I’d really like to thank a couple (I think, it seemed to be more than one but not by much) of anonymous/pseudonymous individuals who sent me disparaging messages over the weekend, trying to… well, actually I don’t know what they were trying to do. Disparage me, discourage me, stir up drama… some combination of all of the above? But I kept getting nasty messages referring to other authors running fundraisers or starting up Patreons right now, in a goading “Look how much better they’re doing than you are.” way. Some of them were encouraging me to give up, some were basically telling me I shouldn’t be “putting up with” or letting others “get away with” their success, whatever that means.

The thing is, I don’t find the success of other authors discouraging. I find it hugely empowering. N.K. Jemisin, a successful traditionally published author who I believe has been nominated for just about every major fantasy award, launched a Patreon campaign on Friday-ish in order to help her quit her day job and focus on writing.

This kid of thing happens because “successful author” does not necessarily mean “making enough money to live on”, no matter what your publishing model is. That discourages me. That makes me feel somewhere between defeated and fighting mad. But an author figuring out a better way to do things? That makes me happy. I mean, heck, it was knowing about this reality that led me down the road I chose in the first place.

Now, I know N.K. Jemisin personally, if not closely. We’re mutuals on multiple social media sites. We’ve met in person. It’s possible we’ve even shared a meal together, although I think it would have been a “push three or four tables together” kind of meal, which is part of why I’m not sure if we have or not. I don’t know if she’d call me a friend, but we’ve had nothing but friendly interactions. I admire her as a person and while I have bounced off some of her books, I love the ones that I got into and I recognize the quality of the ones that I didn’t.

So how could anyone be so petty as to imagine that I’d react to her great achievement with anything but, “Well, good for her!”?

I mean, I’m not just going “Good for her.” I’m taking notes about what she’s doing, and sharing my experience with the platform when she asks. To the extent that our paths overlap, we have a lot to learn from each other. I find her example inspiring not just because of her success, but because I’m watching someone succeed while making some of the same decisions that I’ve struggled with. So it’s like getting a vote of confidence by proxy. Yes, one short story in a month is plenty of short stories. Yes, relatively clean drafts are a fine standard for this sort of thing. Stuff like that.

I have a hard time convincing myself that any amount of work or effort is truly enough to show my value to the world, which makes it hard to muster the energy for any amount of work or effort. So seeing where other people set their benchmarks… well, you can’t live your life living up to other people’s examples, and you shouldn’t try. But it can be a good way to quiet down the doubts.

I think I’m supposed to be jealous because I’m re-jiggering my Patreon at the same time she’s launching, but as far as I’m concerned, we both had really successful weekends. My goal for the weekend was to get enough money to fly two people to WorldCon, and you know what? Mission accomplished. Now, I do also need to make more money on a regular basis, and I have plans to do so, but it’s a “one thing at a time” kind of deal. The plane tickets was a “money right now” situation. Patreon is a longer game, and now that the plane tickets are taken care of, it’s where my focus is going.

It’s no secret that I’m struggling financially, but it shouldn’t be a secret that my financial struggles have spun out of personal/emotional struggles that I’m now putting behind me. Another author’s success didn’t cause my troubles and another author’s success isn’t going to prolong them. I’m ready to start making real money again. And yes, the key word there is “again”.

All the anons who tried to discourage me by pointing to other authors living the dream did is remind me that eight years ago, I managed to get enough recurring income to quit my day job and focus on my writing, and I did it without Patreon. I did it before Patreon. I pioneered the kind of direct micropatronage for authors that Patreon enables, and if I didn’t get a lot of recognition for this… well, that’s partly because I’m an awkward self-promoter, but at the end of the day, I didn’t do it for recognition, I did it for money to live on, and I got that.

You know what the biggest amount of money I crowdfunded for my writing over a couple days was? I don’t know to the dollar and cent, off the top of my head, but it was… as they say dans la belle internet… over 9000. U.S. dollars, that is. Now, that was basically meant to cover several months’ worth of expenses projected backwards over time, but still. I did that. Me. Almost a decade ago. There was no Kickstarter. There was no IndieGoGo. There was no GoFundMe. There was just me rattling a cup, reminding people that I was doing work and that my work had value, and that I had expenses that needed to be covered for me to keep living and doing my work.

