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Achievement Unlocked… crap.

I’ve talked on my show before about how my brain needs a break after I finish a project. I’m serious- if I try to work after I finish a book or a script or something, it’ll be like I’m calling down to the productivity room for inspiration and nothing comes back. The brain, it just won’t work. So I’ve learned to give it a break.

Recently, though, I had a perfect storm. I turned in edits to Ghost Train to New Orleans in late August. Then I went to WorldCon. Then I won the Campbell. These are all positive things, but they all send a message to my brain- “Achievement unlocked, well done, it’s break time!” And with all three of these messages coming in at the same time, my brain checked out. I think it went to Tenerife.

The really big problem with this is if I don’t give my brain down time, if I try to force thinking and productivity, it won’t happen. What will happen is a lot of self-loathing because I can’t write a sentence or get anything done. I’ll hate my characters. I’ll record a podcast but not have the oomph to edit and upload and post it. I’ll do a load of laundry and leave it in the dryer for days.

I got a very nice email from an award winning author who gave me the advice that now that I’ve won an award, I may hit a wall, paralyzed by the pressure of needing to now prove I’m worthy of the award. The fear that everything I write will be scrutinized through a stronger magnifying glass, looking for any error to brand me a fraud. I appreciated the email, and tried to ready myself. But it’s like rejection, or a punch – even if you know something harsh is coming, it’s hard to not feel it.

In fact, I’m realizing that the response to these good things has to be like my response to the bad things. When I get rejections or other bad news, I allow myself a day of feeling sorry for myself. Red wine and chocolate are often involved. When I allow myself to process the sad, I can usually bounce back a lot faster than if I just try to soldier on. The response to good things can be similar; I need time to process, to relax from the hard work, and yeah, to get my confidence back. Because the threat of the Fraud Police doesn’t go away when you get published or win an award; in fact, now that there’s more at risk if you’re revealed a fraud, they’re after you even moreso than before.

Fraud FBI has been watching my house. I just know it.

So I’ve been getting my wordcount in (294 days on the magic spreadsheet!) but that’s about it. I need to get back to podcasting and brainstorming and email and stuff. Because it doesn’t matter if the Fraud FBI are watching, or I win an award, or I lose an award, or I get rejected, or what. If I’m going to be a writer, I have to do the work.

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Sundries and links and stuff

  • Very funny author Michael A. Ventrella interviewed me on his blog.
  • I’ll be on my local NPR show, The State of Things, next week! Will post when it’s live.
  • VCon is around the corner, and I’m a Guest of Honor! I’m still amazed and honored and can’t wait! Oct 4-7.
  • A June, 2014 workshop was just announced, Writing the Other, and the instructors are amazing. (David Anthony Durham is my current mentor at Stonecoast and he’s been instrumental to my growth as a writer.) A lot of people say they don’t write people unlike them (whether it’s gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, etc) because they’re afraid of getting it wrong. If that’s you, attend this workshop.
  • It was just announced that I’ll be a visiting author to the July, 2014 Shared Worlds workshop (the site currently only has 2013 information)! I’m very excited to work with this program, so if you have a teen interested in writing, check it out!

Why Point of View is so damn important. AKA: Go, eagle, go!

Breaking Bad spoilers below.

I’m a tangential watcher of Breaking Bad. We don’t have cable so I’ve watched via Netflix, and usually while doing something else. Jim fills me in. I did get a chance to see last week’s episode and watched with fascinated horror at The Phone Call. Many people have apparently been talking about The Phone Call, trying so hard to whitewash Walt into remaining a hero, doing things for his family, how he said things to try to throw the blame off Skyler, and how Skyler is a bitch and deserved it anyway, etc. This article says why that’s stupid, why that’s making the show as stupider than it is. (also because sexism, but that’s not the point of this post.) Like real people, Walt is neither Good nor Evil. He loves his family and hates his wife and does horrible things for what he thinks is a good reason and has killed and rescued and poisoned and caused the death of his brother-in-law and mourned that death. He is capable of many things, good and evil. He’s complex.

So why, asks the article writer, do some people so desperately want Walt to be the “good guy” – why do they justify his actions? Part of it, yes, is the fact that we liked Walt in the beginning, and we are good people (in our own eyes), so we can’t be evil, so Walt isn’t evil.

