Brendan Halpin's Blog, page 12

Vegetarian FAQ!

When people find out that I'm a vegetarian, they often have a lot of questions (and comments, but FAQ&C just doesn't have the same ring to it.)  So I thought I'd answer a few here.  Maybe I can just give out this link in the future.

How long have you been a vegetarian?

As of this writing, 22 and a half years. 

Why are you a vegetarian? 

I became a vegetarian because I was uncomfortable eating meat.  This had a lot to do with deforestation, at the time (1991). There was a lot of concern about the rainforests being cut down for cattle pasture, and I had read some stuff about the terrible environmental effects of the meat industry, so I figured not eating it could be a small thing I could do to help with environmental issues.  Also, once in college I teased a horrible girl about her rabbit fur coat, and she asked,  "when's the last time you had a cheeseburger?"  I hated the fact that she was right.  Later, when I got a dog and learned a little more about how animals on factory farms live (hint: they are tortured to death over a long period of time), I got really uncomfortable with supporting that. (Except for the ones on dairy farms.)

So, do you think you're better than me?

Yes, but not because I'm a vegetarian and you're not.  I am an American in 2013 and therefore complicit in all kinds of human and animal suffering.  I think everybody has an obligation to do what they can to reduce the horror in the world, but it's going to be a different thing for everybody.  I chose to not eat meat because I've always been more of a carb guy anyway, so being a vegetarian was not a big sacrifice for me.  My wife is the best person I know, and she's not a vegetarian. 

Do you mind if I eat this tripe sandwich in front of you?

I honestly don't give a shit what you eat, and I think it would be quite rude of me to make disapproving comments about your food, especially while you're eating it.

Why are you always evangelizing about your diet?

I actually never do this.  I meant it when I said I don't give a shit what you eat.  This may come as a shock, but my dietary choices are not about you.

Can you eat fish?

I can. I can eat beef, pork,  blood sausage, and fish, and haggis, and just about anything. But I choose not to. 

Do you eat fish?

Fish are not vegetables.

Why are you such a humorless scold?  Why can't you just enjoy life?

I can't really make people believe this, but being a vegetarian is not some noble ascetic sacrifice for me.  I eat what I want to eat. As my frame will attest, I love to eat. Cooking and eating are two of the greatest pleasures of my life. And, as stated above, I don't give a shit what you eat. 

A ha!  But you wear leather shoes!  And you eat cheese!  Hypocrite!

You are correct. As noted above, I am complicit in all kinds of human and animal suffering.  The fact that I don't do everything seems like a particularly cynical justification for doing nothing.

I could never be a vegetarian.

Yes you could.  You just don't want to.  Which, as noted above, is fine.  This is why I'm not a vegan.  I don't want to be.  (I mean, I actually kind of want to be, but I want cheese more.)

What do you eat?

It's 2013, and Google exists. I feel like you should stop asking me this. 

How do you get your protein?

What an unusually specific question this is. Do you quiz everyone on their nutritional intake?  I think this question is actually more about you than me--like you want to prove that my diet is unsafe, which means that you can't follow it. You know that this cult of protein is not a real thing, right? That is to say the idea that you need a big hunk of protein in the middle of your plate in order to be properly fed is bullshit. But, anyway, I eat beans and tofu and hummus and felafel and cheese and the occasional vegetarian sausage or tofurky sandwich.

Eww! Vegetarian sausage? Tofurky? How do you eat that crap?

I believe it's rude to mock what other people eat, but I do think it's odd that people who eat actual sausage (as I did, happily for years--loved me some Bob Evans sausage gravy. And some deep-fried haggis) and therefore presumably know a bit about how actual sausage is made tell me that my food is gross.

Are your children vegetarian?

One is and two are not.  And you often ask this in this tone like, "you wouldn't possibly subject a child to this madness, would you?" My elder daughter has never eaten meat in her sixteen and a half years of life.

But, so, you have to take her to the ER for periodic emergency meat infusions due to your irresponsible parenting, right? She's a sickly and pathetic waif, right?

Um. No.  You don't need to eat meat to grow up healthy and happy.

But bacon!  How do you live without bacon?  You totally crave bacon, right?

