Forever Weird on the Internet

I got to meet Felicia Day! It was really fun!

I think I first saw Felicia in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, but  I didn't really know who she was until I started watching The Guild a couple of years later. I don't personally play World of Warcraft, but a lot of my friends from a previous company did, and introduced me to the series through the amazing music video one-offs she did for it. Once I started watching the web series proper, I was completely hooked: I'm deep into fantasy, and gaming, and awkward relationships, all of which The Guild totally nailed.

I've avidly followed her career since then. In particular, I've greatly enjoyed her Geek & Sundry YouTube channel, which has a really fresh and positive attitude towards video games and other elements of nerd culture. Her personal video journal series The Flog has introduced me to lots of great things I wouldn't have otherwise known about, and Co-Optitude (a series where she and her brother play through the console games they weren't allowed to play as a child) is always fun.

Recently, she has shared some funny promotional videos for her new book, You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost). The book just came out, and I was lucky enough to attend an interview and book-signing with her at the Jewish Community Center here in San Francisco.

The event itself was fantastic. It was moderated by Jane McGonigal, who I hadn’t heard of before but sounds very interesting - she recently finished writing SUPERBETTER, a book about the neuroscience behind gaming. That shared background with Felicia made her a perfect interviewer.

The whole program is available online if you'd like to see it!

The overall event was very funny - Felicia is a quick thinker, with perfect reactions to a bunch of small unplanned things that occurred throughout the evening - but also very inspiring. She talked very frankly about her successes, the steps she took to achieve them, and the unexpected hardships that resulted. She spoke encouragingly to other people who want to become creators, sharing both specific and general advice in completing your projects and bringing them to the world.

Two things from the talk especially stuck out to me. One was Felicia’s optimistic view of fan culture and the way it can bring us together as human beings. As she pointed out, a lot of the topics that are most important to us as individuals are also things that divide us from others. If I start talking about religion, or my political views, I’ll immediately alienate a good number of people. Similarly, people who come from different economic and cultural backgrounds will find it harder to relate to one another, since we don’t share the same experiences and reference points. Nerd culture, though, instantly transcends and cuts through all of those differences. If you’re obsessed with a particular show/game/book/movie, and find another person who shares that same obsession, then it doesn’t matter what race they are, what gender, what school they did or didn’t attend. You feel an instant sense of connection with them, and suddenly have a way to relate and enjoy one another’s company.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard such an eloquent defense of nerd culture before, and it really resonated with me. Like a lot of people, I’m more or less ashamed of the things I love. I always feel kind of guilty when I talk about entertainment that I enjoy; it feels like I should instead be talking about the DEEP things, the things that REALLY MATTER, and not nattering on about some made-up stories. I think Felicia makes a great point, though. There IS value in the connections this shared culture enables. It’s a means of bridging the gaps between people, and can open the way to increasing empathy and understanding. That’s a very good thing!

The other thing that particularly resonated with me was her inspiring rhetoric about creativity. How important it is to work hard and bring new things into the world. How we shouldn't worry about the people who will scoff or devalue the work we do - there's an infinite supply of criticism available on the Internet! - and should instead pay attention to the people who receive joy from our works. Even if only a handful of people enjoy the thing we do, we're still making the world an incrementally better place by making new things that they can love. And creation is not only a gift from the maker to the consumer, but it's also a privilege, a way to commune and communicate, to share our thoughts and ideas.

That's something I immediately took to heart. As I sat there in the auditorium listening to her, I immediately thought of my own Shadowrun campaigns, which have been a major aspect of my personal creativity over the last two years. By many external barometers, they have been quite successful: well over twenty thousand people have played my games, they've been highly-rated, and I continue to receive many kind compliments from people who have enjoyed them enough to take the time to write me about them. And yet, I feel weirdly ashamed about them. I think that might partly be because very few people I know personally really understand the franchise and the lore; any time they come up in conversation, I try to change the subject as quickly as possible, afraid of... I don't know what, exactly. Boring people, or revealing an unsightly passion, or revealing that I cared too much about something and thus opening myself up to hurt if other people dislike it.

After hearing Felicia talk and reading her book, though, I became determined to take more pride in my work. Plenty of people don't care about Shadowrun, but that's okay! I shouldn't obsess about that. I should pay attention to the thousands of people who have engaged with my storytelling, and even more than that, I should listen to the hundreds of people who have reached out to share their own joy. I don't know exactly what I'll do with this newfound outlook, but I'm hoping to carry it forward with me into future creative endeavors, focusing on the people I'm reaching and not the ones I'm not.

There was a fantastic Q&A as well. I really liked the format - people submitted their questions on index cards, both before and during the event, then organizers screened them and the interviewer picked a few to ask. I would ordinarily transcribe what I remember of the best questions and answers, but since the entire program is available online, I’ll take a runner this time.

I stuck around for the book-signing afterwards. As usual, I spent some time thinking of a single thing to say before meeting her. I vacillated between asking “Are you looking forward to Shadowrun: Hong Kong” (which had come out that morning) or thanking her for introducing me to Fallen London via the Flog. I settled on the latter. She got really excited when I brought it up, asking if I’d played Sunless Sea yet, and telling me that an upcoming Flog would be covering the latest game. As a veteran con-goer, Felicia is a master at dealing with slightly awkward nerds, and it was probably the best interaction I’ve had with any of the authors or celebrities I’ve met.

