Better Angels

I forgot my mantra: In search of a blog obsession

Merlin Mann posted last month about "What Makes for a Good Blog?" and I heard him discuss the subject on a podcast; I've been musing on it ever since, and thought it would be interesting (as I'm sure many other bloggers are doing) to compare his suggestions to what I'm trying to do around here:

1. Good blogs have a voice. Who wrote this? What is their name? What can I figure out about who they are that they have never overtly told me? What’s their personality like and what do they have to contribute — even when it’s “just” curation. What tics and foibles fascinate make me about this blog and the person who makes it? Most importantly: what obsesses this person?

On creating this blog, my first decision was to build it around my full name. I wanted to be accountable and real. I wanted to "out" myself on various issues that I normally try to keep quiet about in polite company.

There is risk to this -- most people in my work life and who live within a 100 mile radius of me disagree substantially with my point of view, to the degree that they might well consider me deranged. Since starting the blog, I've noticed that pretty much everyone else in this same situation has chosen to go with a pseudonym to protect their careers and their social standing, which makes me wonder if I made a mistake...but what's done is done, and I will soldier on.

My strategy to get around the deranged thing is to force myself to express my reasoning fully. It's my hope that my in-depth discussion both of why I believe what I believe and, equally importantly, my personal story and background, will make it possible for people who strongly disagree with me to see where I'm coming from and get a sense of my basic humanity. The title of the blog is a call not to bland genericisms we can all agree on, but to civility within the context of strong disagreement. (So get to disagreeing already!)

2. Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can’t stop reading and writing about it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person’s obsessions take them?

This is, for now, a known weakness of this blog. I intentionally did not create the blog with a central focus or obsession; I have obsessions available to me, such as skepticism, gaming, economics, and some politics, but I didn't want to be a blog about any particular one of those things, especially since I might choose the wrong thing and burn out on it, and because there are better, much more informed bloggers in any particular area I might choose.

So I decided to just pour out whatever I'm passionate about at the moment and see if one thing or another becomes the structural identity of the blog over time. No doubt I'll be influenced by visitor stats -- if one of my obsessions seems to hit home more than others, I'll inevitably cover more of that, though never dropping the rest.

If you wish to more directly tip the scales, just let me know what sort of content you find more interesting.

3. Good blogs are the product of “Attention times Interest.” A blog shows me where someone’s attention tends to go. Then, on some level, they encourage me to follow the evolution of their interest through a day or a year. There’s a story here. Ethical “via” links make it easy for me to follow their specific trail of attention, then join them for a walk made out of words.

I believe this will fall out naturally from what I'm currently doing...

4. Good blog posts are made of paragraphs. Blog posts are written, not defecated. They show some level of craft, thinking, and continuity beyond the word count mandated by the Owner of Your Plantation. If a blog has fixed limits on post minimums and maximums? It’s not a blog: it’s a website that hires writers. Which is fine. But, it’s not really a blog.

I'm the king of paragraphs! What Merlin expresses here is exactly what I'm after in each of my posts; if there's any regret I tend to have after publishing a particular post, it's when I feel I should have done more to flesh out my thinking and provide a complete narrative. (Readers desperately sick of the vomiting of words words words may disagree...)

Where possible I want a post to have a beginning, middle and end, with something substantive and important to the overall argument in each segment. It's the process of generating this that stretches my writing muscles and improves my brain (while perhaps torturing your eyes).

5. Good “non-post” blogs have style and curation. Some of the best blogs use unusual formats, employ only photos and video, or utilize the list format to artistic effect. I regret there are not more blogs that see format as the container for creativity — rather than an excuse to write less or link without context more.

I have no interest in being a non-post blog...I appreciate blogs like Instapundit, but I have no desire or ability to be them, and in the case of Instapundit, the lack of context often annoys me; it would work so much better with just a bit more...

5. Good blogs are weird. Blogs make fart noises and occasionally vex readers with the degree to which the blogger’s obsession will inevitably diverge from the reader’s. If this isn’t happening every few weeks, the blogger is either bored, half-assing, or taking new medication.

