Man, I am lucky.

That’s the only way I can figure out how I got to spend last week the way I did. If I hadn’t gone to last year’s World Fantasy Convention, if I hadn’t wound up sharing a room with Daryl Gregory, if I hadn’t gone room-hopping with everyone, I would have been at home, watching the kid practice her back-to-front rolls and not get enough sleep.

Instead, all those things happened, so I got to kick around Flagstaff, Arizona with ten talented, funny people, watching Charlie The Unicorn and not getting enough sleep.

I met Sarah K. Castle at WFC, and we got to talking about writing and what we were working on (me, Windswept; her, a science fiction thriller about a world-spanning EPA with teeth, which I said she should market as SCIENCE NINJAS. She demurred). I made a friend, which is always a nice thing to do at conventions, and I also wound up getting invited to Starry Heaven, a novel-writing workshop based on the Blue Heaven workshop that Charles Coleman Finlay created.

The format works like this: every participant submits the first fifty pages of the novel they want to workshop. Everyone reads every first fifty, then chooses two full novels to read. Then everyone goes to Flagstaff (Sarah’s stomping grounds), where you eat, drink, and critique. The first three days are group sessions where we deliver critiques of the first fifties, four a day. The rest of the workshop, we split into groups of three to deliver the full critiques. It was a lot of work, but when you’ve got good material and good people, it doesn’t feel like it.

Sarah’s invite came at a real low point in my writing career (though that doesn’t feel like the right word. Writing apprenticeship? Writing gestation? Writing sitting-on-my-can-trying-to-fill-the-page-with-text time?), and the workshop was just the kick in the ass I needed. I got to read YA, horror (both urban and smaller urban), fantasy, SF, all of it great. There will be some excellent books coming out of this workshop, and I hope that mine will be one of them (or, at least, it’ll be better than it has been before). Fortunately, I got a lot of excellent input from everyone, especially my two full readers, Brad Beaulieu and William Shunn. This next draft won’t be a breeze, but the path to completion looks a lot brighter, thanks to Brad and Bill’s signposts.

So, time to get back to work. But first, I have to go change a diaper. Ah, the glorious writer’s life…

Filed under: Other People's Brilliance,Scribbling,Windswept






    

I have to write this down because I need a place to put it. The problem with Twitter is that things move quickly, and it’s a bitch to nail down something I find funny or poignant or important. This is Twitter’s curse and its triumph: it’s a snapshot of what’s going on, a place to collect mental warmups and the ephemera of our lives.

It’s also a place for clueless asshats to gather and steal time. If you’ve gotten a link to this through a reply from me on Twitter, it’s because I think you’re one of them, and I want you to know how much what I think you’re doing is wasteful and wrongheaded and it requires me to sit you down and point out the mess you made on the carpet.

It’s like this: I like that random people follow me. It’s just like the early days of the web, when a comment was like finding a nugget of gold in the pile of sand someone had dumped on my desk. That spark of recognition, that light that goes off in my soul when I know another human being has read what I’ve written and it’s meant something to them: that’s a marvelous thing, and it makes a tool like Twitter that much more special. It brings a little warmth to a world that is always growing colder.

And you ruined it.

That’s right, you ruined it, because I got an email saying that you followed me on Twitter, and I clicked on your profile, and I found out that you call yourself a social media maven, an online marketing guru, a SEO expert.

You are none of those things.

You are a murderer.

You have killed a few of my precious seconds, and all because you think your link farm or your blog or whatever twaddle you’re pushing is worth my time, my limited time, my never-going-to-get-it-back time, my time that I could spend with my family or writing or on my bike or connecting with another human being or making the world’s greatest sandwich, and for what?

You follow me, because you hope I’ll follow you back so I can hang on your every word.

Don’t lie to me. You follow a few thousand people. You think I’m going to believe that you really pay attention to all of them?

No, you follow them in the hopes they’ll follow you back. You’re preying on the protocols of Twitter. You are a parasite, a leech, a tumor on the Body Internet, and I feel sorry for you.

Why? Because you are that most awful thing: you’re boring.

