My Three Hundred Thousand Word Year, Three Months In

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So if you follow me on social media you may remember that I have committed to writing 300,000 words this year.

This isn’t a huge thing, really, by indy standards, though were I to publish them all traditionally, that would be an outlier. If you’re not a writer and you think of writing in pages and not words, here’s a link for the lengths of famous novels. 

Oh, all right, I’ll convert that into pages (even though pages vary in lengths for lots of reasons). Call it 3000 paperback tiny print pages.

When J.K. Rowling was constrained by industry standards vis a vis optimal YA novel length, that would be about 3 Harry Potter books like the first two. Of course, she became J.K. Rowling at a certain point, so at 257k, Order of the Phoenix would eat most of my 300k year, with an additional short novel, say, The Great Gatsby, tossed off in the last two months.

So far, this is working well for me. I have hit my target at three months in.

I have finished 2 novellas, 2 novelettes, one short story, and am halfway through another short now. For fun, I will name them.

  • Indigo
  • Uncontainable
  • You Must Remember This
  • The Keyhole
  • The Gorgon
  • Far and Away

If you are considering doing this, setting a writing goal, jigger the rules of your writing game to help you do the thing you need the most. My problem, I think, has been a slow process that doesn’t include proper drafting. I haven’t written bad first drafts; I have agonized, growing stories very slowly, I call it ice-sickling, rereading and rewriting endlessly as I go along. If you are a pantser and want more plot, be sure to count your outlines.

What Not to Count

The one thing I urge you never to count, ever, is your social media and email output. Writers fool themselves into thinking they’re platform building with this kind of thing, when they really need to be writing more books and stories. Mostly what you do in social media is make Mark Zuckerberg, and Google, which people use to find your content, a tiny bit richer. The value that adheres to you is negligible.

There are exceptions to this. John Scalzi and John Green come to mind. But they have written their fiction at a good fast clip and don’t seem to suffer from time in social media. If you aren’t finishing a novel or three a year, I’d look into social media use. It is probably a tail that is wagging your dog.

Twitter might be an exception, tweets are dense and crafted, or should be, and if your content generates a ton of followers…. well. As an editor of an online magazine, I noticed a strong correlation between story reads and Twitter numbers. And a youtube channel actually generates a little revenue. Podcasts consume a different kind of energy and should include human contact, even if it’s a phone conversation or skype call being turned into content, and again, you own that content.

But Facebook is a complete and total disaster. Believe me. Try marketing reprint anthos to your 1000 friends. This gives you a great idea of the monetary value of that relationship as mediated through Facebook. Don’t hate your friends. Hate Facebook. Because you’ll never know, when your stuff doesn’t sell, how much of the failure is genuine ambivalence, and how much is FB gaming the system to sell you ads. Because Facebook is built content they get for free, which they then turn around and charge the content providers to show to people.

Often people who have signed up to get the content!

Facebook sells your own friends back to you.

So, repeat after me, social media is a giant suckhole of time and effort.

That includes stuff like this blog post you’re reading now of course.

Rules of The Game

  1. Pick a number of words for the time period. Figure out how many writing days there are in your time period. Do your math. Give yourself days off. When you miss your goals you can burn them if you have to.
  2. Do not subtract for edits. Throwing words away is important. If you penalize yourself you can’t edit properly. Scrivener has a setting for this; Not sure how you would do it otherwise. A rigorous drafting process would work.
  3. Count your outlines. They’re very dense and time consuming. Don’t worry that you’re counting something twice. Count your story bible, and any idea files you keep.
  4. Don’t count social media writing or blogging or any form of conversational typing.
  5. Pick an easy per day goal; figure out how many days you can work in your year, how many writing days. Do not stretch in this part of the goal. If this is 200 words a day five days a week for fifty weeks with two week vacation, congratulations, you could have written Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five in a year.
  6. This is the hard part. Do not let yourself off the hook for the cumulative goal.* What this means is that as you slip and lose days, to slow edits, to life, your new word goal will rise and become more challenging. This is why you picked an easy one.

Study your workflow. Maybe now you have too many shitty first drafts. One of the downsides of nano-wrimo for many are hastily written novels that nobody finishes. Finishing is when you level up. It is when the Dungeon Master hands out experience points.

