My father died on the eighth of august, a week before his 87th birthday. He had a good life and we had a good relationship. But.

My mother is fading, her memory going, and I’ve been living with her, packing to move her… somewhere else. Back north, to be close to her surviving family, which would be us, her two sons.

Winnowing down the belongings to an iconic few, going through old photos, old clippings, old drawings, financial records, my parent’s academic work. Throwing away the useless tech cruft that builds up around us, the old cell phones and land lines and USB cables and battery chargers and transformer bricks that go to nothing that you’re afraid to throw away, in case you suddenly need whatever the hell it is they used to provide power for.

The retirement community will absorb what we leave behind. Oh, they have experience doing that. It’s a donation. Or more like a lizard shedding its tail to escape a predator.

I am a very lucky fifty six year old, to have not lost anyone but grandparents who was important to me. So lucky. And I’m so torn open now, so empty and lost. I’m not sure why. I’m told it fades. But never goes away completely.

Good bye, Dad. The boy who read every book in the library. The man who took his young sons bowling, for a time. The science fiction fan who bestowed upon me the genre. A futurist, technologist, a curious soul, an early computer programmer. Bridge player, crossword puzzle do-er and life long nightly drinker who never missed a day of work and was seldom visibly drunk.

A passionate atheist. With a wicked sense of humor.

One of the Lucky Few, the name for his generation, the Korean War set who ended up teaching the baby boom. Tenured professor. A man who dearly  loved wearing a suit. Who rose above his working class roots. To be respectable, a man of substance. Husband and father.

My father. Who I never had enough of.

But what I had will have to do.

Not only is writing not rocket science, rocket science isn’t rocket science.

“Rocket science”  means something so hard that people of normal intelligence just can’t do it, no matter how long or hard they try. When we say something isn’t rocket science, we mean, yeah, almost anyone can do that.

Presumably, this means that major scientific accomplishments are out of reach of anyone but a genius. The problem is, looking at the IQs of Nobel prize winners, it turns out this isn’t true.

In one famous longitudinal study of IQ, this happened:

Two pupils who were tested but rejected for inclusion in the study because of low IQ scores grew up to be Nobel Prize winners in physics: William Shockley^[81][82] and Luis Walter Alvarez.^[83][84] …  Richard Feynman, who had an IQ of 125 went on to win the Nobel Prize in physics and became widely known as a genius…

And on and on.

When I was younger, IQ squatted at the center of this venn diagram of scientific inquiry, racist eugenics, and misguided educational pedagogy.

Thirty years later, IQ remains stuck there.

So let’s not shout at each other about those things. Instead, let’s talk about how folks like Feynman, with his 95% percentile (1 in 20) IQ could do stuff that only a handful of humans since the dawn of time have done (made major contributions to our deepest understandings of reality as described by physics; helped build the Atom bomb, etc.)

The one in 20 mind doing the one in a billion thing. How does that happen?

Well. It takes time.

 

Humans live a long time; we’re neotenous apes, which means we are animals that carry aspects of childhood into our adult lives. This is why we are, or can be, lifelong learners. If you measure mammalian lives in heartbeats, humans get more than we deserve.

What this means is, if you have an average mind, but sustained focus, interest, will, or maybe just enjoyment of a thing, you probably have the time to get somewhere. If you don’t give up.

So you’re not a genius… you may have to settle for being a successful writer.

Or worse… just the one Nobel Prize.

Why is today a great time to be a writer?

Because every time is a great time to be a writer. Let me explain. I’m not being an asshole. (Well, more than usual.)

It’s not a great time because of indy-pub (or self-publishing as it known to traditional publishers, who wish people would just call them publishers, like in the old days). It’s not a great time because of e-readers or social media sharing or the Golden age of television or kickstarter or Patreon.

It’s not a great time because fascism is on the rise in America and across the globe and this painful political awakening and resistance is sharpening the senses.

It’s great because you get to write, and as good as now is, better times lie ahead, because you will get better at this.  Terrible times ahead, too, of course. But God you have to grab onto the good ones.

This paraphrases what Jack Dann told Cadwell Turnbull and myself at the Asimov’s table at Readercon 2019. (I think he was speaking mostly to Cadwell, whose first novel, the Lesson, I’d brought with me to be signed. The book evoked in Jack and the other successful novelists at the table memories of their first novels, and advice, real, heartfelt, ironic, mocking, self-deprecating sometimes pointed and blackly depressing echoed with the laughter and genuine good feeling.