Back in the day, my example inspired Catherynne M. Valente to take a chance on crowdfunding and web-publishing her first …Fairyland… novel, which also became her first New York Times bestseller and is now a much-loved series. Before the web response proved that people would read it, it would have been a hard sell: a young adult novel written in a style emulating books for younger readers that is actually a spin-off of a very adult novel? Who would read that? The answer, it turns out, is everybody. The books are a legit phenomenon, an all-ages hit.

The other individual that my anonymous correspondents have tried to pit me against is Rachel Swirsky, who’s launching her Patreon with a fundraiser drive for Lyon-Martin health services through the one-two punch of offering a parody of what is possibly her own most famous work as an incentive for participation, and donating the first month’s proceeds to LM. I think it’s a great way to get people in the door, where they can see what she has to offer. I predict she’s going to get a lot of long-term patrons out of this short-term campaign, and even if she doesn’t… well, it’s a great cause, isn’t it?

The thing is, Rachel actually reached out to me for advice on this before she did it, though I was not in a place where I could offering any. I’m helping her out how I can now. At her invitation, I’m pitching in with one of her incentives, which seems like it’s going to be a lot of fun for everyone involved. I’m in a time crunch, but I have a sketch of a blog post I’ll be making about what she’s doing and why it’s important.

All of this is to say: (a small number of) people are trying to be jerks about crowdfunding, probably because they don’t like it when artists and creators they disapprove of find ways to make a living that they have no power to interdict. This is not new, any more than patronage itself is new.

And I’m a little grateful to the jerks because they forcibly reminded me that however I feel right now, I am not a failure. I have achieved great successes in the past, and there’s no reason to believe that I cannot achieve greater successes in the future.

Even more so, I’m grateful to the readers who have supported me over the years, those who circulated links and spread the word, those who pitched in their dollars and cents and the few individuals who have personally invested hundreds or even thousands of dollars in my life and career, and I am grateful to the writers and artists who have shared the bonds of respect, admiration, and friendship with me.

So, I was on Twitter (drunkenly) explaining the history of the CIA (again) when something about the “Make America Great Again/America Was Never Great” hat war crossed my eye.

I said, “Do you know what hat I want? Make America Better.” Because you can’t argue with that. No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, you have to believe that we can do better.

Well, I thought about it a little and realized I don’t really have the head for baseball caps, but I decided to be the change I wanted to see in the world, so I decided to try my hand a third Teespring campaign. The first two struck out… didn’t get enough minimum orders to go to print. This one is nothing but simple, sharp lettering, though, which apparently comes with a few perks, like a minimum order of 1. So by ordering one of these babies for myself, I fulfilled the minimum and guaranteed that anyone else who wants one can have one.

http://www.teespring.com/makeamericabetter

My first thought on watching the pilot for Fuller House, both a sequel and note-by-note retread of the 1980s nostalgia king sitcom Full House, was, “How did the platform that produces Bojack Horseman think this was a good idea?”

The pilot—the only episode I’ve seen, and the only episode I am likely to see any time soon—plays as an awkward mix of a self-aware “Very Brady” style parody, a winking reunion show, and an overly sincere pilot for a sincerely anachronistic sitcom. And of course, this is because it is all of those things. The entire original cast returns to reprise their roles, with one notable (and noted, in one of the only truly unpredictable moments in the pilot) exception.

Everyone gets a line or two to remind us who they are, what they did 30 years ago, and what stereotypical character traits they represent. Everyone gets a chance to mug for the camera and sneak in their catch phrases. As a side note: with an adult understanding of Bob Saget’s adult humor, it’s hard not to read the repeated references to Danny Tanner’s overweaning cleanliness as a meta-joke. The show ends with a passing-of-the-torch moment that will resonate as being truly iconic for anyone who actually remembers the original Full House pilot and leave everyone else—including people who otherwise watched the show—scratching their heads.

On the subject of predictable moments: despite having had it stuck in my head on at least 11,347 occasions in my life, I never realized before now that the first line of the theme song is “What ever happened to predictability?”

In the original series, this line was meant to be at least a bit of a wistful semi-subversion, as the show’s focus was on a non-nuclear family in a non-traditional household and all the unexpected problems and unconventional solutions they came up with. I say “wistful” and “semi”, because of course, Full House was the late-80s prime time idea of white suburban family entertainment: clean as a whistle, never quite as racy as the carefully coached hoots and hollers of the live studio audience would have us believe. (Have mercy.)

