How I Escaped Fighting About the Hats Online

Excellent piece in the New Yorker about the non-event, and to those of us addicted to our feeds, I don’t have to even identify the non-event, but I’ll just say it involves hats. Screenshot excerpt follows:

***

In the old days, there was a little meme, from before we called them memes, that wars start when politicians lie to journalists and then believe what they read in the newspapers. 

This seems to more or less completely explain the botched Iraq War 2, or as I call it, the Pre-emptive Unilateral War-of-choice based on Cooked Intel that Created ISIS and Cost More than our Total Debt to China.

I used to say based on lies, but lie is a loaded word, it doesn’t really mean what it means, because it encompasses intent and a kind of self-knowledge that many liars lack.

But it doesn’t exactly explain where we are now. Where genuine grassroots outrage is indistinguishable from viral content created by provocateurs, both foreign and domestic.

But shrieking horrible loathsome men caught up, 99% of the time justly, in the gnashing gears of #metoo have a point. We have created a machine that makes mobs. A kind of destabilizing echo-chamber without gatekeepers. 

Progressive have no problem seeing the Mob in gamergate. Our mob is much much better than their mob, I think.

But it’s a mob.

Now the gatekeepers gave us a corrupt status quo, whitewashing racism, sexism, colonialism, all the isms, and all the phobias, homo/trans and xeno. Or, rather the Gatekeepers were part of a status quo that had a degree of corruption in it, and that seemed oblivious to a lot of human misery.

But one has to ask oneself, standing in the ruins of the twitter-fed Arab spring, in the wake of the Trump win, what are the pros and cons of Mobs, and what the hell do we do about the genie we have released from this bottle?

I know how reactionary this all sounds. But know this. I was a techno-utopian, once. I was a cheerleader for the inter-webs.

The far left in America, for a time, believed that the news of Stalin’s purges were fake news by a corporate media in thrall to capitalist imperialism. Regardless of the thrall thing, they were wrong. The purges were real. At some point, some of the left woke up and realized, no, the purges were real, and that while the critique of capitalism made by Marxism had a lot of merit, its prescriptions for Utopia were a complete and total fucking disaster. 

This is where I am now with networked technology, information that wants to be free, ‘free’ tools and technologies, digital anonymity— the whole Whole Earth Review Kevin Kelly slash Cyberpunk / Cypherpunk Randian venn overlap of techno utopianism.

Stain’s purges were real. Trump is real. A none-of-the-above social media revolution empowers the biggest organized monster lurking in the shadows.

Which brings us back to the title, and how I escaped Hatgate. (Hategate?) I stopped using the liking and sharing buttons, in the week before Covington. Instead, I wrote a few comments. I sat with choking outrage at the smirk, worrying at some level… that  maybe I was being cynically manipulated, because I have been manipulated in this way before. 

I wonder now, if writing a comment is like eating a piece of fruit, and if liking and sharing is like drinking sweetened fruit juice, which is fine for some people but a road to obesity and diabetic problems for others. All the white flours which some people tolerate, and which make other people sick.

If you don’t care enough about something to actually talk about it? With words? What the fuck are you really doing by sharing it, and liking it… and maybe not even reading it?

You’re memeing. You’re gossiping. You’re agitating. You’re echochambering. You’re inciting. Like and share is the core of the feedback loop of virality.

Hey what do you call a living thing that grows super super fast, hijacking all available resources, and growing without care for the environment supporting it?

That’s a tumor. That’s cancer.

Like and Share is a tumor machine.

I’m stopping it for now. Or being super judicious (he says) as in linking to the article about non-events above. (he then goes back and reads every word of the article) If I ‘heart’ something I’ll say so with words. If I want to share something, I’m gonna sever the link to the original and embed it in a post I write, that ads some new angle and credits the original authors… let them google up the damn link. Otherwise, people can find the news item… through their own interests.

Maybe even through, gasp, a gatekeeper. 

I’m giving up my part time job as a viral agent, and I realize, in so doing, I forfeit my right to become viralized. 

Without viralizing, any following I have will grow slowly. Word of mouth that is actually words, and not button presses. Apples instead of applejuice.

I was saved from Covington because I didn’t share it, I was never an agent for whatever created it, and I didn’t distract people from anything real by talking about it, except in this broader context, of saying we have to stop talking about pure outrage fed to us by the outrage machine. 

One partial fix, which of course is gameable, is the downvote, which twitter and FB lack. Another excerpt:

***

With the downvote, instead of doubling down on Covington, or parsing it, and talking about it, and feeding it, one could, after getting more context, downvote it.

