There comes a time when you realize you’ll never take the writing world by storm. Like your heroes. You aren’t a prodigy.
There comes a time when you realize you’ll never take the writing world by storm. Like your heroes. You aren’t a prodigy. But you keep writing anyway.. You won’t sell your first story to your favorite magazine. You won’t sell all your stories. (A few folks do!) But you keep writing anyway. There comes a time when you realize that your day job goes on… well. Maybe forever. You may realize this before or after you start selling things. Before or after your first story or novella or novel is published. Before or afterr you first award nomination. Before or after your Kirkus reviews. Before or after your Hugo or Nebula award. But you keep writing anyway. There comes a time when you realize you will never be a fresh face. Your author photo for your first book, if it ever gets published, is gonna be this worn around the edges middle-aged person. Nobody will ever look at you and want to be you. Not if they have to look like you, be as old as you. Your face will not sell a single book. Your books will have to sell themselves. But you keep writing anyway. You eventually realize that your books will not do for you what books written by others do. You are performing magic tricks, that work best for others. You can amuse yourself, but you cannot tickle yourself. You can surprise yourself, but after that moment of surprise, there’s a ton of mechanical toil. But you keep writing anyway. There comes a time when it gets harder to read; when things you read and loved no longer work for you, when you grow jealous of authors of things you cannot imagine ever writing, when you grow weary of reading things you feel you could have written yourself. Or written better. But you keep writing anyway. There comes a time when it all gets to be too much; the ambivalence of friends, family, workshop, market, editors, awards process, agents, publishers, one star reviewers. The pile of unsold work so much taller than the pile of stuff sold. The mental calculation of how much per hour writing has made you. If anything, after you factor in the courses and retreats and professional memberships and research expenses. And you stop writing. For a time. You have better, or more necessary, things to do. And those other things consume you, and then, recede, and the disappointments fade, and the memory of the accomplishments glows, and the friendships shine brighter than the ambivalence and tribal bickering. You remember this hidden world inside, infinite, largely untapped, your own godlike ability to imagine into being that which would require billion dollar budgets to render on film. Nobody needs to green light you—except you. You get the exact same blank page to write on that every single writer you ever loved was given. Your materials are just as good. Language. Introspection. Focus. Effort. Will. Reason. Unique experience. You have time. Some time. Some have more time than others. That isn’t fair. That doesn’t have to stop you cold. You have some time. And you can do this. Because you have before, And you are still you, a version of you, and will always be some version of you. And you find yourself writing again, for no reason, for fun, with no expectations, with great expectations, and when you write, you’re a writer. You get to be one. You are one. For as long as you want to be. For as long as you can. So I cut my social media diet by about 95%. TL;DR. It’s weird. Mostly better. Sometimes… I’m not sure how I feel about it. My mother quit smoking when her mother died. She said, “I knew I was going to feel terrible, so I figured, why not get both things over with at once?” Of course, her mother’s death, fromCOPD caused by smoking. Still, it resonated. “I was going to feel terrible anyway.” So, while I felt terrible about my parents deaths, I cut out social media. A writing friend who is 10x more productive than I had been shaking their head pityingly for years now, lamenting the novels melting into conversational typing funding right-wing billionaires. So, the problem with my experiment of course is I changed two variables at once. What’s really changed? Now and then I search my feeds, groping for adrenal rage in the shared comments of ‘friends.’ (Some of my social media friends are actual friends; at over a 1000 in both platforms of course, many are just contacts.) This sickening urge to unfold a comment string to find something stupid, detestable, so I could feel that surge of strong emotion. So I could verbally spar with an asshole. Somewhere to scream my sadness, rage, and misery at the world. As I do that… now… I stop. Every now and then I compose a reply… and delete it. But I like and share the odd political post. But liking and sharing is the tinder, I should say kindling, of the feed, the raw material social media uses to generate ‘engagement’, (IE, disunity, anger, polarization, outrage, depression, social humiliation and shaming, and now and then, actual violence). So I don’t feel good about political liking and sharing either. But… you feel like you need to make yourself known, take a side, and it’s very hard not to imagine that social media is a good place to do that. All evidence to the contrary. Social media discontent seems pretty good at wrecking things. The Arab spring ousted some miserable governments. Which were gradually replaced by equally miserable governments. Because social media uses algorithms to magnify amorphous discontent… without empowering the creation of organizations that can turn anger into lasting social change. Or rather, the rage comes first. This is the force that causes people to rise up, slaughter the ‘bad’ guys, and then mill about wondering what comes next. Which is the next monster taking advantage of the chaos. Move fast, break things, has long been a silicon valley motto. Unspoken of course, is the idea that the basic fabric of civilization, the infrastructure, that must remain unbroken is Someone Else’s Problem, Primarily the governments that the techno-libertarian right wing majority tries to dismantle, to shrink to bath tub drown-able dimensions. But I digress. Broadly of course, this is about my own response to social media, and in that personal-is-political way, thinking about how my abdication might scale. A movement rising up from the twenty people that read this blog to CHANGE THE WORLD! The social media come-on. The viral lottery. Say something clever? God forbid, wise? It blows up? That’s social capital! Platform building! Which can turn into real money! Or Social change! Or something good! So, we plunk our quarters into the social media slot machine, praying for the jackpot, and now and then that happens. But we know, or should remember, that the real winner is always the house. Run by gangsters for profit, who move fast, break things, and laugh at the grown-ups who scramble in their wake to pick up the pieces. But I will have to adapt to social media somehow. And hopefully society does too, in my lifetime. And I know much of my disillusion is simply the collapse of my previous delusion. No golden age. There was never a golden age. Maybe the fights are just out in the open now. Maybe nothing has really changed. But I feel weird. Taking a huge step back from social media, coping with the loss of my parents generation, feels like growing up. Not fun. But necessary. So, it took a few months of daily effort to step away from Facebook, and the daily news habit that was its co-morbidity. Peeking at it now and again, I see how my feed has adapted to my absence; see the same folks talking about mostly the same stuff. I miss the life events, large and small, of people who had become friends, facebook friends, people who edged into the real friends who don’t live nearby category. I contact a few in messenger now and then, and they contact me. But it’s sort of like work or school friendship, that can be real, and intense, but still mostly based on proximity. A few of them had strong reactions to my writing, mostly to the FB writing, but one or two to my fiction. Maybe three. I had a dozen or so strong supporters, to some degree of my writing, but to a larger degree, people who supported me generally, as a person, in my day to day struggles. I miss them. I think about going back for them. I was this person for a few folks, too, I think, but always, there were others. So you don’t worry too much about stepping away. One of the many FB is different than meat-space. You don’t feel like you leave a vacuum when you vanish. I am billing more hours on my less creative contracts, maybe walking more. I’ve added the FB people I miss to my parents, still, a year after the death of one, two years since the death of the other, Maybe this explains the persistent melancholy. The thousand plus a day COVID deaths and Omicron wave, the end of that feeling that we might get on top of this in a serious way, has also contributed. The death of the dream of a new progressive era caused by a handful of traitorous ‘democrats’, DINOs, also contributes to a sense of loss. The political stuff, without stimulation, becomes less rage, and more acceptance–or is it resignation? The serenity prayer. Was I guilty of weirdly empathizing with a team where I was 99.9999 percent a spectator? I have a friend active in local politics who went from hard working volunteer to a player, in a very large sense, making decisions, or rather, steering a process towards decisions, that matter. A dedicated progressive, much of what she is doing now if preventing a radical left fringe from doing poorly thought out stupid shit. Successfully. It’s too bad the sane stuff needed to save hundreds of millions of lives over the next few decades, and reduce human misery hugely, can’t get past the bottleneck of bigoted, know-nothing racist vampire capitalist theocratic hypocritical opposition, the monster that the GOP has become. (Yes, I know; only 80-90% of them. Sure. Whatever.) But here’s the thing. I’m one guy. I’m not the voice of a movement. I’m at best