Nerdcon: Stories, On the importance of stories

My dad was a storyteller. I wouldn't call him a raconteur because he hated speaking to more than one person at a time, but my God could he spin a yarn. If you took a sample of my dad and examined them under a microscope, I suspect that you'd see cells sitting around telling each other stories. More than anyone I've ever known, he was made of words.

This fact made it strangely easy to put my thoughts about losing him into words. I spoke at the funeral and wrote elaborate notes to thank those who helped mom and supported us as we mourned. I couldn't begin to do that in the wake of mom's death. Partly, I think this was because it was so sudden and unexpected compared to his long fight against cancer. But for the most part, it's because stories were dad's lifeblood but mom was a creature of pure feelings.

Nevertheless, I was adrift after my dad died. I didn't stop telling stories, but they changed in ways that were perceptible to me and I was a long time coming to terms with it. I was uncomfortable with this new facet of my life and how it was manifesting in the tales I wanted to tell and how I was telling them.

What does this have to do with Nerdcon: Stories?

If you've read the acknowledgements page of Howard Carter Saves the world, you'll have seen this:

John & Hank Green don’t know it, but they and the Nerdfighters helped me through a dark time. Their efforts to encourage peace and empathy in the world and to form a support community for those who are not chosen first, kids who are mocked, scared, or live in fear of themselves are laudable and should be supported. In recognition, a portion of the author’s proceeds* from this novel will be donated to their Foundation to Decrease Worldsuck. Learn more about how you too can support their efforts at fightworldsuck.org and projectforawesome.com. Don’t forget to be awesome.

When I wrote that, I had no intention of really explaining it. But events have changed around me. Of course, the death of my father was the dark time I was talking about, but I'm not sure I can fully explain the way that John and Hank helped me through it.

Being somewhat attuned to the memetic culture of the web, I'd been aware of the Vlogbrothers pretty much since they started, but only as a peripheral thing.

As a former YA bookseller, I had a lingering professional interest in John Green as the author of Looking for Alaska but I can't say honestly that I spent much time digging into the philosophical basis of his work. When my dad died, that changed and Green's message of empathy and imagining the complex lives of others suddenly sank in. The idea of telling stories as a means rather than an ends wasn't groundbreaking, but it was amazing to watch someone doing it, live on the internet.

And thus the method and mode of my storytelling changed again.

That's a profound effect to have in someone's life. Because I am a storyteller like my father before me. If you examined me under a microscope, you'd find my cells drinking coffee and trying to top one another with a funnier story. To inject a new and serious note into that conversation was shocking for me.

And over the course of their rambling conversations recorded on their YouTube channel, I was progressively, night by night, rattled me out of the funk and began charting a new course. Which led to Howard Carter.

And because I support their larger charitable mission, it's a profound effect that inspired a likeminded effort on my part.

As previously noted, Howard Carter is a very silly but pointed anti-cynical manifesto. It's about optimism, yes, but it's also about doing the hard thing. It's about trusting one generation to strive to do better than those who stood in their places the last time. It's about not shoving our duties onto the next poor sap to come along. And succeed or fail, it's about the subtle heroism of making the right choice in the face of rampant cynicism that all is for naught.

It's about planting a flag somewhere and defiantly insisting that we are not, in fact, doomed to repeat the mistakes of the previous cycle of humanity.

Whether I succeeded or not, that's where I've been. And some of you have come along for the ride.

On Thursday, I will fly to Minneapolis to attend the first ever Nerdcon: Stories. Put on by the crew that Hank Green assembled to create VidCon, the YouTube creator's conference, Nedcon is a conference/convention that's about the power of storytelling and the important nature of the stories we tell about ourselves to ourselves.

Some exciting Big Names will be there, but I'm not going to meet the big names or even John and Hank. I'm going to support the mission as a volunteer and participant at the conference. Because more importantly, our stories will be there and I will be among these storytellers assembling on the Minnesota plains to discuss how stories make us human and how we can do it better.

So I'll be spending the week swimming in words and maybe I will return with a few in my teeth, reliable old dog that I am.

Have a good week, friends.

Scott
---------

*By the way, for the first year of publication, that percentage is half, but that's another post.

How I spent my summer vacation... and why I never came back

On July 3rd, my birthday, I hung up from a phone call with my mother in Missouri. She was in the hospital recovering from a surgery that had gone well. The surgery had been unexpected, cancer had been detected only the day before and was understandably a little weepy. She had reminisced about the day 42 years previous when she had held her baby son and now I was two thousand miles away and she didn't even have a teddy bear to hold on my birthday.

She told me she loved me. I told her her the same. After a lifetime as the difficult child, we had long ago come to terms with ourselves and each other and had developed a great, warm, relationship. 

I already had a plane ticket to depart for home a week later. I'd be there to take care of her as she convalesced and for a bit after. I even went out and bought her a teddy bear to take with me.

For the past few years and especially since my dad died, I've made a point of getting home at least once a year. A previously-planned trip home that was originally going to involve wandering the streets of my hometown with a video camera to show you, my loyal readers, the town that filtered through my subconscious to became Howard Carter's Sedville.

I had a plan, you see.

As John Lennon said, life is what happens while you're making other plans. Because life -- even your life -- is not really about you.

It was the last coherent conversation I ever had with my mother.

A text from my sister alerted me that something had gone wrong. Stand by. She's had a brain aneurysm. She's being put on a helicopter and flown to Saint Louis. Get on a plane. Now.

Those were the longest days of my life, full of hurry up and stand still. Airports. Hospitals. Waiting rooms. Intensive Care. Moments of lucidity when she told us she was afraid. Told us she loved us. Asked us to sing hymns for her. Hugs from nurses. Terrifying medical procedures undertaken by increasingly desperate-sounding physicians in one of America's finest centers for neurological trauma. Moments of exhausted unconsciousness in waiting room chairs that could only charitably be called sleep.

