Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

So my Facebook monkeys have been linking this thing about being busy, and it reminds me of a related thing I have been wanting to talk about. Because I think that, yes, we do overschedule, as a culture, and yes, we're crap at marking which things are important and which are not. But I think there are some sub-categories there that are kind of relevant to the mistakes our culture makes around this topic.

I think one of the problems is that we get all twisted and tangled up around marking which things are productive, which are fun, which are both, and which are neither. I think that as a culture we are complete crap at actually being honest with ourselves about this stuff. And having recently been to a convention, I can point at alllll sorts of ways in which writers as a subculture are terrible. Take conventions, for example. If you are a writer, and you go to a convention like World Fantasy that's got serious industry focus, are you a) having a good time with your friends; b) talking with people who have common interests about intellectually stimulating subjects related to the said interests (yes, I know, that's fun for me too--but for some people they're not completely overlapping sets); c) making and/or maintaining personal contacts with people who are in the same business as you; d) conversing on specific business-related topics; e) none of the above? It can be any combination of those answers for any writer, depending on the con or the day they're having.

And I think that being honest with ourselves about it is really important, because if you're going to a con to have fun with your friends, that is totally fine. There is nothing wrong with having fun with your friends and a great deal right with it. Things start to get complicated if you either tell yourself that you are Doing Business Dammit when in fact you are having fun with your friends--or else tell yourself that this ought to be fun, and why why WHY aren't you having more FUN--when in fact you are an introvert and this is NOT your fun, your fun would be interacting with the same people in much smaller groups or shorter time frames, and you are doing this particular con for the business aspect and this is WORK for you--or when you tell yourself that it ought to be a lovely co-mingling of work and fun, when in fact you haven't talked to anybody you actually work with or anybody you like, and hmm, maybe you should stop going to this con completely and pick a different one that has at least one of fun or work. (Or decide that as nice as it can be for some people to get face-time with those they work with or share interests with, it's just not for you and stay home. That way is fine too. I love the cons I love, but I'd be the last person to say they are for everyone.) Any of the above can be fine as long as you're being honest with yourself and coping accordingly--and, of course, not being a jerk to other people along the way, and recognizing that other people have other reactions and reasons for being there.

Conventions and writers are just one example. I think that we tend to seize upon an aura of virtue whenever and wherever we can find it. Reading political blogs and participating in the comment section doesn't have to be classified as just a hobby, it's part of being an informed electorate and/or maintaining a community! You want to do those things, don't you? Those are important things, right? And they are. Except. They're not infinitely important, and there's a law of diminishing returns there: how much participation will make you more informed, how much will build more community, how much you're just doing because you like to (and it's fine to do things you like to do!), how much you're doing out of habit. I think habit is a big one for how we fall into things that have some productive component and some fun component but haven't been analyzed recently for how much of either we're getting out of them. And it's very easy to say, "Oh yeah, we should think about that," and not always easy to actually, y'know, think about that. Even though we totally should.

Politics is one of the areas in which I feel like we're doing worst at this. It particularly comes up in a US election year, when people watch the election results as though they were a horse race, which for a few people is actually enjoyable, but for most gives the illusion of involvement with the political process without actually doing anything productive, while still subjecting minds and bodies to stress hormones and reactions. I've watched people do it: some get really happy and excited to watch the results, and for them yay. The rest...it's like a horse race you don't even like but feel compelled to watch anyway. Except it's not. The results won't change. So if you don't like watching the results in real-time, and you're not actually doing something where it's related to your job or any other real-time analysis that will make a difference, don't do it, do something else. At this remove it sounds obvious. It just...seems to come up every Presidential election. I have friends who get upset and stressed and watch anyway. This worries me and makes me sad.