a footsoldier of a national movement. I’m politically inert lodged in a group of comfortable mostly progressives in Cambridge. (Somerville, Cambridge’s somewhat more affordable neighbor without the prestigious universities, is much more progressive now.) I donate a few thousand bucks of family money to causes, do a little phone banking, and vote. That’s it. I no longer preach to a choir, any more than I just did, above. A few tweets. No FB posting. I go on much too long on FB. Like somebody standing on a balcony, Mussolini like. I am, well, I was going to say limping along, on my novel, but maybe that’s just my process. I hope to gather steam on it. Anyway. It’s 2022. I try not to think of it as the year that the democrats lose all ability to do anything but very temporary executive actions that will be hamstrung by SCOTUS and wiped away by the coming red wave. I will try to think of it as the first year without any one year death anniversaries, a year where my family is strong and healthy, and our own personal circumstances good. A year when I could do a lot of creative work, and bill a lot of hours, and interact with a smallish number of closer friends. While missing some people. But let that go. Accept the things I cannot change. Be here now, in a less diluted, less agitated state. Enjoy the time I am given. None of us go on forever. I had a conversation with my father, in his eighties now, about the sixties, the early seventies, I think, and he said, well, that was our our time. And I knew what he meant, because I felt it too, like the 90s was my time, the swelling of that first tech bubble and the way I was sucked into the beating heart, and febrile mind, of late stage capitalism, taking my part in the Zeitgeist that would breed the quartet of IT monopolies that would shape the next few decades. Living breathing a futurism blissfully ignorant of the coming surveillance oligopolies. The SF I’d loved my whole life coming true. The Asimov and the Gibson, both at once. Making a hundred dollars an hour, too. The money pushing away my writing without a ton of resistance. But time marches on and the towers fell and my kids were born in the swirl of ashes and the future went Abu Grahib dark and flared bright again, in the glowing smile of my favorite Kenyan Crypto muslim robot from the future, and now is darker than ever before, approaching the midnight gloom of the Cuban Missile crisis, into which I was born. My time seems to have been brief indeed, the flicker of an eyelid, but I guess everyone’s time feels like that. So. I fell off the stage and broke my leg but my eyes were open, on the way down, and I watched my kids, and cared for them, and they were creatures of this time, and so I was sucked along in the moment, painfully awake, prickly and weirded out and exhausted and alternately happy and very very sad, which of course is probably just the bipolar. But who knows. So, like all parents, I’ve seen life twice through, all my milestones now a double vision. I’m at this age where men can drop dead and people go, “oh, really? What was it?” And the answer is generally, “Heart thing,” and the regret thereafter is tinged with a ‘well that’s life’ kind of vibe. So it’s hard to know what to do next, with one’s time. I’ve watched men my age rewrite old stories. Stories that no longer adhere to the present in any meaningful way. I’ve watched them retire, give up, become worse than irrelevant. I’ve watched them become despised, for doubling down on statements they failed to understand as despicable. Could I be a late bloomer? Or am I just fading out, like Hey Jude, repeating myself as the volume drops and the hiss of the needle in the groove swallows up the murmur of my voice. Before the needle rises from my spinning disk forever? My kids are older and leaving home and I feel my attachment to this time and place and world stretching thin. Bilbo’s butter over too much bread. But… Maybe I’ll be better off in another world. Of my own creation, undisturbed by the noisy now. Or wherever it is we go when we go, if my next pratfall off the stage lands me at an awkward angle. Maybe I had plenty of time. Maybe I did something. I don’t feel like I did, but then, that’s probably the bipolar. At any rate, here is to you, dear reader, to you and your time, and what you do with the time you have on your hands right now. Do something that matters to you. Make something. Love someone. Listen to new music. Enjoy the light. Your time under the sun. I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately. If death is possible think about it. Grasp, believe in, and truly accept. I’m only young now to an 80 year old, but I have like a young person dealt with death with denial. Intellectually I know about it. I don’t believe in Santa Claus or Heaven. But viscerally, even though I have at times been suicidal, I have never wrapped my mind around my death, or the deaths of those closest to me. As COVID takes a 911 worth of lives every few days, as I grapple with the deaths of my parents, my