’s affected the way he tells stories by a few of the things of his I’ve read.

I grew up slightly differently than he did, also in the middle of nowhere.  I’ve been trying for years to explain what it was like, or why anybody should care, but what it comes down to is that it was a profoundly magical place, and not in a nice way.

It didn’t seem, at the time, like living five miles away from our nearest neighbor, eight miles away from the nearest spot on the map (Lee’s Corner, population 2), or having no running water at the school was magical, but it was.  There is nothing out there.  It’s like the Australian outback; it’s like Siberia; it’s even like a remote mountain in the Himalayas sometimes.

Only flat.

There was grass, and there was sky, and everything else was something that someone dreamed up.  Trees aren’t natural; they’re a sign of people.  Fences are a trail back to someone’s house.  And houses are there only as long as someone tends them, day in and day out, like something fragile.  Otherwise they’re a hollow gray shell that’s been stripped bare by the wind and the dust.

The wind out there’s enough to smother babies, just suck the air out of them, so you always cover their faces.  It’s enough to pick you off your feet and throw you in the sky if you spread your coat wide.  The coyotes are closer to you than your neighbors, and a lot louder.  The blizzards kill someone every year, like a sacrifice to a very cold Hell.  The summers kill, too, and you hide out in the basement, because air conditioning is only something you see on TV.  You can see for about ten miles of grass in any direction, and it’s like being on an ocean, only you don’t get seasick.  And the flies, the horror of the flies, the constant, awful crawling when the cattle are around.

And then there are these cracks in the ground, where water has run (yes, we do get rain, big deadly storms that set things on fire almost as often as they put them out).  Most of the time, you can see them coming, but sometimes you can’t, and people have driven trucks or ridden horses right into them.

For the longest time as a kid, I had this secret fear that we’d go out into the fields during the summer and I’d lose my parents.

When my brother and I were very young, we were left in the pickup truck with books, water, and a cooler full of sandwiches while our parents drove tractors around.  We would run around; as long as we were within earshot of the truck, we were okay.  We’d make up stories, pick on each other, dig holes in the dirt–anything to pass the time.

I just knew that one of those cracks was going to open up under my parents.  They would drop in, and the wheat would cover them up again in long, golden waves, and I’d never see them again, and I’d never know what happened to them.

I’ve tried, time and time again, to find a way to explain that feeling through a story–the nothing, the crack in the ground, the disappearing — but I’ve never done it justice.  I’ve been trying to figure out how to phrase that in terms of a fairyland, in which the mortal realms and the fairy realms lie side by side, with sometimes tragic results.

The magic is close, very close.  And, from the inside, it looks perfectly ordinary.

While I’m waiting for that perfect idea of how to do this, I write other things, of course.  The idea that the magical is ordinary, even banal, crops up in pretty much everything I write.  I know that people want to think of magic as extra-special, something that can lift their lives out of the ordinary, but I can’t help but write about the magic that people take for granted or adapt to so quickly that they forget it was ever magic.  That’s what life is like now to me anyway–you’ve probably never noticed the magic of a stoplight, but I didn’t live in a town with a stoplight until I hit college.  When I discovered the Internet existed, I cackled.

I have a book coming out now called Choose Your Doom:  Zombie Apocalypse.  It’s not about magic, of course; it’s all about zombies, and I don’t consider zombies to be magic–more of an odd type of SF.  (This probably would be more obvious if Michael Crichton had written a definitive tale of zombie disease vectoring instead of The Andromeda Strain, but there you go.)  

However, I did take the idea that a change big enough to rewrite the genetic material on our planet could be inserted in our lives and used it to show that we’d do more about it than run in terror and barricade ourselves in the nearest Impregnable Fortress.  We’d use it as an excuse to steal comic books; we’d stick our fingers in it and see what it tastes like; we’d try to be heroes and end up almost ready to kick our refugees into the arms of the monsters because they’re that annoying.

And sometimes we’d even switch sides, on purpose, because that was the only way to get the job done.

I, feeling helpful, said, “Dude. Ninjas.”

And she was like, “Wait, what?”

And I was like, “Ninjas. They attack. Problem solved. The end. You’re welcome.”

And she was like, “Dude. I write YA Romance. No ninjas.”

And I was like, “DUDE. Genre-Appropriate Ninjas. GAN. The GAN in YA Romance is Kissing. ATTACK!”

And then she was like, “Whoa… that totally works.”

So let’s talk about Genre-Appropriate Ninjas and how they make everything better.

“Have somebody come in guns blazing, and figure out who they are later.” — Raymond Chandler

Man… Chandler. There was a guy who knew about ninjas. Am I right? Chandler had a method with his stories that make them — at least for me — kind of breathless. There’s no fat there — no time when the main character gets to just sit still for a little bit and simply ruminate like a thoughtful cow. No. He might get a moment or two, and then boom, something happens. There’s no downtime — there’s always something that the MC needs to react to.

All those things are what I like to call ninjas.

It isn’t all throwing stars and bullets

Put simply, a genre-appropriate ninja attack is any sort of event or piece of information that requires action (and often a significant choice) from one of your characters. (A particularly fun G.A.N. attack is when that’s all true, and you don’t already know what they’re gonna choose.)

Don’t get me wrong, I like throwing stars and bullets, but the Chandler quote up there highlights only one small part of the larger Ninja Toolbox, and let me assure you he used the whole thing — why should we do any less?

