(The photo above is an image of me deciding to blog instead of writing Facebook posts.)

My single professional writer friend, the one who went pro earning six figures year in the three years I wrote and sold ten short stories for 4k, says if you want to write fiction—write fiction.

Social media is a waste of time.  

At least, it can be, if you put the cart before the horse. It was for her. She was canny; savy; she did all those things that your pro heros tell you never to do; she studied the market, wrote to it, and made money while still finding the work compelling and fullfilling… she did as little social media as possible.

Social media, she would say, is writing for free.

Like I am here.

I spent an hour, and the 5-20 people who read this a day get something new to look at, and theoretically, someday, they might be more inclined to buy a book of mine and eventually, it all snowballs and I become rich and famous.

He says, voice expressionless, eyes flatly gazing into the middle distance.

Yeah. It’s unlikely. But at least, at your blog, you’re the brand; it’s an ad for you and your products and whatever else  you want to hawk; it’s your goddamn little lemonade stand.

Still, it’s hard not to just post to Facebook, where two to ten times more people will look at it.

But something about FB stinks. See the monkey above. The little monkey inside us, who doesn’t want to work for free for Mark Zuckerberg.

Or, if you’re an optimist, who doesn’t feel this monkey, you do want to take advantage of a global network, hundreds of millions of dollars of software development, for free, to promote your personal brands, and connect to friends, customers and colleagues…

Facebook, yay!

The reality is, we are doing both of those things at once. Well. A few build a commercially viable brand; the vast majority are just throwing money at Zuckerberg.

To generalize, between Youtube, Facebook, and blogging portals like HuffPo and Gawker, content creators have a vast array of new opportunities to work for nothing or almost nothing for millionaires and billionaires.

Err.

Rather, original content creators now are able to directly reach audiences without having to worry about breaking genre rules, about offending the gatekeeper sensibilities, waiting for years and years to be filtered, edited and packaged.

It’s both at once, you don’t get one without the other.

The problem is that monkey up there, making your peace with him.

Especially for those of us who grew up in a different world, the pre-digital world. We lived through a peculiar time, a time of a vast mass market, dominated by a handful of channels, controlled by gatekeepers of various sorts; if you made content, and got it past the gate, you got paid. Sometimes you got screwed, like the Beatles did on their first albums, when they were paid a flat salary and penicillin shots to cope with the STDs from groupies. Still. They were paid enough to live.

Basically, you made stuff, and somebody else sold it. You helped by talking to the media, who in turn, made something by talking to you, which they sold. (with ads.)

As we have entered the digital age, the file sharing age, the tech bubble billionaire age, the age of creative disruption, we’ve entered into the world of the free chicken nugget.  You can’t expect to sell your pile of chicken nuggets and sweet sauce  unless you give people a taste first. Not just chatter about nuggets. People want a free goddamn nugget.

Now, in a food court with ten vendors, we can all do this, and still, if you want a meal, you’re going to have to pay eight dollars. You can’t keep going back for free nuggets.

But the internet is  a food court that stretches a million miles long.

You can, and many–most?–simply can continue to walk down the row of desperate vendors to the vanishing point consuming free samples until they are full.

You could try to resist this. But once the culture gets going, you would simply be committing suicide. Chicken in sweet sauce with starch is now sold by giving away free nuggets.

The older generation doesn’t get it, and never will, ensconsed in the  previous, but still brutal system, which they mastered. Ursula LeGuin can bad mouth indy publishing at Amazon. She doesn’t need it. Harlan Ellison, when confronted with the nugget analogy to explain why a magazine I work for was giving away an issue with one of his stories snarled.

‘People are getting too many of my free nuggets.’

Coming home from a week long media detox (I read a newspaper at one point and felt like one of those re-enactors at Colonial Williamsburg.) I find myself re-examing how I use my time; where I run my eyeballs; what I am getting out of what I’m doing; what make sense; what is joyless compulsion.

No easy answers. The monkey in me is not happy about any of this. My monkey isn’t sure that the current generation of robber barons are necessarily building a more sustainable future than the past they are gleefully destroying.

But the content creator in me has to be hopeful.

It has to play the game.

Which I guess is along winded way of saying, enjoy this nugget!

Would you like a short story or two, to go along with that?

If you click in the sidebar, you can get some more.

You know when you buy junk food; a bag of fluorescent orange Cheetos or a can of pringles or a tub of Trader Joes peanut butter cups or whatever. And you think, it’s ok, if you don’t eat too much at once, it’s not that bad for you.

Then you eat the whole fucking thing.

