So, the year of pandemic and the death of my parents is over, and I have the one novella to show for it; and a hundred pages or so of memoire, which I have no idea what to do with.
There are a few hunks of memoire here; most of it was donated to a billionaire friend of mine that is sad that he can’t afford his own personal space program.
I’m joking. It’s at facebook. He can afford a space program. Hah hah. Why in the name of God do I post there?
So, this is the best thing I’ve done in my life, pretty sure, and you should go read it. You can read a sample, linked to from the home page of Asimov’s.
ASPIRING WRITERS: I have a tip for breaking into this business. It worked for me. Take a look at the bibliography if you want to see this, but basically, the way I started my career in the 90s, and picked it up again in 2012, was to do this very strange thing…
Read SF magazines. I read the magazines I wanted to be published in. I wrote and finish short fiction. (I did not endlessly pick at a novel manuscript like a scab.)
Don’t run away!! Seriously, this is huge. I wrote for years without doing this… and got precisely nowhere.
It wasn’t that I didn’t read, or hadn’t read; it was just that I read a few dozen authors, and I wasn’t any of them. I couldn’t figure out, from that reading, what my stories were going to be. What my voice should be like.
The magazines expose you to, rub your nose in, a lot of contemporary genre voices. The stories fan out across a spectrum of stuff you are familiar with, and stuff you never personally got into… but you can see have appeal.
Some of that stuff you never read? Turns out, you can write it. And you want to.
The magazine? It gives you permission to; to write this thing you didn’t know existed, you weren’t sure if you liked, but which you find inside you, and low and behold, you have a voice and. you’re publishing a lot.
Magazine editors pour their lives into this. No joke. Their insights mean something. They don’t have time to mark up manuscripts or give you specific feedback, except, the magazine’s they curate… they are the feedback.
Read them. Get a few issues of each and read them cover to cover, including the online markets now starting to dominate the awards. Keep reading, but after that initial brain programming you can read stories across the field as makes sense to you.
Oh, the other thing? Write the authors and tell them what you thought of the stories. Unless you hated them. Then don’t.
Do this for a bunch of issues, go back and buy stuff by the authors you like, email them or DM them and or tweet their content, and you will end up people that will be on. your side as a writer; don’t demand free critique or beat reading or copy edits or award nominations or secret handshakes. This isn’t transactional. But some of these notes will turn into relationships that will help sustain you.
That’s it.
Please check out my novella. Read the beginning for free online.
If you are reading these please go to the Analog site and check out my excerpt and the illustration there. It’s good. It captures the emotional flavor of the work. Analog can track the hits and seeing interest in my work is a Good Thing. If you would like to see more, I mean.
This novella is one of three I wrote last year, one of the two set in the Zeitgeist universe; the first was a mess that could become a novel, or be printed and used for insulation in an attic, and the other straddles the line between SF and superhero fiction and is thus, a hard sell.
That is to say, it didn’t sell.
I’m finally working again on two novellas started before my Dad’s death. I feel like a different person in many ways. I’m curious what it does to my work.
Alpha zero isn’t a stupid brute force engine, either; in fact it looks ahead far fewer moves than its opponents… who are also computer programs. But ones written more directly by humans.
Alpha Zero, more or less, wrote itself.
I had thought that SF writer Vernor Vinge had invented the idea behind this real world realization of a Super intelligence explosion, but it turns out that this idea has been around since the 60s, dreamt up during one of AIs many false dawns.
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. … It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be the last invention that man need make.
I. J. Good
So, this is terrifying, but the worst thing, or best thing, if you get to monetize the product, is that Alpha Zero taught itself Go and Shogi as well, again in a few hours, and now it’s the best at them, too.
These games are similar in many ways, and reassuring articles now abound explaining how far deep learning is still from real intelligence, general intelligence. One has to wonder if one day we get general intelligence, too–without ever understanding what it is. What we are.
Because we don’t understand Alpha Zero. The code just works. It knows more about chess than any human ever will, it plays elegantly, masterfully–at times it seems to toy with its opponent, rubbing their nose in their leaden brute force clunkiness.
The article goes on to talk about other deep learning applications that could soon make a serious impact in medicine–diagnosing brain injury about as good as a human doctor with decades of training and experience… but hundreds of times faster, and, though the article never says it, about a million times more cheaply.