This is the same justification people use when they say racist things. “Racists are bad. I’m not bad. So what I said wasn’t racist.”

But the real reason we can root for bad guys is point of view.

Several years ago I was watching a nature program and suddenly saw through the careful emotional manipulation – in a freaking NATURE program – that they plunge the viewer into. They’ll talk about the migrating bird that flies thousands of miles and gets maybe a mouthful of food along the way but OH NO HERE IS A HUNGRY EAGLE, RUN MIGRATING BIRD!!!

In another scene we’ll get a view of the mama cheetah who has been kicked in the face by a zebra and will soon die, as will her cubs. Fuckin zebras, man. Poor cheetah family.

Even though the nature shows show the prey’s POV a majority of the time, and therefore we find ourselves rooting for the antelope to get away, sometimes we see it from the predators’ point of view, and suddenly we feel for the wolf who hasn’t eaten in days during the lean winter months, and the hungry babies, poor puppies!

While in the scene above we easily felt for the poor migrating bird who was nearly starving and wouldn’t eat until it reached its destination a billion miles away, like a dad who won’t stop to pee on a long trip to grandma’s in Kalamazoo, the scene could have been told from the POV of the hungry eagle, who perhaps had an injured wing and had chicks to feed, and maybe one had fallen out of the nest or been eaten by a snake, and the narrator would have been all GO, EAGLE, GO! EAT THAT BIRD!

We have seen most of Breaking Bad from Walt’s POV. We have seen his professional despair, his cancer diagnosis, his denial of coverage, his controlling wife. Then we see him take control of his life and his money and then do that thing that always makes us like a character- he does something well. He does something better than anyone else, and that’s cook. We see him start to try to help his family by doing horrible things. We know he loves his family. We know he even loves Hank. We know he goes into every horrible thing he does with, if not reluctance, with a grim sense of “this is the only choice I have.” All of these things can make people believe “it’s not his fault.”

MINOR spoilers for A Song of Ice and Fire series:

George RR Martin has masterfully used POV in A Song of Ice and Fire. He sets up Jamie Lannister to be reprehensible early on. We don’t start getting Jamie’s point of view until a few books in when he begins to look sympathetic, and we see his change from inside him. We can even start liking him a little, or at least rooting for him, even when we’re reminded that he’s a complex character who is not embracing the “good” way of life by any stretch of the imagination. (Remember the threat he made against an infant in the Tully family? Yeah, he’s still a Lannister.)

Back to Breaking Bad, imagine the story from Skyler’s POV. A woman whose husband is getting screwed in his job and then diagnosed with cancer and then denied treatment, and bam, unexpectedly she turns up pregnant. That’s a lot of shit to deal with. Then her husband begins to cook, and she has no idea, but knows that Something is Up. When she finds out, she is forced to decide whether to keep her family together or high tail it out of there. She becomes his accomplice, still not knowing the depth of the shit he’s gotten into, until enough people die that she starts to notice. She’s seeming pretty sympathetic to me right now.

While we never want the Lannisters to win in ASoIaF, we do want Tyrion Lannister to succeed, because we see his sympathetic POV – this made the Blackwater battle a complex one because we hated something to happen to Tyrion but wanted Joffrey’s city to fall. A lot of people complain that Sansa is a bitch for not liking Tyrion even though he did the very nice thing of not raping her, but they forget that Sansa thinks the Imp is evil, still believes he tried to kill her brother, he fights for the Lannisters, hell, he IS a Lannister, etc. We want her to see the good in him that WE see, because we’ve seen his POV, but we forget that a) he hasn’t told her the truth of anything because b) he (rightly) thinks she will never believe him. Sansa can’t have Tyrion’s POV, so she hates him. When we see him through her eyes, he’s a horrible, ugly man who is an attempted murderer, part of a family who has nothing but horrible people in it, a drunk, a frequent visitor of brothels, incapable of decency or love.

Anyway, the way to get people to like or sympathize with a character is to show the character doing something well (Remember Italians said that Mussolini made the trains run on time?), or doing a kindness to someone, or see them mistreated.  But also give them a POV so we can see their different layers, the shades of gray that make up everybody’s soul, and remember, like Walt, like Jamie, we all do what we do because we believe it’s the right thing, or the only thing to do.

