One of the things you can do, if you want to, as a human being, is read books about how to be a better human being.

My mix of ego and fatalism, mild-bipolar, and generalized cynicism has kept me from doing the self help thing. Only when I hit rock bottom am I really willing to consider that maybe I don’t know what I’m doing. Which on the face of it, is stunningly obvious.

So there are the hero biographies, and the self-help books about Very Successful People, that tell you what they’re doing, that you obviously aren’t. And theres a ton of overlap, consensus, in these books. I guess you’ve all read a few of them? If not, go do that. You really should, even if you ignore them. Self help. Go.

I’ll wait here. Okay. So you read a few? Good.

The last one I read was Deep Work, by Cal Newport, a guy who is amazingly better than I am in pretty much every way, except I’m more self-deprecating. Cal is an amazing guy. While mostly venerating the successful, (he’s fond of nobel prize winners and billionaires) he politely suggests that the entire world of software connectivity productivity open office constant interruption culture is bug fuck crazy and successful people learn how to shut it off and back away from distraction to actually think. 

Every writer who has had even a whisper of success has a little frozen banana stand where they sell you the secret to their awesome, rich and fulfilling creative lives. That you need, because you’re a little worm who can’t finish his novel. Or short story. Or even start to write one. Or do whatever it is, you really want to do, something you thought about before the world tapped you on the shoulder and whispered in your ear, “money, dude. health insurance. Living indoors.”

I’ll summarize ten thousand of these things in a single bullet point.

• Success is made of habits. Willpower makes habits. Habits make success. (Willpower doesn’t make success directly; nobody has enough of it. Especially not you. Worm.)

At the Freedom blog, the people who make my blocking software, because yeah, now I’m a person who uses blocking software, they had an essay recently saying that the 21 days to a new habit thing is way too short; habits are harder to make than that. The blog also said, you can probably only work on one thing at a time.

So after the election, I noticed something, in my circle of mostly progressive type friends. All of us started to quickly lose our minds, as we shared article after article. We began to tell each other, ‘avoid the red meat, the little bit of news with a lot of attitude sites, that just make us crazy, let’s stick to actual news.’

The problem was, the actual news was… just as bad.

All of us had constructed this virtual news feed, where we chucked the stuff that we felt we all needed to know. The hard stuff. That started to make us super depressed. People pleaded for kittens and photos of tasty lunches and sunsets.

Then people started just posting stuff about things to DO. Because maybe doing things would help. So people did the things. They opposed people… who are all being confirmed. They went to protests. We all were calling our reps. Maybe this was all a good thing, part of a political awakening which stands a chance of heading off a fascist coup. Who knows.

But the countercurrents were there, too. Some more bullets.

• Art is important. That Winston Churchill quote. Art is radical. Even if it isn’t political. Woody Guthries’s guitar sticker that read, ‘this machine kills fascists.’
• Art is sort of self indulgent, now, though, don’t you think? Shouldn’t we die in the protests?
• Self care is important. If you are dead or insane from grief, you’re less effective. So take care of yourself. Detach some. Enjoy life and family. Smell some roses.
• Rich privileged white people who aren’t targeted are full of shit for talking about self-care. Fuck them. Work harder. Worms.

During all this, I promised myself a few things. Which led to the blocking software.

1. Stop generating free op-ed for a few hundred strangers to enrich Mark Zuckerberg.
2. Re-learn how to focus for long periods of time again. As a goddamn eight year old I could play with fucking legos for five or six hours straight, with the occasional glass of Tang or Hawaiian Punch. Dear God. I need the attention span I had when I was eight. 
3. Do more politically. By actually doing something more effective and important than the free op-ed. Such a low bar!
4. Keep becoming a writer who has a real audience that buys my stuff, instead of a dude ranting on a street corner that people who wait for the bus watch because he’s there.

Social media, the party that never ends, was the low hanging fruit, the biggest target. I took aim. I fired. My gun was a 14 hour block… then a 23 hour block. On all devices, using the industrial strength VPN style blocking  of Freedom software.