Like many tech articles, even as it lays out a economic apocalypse of white collar work, with all of new revenue presumably flowing to companies like Google, who ‘get there firstest with the mostest’, there’s the presumption that capitalism will deal with this elegantly.
Progress is awesome! Everyone put out of work by this product will be able to afford the products created by their replacement! Somehow!
Even though these products, built on bazillions in public-spending to get the whole computer thing going, will be priced by giant global brutal monopolies.
We appear to be standing on the lip of the abyss.
Just as fisherman gained the ability to catch every fish in the ocean with high tech, the 1% has gained the ability to utterly capture the wealth of the middle class. IE, 90% of the consuming class. They have done this by reaping disproportionality the productivity gains of the information economy.
Technology may be neutral, but new tech is expensive, and when it is instantly weaponized by the shareholding class, we see that inequality is now tracking the curve of the approaching singularity.
Here’s another thing. The consumer economy doesn’t work without consumers. Your iphone factory is worthless when nobody can afford the new iphones.
So the owners of Alpha Zero and its split-second educated and manufactured slave children, will have two choices.
A new feudalism where 99.99 percent of the wealth is held by .01% of the population. Just keep adding nines on the one side and pushing the decimal on the other.
Or the shareholding class will have to manufacture consumers somehow. Whether that’s basic income, or subsidized work, or labor laws that partner human workers with super-smart AI pals, is unclear.
But we are at the point where the owners can, if they want, catch every fish in the sea. And then starve to death. Or rather, starve us to death, presumably hiding in fortified bunkers till we’re gone.
Alpha zero, at this point, is too dumb to care what happens.
In my Zeitgeist stories, general intelligence emerges in the next few decades and then spills into the environment. It takes whacks at these big problems too.
Short answer ? I wrote about 200k words, which is like two good sized novels. Though I didn’t write novels.
I think that’s the most I’ve ever written. My word count system (putting everything in one Scrivener file) stopped working as I cut and paste stuff back and forth to incorporate edits from beta readers, so, I ended up measuring the final products and not counting some words written.
I’ll firm that system up, or rather, replace it, this year.
The bad news, which will surprise exactly no one who knows anything about writing, is that I made less money than I ever have in my life—the year I spent the most time writing, wrote my longest pieces, and finished four of them.
I sold two shorts to Asimov’s, which was cool. The first has been out for a few weeks… no one has spoken to me about it yet, which I guess, is okay, as nobody has told me I’m a bad person for having written it. So. That’s maybe all I should hope for.
Like my previous story. The Best Man, I’m stumbling about in the minefield of identity politics trying to write stuff that feels true to my spirit, that feels like what I think of SF, that thrums with the moral ambiguities that I think fiction is meant to explore, and that incorporates my own journey parenting two GLBTQ kids. I’m living this diversity moment, from the POV of one of the usual suspects, trying to figure out what my contribution should be.
No consensus has pronounced doom on my efforts to date. Though a few sensitivity readers have gently explained to me that my stuff, ‘isn’t written for them.’ Which is of course, a kind of failure…
Still. I have Asimov’s, Analog and F&SF behind me. For now anyway. This keeps me going.
I wrote three SF novellas set in my Zeitgeist universe, a post-singularity near future. The three novella’s required a timeline, which I built and include a snapshot of above.
My third short story published in Asimov’s, Solomon’s Little Sister, is set in the Zeitgeist timeline, more or less (though it may need tweaking as it was the first one I wrote, before I realized I’d need a timeline.)
It remains to be seen if these novella’s will make it to professional publication… which puts me in this awkward position of reconsidering if I want to keep building out this universe at all.
Nobody is clamoring for more stories of course, after the one.
The Zeitgeist universe is sort of about human motivation in a post-scarcity world, the meaning of life, which is of course mostly a first-world kind of problem? Most people are simply surviving; the meaning of life for many is figuring out how to keep living. Once we have a universal base income, or anything like it, What does life mean?
Of course I still manage to find life and death stakes in this universe.
I’m not going to tell you what she told me, you’ll have to google it yourself or preferably read my story.
The Gorgon is an idea story, but written in the modern way, where the idea is basically a kind of casting call for the characters and plot to compliment the idea.
Not the characters and plot to dress the idea up in a thin layer of prose, you see. That’s the old way.
One of the things about the old way was the casting process. Who will reveal this idea? Some guys like me and the readers. White. Middle-class. American. Boom. There’s your story. You’re welcome.
