Robert Jackson Bennett's Blog, page 7

Multitasking

I am probably about the worst multitasker in the world.

Well, that’s not completely true – I can multitask pretty well provided the tasks are all united in a single goal. Say, writing a novel – that’s not one task, but about fifty or so tasks going on simultaneously. That sort of stuff I can do. I think of these as “projects,” really big endeavors that tend to take up my thoughts when I’m in the shower in the morning, when I can’t sleep at night, when I’m cleaning, driving, etc.

What I can’t do, at all, is support more than one project at once. I just can’t do it. I find I have this weird sort of myopia that could be mistaken for determination and focus, were my attention given in moderation. But it isn’t – I give myself to this One Big Thing I’m doing wholeheartedly, I let it dominate all the “background” processes in my brain, and whenever I’m bored, my thoughts stray to that One Big Thing and nothing else.

And when I go home, I want to do absolutely nothing. Usually. Shifting gears between the One Big Thing and all the other stuff one must do to keep one’s self and family afloat takes a hell of a lot of energy.

I definitely don’t want to blog when I’m in this mode. What’s there to blog about? There’s the One Big Thing, and how it is or isn’t done, and the degree of its doneness is probably of very little interest to anyone else. The only thing I can say is, “Nope, not done yet,” and go back to it.

So, if you’re curious why I haven’t blogged in nearly a month, that’s why. I have A Project. And until that project is done, I probably won’t be doing much else. And though the end is in sight, there’s little more I can say than, “Nope, not done yet.”

On empathy

Reading is interesting, because in many ways it teaches us about how we engage with the perspectives of others.

This doesn’t especially mean that, in reading, you are engaging with me, The Writer – you are, rather, engaging a fabricated perspective, a persona or idea of a person with a very particular manner of expression and a very particular set of values. You are engaging the lens through which the story is viewed.

And one book isn’t necessarily one specific perspective – in fact, most books are lots and lots of perspectives, as many books these days take place from many different points of view, and each of those perspectives will have their own values and virtues. Even if a book is one point of view, focusing on one character, if that book takes place over a great length of time, that point of view’s perspective can change dramatically.

The breakdown is when the engagement  with this perspective fails to happen – when you are incompatible with a perspective, when you violently reject its values. This can happen for two reasons:

1. The writer failed to create some measure of empathy for this perspective – the fabricated perspective, in other words, fails to evoke empathy correctly.

2. The reader has no empathy to give this perspective – or perhaps any perspective other than the ones they agree with.

Empathy, I think, is amoral – it is the ability to sympathize with others. “Sympathize” is a positive word, but it’s perfectly possible to sympathize with “bad” or objectionable people.

More importantly, you can do this and still remain a “good” person. For example, one can understand the fear that inspires prejudice while not falling prey to the same and going on to incorporate that prejudice in their own life.

To have empathy is not to accept; to sympathize with is not to approve; it is merely comprehension and understanding, the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, but not actually become that person.

And when someone rejects a book outright, decrying one character or another, or objecting to one chapter’s perspective of a character – assuming, in other words, that the book is actively advocating on behalf of the values being presented… Well, it always makes me wonder about this confusion between empathy and acceptance, between sympathy and approval: everyone agrees that they want to understand and sympathize with their fellow human beings, but I’m not everyone knows exactly what that entails.

hey robert why haven’t you blogged more

BECAUSE I’M WORKING GODDAMN IT

John Stevens SF Signal review

I’ve often held the opinion that I’d much rather provide a rich, fascinating mess than a clean, efficient diversion, and I’m happy to see that John H Stevens over at the SF Signal appears to have enjoyed AMERICAN ELSEWHERE in the exact manner I’d hoped.

What makes this feel. . . well, not “realistic” but resonant are all of those messy moments that inform the characters’ respective viewpoints and actions. The novel’s power comes from giving the reader so much information that there is a lived feeling to the experience of reading the story, and that makes what the characters go through, and how they deal with the ends of their worlds, that make American Elsewhere so satisfying to read.

 This is cheating because I’m just quoting the very last sentences, which are sort of the money shot of any essay, but I don’t care because this quote makes me happy.