I’m three weeks in. Status report:

1. Attention span so far isn’t improving. I’m less productive, so far, as I am ‘self caring’ a lot and accomplishing little goal oriented activity.
2. I’m less unhappy, by external reports.
3. I can see now, when I peek my head into the social media party, that everyone in there is basically going nuts. The people that aren’t look weird. Like, why the hell aren’t they going crazy?

The news still gets to me; sometimes hours late. I read the NYT a bit, but there’s no passion to it, when you can’t share it with your 1000 people. I’m trying to remember how I used to play with legos for hours on end.

Well. The Freedom blog said, ‘one thing at a time, and it takes a long time.’

So. Social media, the habit? It’s breaking. I missed my one hour window yesterday. I was busy. true, I was watching TV with my teenage son, not like I was curing cancer, but still.

I have to think this is progress.

My family donated a fair amount of money to the causes we believe in, and I get emails daily on how the world is going to hell, which I skim. I’ll call my reps, now and then. I’ll send money. I’ll go to the protests. But I can’t live in that state of sadness and outrage 24/7, or I’ll die. And they’ll win.

Yeah. I’m a privileged asshole.

I’m gonna have to live with that too.

So I spent a month this year detoxing from Social Media. It was painful but I thought I’d learned some lessons, about how I would work with it going forward.

Yeah. I was fooling myself. The election… and since the election…

Yeah. I fell back in.

I wrote an article for the SFWA journal after the social media fast, and I stand by what I wrote. Now I just have to live up to my own standards.

I’ve written more words this year than any year in my life; most on a failed trilogy… but let that go… I’ve placed three shorts for next year, and had my longest work, “What We Hold Onto” appear in Asimov’s, had my first story go live this month in Galaxy’s Edge, and broken into Analog, with two of those three shorts. I’ve included a thumbnail of the galley, too small to read the text, just because, OMG, I’m gonna be in Analog! Not sure what issue! I’ll ask!

But the reality is, I’m here, now, twitching and jonesing, wanting to immerse myself in news, which only makes me miserable and toxic, which causes me to spew rants which I give away to fund Mark Zuckerberg’s little facebook project..

because he needs me working for him. For free.

So. I’m committing to doing a morning a week with like-minded people engaged in political activity aimed at preserving our core values.

And I’m committing the rest of my life, to the also political act, of trying to make my art, make my fiction, find the future in myself and make it sing. And if possible, dance.

Late in the day, today, to be saying this, as I lug my portable office out to a cafe to write, but better late than never. late in life, too. But life is full of second acts; third acts, the story not over until that fat lady sings.

Do your work. Be true to yourself. Fight for what you believe in. Figure out the order for yourself. It’s what we’re here to do.

If you’re like me, and why wouldn’t you be, your consciousness has changed over the last few decades.

You remember a time, when news was a newspaper, or perhaps, a 24 hour cable TV station. CNN to be precise. There was exactly one of these stations. Cable TV exposed you to other news shows and stations, but you probably never watched them. PBS and National public radio may or may not have been part of your info diet. Maybe you are one of the ten people that watched CSPAN.

If you were an internet pioneer, you might have done IRC (look it up; it’s real time chat) or usenet (topic based forums).

You who remember a life before cell phones. You who remember pagers.

How did we think back then?

In a word, differently.

There’s a part of the human mind delighted by novelty, by chance, by gambling, also known as the periodic reinforcement schedule, which is a fancy way of saying you do something a bunch of times and sometimes but not all times you get the result you want. I recall a joke, about a drunk plunging quarters into a candy bar vending machine at a casino, yelling at someone interrupting, “don’t stop me, can’t you see I’m on a roll?” The drunk is so drunk he doesn’t get that he isn’t winning; he’s just buying something.

So, our social media, our email applications, our messaging applications, the 24 hour news cycle, all plug into this.

Our consciousness is fragmented. We aren’t winning.

You’ve probably seen the headline, if you haven’t read the story, and that’s a problem, too, that click bait fake news consumption surpassed the consumption of real news from real news sources in the days before Trump’s apparent electoral college win. The clickbait journalism model represents the ground floor of the race to the bottom of the forth estate.

So the most wealthy and powerful nation on Earth will now be ruled by a climate denier. His first appointment is a vicious criminal anti-semite being roundly praised by the KKK and the Neo-nazis that we have been told not to worry too much about by the many Trump voters who seemed to enjoy his melody, while paying little or no attention to the words in the songs he sang.

If you’re like me, at some point, the news became an addiction, an obsession, something you checked constantly, because with smart phones, you could. Perhaps like me you often read actual journalism, so you knew things. You knew that Iraq didn’t attack us on 911, before the war, and you knew there would be no WMD, because you’d read the reports by the UN arms inspectors. So many things you knew, and know.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t know those things and act on that knowledge. But I think the reality our information technology is now at odds with fundamental mental hygiene.

I would like to sit behind a firewall that batched my information in ways that made sense for a sane and productive life. Short of tornado warnings, local shooting events, and amber alerts, there is no need to become aware of every outrage on the planet the minute it occurs. I’m reminded of pioneers of the atomic age poisoning themselves with radioactive materials, because, they were presumed to be safe. We are the pioneers of the singularity, of the age of pure information, and a very large minority of voters have just accidentally selected a man who thinks global warming is a Chinese hoax as president.

Somehow, we have poisoned ourselves.

Not sure what to do about this, but here’s my short term plan:

1. Maintain my subscription to the NYT.
2. Only read news at the end of my work day.
3. Only consult social media while standing up my workstation. Avoid it entirely as much as possible. Set distribution to friends only. Puzzle out what to do about an author platform later.
4. Read books. Library books. Paper books I buy. E-books. Listen to books. Walk. Listen to music. Think.
5. Donate  money to groups to protect targeted populations. Planned Parenthood. ACLU. Southern Poverty Law Center.
6. Attend non-violent protests. Periodically call my representatives. Vote in all elections.
7. Wear an array of identifiers that mark me as a safe place. So far, I have a Black Lives Matter pin and the safety pin. I’ll be adding more icons in the days and weeks ahead. These markers do not make me feel better. My demographic has allowed a horrific thing to happen. I don’t get to feel like a decent person for at least four years. Perhaps longer.
8. Do my work.
9. Abstain, to the degree I am able, from the self-congratulatory liberal echo chamber.
10. Attempt to rewire my brain to be more like the brain I had in my twenties, which didn’t ache to check a series of glowing buttons on my pocket computer / tracking device every five minutes.

I’ve done this once before, but gradually got sick again, like an alcoholic who starts up again, only drinking one glass of wine with dinner. Then two. Then a bottle. Then two.

I’m gonna live a life with more individual conversations. Less holding forth to small audiences of like minding people generating micro-payments to a giant corporation.

Feel free to chime in below, on how you plan to change your life, in this new world we find ourselves in.

I want to know!

I have been struggling with imposter’s syndrome.

Found this in a business centric site, as a list of things to do to combat IS.

• Don’t stay silent. Find a way to speak about your fears with a trusted friend, a coach, a mentor, your partner, a therapist, or in a journal.
• Become familiar with your impostor. What are you trying to prove? To whom?And why?
• Exercise your sense of humor. Try to keep a sense of perspective and to laugh as often as possible—especially at yourself.

Back in the 90s, I saw these three magazines as the launch path to a career as a novelist, and when I didn’t hit these marks in the first five years of effort I quit for eighteen years.

So. Now, I’ve done it, made my 90s checklist. Time to strap in and launch that career!

But…

Um. Yeah.

The time has come now to commit, to longer term projects, to figuring out what my voice is for. To network more effectively, and not to shudder at the word ‘network.’ To somehow make use of social media without oversharing, venting like a mad man, or being in other ways unattractive.

A successful writer / businessman friend of mine recently told me he had never seen a more self-sabotaging media presence… a friend from the 90s flamed me on twitter for how I’ve discussed my recent successes there, and only the successes. The phrase ‘head up my ass’ came up so often I eventually realized that this guy was no longer a friend. (After he’d blocked and unfollowed me, that sank in. I’m not always quick on the uptake.)

So. I have a lot of work to do.

I thought I might find a cover of each magazine and make a graphic for this post… I searched the web, before realizing, duh, just take a picture of the magazines, and in so doing I found a bunch of reviews of my work I’d never seen before.

All positive reviews.

Don’t read reviews, is one bit of advice writers give. Never respond to reviews, either, everyone says.  Today, though, I think the reviews helped.

In a discussion as to whether an Asimov’s story of mine, Strangers with Candy, was ‘really SF’ or not, the reviewer said, he didn’t care really, the story was effective. The story knew exactly what it was doing, were the words he used.

So. Maybe my stories know what they’re doing. Even when I don’t.

Time to go make some words.

Thanks for listening.

So, twenty six years ago I was living in Jamaica Plain with my girlfriend who would become my wife and I decided that rather than just talking about writing fiction I would actually sit down and write some.

My early efforts… on typewriters… had been pathetic. Typing on a typewriter felt like work. I didn’t like it. The idea of producing stacks of manuscript on a typewriter gave me nightmares. I was shitty at spelling; not exactly dyslexic, nothing worthy of a name, just hopelessly shitty. I recall dumbing down my vocabulary, when writing school papers, because I couldn’t spell a fraction of the words I knew.

But in 1990, I had a goddamn Macintosh personal computer. Spell check, yo.

So, I banged out a novella. The plot was vaguely Phillip Jose Farmer meets Roger Zelazny as written by someone who couldn’t write very well and six weeks after I dopped the manuscript in the mail to Analog magazine, I got back my SASE with the unsigned rejection slip.

The slip was a page of snarky reasons they rejected stories, pre-printed. It was humiliating.

I’d grown up on the myth of John W. Campbell writing letters of critique back to Asimov and Clarke that were longer than the stories themselves. I knew Campbell was long gone. I knew I wasn’t Asimov, or Clarke.

But oh.

So this is the thing; this is common; this is cliche. We all know that this is what happens when you start out trying to do something. But, until you have done this thing and had this happen, really, you don’t know shit about how this feels.

Until you have been the man in the arena.

You don’t know what it feels like. It feels bad. Depending on what kind of person you are, it can be enough to stop you cold.

How many dreams die in that moment, in that first flash of the cold light of day? The short, sharp shock of your own ineffable crappyness?

Lots.

Intrepid hero that I am, or was, at age 27, I collapsed like a house of cards and didn’t write or submit anything for a year.

And then…

A friend of mine sold his first story to a magazine for fifty bucks. (He thought he did anyway, the magazine folded before it published the thing or paid him, but who cares. It happened. A friend. Of mine. SOLD A STORY.) And I realized, I wanted to write. I met a man in a used bookstore in Harvard Square who became my lifelong friend and wrote with him and a few people he was writing with, and when that group disbanded I found another group, which I stuck with for years.

Until I lead it.

I went to Clarion West, the six week writing workshop that makes or breaks people, and….It broke me. I quit for eighteen years. Again, heroic me, folding like some kind of cheap, easily foldable thing. (What do things fold like? Write much, writer boy?)

And then I started up again in 2012, with a new workshop, new friends. I sold nine pieces to Asimovs, two to F&SF, and to Interzone and Galaxies Edge and Fantastic Stories, and this afternoon, twenty six years later, two stories were accepted at Analog.

Depending on where you are in life, I am either an inspirational story (if you’re older and hoping for a second act) or a cautionary tale (If you’re younger and you have a tendency to quit like a little sniveling bitch.)

Know this; the sensation of success is fleeting, behind every success in writing there are a series of disappointments. (No award nominations? No anthology interest?) You better love doing the thing itself, because mostly the thing itself is it’s own reward.

But, that moment of success, that instant, that feeling, reaching a goal, it’s good.

Very good.

You carry it with you forever.