In the tacitly updated version, this same line plays a lot more straight. Whatever happened to predictability? Why, it’s right here where you left it, 29 years ago. “This baby never went out of style,” says Dave Coulier, holding up an amazing technicolor dream shirt from his character’s wardrobe. There’s a comedic beat that seems to last an eternity, by the time John Stamos replies, “That’s because it was never in style,” you will have already heard this line echoing in your head so many times that you feel like you’re stuck in a Groundhog Day loop and haven’t figured anything better to do with infinite time than watch Fuller House.

I don’t want to sound like the show is terrible from start to finish. There are a few genuine laughs early on, most of them having to do with Stephanie Tanner. The character of Kimmy Gibbler, whose defining trait is awkwardness, has the least awkward transition from decades past. She’s never had a problem making herself at home in the Tanner household before, and she still doesn’t. The character works better as a self-assured adult than as a gawky tweenager.

In many cases, the show does work as a reunion show or a nostalgic parody, so on that level it’s worth watching at least the pilot for anyone with fond if hazy memories of the original.

It’s the pilot for the actual sitcom, of which I understand some 10 or so episodes follow, that’s painful. I mentioned Bojack Horseman up above. If you’ve watched that other Netflix show (it’s kind of like Californication, “but, like, a animal version”, with the premise that the main character is a washed up star from a late 80s/early 90s sitcom, and also a horse) before sitting down to Fuller House, you’ll find it almost impossible to not have the lines “Now that’s what I call horsing around!” or “Go home, Goober!” run through your head at multiple points, and this isn’t even mentioning the danger of getting Too Many Cooks stuck in your head.

These things show us that sitcom parodies suffer from their own peculiar version of Poe’s Law. Apparently the best way to lampoon the TGIF-style shows of yesterdecade is to just follow their lead exactly, beat for beat and note for note. When you’re watching Bojack or Cooks, in the back of your head you think they’re probably exaggerating. But then you see an earnest and very conscious recreation of those same sitcom tropes and you realize, no, they worked so well because they were so completely and perfectly on the nose. And in trying to deliberately re-capture the lightning (or maybe the fluorescent lighting?) that was Full House in a bottle, Fuller House somehow does it all in an even more on-the-nose way.

So why did this show get made? And why did it get made by the “network” that brought us Bojack?

To understand Netflix’s plan, we must, as a brilliant surgeon once said, “quietly enter the realm of pure genius”. My first thought when I had actually finished watching the show was “Why was this made?” To judge by the critical ratings, that was a lot of people’s thoughts. But when we’re talking about entertainment media, that question is really, “For whom was this was made?” and if you find yourself asking that question, the answer is, “People who aren’t me.”

Compared to a traditional network, Netflix’s original programming approach seems to be all over the place. They snap up import rights, pick up discarded and discontinued shows from all over the place, make gritty dramas and savvy comedies and bizarre cartoons and licensed properties. A traditional network will cancel even a successful show if it’s attracting “the wrong demographic”, but Netflix isn’t a network at all. It’s a subscription-based distribution channel. Where a network is actually in the business of delivering eyeballs to advertisers, Netflix’s whole revenue stream is based around those eyeballs.

Thus, the point of any Netflix original production is to be the “killer app” to some group of people, the thing that gets new people to sign up. For some people, this was House of Cards. For others, it’s Orange is the New Black. Or Marvel’s [Latest]. Or another season of their canceled cult favorite.

And for some people, mostly older people who have probably never had a streaming media subscription and who otherwise likely would have been among the last holdouts? It’s going to be Fuller House.

Last spring when the show was announced, a lot of people asked questions like, “Is this going to damage the Netflix Original brand?” or “Is this going to be the death-knell for Netflix?” Well, I don’t know if Netflix has released anything like exact viewing numbers for Fuller House, but it’s apparently done well enough for them that they’ve already ordered another batch of episodes. This is not at all unusual for their original productions, and while this means we can’t exactly call the show a stand-out yet, it does seem to signal that their “brand” is fine.

There might not be a lot of Bojack or Orange fans streaming it, but have you seen how many things are under the Netflix Original banner these days? I doubt very many people, or even very many households, watches all of it.