World Horror 2013

The 2013 World Horror Convention was a lot of fun this year. I was dead set on going. I can usually only get to 1 or 2 cons at most, but since this time it was in New Orleans, land of my birth, I absolutely had to go. Originally it was going to be a Bennett Family Jamboree, but then my grandmother had a moderately concerning fall, so it wound up just being me and the Darling Wife going out on the town.

And that we did. I am nervous to look at our credit bill. To summarize, I can recommend the following places with great enthusiasm:

The Commander’s Palace
The Sazerac Bar
Muriel’s on Jackson Square
The Palace Café
The Camellia Grill
The Erin Rose (and Killer Poboys in the back)
The Carousel Bar

And less so these places:

Galatoire’s. It fucking breaks my heart to say this, because my grandparents were frequent patrons of this restaurant, but the food there was extremely disappointing. I ate there all the time as a kid. I guess the years haven’t been kind to it.
The Napoleon House. My polite Canadian friend asked if she could get a Hurricane – a faux pas, but she didn’t know – and after that it was almost impossible to flag down our waiter. The drinks weren’t hugely impressive, but the building and bar itself is quite nice.

Places I didn’t get to go to, but intend to visit the next time:

Adolfo’s
The Green Goddess (for the Neil Gaiman special, which I think is a soup made out of his hair cuttings? No one was sure)

The reading I gave went quite nicely. The room’s ceiling was very low, so I look like a giant in all the pictures. And I gave away all my copies of American Elsewhere at the mass signing that night. (Which, by the way, received a very kind review from Weird Fiction Review.)

[image error](As a note, I’m finding it increasingly expensive to do mailing giveaways on my books. I enjoy it a lot more when I get to go to conventions and put books in people’s hands. Everyone is always so stunned I’m giving them away for free, I always find it amusing. I think I’ll probably start doing that more in the future.)

I had a great panel on Genre Mashups, which gave me tons of food for thought for future blog posts. I think I’ve made it clear that I consider genre less and less these days. Go down the rabbit hole far  enough, and categorizing fiction starts to feel like filing your taxes.

And I also got to while away the hours into the new morning with the likes of Robert McCammon, Michael Slade, and my friend Joe McKinney (a pity he didn’t win Best Novel, but I’ve no doubt he’ll be a frequent nominee in the future). We actually managed to close out the Café du Mond, having consumed numerous Sazeracs beforehand. I think it was a pretty good New Orleans experience, overall.

And, to finish, I genuinely cannot resist posting this picture: 

I don’t normally get political here…

…and I don’t really need to, because this short piece by David Foster Wallace from 2007 will do it for me.

In other words, if you demand zero terrorism deaths, you probably shouldn’t be surprised at what it takes to accomplish that.

Of course, the real concern is exactly who decides what we’re being protected from. So much of this is barred from public knowledge that, at this point, the vague deciding bodies could say, “Okay, terrorism is no longer an issue. What do we need to go after now?” and the answer could be quite frightening.

The nature of associations

I live in Austin. I work in the association industry. Almost everyone here has a connection to the association industry, because this is the capital of what is quickly becoming one of the largest economies in the world. There is a lot of trade in this state, there are a lot of decisions made here, so there’s a whole industry devoted to trying to get a place at the table when the decisions go down.

So, yes. I work for an association, I’ve worked with other associations, I know a lot of people who work in associations, and I’ve seen the way associations in general work.

So when I saw people getting very upset over the Bulletin issue, and then going on to decry the SFWA, I do feel a need to add my perspective on the matter, not because I am a member of that particular association, but because I’ve lived in the guts of associations long enough to have a somewhat good idea on how this might have happened.

Associations are, by nature, hugely uncoordinated, very messy, self-contradictory, and poorly organized. This is because they are lots and lots of people wanting lots and lots of different things. These people are also usually hard-working professionals who wish to see something get accomplished for their industry, but they have to volunteer their own time to do this, which is precious enough as it is.