Jesus, I know you like bacon. You never stop talking about it.  The half of the internet that's not unfunny cat memes is about bacon.  I'm glad you like bacon.  I never really liked it that much--for me it was one of those foods that smells way better than it tastes.

 

 

 

Escape From Assland

Today is the day!  My new novel, written with my friend Trish Cook, arrives in bookstores and online! We originally called it Escape From Assland, but it was determined that too many retail outlets would be put off by the word "ass" in the title, and so the book became A Really Awesome Mess.

I was going to talk about how great this book is, but every writer thinks their own book is great.  In this case, it's safe to say this book has gotten more positive early reviews than anything else I've ever written.  So I'll leave it to them to talk about the book, with my thanks!

"I’ll definitely be looking out for more books by Halpin and Cook – they make a brilliant team."

"What I enjoyed most was definitely the humor, which I wasn't really expecting."

"...if you read something and you just want more no matter what that more would be
then that makes the book you just read pretty fantastic."

"Cook and Halpin manage to provide many laughs in spite of the tough subject matter."

 

"The characters were so fun and some of the greatest characters I’ve met."

"ALL THE FEELS were felt."

"The basis of the book surrounds the group of unlikely friends who are experiencing self loathing, mental illnesses or issues with social interaction, but yet it rises above the serious diagnosis of each teen in a positive, fun and hysterical light.

I absolutely loved it."

"It's probably the most honest portrayal of teenagers that I have ever read in a
YA novel."

"The discussion of these admittedly heavy issues never feels message-y or didactic; it just feels real."

"On authenticity alone, this book is AMAZING, you guys. It presents residential treatment for teens the way it really is, and I can say that as someone who spent years working in the trenches."

"This book should not be missed."

"A Really Awesome Mess was a great, fulfilling read that made me feel good while reading it."

"Oh goodness, I loved this book.  It's snarky and sarcastic, sad and cynical, quippy and crass...a full range of teenage emotion.  With some serious laugh-out-loud moments."

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dig Dug and the Lie of Nostalgia

Just back from a week's vacation in New Hampshire, where I connected with beloved family members I see too rarely.

One day all but one of the male family members took a road trip to Funspot in Laconia, which is indeed a fun spot and which houses the American Classic Arcade Museum, which sounds awfully classy. Thankfully, it's not. Said "museum" is actually an old-school arcade. There are some informational plaques about various games (and I actually longed for more of this, as I found the ones that were there very interesting), but it's mostly a collection of classic arcade games that you can play for a quarter. Or actually less, since I got 100 tokens for 20 bucks.  Bargain!

We stayed there for 2 hours, and at first, I was in heaven, walking around and seeing all the games I used to play with my pal Eric at Aladdin's Castle in the Beechmont Mall back in the 80's (and yes, okay, the late 70's). I walked around and marveled at the fact that they had not just the expected Pac Man, Space Invaders, and Donkey Kong, but also Red Baron (the only game I was ever any good at!), Xevious, Gorf (the Gorf being is tired!), both Tron games, Rampage...well, you get the idea. 

And then I touched base with the boy, with whom I had split my 100 tokens, and he said to me, "So, did these games always suck this bad?"

By this point, I was getting screen fatigue and had not managed to get through many of my tokens.  "Yeah," I reluctantly admitted, "they did."

Don't get me wrong--I enjoyed the 2 hours we spent there.  And it was fun for me to see the artifacts of my childhood and adolescence still standing. My childhood home was destroyed years ago, and my high school has been remodeled beyond recognition, so it was comforting to see that not all physical evidence of the time in which I grew up has vanished.

But yeah, the games suck. And they always sucked.  Because these games were created with the aim of sucking as many quarters out of you as possible in as short a time as possible.  So they are really hard and not particularly satisyfing.  The boy and I had some success at Rampage, but after about 3 levels, it became clear that it was going to be pretty much the same thing over and over again.  The scenery changed in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but the gameplay was dull. The games that have aged the best are actually the pinball games, where the designers simply can't manage your gameplay and which therefore still feel consistently surprising in a way the video games that killed them don't. (Gauntlet II was also decent--dumb but actually fairly decent because there are so many ways to deal with what you encounter. I like Smash TV for the same reason.)