You have to finish. Some things can be finished in outline only. But you have to finish what you start in some way, or part of your brain will be sucking that lolipop for the rest of your life. That sucking may actually turn into something wonderful, but don’t count on that, ever. You’re better off finishing everything you can.

If you are writing stuff you know you can’t return to, you may want to stop and revise your goal downward. If on the other hand you look at the work and see something you will want to work with, keep going.

Common Observations on Goal Oriented Writing

  • So many, many pros say this I’m not going to bother to source it. The writing you produce when inspired, and the writing you grind out under your self imposed deadline will read the same. You’ll see no huge dramatic shifts in quality.
  • You will build a muscle you didn’t know existed.
  • You will become a better writer.
  • If you submit what you write, you will start selling eventually.

Risks and Dangers

If you have mental health issues, stress can trigger problems. This is a stressful activity. That’s the point. To use the stress to build a muscle. To use increased workflow to find a better process. I have noticed, for want of a better term, a prose module in my head that heats up and is hard to shut off. Characters will chatter at you. Story details will pop into your head constantly. You’ll itch to get to a keyboard to make sure you don’t lose anything. Why does this happen?

Writing is dissociation. Here’s a definition of that in psychiatric terms:

Dissocation is a separation of normally related mental processes, resulting in one group functioning independently from the rest, leading in extreme cases to disorders such as multiple personality…

Dissociation is any of a wide array of experiences from mild detachment from immediate surroundings to more severe detachment from physical and emotional experiences. The major characteristic of all dissociative phenomena involves a detachment from reality, rather than a loss of reality as in psychosis.

This detachment is your writing trance. It is what makes the solitude endurable and enjoyable. We don’t write alone. We write in the company of our imaginary friends.

If you take from this the idea that I’m saying becoming a good writer means you drive yourself slightly insane then you are reading me correctly. I am saying that.

So don’t break yourself. Adding heavy drug use, even moderate drug use, lack of exercise, lack of sleep, lack of all human contact, to a new writing goal is a recipe for disaster. Don’t try this at home. Take care of yourself.

But when you feel it’s time, do this thing with all your heart, so when you lay down to die, you’ll know, you did it. When the music stops, and you take your seat for the rest of eternity, you want that moment where you say.

I gave it my all. My all was good enough.

A Modest Healthcare Proposal

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The current misery being created by the GOP for most Americans, slated to hit in a few years, when they have lost power, to make Democrats look awful, has me thinking about what we could do with healthcare, for pennies on the dollar of what we spend now. And how we might do that.

One thing to do, like the patriot act, is to have legislation ready to be rammed through congress in the aftermath of a foreseeable tragedy.

Climate change disaster is an obvious idea. Scientist’s refusal to name any specific event as being 100% caused by climate change saps CC of its power, alas; nobody wants to hear that so and so disaster is now 20% more likely. This won’t work for people who buy scratch tickets and cigarettes at the same gas station. You know. Swing voters.

So, what’s left?

Well, let’s talk about the first bioweapon, which CRISPR tech is making as we speak, somewhere in the world.

I once spent twenty minutes wrestling a conserative to the mat, getting him to admit that the lack of a national healtcare system could be the chink in our armor that lets a disease, natural or artifical, go from being a manageable outbreak to a full blown pandemic.

It was amazingly hard to do this. His brain, a great brain, he scored higher than I did always on standardized tests in high-school, had been damaged by a lifetime in the financial industry working for parasites and pests of various sorts.

I dug up the data. People without insurance delay going to the doctor by 10-20 days; incubation period and infection vectors mean that during those days, a virus can go, ah, viral, and kill us by the millions.

He reluctantly conceded it could happen; and our lack of a national healthcare system comparable to the rest of the western world could be the root cause.

So.

We need the Bioweapon Defense Shield Act. Like Star Wars missile defense, this is a metaphorical dome which protects us from something utterly horrifying; like Star Wars, it only has to work a little to be worth, in political terms, a whole helluva lot.