It would be rude to quote it directly without permission, this wonderful moment of camaraderie and shared purpose, which I was glad to witness. (I haven’t sold a novel yet, but my publications had earned me a seat at the table.)

I tried to shut up and listen and enjoy the moment, too. I succeeded pretty well, as such things go for me. Feel like I’ve arrived. Though I will never arrive. No one ever arrives. And you have arrived the moment you write your first word. That’s about as good as it gets and it doesn’t have to get any better. But it will and it does. I hear. Think. Hope.

Calming and refuting the horrible voices inside me that say, “So where’s your novel? What’s wrong with you? You have proved you can do this now, what the fuck is the hold up, son? You’re sitting here poking at short stories and novellas and doing entry level graphic design for cash, having abandoned the corporate career, which is fine, for a goddamn twenty something. Thirty something. Forty something?

Fifty something?

But as the lunch winded down around dinner time Jack’s relentless clear eyed encouragement mixed with a funny, brutal honestly on the writing life was infectious, joyous. Jack was reeling from the hideous jet lag of his unbroken flight from Australia. Where is doing very well!

He has done great work and made great friends in this life.

And so will you. Maybe. If go and write now and take your piece of this writing life which is accessible to us all in bits and bites and sometimes huge delicious meals, and sometimes this becomes our lives, at any age, for some unknown number of years, because everything you have and gain will crash and burn, Jack told us. And you’ll keep writing, or stop, but you don’t have to. You never have to stop. And if you do stop you can start again, in a month, a year, five, or eighteen.

That’s me. The eighteen.

But you’re writing now, writing all the time, in your head, living your life, the voice I cultivate now whispers.

Make the most of it.

So the title is a provocation, as people are complicated. Nobody is all bad or all good. And most people don’t think of themselves as bad, even if we agree they sorta are, and most people who think they’re bad suffer from mental issues and are no worse than average.

So what am I talking about?

I’m talking about a thing we see in some workshops, the better ones, where people are being honest, but it may be manifested as an author never selling a single thing for years and years and years or forever.

Did that catch your attention?

Your story maker, your subconscious as mediated through your conscious decisions on what to write and how to write it, spits out stories that other people find offensive. Your worldview. Your obviously author-surrogate characters. Your implicit politics. Your anger at the world. Your deep and untreated depression.

There are so many ways to be offensive and, and if you’re a certain kind of person, like me, you will bump into them as you workshop. They are all embarrassing. But they will teach you important things about yourself, and humanity. Things you may wish you didn’t have to learn.

This cosmic embarrassment stage is not optional. You have to go through this, in the same way that a surgeon must get used to people bleeding as they cut into them.

You will endure. Don’t worry. I’ll help you through it.

One Way Your Story Might Piss People Off

Your POV, the interior monolog of your POV character, and or their actions, will be understood as Bad in one of the following ways: uncaring, duplicitous, narcissistic, weak-willed, spineless, cowardly, homicidal, sociopathic, racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, xenophobic, anti-religious, politically extreme or simply out and out evil.

Here’s the thing. You wrote POV as an author surrogate, by asking yourself, in this horrible situation, what would I do?

Now you’re sitting there, shaking inside, having been revealed to be a bad person. In front of the whole workshop… or in one on one, only to the person giving you this feedback.

What You should do In this situation

Nod knowingly as your POV is torn to shreds, as if this was your intention all along. Do not let on that POV is doing what you would do in that situation. This will help you not hyperventilate, pass out and urinate in your trousers.

If you are able, probe for details, for the reasoning behind the emotional response of others, but don’t defend POV.

Don’t get defensive,

Because you are not your characters. Say it under your breath as your heartbeat slows to normal.

Even when you think you are making your characters do what you would do in that imaginary situation. Take a deep breath. Get through the session. Your subconscious will process this later. Believe me. It will.

If you are writing non-fiction disguised as fiction about genuine trauma and what you did in that situation, and reader responses are tearing you up… look you should see a professional about that.

There is evidence that writing directly about trauma, simply re-staging traumatic events as they occurred, can cause re-injury, and make your PTSD worse. Take care of yourself. Do not use your writing workshop as therapy.

Most Offense is about Expectations. Genre Expectations. And Generational Expectations.