So I've been thinking of declaring Election Day officially Talk About Something Else Tuesday. Go vote, those of you who are eligible and informed, and then come home and take a deep breath and...talk about something else. I'll compile a list of suggestions for alternate blog topics here and post them on Election Day. Just "not thinking of pink elephants" doesn't work; thinking of something else actively is much better if you're trying not to stress, if you've already done what you can. And then at the end of the night or in the next morning you will find out who has won the various elections you care about, and the results will be the same even if you don't hear the exact moment when they have 3% of the returns counted from Decatur, IA. Go for a walk, make a pie, volunteer somewhere apolitical in your area, blog about something unrelated to politics. Unless you can honestly look at watching election returns and say either, "Yes, this will really be enjoyable for me," or, "Yes, here is the concrete good I will do with this," do something else. And let's help each other on that one. Suggestions welcome in the comments section.

Do what you can, and then stop dwelling and do something else that's either productive or fun, but for heaven's sake not neither. I will keep repeating this to myself until I get it right. Probably this means I will be repeating it awhile. Sigh.

I made the mistake of reading Katherine Kersten in the Star-Tribune today, and she was crowing about the recent study that declares that liberals de-friend more people over politics than conservatives do. Liberals are less tolerant, take that take that liberals! crows Kersten. (She also thinks liberals are ignorant for thinking that a party that wants to spend through the nose on the military--and has done so historically--does not want reduced government spending. Um. But anyway.)

I have de-friended two high school classmates in the last month on Facebook. One of them posted a video with the title, "Look at that n----- go!" His did not have dashes. He did not comment, "What an unfortunate title, but really the guy is an awesome athlete and worth watching." He did not in any way mitigate the slur in the video title. Seriously? I get that "Facebook friend" and "actual friend" are not identical, but either way: gone now, bye.

Within the last few days, another high school classmate posted an incredibly racist picture/caption of a South Asian man. I do not need to describe it for you and perpetuate the racism. Trust me: totally racist. She did post additional commentary. Her comment was, "haha stupid c----." My reaction was: 1) goodbye, racist jerk; 2) he is not a c----, that is another group completely, ignorant racist jerk.

And Kersten would like to believe that she has won the prize because the semantics of "tolerate the intolerant" means "ha ha I win!" No, Kersten. We all lose here.

There is a thing I say when people are being snobs from one part of fandom towards another, and that is: "If the Klingons were good enough for Mike Ford, they're good enough for you, buddy."

Occasionally I even mean this literally. I don't know anybody in serious Klingon fandom very well, but the Klingons I have met briefly and casually have seemed like awfully, awfully nice people, and...look. How different do we really look, from the outside? I don't have a prosthetic forehead that I wear on my real head. But at least half of you knew exactly what I was quoting with that last sentence, and friends, that is plenty nerd enough. If I go to my high school classmates on Facebook and say, "I am going to spend my Easter weekend at a science fiction convention," all the defensiveness in the world about how I write the stuff, and serious thoughtful stuff at that, how I R Srs Arthur, how I am not like the Klingons and the Slave Leias and the Sailors Moon will not stop them from thinking that I am like them.

Because I am like them. Because we are nerds who fixate on blue-sky ideas without regard to how crazy and silly they are, or sometimes because they are crazy and silly. And hey. Go that. Srs Arthur hat or prosthetic forehead, whichever. You have to know who you are, and I am, in fact, a nerd who stopped making stuff up about a teenage spy girl from Atlantis for awhile this morning in order to make stuff up about a family who lives on a space station in the Oort Cloud. I could posture about how I have had stories about quantum mechanics and yearning published in Nature, Nature!, and it would mean nothing to anybody who wants to sneer in the first place, unless they are anxious about their own place in the nerd hierarchy. Why bother. I have also written steampunk about an intelligent monkey. I get by better without clutching to myself a firm sense of my own dignity. People are messy, ideas are messy, and science fiction is about both. Better to wear something that washes easily.

But more importantly, I would rather dress up like a Slave Leia Klingon Sailor Moon* than neglect a brilliant idea related to it because I was afraid of looking stupid. You can't be afraid of the trappings that come with your crazy brilliant ideas. I don't want sparkly vampires, I don't want an adventuring party chance-met in an out of the way tavern, I don't want any of a number of silly-looking tropes--but even more than that, I don't want to talk myself out of writing things I actually believe are interesting because I'm afraid of looking stupid in front of the cool kids.