The Defense shield comes with a national ID card. So everyone has access to the kiosk, and as a nice side effect, this kills that GOP voter suppression tactic. The kiosks are a system which dispenses vaccines, tons of them, very quickly, or any injectable cure. They have sensors to estimate mass; they have access to data to determine cross toxicities, risk factors; the kiosks cannot be sued. Medicine distributed via them cannot trigger malpractice.

Probably, we’ll need to have one event where people skeptical of the vaccines and the gub’mint die like flies, to get people to trust the things. Never mind. The plagues are coming.

So, the BDS kiosks become a cheap as dirt, high bang for the buck Doctorless healthcare for the poor program over time. All immunizations, and then, perhaps, other problems. They take readings, they have skype screens, and they’re patched into an Amazon-like machine of support people, escalating as needed.

The system has some low amount that it sees poor people as being worth, and AI is used to get the most bang for the buck for treatments. Sometimes it just gives people euthanasia drugs.

It’s the lilbertarian, break the medical cartel system. Real doctors become the luxury they are, for the professional and shareholder classes. Regular people use AI doctors and the PAs that the AIs hand people off to.

The AI Grinds on the data, and figures stuff out. Fitness trackers that allow access to additional treatments? Premptive, proactive treatments. We don’t really know what we don’t know here; what we need is a giant pool of carefully anonymized data, or data signed over willingly to an entity whose ultimate purpose isn’t extracting profits, but improving health. Cheaply. Eventually, as with the financial industry and programatic index funds, Im guessing the AI / PA system will outperform most human doctors, giving super cheap care that is on par as good as the private system.

(Most financial planners underperform random chance; the entire financial planning industry, on the whole, is a waste of time, and we would be better off we marched them all off cliffs and told regular people, those without inside information, to just buy index funds.)

Our network of kiosks will start out, day one, far more useful than the average financial planner.

It’s a tiered system that calls a spade a spade. It quantifies how much a human life is worth to the state, and caps treatment at that level, confining itself to huge bang for the buck treatments. A system of liability controlled private kiosks building on the public system might deliver other goods and service affordably.

This is the cyberpunk future. I don’t think we do this. We will pretend we’re better than this, even though we aren’t. One day, perhaps, we will be better than this. I hope.

How a videogame (Overwatch) teaches us how to fix capitalism…

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I’ve been thinking about how game worlds are these socialist utopias, where all players start out equal, and social engineers continually tinker with the rules to produce the desired outcome. Maximum fun, for the maximum number.
 
You get the same kit ,the same raw stats or the ability to allocate some underlying stat, and convert it into stuff you use in gameplay. Subsidized game consoles are part of this; everyone locked into uniform hardware, subsidized by the whole gaming system.
 
Libertarian gamers are often infuriated by unlockable content— people converting cash into game abilities, or even game ornamentation. This is how the real world’s inequality leaks into the game world, and most of them respond with abject horror to this kind of thing. It’s instinctive. Without their ideological blinders in place, they feel how wrong this is.
 
They know, as every socialist knows, that games work better when all the people playing are given equal footing to play, and compete, and improve. This kind of game catches up the most players, and so ends up with the most resources, and the best players win, or at least the ones most dedicated to the game, who think a certain way.
 
Today’s networked games are different than the first dozen generations of cartridge and disk-based releases. Today’s game code base is fluid, in constant flux. Many of the hottest games, like Overwatch, are network only. This means that _all the gameplay_ can be studied by the game makers, and the game makers tweak characters, tools and maps to produce funner and more fair play.
 
What is fun in a game?
 
Freedom to find your own way to succeed with a variety of tools is fun.
 
Diversity, seeing all the different ways that people figure out how to succeed, is fun.
 
Working with others to succeed as a group, combining the different strengths of different strategies, is the pinnacle of fun.
 
If there is one strategy, one character, one weapon, that is too strong, that is overpowering, everyone jumps on that, uses that–hell, you have to, to win– and the game gets boring. Identical characters striding around doing virtually identical things. Maybe all gameplay gets reduced to how fast you twitch a single muscle.
 
Picture: White guys in identical mad-men suits giving each other power point in endless all day meetings.
 
No. Fun. At. All.
 