The fleeting pleasure wiping out the sure knowledge of just how bad an idea this is. The moment collaborating in this nihilistic twinkling of fulfillment. Afterwards you feel stupid and degraded. Your finger tips are bright orange.

Oh, and you’re still hungry.

Well, social media is my bag of Cheetos. Probably not that bad for you, if you don’t eat like a huge bag a day. Or two.

I’m a triple bagger.

I have a few hundred readers on FB, or it seems like I do, versus the few dozen of my blog, so I tend to write over there, making Mark Zuckerberg some tiny fraction of a cent richer with every unpaid word.

Facebook’s business model, in which everyone is simultaneously a customer and a supplier and an employee, is perhaps one of the most horrific ideas to emerge from internet culture. FB makes up about half of all web traffic at this point. It is an entirely voluntary horror, of course; you don’t have to be there. You don’t have to have electricity, running water, or pants either, of course. There reality is if you want to be in business you’re on FB one way or another.

So. I’ve been pretending I have a busines being there.

I wrote a post recently, about how there’s this way now as a writer to check on your progress, or lack thereof, on a minute by minute basis, and experience a sense of failure and paralysis continually, shocking yourself, over and over again.

Watching books not sell; watching stories sit in queues, the days tick by, and then not sell, watching the awards spin by, checking absently for your name on various reading lists, etc. Googling reviews. Being careful not to replay to any.

It’s one of those things you have to learn to stop doing. Like eating the whole fucking bag of Cheetos.

I’ve been angry since the AME shooting. Politics consumes me.

I’ve had no good news on the writing front for what feels like a good long time. I’m finishing up the latest in a series of what feels like utterly doomed efforts. In retrospect, I know why I wrote them, but for God’s sake, I know, I shouldn’t have. Or rather, I know nobody wants to buy them.

Sure feels like my fifteen minutes are over.

One thing that social media, and email before it, has been able to do for me, though is to capture the sense of my personality over time. I can go back and read myself, over the last 20 years, in various ways. And find out that I’ve always been like this. Always hanging on by my proverbial finger nails. Since I was sixteen years old, or so, post-puberty, anyway.

For whatever reason, I’m happiest in made up worlds. Mine or those created by others. The worst imaginary dystopia is somehow less painful than our world, which I feel could be a utopia, if we weren’t so fucking idiotic a species. I’ve loved stories and shows and movies and games and writers and writing, and been barely able to stand anything else, for a long long time.

My few decades, moving in and out of various business-esque jobs and roles, inform me, but represent nothing I want to return to.

I struggle now with the political dimension of my very existence.

My participation in progressive politics triggers an intense self loathing; it is the feeling I had when I learned about the Holocaust, about the genocide of the native americans, the My Lai massacre, about Jim Crow and Slavery. The feeling I got when my wife explained that she would never dream of walking to the convenience store at night for fear of being raped.

The solid cores of my identity exist as a kind of shorthand for oppression, murder, and rape. European ancestry. White. Male. Het. Cis.

Add to that now, middle-aged. Boomer. The generation that ate the world, and gave us… all this.

I feel stuck.

If there is anything to gained by my fifteen minutes, my ten pro stories of my Second Try at writing, it has been an effort to bend my thinking in more positive directions through the sheer application of will.

Medication never worked. Mediation sort of worked. But writing, storytelling, works, when I let myself do it, because in story telling, you’re there, and your’e not there, you disappear and reappear moment by moment. Existence is less painful when it is periodic.

Fictively, I conspire, cajole, lie, if necessary, to create some sort of positive direction for my characters and plots. It’s like I’m trying to dream my way out of myself. Escape from the hideous legacy of my own identity.

For me, the lie is often what tells the truth; because my mind lies to me a lot. In this I think I am far from alone, of course. Sanity is really just a kind of useful delusion.

I model it, to the degree I’m able. I’m pretty good at it really.

I’ve lived now among the humans for half a century, and they think of me as one of their own.

I had a dream last night, it was so good, so pure, that it made my whole life feel like an ill fitting suit. It’s a feeling I’ve been struggling to hold onto, even though it is painful, so I can put it into something.

A few more hours left in the day. Let’s see what I do.

A writer friend of mine, Kayeigh Shoen, invited me to participate in this blog-tour. So here it is.

1) What are you working on?

I’m currently working on SF short stories and novellas. Some of the stories are decades old fragments, stuff I thought I’d write when my skills were up to the task and / or I started selling. Well, I am selling now, so premises that have been lurking in the wings forever are now turning into words on the page.