Downvoting the non-event would be a way of voting for none-of-the-above that isn’t abdicating the slippery moral imperative to vote for the lesser of two evils. 

You got scammed by the outrage machine? Fuck that. Downvote is the button we need. All publicity is good publicity? And you tricked me into giving it to you?

Let me knock that bullshit back down to size.

This cranky man resisted click-bait outrage. You won’t believe what happened next!

The Intoxicating Jolt of Now

Doing research for this I discovered the origin for William Burroughs Naked Lunch Monsters. Maybe. Wikipedia doesn’t think so…
Remember language is a virus.

Those little red circles with the numbers in them, that top out at 99 on the iphone, but soar upward unbound everywhere else.

How many people have read me, hearted me, shared me, linked to me?

The graphs at the on-line etailers. I just sold five books! I haven’t sold a book in two days!

Your sales rank graph at Amazon, KDP. Your KENP page reads.

The progress of readers at Goodreads. Ten people have added my book. I can see what page some of them are on. I can check each and every review.

The control panels, where you can track your trend lines. 

Your twitter followers, your retweets, your FB friends, your Youtube subscribers and views, your mailing list sign-ups… and drops. 

Your award nods slowly accumulating at the SFWA site. (if you do SFWA) If you get nods. 

“Sure, the world of the future is like a swarm of angry bees living in your head… but there they are,” said Firesign Theater a long damn time ago. 

This week I successfully avoided talking about the hats, a reference that may or may not be decodable in the future, assuming there is a future, which seems mostly safe to assume. But not entirely. 

I didn’t share the Hat thing, so I didn’t have to apologize about sharing the hat thing or double down on the hat thing or drill into the hat thing to find the deeper truth of the hat thing. 

Instead I read my feed without liking, or sharing but occasionally commenting in others threads, congrats and condolences. Brief engagements that spurted way too many words into someone elses comment thread.

A friend asked me to not derail the point of her tweet with a long orthogonal rambling and I deleted my posts and she said she’d be sure not to waste time commenting on my comments again. 

Ouch. And mission accomplished, I guess. Unintentional of course, the way I do most things.

  • There’s no way to interact with the feed that doesn’t entrance you. 
  • The feed is designed to entrance you.
  • This entrancement is designed to sell things to you. 
  • It is designed to prevent you from selling things to your ‘friends’ —unless you pay for ads.
  • Your feed is not a publicly regulated utility. It may be entirely composed of lies. If you choose to fill your head with lies and rage, your feed will feed that to you in auto-amplifying waves until you are ready to second amendment whoever it is you are mad at.
  • Your feed’s author and owners, when warned that their platform were being weaponized, shrugged and said, “that isn’t our responsibility.” 
  • Your feed is a nineteenth century vitamin elixir chock full of opium before the Harrison Act.
  • Your feed is a radium cocktail toasting the new millennium.
  • Your feed is a Shoe-fitting fluoroscope spewing hard x-rays in all directions.
  • Your feed is a glowing watch dial painted by radium girls –taught to twirl the brushes in their mouths to get a sharper point. 
  • Your feed is energy  too cheap to meter.
  • Your feed is free… but TANSTAAFL.
  • What else do billionaires give you, specifically you, for free? I’m not talking libraries built by governments. I’m not talking about soup kitchens or food stamps. Billionaires. Giving. You. Stuff. For. Free.
  • Nothing. Nothing else. Ask yourself. Why do I get this for free?
  • Your net search is free, too. Shiver.
  • TV was free… but the broadcast spectrum was limited. TV was like drinking a six pack a night. Not good for you. But endurable. 
  • Your feed is infinitely large. It scrolls for ever. It is a billion billion channels.
  • South American native people chewed coca leaves for centuries with harmful effects similar to coffee. Until the leaves were concentrated into powders and the boiled into crack. Becoming more and more concentrated.
  • The info billionaires are using deep learning and research and all the shiny tools they have from the whole billionaire thing to concentrate your feed and make it ever more entrancing. 
  • You are the product. You make the product. You are the employee. You are the market.
  • You work in a company store and every interaction makes money for the store owner. 
  • You are addicted to the adrenaline jolt of Now. I’m doing it to you now, too. The irony isn’t lost on me. We’re falling off this cliff together. Have we reached terminal velocity yet?
  • When will we hit bottom?

But my blog is a backwater, a church basement and a ring of folding chairs. At best I hope to grow into a grainy, hissing channel 2 with PBS and reruns of Monty Python, new to you perhaps. 