This all means that it is not only hard to decide what to do, but it is hard to actually do it. Ever tried to put together a meeting or vacation with your friends and family? Try it with anywhere from 10 to 30 people who generally put your priorities on the low end of the totem pole, and remember that plenty of them won’t live anywhere near one another. How do you get them all in a room? Or do you try it by conference call (the sound of 30 people with their phone on mute) or email (ridiculously time-consuming) or by skype (good luck getting everyone to install it properly)?

So coordinating this vast morass of people with varying ideologies is tough. What happens is that 90% of the work done by associations is done by 5% or less (almost certainly less) of the members. They’re the Energizer Bunnies, the volunteers who truly care and have the time to care, who can take a year or two off of their jobs to be an officer, to chair a committee, to serve on the board. Whoever they are, the association will always ask more of them, more and more, because there’s always more to do. So they’ll be overworked, overstressed, hearing comments and questions and requests from the thousand-plus people out there who Want The Association To Do This, as if associations are an endless wellspring of time and money.

What happens is that it’s very easy for things to go rogue. The leadership structures in associations are frequently vague – everyone is kind of in charge, there are just some people who are more in charge – and things get “siloed off” very easily, where people can be working right next to one another and never know what the other person is doing. Duplicating work and hitting up the same people repeatedly (for money, for membership, for volunteer work) is very frequent – there’s a small pool of contributors for associations of any kind, so they tend to get overworked.

And communications are always a sensitive spot. What’s going out into the wide, wide world? What’s getting emailed, posted on Facebook, or tweeted by the dozens of people working for the association? You just assume that there’s a gatekeeper, a transmitter, but can you imagine that job? Boy howdy, if you can find someone who’s willing not only to monitor all the things already going out, but also to keep an ear to the ground in case some member says ,“Gosh I sure would like to make a Facebook page for this!” and then run out and STOP them, then damn, hold onto that person like grim death – and it will be death, because that sort of job is murderous.

An association is thousands of people talking at once. Thousands of very, very different people. Remember – most associations won’t turn down a member if they want to pay dues. Associations desperately, desperately need dues to function, so they’ll happily admit anyone – they might not ask them to serve on a committee or on the board, but they’ll take their money and give them the member benefits.

And last of all, Jesus, I can’t imagine a profession more fucked up and buckwild than writers. I’d rather work for the CPAs and the trial attorneys in a heartbeat – those guys are guaranteed to be at least a little professional. But writers? Who the hell knows. You’ve got to be out of your goddamn mind to try and be a writer in the first place! This is a job where most of the work occurs in your head, where you can do it naked, if you like. Writers can’t even coordinate their own damn thoughts, so can you imagine trying to get them to coordinate with each other?

So the real question is – why don’t associations screw up more? The answer is, because there are committed members keeping it from happening.

If you’re mad at your association, the first question you need to ask yourself is – when’s the last time you were at a meeting? When’s the last time you checked in with your committee? When’s the last time you volunteered? You want it to do This Thing, but just writing a check isn’t actually doing anything. If you don’t have the time, then you’re not actually doing anything at all.

So if you’re in that sort of situation – where you’ve given dues, but no time – then ending your membership is not the answer. If you’re a member who sees something going wrong, get involved and try and fix it. And if you try, and the committee and the leadership and just the whole setup just seems like shit, and you waste your volunteer time and genuinely, genuinely don’t think there’s any sliver of light in the clouds, then it’s perfectly reasonable to end your membership.

But don’t just write a check and assume you’re buying a bill of goods – you’re not. You’re buying the opportunity to speak on behalf of and support your profession (or whatever it is).

So as I said in the last post, yeah, I’ll totally consider being a SWFA member in the future. There seem to be some good people working there who have done the right thing with the situation. I’m currently an HWA member, because that kind of fits me more, and also because Joe McKinney is a friend, and the treasurer, and he’s also a cop and he probably has a gun around whenever I see him. But the very first thing I did when I signed up to be an HWA member was look at opportunities to volunteer. Because volunteering is the lifeblood of everything an association does.

Shithead fatigue

I don’t want to talk about this.

This is for a lot of reasons. I’m not an SFWA member (though I’ve considered it, and will consider it in the future despite this, for reasons I will explain at a hazy time in the future). Another is that some people have already done a really eloquent job of expressing some basic common sense on this issue. I also don’t think I can consider myself a full-on SF writer, nor do I think many other people see me that way. And I’m also not female, but that’s another issue entirely.