So the game designers “buff” or “nerf” characters and weapons, to find balance, to produce diversity. They tweak maps, to get rid of obvious strategies, choke points that make play uniform, dull. That reward only a single kind of play, forcing people into single strategies.
 
Everything I’ve said, about the gameworld, needs to be done with capitalism, now, to keep it working.
 
And it can be done.
 
We can see how to do it.
 
With games.
 
First and foremost and most simply, get everyone the ability to play on an equal footing. In the real world that’s education, housing, network access, and healthcare.
 
But you say, if we make all of that free, socialized, who will play at all?
 
Look at games.
 
People play because they love to play. Not because they have to.
 
As long as they think the game is fair. And the game makers continually upgrade the code, to keep the game fun.
 
Utopia is staring us in the face.
 
The future isn’t the dignity of work.
 
It’s the joy of the game.

The Seduction of Reason: Conspiracies both Real and Imagined

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Some government conspiracies are real. They tend to align with openly stated policies; the US government was hostile to the civil rights movement; in secret, they did many terrible things to discredit it. While there are false flags here, logic chains are not completely tortured. Cointel pro is understandable. A 911 missile strike on the Pentagon covered up by a plane-full of people mysteriously disposed of off camera isn’t.

The most seductive aspect of the conspiracy theory is that once freed from the bonds of available, impeccable information sources, you are free to build logic chains that lead, literally, from anything to anything else you want to believe in.

Something about breaking that first logical chain, throwing out traditional media sources completely as corrupt, empowers the conspiracy theory to break the next logic chain. And the next. And so on.

As an example, New World Order conspiracists who saw 911 as an attack by the NWO on American ‘sovereignty’ (keep an eye on that word, always, it’s very slippery, like the word ‘freedom’) had no problem seeing GW Bush’s flouting of the United Nations as a conspiracy by globalists who were behind… greater United Nation control of national government.

Wut? You say.

I had a conspiracist explain it to me. Bush was so obviously insane, so obviously corrupt, and the process by which we went to war was so obviously illegal, that it damaged the reputation of the US, leading us down the road to greater United Nations control.

In the long game, ignoring the UN was a plot by UN lovers to create an all powerful UN. Obviously.

This is idiotic.

This is an example of the If X-then-Y reasoning, where X and Y are non-causal, that conspiracy theory abounds in. False flags! Deep, long games!

Pro tip: the reason the world stands on the brink of climate change disaster? Nobody, not even the rich elites, ever plays a long game. EVER!

THERE IS NO LONG GAME!

The only people playing long games do it in the open with think tanks and white papers trying to create a policy consensus around a given world view. Communitarian values on the left; libertarian values on the right.

Now, does this mean I don’t believe in conspiracies? No. The US government spends hundreds of billions annually on agencies whose only job it is to uncover conspiracies! If they didn’t exist, we wouldn’t stand for this.

Do false flags never happen? No. Look at the COINTELPRO portfolio from the sixties.

But prematurly embracing conspiracy of any sort is a slippery slope into the world of electing Donald Trump. In the Trumper’s world view, all expertise is seen as corruption and collusion. All graphs are fake. All data is suspect. Anecdotes and gut feelings replace data and research and academic opinions.

And while academics aren’t always right, gut reactions are more often wrong. Because we think with our brains, not our guts. A gut reaction is a deep, primitive brain response from reptilian brain centers responsible for fight or flight, panic, fear, mating, death and hatred.

Those emotions are not a great foundation for good policy choices.

Conspiracy theories, upper and lower case style, and no, there was no second shooter in Las Vegas

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Occam of Occam’s Razor fame. His principle states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.

To some of my beloved and funky friends; I think you are being played by the fake news makers.

There’s no clear reason to make up the Vegas shooter story. None. We’re all shell shocked by Trump and North Korea and the hurricanes and Russia and everything else. What does the Vegas story do? Insert gun control debate into a schedule already so crowded that nobody can focus on anything for more than ten seconds?

Look Trump was doing that already AND IT HAS BEEN WORKING GREAT. Trump’s twitter account is like a squid spewing ink trying to escape a predator.

Trump has the ability to make us insane already, and he’s fully deploying that ability.