In the early morning of July 11th, we lost our battle to keep her with us. 

The doctors and nurses wept with us at her bedside. 

She was that kind of lady.

Her last words to me were "I love you."

She was that kind of lady.

After that, it was opening safe deposit boxes, bizarre meetings with lawyers and funeral homes and florists, choosing from the many who offered to be pallbearers, talking to ministers and local dignitaries, and realizing as the well wishes and casseroles came in just how big the ripples were from my mother's death.

And I haven't felt much like writing since.

There are so many things I'd planned to do with her. So many somedays that I thought were ahead, and the crushing fact of the matter is: today is always someday.

So, I'm back or will be, as I slowly and carefully walk through the shut-off wing of my mind where the writing comes from, turning on the lights, taking the dustcovers off the furniture, and fishing around in the couch cushions for the lost thoughts and dreams that I let fall when the call came in.

Just because life is what happens while we're making other plans doesn't mean we stop making plans; it means we realize that today is the someday we were looking for and everything we put off until now has come due.

Scott

My mother, my sister, and I discussing a Thanksgiving turkey. I love this photo.

Toilet Squirrels, inspired by true events

There once was a guy in a little blue car. It was a sunny morning and he had a winding road, the wind in his hair, and a full cup of coffee. Life was good and he was happy...

Wait, I can't start there; that's the beginning of the story. No one starts at the beginning of the story anymore. Not since the ancient Greeks did away with that sort of thing.[1] This is a modern story of terror, of the harsh realism of modern life and the fragile underpinnings that anchor our society. It’s a tale of grief and woe and it should begin at the darkest moment, preferably during the high point of the action.

We'll start again.

There once was a goblin named Thistlepin who loved his job just a bit too much.

Yes, a goblin, shut up.

On this particular day, this particular goblin was bored. It was a slow day and not much was happening at Fate.com and like all bored creatures since the invention of the internet, Thistlepin was taking selfies and posting them on Instagram. 

That’s when the red light on its console began to flash.

FLASH FATE TRANSMISSION MESSAGE BEGINS>>>>  > Instagram user ‘swalkerperkins’ has ceased posting pictures of > cats and food and dared to post a selfie in his little car.
> Has declared unapproved moment of contentment.
> > Did not knock on wood or suitable substitute.
> > Take appropriate action.
> >  
<<<<END MESSAGE

Thistlepin chortled a gobliny chortle[2] and opened a window on its browser.

There was swalkerperkins, mugging for the camera. He had a shaggy beard and hipster glasses. He looked the sort who would tempt Fate. The sunroof of his little car was open and a blown-out sky beyond the open roof betokened a sunny day and little skill at cell phone photography.

          In the twenty-first century, physical manifestations of psychic phenomena don’t get a lot of respect. Every day in the modern world, Death was cheated, Time wasted, War averted, Nature tamed, and Fate tempted. Only Fate, though, had the goblins to get hers back.

Thistlepin was one of her best.

He was the cleverest, the most devious, and the most devoted to punishing those who tempted Fate’s wrath. Death, Time, War, and the rest were constantly trying to hire him away with promises of salary and all the garbage he could eat, but Thistlepin was a company goblin and Fate made sure her star player wanted for nothing.

Thistlepin called up the poor sap’s dossier. A week previously, the guy had posted another in a series of too-long blog posts about how deplorable it was that the world had forgotten how to dream optimistic dreams. He liked the movie Tomorrowland. His favorite song from The Who was Boris the Spider. His house was painted yellow. The car with the open sunroof was a blue Mini Cooper named Sweetie.

Seriously.

The guy was practically begging for it.

The goblin pondered the smug mug and carefully cracked each of the thirty-six knobbily green knuckles as it planned a diabolical plan. Finally, the cracked black lips drew back to reveal a rictus grin. This would require a comeuppance of unparalleled uppance.

Thistlepin fished the chain around its neck out of the front of his dirty white tee shirt and inserted it in a keyhole on the console that hadn’t been used in so long that it squealed as the knotty green hand forced the key to turn.

Lights lit, klaxons wailed, wood knocked, and on Earth a squirrel crawled into the exhaust pipe on the roof of a small yellow house on an island somewhere off the coast of Washington state.

---

Scott was depressingly good at what computer programmers and science fiction authors call pattern recognition. When a picture of numbers crawled across his social media newsfeed challenging him to spot the 6 among the 8’s, he never reposted because it felt too simple a puzzle. He grew up on a steady diet of Highlights puzzles and Sesame Street rhymes about one thing being nothing like the others. He excelled at find-a-word puzzles and the spot-the-difference pictures on the back page of the Sunday comics.

When he opened the toilet lit, he wanted his brain to refuse to accept a shape that was quite clearly a squirrel but his brain wasn’t having any of it. His brain didn’t reject patterns it found familiar no matter how much he begged it to.

Maybe someone forgot to flush the toilet.

Squirrel.

Turd. Obviously.

It's a squirrel.

Over time water and waste can sculpt strange shapes.

Including a bushy tail?

Look, it’s brown!

With a reddish chest and tiny paws?

Maybe someone needs to see a doctor?

You do if you think that’s anything other than a squirrel.

Well, at least it’s dead.

He’d lost track of which voice was which.

Scott mentally redacted every expletive he could think of.

He lowered the lid and walked out of the room.

“Honey!”

From the kitchen came a muffled answer that sounded like “What?”

“Why is there a squirrel in the toilet?”

Silence.

Footsteps.