And so we get to Christopher Priest judging Sheri Tepper for her book having a talking horse in it. Seriously? Seriously? Of all the reasons to get judgy of a Sheri Tepper novel? The woman writes with substance. She writes things you can argue with. She writes things you can dislike with a vengeance--I know, because I have. But not Christopher Priest! No, he has to dislike the presence of a talking horse, not anything anybody might say or think in the context of this book except for one single pun. (God forbid we should pun. Piers Anthony punned once. Enough said.)

What is the problem with SF today? Is it that we don't spend enough time making sure not to embarrass each other in front of our cool brilliant genius friends? Bullshit it is. I have cool brilliant genius friends. You know what cool brilliant genius friends have in common? They are more interested in cool stuff than in making sure they never look mildly stupid or embarrassed. They will always ruin their metaphorical shoes wading in to see the slimy interesting thing. (Have you ever seen jonsinger wearing Manolo Blahniks? I rest my case.) They are more interested in whether the horse has anything interesting to say than in whether someone sees them reading a book with, oh noes, a talking horse.

Problem with SF today, if in fact there is one other than people fussing too much about problems with SF instead of getting on with it, is not insufficient time spent making sure not to embarrass each other in front of the Srs Ppl, but insufficient exuberance. Solution to this is not whining about somebody else liking a book with a talking horse. timprov has been listening to an online philosophy course, and the fellow who is teaching it was trying to do a gedankenexperiment, and he was mentally transplanting Napoleon's personality to modern-day Michigan. Fine, he said, and then made it New York instead. Fine, he said, and then tried to make it one of each, and then he said, no no that's too ridiculous. And we said, "What? What? This is your line, this?" And that's where I am now with Christopher Priest. You were willing to write the novelization of Short Circuit--SHORT bloody CIRCUIT with the Indian guy who is NOT EVEN INDIAN and the robot who sings the who's Johnny song--and you cavil at talking horses? This, this is where you feel we have Gone Too Far? Napoleon in one place was all right but two is just too many, and if it was Napoleon in the body of a talking horse, well, not for the Clarke Award? Particularly not if he then had any kind of quest to achieve?

If he draws the line at talking horses, he has almost certainly not gloried in Digger. And then there's Beasts of New York and a dozen other things, not to mention the quests that have something interesting to seek. And that is not the way to a thriving and exuberant science fiction genre. If we can't articulate any problems with Twilight beyond the fact that there are vampires and they sparkle, we need to hang it up, because the fact that there are sparkly vampires is a mild matter of individual taste compared to the things that have gone wrong in that book. Is the talking horse an idiot? Is the talking horse a fascist, a nihilist, badly plotted? Is the talking horse boring? That's criticism worth talking about. Pointing out that it is, in fact, a talking horse is being a child at the zoo: yes, Christopher, horsey, well done, next week we'll teach you what a puppy looks like, since you seem to still be having trouble with that one.

*Those of you now picturing me as a Slave Leia Klingon Sailor Moon: you had better not be enjoying it, or you're now fired.

This is one of the reasons I don't do very well with the "over-the-top ridiculous dystopian satire" sub-genre. Actually it's a host of the reasons. Because:

1) Whatever satirical reductio ad absurdam you've come up with, someone else will have proposed it as a real thing. We have hit the critical number of monkeys and availability of communication to make this happen.

2) "Other People are So Dumb" is not actually a very interesting premise for a book. Sure, someone has to point out the stupidity when it comes up in public forums. But elaborating on it at book length? So that Our Proud Heroes can at least be smarter than Those People? Meh. If the premise of your dystopia is one my 4-year-old goddaughter can pick apart in ten minutes, try again. I mean, she's almost 5. So she's getting pretty good at this picking apart of the big monkeys' nonsense. But still.

3) How We Got There From Here is actually fairly interesting to me. Sometimes humanity actually does adopt a phenomenally dumb idea locally, for values of "locally" that can include entire empires. This doesn't just happen out of ignorance. Sometimes we know better and do the dumb thing anyway. How? Why? The thing is: satirical dystopia writers do not much seem to care. The story linked above looks phenomenally unlikely to be enacted, from here. What would it take to get there? Sighing and saying, "People, man...they're so dumb sometimes..." is not enough. It's not enough to make me buy your worldbuilding, and it's not enough to figure out things we can do to stop the stupid in the real world.