I have  three novels started, but I’m waiting for some weird sign from The Cosmic All to tell me which to continue. Any day now. I hope.

2) How does your work differ from others of its genre?

I tend to write about people with, um, issues, with whom I can empathize. As a person with issues. Genre fiction is often built around kinda bland heros, decent everymen / everywomen… Side characters can be kooky and villians, of course, can always be textured and multidimensional, but protagonists… my protagonists feel to me a bit off the beaten path.

I don’t know if this is a good thing or not. We’ll see!

3) Why do you write what you do?

I write genre fiction because I enjoy it, and I feel like I’m allowed to write it. Genre elements, for me, push stories away from solipism, navel gazing, self-important pseudo-memoir, towards the mythic, the universal. I struggle to be purely entertaining, but of course, art and deep personal meaning creeps in around the edges.

There’s a reason fairy tales and myths survive for millennia.

There is no literary fiction from the Bronze age. All that’s left in the end is myth, fairy tales, religious texts, which themselves are a kind of fantasy. Please nobody kill me for that last sentence, OK? I devote myself to this stuff. I’m not trivializing it.

Why would anyone write anything else? Seriously, though, SF, which I mostly write, can be ephemeral and often ages badly… I am drawn into it for the usual reasons; geeky-techno lust, a brain that ceaselessly extrapolates trends into the future, that conjures worlds into being uncontrollably.

4) How does your writing process work?

My process is a work in progress.

In the past it has involved getting depressed and quitting for decades, so, I’m working on not doing that anymore. Double-plus Un-good.

Stories work themselves out on the page. There is salvation in simply sitting down and making words every day and seeing what happens without a ton of agonizing. I’m trying to think of something more cliched or less useful I can add to that, but I’m drawing a blank.

I aspire to be a plotter, and while I often am working towards some end which has been foreseen, the good parts, the fun stuff, emerges from the seat of my pants, if you’ll pardon the disgusting metaphor, which maybe you shouldn’t.

My process now involves being honest with myself about what I enjoy most in the writing of others, and what I can find inside myself which to some degree resonates with what I like to read.

This seems painfully obvious, self-evident, but for decades I found that as a person I liked to make people laugh, while as a writer I seemed intent on making them cry. It came to me that this was because some part of me disliked being alone, which one is while writing, I was also nervous about my work being rejected, and I was translating that discomfort into my text.

I call this the ‘poisonous subtext feedback loop,’

I write now in the company of my imaginary friends, who are more real to me now than ever, the made-up people on the page, with more joy and freedom than before, with some sense that what I am writing willl be read, and I want to give those readers the best experience it is in me to give.

We don’t become writers to give ourselves a shitty job. I look for the joy in the process, I look for the light, which anyone reading me will snort at, I’m sure, as there’s plenty of dark in what I do too.

And to a degree, the work is becoming its own reward. Thank God.

Practical suggestions: I leave the house to write, so I don’t do housework as procrastination. My family isn’t happy about this but I get more work done.

Cafe-writing also prevents prolonged day-time napping. (Freelance clients also prevent naps, but as I’m trying to move way from design towards writing: cafes, walking, workshops, and coffee, have been hugely important.)

I write with other people, trying to set up deadlines and expectations of word counts, hoping that my own productivity can be inspirational to others.

This can help short circuit depression and ego-fatigue.

So, one of the things about being a writer is that you do it by yourself, mostly. You do it anywhere, everywhere. You create your own structure. Most writers have day jobs or do freelance work and have families and all these things eat up  time.

Your kids lives rush by in an eye blink. Your day job teeters precariously in the jaws of the global economy. There are about a million reasons not to write fiction.

Your chances of ever making a living are infinitesimal.

Channeling the mental energies of writing into anything else will yield tangible results. Ph.Ds, real estate, happy children, a cleaner house, stacks of neatly folded laundry, tasty meals, european vacations, better local elected officials.

Why in the name of God would anyone want to know what Jay has in the box?

(Google: Let’s Make a Deal.)

It’s going to take you a few years, lets say five, but it could be ten, to see if you can even do this thing. That’s five years of mostly solitary confinement.

And so, as with any rite of passage, any exile from the mainstream, any gulag, any ghetto, any polar expedition into the arctic, the people with you, the ones you walk with, become hugely important; because mostly, you choose them, and mostly, they have chosen you.

You’re not working on an assembly line, or as part of a team in a corporation; if a relationship isn’t working, you can walk away from it. A workshop, a beta-reader, a fellow writer whose work you follow, who follows yours, nobody cares, it’s all up to you and down to me, as a former business partner of mine used to love to say.