We’re all mad as hell. But are we going to take it anymore?

Pull up a chair, introduce yourself, and smoke ’em if you got em. 

Social Media Unleashes Monsters from The ID

The gaunt middle aged man tosses his  smoldering cigarette butt to the floor and twists it out with a sneaker that has seen better days. Looks up at the circle of people sitting in their folding chairs and winces, realizing this was rude. He should have asked for an ash tray.

Really he shouldn’t have been smoking until the first break. 

It’s his turn to share.

The man clears his throat. “After a million years of shining sanity, they could have hardly understood what power was destroying them.”

He looks around the circle and sighs at the blank stares. He’s the oldest one in the circle.

“Monsters from the id. An old movie. The movie that became Star Trek? Sort of? You know about Star Trek? But you never watched Forbidden Planet…”

The man takes out another cigarette but doesn’t light it, only stares at the unlit tip.

“The movie is based on The Tempest, but the part I’m talking about isn’t in the Tempest. It’s new to the film. Something gained in translation—”

The  man is interrupted by a sigh of comprehension from across the circle. “Invisible monsters. That robot that was in all those Twilight Zone episodes! Um,” the woman in her thirties looks at the man, skepticism and compassion at war on her face. 

The man nods. “The monsters that destroyed the Krell, the alien species on that planet, were unleashed by  tech which set free the darkest impulses of the subconscious. The monsters were thought into being.

“Oh. So you’re talking about the internet? Social media.”

The man smiles. “I worked in the first tech bubble. I was a believer. I laughed at luddites! A world without gatekeepers would be a better world. A new anarchic, meritocratic, democratic commons. A new marketplace of ideas! A wave of intelligence and compassion lifting all boats. A new golden age…”

The man lights his cigarette and takes a long, deep drag, and closes his eyes. The smoke streams through his nostrils as he smiles. 

His eyes fly open and the circle of faces around him flinches as one.

“Guilty! Guilty! My evil self is at that door, and I have no power to stop it! Stop! No further! I deny you! I give you up!”

An awkward silence falls. Someones phone set to mute wriggles in their back pocket, making the metal folding chair buzz.

The thirty something woman smiles as she breaks the awkward silence. “Dude. Relax. You were in marketing in the first tech bubble. Genies out of the bottle anyway. The question is what do we do now?”

The man lowers his cigarette. “I’m out of ideas.”

A smile at that. “We can tell. Why don’t you listen instead of talking, for awhile?”

The mans nostrils flare. “Okay,” he says, after a painful beat.

He drops his cigarette next to the first one and puts it out with a sigh.




GIVING UP ON WORD COUNT

So, last year I had two goals. A financial one, and a writing one. And a hoped for relationship between the two–that meeting the writing goal would lead to meeting the financial goal. 

Nope. Wrote more words, and made less money, than any year of my life since high school. 

So. What metrics do I use this year? 

Money and words worked for some friends of mine. Maybe I need to just keep going and they work someday in the future. Maybe I come back to that way of doing this. 

But another friend of mine, a writing teacher, says, for God’s Sake Don’t Quit Your Day Job, because the saddest writing story ever told is of a writer doing meaningful work, who had enough success to quit and go full time…

Who then struggled to make a living, at the mercy of the inscrutable and merciless marketplace. Their work becoming lifeless garbage before their eyes as their fingertips arc mechanically through motions once joyful, and now simply necessary. And purely mercenary. 

But. 

We are creatures of the marketplace, if you grew up when and where I did. Anywhere on Earth in this century. And hooking the marketplace to this effort, even if it is only to dream of lottery ticket glory (JK Rowling! Fifty Shades of ME!) is inevitably a part of this. Unless you’re filthy rich and I suspect even then. 

That thing, from the musical A Chorus Line… that song Dance 10, Looks 3.

Dance for my enjoyment? That ain’t it kid. That ain’t it kid. 

The dancer in that song gets plastic surgery, to get paying work. Alters herself with a knife. That was what it took. So she did it. 

There’s a Clifford D. Simak story, about a future in which fiction is written by AIs, and a writer doing very well, and his friend, who is struggling, who covets his AI fiction engine. 

Writers feed in parameters and tweak the output and so the struggling writer sneaks into his friend’s studio at night and discovers that his machine is hollow, just a shell, and the writer his been coming up with it all himself. 

So Bright the Vision, is the name of that one. So Bright the Vision. That’s what you want. Not the knife. The Vision. 