Some of these old fans are now, frankly, pissed, when a story’s POV is, say, a woman.
“What about this story requires the POV to be a woman?” They sometimes say. Innocently. Not Getting It.
What about a story requires POV be a man… they don’t ask, because that was the default. Why are you shifting the default? Some ask innocently; mostly, now, this is followed by something about SJWs and Virtue Signaling.
Anyway. Nowadays, when I do my mental casting call for the story, the usual effortless white male het cis middle class dudes all show up…. but I try to search the crowd for someone more interesting.
There’s two ways that someone more diverse can be interesting.
One, their diversity echoes some metaphorical subtext you are working with.
Two. It doesn’t.
When it doesn’t, you’ve flipped the default… just because. Because fuck the default.
So this was an idea story… and here’s the spoiler alert.
I made the characters presumably white middle class… bisexual / pansexual though neither character overtly identifies as either.
I have compassion for both these characters, one loosely based on a guy I worked with in the tech bubble, the other a friend who worries about being a sociopath. Mixed with other people blah blah blah, you know, standard drill, these aren’t direct portrayals but there are real things in here.
Where did these character’s sexuality come from? Am I virtue signaling?
No, because these characters aren’t model citizens. One is casually racist; one is unreadable, as everything he says he says to manipulate.
Am I saying that sexual minorities are sociopaths and racists? No.
The idea story casting call required these types, these kinds of people. But I let diverse characters be cast anyway.
When both my kids came out as GLBTQ my family made the conscious choice to seek out more friendships and relationships with potential role models. These minorities became part of my internal landscape through a thousand meetings and stories and books. So they emerge in my stories, more often than the one in ten rate that one might expect, were fiction to be a demographic mirror.
Am I allowed, with my identity, to portray a diverse character negatively? That’s the issue isn’t it? Do I reveal hidden and implicit bias by doing so? Or, have I reached a place where my diverse characters are no longer cardboard model minorities, GBLTQ BFFS, and other assorted forms of window dressing?
I don’t know. I don’t get to know. Seems like I gotta do it though.
If you’re a spec fic writer, who seeks to write about Others like aliens, fairies, ghosts, AIs, seems like you oughta be able to write women, POC and GLBTQ beforehand. I mean. If you won’t investigate and portray the variety of lived experience within your own species…
Anyway. Hope you like the story. I run the risk of alienating old fans with the flipped default, and new fans, with the non-model-minority portrayal. The only way out of the box is to do a very good job. Do it right.
Hopefully I managed that. Asimov’s thought I did. So I’m going to keep trying. Keep flicking away from the default. Trying my best.
On the brink of a breakthrough I grew fat with despair
Down 200 sticks of butter from Peak Fat. A man as thin as a twenty-nine year old, with a curiously long torso.
A year into the ongoing tragedy of the Trump administration I had packed another fifteen pounds into my fat suit, the one I’d been working on diligently since my twenties. This is the fat suit most Americans don as they age, swapping a pound of muscle for two pounds of fat each and every year.
I felt like shit. I wasn’t sleeping sleep well, I had gastric issues, but eating three to four thousand calories a day helped stave off panic and kept my depressive mood swings barely in check. My mental state induced a suite of symptoms leading to expensive medical tests which showed nothing deeply wrong with me… besides the thing my doctor had begun to mention at my yearly checkups. I was, at 240 pounds and five foot ten and a half inches, clinically obese.
I didn’t really feel obese, though, and when I mentioned this people said I wasn’t, meaning, really only that I didn’t look morbidly obese, which is really what we commonly understand that word to mean.
I’d been a skinny kid and an average weight young man…. what happened? Was I cursed with some metabolic slowdown? Bad microbiome? Thyroid condition.
No. I ate too much. I have alcoholism in my family, but have been spared that, but food has always been my weakness. I’m a good cook… and an even better eater. I love food. All food; organic, healthy, vegetarian, vegan… and factory food, fast food, snack food, meaty and fatty food. Ethnic food from every nation. American diner fare. Crappy-crass parodies of ethnic food. Lousy New England Chinese restaurants.
Taco Bell.
Hey what about the writing?
I’d broken into the big SF mags at age 50. Yes, I use this graphic a lot.