His wife’s hands are at her side. The look on her face is not a good one.

“What?”

“There’s a squirrel,” he said. “In the toilet.”

She went and checked. Because this is apparently a story that people tell. A joke. A jape. A prank. Some sort of… squirrel.

His brain gave up making excuses. There was a dead squirrel in his toilet.

“You are taking care of that,” she said. “And can I say how glad I am that I’m not the one who found it?”

“Right.” 

Because even in enlightened 21^st century households, there are boy jobs and there are girl jobs. Either that, or as an MBA candidate, his wife had taken on the lessons about delegating jobs to fit candidates to guide their professional growth.

Besides, she wasn’t the one who tempted Fate.

He thought he heard a gobliny cackle.

His wife went into the library and he went to the bedroom to change. What do you wear to fish a squirrel out of a toilet? Not work clothes, certainly.

He put on canvas dungarees and an old teeshirt and wandered into the library to find his wife on the computer with the Google open on the screen. The internet was singularly unhelpful.

The normally reliable “Straight Dope” forum was already there with the aspiring stylings of the North American Itinerant Internet Humorist. A user named Polycarp summoned this gem from the back row of a high school physics classroom:

“It's Schrödinger's Squirrel. At all times and places, there is an infinitesimally small but non-zero chance that a macroscopic object such as a squirrel will coalesce out of zero-point enerhy. You drew the short straw.  Just be glad it wasn't a moose.”                            “Polycarp” (Guest user) Straight Dope Message Boards

How Did a Squirrel Get In My Toilet? (discussion thread)

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=559221

Accessed 9 June 2015, 9:25 pm

When he wasn’t tempting Fate, Scott was a science fiction author of a strange bent and that explanation pleased him on some perverse level even as it lit up some hitherto unnoticed dark corners of his imagination.

“Terrific,” Scott thought. “Now I have to worry about a toilet moose.”

That’s what he thought.

To himself.

No man gets credit for speaking that kind of thing out loud, and he’d been married long enough to know that. His outside voice said “Do they say how to get it out of the toilet?”

She checked again.

“No.” She paused. “Gloves?”

“I am not touching that thing.”

“Tongs?”

“Maybe the fireplace set has tongs…”

Scott tried to banish the fact that his world had expanded to include toilet mammals as a genus/species combo as he lined an orange Home Depot bucket with trash bags. The log lifter tongs made short work of the tiny furry corpse and he flushed the toilet.

Thistlepin whispered in his wife’s ear and she came running into the room to deliver the coup de grace.

“Oh my God, you didn’t flush it did you?”

“No,” he said. “No, I’m not that crazy.”

He tied a knot in the sack and headed outside.

“Dinner’s cancelled. Eat whatever you want; I don’t think I’m going to feel up to food tonight.”

As he headed outside, dead toilet squirrel in hand, he chanted quietly to himself over and over, It could have been worse, at least it wasn’t a moose.

---

[1] Not since the Greeks invented the "cold open" for their iconic dramas featuring the recurring hero Ἰάκωβος πέδη.  This innovation allowed them to show the hero smashing the Kakos syndicate before they went to the bother of showing him meeting their leader, cheating at baccarat, or wooing his bride. They also invented the little known speculatori ex machine but the Romans stole it and claimed it as their own. Bloody Romans.

[2] The goblin was required to chortle. It was in the handbook. A good gobliny chortle was a prerequisite for Fatework.

National Grilled Cheese Day (Now with Giant Robots!)

My novel is coming out on Tuesday, there are a thousand words of a new novel sitting on my laptop waiting for me to get back to them, and the science fiction world is embroiled in a kerfuffle about the Hugo award. The impending debut of Howard Carter fills me with a certain gut level of anxiety that I've never encountered before, my work in progress is a bit 'in the weeds' at the moment, and the Hugo imbroglio just saddens me.

It's also National Grilled Cheese Day, so let's talk about that instead.

Grilled cheese sandwiches weren't a Thing in our house growing up, so I don't have nostalgic warm fuzzies attached to the idea of the thing. I'm not sure why, but mom just didn't feed us cheese sandwiches for some reason. But I have a deep and abiding, possibly genetic, yen for things involving cheese, so it was the first thing I ever learned to make on my own without help.

Two slices of wheat bread, margarine, and pre-wrapped sandwich slices of American cheese*. Heat control when cooking is learned behavior and I burned the crap out of the first three or four that I made without ever getting the filling to melt. I ate them anyway because we didn't waste food in my family.

By the fifth sandwich, I'd sussed out that "Back end of a Mercury Rocket" was not the correct setting for the stove if I wanted something edible to come out of the skillet and I was off and running on my first culinary adventure. Eventually I also worked out how to handle a sandwich that's been buttered on the outside pre-cooking.

I've since learned a thing or two about what does and does not count as 'cheese' and tested my wits against various cooking implements that were intended to deliver prime sandwiching to the huddled masses yearning to eat cheese. My favorite is the panini press, but I don't have room for one on the counter in our small kitchen, so I stick with the cast iron skillet by preference.

The best grilled cheese sandwich I've ever had was at Beecher's Cheese in Seattle, which is where that photo above was taken. That is the moment of bliss, caught with the lens of my wife's smartphone. Their mac & cheese is God's gift to humanity, by the way, but National Mac & Cheese Day isn't until July** so that's another post.

Though maybe we should contemplate how many National ________ Day's one country really needs to have.  I don't know who comes up with this stuff, but if it gives me a ceremonial excuse to eat cheese, I'm down with it.