It was an unusual and, I think, lucky experience to have the nostalgic glow of delight followed so quickly by the disappointment of actuallly getting to experience the object of nostalgia again.

I'm already at an age where I feel nostalgia for the past at least as often as excitement for the future, and I think this visit was a good reminder for me that nostalgia is always a lie.  Some things from the past were aweseome, and some things from the past totally sucked. Nostalgia is the lie that enhances the awesome and glosses over the suck.  So whenever anybody says that anything--games, music, sports, music, education, politics, whatever--used to be better, remember that they're lying to you.  And perhaps have a little compassion for them because they are lying to themselves. 

Tolerance for Card

I have blogged about Orson Scott Card before. The column that he wrote for Mormon Times in which he makes thinly-veiled threats of anti-government violence is no longer available in it's original form, but the relevant quote is still available here. And here's a nice catalog of his bigotry.

I used to be quite alarmed about whether he was going to use whatever money he got from his fiction to fund the uprising he wrote about in that column.  But his latest pronouncement--asking for "tolerance" and declaring the issue of gay marriage "moot"-- shows that he's more committed to his bank account than his hatred.  I guess even bigots have their price.

I still think he'll use his money to fund hate groups like the National Organization for Marriage, and I will not be seeing Ender's Game.  And I do think there's a distinction here between an artist's personal views and an artist being a prominent hate activist, which is what Card has become.  Perhaps I'm splitting hairs here, but it does feel to me that there is a distinction between an artist who happens to be a dick (lookin' at  you, Harlan Ellison), an artist who has political views I don't agree with (hi, Dan Simmons!), and an artist who is a pro-bigotry activist. 

Again, maybe I'm splitting hairs because I don't want to research the views of every author I read.

But what I'd like to address is Card's plea for "tolerance."

I'm sure many other people have pointed out that Card is asking for something he hasn't shown. I'd like to explore something else.

I stopped reading Card years and years ago, before I knew about his bigotry, because it was clear to me that he was writing the same story over and over and over again.  The story is this: the specialest boy in the whole wide world overcomes adversity, which always includes the threat of possibly fatal violence at the hands of an older male relative who is threatened by the boys specialness.

I remember a particularly sexualized threat of violence in Ender's Game--the shower scene. I can't remember any other cases where the violence seemed sexualized, but I don't remember any of the other books very clearly. In any case, a boy being terrorized by an older male relative who should love and protect him is a prominent theme in Card's work.

I read about (but did not read, because why would I, or anybody for that matter) Card's book Hamlet's Father, in which the titular character is a pedophile who rapes a bunch of boys, thereby turning them gay.

You can draw your own conclusions about what's happened in Orson Scott Card's life.  I have drawn mine.

And so I can, based on my unfounded speculation extrapolated from his work, have some compassion for this dude.  Hatemongers like this aren't born--their souls are twisted into deformity by other people.  And for that, I have compassion.

But not tolerance. 

Because here's the thing. Many many people have been through incredibly awful things in their lives. Things that are impossible to get over. 

But at a certain point in your life, you have  a responsibility to the rest of the world to examine yourself and do the best you can possibly do to ensure that you don't become someone inflicting harm on others. 

Having lost my father at age 9, I was kind of an angry kid and used to lash out verbally a lot. And I felt kind of justified taking shots at the world that had wounded me. But it wasn't the people in the world who had wounded me, and there came a day (I think at some point when I was 17 or 18) when I realized I was becoming a real dick, and that I was driving people away with my nastiness, thereby confirming my fear that I was going to lose people who were important to me.  Any regular reader of this space can confirm that I'm still kind of a dick, but believe me when I say it used to be much worse.  So I made a still-ongoing, not-entirely-successful attempt to curb my dickishness.

Like I said, I'm not there yet.  But I've realized that I'm not in the right when I'm  punishing people who have no blame for what has happened to me.  And I think everyone has a responsibility to do the same.

You can't ask for tolerance when you're hurting people.  You can only ask for forgiveness. 