Pound Cakes Need Flour

I can’t take credit for this. This is taken directly from a conversation I had with Ursula Vernon, who was trying to give me a “buck up little camper!” talk.

Damn but I love me some Fire Emblem...
Damn, but I love me some Fire Emblem on the DS…

See, what happened was I was procrastinating and playing my DS and doing laundry and watching The Office when there was something work-related I had to do. When I finally got my head straight and did what I was supposed to, I killed it, efficiently, well, and even got a compliment from the client. But as I was walking to lunch, I still felt lousy and unaccomplished because I’d wasted that time. I thought, man, if I could be productive like that all the time, I’d be unstoppable.

Ursula gave me a great metaphor for this (well, no, first she said, “if you did that all the time, you would die.” Then she gave the metaphor): traditionally, a pound cake needs a pound of butter, a pound of flour, and a pound of sugar. The thing that makes it really good is the butter, right? * So if butter is the best part, why not make a butter cake? THREE POUNDS OF BUTTER. CHURCH LUNCHEON, HERE I COME!

Three pounds of butter? You’d die.

The butter in this metaphor, says Ursula, is the time that you work and you’re on top of it, you’re nailing everything, you’re creative and clever and productive and awesome. But if you ate just butter, if you were so on fire creatively all the time, you’d die. The flour is the boring stuff in your life, the laundry and the gardening and the cooking and the driving. It’s boring and tasteless, but the butter needs it for support to make a cake. **

Your mind needs downtime to process awesome creative stuff. You need time to wind up the clockwork toy that is your brain, and the winding up is the part of your life where you’re not sitting at the computer (or notebook or easel or drawing pad or musical instrument, etc). How many ideas do you have when you’re away from your computer? Driving? Showering? Shopping?

This is why I worry when someone says they can’t wait to quit their job so they can “write all the time.” I have no day job, thanks to the economy, and promise you, people who write as their day job don’t do it all the time. Just like we don’t eat butter all the time. We need procrastination, manual things to do, times where our brain clicks off to let the subconscious play for a bit. ***

One thing the day job and parenting gives you, besides all the negative stuff I’m pretty sure you’re thinking of right now, is structure in your life. You have a time you need to be at work, you have a time to get home, you have a kid who needs its own schedule. While this can give you a sense of being overwhelmed, you can look at your schedule and see where your holes are. If you fill the holes up with TV and video games (I don’t judge; I do the same thing) then think about removing those things and writing.

Because right now, I look at the day, and the time I have to write is a huge lump that procrasti-brain decides can be pushed back further and further, and suddenly it’s 9:30pm and I should be relaxing but I haven’t written yet and HOW CAN THIS BE WHAT EVIL CREATURE HAS EATEN MY DAY?

I think I’m talking about two different, but linked, things here. The point is, time doing things other than creating is necessary. Wishing for a full day with nothing to do but write, well, be careful what you wish for. If, right now, you are finding other things to do than write when you have 30 min of free time, you will do the same thing if given 8 hours. I promise.

So. Pound cake. Turns out the flour is necessary. I’m going to go do a load of laundry now.

Work in Progress: MIND THE DRAPES (working title)

* Note-  I could argue that the most important thing was the sugar, but that’s a moot point in regards to her argument.

** Note- if I am completely honest with myself I will admit that DS playing is not really flour in my life. It’s not much of anything except for dopamine hits to my easily-addicted brain. Maybe it’s Cheetos.

*** Note- While procrastination and the like are necessary, remember what happens if you have too much flour and too little butter. Yuck. Don’t go overboard.

Personal, Travel

So, Worldcon. That was cool. A bit.

I got back from WorldCon last night and spent today processing and napping.

In case you hadn’t heard, I won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer of 2012. I mean, HOLY CRAPBASKETS. I’m still stunned. As Pat Cadigan keeps saying about her Hugo, “I keep waiting to wake up.”

lake_campbell
Jay Lake, me, and Jay’s daughter – Photo © 2013 James J. Seals, all rights reserved. Reproduced with permission.