Oh, and Howard Carter Saves the World is coming out on Tuesday, so I declare April 14th to be National Giant Robots Day! Don't miss out on the giant robot event of the year. If you have a Kindle (or the free Kindle app) you can pre-order from Amazon now: http://tinyurl.com/HowardCarterSavesWorld or it will be available on Nook, Kobo, and other formats soon. (Amazon just makes it so easy to upload and do presales on eBooks.)

Now if you'll excuse me, there's a block of Beecher's cheese and a loaf of bread in the kitchen with my name on it.

* Which may or may not have actually contained any measurable amounts of actual cheese.
** Yes, really, July 14th apparently.

Top Gear, The Italian Job, and My Strange Relationship with Sports and Cars (Redux)

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking about my dad's love affair with the automobile, and I indicated that I didn't get it. That it didn't rub off on me. I just didn't "get" the whole car thing... and that was a bit of a fib. For my readers from outside the United States, that must've seemed a bit disingenuous since as everyone knows, American doctors, by law, inject petroleum and galvanized rubber into the base of your skull at the moment of your birth. Probably some grass from a baseball infield as well.

America is a curious cocktail.

This is my Mini Cooper. There are many like it, but this one is mine

The truth is, growing up where and when and how I did, it would've been a bit impossible not to come away with some slightly perplexing affection for anything with four tires and a steering wheel. It's as ingrained in our culture as questionable sausages and baseball games. So it's a lie to say that I don't have any appreciation for things automotive. But I feel much the same way about the automobile as I do about baseball: I love the mystique of the thing, the history and the pageantry, and the mythology. I even love playing the game, but for most of my life, I would've told you I'd rather be shot at dawn than watch it from the sidelines.*

Driving, like baseball, is something best experienced from the field of play. Anything else bored me silly.

So when I said I don't "get" cars, what I really don't get is the love affair with watching from the bleachers. Memorizing statistics and reading about the new players for the coming season, and following and vigorously defending a favorite team despite their shortcomings... that's what I will never quite understand. But it is nevertheless in my blood, and even if it didn't come in a syringe in the birthing room, it did get there when I was too young to understand what was happening.  If I implied that the sight of a Corvette Stingray or a '57 Chevy doesn't get my heart racing a little in much the same way as watching a baseball sail over the outfield wall, that was a fib.  I may not know much about the players or the game, but I know when something exciting is happening and I can enjoy the shared excitement of a world of people who are recognizing it with me.

So it goes.

I watched the Italian Job (the original one, mind you) with my dad back at an age when my mom would probably have rather I was watching Nickelodeon. I also watched Smokey & the Bandit and Cannonball Run at a similarly premature age and got away with it because they were "Car Movies" and that somehow made it okay. I didn't really come away from Smokey & the Bandit with an affection for the Trans Am (I was more entranced by the "Big Rigs" if I'm honest) or from Cannonball Run with any real affection for Ferrari.

Though, I did come away from them with a weird respect for Jackie Gleason and Dom Deluise... probably the outcome my mom was most worried about.

The original, official "Italian Job" Mini
(Car shown actual size.)

The same cannot be said for the Italian Job. Partly because I was too young to really understand the movie, (and I could barely understand Michael Caine anyway) what I came away from with that movie is a deep affection for the tiny cars they used to pull off the job: I was hooked on the original Austin Mini. I can't speak for my sister. I'm not sure if this played into her yen for the car, or if she just got in the driver's seat of one of the BMW-built revivals and just flat-out fell in love with it. It's an easy thing to do; God knows it happened to me a couple of weeks ago.

Which brings us back to my weird arms-length affection for automobiles.

For a long time, I've been a quiet fan of the show Top Gear, which is ostensibly about cars, except not really. It is and for a long time has been a show about the hosts being cartoonishly goofy. And it's becoming more of a cartoon with every passing season until cars are less and less the core of the show and more and more a vehicle (cough) for slapstick hijinks.

That's all fine as far as it goes, but when I was car shopping, what I wanted was honest advice about cars. I went to Netfllix and watched a few episodes of Top Gear that were tangentially related to the FIAT 500 and the MINI Cooper (we test drove both) but didn't find much there to illuminate my quest for information. Host James May raced some kids on bicycles through an Eastern European city in a FIAT and Richard Hammond tore up the track in a MINI Cooper S. Jeremy Clarkson came ashore with a Royal Marine landing party in a Ford Focus and then was chased around a shopping mall by "baddies in a black Corvette."  None of which really gave me much information pertinent for making a decision about buying one.

The guys did mount rockets on a MINI and send it over a ski jump, which is fun if not really enlightening.  Ditto their "review" of the Ford Focus, and just about everything else they've ever touched. Like I said, it's a cartoon.

Being enlightening about cars is not really what that show is for.  For that, you have to turn to the Internet, and there I found information in abundance. I was put in mind of Neil Gaiman's quip about drinking from a fire hose. Consumer Reports is dry and businesslike and will put you to sleep. I was bored to tears, to be honest, until I stumbled across a different group of British car buffs who are doing what Top Gear used to do, and quite frankly, doing it better than Clarkson's boys ever did. They talk about cars.

This is their review of the 2015 Mini.


XCAR is affiliated with the website CNET, owned by CBS Interactive, and they are simply brilliant at what they do. Their review of the 2015 MINI didn't sell me on the car (we bought a 2013 anyway) but their defense of the new MINI against the naysayers who whine that it isn't the old Mini did sell me on their show. It was rational. It was rooted in the mythos of the brand and the reality of bringing it into the litigious and safety-conscious 21st century.