I wish Card would do that.  But until he does, the hell with him and his movie.

Breaking Up With Football

Dear Football:

We had some good times.  Remember the Bengals' improbable "Who Dey" run that ended in Super Bowl 16?  Remember all those Sunday afternoons when I worked at a work-study "job" in my dorm that involved being the official watcher of the big screen TV in the lounge? Remember the Patriots' victory in the superbowl in 2002?  Great memories all. 

And yet, it's time for us to break up. We've been growing apart for a while, but it's finally time for me to say goodbye.

I know-- you want to know why.  You think we had a good thing going. After all, I can't afford tickets, and you're way better on TV than in person! 

But I've been overlooking a lot of things for a long time. Things I just can't overlook anymore. 

Sure you're a violent game, but I just don't think we can continue to deny that your off-field culture is violent and more than a little rapey.

I'm not just talking about Aaron Hernandez here, though of course that has been in the news a lot lately.  I'm talking about Steubenville and Notre Dame and Penn State and the Naval Academy and everywhere else that football players and coaches and administrators do terrible things.  Maybe this has to do with the corruption that follows money around. But you don't hear about big time basketball programs having these kinds of problems.  Nor do the top-level athletes in any other sport rack up the kind of arrest records that football players have. (Here's a handy site where you can compare if you don't believe me.)

And ultimately, I don't care why this happens.  I just know that it does, and it makes me increasingly uncomfortable. As does the fact that so many of the people who play the game professionally are ruined by it.  Did you read this article?  It's actually quite heartbreaking.  And it's a shame that ever since the research on concussions and football started breaking, most of the coverage has been around, "what can we do to preserve this game in light of this information?"

Well, I'm going to propose this: we don't preserve it.  I think it's probably time for you to go the way of bear baiting and gladiatorial combat and all kinds of other spectacles that people used to enjoy and ultimately decided were too cruel to continue. 

I just feel like if I continue to watch you or care about you, I'll be supporting your toxic culture as well as the cavalier attitude you take with your players' brains. 

Well, the hell with that.  There are other games.  We're over.

 

Authors Reading Reviews

When it comes to reading reviews of our work, there are two kinds of authors: those who read everything and those who claim they don't.

I thought of this the other day when I came across a goodreads review of one of my books in which the author of the review said she felt constrained in what she could say by the knowledge that I read the goodreads reviews.

To which I have the following response:

Please go ahead and criticize my book if you think it deserves it.  I can take it.  It's part of my job.  I love most of my books, but I don't think I am that one writer in the universe whose work is going to please everyone.  Most of the criticisms are fair and accurate and just reflect the fact that we all have different taste.  Some folks complained about the ending of Tessa Masterson Will Go To Prom.  I knew it was fairy-tale-ish when I wrote it, and I love it for that reason, but you might not.  Which is fine. 

My favorite parts of Jenna and Jonah's Fauxmance are the parts at the Shakespeare festival.  Many readers didn't like these parts and wished the action of the novel had stayed in Hollywood.  Fair enough! If you didn't like the move to Oregon, I get it.  We just disagree on this. 

Most of the early response to A Really Awesome Mess has been positive, but the few negative reviews seem to focus on the tone.  Trish and I made a deliberate choice to try to write about very serious issues that are very close to both of our hearts while still having a book that overall felt like a fun read.  We are both really proud of the book and feel like we made the right choice.  But some readers won't.  Which is fine! 

All of which is to say, I obviously write because I want people to like my books, but I know some people won't like them and some of the people who do like them will have quibbles, as I do with just about every book I read, even the ones I like a lot. 

Having said all that, it's a good idea (and something I try to keep in mind in my own reviews) to keep your criticism on the book and not on the author.  "This is a shitty book" is a fine piece of criticism. "You are a shitty person" is not.  One thing that all authors hate is having their minds read.   So maybe skip the "Author X is obviously trying to be...." whatever.  Literally every time this criticism has been leveled at me, it has been suggested that I was trying to imitate a book I hadn't read. 