The very cool thing you’re not seeing here is we were in front of a wall of photographers, and Jay’s daughter was directing the whole thing. “OK, let’s focus left…” (wait for photos) “Now center…” (wait for photos) “Now right.” She was IN CONTROL. It was awesome. She is such an amazing young woman and Jay should be very proud.

But I’ll get to more Hugo/Campbell details in a moment.

I stopped doing con writeups years ago, as I would always worry I would forget something. I’m going to give some highlights, but if I forget someone, I’m truly sorry.

On Wednesday, I drank with Chuck Wendig because drinking in the afternoon is either sad or awesome, depending on where, why, and with whom you do it. And I figured a hotel, being at a con, and CHUCK was good enough. Later that night we got Adam Christopher and his oh so cool wife Sandra and my friends John Cmar and Laura Burns and treked down the very warm street to a pub where we ate under the scary severed head of a buffalo and I drank a tasty Hemingway cocktail.

Thursday the con started in full force, and I got to be part of Just A Minute, an English game show that Paul Cornell brings to cons. You must talk for a minute on a topic, without repetition, hesitation, or deviation. If someone catches you in this, they can challenge. It gets silly and cutthroat at times. I was in the competition with Connie Willis, Emma Newman, and Gary K. Wolfe. It was amazingly stressful and fun, and it was awesome to sit beside my idol, Connie.

I had a great autographing – there was a line of like four people at one point! That’s great for me! – and before that got to have lunch with my mentor and friend, Jim Kelly. Later that night, I was in the weird position of all of my friends were scattered, and I was wondering what to do with myself, and SFWA President Steven Gould and his wife, writer Laura Mixon, my old Viable Paradise instructors, invited me to dinner. It was great to catch up with them. I fear I didn’t call Steve “El Presidente” enough, though.

Jim got in that night. Yay husband!

Saturday night my editor, Devi, took me and Jim out to dinner, and then we hit the Drinks with Authors party late. It turned out that we missed a lot of the party, but the plus side was that the overcrowded bar group had thinned and we had a nice time. I discovered that ALL of the Campbell nominees were there, and we quickly gathered and bonded. Stina Leicht and I already knew each other from last year’s Campbell nomination, and Chuck and I knew each other from before, but I hadn’t met Max Gladstone and his awesome wife Steph yet. So we bonded and formed Team Tiara.

The other nominees are awesome people. The next day, Max, Steph, and I went shopping for tiaras to form Team Tiara for real, and we found some nice ones at the mall. We brought them to the Campbell panel, which included Ben Bova, the creator of the Campbell Award. Ben wore his tiara with good humor. (We got him an understated one, you can barely see it in the weird lighting below.)

Team Tiara! Max Gladstone, Stina Leicht, me, Chuck Wendig, and Ben Bova - Photo by Karen Bovenmeyer
Team Tiara! Max Gladstone, Stina Leicht, me, Chuck Wendig, and Ben Bova – Photo by Karen Bovenmeyer

It’s hard to compare the two years of Campbell nominations without making one sound better than the other, but the experience was better this time around. And I know that is stupid-tasting, because duh, I won, but it goes beyond that. Last year, Karen Lord didn’t make the con, E. Lily Yu (the much-deserving winner) arrived late to the convention, and I never actually met Brad Torgersen. (NOTE- I am NOT putting any of them down for this, I’m just saying this was how circumstances worked out.) This left Stina and me, and we bonded, but it felt more like a friendship (this is NOT bad, obviously, but I’m speaking of bonding as a group of new writers who have the crazy honor of being told they have amazing potential). This year, we missed Zen Cho, but everyone else were there, and we all got along great. We hung out at the before party, all sat together during the ceremonies, and exchanged much hugs after. These are amazing writers, each one, and I know Max will be on the ballot again next year.

The downsides of the con were the kaffeklatch and my reading. The kaffeklatch had only four people (one of them a friend, John Shade, a writer at Stonecoast) and was somewhat awkward. I’ve had better kaffeklatches as an unpublished writer. Weird. Then my reading, which was a clusterfuck of non-euclidian design. I thought I knew where room was, and I was wrong. No one could give me satisfactory directions, and it turned out the signing rooms were in a separate building that had about 80% of the outside doors locked. (I of course didn’t try the 20% that were open) The fans were very, very kind that they only got 15 minutes of reading, and haphazard and stressed reading at that. Mortified.