I know what you're thinking and let's be honest, that picture up there of me holding the Mini Cooper HotWheel is not far from the truth. I was standing next to one yesterday at a dealership and I swear I could've smuggled it out of there in my pocket. The original minis were... well... mini. They were surprisingly roomy because of their peculiar geometry, but I'm 6' 2", a height which is complicated by the fact that an unusual percentage of it is in my torso. I'm actually a bit taller sitting down, if you'd believe it, and that makes for a frustrating time with cars. All cars, not just miniature ones. This is part of the reason I've always favored trucks and SUV's, but we live in a time when cars are getting smaller and at the same time it's becoming more and more ethically problematic for me to keep chugging along in the largest thing I can get my hands on just to get through a commute without a crick in my neck. My wife is 5' 4" and we share cars, carpooling to work every day, so that further complicates the issue. There's no "Her car/My car" dichotomy, everything is "Our Car" and that's how we like it.

After driving everything from Mini to Camry, it turned out that the best fit for my peculiar geometry was, in fact the Mini. It was also the most economical, strangely enough. You could've knocked me over with a feather.  And my sister was right, it's astonishingly fun to drive.

But back to watching cars on TV... er... Youtube (like there's that much difference these days).

As I allowed the XCAR playlist to unfurl in front of me, I felt my longstanding antipathy for appreciating cars from the sidelines eroding with each passing moment. By the time I got to this video of one of the hosts enthusiastically playing with the Morgan Three-wheeler, I was a goner.


Seriously, how can you not love that?

I was watching car videos, enjoying vicariously cars I'd never own, some cars I've never even heard of. Not a cartoon masquerading as a car show, mind you, but a proper car show. I almost wished I'd kept all my dad's car books... kept them where, I don't know, as there's no room in the library, but I had this strange yearning to read about a bunch of cars I'd never own.

And lest you think my appreciations are limited to the far side of the Atlantic, this is an excellent summary of the mystique of the Corvette that my dad always tried and failed to impart to me.

So there you have it. I went right out and changed the alternator in my Toyota. Grease under my fingernails, barked knuckles... I even received an invite to a local racing club.

Heck, I might even watch a Mariner's game...

...

...

Well, let's not get too crazy.

~ Scott


*Americans who moan about how boring soccer/futbol is should check themselves because our "national pastime" is a game with no time limits and often hours-long stretches during which NOTHING HAPPENS (follow that link, it'll make you cry). I'm going to get in trouble for saying this and I truly have a deep affection for baseball I can't honestly explain. It defies logic. Soccer is the rest of the world's baseball and frankly, they're the better for it because at least in futbol, something's always happening.

More random thoughts on writer's block and giant robots...

Did you realize that it's possible to have writer's block in one area of your writing life but not another? I didn't either. In fact, I've (over)confidently stated before that I don't even believe in writer's block. And in terms of this impenetrable wall that makes writers drink, that's still true. But my brain does enjoy a sort of line-item veto sometimes that nullifies specific projects that it feels have gone a bit stale. For instance, until recently I found myself uninterested in blogging and unable to come up with anything I was willing to put on paper relevant to the things I was watching crawl past on my Facebook and Twitter timelines.

Maybe I was a little afraid that I've already said all I have to say about the processes of writing fiction. I'm not generally interested in repeating myself.  Even if I had been interested in posting long reflections on the matters that matter most to me, I've already delved as deeply as I think I should into gender politics and sexism in nerd culture, I've ground my ax on matters of book banning, Amazon's antics, and the slow-motion murder of bookselling.

Those are stories I've told so many times I wonder if anyone cares to hear them one more time. There's a thin line between blogging and boorishness. If I can't find something fresh to say, I tend not to say anything. So I ignored the modern world and worked on teaching myself shoemaking instead.  That was new. That, I had no trouble writing about.

I saw someone at a writer's conference awhile back who was wearing a tee shirt that claimed "Writer's block is when your imaginary friends refuse to talk to you."  That's clever, but it's not how it works for me. For me, the problem isn't my imaginary friends giving me the silent treatment, it's when I've heard all their stories before. It's like being at a dinner party with long-time friends & realizing you've all heard each other's stories already.

With real life friends, this leads to in-jokes and companionable silences. In fiction, it leads to stagnation.  And when what you write is already difficult to sell because it's a bit zany, you're already on your back foot. As hard as zany and original might be to sell, zany and stagnant is something no one wants to read, much less buy.

For my money, writer's block is more like hand-written social awkwardness than it is anything else and there's only one cure for the "All the stories have been told" syndrome: Go out and get some new stories.

Or to put it in Howard Carter terms: When the old robots rust, go out and build some new robots. Bigger ones. Better ones. It's hard to save the world without them.

If I'm telling the truth, one of the things that scared me about Howard Carter Saves the World was how quickly it came out of me. If someone was willing to pay me to do so, I'd happily tell those stories for the rest of my life. It's a type of story that allows me to posit a scenario and then completely let go the reins and give the story its head. In a world that madcap, I can follow the story wherever it leads and not be worried I wouldn't have something to say no matter when it went.

And I'm not saying that in case any of the publishers or agents currently entertaining then notion of picking up that book will be convinced by my sincerity. I just enjoyed the heck out of writing it, as you might recall if you were around when I was posting fresh chapters three times a week.

It's a popular conceit that writing is socially-acceptable schizophrenia (I think that quote belonged to EL Doctorow, but don't hold me to that) which gives rise to my compatriot's tee shirt.  Not that the tee shirt or Doctorow are necessarily wrong. I myself have noted that if your inner voices tell you to do stuff, you're crazy, but if the voices just tell you stories and make you write them down, you're a writer.

The trick isn't getting the voices to talk to you. The trick is getting them to tell you stories that someone else will want to hear, stories that you and everyone around haven't already heard a thousand times before.

But then, that's always been the trick, hasn't it?

~ Scott

----
This blog post was, in part, inspired by this TED talk given by Sting...