All I'm saying is, if knowing the author is going to read your makes you treat them with the civility that all humans deserve, cool.  If knowing the author is going to read your review makes you feel like you can't be critical, please reconsider. We all benefit from passionate discussion of this art form, and if an author tees off on you because you wrote a bad review, then that author is a baby who deserves the public shaming they'll get as a result.

Take Me To the Pilot

It's a busy summer here at Halpin World Headquarters!  Read through the entire update for a free treat!

 

Paperbacks:

Both Tessa Masterson Will Go to Prom and Notes from the Blender are now available in paperback and ready to be snapped up!

(And both, I should add, are ALA Rainbow List selections.) 

Hardcover:

A Really Awesome Mess is coming out on July 23, but you probably could pre-order it if you felt so moved.  I'm really proud of how we dealt with pretty serious subject matter without being a relentless bummer in this book. There's serious stuff in here, but you will finish with a smile on your face. 

Ebook Sale:

For a limited time, Seamus Cooper's homage to EC Comics-Style Horror, HP Lovecraft, Humanoids from the Deep, and The Jersey Shore,  entitled Terror at the Shore, is now available for 99 cents for Kindle, Nook, and Kobo.  It's a hell of a beach read.

Works in Progress:

Kickstarter-funded Enter the Bluebird is still being edited, making it even more awesome than it was before.  I estimate that we are about two-thirds of the way through the edits.  Backers will have their ebooks within a month and their hard copies soon thereafter.  The book will be on sale to the general public in the fall.  I'll be sure to spam you let you know as soon as it's ready.

Seamus Cooper's sword-and-sorcery parody Blomi: A Sorcerer's Tale is going to be serialized on the web (for free!) beginning late this year.  When the entire serial is complete, I'll bundle it all up and sell it as an ebook.

 

Take Me to the Pilot:

Donorboy fans!  I adapted my bestselling novel (that is to say, the one of mine that has sold the best. It wasn't a bestseller according to the New York Times or Amazon or USA Today or anything. But what do they know?) into a TV pilot.  I offer it here as a little free nugget of goodness with my thanks for supporting me and my work for so long!  I'm posting under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license, which means you can send it to anybody you want as long as you keep my name on it and you can "remix it" if you feel like doing that. You just can't make any money off it without talking to me first.  (And if you think you can make some money off it, by all means talk to me!)

Download it here!

 

 

Why I Need an Editor (and you do too)

Work on my kickstarted YA noir superhero novel Enter the Bluebird continues.  We're about a third of the way through the edits, and working on this has made me really appreciate both my editor on this project and the work of editors in general.

With publishing an ebook now an absurdly easy task, it's probably pretty tempting, especially for those of us with an eye for spelling and punctuation mistakes, to say "forget the editor! I'll just put it up there!" (Ahem.  I may know of a project that was done this way.)

But it's really important to get fresh eyes on your work.  Because when you're deep into a project, you stop being able to see it as someone who is not you might see it.  And people who are not you are, after all, your audience.  

I'm getting notes on Enter the Bluebird asking for clarification of stuff that was perfectly clear--in my mind. Not so much on the page, as it turns out. I have read this book at least three times after writing it and never saw this stuff.  There are parts that I knew needed work, but Deb is having me work on the parts I didn't know needed work.  

That's why this book is going to be freaking top shelf, and that's why we all need editors.

For more evidence, let's turn to the world of popular music.  Most of the best rock and roll songs are written either by teams or in the context of a longstanding group.  Lennon/McCartney, Jagger/Richards, Morrissey/Marr, Strummer/Jones, etc. etc.  And none of these guys has equalled on their own what they did as part of a collaboration.  I don't think that popular music is necessarily a collaborative art form--I think it's just that each member of the team is acting as an informal editor keeping the worst impulses of the other in check. Even in groups with one songwriter, I believe the other members of the group are there calling bullshit on stuff that doesn't work.  Or perhaps it's even that songwriters internalize the voice of the other group members and won't even bring them a song that's not going to work because they are imagining the response.  So Pete Townshend pretty much only wrote good songs with the Who, Sting strangely managed to get both more pretentious and cheesier without the Police, and Daryl Hall's solo efforts always fell flat. (Now we finally know what John Oates did!)