Weirdness is in the eye of the beholder. Vexing, though, I can handle (get me going on organic food sometime...or, you know, Naomi Klein...)

6. Good blogs make you want to start your own blog. At some point, everyone wants to kill the Buddha and make their own obsessions the focus. This is good. It means you care.

Yeah, kill me and start your own blog! Though I would like to point out that the killing me part is strictly optional (the experience might provide for a good first post, though).

7. Good blogs try. I’ve come to believe that creative life in the first-world comes down to those who try just a little bit harder. Then, there’s the other 98%. They’re still eating the free continental breakfast over at FriendFeed. A good blog is written by a blogger who thinks longer, works harder, and obsesses more. Ultimately, a good blogger tries. That’s why “good” is getting rare.

Didn't Yoda say, "There is no try, there is only do"? Nonetheless, I shall strive to endeavor to try.

8. Good blogs know when to break their own rules. Duh. I made a list, didn’t I? Yes. I did. Big fan.

So there it is. The ultimate verdict on this particular humble blog remains to be seen...

My ancient gay workplace column

Fifteen years ago (!) I went through the experience of coming out in the workplace and campaigning for domestic partners insurance at a time when such benefits were rare, the concept of gay rights were little understood, and AIDS was still about the only thing most people knew about gays. During a critical time for the gay rights movement, I got to play a little part in the history of changing things.

As part of all this, for a brief period I wrote a column for a Bay Area periodical called OutNOW. The columns are relics now, but I thought they'd be interesting to provide as an insight into where things were at the time, so I've created a side box listing the columns, and also link to them in this post.

Below is a write-up I did for my first-ever website (I was trying to do a sort of blog long before this blogging thing existed). I was going to modernize it and make it this post, but it seems fine to just pass it along as I wrote it at the time.

It strikes me now that teenagers today might find the workplace issues I was documenting in these columns as incomprehensible and alien to the modern world. And I can think of no greater tribute to the success of the work we did back then.

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These are some columns I wrote for a Bay Area paper, OutNOW, a couple of years ago. They tell stories of being gay in the work world, including my experiences campaigning for domestic partners insurance coverage at Oracle.

They started out as as "plug tab A into slot B" journalism: The details of coming out at work and getting domestic partners insurance. How to be a practical gay person. This is what the paper wanted, and I was just happy to have a column, so it's what I set out to write. Later I realized I was after something different. Nonetheless, here are my first three columns, published under the banner "Out on the Job".

Five Levels of Outness

Out on the Job Search

I'm a writer, not a journalist. So while I had a lot of interest in educating people, I had a lot more interest in having an emotional impact on them. Many people have complemented the first three columns, finding them useful instructional pieces, but I found them lacking. I wanted to accomplish more. I pushed myself, but with each column I just wasn't getting any closer to where I wanted to go.

Finally, for The Inherited Closet I did a lot of soul searching. And then a lot of rewriting. I wanted to communicate a person and her story, not a set of bulleted steps about "coming out in the workplace". This was the first writing I can recall ever writing and rewriting and rewriting. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to give a picture of this person I had so much respect for. It was work. But finally I reached something that maybe, just maybe, was getting to where I wanted to go.

The Inherited Closet

Looking back on it now, The Inherited Closet seems like a pretty typical piece of feature article journalism. But it was an important step to the next two columns, which are the ones I'm most proud of.

I had come out at work in the first place because I needed domestic partners insurance, in a time when it was almost unheard of. I joined our gay/lesbian/bisexual group because I needed the insurance, and therefore needed to campaign for it, and I agreed to co-chair the group for the same reason. This led to many things in my life, one of them being the "Out on the Job" column. In the middle of my short tenure at OutNOW!, the benefits finally came through. A year and a half of my life was justified. This was the result.

The Journey's the Thing, They Say

Now I was rolling. Now I had written something that I felt strongly about. I felt that it really communicated my experience and the feelings I went through on that roller-coaster. Now it was time to reach that height with someone else's story.

This next column means more to me than I can say.

I didn't create a single word of it. Every word came from things Amy Lapidow said to me on the phone, from email she sent me, and from her personal journals. Rather than use a typical interview format ("How did that make you feel, Amy?"), I decided to take her words and her sentences and fit them together to tell her story. Her voice was so unique that I didn't want to get in the way.

It starts with Sophie, her partner, her wife, already dead. And it ends with her alive and on a note of hope.

This is what I came up with. I hope you still like it, Amy.

Are You Getting Another Roommate?

That column took its toll. It was the hardest thing I ever wrote, going through many many revisions, and many late nights of tearing my hair out. I wanted every word to be perfect, and at the same time I wanted to communicate years of a person's life in a few hundred words. That was all stressful enough, but after I turned it in, the publisher demanded changes on the day of publication. He wanted to remove the italics. They didn't work in the newspaper format, he said. I felt the italics were essential to the passages from Amy's journal. Without italics much of the column would make no sense. He wanted to try a different font instead of italics. I didn't think that would help. We went back and forth on it.

He was generally suspicious of the column. "What does it have to do with being out on the job?", he asked. True enough, but that wasn't my agenda. I countered with the fact that she did mention something about her workplace.

Then he wanted to replace shit -- as in "Dead is, they're gone, you don't want them to be, and all their shit is your shit, and you can't call them up, they're gone." -- with stuff. Stuff. I went through the roof. That paragraph was the heart of everything. Amy's words were better than anything spoken in any fiction. She was talking about everything that a relationship and death means, and he wanted her to be talking about stuff, not shit.

The advertisers.

I couldn't talk him out of that one. We went back and forth on it, with only a couple of hours to press. I was furious. I told him I wouldn't do it without Amy's approval -- if she didn't approve, they'd have to pull the column. So I made some frantic calls to Amy (on another coast), and she accepted the change.

The column went to press, with some things changed and some things not. Shit was now crap.

After that, the publisher made some agreements with me. With each of my columns, they would choose to publish it verbatim, with absolutely no changes, or they would not publish it. In turn, I would give them enough lead time to make that decision. Really, this showed the publisher's good faith. He wasn't trying to stomp on my artistic desires so much as run a paper; if my columns weren't always going to be about being "out on the job", maybe they should be run as some kind of feature instead. He was happy to accommodate me, he just didn't want to spend so damn much time arguing about a single page of the paper.

So technically I had everything I wanted. But it was too late. Something about that experience just burned me out. I couldn't put myself out that much for a column and then have to go through the fight for its integrity.

I only did one column after that.

Walking the Line

It's been a couple of years, and these days I'm concentrating on writing fiction. But I think sometime I'd like to try a column again.

Story: Down the Hell Hole

The story: Down the Hell Hole

Spoilerific discussion below...please read the story first! (It only takes a couple of minutes....)

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This is a story that was rejected by Escape Pod in no time flat, indicating it didn't make it past the slush pile. Ah well, I respectfully disagree, as I think it would have made a good flash fiction entry there.

As shouldn't be too hard to discern, the story is an encapsulation of numerous first-person shooter games I have played -- no one has yet successfully named each game referenced, and I invite you to try.

For all I know this story is the first to provide an explanation for illogical staples of the first-person shooter genre such as random health power-ups laying around, so perhaps it is history-making in that regard.

All I can say is: I think it's funny, and the sheep cracks me up.

Story: Maya

The story: Maya

Spoilerish comments below -- please read the story first! (And the previous post if you haven't already...)

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First off, if you did take a moment to read the story, thank you. If you didn't, it only takes about two minutes, to why not go do so now?

I like this story for reasons I'll get into, but I'm plagued by the idea it is too short. I would love to have the facility of Robert Silverberg to spin a luxurious novella-length tale around a plot of this sort, allowing the reader to sink into a world and the characters in the manner of his haunting "Sailing to Byzantium". Perhaps the biggest benefit of such an approach would be a greater chance of achieving the desired emotional impact at the end. As the author, I read in the emotional resonance I want, but I have no idea if the same occurs for someone coming to it cold.

Whatever I might wish, though, I find myself constantly striving for the shortest and quickest resolution to whatever I am writing. I like to think it's a sort of modern style and not sheer laziness.

It's not much of a stretch to admit I'm the immature dolt of the story...except in real life I'm the one who happens to know how to program.

Speaking of Silverberg, he is both a very favorite author of mine and a big inspiration for this story. I'm on a probably-lifelong mission to read all the Silverberg I can (his oeuvre is quite massive), and a common theme of his work is a couple working out their problems against he backdrop of time or space. I had thoughts at the time of dedicating the story to him, since it couldn't have existed without him.

I was congratulated for the clever use of the title and name of the wife, as "Maya" is a goddess of illusion, which was very appropriate to the story. However, I was not in fact so smart...I was making a reference to Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam War Memorial and all-around artist. Fortunately for me, both sources work well and resonate, so it's a happy accident (unless Maya Lin was also named after the goddess, in which case it's indirectly intentional...)

An additional inspiration for the story (where "inspiration" means "I ripped off the concept wholesale") is a short Alan Moore comic story about a world in which superheroes have been placed in a ghetto, surrounded by an encroaching darkness that will annihilate them. I can't find the title of the story at the moment, but will update this post when I get home from vacation. In any case, the last frame of the story has always stayed with me, a picture of a top-hatted Victorian superhero looking beyond a fence at the coming darkness, with the thought:

Perhaps it is an illusion, borne of the distance...

I decided to build on that, and combined it with an idea from a story I wrote in High School, about a guy living in a fantasy world in his basement and starving himself to death while the world wandered on by. In thinking about a universe disappearing in shrinking concentric circles around this couple, it seemed fitting that the universe would eventually be composed of their bedroom, the place where they could continue to try to shut out the events of the world and interact with each other at the most intimate level.

For me, the story is all about the point where she loses language, yet they continue on. That part gets me every time.

On Writing

A couple of points that are key to this post:

1. I do not believe in false modesty, so all mentions of personal insufficiency herein are heartfelt.
2. I do believe in publicly shaming myself into action.

From my earliest days of self-awareness, I had a burning drive to be a writer. This stemmed from my being a voracious reader of books; science fiction, specifically. Thankfully, I grew up in a pre-internet era, or these beloved electrons would have kept me from so many delightful hours and days completely immersed in dead paper.

I read hundreds of -- perhaps a thousand or more -- science fiction books as a youngster. I can't pinpoint exactly when I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I recall imagining the dozens of manuscripts I would write, and when I was -- eight? nine? -- asking my father for a filing cabinet so I could store my works-to-be. He suggested buying a little cardboard two-drawer thing for me (I've had one for years now, as it happens, and they are surprisingly useful), and I was discouraged because I knew it wouldn't be large enough for my coming output, and so I didn't get into writing quite yet.

This thing of having plans and never actually executing them was to be the curse of my life, as it turned out. And while I may have slain a few of the mental dragons involved, conquering it completely remains my holy grail.

As I became an early teenager the writing flame began to burn all the brighter, and I made my first couple of attempts to scratch some handwritten thing out. In High School, my friends new me as the wannabe writer, and I even completed a small thing or two on a sturdy manual typewriter, including something intended for the first Writers of the Future contest.

The most successful story I ever wrote back then had an odd little history. I had a rather depressive friend who at some point was close enough to killing himself that he called a suicide hotline, who promptly alerted the cops while assuring him all along that his privacy was guaranteed, even as he watched the officers get out of the car and approach his door. He spent a bit of time in a facility for troubled youth, and when he returned he was naturally enough behind on his school work. His English teacher told him he could make up credit by writing stories, so my friend and I spent an all-nighter taking turns churning out stories on his Apple II that he could turn in.

One of my stories was from the first-person point of view, started out something like this:

You must listen to me. I have a message. The world hangs in the balance, but first I must get someone to hear me.

Throughout the story the protagonist pleads that someone must listen to his message to save the world, but no one hears him and in the end he dies knowing that humanity will also die for not having listened.

My friend turned in this story, and for some reason the teacher took this oddity about the death of us all from a recently-suicidal student rather seriously. Next thing my friend knew he was in the Principal's office expected to explain the meaning behind a story that he couldn't quite remember, given both the fog of the all-nighter and the problem of not having actually written it. Thankfully we were a decade or more away from Columbine, or he might still be in that Principal's office.

As I approached graduation, my intent was to be a full-time or almost full-time writer and to set the world on fire. At the first or second mind-blowing science fiction convention I attended (NorWesCon), where I was immersed in the shocking experience of fitting in somewhere, I encountered a woman, Bridget, who would change my life.

I was looking for some kind of writer's group, and Bridget happened to be involved in one, the only problem being that it was in another state. Somehow we decided we could get past that, so I ended up joining them remotely. They would tape their meetings and send the tapes to me, and I would tape myself and send the tape and my latest story back to them -- this was a very high-latency precursor to Skype.

Through this I met my partner of 20+ years, which is the biggest way my life was changed, but that is another story.

As for writing, I burned with mental energy and could churn out the bad stories. I would get gripped with an image or line of prose and have it take over my brain until I could get it out...one way to make sure I would finish a scene or story was to not let myself actually write down the magic line in my head until I had written out all the preceding material, at which point I got to experience a mental fireworks show as I put down the words that had been haunting me til that moment.

Nothing else meant nearly as much as writing to me. This was clearly my purpose in life, and the one thing I had to be.

But it wasn't to be.

For one thing, there was the need to make a living. Which required, to my dismay, doing the one thing I was sure I would escape: Working 9-5 in a corporate office.

For another, there was the artistic maturity problem. I actually had a facility for throwing around words (much more so then than now, I fear), and found I could write some interesting letters and sometimes weave an interesting auto-biographical tale, but when it came to making up stuff about how other people talk and think and creating plots that I wouldn't immediately eviscerate as being ridiculous and unacceptable, I became a blithering idiot.

Also, I had some strange mental hang-ups. Like, for no particular reason, I believed you could only write something you already knew. The idea that researching something was an acceptable way to proceed was repellent to me, and if I did try to research something and then write that into a story, it felt incredibly and obviously artificial, like I was yelling, "Look what I read about!" It's surprisingly crippling to a writer to be stuck with what you already know, especially if you are eighteen.

The plot problem was a big one. Not only would I not allow the seed of a plot to live long enough to find its own way, but I would constantly plot myself into a corner and then give up on the story because it turned out not to work. I simply could not see or accept that, as the writer, I was in charge of the universe and could make anything happen that I wanted. Somehow the plot had to spring up organically and then all the parts must work perfectly together without artificial interference from my conscious mind. Since this more or less doesn't happen in the real world, I was truly stuck.

And there were other issues, such as lacking the ability to perceive passage of time and familiarity with character that the reader would have, such that on page three I would feel like the reader had been living with this character forever and knew him as well as a family member, when in fact the reader hadn't quite cottoned on to their name yet.

I soldiered on, spending years obsessed with one story that I could never get right, based on my relationship with the depressive friend mentioned above, and then with another story about a spaceman stuck on a planet that never came together, then trying to combine those two stories...eventually I toyed with playwriting, and found the excellent The Playwright's Handbook, which I recommend to anyone writing any sort of fiction. The interest in playwriting prompted me to join a local playwriting workshop that was quite educational.

The workshop was weekly, and consisted of doing a writing exercise, then everyone turning in the progress they'd made on their play that week and hearing it read by two professional actors, after which we all critiqued that week's work. This format was amazing, because it's simply unheard of for complete amateurs to get to hear professionals perform their work days or hours after pen hits paper.

For a year I attempted to turn that same muddled story that had been obsessing me into a play. After a year I had a couple of reasonably good scenes, and got the honor of having one of the scenes produced as part of a workshop contest. Unfortunately, life events and a misunderstanding with the instructor ended my participation in that workshop; if I got something out of it that really stuck with me, it was the hours and hours of listening to and commenting on the work of other budding playwrights.

My writing drive began to fade. The vast chasm between my taste/sense of quality and what I could actually produce had eroded my lifelong desire. Here and there I tried something again, only to back away when I saw the result.

I knew that the only answer to these issues was to continue trying, to actually finish some stories, and to slowly learn the craft. But I just didn't have the patience. Eventually playing computer games, and then making computer games, became my hobbyist passion, particularly once I found the BYOND game creation system, which was right up my alley, so much so that I spent years creating games and eventually contributing to the business aspects of the system and the revamping of their website.

Oddly, I discovered that when it came to designing computer games, many of my writing hang-ups were not to be found. I had no problem dispassionately looking at the components of a game that wasn't quite working and re-arranging them until something good resulted. When it came to game design, I lacked the lifelong soul-defining desire that would crush any creative thought before it could be fully born. I was able to treat it, as Penn Jillette describes Penn & Teller's handling of their magic show, like "running a laundromat".

And this eventually resulted in a popular game that gets a bit of play to this day. My collaborators (hi Guy T!) and I put in a lot of work and the work paid off in satisfaction, but when the work was done I didn't find myself embiggened, as Jebediah Springfield would say.

So my fancies turned back toward writing, and the hope that I could get some of that game design mojo to rub off on my craft of choice. Mr T (Guy T, that is) and I worked on some things together that we never quite finished (ahem, there!). In the meantime, Guy was editing a BYOND-based web magazine, BYONDscape, and interested in accepting fiction. So I decided to try an make progress this way: I would just write stuff as well as I could on the first try but without letting my self-criticism kick in, and I would send them to Guy before I could talk myself out of it, and it would be up to him whether to publish them.

In this manner I actually completed several stories and Guy agreed to publish them. Score something for me, even if in retrospect I find all but two of them cringeworthy; they were reasonable for that audience and that format, and the rule was to just get them out there. Later I submitted the stories to the science fiction podcast magazine, Escape Pod, which rejected all of them but did seem to at least take a couple into real consideration (I judge this by the fact that when something really didn't work for them, I got it back in about 20 seconds...)

Being serially rejected by Escape Pod, while to be completely expected, demotivated me again. I had a story in progress that quickly felt amateurish, so I let it hang. It's been a while, but now that I find myself reading the slap-to-the-face that is the ultimate James Tiptree, Jr. collection, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, I find myself both marveling at her (yes, her -- I'm likely to get into that in another post) bracing prose and ability to instantly capture an adult personality in a few words and thinking that for that last story I was working on, if I just twisted this and did a bit of that, maybe it wouldn't be so bad...

But how to publish? BYONDscape is no more in that form. Years and experience have thoroughly disabused me of the universal notion of the new writer that having a work selected for publication anoints one, changes one, or does a damn thing for one (other than get a bit of a paycheck, if you are lucky). And in this webbified instant world, waiting months or years for response isn't too interesting either.

I'm fully aware that this attitude marks me as a permanent amateur, and that I'm avoiding the true path to publication...but, really, I don't care. At this point in life, writing fiction, like blog writing, is for the improvement and enjoyment of myself and those few outside of my head who might be interested.

So I am resolved: I will publish the occasional thing on this blog, at whatever frequency they occur. There will be a "Stories" block on the side, to taunt me with its near emptiness, and for each item I decide to publish here I'll provide a corresponding post with some background on how the story came to be. Stories will be open for comments, and I'll refine them at my whim or if a suggestion inspires me.

I will seed the box with the two stories I mentioned that don't quite have me trying to kill myself in despair. You are welcome to join in the taunting if I'm not holding up my end.

Now you know where I am and how I got here. Be kind, but be not gentle.