Four Things

1. Car shopping still kinda sucks; buying a house was less annoying.
2. I finally got that car-related frisson I was talking about.
3. My sister was right about everything.
4. Does anyone know how they got off the cliff at the end of The Italian Job? I'm asking for a friend...

Running on borrowed nostalgia...

This is about cars. I am not a car guy per se, though I do enjoy an episode of Top Gear now and then.

My dad was a car guy. Sorry, I should say my dad was a Car Guy. He collected books on the history of cars, he collected model cars, he took pictures of every interesting car he ever saw (often from multiple angles) and kept binders of these photos to refer back to. He could rattle off specs and production dates and designers and engine sizes like other kids' dads could rattle off baseball statistics. He could tell model years apart by the shape of their taillights and tell you what someone got wrong on a restoration. He wasn't a gearhead, mind you, he couldn't repair one if his life depended on it, but my God, did he love the automobile. For him it was about aesthetics and culture, a trip through an art museum held less for him than a walk through a car show. And oh my, did he take me to car shows.

Not just old cars either, dad loved cars, period. Every year when the new models came out, he would send me into the showrooms of the local dealerships while he waited out in the car to collect the new pamphlets for the coming models of Ford, Dodge, and Chevy and Toyota and whatever else came through town. More than that, I sat beside him more than once while he dickered with car salesmen just for the fun of it over some car he had no intention of buying.

My dad's Karmann Ghia looked exactly like this one, except

it was brown. Even I can see what he saw in it, I think...
Source: Wikimedia Commons

 Personally, I'd rather have a voluntary root canal than go through the process of picking out and purchasing a car.  It would be cheaper for one thing...

In case you ever wondered why I don't write much about the cars my characters drive, this would be it.

Amusingly (to me at least) it wasn't me, but my sister who finally caught the car bug from dad.  But I'll get back to her in a minute, because how she caught the bug is important to this story.

My first car was a 1985 Nissan 4x4 pickup. I was 16. It was chocolate brown with a gold-fleck in the paint and a roll bar bolted in the back. It was awesome. I was proud of it as any 16 year old would be. And I crashed it in the middle of a Valentines Day ice storm a week after we bought it and dad was livid, as you might imagine, but we got it fixed and back on the road and I drove it all through high school.  Most of the vehicles I've owned since have been small pickups by Nissan or Toyota, but never was quite as much fun or saw quite as much mud and gravel roads as that one. Partly because I moved to a series of decent-sized cities, and partly because I got it out of my system early.

That truck was fun, but it wasn't ethereal. Even when I was jouncing down a rutted path or bogging through a muddy field or driving a freshly-waxed and vacuumed version of that same pickup with a pretty girl in the passenger seat on a date... even in those moments, I never had that "It doesn't get better than this, I AM IN LOVE WITH THIS CAR" moment.

My sister's Mini looked not very much like this one, but 

isn't it cool?  She probably felt like she was pulling the
Italian Job every day on the way to work...
Source: Wikimedia Commons

My dad would speak wistfully of his favorite car, the one in which he fell in love with the automobile. He had a scrapbook's worth of pictures of it, naturally: It was a brown convertible Karmann Ghia that his dad bought for him at an auction. Karmann Ghia, I was informed, was an Italian-designed sports car maker, who basically built a roadster on a Volkswagen Beetle chassis. It was oddly beautiful, with rounded fenders and swooping lines of the sort you just don't see anymore. It was just the thing for bombing down the winding back roads of rural Missouri.

Then, as the story goes, he woke up one morning and his dad had traded it for a tractor (I told you we were from rural Missouri). Dream over. Move along. Nothing to see. Chores to do. Carry on. But his feelings about that car were so strong that I still feel a whiff of borrowed nostalgia every time I see one.

But I've never felt that. Not firsthand. Not ever. Today, I was talking about cars with my sister because our old Nissan is about to give up the ghost and we need something more fuel efficient and earth friendly, when she told me she'd felt it when she got in her 2004 Mini Cooper for the first time. Which gives me hope that some day, a car might be something other than a means of conveyance from point A to point B.

But I won't hold my breath.

In the mean time, I have a root canal to schedule... er... I mean I need to find a car that won't fall apart half way to work in the morning.

This is the definition of "First World Problems", I guess.  Ah well, maybe I'll spot an old Karmann Ghia at the back of the car lot and get a whiff of my old man's nostalgia once again. Might tide me over through the interminable cultural dance that is car purchasing in America...

The perils of non-fiction...

For some reason, I find that non-fiction is harder to write about than fiction.

At this point in my writing life, it's strange and exciting to be doing something entirely new. To slake my appetite for words with some new flavor and test my tools on new materials.

My apologies for not posting more often. If you are following my non-fiction project blog "School of the Renaissance Artisan" you'll know that I haven't died or gotten lost in the woods. It's just that I haven't as much experience writing nonfiction, so I don't feel authoritative enough to really give good tips or even talk about it much.

For one thing, the "characters" I'm writing about are real rather than figments of my imagination, so I must be more careful with them. And they certainly won't do as I tell them or go where I want them to go at the whim of making a good story. And I can't just write them out of the narrative if they're being recalcitrant.

I can see why memoirists have been so notoriously prone to making stuff up.

And then there's the constant distraction of my drug-of-choice: research.

I've written before, at length, about the dangers of too much research. Often it becomes an excuse for procrastinating the beginning of a project. One more book and I'll be ready. I must constantly fight the impulse to get so lost in the minutia of a project that I never actually get around to beginning it.