This is not a post about the Bulletin. The problem is, I don’t think I have it in me to make a post about the Bulletin. I’m not sure if I have anything to say that could matter. I’d like to think that the issue is that other people are better at fighting this fight.

But I know the real problem is Shithead Fatigue.

Shithead Fatigue is when a specific breed of blatant shitheaddery feels like it becomes so prominent, so unavoidable, so ubiquitous, that getting outraged over it is like getting angry over rain: this is what happens, you say, you do what you can about it, you get a little wet, maybe, and you move on. There are, it feels, anointed people who are here to fight this battle. Nod along, agree that you, too, dislike the rain, and be a passive participant.

And that makes me feel pretty shitty. Because I feel like I should say something, even when I can’t think of anything that would matter or be new. I feel guilty for being quiet, I suppose, but everything I could say has been said and is being said.

This is because, I think, outrage has a short lifespan, as far as action goes. Outrage induces a kneejerk reaction, uses up a lot of calories, occupies a lot of your thought. It takes work to be outraged. Outrage is overdrive, burning up your fuel.

The best comparison, as inspired by a brief chat with Seanen McGuire, would be the Democrats’ War on Women. I say it belongs to the Democrats, because it really does: the term has existed for a long dang while, but it wasn’t until March 2012 that it became a commonly-used phrase, chiefly, I imagine, as a campaign effort to increase fundraising – for the Democratic Party. (And if I recall, it was extremely successful. I don’t know how much, but it got me to donate.)

Now, just because this got used politically – to unify people, to generate donations – that doesn’t mean the intent behind it isn’t legitimate. After all, a huge, huge, huge bunch of horrible shit prompted it.

But it did get used. Used for good intent, probably, but it got used, used to keep people engaged, to keep them angry, to keep them willing to vote, and to keep them donating. This is how movements work: someone has to keep pushing, which means other people are getting pushed. So every time someone says something outraging, the people who are pushing for change must drag it out in front of you and shake it in your face to make sure you remember that you’re mad.

And this gets exhausting. It especially gets exhausting because it keeps happening, despite, it seems, everyone, even people theoretically “on the other side,” feeling wildly different about it.

So you keep hearing that you have to change things. And you hear that, yes, things are changing.

But it keeps happening. And you feel obliged to stay outraged, even if you don’t have it in you anymore.

I keep reminding myself of what Frederick Douglass told his grandson what the next step in black rights was. He said it was three words: “Agitate, agitate, agitate.” But how do you do it when shithead fatigue sets in around you?

Here is the thing I feel is the truth: rage is for sprints. Positivity is for marathons. And change is a marathon race.

When I feel like shit about stuff like this – because it’s happening, because I feel tired about it, because I content myself with well-meaning, weary silence – I try and remember something very basic, something very positive: that people are mad about this who, not many years ago, probably couldn’t speak up about anything at all.

I feel good because I am pretty sure that someday more people will have the opportunity to be people, fully people, to be themselves in ways that they never could before.

Then I come back, and try and do what I can, because I know that whenever someone realizes, “There’s no reason we can’t do this,” it can so often be a good thing. When they realize that what they can do is up to them.

Say, have a job. Fight in a war. Have a child. Build. Write. Or, I suppose, love. You know – things people do.

It is worth reminding one’s self, I think, not to be enraged because of what is denied, but to remember that what is being sought are very basic things. And that maybe one day people will wonder how these very basic, very easy, very simple things could have ever been denied to anyone.

Whenever something new/dreaded pops up in publishing…

…my default reaction is to look to Mr. John Scalzi’s thoughts on it first.

This is for a lot of reasons – among them, whether I should care on a general level or on a personal, terrified, this-will-absolutely-affect-my-paycheck level – but mostly it’s because he’s evolved, somewhat, into the Author’s Bulldog On All Things, always ready to scrutinize any new announcement and decipher if this hurts or helps the author’s position.

Spoiler: it usually hurts. Including in this new Amazon Kindle Worlds thing, where Amazon will pay you for your fan fiction, but keep all of your rights for doing so.