What you may have just learned is that the genre or generational expectations of your readers are different than yours. Your horrible character might work in horror, or in literary fiction, and might work as a villain in epic fantasy, as the beginning point of some deeply flawed character, but will just be roundly despised by everyone in Science Fiction, which is currently kinda obsessed with deeply likable characters.

You character might read perfectly for people who were reading twenty years ago… maybe most of what you read was twenty years ago?

Yeah. You gotta work on that, unless you can find a time machine to publish your work. Or unless you’re Great. I highly recommend being Great if you can swing that.

How will I learn to stop offending people?

Listen to people who read your stories.

This is a line that’s easy to gloss over, and it’s so basic, and so dumb, and so, ‘duh,’ that if I don’t add this paragraph and jump up and down, you will forget this, and I won’t have helped you. Sure, this is the Scarecrow’s diploma, you waded through all the above, and I hand you this thing you sorta already had, but this goes beyond writing, beyond politics, beyond your creative truth.

Listen to people. If you don’t have friends who are like your characters, seek them out. I’m not going to dig into the diversity reader thing here in this column, on how to do that, this is my general advice that applies regardless of your politics.

I am not saying that other people get to tell you what to think, or what to write. I am talking about your experience of offending people, your sense that offending people might be hurting your career, and what you can do about that.

If you want to emote about snowflakes and kids these days and your anger at stuff you loved getting cancelled by the kids these days, feel free to do that, in the privacy of your own thoughts, or on your blog. I’ll delete your comments here and block you. This isn’t about that.

You are pointedly missing my point.

Listen to what other people say about your stories, not necessarily the prescriptions and the ways they want to change them, those may not work. They often don’t.

Just listen to how your stories make other people feel.

How did you want people to feel, reading it?

Why didn’t it work?

And never, ever, tell someone what they should feel about something you wrote. It doesn’t matter if you put something on the page they seem to be ignoring. They feel how they feel. Yes, I have reached the tautology stage of this argument, which means we’re getting to the end.

If it was never your intention to be offensive, and if you have roughly standard brain wiring, your subconscious will hear these people and will adjust itself in time. Your new stuff will eventually not offend in a career killing manner. Even if you want to find an edgy edge to edge-lord over. In fact, this is how you find that edge.

What if I want to offend people?

Be my guest. A ton of great art is offensive as fuck. To figure out if you are Great, you have to search the space with your writing, which means writing a lot of stories and novels and sending them to a lot of people. If you are even a little great, this will generate useful feedback. Your offensive thing may be pure genius. Somewhere in all that feedback, in that emerging consensus, your subconscious will crack the code, the world will bow down before you, and you will ascend to literary stardom.

Don’t feel bad. Yes your story made some people feel bad. Unless you’re the guy in the paragraph above, that wasn’t your intent. And even if you are, there are no bad people. There are only people who make mistakes, and sometimes do bad things.

Your story never means you’re a bad person. Even if people think it does.

Because you’re always learning. Listening. Growing.

If you’re not… I feel sorry for you.

Good luck with that.

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I studied art in art school a long time ago, and had the one great professor there. (That’s as many as anyone deserves to get.) Larry Bakke, was the man’s name, and he had a rumpled suit, a dark scraggly beard, and gravelly voice, which he attributed to shouting at the students who insisted at sitting at the back of the auditorium for no goddamn reason at all. 

He had one rule. Do not read the Daily Orange in his class, the student newspaper. He didn’t like the rustling sound it made when people turned the pages. He wondered how people could read a paper he could finish in three minutes for a full hour, too, but it was the rustling that drove him crazy.

One class later, he barked at someone hidden behind the DOs unfolded pages, “You, in the second row, leave now! My TA awaits you outside with your drop slip!”

God I loved this guy. My very own art-school Paper Chase inspired bastard.

He was about the idea of cultural literacy, the ways in which high culture infected popular culture and the ways in which culture was the lens through which we saw the world, the way art became reality.

He was into Andy Warhol and Marshall Macluhan. He introduced me to Joseph Campbell, the heroes journey, Carl Jung’s archetypes and the shadow.

Bakke states his thesis during his first lecture of his trilogy of interlocking courses, Art History–mandatory for all art-school students, Aesthetics and Advanced Aesthetics, optional. Bakke told us that while art in the nineteenth century was about nature, and retinal depictions of the human and natural world, art in the twentieth century was about art.

Full stop. Art was about art, had been since the turn of the century more or less, and if you didn’t get that, you were simple. Bakke would teach us the language of art, so we could do more than grunt about whether we liked any a given piece or not.