The internet is especially good at sucking me down the research rabbit hole, yet this project would be next to impossible without it. Though I honestly profess to a Luddite streak a mile wide and a preference for the thousands of physical printed books on the shelves around me, without my e-Reader and computer, I would not have access to many of the reserves of the great libraries of the world. The Internet Archive alone is a font of knowledge that just keeps flowing and refilling like the oil can in the Hanukkah story. The historical works of Roubo and Moxon would be out of reach without a lengthy trip to the libraries that still hold copies behind glass and subsequent negotiations with their caretakers for access.

Without this font of distraction that is the internet, I would not have access to the consistently generous of masters of their crafts Chris Schwartz and Peter Follansbee; I would never have met virtually with historical cordwainer Francis Classe; nor would I have had the unpublished pin research of Rachel Jardine drop unannounced into my email inbox.  The curator emeritus of the Museum of London's medieval collections would likely never have sent me a parcel of research books as he did electronically at the outset of this project.

Technology is, as ever, both angel and demon, giving with one hand as it takes with the other.

As strange as it sounds, the hardest part of this project has been to remember to write about it. As dangerous a drug as research can be, more perilous by far is the lure of Making Neat Things. And I did not anticipate the high I get from discussing Making Neat Things with other makers online and in person. It's akin to the feeling of stepping from the workaday world into a writer's conference and for the first time finding yourself surrounded by hundreds of people who live the best parts of their lives internally. The conversations are different, the kinship you feel with almost everyone you encounted is intoxicating... and if you're not careful you'll spend so much time talking you forget to do.

As I and other writers have often said: writers aren't writers unless they write something. The same can be said of makers and any other of hundreds of trades such as these.

So I have been making a concerted effort to do more than I talk, which is sort of against the blogging aesthetic. Hence my lengthy absences for which I apologize.

Now if you will kindly excuse me, the sun is out and I've some doing to do.

~ Scott

The School of the Renaissance Artisan is a yearlong project to unlock the histories of the renaissance craft guilds and reunite the author with his craftsmen heritage. One man, 54 Livery Companies, 111 trades, 52 weeks. Join the fun at http://renaissanceartisan.blogspot.com/

Nerd World Order: We Won... Now What?

I don't know if I will post this, but I had to write it for the same reason that I write anything: because things build up in my head and I can't do anything else until I've let them out. It's how I cope with a world that often befuddles me.

Close your eyes and picture a nerd in your head. Seriously. Close your eyes and think about "Nerds" for a minute.  Summon a mental image that embodies the essence of Nerd Kind.

Got it?

What was your mental image?  Did you picture Bill Gates? The guys from Big Bang Theory? Or maybe Anthony Daniels from Revenge of the Nerds? Awkward, brainy-but-socially-stunted men with questionable hygiene and tape on his glasses suffering under the knuckles of the school jocks...

Me, basically?

Congratulations if you imagined Felicia Day. You are ahead of the curve if you did. When I was a kid, nerds and geeks were synonymous, and they did not as a general rule look like Felicia Day (at least none of the ones I knew did) but we'll get back to Ms. Day in a minute.

When I close my eyes and picture a nerd, I picture myself.  At around the age of 12 or 13, usually, but any age will do. Bespectacled, awkward, desperate to fit in. Talking to my peers with the ineptitude of a foreigner speaking a language with which he is only passingly familiar, always a page behind in the guidebook and wearing the local garb like it's a Halloween costume.

This is going to sound dark, and it was. And it might not jive with the stories I usually tell of a childhood out of an Archie comic if it had been ghostwritten by Ray Bradbury. Those stories are true and so is this: No true story is entirely light or entirely dark. It's mostly a matter of what bits you choose to leave out.  Humor, as is often the case, has been a defense mechanism of mine for as long as I can remember.

I was a nerd before anyone thought it was okay. I was tormented and sometimes quite literally tortured by bullies under the uncaring gaze of teachers -- mostly gym teachers. Once, after I had been bodily picked up and slammed down on a larger boy's knee as one might when trying to break a stick, cracking two of my ribs, the gym teacher who had watched it happen ordered me to get up out of the dirt and run laps for the sin of being an asthmatic wimp who would rather read a book than toss a football. I managed a quarter of a mile out of shear fear of punishment before saying "screw this" and stumbling off to the nurse's office without permission.

What I remember most is that I got in trouble and he did not.

That sort of thing happened over and over again. From the relatively innocent glasses getting stolen and thrown in a toilet to my head getting stomped or my testicles randomly punched. From early on, classmates singled me out as someone they could make cry if they were heartless enough. These memories are rife with adults standing by, ignoring what was happening, apparently under the impression that getting my ass kicked on a regular basis would build character.

I don't know if it built character. It might have made me stubborn or I might've been born that way. I do know that it built, deep in my heart of hearts, a deeply-embedded suspicion of authority. So congratulations for that.

I was told that if I just wouldn't cry, they would leave me alone. That turned out not to be true. I was told again and again to ignore them and they would stop. That wasn't true either. I ignored them so well that I developed the ability to become vacant -- to retreat so far inside myself that it was as if my body was a costume and I was simply pretending to be Scott. Which is a handy thing when the other kids view kicking you in the crotch as a hobby.

Being smart or talented didn't seem to matter once you walked out of the classroom and into the halls or onto the gym floor where might made right.

I was uncoordinated and I was (and remain) almost painfully thin. If I sit still for too long, the pressure on unprotected arteries will put my extremities to sleep. I have historically had very little meat on my bones or the ability to acquire it, much to the frustration of the same gym teachers that thought what I really needed was more laps, more weight lifting, more basketballs to the face.  More time to suck it up, wipe the blood off my face and get back to moving a ball from one end of a pointless expanse of grass to the other end of the same pointless expanse of grass.