And so I tend not to care so much.

In other news: still sick, but on the mend, I think.

The duvet is in being cleaned, and markgritter is out of town, so rather than use the energy it would take to wrestle a spare comforter onto the bed, I have been sleeping in the guest bed. My usual bed is in the corner of the house farthest from the driveway and the street; the guest bed is in the corner nearest.

At 5:00 a.m., I awoke to the sound of a woman loudly gasping, "Fuck you. Fuck you," with very little breath to spare. I had my glasses on and my phone out and was at the window before I was fully awake, but it didn't take long to be fully awake, either; my brain had started automatically going through under what circumstances I would open the window and yell, under what circumstances I would go downstairs and open the front door, what would mean I would need to call the cops.

It was our newspaper carrier. Getting out of her car to throw our paper. On her cell phone. And I know that life is not always tidily segregated so that you're not having to tell off friends or family members while you're working--wait! Actually my life is that tidily segregated, due to not having to tell off my friends or family members all that often or that urgently! I really feel that making distressed noises loud enough to wake people from outside their houses at 5 a.m. is really not the thing if you can avoid it. Picky me.

The up side is that I know now that my subconscious mind is prepared to try to help a distressed stranger at 5 a.m. So, um, yay?

If you're a writer with a recent or forthcoming first novel, do talk about the other writers who have inspired you. Lissa Price was on my panel, and her comments about which writers had led her to think she could not only do this but have fun at it were a very good way of placing her context and the likely audience for her book--and were gracious besides.

Don't promote your book by tearing down the entire rest of the field. The gentleman who talked of his book being different from the entire rest of the fantasy field, which is composed of quest tales of young white orphan boys and their swords--not only has he not done his research, he's just gone and offended half the room at World Fantasy, because some of them write and like that stuff, and some of them have been writing and publishing completely different kinds of fantasy for ages now and don't like being told they don't exist.

Do plan ahead. Saying to a friend, "Are you free for lunch tomorrow?" or "How about dinner Friday? Where shall we meet?" may be the difference between seeing them for a happy few hours and never finding them again. Knowing that I would definitely get to see dear friends I hadn't seen in a long time was a steadying point and a high point.

Don't make those plans vague. "Oh yes, I'll see you later! And meet your fiancee!" Um. Not so functional, that. Sorry!

Do leave space in your bag for books. Wheeee!

Don't buy a membership to a con that has a capped membership and a waiting list if you have publicly expressed scorn and loathing for its subject matter. Tacky, tacky, tacky. Seriously, people, how hard is this? I don't really like horror. I don't go to World Horror. There! Done! How hard was that? I do not trip and fall and find myself on the membership list. Similarly, if you don't like fantasy...and you have been very clear that you don't like fantasy...and the convention is World Fantasy...well, you do the math.

Do try crazy nearby restaurants. The top of Neiman Marcus was surprisingly not overpriced, and brought us lovely things; the weird iPad-themed restaurant worked well and was easy for a group that was not paying all together without actually being fast food. (But Boudin Bakery is also still good.)

Don't go to an event at the Town and Country. Seriously. It sucked, lo, mightily. I didn't even have the worst issues with it, of all the people I know. But even minor things like the Which Towel Type Won't We Get Today? game were annoying, and the disability issues were far, far worse. This is everyone's problem.

Do tell writers you meet if you like their work. Even if it's little things. They will appreciate it. In some cases it may get them through tough weeks.

Don't grab somebody by the thigh as she is walking to get her attention. I...feel like all the qualifications on this one are a bit moot. Other people's thighs: they are not yours. When you're male and they're female; when you're an editor and they're a writer; when you just met the previous day and are not old friends; when they have a balance disorder that affects their mobility--all these things are additional problems. But in their absence it's still not okay to just--in person I tend to go into rant voice on this. Because we do not! We just don't! We don't grab other people by the thigh! What the hell! Other people's children!

(I also feel obliged to say that it is not an editor I have worked with or would work with. The folks from Shimmer, Fantasy, and Tor.com were all great.)

Here's the thing. I was watching hockey last night, and one of the Red Wings came crashing into the Wild net, straight into Josh Harding. And the announcer was saying something about how he was not sure that this person intended to interfere with the goaltender. And I watched the replay and said, "No, but he sure didn't intend not to." And that's the standard. It is his job to attempt to steer clear of mowing down the goalie. And that's kind of how I feel about this. Did the person in question mean to sexually harass me? Probably not. But he sure as hell didn't put in even rudimentary kindergarten level effort to respect my personal space, either, and that's quite enough. It was not incumbent on the ref to ascertain that the Red Wings player had great evil and malice aforethought; it was enough that he did not make an effort to avoid the thing that was over a line. And this? This was over a line.

Nor was it the only such incident I experienced at this con. It's just the one I can describe most clearly at the moment: I was walking out of my reading, and this guy grabbed me by the thigh as I was walking past, to tell me that he liked my story. And the stuff I said above, about saying nice things to the writers you like? It goes out the window when you invade their personal space first. Truly.

I made something like this as a comment to a locked post, and I had a request to take it public where someone could point at it, so here we are:

I think one of the easiest things to get wrong about depicting other people's belief systems is how to predict how much they will follow what they say they will follow. When you're talking about someone from the same larger cultural umbrella as yourself, it's much easier: I have a sense, for example, of how much my Catholic friends and neighbors will change their mind on an issue if the Pope issues a new ex cathedra statement about it. I know what the range of responses will be for Midwestern American Lutherans if the ELCA comes out with a resolution, or if their own pastor preaches a sermon. But I find this much harder to predict with a religion or other belief system I'm less familiar with, and I think it's simultaneously disrespectful to assume that members of group X will do exactly what their holy book, leader, etc. tell them to because clearly they don't have minds of their own, or to assume that members of group X will ignore their holy book, leader, etc., because clearly they don't take that stuff seriously.

And that sort of stated or implied reasoning is big part of the problem. I know that a lot of my Catholic friends and neighbors disagree with the Pope because they're devout and believe their interpretation of human sexuality or other human rights issues is a better expression of Catholicism than his. But if I don't know a lot of, say, Japanese animists, and I come up with something that is supposedly a deeper expression of their animism than the stated beliefs, then I have fallen into the smelly pit known as What These People Need Is A Honky. (Or a Gentile. Or just My Brilliant Self; this is not limited to non-white groups.) I have been in arguments with people who decided they knew what I thought and believed better than I did, and it was condescending and unpleasant. I don't care to be that person.

Which doesn't mean I'm off the hook for depicting people from more distant/different belief systems--and on the up side, figuring out the details of this sort of thing is one of the more interesting parts of making up a belief system. I've just been thinking of this as one of the hard bits to remind myself so I don't default to behaving as though fake fantasy religions are all approximately Midwestern American Protestantism in funny hats.

This was not part of my original comment, but I wonder if this kind of mismatch in how much to assume people "mean it" and which directions of "meaning it" they will follow is part of the disconnect in how we talk about politics and religion in this country. Various subcultures have different assumptions about what to take literally that don't always match up very well.

Mostly in locked posts, I've seen people talking about how badly Connie Willis handled the British setting details in Blackout/All Clear, and as a result the comments I want to point to are also mostly in locked posts: it seems that a great many people feel that the appropriate response is to say something like, "Well, when was the last time you saw a book do every detail perfectly?"

Look, people. This is not just a straw man. It's a stupid straw man. Nobody is claiming that Connie Willis's books or anybody else's books need to be flawless to be worth reading. They are claiming that the flaws they're discussing are meaningful. If you don't think they're meaningful, say so. Have the guts to stand up and say that you feel the other person is nitpicking. If what you mean is, "I don't think getting the details of how your country handles things should be important to someone from my country," say so. If what you mean is, "I think that the detail you are talking about will not mislead anyone severely, and I think the author got at some very important emotional truths," say that too. But don't wave it away with, "Well, no one's perfect!" That may be the standard we'd like, but it's not the one anyone is actually using.