You know the thing in the noir detective thriller where the main character is like “Damn, I need to talk to Sarah McHotness and get some answers out of her, but no one knows where she is… ahh hell, I’m just gonna go back to my office and sack out for a couple hours, I’m beat.” Then he gets back to his office, and who’s waiting in his office chair? Sarah McHotness herself, of course; the one person it couldn’t possibly be, it is, so now what do you do, hotshot? The cops want to talk to her, the mob wants to kill her, anyone standing near her is probably a dead man, and she’s hiding in your office. Go!

You know what he isn’t going to do? He isn’t going to take that nap he’d planned; he isn’t going to ignore the girl in his office.

Sarah is totally a ninja attack. Sure, so is the guy who comes in guns blazing a few pages later, but that’s the obvious ninja attack; one thing we know about ninjas: the subtle ones are the most dangerous.

Chandler uses the HELL out of these things. Every time the story pacing starts to lag — hell, any time the speedometer drops below fifty — he attacks the scene with something unexpected that the MC has to react to: guy with gun, lady with a problem, married lady making with the kissy-face, dead partner, cops show up for a chat, mob shows up for a chat, cops and the mob show up for a chat at the same time, automotive homicide, et cetera. That’s what I mean when I say his stories are kind of breathless — he never lets up.

(Complete aside: As a result of this method, his stories — and many if not most good stories from that era and somewhat later — are lean, mean, storytelling machines that rip right off the page and tear down your eye canals in about 150 pages or less. They are whip-thin racing greyhounds, and the bloated 750 page couch potatoes clogging up bookstore shelves today could do with a big dose of the cardio workout that the previous generation of writers gave their books. But I digress.)

Now, Chandler’s novels are short by today’s standards, but that’s okay for us because NaNoWriMo novels are short by today’s standards. (It is so hard for me not to put standards in air-quotes. Rant for another day.) We can totally use this pacing trick to keep the story zipping along and to make sure we have something fun and interesting to write.

Also, if your story’s wrapping up too fast, GAN attacks are great for throwing a monkeywrench complication that stretches things out some more.

What Is it About, Then?

So here I go repeating myself. A Genre-Appropriate Ninja attack is:

• Something happens that cannot be ignored and which demands some sort of response.
• [Bonus Points if:] You’re not entirely sure what your protag is going to decide to do.

And, just in case you missed it, every scene should have something like this – a conflict – going on. Any scene that doesn’t is pointless cruft.

The benefits of these things are:

• They keep things into motion.
• You’ll learn something you didn’t know (or weren’t entirely sure of) about the character when they make their decision about what to do.

Character and Conflict. Character and Conflict. Lather, rinse, repeat. That’s the story.

Speaking without any sort of genre specifics in mind, I think you can break your GAN attack down into a few types.

Dilemma: You grab two Important Things and make up a situation that forces the character to make a decision between those two things. Finding the Important Things is pretty easy – take what you know or think you know about the character, pick two things that seem to be roughly equal in importance, and set up a situation where somebody’s gotta choose. This sort of GAN might result in the character losing the thing they didn’t choose, but this isn’t necessary, and it might be better (read: more incredibly awkward and painful for the character at a later point in the story) if that doesn’t happen, and the un-chosen thing/person comes back to confront them with a heartfelt “What the hell?!”

J’accuse!

Be ready: your character may decide to pull a Batman and change the situation: they don’t accept that they can’t get one thing without losing the other, so they put a third thing at risk, trying to save both of the original things. This is awesome. Go with it.

The cool thing is you can start out with a small either/or decision and continue to revisit that choice, gradually amping up the tension.

“Oh, you decided to go with her over him, huh? Well what about now? Oh yeah? What about now?!”

Which leads us to:

Escalation: this is essentially returning to some previously-introduced Dilemma, upping the stakes. Basically, you take the unselected option from a previous dilemma and make it more important or more endangered. Maybe before the choice wasn’t life or death, and now it is. Maybe it affects more people this time.

Maybe now there’s a giant flame-throwing bug. Whatever.

Identity Crisis: Someone thinks they’re one thing, and they find out they’re something or someone else.

“You totally suck, man!”

Something Totally Weird: Exactly what it sounds like. Something really weird happens which can’t be ignored because it’s so… weird. With no particular clue about a solution, what we learn about the character (hopefully) is how they try to address the event.

Maybe they go a little crazy.

Actual Ninjas: You’re kind of out of moral dilemmas, but you still need to get the action going. It’s at moments like these that we give the floor to the Reverend Raymond Chandler. Boom. Bang. Kiiiyah. Fzzzwap. Kaboom. Kapow. Braaaaaaains. Whatever.

Take this guy. Give him a knife. Oh yeah. Good times.

Does your guy fight or run? Do they freeze? Are there innocents to protect? Valuable stuff that needs to be kept from harm? Watch, learn, and write it down.

Every story has ninjas

I thought I might go through a list of genres and list out specific Genre-Appropriate Ninjas, but I like this idea better: Think about it for about 60 seconds, and then tell me in the comments what kind of ninja attack ideas you came up with for your story. Alien abduction? The authorities show up? The authorities don’t show up? The deal falls through? The jock asks her out before the cute nerd has a chance to?

Let’s hear it.