So, the Hugo awards! I was terrified I wouldn’t have enough time, as the Campbell panel was at 5 and the reception started at 6. I ran back to the room, got showered and started getting my girl on. I managed not to mess up my hair, and the only makeup problem was learning that liquid eyeliner is proof that Satan exists and he hates women. Once I got it out of my eye and threw the rest of the shit away, things were smooth sailing.

When I won, I was stunned and shaking (video, about 5 min in), and I can’t decide if being caught in a bear hug by Chris Garcia helped or hurt my composure. 😀 (I’m kidding, Chris hugs are one of the best things about WorldCon.) When I got on stage, a beaming Lake child (Jay calls her The Child) held the tiara, put it on my head, and hugged me and told me it looked wonderful. I had never met her before but she was so welcoming and she looked so thrilled to give it to me I nearly teared up right there. During my speech, I managed to a) remind people that we were all winners simply by the fact that through our nominations, we’re all entered into SF history, and nothing ever changes that, b) swear on stage, by quoting Grand Master Connie Willis’s advice not to say “OH SHIT” when you lose, and c) remember to thank my family, mentors, the fans, and my listeners. Sadly, I forgot to thank my editors, namely Jeff VanderMeer, who gave me my first pro sale, and Devi Pillai, my editor at Orbit, who was texting me furiously after the ceremonies to come to the bar and get my champagne.

I meant what I said, that Zen, Stina, Max, and Chuck will be forces to watch in the next several decades. I can’t wait to see what else TEAM TIARA comes up with.

I was quite happy with the Hugo awards, including the podcast Writing Excuses for Best Related Work, never-won-a-Hugo-in-decades-of-writing Pat Cadigan for novella, and John Scalzi’s Redshirts for novel. I was super super proud of my friends Patrick Hester (ISBW producer, winning with the staff of SF Signal for fanzine) and Kate Baker (Clarkesworld podcaster, winning semi-pro zine) winning Hugos. I was so happy to see John Scalzi win for Redshirts, for two reasons: 1) the book moved me in many ways- it was a funny romp for the first part, and then the three codas moved me and made me think a lot. and 2) Funny books winning the Hugo is a Good Sign (TM) for my career. The full list of winners is here.

The awards were covered by the New York Times, shockingly enough, and they mentioned me. Whoa.

At the photos after, John Scalzi whacked me in the face with his Hugo, but it was an accident and didn’t leave a mark. Got a good story, anyway. Those things are heavy.

Devi bought a lot more champagne for me than was needed, I think they were on their third bottle when I finally got to the bar. I didn’t drink that much (I know, SHOCKING) but I think i was on an adrenaline high most of the night.

The night was magical, and so so wonderful. Orbit bought a ton of champagne. I hung out with my Stonecoast friends. I was congratulated by the likes of Gail Carriger, Carrie Vaughn, Harry Turtledove, John Scalzi, and Patrick Neilsen Hayden (among many others.) And my sweetie was by my side the whole time, taking pics, giving hugs, and just in general being the best husband in the world.

Since then I’ve gotten tweets, FB messages, and emails that have made me cry with the sentiments involved. This is an overwhelming and amazing time. Paolo Bacigalupi told me that I have to take a few days to enjoy this before delving back into the pits if self loathing. I will do my best.

More pictures!

 

 

Podcasts, Projects

ISBW #306 – Huge Feedback Show #2

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:09 — 40.0MB)

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Catching up on feedback! Show notes below.

Watch Twitter – @mightymur – if you want to do a meetup at WorldCon! Once I get a lay of the land, I’ll set something up.

Personal

What to do if you need help

We talk on the show about depression and other mental illnesses that damage your health, life, and your writing quality and productivity. I encourage everyone to get help if you think you need it, but I am painfully aware that I’m very lucky that I have health insurance that pays for my doctor and my antidepressants. What do you do if you don’t have that?

Lifehacker recently had a list of how to find someone to talk to when you can’t afford a therapist, and I thought it was so useful that I wanted to guide people there. Please, if you need help, it’s there if you can look for it.