Look. The zero level barrier to entry. (time; the ability to twitch a single body part.) means that as a writer you are in direct competition with every being on the planet who wants to give this a go. Oh, and everyone who has tried from the 18th century on, too, because writing isn’t like bread. It keeps. Pretty damn soon we’re going to be competing with AIs. Rationally? You’re doomed. 

So Bright the Vision. The Titanic sinks. Are you Leo De Caprio or Kate Winslet or the band that plays on? Doesn’t matter.

Do it anyway. Ever wonder if you could be a hero? Then keep going. I’m not blowing smoke up your ass. This shit is excruciating. Do it anyway. Keep going.

It’s only life after all. 

Letting yourself write

There’s nothing easier than writing. 

You need time, and a place, and something to write with, and on. 

Obviously, as in all things, it helps to be rich, and un-persecuted, and we all know about the stunning percentage of artists and writers who turn out to be dependent upon patronage of one sort or another for much of their careers, but let that go for now.

Write. You don’t need to get a green light from a major studio; you don’t need to license IP; you don’t have to convince angel investors or VC or banks that what you are going to write is worth writing.

There are no auditions, or job interviews. 

Entire novels are now being written on smartphones by people crammed into mass transit who can barely wriggle their thumbs. 

And yeah, for people under stress, people in debt, people in tough situations, finding the special kind of mental energy and resolve to do this can be elusive, but…

But lets’ face it a lot of people who call themselves writers, a lot of people who want to write, have plenty of time and plenty of space within which to do this and they still don’t.

Why?

I went to Clarion 20 years ago with a man named Eric Nylund, who had the distinction of walking into the workshop with a finished novel already picked up by a major publisher. 

As the class got to know each other, in the endless conversation that roils at the fringe of any writing retreat or workshop, the subject of wannabe writers came up, and what Eric would say to someone who asked:

“I want to write more, but I don’t have the time.”

Eric would ask, “Do you have a television?”

They would say, “Yes.”

“Throw it out the window. There’s your time. You’re welcome.”

Fast forward twenty years and television no longer feels like the major culprit. Social media, web-based video and commentary and imagery, is the muffin of distraction, and TV is like hunks of chocolate or nuts or crack cocaine sprinkled through that matrix. 

And here I am. Not writing, really, but writing about writing, for ten people, now; maybe a hundred people, eventually. Or maybe a million, if I were to, oh, I don’t know, get off this thing and write something wonderful.

What are the chances of that? Zero, if I don’t get off. Non-zero, if I do. 

Which is a long, long, round about way of saying that the only thing stopping you from writing is you. 

You are afraid that creating a lot of mediocre crap that nobody wants to buy or read will be a greater waste of time than fucking around doing something else. You’re afraid that this waste of time is somehow more tragic than wasting time more honestly, doing time wasting stuff that everyone agrees is a waste of time.

You’re afraid of disappointment and rejection. You’re afraid of small success. You’re afraid of bad reviews. You’re afraid of revealing things about how your mind works in your fiction that might prove that you’re a bad person.

Two things work to get past this, I think. Well, three. 

Assume your success lies somewhere down the road if you don’t stop. 

Be in the moment and enjoy your process. Writing as its reward.

Assume you are totally doomed and do it anyway, out or some twisted contrarian impulse, for some tiny number of friends or work shoppers, or for your own idiot pleasure. Give into dreams of glory now and then. Switch back to doom mode every time you get rejected. Lie in the bed and curse your fate and hate yourself for being a loser and then get up and do it all again.

That third mode sucks ass, by the way. That’s what I do. 

Click into my bibliography. “Look at this poor son of a bitch” (Jim Kelly referred to me this way when I was talking about dieting, but it’s not a bad description of me generally)

This poor son of a bitch has sold stories to Asimov’s (10) Analog and F&SF (more than one each, to those places.)

You can write. You can write in one of those three ways. Even in that most awful of ways, mine. You can succeed with all three ways. If my bibliography looks like success to you. 

You can do the thing. 

It’s the easiest thing in the world… to do badly. 

And the easiest thing in the world to aspire to do, to pretend to do, and not do enough to really be doing it. 

So let go. Let go of expectations. Fall in. The secondary creation calls out like young love on a cool summer night. The universe you own, or the one that owns you is out there… waiting. It wants you. The world inside. Shrink into it, fight the monster spider with the needle and plunge between the atoms and alight on a tiny worldlet inside a single atom and set up shop. 

You’re a God there. You can do anything.  

Now get to work.

2018 Wrapup: how Did I do on my 300k year?

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. 

This thing for me evokes echoes of Heinlein’s Future History chart, and Larry Niven’s Known Space timelines. 

Known Space Timeline, Larry Niven

Robert Heinlein’s Future History

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.

The stories aren’t boring.

I hope.

My story the gorgon in asimov’s january 2019 issue: Idea stories, Model minorities and negative portrayals

I was talking about having recently digested Neil Bostrom’s Superintelligence: paths, Dangers, Strategies with my friend Erica Satifka and she mentioned, “Reminds me of Roku’s Basilisk,” to which I said.

“What’s that?”

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. 

That’s the idea. 

Managing my Facebook addiction: No posts in 2019

I have been here before.

The parallels with real addiction, substance abuse, are uncanny. 

You try.  You succeed. You try to meter your intake, build a system to manage your tendency to spend way too much time and effort on social media… and you fail. You fail hard. 

One reason you fail? Because you can’t turn to social media to help you get off social media. And social media has hollowed our our traditional connections to each other, taking what existed before, our demonetized, data-free friendships, and converting that impulse into eyeballs, data,  influence, and cold hard cash.

Mostly for Mark Zuckerberg.

Sure, non-profits use it and businesses–they have to. But the cash isn’t shared with the content creators, whose personal data is what Facebook brokers, of course.

That is not how tech billionaires are made. 

Leaving the angry socialism aside, (which is way hard for me to do) I’m left with what is within my power to change. My own behavior. And how I interact with the networks of people who help keep me alive; who I help as well. 

With this in mind, I have commented on a few friends posts this year, and shared a dozen things. But I  haven’t written a post. The part of my brain that listens to the news and instantly begins composing my own brand of amateur citizen commentary chatters away without any form of release. 

So Sigh. Here I am! 

Welcome to my methadone maintenance program. 

As a friend of mine said, my stuff is fun to read because it isn’t monetized, or monetizable. Typo riddled but readable, with a strong voice, profanity, and unfair reasoning by analog, with the occasional novel reasoned argument thrown in for good measure. The infrequent valuable connecting of the dots compiled through compulsively reading real journalism…

But really, mostly, the only reason to read me is that I get to say fuck, and the stuff that Paul Krugman will say a few hours later in the day, in copyedited form, with the power of a Nobel prize in economics behind it.

Meanwhile, I don’t make a living wage as a writer and I make, near-zero dollars writing at FB. Full stop. ( I forced fifty friends to buy an anthology once with a series of posts and videos and small ads, earning less than 100 bucks. I could have made more in that time collecting cans.  I won’t do that again.)

I write for a few hundred or a few thousand readers, in the stories I sell to national magazines, the people who read my feed, the occasional shared post that is widely shared. (but only viral a few times in my, eh, ‘career.’) 

I love writing and knowing people read what I write. When I write in my blog here, I can see, clearly, the readership as hits. A tiny number of hits. In FB, I have to translate likes into reads in my head. Except in my vendor account, my pro author account, which nobody ever looks at, and which FB flogs me to advertise. 

In my amateur columnist / memoirist role at FB, there’s a random reinforcement schedule. Some things get dozens of shares and likes. Some get a handful. Some get none.

And as we all know, the random reinforcement schedule is the addictive core of the gambling urge. It draws marks to the casino table, the stock market, and to social media, looking to hit it big, with a viral hit that will redeem the activity financially.

But I’m ten years or so into this thing, and my ‘career,’ as Paul Krugman’s little typo-riddled non-nobel prize-winning brother with no hard skillset, but who gets to say ‘fuck,’ has probably accomplished all it can. So be it.

For all my belly-aching? I loved every second of it. 

I’m going to go write a marketing post now for a good friend, which I’m gonna say doesn’t break the no posting rule.

I’m going into the bar just to get a soda. For real.

I guess it’s one day a time. Day 3, no posts yet. We’ll see if I get to 365. 

Reading the feed and not posting is very hard. People’s relatives and pets die. People need answers to questions. People need support.

I’ll come back in 100 days, and tell folks that they can still ask for support, here, at the blog, or in personal messages or face to face meetings. I’ll check messenger–everyone know FB was letting companies access the actual content of these messages for marketing info, right?–to tell the few folks who really dig my stuff I haven’t been hit by a bus. I’ll get a half dozen of those messages.