You’re boring because you only care about trying to sell stuff. I don’t care if it’s your services or your thoughts or a new website about cheese; you are trying to sell me something, and we both know that what you’re peddling is worthless. That’s why marketing was invented: to convince people that the shit sandwich they’re being served is actually tasty roast beef.

I should know, because that was my job.

“Aha!” you cry, “hypocrite! You self-loathing loser!”

Maybe.

But there’s a difference between the stuff I sold and what you sell: I knew my audience. I went out and hunted for them. I used tools to speed up the process, but I knew who I was looking for. I knew what I was selling was something that people would want to know about, if they only knew about it. Nine times out of ten, I was right.

But you? You have a tool that scans Twitter for keywords and follows automatically, and those keywords are boring. “Marketing.” “Social media.” “Online.”

Pathetic.

What’s worse is that they devalue both of us. They turn me into a commodity and your words into so much bland mush. You don’t care about me except that I could be one more number on your Followers list, and that’s a sad, sad thing. You measure your worth in how many people are engaged in the sad game of Pay Attention To Me.

You could be so much more.

That’s why I’m sending you this link before I block you. It’s not that I’m angry at you; it’s that I’m disappointed. You seem to get how Twitter and the web and the online world all work, yet you’re wasting it all by trying to get me to pay attention to you.

What if you spent all that energy into doing something that was worthy of attention on its own? What if you turned off the auto-follow tools, sat down, looked hard at your life and found that brilliant, amazing thing inside you that wants to shine? What if you worked like mad honing, shaping, polishing that thing until it was so fucking bright that people couldn’t take their eyes off it if they tried?

What if you want tried to make things better?

Most of you who get this link won’t get very far. You’ll write me off, continue checking boxes and going about your boring business. That’s fine. Within twenty-four hours, I’ll have blocked you, and you’ll be out of my life.

But some of you will read this, and it’ll gnaw at you. You’ll roll it around, like that bit of corn stuck in your teeth, and you won’t be able to dislodge it. It’ll drive you nuts, and that’s because, deep down, you’ll know I’m right.

An oyster needs a grain of sand to make a pearl. I hope yours turns into something beautiful.

Filed under: Spleen Venting






    

1) Babies are noisy. And I’m not talking about the crying bits; I was totally ready for that. What still throws me is when Grace is asleep and completely calm, she’ll turn her head and honk. How does someone so tiny get so much volume?

2) God, I love putting her in the sling and walking around. If this feeling of peace and contentment as my daughter snoozes against my belly means that I get my Man Card pulled, tell me where to mail it, man. You can keep your card; I wouldn’t trade this time with Grace for anything.

3) You can’t burp out a fart. Yes, I can rub her tummy or bicycle-kick her legs, but, dammit, I want some brilliant pediatrician to find the magical spot on my daughter’s body that I just have to pat a few times to relieve all that gas that’s making her cry like it’s the end of the world. Whoever finds this spot will get the Nobel Prize for Medicine. Probably the Peace Prize, too.

4) For the first three weeks, Grace has had two facial expressions: Asleep and Serious. Then, in week four, when her neck had gotten strong enough to hold up her head, she added a new one: Curious. We’ll get her on one of our shoulders, and she’ll look around with this wide-eyed face that looks like she’s saying, “Hey. I like this. This is cool.” The pots and pans above our sink? Fascinating. The tree outside the living room? Incredible. She’s looking around and drinking it all in, and we love it.

5) I thought my heart was going to burst the night she was born and I first held her. Turns out that feeling was nothing compared to the first time she smiled at me. Oh, man…

6) While baby photographers are great and kind and professional, the companies they work for? Pushy.

7) I know every father since time immemorial has felt these things, but I still want to tell everyone I know. I want to stop strangers on the street and say, “Here, you! Look at my daughter! Isn’t she the greatest thing ever?” I have to make sure I don’t babble about the things she does (tummy time! Laughing in her sleep! Grabbing her bottle!) so I don’t become That Kind Of Dad.

8) Actually, I am That Kind Of Dad. I should just admit it.