He had a complex lecture whose punchline was the the Star Trek episode Who Mourns for Adonais. This little bit from wikipedia perfect illustrates what Bakke is talking about. 

The title is a quotation from the poem Adonais by Percy Shelley lamenting the death of John Keats, which is loosely based upon A Lament for Adonis by the Greek poet Bion. A part of the episode is shown in a scene in X-Men: Apocalypse.

So we see this theme, echoing down the centuries from ancient Greece, in a poem and another poem centuries later and then in Star Trek and then that episode turning up as a bit of window dressing in a big budget Hollywood film decades later.

Bakke’s thesis was that art was used by the powerful as a kind of weapon, to subliminally shape and control thought, and if you were ignorant of this, of the referents, of the weight of these traditions and this history of this language we all know, if only subconsciously, you were dangerously illiterate.

So you could be manipulated by art. Or you could understand it, know it, place it in context, appreciate the echoes. Get the bigger picture.

Art was important. He would show us, later on, clips from nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, and show us, again, how its imagery would be re-used at the end of Star Wars. 

And now, as a writer and, uh, artist I guess, I find myself locked in a conversation with Science Fiction itself. The genre in which I have read one thousand or so books. 

I am peering inward at the world SF created inside me. It’s unexamined assumptions. The genre’s lies and omissions and cultural blinders. The genre’s promise and positivism and relationship to progress and our technological future. Alongside the unfolding of history, the world SF helped make.

I’m currently beset by a supply side pulp hero spacemen falling in with progressive anthropologically sophisticated gender fluid utopian. Both stuck in the here and now wondering who the hell they are, where they came from, and what in the name of fuck all they are to do with the rest of their lives… knowing now what they learn from each other.

I don’t know if I’m shipping fan fic or doing the Alan Moore thing of reimagining fictive universes so deeply that I am making art about art. ‘

Or really if there is any difference between the two.

God I hope this one makes it through the meat grinder. Wish me luck. 

Had an epiphany talking to a friend on the phone yesterday as I walked the Charles during the freakish warm weather. I’ve been struggling, about what I should be writing, and who I should be writing about, about diversity and inclusion and my identity and my relationship to my family and how to be respectful and relevant, and he interrupted and said, ‘you can’t make this about you.’

You can’t write about the process because that writing instantly becomes the process, a higher level process, and that higher level processes swallows the lower level one and supersedes it.

Isaac Asimov once listened to a lecturer talking about his works and went up afterwards and smugly informed the lecturer that he was wrong, that he hadn’t meant half the things that the lecturer had dug out of the work.

The guy said, “Why do you think that you know more about this work than I do, just because you wrote it?”

Asimov enjoyed that. Then he went home and typed another novel before dinner. 

In A Perfect Vacuum, Stanislaw Lem sidesteps this by writing excerpts of novels and then the analysis, without the agony of having to write the books themselves.  Speculative Fiction as a genre is often guilty of this, of presenting maps rather than exploring territories. 

I have enjoyed my own vivisection, I think, in part, because I haven’t been teaching, as I should be, and I have imagined that was teaching myself and others in my analysis, and not spiraling into my own mind like an infected ingrown follicle. 

Analysis, like sex and tickling, isn’t the same when done on oneself. One can argue that like tickling it is impossible to do to oneself.  Unless you’re faking it. 

And here is the thing; if you can do it, if you can remove yourself from the equation enough for your analysis to be meaningful, you should use that energy, that remove to make more work, and let others do that job for you. If your work even warrants it, which, let’s face it, isn’t for you to say. 

It isn’t about you.

Getting out of your own way, letting go of anticipated failure or success or criticism, is vital for doing any of this with heart.

Anything that wakes you up and keeps you from entering the fictive dream? You have to let go of that. 

Michael Swanwick once told me to protect my head, when I confessed to him I couldn’t write anymore, after my Clarion, and I didn’t write fiction for 18 years.

It was a great metaphor. Analyzing your own work in public is like riding a motorcycle without a helmet. It probably wont kill you immedieately. But it is so fucking stupid.

There may come a time, with beta reading and workshopping and publisher feedback, when you have to step back and do this kind of soul searching, but for gods sake, don’t write about it and never share that writing if you do. 

I found in OS Card’s writing books many things that I felt cheapened his writing and diminished my enjoyment of his work. At a time when I had begun to emerge from my culturally conditioned homophobia, I found his defense of his own jaw dropping and I never felt the same way about him again. 

