Curtis Edmonds's Blog, page 13

The Value of Experimentation

As of this week, both my books, WREATHED and RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY, are available exclusively on the Kindle store in e-book format. Both books were previously available as EPUB books available through Smashwords, the Nook Store, Apple, and other locations, but I’ve taken them all offline and am only offering e-books through Amazon.

This may not be a smart idea.

There are plenty of writer-humans out there who have made a lot more money than I have selling books who will tell you not to do this. My best guess is that they are right. There is considerable value in diversification in all sorts of fields, including publishing. I have made some money (not a lot, mind you) on the non-Amazon sites, and who am I to turn down money? Nobody, really.

In fact, this may be the worst time to go Amazon-exclusive, what with the rise of Kindle Unlimited and the lesser pay-outs for authors through that system.

So why bother?

Well, really, honestly, there’s no reason not to try something different. It is not as though I am selling a lot of books on the other sites; I’m only marginally selling more on Amazon. Historically, I’ve made a lot more money on Amazon than anywhere else, so why not take advantage of the tools that are available for KDP Select books?

The answer is, “I don’t know.”

The only way to tell is to experiment, to try as many different things as I can, to see what works and what doesn’t. I am fortunate in that this is not my day job and that I’m not dependent on writing for my income. So I’m going to try this, see how it works, see how much money I make this way, and go from there. It may not be a smart idea, probably isn’t. But it’s worth trying–and I can hardly make less money than I’m making already.

 

The National Institute of Precognition Research Reluctantly Rejects A Prospective Fifteen-Year-Old Applicant

Dear Applicant,

Thank you for your future decision to take the time to apply for a position with the National Institute of Precognition Research (NIPR). We expect to receive your application sometime in April of 2025, shortly after your graduation from the graduate program of either the University of Michigan or the University of Wisconsin. Unfortunately, we have decided not to accept you as a candidate for any open positions we may or may not have at that time.

This is not a reflection of your talents and abilities, particularly not at this formative time in your life. NIPR expects to recruit and attract a talented and diverse set of researchers, scientists, statisticians, and entablaturists when it opens its doors officially in 2021. We expect that the process of choosing such individuals will be highly competitive. Based on our projections, it does not appear that you will meet the high standard of individuals we plan on adding to our team.

You may be wondering how we can be so sure that you will even apply to NIPR, much less that your application will be rejected. In fact, we estimate that there is a non-zero probability (1.7% ± 0.973%) that, for various reasons, you will not complete your undergraduate education. Of course, in that instance, you would not even be considered for employment at NIPR. There is also a distinct possibility (1.4% ± 0.783%) that you will complete your undergraduate education with a degree that does not properly equip you for work at NIPR, particularly if you decide to enroll at the University of California-Santa Cruz.

However, the majority of projections (71.7% ± 0.057%) indicate that you will attain an advanced psychology degree, and attend graduate school at a Big Ten university. We intend to send recruiters to all of the schools that you are likely to attend, and it is reasonably certain that you will meet with one of our recruiters, and will subsequently apply for a job with NIPR. There is a minor possibility (2.9% ± 0.873%) that you will not encounter a recruiter due to being stranded in Cabo San Lucas over spring break due to a popular uprising over an increase in the cost of gasoline, but we anticipate you will still seek employment at NIPR in any case.

Please rest assured that the reasons for your rejection by NIPR have very little to do with your studies, or your intellect, or a future embarrassing incident involving Gwen Harper and your father’s Toyota Highlander on the night of your senior prom. Quite simply, we only have room on our team for four junior psychometricians. We have already pre-qualified three applicants for these jobs. (The Joint Guidelines on Precognitive Ethics, to be developed in 2020, prevent me from disclosing their names or backgrounds, in the event that you should seek to alter future history by incapacitating them in some way.) We intend to leave the fourth position temporarily vacant, pending the outcome of several factors, including (but not limited to) the decision of the parents of a highly-qualified applicant on whether or not to move to Colorado, which may result in a higher-than-expected likelihood of developing a dependency on marijuana; the eventual immigration status of another highly-qualified applicant; and the decision of a third highly-qualified applicant on whether to take a position as an exotic dancer to earn money to attend community college. In all three cases, the probabilities overlap to a degree that we are not, at this time, able to offer this position to any of the candidates. However, we are certain (99.9% ± 0.017%) that you will not be considered ahead of them.

We do not wish to, in any way, discourage you from going to graduate school and receiving your master’s degree in psychology. Based on your current level of attainment, we think that it is probable that you will receive several job offers after graduation, including a clinical position at an inpatient drug treatment center in New Jersey (15.7% ± 0.908%), an administrative position with the Michigan prison system (12.5% ± 0.332%) or an adjunct lecturer’s position at a Minnesota community college (8.9% ± 0.404%). All of these are fine entry-level positions and there is a strong possibility (62.8% ± 0.228%) that you will be able to pay your student loans back in a reasonable amount of time.

All of us who will, in the future, make up the team at NIPR wish you the best of success in whatever ventures you eventually decide to engage in. We hope that this rejection will not adversely affect your interest in precognitive research, although we expect (72.4% ± 1.073%) that it will to a degree. Best wishes, and if Gwen Harper offers to introduce you to any of her sorority sisters, we strongly advise you to say yes.

I Was Wrong.

Yes. I was wrong. I was wrong about the 2014 Dallas Cowboys. I was wrong to think that they would go 0-16 after the opening loss to San Francisco, after what may have been the worst quarter in Cowboys history. When the Cowboys started reeling off wins, I was wrong to think that they would regress back to the mean and go 8-8.

After the Seattle game, I went around saying, “The Cowboys are only as good as Tony Romo’s back and DeMarco Murray’s hamstrings.” It looked as if that were true after the Washington game, when the heralded offensive line allowed a Redskins blitzer to put his knee in Romo’s back. It definitely looked as though that were true after the Arizona game, when Brandon Weeden did his impression of Ryan Leaf. But Romo recovered, fought through the pain, and led the Cowboys back to respectability.

And I figured it would end there. I thought before the Thanksgiving game that the Cowboys would finish the year 1-4 by losing all their games in December. It seemed as though that they would, after cratering badly in the Thanksgiving game. But Romo and company pulled up their socks, thrashed the Bears in Chicago, gave the Eagles some much-needed payback in Philadelphia, and beat the holy hell out of the Colts in Dallas before (for once) an adoring home crowd.

And now the Cowboys are NFC East champions.

I was wrong. Period. I was wrong to be pessimistic, wrong to put the sins of Cowboys squads of years past on this team, wrong to think that a Jason Garrett team could be competitive.

Having said that, I think there’s every chance that the Cowboys hork it up in the playoffs. I will be pleased to be wrong about that, too.

The 2015 Independent Author Book Review Karma Challenge

Let me just say at the outset: this is probably a very ill-advised and foolish thing to do. (Like I’ve ever let that stop me from doing something like this before.)

It’s like this, though. I am going to spend the next couple of weeks asking people (as nicely as I can) to review my new novel, WREATHED. These are people I don’t know, who review independent and self-published books, and who typically have a to-be-read list a mile long. I sympathize with this, because I myself am a book reviewer, and like a lot of people, I have a long to-be-read list myself.

The difference is that almost every book I read and review is traditionally-published. I don’t apologize for this; there are a ton of wonderful books that are traditionally-published that I enjoy reading. I write most of my reviews for Bookreporter.com, and they only take traditionally-published books. (Ask me how I know.) I’ve read maybe five self-published novels in the last few years – The First Assassin, by John Miller, Jewball, by Neal Pollack, and A Distant Eden, by Lloyd Tackitt, Ark Royal, by Christopher Nuttall, and its sequel. I only reviewed a couple of them (although I did rate them all on Goodreads) and I didn’t link the review back to this blog (which I’ve corrected while writing this).

So what I want to do is to improve my karma in this area a little bit by doing some good deeds and helping out other independent self-published authors by providing reviews of their books for free. Accordingly, over the course of 2015, I am going to do my best to fulfill:

The 2015 Independent Author Book Review Karma Challenge!!!

Hereinafter are the rules, such as they are.

1. Over the course of 2015, I will accept up to 100 self-published novels for review. I will take the first 100 novels, regardless of genre, number of reviews, or sales rank. (One book per author only, please.)

2. I ask only the following:

a. Novels only, please. No non-fiction or memoirs. No novellas or short story collections. No ten-volume epic sagas or boxed sets.

b. Novels should be in MOBI format, on sale at Amazon, (preferably) listed at Goodreads, and e-mailed to me directly as an attachment. (Please put the word “karma” in the subject line so I’ll see it if it gets caught in the spam filter.) I am going to ignore anything that’s sent in epub or PDF or that I have to go to some other website to use some coupon to get. No audiobooks, either.

c. If you send me erotica, I am probably going to make fun of you.

d. If you sent me shape-shifting were-weasel erotica, I am definitely going to make fun of you.

e. I reserve the right to reject any book for any reason.

f. I would prefer books that have been published in the last couple of years or so. If your book has been out there for ten years and hasn’t gotten any reviews, I am probably not going to touch it.

g. I won’t reject a book JUST because of genre. I mostly read historical fiction and sci-fi. But send what you want.

h. Once I get the 100th book, the challenge is over and I won’t accept any more books for review.

3. What I will do in return:

a. I will send you a quick e-mail letting you know if you’re in the challenge or not. (Please don’t bug me about when I will read it–I promise to have all the books read by the end of the year, but I don’t know when I will read yours, so don’t jog my elbow.)

b. I will at least try to read your book, the first chapter of it anyway. I will stop reading after that if there are multiple spelling and grammar issues, or if the writing is so cheesy that I don’t think I can finish it. (I don’t expect this to be an issue, but fair warning.)

c. If I can get past the first chapter, I will make a good-faith effort to try to finish it, unless I think that it’s just going to be too painful or time-consuming.

d. If that happens, I will send you a reply e-mail to the effect that I didn’t much like your book, and I won’t leave a one-star review or anything mean like that. I might even write a short critique if I get around to it. No promises.

e. If I finish your book, and I don’t like it, I will leave a short two-star review on Goodreads. I will try to be nice, because this is essentially a way for me to gain karma. Having said that, I am kind of a wart, and I am perfectly capable of writing something scathing and horrible if I’m feeling cranky enough. You have been WARNED.

f. If I like your book (oh, how I hope I like your book) I will leave a nice review on Goodreads, and may cross-post it to Amazon and this site if I feel like it.

4. Once the challenge is over, I will write a quick post here with some statistical analysis about the books in the challenge, and how much I liked them, and say something nice about the best book I read, whatever that is.

5. I reserve the right to make whatever other rules I want to whenever I want to, because this is my challenge, and if I find myself drowning in shape-shifter weasel erotica, I will shut it down quicker than you can say Jack Robinson.

So that’s it. If you want to start sending me stuff to read right away, that’s fine, but I probably won’t get around to it until after the holidays. You are not obliged to read or review any of my books, but that’s fine if you do. (I am not interested in any review exchanges or anything like that, sorry.) Let me know if you have any questions in the comments.

LET THE CHALLENGE BEGIN.

The Story That Wasn’t

I never thought it was such a bad story.

It began with a hundred-year-old woman who was quitting her cruddy job as a commercial diver in dockside Philly for a slightly less cruddy job leading tourist diving expeditions in Florida. But the Navy intercepts her on her way south, and convinces her to make a second trip into deep space, as she’s the only person on the planet with direct experience in salvaging a Conestoga-class starship.

Said Conestoga-class starship (the USS SUSQUEHANNA, or “Susie Q”) is, we learn, orbiting a mysterious planetoid around Epsilon Eridani, and emitting a curious digital signature called, somewhat un-imaginatively, the “Liverpool Signal,” because it was all Beatles songs at first. Our heroine is placed in a cold-sleep berth aboard the USS SARATOGA, which is making an unscheduled rendezvous with the SUSQUEHANNA to investigate the situation, and, if possible, bring the SUSQUEHANNA back to Triton Station for refit, because you don’t leave trillion-dollar starships lying around.

So there would have been an away team (it probably would have been called “AWAY TEAM”) made up of our (now) hundred-and-fifty-year-old kick-ass heroine (who has been marinating for fifty years in a virtual-reality simulation of the actual mission and is profoundly pissed off), a naive communications officer who was born (printed, really) aboard ship and has no knowledge of Earth, and a shuttlecraft pilot who certainly should have mentioned that her great-grandfather was in cold-sleep aboard the SUSQUEHANNA before she volunteered for deep-space duty.

And there would have been an alien infestation aboard the “Susie Q,” who would have appeared to the away team on a holodeck set up to look like the set of the old “Cheers” TV show, and they would have been nice and friendly up until the point where they were not. And it would have ended…

Well, I don’t know where it would have ended, because I didn’t finish it. I wrote something else instead, in a different genre, and finished that and published it and am trying desperately to have people notice it.

So. Is Chuck Wendig right? Should you finish your shit?

(looks around for Chuck Wendig)

(don’t see him anywhere)

(checks attic, because use he could be hiding in the attic, you never know with Chuck Wendig)

(deep breath)

No. You don’t have to finish your shit if you don’t want to. It’s okay to quit sometimes.

Notice that I said sometimes. And I can say this because I have finished my shit. I have finished two novels that didn’t get published and are sitting in odd corners of my hard drive, rusting away like the SS UNITED STATES. I have finished two novels where I am the author-publisher, which means that traditional publishers didn’t want them, and shut up. That doesn’t count a buttload of flash fiction that’s published here and elsewhere. (Not to mention four law review articles and three or four other articles in scholarly journals.)

Okay? I can finish my shit. I do finish my shit. But, sometimes, I don’t.

YOUR GUIDELINES WITH REGARD TO FINISHING YOUR SHIT

You should finish your shit. It’s a good idea and it’s good for you, like eating kale, and sometimes it’s bitter, like eating kale, but it doesn’t make your poop green and other than that I’ve got nothing. Finishing your shit is better than not finishing your shit.
You do not have to finish every single solitary piece of your shit, just like you don’t have to eat every single one of the fries that your fry-hating kid won’t touch. Moreover, you shouldn’t. Every writer is familiar with “vampires” – story ideas that sound great in the middle of the night but fall to dust in the light of the morning. My favorite vampire of all time was writing something of a sequel to the great MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN, which would have featured a character based on H.F. Saint (who really did retire to the South of France on his novel-writing fortune) who was a time-traveler. I worked way too hard on that one (even pestering the agent who was reading my stuff, which turned out to not be a good idea) and came away with nothing except the thought that using your book’s ISBN as the tracking number for your Swiss bank account is a phenomenally dumb idea. I didn’t finish that story, and the world is better off.
Ask yourself: Are you dealing with Resistance? Wendig mentions Resistance in passing in his piece, but doesn’t dwell on it. Resistance, as Pressfield cautions us, is always lying, always full of shit. Resistance will always tell you to quit, because it tells everyone to quit. But the thing to remember is that Resistance can’t evaluate your story for you. You have to do that. You have to be honest with yourself. And if what you are writing is, based on your honest opinion, simply not working, it’s all right to quit and try something else.
Only YOU can decide to quit. Not your wife, not your critique partner, not your writing group, not your agent, not Amazon, not the market, not the readers. You. Don’t let anyone else make that decision for you.
Don’t quit because you’re tired. Don’t quit because you’re angry. Don’t quit because you’re unhappy, or because sales are a bit off, or because of the RELENTLESS ONSLAUGHT OF WINTER ON SNOWBALL EARTH. Quit because it doesn’t make economic or artistic sense to keep going.
If you quit, quit. Walk away. Don’t keep going back to it, because it will torture you. Make a clean break.
I am not talking here about giving up entirely. If you quit, start writing something else, something better. This is not giving into despair, it’s a rational decision to give up something that isn’t working in favor of something else that will–something that you can finish, and be proud of.

I don’t like quitting. Quitting isn’t attractive, and it isn’t cool. But when you are bogged down in something that simply isn’t worth finishing, don’t. Do something else. It’s okay. Just do it, don’t beat yourself up about it, and move on to the next thing as quickly as may be.

The Worst-Case Scenario

Of course the Cowboys beat the Giants last night. It’s November. Of course they did. Of course Tony Romo led a stirring fourth-quarter comeback. It’s November. Of course he did.

I don’t hate Tony Romo. He has been a very serviceable quarterback for the Cowboys for a very long time. And every year, he’s done something that’s caused the Cowboys season to be over before it should have. Sometimes that’s just bad luck in getting hurt at the wrong time. More often, it’s incredibly bad decisions at the worst possible times.

This year, though, this year there hasn’t been a game (outside of the Week One stinkeroo against the hated 49ers) where Romo has underperformed. He got mauled by the Redskins–hard to blame him for losing that one, the way he got flattened, and of course wasn’t playing against the Cardinals. But when he’s played this year, he’s done well, if not heroically.

I think Tony Romo has one more good game in him. I think the Cowboys will win on Thursday. I think they will win nine games this year for what seems like the first time in forever.

And I think that the Cowboys will lose all four games in December, finish 9-7, miss the playoffs, and make me very, very unhappy.

This would require very bad, painful losses at Chicago and at Washington, teams that should be patsies at best. I am going to predict that they lose both games. I am basing this on years of experience at being a Cowboys fan, and because this defense could not tackle Mother Teresa in a flag football game.

I don’t know how this will happen, but it is what I believe will happen.

Having said that–even if it happens, just this way, I am going to be deeply disappointed and hurt by the outcome. I want to believe I’m wrong. I want to believe that this team is better than I think it is, that it has lost the habit of giving games away, that it has a quarterback that can take them to the post-season and make noise there.

I just know what the worst-case scenario is, and I hope the Cowboys can rise above it. It would be nice to be wrong, just once.

Go Home, Self-Publishing, You’re Drunk

I mean, seriously.

It’s just $2.99, so you have that going for it.

Description (sic):

WARNING: This 3,300+ words story features graphic descriptions of very adult situations of MANY KINDS, some of them EXTREMEly unusual, and many involving a LOT OF CAKE.

It’s Chili Time, Arctic Explorers

When I was growing up, my favorite writer was Blackie Sherrod, a sports columnist in the old Dallas Times Herald, and later in the august and serene Dallas Morning News. Blackie said that you should always wait until after the second hard freeze to make chili. And that’s all well and good, but I live in New Jersey, and we’ve already had our first snowfall, and I have time NOW to make chili and write about it. And there’s a polar vortex coming, don’t you know. So I’m going to jump the gun a little bit.

ASSEMBLE YOUR CHILI.

The Meat

This particular chili I am making today has three meat ingredients:

1. Two pounds of smoked beef brisket, cubed

2. One pound of lean ground beef

3. One pound of ground pork

Now, I am not doctrinaire in your meat selection here. I made some venison chili last year, and it was delicious. I have no objection to using turkey if you want that. I like ground turkey in chili just fine. If you want to use stew meat and just stew meat, and have the patience to cook your chili until the stew meat breaks all the way down, go for it. What I’m doing here is making a chili that’s half-chunky and half-not, because that’s what I want to go for here. What you want to do is sear your meat, get it nice and cooked with a lot of crusty bits, and then throw it in your chili pot and cover with your chili liquids:

The Liquids

What I am using here is:

1. One bottle of Shiner Bock, because Texas

2. Two cans of generic store-brand tomato sauce

3. An equivalent amount of water (empty out the tomato sauce can into the chili, fill it up with water from the sink, empty out the water into the chili).

Basically, you want to have enough water to cover the meat, and to distribute your chili spices:

The Spices

I put in chili powder (a whole bunch of it), cumin, paprika, and salt. If you want to put in something spicier, by all means do it. (I am sharing my chili with my wife, who is not a big fan of hot and spicy food, so I have to moderate the spices in the recipe.) By all means, add in cayenne pepper, or sriracha sauce, or Tabasco, or habanero anything, and whatever the hell else that floats your boat. (I happen to like putting sweet-pickled jalapeno slices in mine.) Once you have all the spices stirred in, cover your chili, let it cook on low, and walk over to the stove.

The Extras

What I did this time was to dice up a Vidalia onion and caramelize the living hell out of it. I caramelized that onion the way that I want God Almighty to caramelize Jerry Jones’s black heart in Hell. Then I tossed it into the chili. I have no idea how this is going to turn out and don’t care because it’s going to be beautiful, you guys.

Right this minute, I have about fifteen jalapeno peppers sitting in the oven that I’ve dry-roasted and I am going to give serious consideration to dicing at least some of them once they’ve cooled down a bit. I don’t know if they’ll go in the main chili just yet, or just my bowl–I’ll need to taste-test it a bit.

At some point, yes, I am going to put some masa in the chili to thicken it a little bit. If it gets too thick, I have a can of Ro-Tel that I’m going to use to thin it out a bit, and add some more flavor to the equation.

So that’s it. The beautiful chili is in my Crock-Pot right now, simmering. The connective tissues of the brisket are breaking down ever so slightly. The spices are integrating with the liquids. Nothing to do but wait. And there’s nothing else, not one thing, that needs to be added right now. Nothing.

 

 

 

How a Random Tweet From a Theater Critic Inspired My New Novel

I wish I had favorited the tweet, but I didn’t, and I couldn’t bring it up on a quick Google search. I found this tweet, though, and it’s close enough:

Okay. So, I follow Terry Teachout on Twitter, and he’s a playwright and author and drama critic in New York, and I am a work-a-daddy lawyer in beautiful downtown Trenton, New Jersey. I don’t think we have much in common except politics (we’ve both written for National Review Online, although not for several years for either of us) and an appreciation of country music.

The actual tweet (and again, I don’t have it, and am too lazy to go winding through Teachout’s Twitter timeline to find it) was either a link to this Commentary review of a book about country-music legend George Jones, or a link to the book itself, endearingly entitled “He Stopped Loving Her Today: George Jones, Billy Sherrill, and the Pretty-Much Totally True Story of the Making of the Greatest Country Record of All Time.” Either way, it was enough to encourage me to buy the book (written by Jack Isenhour) and read it closely.

This is the point of the story where I need to direct people to the actual song, in case they haven’t heard it. (This is not a very good version, and has Jones kind of mangling the words a little, and of course does not have the Billy Sherrill production values that Isenhour’s book dissects, but it’s George Jones singing “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” what more do you want?

Okay. Now, how do you get from that song, to a whole contemporary romance novel set in New Jersey? Well, for that (as he said, rubbing his hands together), you’ll have to read the book. What I can say is that the book is about a funeral, and a woman who returns from the deep past to attend said funeral, and the events that happen afterward, and that there are at least a few references there to George Jones songs, and lost love, and heartbreak.

But the amazing thing that happened, or at least I think so, is this: Bobby Braddock and Curly Putnam sat down and wrote a song together, and that got Billy Sherrill to put together the musicians and the arrangement, and that got George Jones to be just sober enough to get into the studio and make a hit record, and that got Jack Isenhour to write a book about it, and that got Terry Teachout to write a book review about it, and when George Jones died, Teachout (using a technology that no one imagined in 1980) tweeted about it, and I saw the tweet, read the book, and wrote a novel incorporating its themes. If even one of those things doesn’t happen, I end up doing something else with my time, and you don’t have a nice book to read, or if you do, you have a different one, probably about a spaceship. So there you go, and thanks to all the good people who helped make it happen.

Older

This happens, occasionally. You’re out with your twin daughters, and some random person will come up to you and say how cute or how well-behaved they are. I am a cynic and a curmudgeon and generally a horrible person, and so I accept such comments for what little they’re worth. Yes, they are cute. Yes, they are behaving themselves right now, although you wouldn’t know that from the way that Child B threw a screaming fit about having to share her library book with Child A. Okay, fine. Let’s move on.

And then, the random person will say, “Which one is older?”

I am asking you, as a human being, as a parent, as a cynic and a curmudgeon and generally a horrible person, to STOP DOING THAT.

Here’s the thing:

You don’t care which of my kids is older. You really don’t. Knowing the answer as to which of my kids is one minute older than the other one does nothing, absolutely nothing at all, for you. It is not knowledge that you will retain for more than ten minutes. Even if you do manage to remember, what good will the information do you? Nothing at all.
There is such a thing as “idle curiosity.” I, myself, spent part of my morning just now reading the Wikipedia article on Jared Leto’s band, after I saw someone with an odd bumper sticker that turned out to be a reference to said band. Okay, that’s idle curiosity, emphasis on the “idle.” But, you know, in the unlikely event that I am ever, you know, in a conversation about Jared Leto, I can say, “He has a band that plays horrible music.” You see the difference? That’s potentially useful information there.
No, what you are doing is what’s called “idle chit-chat,” again, emphasis on the “idle.” When you say, “which one is older,” you are letting your mouth operate independently from your brain. It is one of the things that society, for some inscrutable reason, has drilled it into people’s heads as something that you say to twin parents. (The other main one of these things is “Are they identical.” My kids are not identical, and they look less identical now than they ever did, so we don’t get that question that much anymore.)
My kids don’t know which of them is older. We have not told them and I don’t expect that they will ever know. There is no reason that Child A should know that she is a minute older than Child B. There is nothing positive that she can do with the information, and nothing at all to be gained by having Child B feel inferior for no good reason.

If you ask, I am going to say, “We don’t discuss that.” I do not say, “That is none of your business, and you’re a idiot for asking,” even though that is true, because I am trying to be as nice as I can be, with the qualification that I am a cynic and a curmudgeon and basically a horrible person. I am being nice, again, by asking you not to ask me that anymore, because it is none of your business, and quite frankly, I am doing all I can just to make sure that my kids aren’t actively trying to poke things in each other’s eyes at any given moment.