I’ve been workshopping off and on for twenty years, doing social media heavily for as long as it has been around. I have people but, ah, this is thing, the people come and go.

Writers seldom stay put. Oddly, I do. I’m embedded in Cambridge, in my family, and nothing is likely to pry me out of here any time soon.

But my people come and go.

As writers we size each other up, and try to help each other. You look for signs, that your input is helping someone, or changing them; are they getting any better? Do they keep doing the same thing over and over again? Do they really get what you’re trying to do? Is their feedback useful?

So I have reconnected, to some degree, with the people I’ve written with over the years, around my raft of 10 professional sales over the last year. They’ve been wonderful, supportive, happy for me, and jealous and pissed off to a degree that is reasonable. (I’m a white het cis upper middle class middle aged male soaking up valuable publication slots. Even I piss myself off sometimes. I am diversity kryptonite.)

So I went looking, online, for a smart, compassionate man who gave me a copy of “Oh, the Places You’ll Go,” as I went off to Clarion in 1994, to tell him the places I went; the decades of darkness and my short sweet time in the sun.

I looked for evidence of his publication, hopeful. This guy was smart, focused, driven. He’d been a corporate lawyer.  He’d gotten himself and his family situated, and cut his hours back drastically to give himself time to write.

I remember thinking, in the 90s, wow, that was the right order to this in. Get a real gig, get comfortable, and then, scale back your lifestyle and clear the decks and put the time in, from a position of strength; knowing that you could choose to be richer, choose to have a bigger house or a nicer car, but instead, choosing to write. Know, first of all, that you aren’t a loser–then, write.

He looked me in the eye, and told me, he simply had to do this. He had to write. He couldn’t live with himself otherwise. He impressed me. I was sure he’d do it, he’d make it.

So I looked and looked and looked. Maybe he was writing under a pseudonym?

Finally, I looked for him on Linked In, knowing that finding him there would not be a good thing.

I found him. A bank president. A man in a suit. I barely recognized him, he’d put on weight and gotten grayer, but he looked happy, in the photo, happy and maybe a tiny bit sad. But you can’t really tell from a photo how someone is feeling.

Linked in profiles are scrubbed clean of anything resembling humanity. Linked In is your resume personality. This is the version of you that when asked, what is  your greatest weakness, answers, “sometimes I work so hard I forget to eat and sleep.” Linked in is a world of professional lies.

Oh, the Places we Go.

I hope he writes under a pseudonym.

If he doesn’t, I hope he never sees my name on a magazine.

I wish him nothing but the best.

Writers of middle-grade and young adult fiction get there first.

Who introduces the young reader to dystopia? To artificial intelligence? To generation ships and apocalypse and cloning and galactic empire?

It isn’t Orwell or Huxley or Shelly (or even Heinlein or Asimov, anymore). It’s some middle grade / YA writer from the most recent decade, maybe someone great, like Neil Gaimen, or maybe a hack who somehow got popular. They wrote the book in the school library that the kid picks up on a whim; because of a cover or a blurb, or maybe, simply because it was there.

In the late sixties, and to this day, Scholastic Publishing produces a flyer handed out in public schools; cover thumbnails, descriptions, and prices; an order form with little checkboxes, the books delivered to you in homeroom. As a kid I also had free books through the RIF, Reading is Fundamental program, a non profit still active forty years later; it’s mission is to get books into the hands of kids under eight; two thirds of low income americans own no books whatsoever, according to the RIF website.

Wow. I have a hard time wrapping my head around that.

So we got free books in Charles Andrews Elementary School, being in a mixed income, majority minority community. I don’t remember if I paid for my copy of Stranger from the Depths by Gerry Turner or not.

The cover price is 50 cents.

My copy has an unsigned RIF sticker in it… is it my original copy, or one I picked up twenty years ago, with far too many used books in one of the Cambridge’s many vanished used book stores? I had this book, the abridged edition, in third grade, which was 1970 or 1971. My current copy is a first printing, in 1970.

The book is about a few young men and one young woman and a kindly professor who revive a 60 million year old Lizard Man named Saa, who inhabited a crystalline city which sank beneath the Earth during what we now call the CT event, the iridium rich boundary layer which represents the end of the Cretaceous, the age of the dinosaurs; kids these days know the comet and subsequent nuclear winter is what did those wonderful animals in…

Back in the 60s, though, nobody knew. Turner guessed some sort of seismic event which made the atmosphere toxic, this inescapable thing. Stranger’s Lizard people manage to barely survive, though, in ways familiar to SF readers, then and now.