From whatever:

[...] I suspect this is yet another attempt in a series of long-term attempts to fundamentally change the landscape for purchasing and controlling the work of writers in such a manner that ultimately limits how writers are compensated for their work, which ultimately is not to the benefit of the writer. This will have far-reaching consequences that none of us really understand yet.

Yep. Business as usual, then.

I don’t have a hugely strong position on Fan Fiction. I’m for it, mostly because I first got my taste for writing by composing (get ready) Warcraft 3 Fan Fiction in anticipation of when the game came out. And most first novels, whether someone knows it or not, are basically fan fiction, closely mimicking a beloved author’s style, putting on daddy and mommy’s clothes and posturing in the mirror.

I know if I ever got to the point where fan fiction of my stuff appeared, and got read, I’d pop some champagne – because it’d mean I did a good enough job making up a world that people feel there are untold stories taking place in them.

But I don’t think I’d sign with a publishing house that would essentially allow people to play around in my house and get paid for it. For one thing, this feels like a scam, and for another, it completely fucks up the authority structure. Who’s in charge of the show? What’s legitimate, and what isn’t? Is there any defining voice owning and articulating the thing?

But, apropos of nothing, if you want my broad feelings on the eternal “internet/e-rights/how do I get paid for this/information wants to be free” mess that’s been ongoing for the past 15 years or so, here are my general, BigMcLargeHuge, perennial thoughts, broken down:

Markets are based on scarcity. The value of a thing is based on how unavailable it is.
The scarcity of art is wildly unclear. Theoretically, anyone could produce art. Therefore, it is impossible to assign a fixed market value to any art.
Because art has no fixed market value, the end user often projects the value onto it – “It should cost however much I say it costs!” While on the one hand, charging $11.99 or whatever for a paperback and $11.99 for an e-book doesn’t make sense from the scarcity-based approach (“It’s all just bits and bytes! This is ridiculous!”), from a producer/writer’s standpoint, when someone says an e-book shouldn’t cost the same as a paperback, the producer/writer is hearing, “The experience of your art is not worth $11.99.” In essence: “Me liking it should be enough for you!”
Two things will be forever at odds here: “Information/art wants to be free!” vs. “I sure like getting paid for work.” People, like water, are always looking for the more convenient option: as water flows downhill, people will always gravitate toward easier money, and more money. If a writer can exercise their creative muscles in a satisfactory way in a more lucrative industry – movie, TV, etc. – they will do that, and will stop writing books.

I’ve had a few other thoughts about how the new marketing models endanger a lot of artistic legitimacy, but those are my overall feelings on how this big huge mess is all shaking out right now. In the future, if someone asks me my thoughts on any future e-rights mess, I’ll likely refer them to the list.

On libraries and inequality

These days, we take a lot of things for granted. For example, we take phones and computers and television for granted, assuming that, because they are superfluous in our lives, they must be so in the world.

We forget that this is a position of privilege – we have these things only because we can have them. And as more and more of the world moves online, more and more of the people who can’t afford the appropriate devices lose access to that world.

This is why, as Rita Meade aptly points out, libraries are actually more important than ever, and phasing them out or cutting their funding would be a remarkably horrible decision to make.

There are many, many people in the world who don’t spend all goddamn day on their phone because they can’t afford one - the device, the plan, or both. They don’t have the world in their pocket. They have very, very little, and taking away libraries would take away a big cut of the little that they have.

Monstrous inequality aside, hearing “Libraries should be cut BECAUSE INTERNET” makes as much sense as “Schools should be cut BECAUSE INTERNET.” I mean, it’s all information, right? Right, it’s all just data! So let’s keep your kid home, and he or she won’t go to college, and they can just google up a degree, download “COMMUNICATIONS MAJOR” into their brain like Neo, and be done with it, because that’s completely the same as having an in-person, tactile educational experience. Looking at youtube videos is exactly the same as attending lectures and spending a shitload of time in front of a book.

Even if libraries did no more than provide us with a quiet place to read, they would still be worthwhile.  Shit, I wish I was in the library right now.