I knew another three to seven years of this was going to kill me. I’d also realized, after publishing a dozen stories and novellas in the SF pro-press (Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, Interzone, FSi and others), that if I ever wanted to do this writing thing, I had to do it now. Time wasn’t on my side. I could stroke out, become demented, or die, at any minute. Of course anyone can pull a Stuart Sutcliff, but I’d reached an age when, as the late Louis CK put it, there would be no candlelight vigils at my sudden unexpected passing.
Most of the writers, artists, scientists, important people I’d read about had done their best work long before age 55. If I was ever to do anything, I’d be an outlier. Any success was growing more unlikely day by day, week by week, year by year.
The remnant of the energy and excitement at my big magazine breakthrough at age fifty was washed away by the national tragedy, and my work failing to trigger any observable, measurable change in my life. No awards, nominations, TV or movie options, no interest from agents for anthologies… all things happening to friends of mine with similar credits. I’d passed one hurdle but this proved just another milestone in a long slog that again disappeared to the vanishing point on the horizon. Still, I couldn’t stop now. I didn’t want to. I was publishing regularly in the top magazines in the field.
But I was grinding to a halt. Writing wise, I’d picked at a novella for months, while doing my usual freelance design, a little activism, a ton of Facebook Ranting, and nothing else worth mentioning.
But with the support of friends and long-suffering family I began to shakily, fitfully, pull myself out of the mire.
Pysch meds, which I had long avoided, were the first step. While I know from personal experience that pysch medication can save your life I’m agnostic about their ability to fine tune one’s mental state; chemical intervention is always a double-edged sword, and I’d hoped to treat my various borderline clinical issues in other ways.
Trump changed that, in the first months of his ‘presidency,’ while viciously attacking, debasing and insulting almost everyone who wasn’t an aging white ultra-rich guy. Non-aging-white-ultra-rich guys, IE, 99% of my friends, around me were regularly dissolving into tears, fits of screaming rage, or near catatonic despair.
I alternated between these three states myself.
As they say in the airplane safety dance, first put on your own oxygen mask, then help others paralyzed with fear.
I started reading what I have always called ‘self-help crap,’ fitfully, in an annoyed fashion. Reading the blogs, the books. Successful friends recommended to me what had helped them. I held my nose and entertained the notion that I didn’t know everything about how to live my life.
If you speak science-ese you can look at the study here. The TL:DR is this: A bunch of random people were given index cards with a mini-course on mindfulness meditation, and in 8 weeks, they changed the physical size of their amygdalas. In fifteen stinking minutes a day.
Not reduced electrical activity in the region. They shrank the gross physical mass of this nightmare inducing part of their goddamn brains.
They didn’t have to scale mountain tops, or learn how to speak Martian. They read a card and sat in a chair and did a certain special kind of nothing for, and yeah, I’ll say it again, fifteen lousy stinking minutes a day.
So I added meditation to the medication. And one day, while looking at myself in the mirror, I pivoted to that sideways view that is always so, so disturbing and thought to myself, grabbing the thick pad of fat that now filled out my silhouette transforming me into a barrel of man—
Fuck this. Fuck this shit. Seriously. What the fuckity-fuck. Who the fuck is that? Having just meditated, I said all this calmly without throwing things or clawing at my abundant flesh. (have I mentioned the Zen is a work in progress?)
I asked myself, ‘how did I get here?’
Letting the days go by. That’s fucking how. You fuck.
And I remembered a moment as I approached the age of thirty where I thought to myself, “Considering the alternative, I have to turn 30, but do I really need to get heavier than 200?”
I have fat friends, and I have embraced, and still do, the basic tenets of fat acceptance, that shaming and judgement of others based on weight are bullshit. I had unfriended people for preaching the gospel of universal weight-loss to some of the larger bodied friends in my feed.
But the body in the mirror didn’t look like me, to me. Nobody was giving me much shit about it; even my Doctor. The advancing case of Old I could do nothing about. But the fat? Maybe. I could get under 200 pounds again. Maybe it wasn’t going to make me healthier. Maybe it was arbitrary. Maybe it was vanity. A mountain to climb for no reason.
But to tread that lightly on the Earth again. What would that feel like?
The writing thing? Same basic plan. Use a scale. Measurable goals. Read the work habits of Very Successful people. And Try. I had already set a word count goal for the year. Successful pulp writers crank out between 500,000 to a million words a year. (five to ten novels). I’d shoot for 300,000.
The mental health thing? Medication and Meditation baby. And maybe progress on the goals would help, too. My writing program, Scrivener had a word tracking system built into it.
Which was good, because I suck at data entry.
Okay, it’s worse than that. I suck at any and all forms of discipline, any and all regularity of pattern, any and all structure. In short, any time I am compelled to do anything like a metronome I feel the desire to stick it to the man, and not do the thing.
Even if I am the Man!
So I was going to have to build new habits. I’d learned that one recipe for failure is to try to turn your life around all at once. To use force of will to simultaneously tackle many weaknesses. Because you don’t have that much willpower. Trying and failing to adhere to fanciful work plans had proven that already. What I hadn’t known, until I did my reading was that nobody has that much willpower.
What successful people have is habits, cultivated over time, which they added to gradually, habit by habit. Being creatures of habit (supposedly) their ability to become ruthless self-actualizing world-beating success machines grew exponentially, as they built habits inside of habits in nested epicycles, hung habits on top of habits, and habitually kicked the sorry asses of seat-of-the-pants, winging it, late sleeping slackers like me.
Or rather people that acted the way I was acting.
How do you start? How did I start? One habit at a time, dude. With the keystone habit. The first habit. The mother of all habits. Unbeknownst to me, I’d started the work. With a pill. And an index card of meditation instructions handed to me by a scientific study via the NYT. With a selfish grasp of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as illustrated by the Airline Safety Dance.
Put your oxygen mask on first.
Build a better life one habit at a time.
Start at the bottom of the pyramid… and work you way up.
Stay tuned for Part 2: Gamifying Everything: On Becoming a Cyborg and the Quantified Self
Very pleased to announce the sale of my short story, “Not Only Who You Know,” to Asimov’s.
A little near future spec fic, a little romance, a little crime fiction, a little social commentary… I’m happy with how it came out.
I am making my 1k a day goal for 300 days this year, though I don’t write evenly, some days are more productive than others, and some days are lost to the real world.
I’m a bit behind now. I’ll pour it on and make my deadline, I think.
I’ve lost 25 pounds in the last seven weeks or so, on purpose. So, I’m counting calories, and counting words, and counting steps, my Self fully quantified.
I wanna thank my workshops, Neopros, Mechanics, and B-Spec, for all their help over the years, Sheila Williams for helping me fix the broken bits of my stories, my friend Celeste for being Celeste, and my family for giving me the time and space to write a lot. A lot for me anyway.
At the end of the year I expect I will be pushing just as hard, just as frantically, for more clients and more freelance work. But I’m not worried about that now. For now I am doing this. As hard as I can.
Or is it easy? What could be easier than falling into your dreams.
The hard part, really, is leaving them to live in the world.
I will be hosting an Asimov’s authors get together in the bar at Readercon at 3:00 pm on Saturday July 14th. Sheila Williams, Asimov’s award-winning editor will be attending, if everything works out as planned.
Chime in, if you can make it; if you know of Asimovians feel free to invite them; have them RSVP if they want to following up on my public post, or email me at ejayo1963 (at) gmail.com, or just show up!
Let’s try to celebrate the magazine and discuss the work, and not get sucked into a lot of discussion of the current dystopian hellscape!
Let’s enjoy the weekend!
Hope to see as many as can make it there. Feel free to comment here or on my Facebook page!
I want to briefly thank everyone who I have met through the magazine for being awesome to me. Thank you! Thank you. You make this whole thing feel a lot less isolating.
This is the link to the ebook preorder page. The book will be discounted in pre-order by a buck, so it’s only 4.99 for a novel length collection of stories from the top magazines in the SF field, Asimov’s, F&SF, Interzone… (my Analog stories are still coming out…)
Here’s the blurb from Amazon:
Con Men. Ex-lovers. Time-line Wizards. Cyborgs. Zen Master Private Detectives. Dead-Enders. Wunderkind, and Fools.
These stories are filled with people you know, living hauntingly familiar lives set fifteen minutes in the future. Stories about people that desperately want things. People on the brink. Every one bewitched, bothered and bewildered by Bad Gurus.
Jay O’Connell re-emerged on the short genre fiction scene in 2013 with a sudden outpouring of short stories and novellas in the SF pro press which transmuted his mis-spent years in east-coast tech-bubble start-up culture into something weird and wonderful. This is also his story, one of those mid-life transformations that gives us hope the future might grant us an unlikely redemption, if we keep our head in the game.