I think it's really important for anyone who is creating anything to have someone involved in the process who is supportive but not inherently impressed with you .  Somebody who can look at what you've done and say, "wow, this part is awesome!  And this other part really isn't." 

Rich People Getting Their Feelings Hurt

I cannot possibly jump into every online controversy that pisses me off, so I'm issuing this blanket statement. 

I no longer want to hear about rich people getting their feelings hurt. 

Let me clarify.  Rich people are, of course, people, and, as a result, it is a shame when they get their feelings hurt.  But it is not a social justice issue.

And yet on the internet, rich people getting their feelings hurt gets conflated with actual injustice all the time.  And they are not the same thing.  

A few weeks back, lots of people were sharing this New York Times piece about a guy who decided to boycott a deli because an employee of the deli accused Forest Whitaker of shoplifting.  This was supposed to be some kind of big thing about racism and how everybody's racist and his wife's bigotry is totally justified or something.  

But here's the thing: at the end of the day, whose life would you rather have: the guy working for maybe 10 bucks an hour in a Manhattan deli, or the millionaire actor?  If you said the deli guy, you are either profoundly racist or profoundly stupid.

Remember the controversy when Massachusetts screwed over foster kids with empty promises of free college tuition?  Me neither. Like most things that only affect the most vulnerable members of our society, it went pretty much unnoticed. But I know every time Jodi Picoult gets pissed at the New York Times.

It sucks to get your feelings hurt. It sucks to be humiliated by assholes. 

You know who gets humiliated by assholes every day? Poor people!  If you've never been broke enough to experience the kind of humiliation that millions of people in this country experience on a daily basis, good for you. If you have, you know what I'm talking about.

We live in a society where the game is rigged to screw poor people, and where people who are not poor benefit from systems of oppression.  If you are an economically successful person in this country--male, female, black, white, straight, gay, whatever-- you benefit from these systems.  And it's true that sometimes your class privilege may be incomplete and someone might hurt your feelings.  But you know what? At the end of the day, you are part of the ruling class of this country.  I don't want assholes to hurt your feelings, but let's not confuse this phenomenon with actual oppression.

And I think there's a danger in all this, which is that people conflate sharing some article about a rich person's feelings with actually taking a stand on an issue of consequence.  I think people can overlook their own complicity in oppression by complaining about how some other members of the ruling class have it better than them.

I know life's winners will never stop complaining that there is someone else who is maybe winning a little more than they are.  But I do wish that we could stop pretending that this is an issue of societal importance when it's really just a case of rich people getting their feelings hurt.

 

Thoughts From Boston 4: Accelerants

Catcher in the Rye. Metallica. Marilyn Manson.  Video Games. These are some of the things that have been blamed for heinous acts in my lifetime.

I have consistently argued that the fact that millions of people enjoy these things without ever doing anything incredibly heinous is pretty convincing evidence that they don't "cause" bad behavior.

But Stephen King withdrew his school shooting book, Rage, from publication after a few school shooters were found to have it in their posession.  Here's what he said: I don’t think that any kid was driven to an act of violence by a Metallica record, or by a Mariliyn Manson CD, or by a Stephen King novel, but I do think those things can act as accelerants.

It struck me that the elder brother's interest in religious extremism was just that: an accelerant.  It's just a fact that most of the poeple who are exposed to even the most virulent religious-based hatred don't ultimately end up becoming terrorists as a result.  

Perhaps that's because most people see through the obvious cynicism and deception of the (usually) old men who preach martyrdom: they're not doing it themselves.  The leaders of religious hate groups seek out vulnerable and/or disturbed young people to risk or sacrifice their lives because it's better to die for your beliefs than to live in a corrupt world, but the leaders keep living in this corrupt world.  Because they like being alive.  Because whatever the torments of living in a world where gays can get married, where abortion is legal, where porn is just a mouse click away, or whatever offends their version of God, the leaders of these religious sects always prefer the real and quantifiable perks of living in this world to the theoretical perks of dying for a cause. 

So I think we have to look at the elder brother's flirtation with religious-based hatred not as the cause of his actions, but as an accelarant: they gave a sick and violent young man a direction for his violence.