Netflix is living in the long tail of the market, building a broad catalog of things that individually appeal to as broad a spectrum of the market as possible. This is the opposite of the traditional approach, which is to try to make everything you do appeal to the “mass market”. It gives us shows that would otherwise not exist (like Orange is the New Black, Bojack Horseman, Marvel’s Jessica Jones, or Grace and Frankie, or even Fuller House), shows that are not completely watered-down and sanitized and homogenized because when Netflix streams a series, they’re not worried about who they might turn off but who they’re going to hook in.

Simply put, Netflix doesn’t have to worry about the “18 to 35” demo with Fuller House. They already have those people’s subscriptions. Anyone who’s still worried about the future of original programming on Netflix after this trainwreck can relax.

The fact that they’re willing to make a show that does nothing for you personally indicates that they’ll continue putting out shows with no regard for pleasing everybody.

Update: After I posted this, Twitter user @Trevel had this to say, which I think just about sums up the key to Netflix’s approach:

“Arguably the best thing about Netflix is that I’m the customer, not the product.”

They tell you to never go to bed angry, but sometimes there’s nothing else for it.

You can’t talk it out. You can’t work it out. You can try to fight it out, but the longer you do that, the less certain you are that out even exists, that you aren’t just fighting your way further and further in with every word either one of you says.

In these cases, maybe there is nothing to do except to sleep it out. When you wake up, maybe you’ll both feel better. Maybe the problems won’t seem so big. Maybe the solutions won’t seem so impossible. Maybe the good won’t seem so small or far away, maybe the bad won’t seem so big and overwhelming. Maybe all the things you fought about the night before will still be real, but it will matter less.

Going to bed angry isn’t a great thing. It’s not fun. It’s isn’t a plan of action or a solution or something you should aim to do. It can be the worst experience of your life, or at least it can feel like that at the time.

But the thing about going to bed is that it almost always offers you something you can get no other way: a chance to wake up.

If you go to bed angry and you wake up still angry, then you know that you’ve got a real problem. If you go to bed feeling hopeless and miserable about your situation and you wake up feeling that way, then things are seriously wrong. If you go to bed seething with frustration and wondering how you can ever possibly get past this huge intractable impasse and you wake up with stars in your eyes, love in your heart, and a smile on your face (or however close you can get to that before caffeine), though, then you can be pretty sure that things are going to be okay.

Sometimes I want to be the one who gets to say “I’m trying as hard as I can.” and have people tell me that it’s okay.

Sir Christopher Frank Carandini Lee, CBE, CStJ was born in London on May 27th, 1922. He lived every day of his life until he didn’t.

His career as an actor spanned seven decades and literally hundred of films, including roles that were both iconic and sublime. He is not the most famous person to have played the role of Frankenstein’s monster or Dracula, nor the most infamous person to have starred in a movie called The Wicker Man, but he put his stamp on everything he did.

His long career as an actor followed an initial foray into office work and then extensive and storied service for the Allies in World War II. Newly returned from war, he found his old life unsatisfying and the staid paths laid out before him unappealing, and so he reinvented himself as an actor.

He spent a decade doing bit parts and background roles, constantly being told he was too tall for an actor. Lee persevered in the face of what he saw as a non-sequitur, and would eventually prove his critics wrong with a career that ran the gamut from big budget tentpole blockbusters to B movies to prestige pics. It could be surmised that he used his physical stature to his advantage, but if anything, it only complemented the tremendous personal presence he brought to his roles. He played everybody from Sherlock Holmes to Georges Seurat, while also doing voice work and recording several heavy metal albums.

In 2005—at the age of 87—he was referred to as the world’s most bankable star after movies he was connected to posted record grosses. Notably, he portrayed notable villains in three of the biggest movie franchises of all time: James Bond, Star Wars, and The Lord of the Rings.

In 2013, speaking on the subject of the retirement he never pursued, he said, “Making films has never just been a job to me, it is my life. I have some interests outside of acting – I sing and I’ve written books, for instance – but acting is what keeps me going, it’s what I do, it gives life purpose.”[x]

In 2014, speaking of a lighthearted Christmas album he had just put out, he said, “At my age, the most important thing for me is to keep active by doing things that I truly enjoy.”[x]

Christopher Lee celebrated his 93rd and final birthday on May 27th.

He lived until June 7th.