When I should have thought, as the reviewer did with Asimov, that I knew more about Card’s work than he did.

Doctors don’t discuss patients. Lawyers don’t discuss clients. For good reason. 

Your WIP is a patient on a table; it’s a defendant sitting in the witness stand. There are a very few proscribed things the professionals can say without a breach of professional ethics.

None of them are interesting. 

So, this is the end of a certain kind of talk here. I’m going to save this thing for my classroom. This is inside the beltway stuff. Inside baseball. 

Thanks for listening, as always. And goodbye for now. 

Why does the water alway feel so damn cold, even though it isn’t, you’ll feel perfectly warm after you’ve been in it for a few minutes?

Evolution seems to have rendered us skeptical about immersion.  Phase changes. Slipping back and forth across that aquatic boundary layer. Piercing the surface tension. 

But oh, when you adjust, and your stupid skin stops shrieking, you are weightless and free and your nose does seem to be evolved for this space, nostrils pointed away from the flow as you pull your way through the water. 

So this is just a quick note to let those who care about such things know that I am under water again, in the secondary creation after a few months shying away from that first blast of cold, mourning the end of the last project, in that time between when one wonders if one will ever do this thing again. 

And finally you let yourself dive in, and finally you realize you’ll be swimming to the day you die, and how did you forget, that you are weightless here? How did you forget, that the water grows warm and your muscles loosen up and your sinuses get weirdly clear, and the sun on your back when you emerge feels wonderful?

Oh, I am having a lovely time, I wish you were here, and maybe you will be after the few weeks of work, followed by the one to twelve months of marketing, followed by the months to publication and distribution. Say a year or two.

Meanwhile last years output slowly winds through the system. Hope you get to see some more of that, too.

But you’re the greek chorus really. 

Though I wouldn’t dream of doing this without you, either.

I know those statements are oddly paired. 

But it’s the truth. 

So the job inside your head isn’t really a job job, because it doesn’t pay enough, at least, not at first and oftentimes not ever. 

But it isn’t a hobby.

Why isn’t it a hobby? Well, for one thing the word hobby is insulting, a word invented by capitalism to make fun of activity it has difficulty monetizing.

The job inside your head is harder than a hobby, oftentimes impossible to quit, but infinitely easier to avoid for long blocks of time. 

The job inside your head drags everything into a big barn labelled ‘raw material,’ and then doesn’t know how to file any of it. As you age the barn fills with old magazines, broken typewriters, antique furniture, dead media, floppy disks and analog tape and zip drives and stacks of vinyl warping in the mildewed air. And box after box after box of unlabeled, uncategorized snapshots. 

The job inside your head is a welcome relief from your job anywhere else. The job can also be nerve wracking. It’s easiest when you pretend that you’re really, really good at it. But you never get any better when you think that way too much.

And when you never get any better, what starts in your head mostly stays in your head. 

Because the goal of the job inside your head is to make things that make the difficult and dangerous journey into other heads. And having penetrated that quarter inch of bone and skin and membrane, like Trojan horses or IEDs or Vaccines or Opioids, your head-made-thing detonates. Blooming into stuff that matters. Stuff that gets dragged into the barns inside those other heads. Tucked into a section that isn’t for raw materials but is instead loosely regarded as inspiration.

Or joy. Pure joy. 

So let us leave the here and now and go to work, or forget to work and just be in that place for a time where the work piles up undone, just mist, ghosts and shadows and briefly glimpsed vistas  of glittering starscapes, sweat slicked gleaming bodies, expanding spheres of quiet destruction, mushroom clouds and armies marching over shattered obsidian. 

Rebels languishing in caves of methane ice. Silent generation ships shepherded by orbs of crystalline computronium dreaming incomprehensible dreams. Chosen Ones and Everyman. Men. Persons. 

Tigerfaced Gully Foyle scattering capsules of anarchy across all spacetime. 

The black hole lurking behind nebula at the center of the Galaxy, devouring all things.

The Instrumentality punishing Command Suzdal with eternity in Shayol.

The velvet black sky full of whispering stars.  

Dark interdimensional spiders aghast at the race that would rule the sevagram!

A pulp magazine. A light saber. A rubber mask. One ring. 

A particle beam handgun with a worn ivory handle. 

Pack them in your briefcase. Finish that cup of coffee!

Time to get to work.