Some stories I loved in 2020

Posting any kind of round-up of 2020 fills me with a sense of pressure to comment on the hell year that we all just lived through . . . except we’re still kind of living through it. In 2020 I stopped being able to hang out with my friends in meatspace, stopped being able to go to karaoke, stopped being able to go to theaters, stopped being able to go to restaurants, stopped having my daily Starbucks. Still went to the day job, though, only now it was this weird hybrid-virtual thing with masks and the everpresent fear of catching a deadly disease that had already killed one of my friends.

All of which is still true.

I did have one new story come out, which hardly anybody read or liked or ever mentioned again.

So yeah, the less time spent recapping 2020, the better.

On the other hand, I read more than I have in years, and, with my internet being often overwhelmed by the effects of a world gone virtual, many times reading felt like the last little bit of human contact left in my life. I’m immensely grateful to the authors I read for helping me get through a difficult time. Over on twitter, I used the hashtag #labyrinthrat2020reads to call attention to stories I enjoyed that I thought other folks should know about. Here are a handful more terrific stories I encourage you to have a look at.

As I write this, there is a little over a week left to nominate for the Nebula Awards, and almost exactly a month left to nominate for the Hugo Awards. If you are still looking for short work to round out your ballot, maybe take a look at these stories:

“Flashlight Man,” by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor: I get a little more into short horror with every passing year, it seems. This is the sort of delicious little horror short story I could imagine being told by the light of, well, a flashlight, in a summer camp cabin. Read it and feel like a kid again . . . a terrified kid.

“This is How the Rain Falls,” by M. K. Hutchins: This short story was tiny, but heartbreaking and beautiful. It made me think of how trauma makes us less able to be our genuine selves, and more protective of what we have left, and . . . yeah.

“We Are the Flower,” by Claire Humphrey: This is just a heart-aching and beautiful ghost story.

“Twenty-Seven Gifts I Saved For You,” by Filip Wiltgren: This short story is a great example of how futuristic extrapolation can be used to power a gripping and lovely story.

“Rat and Finch Are Friends,” by Innocent Chizaram Ilo: This short story is quite possibly my favorite this year. It is a heartbreaking and beautiful story about how sometimes the ones who cut us the most deeply are the ones who love us, and who think they’re hurting us for our own good.

“The Author’s Wife vs. the Giant Robot,” by Adam-Troy Castro: I really enjoyed this delightfully meta novelette—it reminded me of discussions Lisa and I have had over each others’ works in progress. And at the end of it all, what I took from the story, about how we don’t generally know when our end will come, and about not letting the time we do have go to waste, spoke to me.

“Ask the Fireflies,” by R. P. Sand: This novelette pushed my tolerance for abeyance to its limit. About a quarter of the way in, I was lost, not clear on what kind of aliens I was reading about, what was happening, what was real and what was imaginary. The author really committed to not giving the reader anything outside of the narrator’s perceptions. But as it all coalesced for me, that choice really paid off. The story was gripping and the resolution powerful, and it was all the more powerful because I had to do a little more work to piece it together.

“To Look Forward,” by Osashon Ize-Iyamu: This was a story to read slowly, lest I move on before some image finished coalescing. A story about leaving childhood behind, about being pressured to be who other people want you to be, about believing (wrongly) that everybody else has their shit together and you alone do not. This story does a really nice job of showing simultaneously that childhood can be a harbor and yet that it can be one whose safety is illusory.

As I post these descriptions, I sense a theme. *grin* I definitely gravitate toward the heart-aching. Or maybe that’s what struck a chord the most this year. Anyway, if you find any stories you love in this list, please let me know!

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Last Day of School Selfie

My what interesting times we have lived through. This morning we had a parade honoring our graduating seniors–they drove through the campus with their families, in their decorated cars, recording on their phones and taking selfies, while we waved, clapped, cheered, and made lots of noise.

I did not expect how this would wreck me emotionally. First, I noticed that the more decorated a car was, the more verklempt I became. It’s like, you’ve had all the pomp and circumstances of this rite of passage taken from you. Your prom. Your spring sports. Your Odyssey of the Mind competition (okay, I mean my Odyssey of the Mind competition, but still). And this is what you get. Driving through campus in a car your parents attached balloons to, no hugs, no handshakes, but for all that, even as it seems inadequate, it is festive. I don’t know. I feel very strongly every which possible way.

But also, tomorrow I’m attending a celebration of life for an alumn, a kid I thought the world of, gone much too soon. And I saw these kids being driven past, sitting with their torsos half out the window, laughing and waving, and I saw him in each of them.

Life is short, and capricious, and we spend too much of it judging, angry, fighting. Give somebody a hug, when you can.

 

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Some great stories I read in 2019

2019 was an exciting and eventful year for me. I was nominated for a Nebula Award, and somehow never got around to mentioning it here—and even gave an acceptance speech, in an alternate universe. I got my first “year’s best” publication, and my first translation sales. (And missed being a Hugo Finalist by seven votes!) The experience of being a finalist, of going to Los Angeles and being celebrated, was more complicated than I ever imagined, but I got to hang out with some of my favorite writers and people and I created memories that will stay with me forever.

I had three new stories published in 2019, most notably “This Wine-Dark Feeling that Isn’t the Blues,” published in Escape Pod in February, and “Amanda Draws Crows,” published in Fireside Fiction in July. Both stories found appreciative readers, but neither one caught fire. To be honest, this is okay—it frees me from the pressure to self-promote. Trying to get people to notice “The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births” for months on end wreaked havoc with my tendencies toward anxiety and depression. I have no regrets, but it’s nice to sit back and take a year off and direct people towards wonderful stories by other people.

Calling attention to other folks’ work is something I’ve always enjoyed—there’s little pressure on me, and people always appreciate hearing that their stories were valued. I’m constantly tweeting out links to great fiction, and I’ve been rounding up some of my favorites here for years. So without further ado, here are some stories you should check out, especially if you are reading for award consideration:

“Her Silhouette, Drawn in Water,” by Vylar Kaftan: this spoke to me in a personal way. While trying to avoid spoilers, this story gave me feels about interval versus external oppression, and the ways we become the tools of our own suffering. I sometimes despair of ever being able to stop shooting myself in the foot; of ever not feeling broken, fragmented. I can’t do justice to how I felt to see this story offer a hopeful outlook on that.

“The King’s Mirror,” by M. K. Hutchins: I loved this story’s thoroughly sincere depiction of siblings who love each other and aren’t driven by jealousy or family drama. I loved, in fact, how the protagonist finds himself with a hell of a terrible choice and yet doesn’t really have any _enemies_, just . . . a rough dilemma. He’s caught in a bind where any choice he makes seems like it will hurt _somebody_ he loves, and he’s got to tiptoe his way through this. That’s the kind of story I like to write myself, so this was up my alley as a reader.

“The Last Eagle,” by Natalia Theodoridou: This is a touching story about broken things and broken people and those who love them/us, written with Theodoridou’s usual beautiful wordcraft. I’ve long been a fan of Natalia’s work, but this might just be my favorite.

“The Archronology of Love,” by Caroline M. Yoachim: This is a moving novelette that projects issues of contamination of data into a science that doesn’t exist in our world, and examines the balance between being too close to a subject of study to be objective versus being motivated by that closeness to look harder. Layered under all that is a powerful story about loss, about when it’s time to move on, and about who you still live for when you’ve lost your lifelove. If you dig that, and interplanetary exploration, deep freeze missions, found technology, and time-travel (of a sort), then give this one a look-see.

“The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye,” by Sarah Pinsker: I thought this story was a fun, spooky take on the mystery-writer-who-is-always-suspiciously-followed-by-deaths trope. Check it out!

“Some Kind of Blood-Soaked Future,” by Carlie St. George: This story is much more violent than I usually go for, but I love it. Partly it’s the deadpan voice, and partly it’s the heart that’s hiding under the sarcasm. It’s a combination of a fun romp through teen horror tropes and a really touching story of found family and overcoming shitty formative experiences and formative people.

“Windrose in Scarlet,” by Isabel Yap: This is the f/f Little Red Riding Hood/Beauty and the Beast crossover you didn’t know you needed. Less flippantly, it’s a lovely story about found family and overcoming different kinds of abuse.

“Move Forward, Disappear, Transcend,” by A. T. Greenblatt: This story snuck up on me. Not that the first line, “I lost my favorite fingers as I was walking to the library,” didn’t hook me in, because it did. But I didn’t expect the feels this story delivered, as this story went from that curiosity-provoking opening to a powerful meditation on aging and how people get left behind despite everybody’s best wishes, and how sometimes you need to let go of those you love. On an obvious level, it makes me think about aging and my inevitable death, but really there’s so much more here, like the sense of disorientation as the world keeps changing around you and becoming more alien, and the sense, as you age, that more and more of the people you care about are gone. For me, it also made me think about how much older I am than most of my publishing peers, and, how, though everybody is kind to me, sometimes I feel like maybe people are humoring me and I can never quite fit in. Check this one out when you are up for a bittersweet read.

As you might notice, I gravitated toward longer stories this year—more novelettes and novellas on this list than in past years. Lots of familiar authors on the list, though—these are folks I’ve learned I can count on to move me with words. If you find something new that you really like in here, please let me know! I’d love to know that I’m not wasting my time rounding these up!

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A dozen stories I loved in 2018 (and my own award-eligibility posty thing)

Looks like I didn’t do one of these for 2017–in hindsight, I didn’t read terribly widely in 2017. I didn’t write much either. Jesus, where did 2017 even go?

2018, though, was a year that my short fiction reading really bumped back up, for some reason, back to the levels I used to read when I was trying to break through with my own first sales. I certainly didn’t read everything that was out there–for one thing, there are so many more professional markets than there used to be! But I read the markets that I already know play to my tastes, and I also read stories by people whose stories I’d loved before, if I happened to come across them in other markets. So many of the stories I read were terrific. Way too many to recap in a blog post of any reasonable length—honestly, too many to even be able to reliably remember them all. So please take this list with a grain of salt. It is necessarily incomplete, and kind of arbitrary, but if you’re looking for a good starting point to get into contemporary short speculative fiction, or if you’re working on your award nomination ballot and looking for stories you may have missed, here’s some you might want to check out.

“Mr. Try Again,” by A. Merc Rustad: This is a chilling story about child abuse and monsters, and taking things into one’s own hand, and who we believe and who we don’t. I couldn’t help but think about Larry Nassar and all the gymnasts who complained about him and how USA Gymnastics and the USOC protected him instead of the girls he abused; I imagine this story was written before Nassar’s story came to light, but honestly that just speaks to how symptomatic Nassar is. CW for child abuse and spousal abuse.

“The Independence Patch,” by Bryan Camp: This one reminded me of my teen years in weird ways. I think it’s evocative of being an adolescent of above average IQ but definitely not above average emotional intelligence, and definitely not knowing how to navigate the social situations I found myself in. I have a feeling a lot of my adult friends will also identify with this. The story even reminded me of knowing that my first really serious relationship was ending but now knowing what to do about it, other than watch the inevitable end. And I appreciate the tenor of the ending, and how sometimes knowing that you can do a thing is enough, more so than actually doing it.

“A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies” by Alix E. Harrow: This story is a wonderful read if you love libraries, or if books have ever healed your soul, or if, you know, you’re a human being.

“Without Exile” by Eleanna Castroianni: Here’s a story that pushed my buttons. It is a timely exploration of how we decide which refugees deserve our help and which will do without, of how families get separated, but for me this story was more than that. This story spoke to my feelings of living in the space that straddles two cultures, of knowing that one culture’s acceptance is conditional, and of living in fear that the culture of my birth will eventually say, “You’re not one of us.” Of being told by the dominant culture, “Forget your past, you’re one of us, now,” and yet also being held up as evidence of the dominant culture’s inclusivity. It spoke to my experience of going into Sedanos and being spoken to in English no matter how much Spanish I speak because I have, as Junot Díaz might say, the face of the conquerer. Of wanting to visit the land of my parents but knowing I can only ever do so as an outsider. And of course I’m a sucker for stories featuring atypical gender dynamics, and this story has that too.

“Asphalt, River, Mother, Child,” by Isabel Yap: Under Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, literally thousands of people–including children–have been executed without trial by police and by vigilantes for alleged drug crimes (including drug addiction) just in the last two years. (You may have heard about him one year into his presidency when Donald Trump invited him to Washington and said that he was conducting the “War on Drugs” in “the right way.”) Since trials are not conducted, research has shown that they often get the wrong people, and plant guns and drugs as evidence after the fact. Which brings me to Isabel Yap’s heart-rending story about Mebuyen, goddess of the underworld, trying to figure out what to do about the sudden influx of confused child murder victims entering her domain. This story is by turns touching and harrowing. And it’s a story about changing course, about realizing you’ve lost your way, and about how being sorry and changing your ways doesn’t undo the harm you’ve done, but it’s a start. This is the kind of story I love spec-fic for, and the kind of story I love Strange Horizons for.

“The Thing About Ghost Stories,” by Naomi Kritzer: It’s been a little over a year since my father died. On his last day, when I came to the hospital to visit, his wife mentioned that he had claimed earlier in the day to have had a couple of visitors, a man in a hat and a woman in some vintage clothes several decades out of date. (My memory is hazy, so I am likely messing up the descriptions, but it doesn’t matter.) Since he’d never been alone the whole day, his wife and I had a bit of a chuckle at how out of it he was, on such poor sleep, between the constant interruptions from nurses checking on this or that and also the medicines he was on. And then he died. Now I’m not really the woo-woo type, but I am a fantasy writer, so naturally, once my own feelings about my father’s death had stabilized a bit, I remembered the visitors he’d had who nobody else saw. I had this thought that maybe when you were about to leave this life, people who’d gone ahead of you might come help you transition, and nobody but you would be able to see them. A week or so later I was out running and hallucinated seeing somebody behind me, realized there was nobody there, and spent the rest of the run in a mild terror that I was about to have a heart attack or something. I’m not saying I believe this–just that these are thoughts that passed through my mind. So anyway, “The Thing About Ghost Stories,” by Naomi Kritzer. The protagonist is an academic, just a year or so removed from her mother’s death. I love the metafictional feel of the language of academia sprinkled throughout this piece, the intriguing-in-their-own-right observations about the nature of “true ghost stories” (stories of people’s experiences, which may or may not involve actual ghosts, but are accurate recollections of what the speaker observed and remembers), all woven around a powerful story about a relationship and end-of-life care for a parent.

“A Song of Home, the Organ Grinds,” by James Beamon: The world here is so detailed and unique—steampunk on a Turkish attack airship in the Crimean War—but with, I shit you not, organ grinder attack monkeys! But beyond the inventive worldbuilding, this was a story about castoffs and found family and how we make decisions we can’t necessarily articulate the reasoning behind. This story made me think of all the different times people will stay in situations that aren’t great, either because the devil you know is better than the one you don’t, or because there is somebody else you’d be leaving behind and you feel a responsibility to them.

“The Crow Knight,” by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam: This was a wonderful story and a powerful metaphor for mental illness. It made me think of the severe depression I experienced as a teenager, and how at the end of my teens and into my twenties, it seemed to have gone away and I foolishly thought time had “cured” me, and I would look back on my adolescence, when I “used to” have depression–only for it to slam back into me in my thirties. I found that having believed myself cured, I didn’t have the coping mechanisms to fight the lies coming from my brain. The last couple of years or so have again seen a reduction in . . . well not a reduction in anything, but rather an increased ability on my part to correct self-harming analysis from my brain. Only this time I recognize it as not a cure, but more accurately a remission, and so I’m on the lookout for those lies, working more actively to keep them from taking root.Anyway, I’m a big fan of stories that are about more than what they’re about, if you catch my drift.

“When We Flew Together Through the Ice,” by J. R. Dawson: This story featured beautifully vivid worldbuilding and a compelling look at growing up on the run in a spacefaring civilization. But what made it stand out to me . . . many of my friends know I experienced an abusive childhood. This story literalizes in a way I haven’t seen before the way that damaging messages from other people in childhood become your own messages to yourself in adulthood. It’s a rough read, but a powerful one. Content warnings, naturally, for child abuse survivors and for panic attacks. Also, if you pick up this issue, you might want to flip to the little icon F&SF places at the end of every story to help you decide if this one’s for you.

“The Life and Times of Johnny the Fox” and “Toward a New Lexicon of Augury,” by Sabrina Vourvoulias: A two-fer of short fiction recs. This summer I was fortunate enough to hear Vourvoulias read a new story at Readercon in Boston and was transfixed as she shared her wonderful post-Hurricane-María trickster tale/tall tale, “The Life and Times of Johnny the Fox.” Fast forward five months or so, to when I read, “Toward a New Lexicon of Augury” in Apex Magazine, and I realized that I just need to add Sabrina to my read-everything-she-writes-as-soon-as-it-comes-out category, because I haven’t read anything by her that I haven’t adored. “Toward a New Lexicon of Augury” is a story about Latinx witches in a futuristic setting banding together, and making sacrifices, to resist their city’s wealthy and powerful men, who are trying to break up their barrio for their own economic benefit, and also to further subjugate the city’s downtrodden. That doesn’t do justice to the wonderfully real settings and characters that Sabrina creates in her stories.

“Dandelion” by Elly Bangs: This story gave me similar feels to something Ted Chiang might have written. It has serious science chops and wrestles with big cosmic questions about the likelihood of our species ever getting off Earth or, indeed, surviving beyond a certain point, but what made it all work for me was the multigenerational human story at its heart. A scientist in NASA’s earliest days, her daughter, and eventually her granddaughter, all following in her footsteps and trying to decide what her life’s work tells us about our place in the universe.

“Antumbra,” by Cory Skerry: I can’t talk about the spec element without spoiling it, but I can tell you that I love these characters and the brotherly bond between them. This one falls into the category of “stuff I wish I’d written myself.”

Aaaaand . . . that’s it for recommendations of stories by other people. But. I did have stories published that I wrote. If you’re reading with an eye toward nominating for any of the year-end awards, it would mean a lot to me if you would consider my work as well. I had three new stories published this year, but one in particular is a bit of a story-of-my-heart, and I’d like to tell you about it.

My favorite story I’ve ever written is “The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births,” published last January in Lightspeed Magazine. It’s an #ownvoices novelette about an enby teenager solving their own murder from a previous life. The story has gotten a lot of love, but I feel like people haven’t realized just how much this story means to me. They say you should open up a vein on the keyboard and just let it all out; they also say you should write the story you wish you could read. More than any other story of mine, that’s what I tried to do with this. And impostor-syndrome be damned, I think I pulled that off. I love these characters, Jamie and Alicia both. This is a story that once upon a time I needed to see in the world. This is a story about non-binary characters that doesn’t play the queer character for tragedy. This is a story that isn’t about coming out. This is a story where the protagonist already has people that love and accept them, and if there are people who don’t, well fuck ’em, they don’t matter. And I feel like surely there’s another enby reader out there who really really wants a story like this one.

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Running out of gas

I keep wondering why people have repeatedly mentioned having read my latest and then go on to talk about “Duck Duck God” . . . and then I look at the last update on this journal and I’m like

So . . . I have had things! And stuffs! And happenings! Just . . . not journal entries.

I’ll do the publishing recap in a different post, since it’s almost time for authors to start putting out year-end eligibility posts. I will note, however, that while I haven’t been journaling, I have been keeping my Bibliography and Appearances pages pretty well up to date.

So what else has been going on in my life?

I was on programming at ReaderCon in Boston, which was an absolute career highlight so far. ReaderCon was the first specfic literary Con I ever attended, as a fan. To be there as an author was just too amazing for words.

I’ve been in the longest remission of my chronic depression that I’ve had in decades. I’m feeling like this is making me a better teacher too. I know better than to believe in cures, but I’m enjoying the moment, even in my daily ups and downs.

And I’ve continued to run, something I was evidently already doing back in *mumble*wheneverIlastupdated*mumble*. I’m going to try to insert a page break here, if I can figure out how to do that on WordPress, so that if talk of fitness and body image isn’t for you, you can avoid that content.

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New story out: Duck Duck God!

My newest publication came out this week from Book Smugglers Publishing: a short story called “Duck Duck God.” Check out this amazing cover they made for it!

This story goes in several new directions from me. First, it’s much more lighthearted than my usual style. It’s about a kindergarten teacher whose life is turned upside down when one of the little boys she teaches is suddenly gifted with godlike powers. While I got to play a lot with the natural conflict that would entail, I also got to sneak in some poking fun at educational bureaucracy. Since I’m now beginning my twenty-third year as a teacher, this story is probably about as write-what-you-know as it gets!

So check it out, and consider leaving a review for it on goodreads!

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At the intersection of exercise and nerdiness

[CW: exercise, fitness, possibly diet, possibly body image]

[Please don’t give me unrequested advice. Talking about exercise, fitness, and body image in a public setting is incredibly vulnerable-making for me, and well-intentioned advice is more likely to prove damaging than helpful. Just trust me on this. I do research what I’m doing and I track my health using a variety of metrics. (On the other hand, cheerleading and celebration is totes welcome.)]

[By the same token, this is a journal entry, not advice for you. I’m just talking about what’s going on in my life, not telling anybody how to become fit or how to do anything else. IANAD and YMMV]

For about three years before my kids started high school, I used to bike or walk to school. (Don’t be too impressed: we’re just talking 1.75 miles each way, so not like biking cross-town or anything.) It was a nice way to feel like I was getting a little exercise, I liked to think it was somewhat good for the environment, and it gave me the flexibility to arrive and leave at whatever time I wanted, without messing up the rest of my family’s transportation needs. When my kids started high school they needed me to transport them, and I didn’t want to fight the fight of having them walk, because reasons, so I quit. Last month they graduated from high school, and I got to thinking that I should try to take up car-free commuting again, but I knew I was in no kind of shape for it, so I decided to try to get back into shape a bit.

My initial, very modest goal was to reliably be able to walk 1.75 miles in a half hour,  so I focused on being able to walk 3.5 miles in an hour. That took less than a week to achieve, and I wasn’t experiencing any soreness. So for whatever reason I got it into my head to start running a little bit around the midpoint of each workout, and see if I could increment how much I ran each time I went out. The first time, I was only able to run a quarter mile before I had to go back to walking. (I felt the need to say only, but then I struck it out, because for me that was pretty good. For someone else that’s nothing, but as in my previous post, about finding your own path to art, everybody needs to find their own aspiration and their own goalposts. Running a quarter mile as an obese 45-year old? Freaking Huzzah.)

For several days I went on this way, feeling pleased with any increment no matter how small. Then I decided to research Couch-to-5k programs. 3.5 miles is a bit over 5k, and if I could run a 5K without needing to stop to walk, I’d feel pretty badass. I have been skinny in my life, but I’ve never been fit in that way. I ultimately decided that C25K wasn’t for me, but I was intrigued by the fact that the program’s goal was to get one 5K-ready in 9 weeks. I extrapolated out my current rate of improvement and saw that I would not be running 5K in 9 weeks, or even in 18 weeks, so I decided I could stand to push myself a bit harder.

I used a spreadsheet to extrapolate how much I’d need to increment by each workout if I wanted to be running 3.5 miles by mid-November (which is a lot more than 9 weeks, but like I said, we all need to set our own goals). Based on this I’ve been pushing myself a little harder and experiencing success and feeling happy about this, and feeling the effects of being more fit. (I’ve also been tracking my nutrition, and the combination is working well, ~45 days in.)

In my research into running-for-new-runners, I’ve learned that C25K variants don’t generally do all the running in a single block, but rather alternate bits of running and bits of walking, with the goal of having the running gradually take over the workout. For me, in the hypothetical case that I am unable to reach my goal on any given workout, then my intention is to break up the goal distance into chunks, and then keep the same target for the next workout, instead of incrementing, but try to be able to do it all in one shot.

The other thing I learned in my research was that the main reason new exercise regimens fail is because people push themselves too hard at first, and find themselves feeling defeated or too sore. (I’d add from personal experience that another issue is not really pushing oneself at all, and thus not seeing results and wondering why one is bothering.) What I’ve found is that the higher goals I started setting for myself were a challenge at first—but this is where only running in one chunk worked well for me, because it was a challenge but then it was over and I could just feel accomplished, and not have to stress about the next bit of running.

As I went on, though it got easier and easier to reach each new goal, and this is where I realized I’d unthinkingly engaged in some questionable mathematical modeling. I’d imagined my “fitness” (as measured by distance I can run without stopping) as increasing linearly. More realistically, this ability ought to increase logistically, and if I’d been approaching this as a mathematician, that should have been my assumption. Logistic functions have graphs that look like this:

An image of a logistic function's graph.

Your basic logistic graph . . .

This seems to make sense to me. Gains are easier to come by at first, until eventually you reach a point of diminishing returns. For instance, at first it might be realistic to expect an improvement of 5% or perhaps 10% per workout, but eventually sustaining that rate of improvement becomes impossible in any practical sense–you can’t become infinitely strong, or capable of running infinite distances.

(I did want you there would be nerdiness.)

Now, since my total distance has been capped all along at 3.5 miles, I will never see that top flattening. So if I had it to do over again, I would probably increment by a percentage, instead of by a fixed amount each time. It probably would have helped me avoid a risk of finding this too hard at first. On the other hand, what I am experiencing now—that incrementing is getting easier as I go—is pretty good too.

 

Posted in assorted nerdom, blargety-blog, first world problems, math | 1 Comment

Embrace the great YMMV

I unfollowed a writer on twitter the other day, in an act of self-preservation. Not a bad guy in any way, but he kept tweeting a sentiment I found artistically damaging. Over the course of several days, he kept tweeting that you should only write the stories you couldn’t not write, the stories you had to write. Now, there’s nothing wrong with living your artistic life this way. But for me, well, I don’t have to write anything. I find twitter and facebook and reading pretty fulfilling, actually, so if I were to only write the things I have to write, well I’d pretty much stop. So I decided what I really had to do was unfollow.

Now, I care deeply about the things I write about. I write emotional stories, or at least I try to, and I try to bleed on the page and sell my heart. But I don’t think everybody needs to do this. The world needs clever puzzle stories and comical stories and fun stories and adrenaline-pumping action stories and stories about übercompetent characters who don’t actually have character arcs.

One of the most damaging things I’ve experienced as an aspiring artist is the overly prescriptive nugget of advice. You have to do this. Real writers do that. It’s not worth doing if it isn’t such-and-such. This is the only way. For many years, this was a source of writers’ block for me, as I struggled to fit myself into other people’s boxes.

(I recognize the irony of linking to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “You’ve got to . . .” advice, but despite how prescriptive it is, this was one piece of advice that worked for me. And that’s the thing. It’s not that advice from artists to artists is bad—it’s that it’s not and can never be universal. I think advice should take the form, “This is what I find helpful. You might like to try it and see if it works for you as well, if it matches up with something you are looking to change.”)

These days, when somebody offers me a box, I run the other way.

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Oh hey, Cuba’s in the news again

There’s a certain specific kind of cognitive dissonance I experience every time Cuba’s in the news: when [some] people who share my liberal views lose their ability to do nuance, and start to glorify the Castro regime. (It’s the mirror image of the cognitive dissonance I experienced when I noticed that so many people who had suffered under Castro seemed driven to embrace the worst policies of the right, as if it were not possible to reject one kind of evil without simultaneously embracing another.) So, since I always get asked to give my Official Opinions as a Cuban American at times like these, here are a few reminders:

  • It is possible to reject a communist totalitarianism without embracing fascism.
  • It is possible to reject fascism without embracing totalitarianism.
  • It is possible to think the embargo is a shitty, failed policy while simultaneously believing Cuba’s current regime is repressive and corrupt—my basis for opposing the embargo is not because Cuba’s government is good, but because the embargo has clearly and obviously failed.
  • Fidel Castro was a dictator, a murderer, and a thief.
  • Elections where your only choices are to vote for the party ticket or against it (i.e., where you don’t actually have a choice between candidates or options) (and where your votes are tracked) are not free elections.
  • Cuba’s human rights record when it comes to repression and political prisoners is terrible—and this is not just a back-in-the-day thing. Cuba has continued cracking down on dissidents all the way up to the current day.
  • Che Guevara was at best a duped idealist who was happy to murder innocents for his cause—and at worst another murderous opportunist.
  • Your Che Guevara T-Shirt (bought at Walmart) doesn’t make you a revolutionary, it makes you a sheltered, privileged douchebag.
  • Don’t idolize murderers, kids; it’s a bad look.
Posted in rants, the latino thing, this I believe | Leave a comment

Giving RENT a second chance

I love theatre, and I love musicals. My spouse and I used to perform in our local community theatre troupe, before toxic politics sank it. So gosh, I should really like Rent, right?

I like a lot of the songs, maybe rising as far as loving one or two of them, but when I finally got to watch the film version, my biggest memory is of being underwhelmed. I remember getting to know these characters, getting somewhat intrigued by their situations, and then a blur and the movie was over, and I didn’t really feel much of anything about what I’d just seen.

I know, watching a film of something virtually never stands up to watching it in its original medium, and particularly watching a film version that tanked and was not well-received critically is beyond unfair to the show. But I’ve never gotten an opportunity to watch it on stage, so this is all I’ve got.

But tonight I saw that the movie was on television, and I got to wondering if perhaps I had misjudged it. It’s only been a little over a decade since the film came out, so I was well into my thirties when I saw it, certainly an adult by any stretch. But I’ve experienced so much since then, it’s hard not to look back at early-thirties me and think, that person was just a kid. Maybe I would get the movie now, in a way that I didn’t back when it was new.

Well, no.

What I do have now, in my forties and a few years into a tiny little “career” as a selling author, is better tools with which to understand why something fails to work with me. I also find that analyzing why narratives fail is pretty useful, and generally less overwhelming than articulating all the reasons why successful narratives do work.

What I see now in the movie version of Rent is a dropped third act. I’m just using the term “third act” as a convenient shorthand. I don’t know that it was written in three acts, and I’m not faulting it for failing to hew to the so-popular-it’s-getting-trite three act structure. What I mean is that I am introduced to a number of characters, I learn what each character seems to need or want, I am shown some highs and lows and invited to care about them, and then, when things look their bleakest, the movie tries to tie the story back up together into some kind of a bittersweet we’ve-all-suffered-but-now-we’ve-grown climax, and it’s a mess and it utterly fails.

I wish I’d glanced at the time when the funeral scene was going on, because that’s where it all . . . well, not where it came apart, but where it failed to come together. Roger moves to Santa Fe and . . . then he comes back. Mark goes back to working on his own film . . . because . . . well, because that’s what the story needed him to do. We don’t actually see the other characters have any transformative moments, unless you want to say that looking for the missing Mimi counts, which, fair enough, but as with Roger and Mark, we don’t actually see the characters grow, we don’t see them move past the separation they demonstrated at Angel’s funeral.

I actually love writing those scenes where characters realize what’s truly important to them, where characters stop focusing on the tangible and learn to value their relationships. It’s not for me to judge how good I am at it, but I live for those moments, and in this film, I can see now that we never get them. Roger comes back to New York because he does. That’s it. So that you can have the climactic scene with Near Death Mimi. Maybe because the film was already over two hours long, but I would have valued seeing Roger and Mark (and the others!) have their little moments where they compared the things they were chasing with the things they’d left behind and realized they’d made the wrong choices. But for that to happen, the funeral scene would have needed to happen around the midpoint of the movie, if not sooner, so there would be time for all those realizations. It doesn’t happen until around 90% of the way through, and so that’s why we get told, instead of shown, that the characters have had these arcs while we weren’t looking.

Character arc by montage.

We talk a lot about earning your end-of-story payoffs, and here’s the quintessential counterexample: the finale scene is completely unearned.

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