Despite his penchant for playing monsters and monstrous people, the part for which I will always remind him most fondly is the kindly, avuncular voice of Death in animated adaptations of the beloved Discworld series by Terry Pratchett, a brilliant author who also lived.

So, while dealing with being sick and the need to be sitting upright at times when I would rather have been laying down sleeping, I wound up playing a lot of the comic sci-fi FPS game Borderlands. This is a game I’ve played through multiple times with multiple characters, so it can be fairly relaxing, even meditative, when I need something engaging enough to distract me but that won’t take a lot of energy or mental effort.

A side effect of playing a FPS (that’s first person shooter, for those not hep to the modern lingo) right before falling asleep is I had dreams that were from a first-person perspective. The first thing I thought when I woke up was, “Well, that was weird.”

The second thing I thought was: why was it?

After all, I live my life from a first-person perspective. I do not see my body from an outside perspective. I do not watch myself perform things from a distance. When I want to pick up a can of soda and drink from it, I am extending my own arm, guided only by what is visible in my field of view and a peripheral awareness of my arm’s existence and position.

Everything I see is from a first person perspective. Even if I look at a picture of myself, or see myself reflected in a mirror or window, or play a video game that uses a third-person perspective and watch a little figure respond to the movements of my fingers, I am seeing it from a first person perspective.

But I am used to seeing myself in dreams, or someone who somehow represents myself. When I imagine myself doing something, whether it’s the kind of elaborate fantasy that fuels my writing and roleplaying or something as simple and mundane as imagining interacting with a clerk at the DMV so I can psych myself up for it, I tend to imagine it from the sort of point of view that movies, TV shows, comic books, and (many) video games have made so familiar and accessible to me: the third person.

Since I had this realization, I’ve tried—at first, mostly just as an exercise in curiosity—to shift my inner life from that of a cameraman to that of a person. When I imagine myself doing something or rehearse something in my head, I imagine what I will see looking out through my own two eyes. When I’m imagining a character in a situation, I try to imagine it through their eyes, literally as well as metaphorically. It’s not something I can do consistently yet, and maybe not very well, but I think it’s actually doing something for my confidence and follow-through when I think of things like… well, when I conceive of “writing” from the viewpoint of the screen in front of me and a keyboard just visible on my lap, rather than a doubtlessly inaccurate and detached view of myself sitting in a chair in front of a computer.

I don’t know if this will be any kind of great epiphany for most people. I don’t know what percentage of people imagine themselves in the third person what percentage of the time.

In addition to changing how I think about myself when I’m imagining something, I’ve also started just noticing myself from a first-person point of view. People I trust—friends, family, random articles on the internet—have been talking to me about “mindfulness”, but other than things like being aware of my breathing (which I usually am) and sometimes taking a moment to reflect on how I’m feeling, I’ve never quite acquired the knack of it in any larger or deeper sense.

But now I’ll be walking down a hallway, or sitting in a corner, and I’ll think about what I can see, where my hands are, what my legs are doing… not in a “OH GEEZ WHAT ARE MY LEGS DOING NOW?” sense, just “This is what’s happening. This is where I am. This is what it looks like to me when I am in this place, doing this thing.”

And while it might seem like this kind of self-awareness would lead to self-consciously, but the opposite has been true. I find myself moving more smoothly and fluidly through the world I live in. with the same kind of facility I can slide around corners on the alien world of Pandora when I’m playing Borderlands.

It’s interesting. Growing up trans, and coping with everything that comes with that as a young adult, I sort of divorced myself from my body. I stopped thinking of what I have—my body—as me, as what I am. But I never really found anything to replace that.

If I am not a body, what am I? A soul, a mind? What are those? A consciousness? That’s so nebulous. And yet, when I’m trying to explain the qualitative concept of consciousness to someone who’s never pondered it, the first thing I settle on is asking them to think about their field of vision. If a brain really was just a series of physical interactions, chemical dominoes knocking each other over in response to stimuli, the human body that is recognized as you would behave exactly the way you do in response to anything that happens within your field of awareness, but would that field of awareness exist?

Note that I don’t want to bog down this post with a discussion of philosophical zombies, so please treat the questions in the previous paragraph as rhetorical. The point here is that for questions like “What am I that is more than a body? What does my existence add to the world? What will be lost when I’m gone?”, maybe the best answer is “A perspective.”

Or as The Sandman put it, so many years ago now: