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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It isn’t about you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

None of them are interesting. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But you’re the greek chorus really. 

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

I know those statements are oddly paired. 

But it’s the truth. 

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

But it isn’t a hobby.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or joy. Pure joy. 

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

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

Tigerfaced Gully Foyle scattering capsules of anarchy across all spacetime. 

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

The Instrumentality punishing Command Suzdal with eternity in Shayol.

The velvet black sky full of whispering stars.  

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

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

A particle beam handgun with a worn ivory handle. 

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

Time to get to work. 

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!

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. 

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.

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.