Liberals and gun control people are all useless and powerless and hampered by our ‘we don’t want to shoot people’ fetish. This attack is beyond us.

This isn’t a big C conspiracy.

There might be a small c somehwere lurking, still. The dude might have bribed hotel security to wipe some hard drives. Why? Because he didn’t want to be stopped during the set up. Is there evidence for this? NOT THAT I KNOW OF. But its the kind of thing that might explain any discrepancies, and it’s pretty boring.

That the thing about the little c conspiracy (all that conspiracy means is some people are keeping secrets.) The little c stuff is petty and stupid and ugly and whether you accept it or not, the big story stays mostly the same.

So on 911 we were uniquely vulnerable to the Saudis because of Bushes ties to the kingdom / and / or various forms of criminal incompetence. So the administration fought any investigation of 911 and quietly shredded evidence for years to the degree it could.

This little c conspiracy generated the big C conspiracy. The PNAC they were all in on it New World Order stuff. The biggest C 911 conspiracy insisted that there were no planes used. It was holograms and controlled detonation. (This was called the web fairy theory.)Variants of the web-fairy also say no plane hit the pentagon. it was a missile.

The missile theory is fascinating. It seems to have merit. But why? Why use a missile? What happened to the plane?

It doesn’t matter; all that matters is that you have something that seems hard to explain, small hole in the pentagon; very little intact debris, and the conspiracy theory explains it. Like the American flag ‘rippling’ in the vacuum of space on the moon. (The razor thin aluminum sheeting was reacting to sunlight, buckling as it expanded and contracted.) There are no stars in most of the moon shot photos! Exposing for the surface light condition, raw unfiltered daylight, meant there wasn’t enough light hitting the emulsion for the stars to register. Standard photographic stuff, and you don’t think, if They were faking it, that They would stick some stars in the goddamn backdrop?

And on and on.

The US military and the intelligence agencies used UFO reports to mask several kidns of secret surveillance missions against the Soviets; U2 sightings and the Mogul balloon program. A Mogul balloon crashed in Roswell. They said it was a flying saucer.

Whups. They’d started a big C conspiracy that will never, ever die. Why won’t it die? Because there’s money in it. That’s the other thing to understand about Conspiracy—it is a consumer product.

Little c is true, often, and kind of boring. Big C is seldom true, and when it is, that truth emerges generally only after the culprits are beyond justice. (Gulf of Tonkin; Zimmerman telegram.) Big Cs are exciting. Big Cs sell in certain segments of the population like hotcakes.

US intelligence agencies, fearful that the UFO craze could be exploited by the Russians, many people thought that UFOs didn’t like our nuclear weapons, caused the US military to conduct experiments where they exposed hundreds of soldiers to mock-ups of alien craft, and people in odd space suits, and they asked the soldiers what they would have done, if strange orders started being barked at them through megaphones from these people.

Then they told the soldiers never to talk about this.

So the area 51 alien crashed saucer government knows about the aliens thing? It IS a conspiracy! A little c one. No aliens, no saucers. Just a fear of Russians, and of a pop culture phenomena.

(This all from the work for Jacques Vallee, a french researcher, who was offered, on many occasions, a chance at taking a cab to the pentagon to see alien bodies–but only off the record. This was some psy ops thing. He turned down the offers. If the pentagon wasn’t going to make any official statements, Vallee refused to go to their halloween haunted house. He agonized over this. It was the right decision.)

I know all this because…

I LOVE CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND I WANT THEM TO BE TRUE VERY VERY BADLY!

But I also have a really sharp brain (so sharp it cuts itself sometimes) and I can inhale books, I have access to the best libraries in the world, and so I have spent—wasted?—tens of thousands of hours trying to dig to the bottom of these things, trying to find the Truth, capital T, when there is only ever a little t truth. And while there are mysteries on this planet, the little c conspiracies so far outnumber the big C ones, that I can tell, from the get go, when a conpiracy theory smells like capital C, because it smells like bullshit.

And I have stepped in this shit before.

Read me for Free in Kindle Unlimited… for a limited time. I think.

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So I have three short story collections now in Kindle Unlimited. Well. One collection is a single story I’m trying to make perma-free, and it included in the other collection, so, I have two short story collections in KU.

There aren’t a lot of SF short story readers in KU from what I have read, and certainly my own experience is bearing that notion out. But I figured I’d try a 3 month stint in KU and see what happened.

Give them a shot, if you’re in KU. Four worlds and Counting is the newer stuff, Dystopian Love is the older stuff. But it’s all good stuff!

If you like the free stuff, then buy Bad Gurus, the newest stuff, the full-length collection, with my first Asimov’s novella Of All Possible Worlds, a Years Best short-listed / honorably mentioned thing from a few years back.

 

 

 

The Conversation We Never Had

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A man in a red t-shirt sits watching TV alone in his condominium drinking a can of beer. He has recently quit smoking and feels like shit. He is wearing three nicotine patches. He has had a bad day at work. His wife has left him for another…

woman.

There’s a knock at the door.

“Hey,” the man at the door says. He’s about the same age, and build, and race, and is also wearing a t-shirt. His is blue. “I’m here because our data indicates that you voted for Trump?”

The red shirt man frowns and gives a curt nod.

“Right. Do you have a minute to talk?”

The red shirt man shrugs.

“I’ve been assigned to you,” the blue shirt man says.

“What?”

“A grassroots organization called People for a Recognizable Tomorrow is putting 100 million volunteers on the streets to talk to every Trump supporter to try to help them make a better decision in 2020.”

“Well,” the red shirt man’s face turns pink. “He isn’t perfect, but nobody ever gave him a chance!”

“I hear you when you say that no one gave Trump a chance, but I don’t want to talk about that now. I want to talk to you about who you are. Your hopes, your dreams…”

“Not interested—” The red shirt man moves to close the door. The blue shirt man sticks his foot inside, and raises his hand. He says the next paragraph quickly, as if it has been memorized.

“I’m authorized to buy you a case of beer a carton of cigarettes or a steam download of a new video game, also, I have a code for a free month of HBO Go with any gift offering of your choice.”

The red shirt man scowls. “You serious?”

“Yes. And I don’t hate you!” the blue shirt man says. He smacks his own forehead. “I was supposed to say that earlier!”

The red shirt man rubs his nicotine patches. “I quit smoking.”

“That’s hard. Very stressful. I quit a few years ago.”

“Really?” he laughs. “I thought democrats were perfect.”

“Nope,” the blue shirt man says.

“What kind of beer?”

“I have a list you can choose from.”

The red shirt man nods.

The blue shirt man pulls out his phone. “This is an Amazon Beer Right Now demo rollout. Here are your choices. It can be here in fifteen minutes.”

The red shirt man looks at the phone, and selects an inexpensive American beer. In cans. “It’s the kind I like,” he says levelly.

“Me too,” says the blue shirt man without a hint of irony.

“I already have HBO go.”

The blue shirt man nods and they both go inside.

***

How you feel? Good? Join my mailing list.

My new collection Bad Gurus, is available for pre-order, shipping September 1!

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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.

Little Boy Blue and the Man in the Moon

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So I had these kids (to be honest, my wife had them, I watched) eighteen years ago and after taking care of them, doing long stints as the primary caregiver, I eventually graduated to the status of medical and after school appointment driver, cook and bedtime book reader.

My wife read them picture books until they were in grade school, at night, every night. We hauled fifty or sixty books at a time from the library; I stopped shopping for titles after a few hundred, and just worked my way alphabetically through the stacks, counting on Cambridge to curate the experience, which worked just fine.

But then came chapter books and I took over, quickly reading through every chapter book that I could remember, then on to contemporary stuff mixed with any classic stuff that I could get them interested in. Books I’d dodged and missed somehow, the historical stuff assigned to other classes, like Johnny Tremaine; The Wolves of Willouby Chase, The Westing Game, and others. I worked my way through various lists. Newbury Award winners; various Best Ofs.

So, together we walked and played and ran in terror and cried through Narnia and Prydain and the Potterverse, The Wrinkled Time stuff, pretty much everything by William Sleator’s of House of Stairs fame, a favorite of mine, but also the first ten Redwalls (a favorite of my youngest child). John Cristopher’s The Tripod’s held up really well. A few hundred books in all.

There were explicable rebellions. The LOTR? No. Dad singing poems full of made up words to the same bad improvised melody didn’t go over well. But oddly, also Earthsea was denied. (Why?) But mostly we had successes and we read and read and read together, at night, them in their twin beds with me between them with my lovely glowing e-reader.

I found new stuff to love; Ellen Potter, referred to people who want more Roald Dahl, (she isn’t really like him but this makes sense), Rebecca Staid, and Suzanne Collin’s brilliant and horrific Hunger Games. Alif and the Unseen was a modern favorite, a sympathetic and magically inflected portrayal of modern life in an islamic state on the verge of spring.

But kids grow up and older, and yes, that horrible cats in the cradle song is now playing in your head, if you have had kids, and had them do this to you. We built lofts for them, so they had more room for their stuff in the tiny condo, and so the pair rose up and away from me on wooden stilts. I sat beneath them on the carpet, periodically yelling up at them to get the hell off the cellphones or I was going to stop—do you hear me?

But I didn’t want to stop.

When did I realize this was the best time of the day? The best time of my life? I don’t know. But that realization came and I did my best with that, knowing of course that it would one day end…

My eighteen year old graduated and had an early schedule, working in public schools, doing good work for Americorps, and my fifteen year old went to bed later and it all fell apart. The kids never admitted we were done, because my kids are happy and even if growing up is okay, who wants a happy thing to end? This is why kids hold onto old toys. Why file away those memories? Who is to say the Polly Pockets or Tamagotchies might not one day become fascinating again? Who wants to tell Dad they’re done being read to? Well, I guess normal teenagers would, but my kids are far from normal.

I thank the stars every day for that.

We started slowing down seriously as we read Marissa Meyer, which is not a knock on her work in any way. I was initially resistant to reading them, something about science fictionalized romantic quasi fairytales didn’t appeal to me in the abstract, but my wife kept insisting, “read them and see,” and so I did and I was hooked.

I fell hard for these things.

Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter form the main cycle, a braid of fairy-tale themed and inspired (but in no way derivative) middle-grade / YA science fiction adventure romances.

We bogged down in book four at the climax of these intersecting romance arcs—which were so compelling to me; three pairs of characters; A cyborg Cinderella and her uncertain Prince, a pugnacious little Red Riding Hood, and her shifter-romance-inspired mate to be, Wolf, and a frail and retiring but ultimately heroic Rapunzle, known as Cress, freed from her metaphorical tower, a spy satellite where she worked for the Evil lunar Queen, who is every evil queen, ever, and Cress’s love, a charming Rogue of no clear origin to me who grew to be utterly delightful.

Both kids came out, while I was reading them these books, and maybe the relentless heteronormativity was one of the reasons I found them so infectious, while my kids never needed to race to the oh so wonderfully rendered Happily Ever After? There’s no way to know. I’d sought out and read some GLBTQIA themes YA titles with trans teens in them, but they were a little stressful and on-the-nose for my eldest and so I didn’t push them after awhile.

So finally, flying back from San Jose after a week long vacation with my brother-in-law and his husband, I let myself finish the last book, Winter, and found myself caught up in this story that I’d had on pause for at least a year. I didn’t need any refreshers. I remembered everything. As did the author, revisting and reprising the various elements of the stories as the characters completed their arcs, had their moments of heroism and growth, experienced epiphanies, and found true love and friendship.

It was so fucking good.

But I finished the journey I’d started with the three of us by myself again. Reading a solitary pleasure once again.

I suspect my younger son will reread the Mayer books to the very end; he’s a reader, and we still do read things together, just to ourselves. We talk about them, afterwards. Not the same thing, really, but it’s something, and it will have to do. Because the kids are mostly grown, and reading aloud time is done.

Queue that awful song. Little boy blue and the man in the moon.

Taking care of children is a seemingly endless chore, brightened by these wonderful moments that remain, while the endless tedium of it washes away, little hunks of gold lodged in your brain, left behind as time swirls away the silt and sand.

God I loved reading time.

But now it’s time to write.