ending becomes more real, and yet, never comes into focus. It’s a hole in my retina. It’s in my blind spot. I catch glimpses. Evoking horror. Or a curious numbness. But mostly, I’m no closer to any understanding or closure. Instead this gasping fear, this hideous dread, of finding myself in the hospital or hospice bed with my sad family gathered around me. Saying goodbye. Or it’s an abstraction, devoid of panic, fear, only a mix of sadness and an attempt at acceptance and resignation. Aphorisms. For everything a season. He lived a rich and full life and was loved. Everything dies, my mother said. That’s just the way it is. And if I’m going to die, I wish I would and get it over with. This said while she was in uncontrollable pain for a month or so. So I’m left wondering, what do I do with my fucking life, now that I know, at some level, my days are numbered? What matters enough to do? To give myself to utterly? It’s down to writing. Some part of me wants to join some mythical brigade of tree planting climate warriors. Or armed defenders of the weak against the rising right-wing white supremacist GOP fronted menace that threatens anyone and everyone but those most like me. But what the fuck, when has that ever been me? I got closest to that with my trans kid, writing about and learning about them, fighting online for them, and once virally boosting a boycott that helped shut down a few right wing radio jocks. I had businesses contacting me begging to be taken off their show’s sponsor list. But mostly I have gamboled and angsted perched on some high terrace of Maslow’s heirarchy of needs. And I want to throw myself into something. Completely. Make some small mark. Be for something. Be about something. Time not on my side. At an age when many of my heroes have been dead for years. Trying not to stare into the sun and blind myself. Trying to snap out of the daydream of immortality. Withdraw from the anodyne of streaming media. Leave the party and roll up my sleeves and get to work. Work eighteen hours a day, to make up for all the lost time. All the self-indulgence. Until the end. Until I am dragged, kicking and screaming into the unknowable. Locks on the Mass Ave (Smoot marked) bridge to MIT. The markets that publish me that have made me feel like a ‘real writer,’ have a 20k suggested word cap, which I have successfully pushed out a few thousand words a few times. But my shorts have grown longer and longer, and now everything I write becomes a novella, which I sell every other time or so. I write novel starts… and hit a hard wall at 40k. The unpublished novellas I believed in so much haunt me. I stare at the wall. I don’t write. My supports, writing community, friends and editors haven’t, as yet, been able to shove me up and over that wall in the spec fic genres. I have endings in mind that call to me, and my scattering of milestones that I pants my way toward. I have finished a few short novels in other genres. But with SF, which I feel is my true calling, I stall out. Nothing in my work has ever been called ground breaking. And that, for a long time, was what I thought was the point of SF. To be something new under the sun. Gradually I realized I read a lot of entertaining SF, and loved it, that explored old tropes in new-ish ways, or simply executed well on old tropes—with great plots and characters. Good world-building. And I liked that stuff. Everything I liked wasn’t a part of this huge tapestry of extrapolation that SF has woven through my world, through my understanding of the odd future we now live inside, and the even odder ones to come. Sometimes what I love is just good writing and enjoyable reading. Reinforcing that fabric. Overlaying it. Singing in harmony with it, to abruptly abandon the cloth metaphor. I first first realized this while reading SF magazines, and it let me write. I didn’t have to be a genius. I could be me. There were stories I could write, that maybe only I could write. In Nancy Kress’s Beginnings, Middles and Ends, she says that all writers have the Dostoevsky problem. Eventually realizing they will never be Dostoevsky, and wondering, what the fuck is the point of this difficult activity? This is often after the writer comes face to face with the reality that most authors do not making anything like a living. At best, fiction is a part time gig. Those that do it full time usually have patrons. This is one reason we get too much white het cis rich guy fiction. We also get fiction from their white het cis wives, and their white het cis children. But whether you are struggling to make a living, or another well-supported white het cis guy, the Dostoevsky problem remains. Writers are haunted by reviews. Writing workshop critiques can be painful, and professional rejections sometimes worse, but a review on a finished published work takes the psychic horror to a new level. This is a reader, who took a chance on you. You failed them. With this thi… truncated (13,044 more characters in archive)
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