Here’s a list of stuff from Stranger that is now badly used furniture, which felt newer in 1969, and which worked for the third and forth grade me perfectly.

• Parallel evolution which produces a humanoid intelligent species which resemble us strongly enough that we can wear their clothing, and vice versa. Saa is a seven foot tall man with frog eyes, scales, webbed fingers and toes and needle sharp teeth. (He is also a vegetarian, which makes the teeth a, well, a mistake.)
• Learning an alien language in a quickly glossed over bloc of narrative summary which spans a few weeks or months.
• Ancient civilizations for which there are no fossil records; species without any fossil record or any evolutionary antecedents in the fossil record.
• A teaching/learning machine which directly implants knowledge into brains with tiny wires. (Human and Lizard people brains are so similar that the machine can be used on people without a single test or modification. It’s a Babel Fish machine.)
• Food pills. Food synthesizer machines which assemble meals from grids of buttons you press for different types of flavors and textures.
• An entire technological civilization which is confined to a single city of a few thousand individuals. (I guess Turner was trying to help explain the lack of fossil record, but he simply creates this more difficult problem of a technological civilization far too small to be technological.)
• A humanoid species without any identifiable culture to speak of. The city is full of barely described apartment and municipal buildings…. with no roofs, because they live under a dome with a giant sun thing handing from the apex like a chandelier. We see no art and hear no music. We never learn anything about Saas family structure… the alien minds we see all behave in ways easily understood by humans.
• The sterile city of the future as imagined by many a SF writer at the time; Asimov foresaw windowless houses perfectly illuminated artificially by flat colored panels, programmable auto-kitchens, cleaning robots, etc. Saa’s city of Haad has all these things.
• A mole machine which can bore through solid rock and travel through the earth’s metallic core, protected from heat and pressure by, well, forcefields and stuff. It is moved by… forcefields. It also has antigravity. Which is never really used anywhere else in the city.
• Energy from the earth’s core; not simply heat driving  turbines to make electricity, but some sort of degenerate matter created by heat and pressure which can be used as fuel in reactors.  Turner may have been thinking about stellar degenerate matter here; at any rate, it gives the lizard people something to do with their mole, which is to go deep into the earth and hunt for this stuff.
• The Evil Retrograde culture. Surviving members of a terrorist lizard people breakaway culture live in a another city, but their tech is deteriorating, and they can’t fix the old machines. This culture also has teaching machines and memory disks, so it’s uncertain why they can’t fix things. They have been eking out an existence since the cretaceous, presumably waiting for the surface to become livable. Even though they have the mole, nobody ever uses it to check on surface conditions, because… um.

Ok, I didn’t mean to do a plot summary here, I just wanted to list these tropes, but I got sucked into it, and as I did, all these gaping plot holes opened up…

After a wonderfully detailed opening featuring scuba diving and a tidal wave striking a shore which sets up the discovery of Saa’s Crypt, the descriptions grow more and more vague, as to what it’s like, to be walking around a mile or two beneath the earths crust in a ‘fire suit’ which protects you, but somehow, there are…I guess caverns and underground lava seas…you can’t really see much of anything, the story moves along at a good clip… more and more tech is introduced, working flawlessly after 60 million years, which allow stuff to happen. There are long winded explanations of the tech.

…oh, you wonder, what the hell was in the unabridged edition!

…Jesus, the reason  I wrote this was to tell you that this book was wonderful to me, in second grade, and I wanted to say it still holds up, but like a Jerry Lewis movie, its one of those things that can’t really make the leap, from youth to mature appreciation.

But I believed in Saa, the lizard man, last of his super intelligent, rational reasonable and kind race. I believed in the undying underground diamond city of Haad, preserved perfectly for 60 million years by a mysterious gas. I believed in the mole, which could travel through rock in one of two modalities; one which leaves tunnels behind, perfectly round smooth tunnels, or in an invisible mode, where the melted rock just hardens again leaving no trace of its passage. I used to think about the mole a lot, as I recall.

Boy could I believe in stuff, when I was in second grade.

What is this story, though, really about?

It’s about adventure; finding a hidden world beneath your feet, about voices out of ancient time talking to you, it’s about encountering the alien other and befriending it, finding out that the other is just like you. It’s about fearlessness, as the amiable professor drags along his young charges, into the underground city, and into the mole, to travel deeper and deeper into the earth.

This is Turner’s only SF book.

As I contemplate what to do with the rest of my writing life, this book confronts me, haunts me, weirdly.

Middle Grade and YA authors get there first.

Could I lean how to be one of them?