Otherwise, that’s it. I’ll post here. When the readership is ten people, I can scale this effort down to what talking to ten people is worth in terms of money / career… which is fine! I pay ten bucks a month for this site. I should probably move it to free-wordpress, if I feel that the site hasn’t earned me 120 bucks of readership in a paid product. 

I’ll look at that next year. 

A Hundred Hours of Zen, Shedding Two Hundred Sticks of Butter, and how I learned to ignore Trump and Love My Writing. (Part 1)

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.

Apparently.

And I became obsessed by a recent study of meditation and its effect on the amygdala, a brain region associated with panic, depression and despair.

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?

And maybe, as another article I had read in the NYT suggested, I might reduce my chance of becoming demented by 30% if I got my waist measurement under 40 inches. 

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

The Immigration Debate Demystified: Explaining Mollie Tibbetts to Trump Supporters

So, let’s say there’s this amusement park, which is huge. The size of a continent.

And the people who live and work in it are pretty well off. People come to visit the park; some people come to live in the park; a few people jump over the fence, to avoid paying the turnstile fee. And one in a million of those people who jump the fence are on Most Wanted posters. They jump the fence, too.

So the money folks at the park run the numbers, and discover that, on average, the folks that jump the fence, buy enough stuff at the park so that the park makes money. It makes a little less than it does on the folks who pay at the turnstile, in some cases, on average, but overall, yeah, the park makes money on the jumpers.

Park security has its own job, keeping the park safe. It collects data on the pickpockets and muggers in the park, and it finds out that, on average, the fence jumpers pick fewer pockets, get in less fights, and rob people less than people who pay the fee at the gate.

Now. Here is the part where my analogy breaks with reality.

Most of the people in my analogy are reasonable. They use data to justify policy.

A horrible mugging occurs. A one out of a million thing. And the mugging, which ended in a death, so it’s a murder, was committed by a fence jumper. The money person and the security person and the marketing person all meet to figure out what to do.

Our mugging numbers are pretty good, overall, but they could be better, Security says. Give us more money if this issue is affecting overall operational goals.

Wait, the marketing person says, the person who did this jumped the fence. Shouldn’t we work on the fence?

The security person and the money person exchange a look. “No. That’s a waste of resources. There are two things we can do. We can spend more on park security in general. Catch more muggers. Don’t worry if they’re fence jumpers. Most muggers are paid customers anyway. Those numbers go down. We can afford to spend X more on that without eating into the bottom line too much, the money person says.

The security person agrees. “Yeah. Give us more funds. We catch more bad people. The fence jumpers aren’t worse than the average park goer. But don’t worry. We check the Most Wanted Posters at the fence. So if a fence jumper is a real bad hombre, he gets evicted hard.

The marketing person, the least smart and most emotional person there, gets all pissed off. “Well then. Just tear down the gates and let everyone in free, I guess, is what you’re saying. Free park. Build all the costs into every ride. We all take our chances! Fence Jumpers! Cat’s and Dog living together! Anarchy!

No, no no, the money person says. The model basically works. We don’t want to do that. The fences work about as good as fences work. The slippage doesn’t cost us money. And it doesn’t make us less safe than, say, making coupons and letting more people in the first place. Nobody here is saying ‘open park’.

The marketing person is now wide eyed, frothing. Fence jumpers! Murderers! Rapers! Fence jumping murderer raper jumpers!

Please shut up, the money and the security person both say. We’ve explained the rational options. You’re being an asshole.

But what about this thing? the Marketing person screams.

We’re lucky, the money person says. We live in a metaphor where most people are rational, except for you.

What we will do is check the most wanted posters at the fence, and everywhere else, and spend more on security evenly applied to everyone when we feel insecure, and accept that the fence jumpers make the park money, that other than the jumping they’re the same or more profitable than regular park goers, and that overall, we are a better and more profitable park, with the fence built to the level it is now.

Oh, and nobody wants to tear down the fence, nobody that matters, anyway, so shut up about that. Your hysteria doesn’t move reasonable people.

Because we are people who can look at graphs. People who reason by data. People who respect numbers. People who recognize say, that getting on a plane is safer than driving 2000 miles, even if they feel safer behind the wheel, than trusting a pilot. People that know seatbelts will save them ten times more often than they will trap them in a burning car. People that know vaccines save far more people than they kill, who still want vaccine making and selling regulated.

People that know that, in the rare occurrence they are mugged and or murdered, 95% of the time it will be by people they know. From their side of the fence.

People that know that getting super upset about the fence is really a symptom of something else entirely.

People who have decided not to let that something else rule them.

People who have decided not to let racism win.