Filed under: Real Stories






    

Grace is snoozing away in Anne’s arms while our lunch (rice and dumplings) and dinner (roast chicken with pesto) cook away. This will be the first non-hospital food we’ve had in two days, though I recall us sneaking in a patty melt and milkshake from Izzy’s the night she was born. Really, this is all a blur of plastic bassinets, rotating nurses, and a tiny, tiny person with a mighty grip.

Grace Laural Rakunas was born at 6.24 in the evening on Boxing Day, 2009, and it was so fast. One minute, I’m holding our birth mom’s hand as Roy Silver, our friend, walked into the room and into his scrubs; the next, there’s this little girl slipping out like she was on a waterslide (which, in a way, she was). I cried, Anne cried, Grace cried, but only a little bit (Grace, that is. I bawled my eyes out and lost a contact lens, so I was literally half-blind as I cut the cord). After she was warmed up and rolled into the nursery, we got to hold her and feed her and I understood what my mom meant when she said this cord was just going to spring from your chest and wrap itself around the kid and never let go. It tugs whenever Grace cries or sleeps or makes one of those big baby sighs.

We got through the first night by swapping off shifts and learned a few things right away:

1) She loves eating
2) She’s not a fan of pooping
3) She sleeps best when we’re holding her

We are over the moon about all of these things. Even the poop, though I’ve now upped our weekly order with Dy-Dee Diapers.

I think the best part of all this has been the ridiculous outpouring of love from our family and friends. Every email, Tweet and Facebook update about her has melted the both of us, and it’s going to take a while to thank everyone with the individual notes you all deserve. I’m especially thankful for every one of you who’s shared that you were adopted (or are married to someone who’s adopted, or has parents or siblings or cousins who are adopted). Grace is in a club with some pretty awesome members, and I think it’s going to make for some very happy birthdays.

Our moms are coming Tuesday, and we’re going to start receiving other guests on Wednesday (I wish there were an app to make scheduling this all so much easier. Is there?). The first of the pictures are up on Flickr here, and there will probably be a ton more.

And now I have to wipe my eyes and blow my nose and inhale some food and do laundry while I can. Grace will be up soon, and I’ll be too busy staring at her while she feeds and burps and sighs to do anything else.

Welcome into the world, Grace. We love you so much.

Filed under: Real Stories






    

Note: the filling works really, really well as a side dish. You can also toss some sweet potato in if you like.

Second note: this takes some time, so either do it in two parts (filling one night, ravioli the next), or make it a group activity.

And now: the food.

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Filed under: Complete Wastes of Time






    

Ozark Pudding

1 egg
2 T flour
1/8 t salt
1 apple, diced and peeled
1/2 c sugar
1 1/2 t baking powder
1/2 c nuts, broken
1 t vanilla

Beat eggs and sugar until smooth. Add flour, powder, salt. Add nuts, apple, vanilla. Bake in 8″ buttered pie tin 35 min at 350. Serve with whipped cream or ice cream. Serves 3-4.

Note: we triple this recipe for a 9×13 pan, but do not triple the sugar.

Filed under: Other People's Brilliance






    

When I was in high school, I was at Wendy Grace’s house watching “The Commitments” with a group of friends. At some point, for some reason that I couldn’t identify then and sure as hell couldn’t now, my friend, Rob, and I started laughing and could not stop.

(Note for clarification: we were not on drugs of any kind. I feel it’s important to state that for the record. We were so squeaky-clean that you could’ve served a banquet for the Queen on our souls. Not that you’d want to, ’cause, dude, that would make for a really crowded table.)

One of us would slow down to catch his breath, look at the other, then start all over again. We reinforced each other in a positive feedback loop that had us laughing so hard that it hurt. Tears streamed down our faces, our stomachs hurt from doubling over, but we could not stop, not even if we wanted.

Last night, at w00tstock, it was just like being in Wendy Grace’s living room, except instead of Rob, there were three hundred geeks, and, instead of “The Commitments,” there was the greatest line-up of nerd music, movies and comedy this world has ever seen. And I just made my Saving Throw vs. Hyperbole, so that’s totally for reals. My sides still ache from laughing.

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Filed under: Other People's Brilliance