If a foreign government did half of the things that happened to me to an American soldier, the United States would bomb them back to the stone age on principle.

My parents helped as much as they could. God bless them, they tried and I wasn't an easy child at the best of times. They were as understanding as two adults can be who have no idea what I was going through because I wouldn't tell them most of it. It wasn't fair to them, but I was a kid, what did I know of fair? Very little of my experience of life outside of the house was about what was fair.

Talking was too painful anyway. Far easier to escape to my room and bury myself in books -- escape into fantasy.

I spent nights and weekends in basements with like-minded friends, rolling dice and sending characters with more impressive attributes than my own down dark dungeon hallways.  I gravitated toward bards because what I really dreamt of wasn't strength, but charisma. I yearned not to punish the monsters that tormented me day in and day out, but to communicate with them. To somehow get across to them that I was human too.

Because I don't think most of them believed that I was.

What does this painful reminiscence have to do with anything?

It's to underline the fact that when I tell you I, by God, earned my nerd glasses and if anyone has the right to be a got-here-first, these-damn-kids-have-it-too-easy, nerdmudgeon, it's me.

But I can't.

I didn't endure all that only to force those who came after me to go through it too. That's insane.

While I was in the trenches, up to my ears in a fight against an enemy that had no idea they were losing, somewhere, out beyond the schoolyard, the heroes of nerd kind were inventing the personal computer, creating video games, piecing together the internet, and conquering the world on my behalf.

If it was a war, then we won.  Comics, computers, games, books... The things that got me beat up are the things that now define our culture. Our President is a nerd. There's a picture of him posing in the Oval Office with Nichelle Nichols, the lady that played Uhura in the original Star Trek. He's throwing the Vulcan salute which is the closest thing nerds have to a gang sign.

Nerds rule.

Literally.

Which brings us full circle. Now that we have the upper hand, will the Nerd World Order rule benevolently? Or is it time for us, in turn, to give as good as we got?  Are we to now become the closed clique against which the outsiders run headlong in hope of belonging?

Recently there was this piece at CNN.com by one Jon Peacock titled "Booth Babes Need Not Apply", which implies that we should go exactly that route. Peacock was apparently set off by the influx of girls pretending to be nerds so they can dress up and go to Comicon. You see, being a nerd is cool now so everyone wants a piece of the action. Pretty girls that were never seen in those dank basements are popping up at Comicon and other conventions dressed like Lara Croft and Catwoman and Princess Leia and "sexy insert noun here". Peacock implies that these pretenders can be discerned from the "real" nerd girls by dint of being too sexy. By making him feel uncomfortable and drawing attention away from the nerdiness of the event with their feminine wiles.

Peacock's rant struck me and many others as inherently sexist. It also resonated deeply with some part of me that I am ashamed to admit exists. The part of me that was snubbed by the pretty girls that saw me as sub-human.

They're too pretty to be real nerds. They never suffered like I did, how could they?

Even I found myself thinking that and I damn well know better.

My wife is, hands-down, one of the smartest people I've ever met and a mechanical engineer to boot. Told from an early age that she would never be good at math because she was a girl. She is also the prettiest girl I've ever met and a nerd at the same time. She hid her grades from her classmates so they wouldn't know she was the one who blew the curve in physics class and was told by fellow engineering students and professors alike that she didn't belong in engineering because of her looks and gender.

Those men who said those things were wrong; no one had more business being there than she did. Who were they to tell a brilliant, articulate woman what she could or could not accomplish because of her gender?

And who are we to do the same to any woman in any other sphere?

Did we all really suffer through the travails of growing up nerdy just to perpetuate that horror on the next generation? Are we truly going to demand that others endure that hellish existence before we let them play our particular reindeer games?

Or did we claw our way to the top of the societal heap so that no one else ever had to go through that again?   To win the right for everyone to pursue their interests and enthusiasms as suits their whims?

The truth is, we've created a world where everyone is a nerd, or can be if they put their minds to it. Felicia Day is a mogul of internet video, in the vangard of the new entertainment, built on the uber-nerdy and self-referential gamer comedy "The Guild".  Steampunk has rewritten fashion and film. The Maker movement is generating real inventions and real revenue for the creators.  Comic books are the film industry right now.

The 21st century is shaping up to be a time when formerly nerdy/geeky enthusiasms are pursued with furious abandon.  And while it's no utopia, it's a world where - as predicted by Herbert Gerjouy predicted  - the illiterate is not the one who cannot read, but the one who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

And if it's really a nerd world, then that makes all of us nerds. No glasses or pocket protector, or background as a bullied minority required.  We went through it so you wouldn't have to.

Sure, we're "the ones who are cool" but that means we get to define what that means this time. Playing 'we got here first and you're too late to play this game' is nothing but rank hipsterism.



Postscript: Peacock's rant launched a thousand blog posts in response, but the one that most resonates with me is this one by John Scalzi, once and future king of the nerds, who dismantles not only Peacock's standing as someone who can decide who has nerd cred or doesn't, but everyone else's.

Neil Gaiman's Advice for Young Artists, 2012 Commencement Address, University of the Arts in Philadelphia

"If you don’t know it’s impossible, it’s easier to do. And because nobody’s done it before, they haven’t made up rules to stop anyone doing that again." ~Neil Gaiman

I don't have many heroes, and I get the feeling that Neil would be intensely uncomfortable wearing that hat, so I won't he's one of them. Except that he is. Just don't tell him.


There's a transcript floating around, but it's not 100% accurate and I prefer to let the man's words and delivery stand on its own.


Wiser and more accurate words about a life pursuing the arts, you would be hard-pressed to write or speak.


From his blog: "Trust me, I'm a Doctor * (Honorary, of the Fine Arts)"