(Since then, I've found out that she actually has her own NPC in Shadowrun: Hong Kong, which makes me wish I'd brought up that instead... but hey, that will give us something else to talk about if we ever meet again!)

I was planning to make a separate post when I finished reading You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost), but I finished it by the time I finished this post, so… here it is!

First, a tiny little "wow" moment I had was reading Felicia's obsession with the Ultima series. I think we're about the same age, and Ultima was also an incredibly formative game for me. Felicia wrote poetry about it; I drew maps and wrote short fiction. In the book, Felicia talks about how she met other Ultima fans online and the funny/weird interactions they ended up having in the real world; I was lucky enough to have some real-world friends with a similar love of the series, and I strongly related to her reminiscing of shared enthusiasm for the wonderful gameplay and lore of those games.

The book as a whole is a really fantastic memoir. Felicia has a wonderful voice, which you know if you’ve watched The Flog or her various public appearances. She’s very frank and self-deprecating, but also has a wonderful spirit and keen sense of humor. She eschews false modesty, but also places things in their proper context.

For example, during college she was very proud of her 4.0 GPA (while pursuing a double major in mathematics and music performance). She still seems a little proud of it today, but is also very clear that it made absolutely zero difference in the rest of her life after graduation. One of her professors suggested that getting a B might be the best thing to happen to her, which she reacted VERY strongly against, while acknowledging from the present that he may have been right.

Her personal upbringing was fascinating, and she draws a pretty clear line from it to her adult success. She was homeschooled, and grew up with NO friends at all. That was a deprivation in many ways, but the advantage was that, without any peers, she never had anyone to tell her “No” about any of her obsessions. There weren’t any boys around to tell her that girls couldn’t play video games; there weren’t any girls around to tell her that math was hard and dumb; there weren’t any teachers around to keep her from watching Lost in Space every morning. So, by the time she went to college and did start encountering peer pressure to conform, she was secure enough in her likes and dislikes to hold on to the things she loved. If she’d faced those pressures earlier in life, she might have lost those passions, and ended up with a much more mundane career.

Of course, there are also downsides to that lack of socialization. Throughout the book, Felicia is extremely honest (although also funny) about her struggles with anxiety, panic attacks, and imposter syndrome. Ever since childhood she’s had a deeply-ingrained need to succeed, which pushes her to always try harder and never feel like she’s accomplished her goals. Even in situations when the people around her are praising her accomplishments, she obsessively focuses on the imperfections of her creations. That drive has contributed to her career, but has also made her miserable.

One of the major points Felicia makes, and observes that almost nobody else does, is that success does not make things better. As she points out, that sounds like a dishonest thing to say - “If you achieved your dreams, you would hate yourself!” - but she’s hoping to help warn future people who may follow in her path. It’s easy to think to yourself, “Oh, if only I could accomplish this goal, I would be happy!” Then you accomplish that thing, and you don’t magically become happy, and the fact you don’t become happy after working so hard and making so many sacrifices makes things even worse.

The book is extremely frank about her struggles. When she seemed to be at the peak of her career - The Guild extremely popular, she had launched a multimillion-dollar company, and was featuring in a popular television series - she was suffering from depression, had massive health problems, and obsessively thought of suicide.  She’s also very candid about what she did to pull herself out of that hole, including the things she tried along the way that didn’t work.

The last couple of chapters are about her interactions with the misogynistic GamerGate mob, a topic that’s horrified me ever since it began. Much of this is in the public record already, but she shares some additional information in the book that underlies how terrifying the situation was. That whole story is so sad on so many levels. You feel bad for what’s happened to Felicia, and how terror tactics are being used to silence women in the field, but in the context of this book what’s especially tragic is how it seems to strike at the very heart of her optimism about the Internet and nerd culture. Virtually all of her experiences up to that point, from her Prodigy dial-up days onward, saw the Internet as a way of connecting with other people, of discovering like-minded individuals unfettered by the constraints of geography or lifestyle. It’s an engine of creation, of germination, capable of cultivating and birthing wonderful new things that could never be born in the traditional physical world.

The sad take-away from these last chapters, though, is that the Internet can be turned to evil purposes as well as good. It can destroy things, destroy people, crush ideas before they have a chance to grow. Felicia’s solitary nerd childhood allowed her passions to flourish away from the harsh judgment of peer pressure. If she grew up today, though, and shared her early works online, an army of millions of trolls would stand at the ready to crush her dreams into the ground. The Internet is a wonderful tool for bringing together communities of people who share a love about something, but it’s also a deadly tool for organizing hate mobs who feed on each other’s self-righteous anger.

Felicia herself remains mostly optimistic about the Internet. During the Q&A, when an aspiring YouTube vlogger asked her for advice on growing her channel, one thing Felicia emphasized was building a core community who enjoys you and supports your work, rather than chasing a larger number of people who will be fickle admirers. These days, Felicia feels most connected to smaller communities, like her GoodReads book club and her Twitch subscribers. There are many trolls out there, but also lots of wonderful people, and she tries to stay focused on the good.

So, yeah! This was a fantastic book, in all honesty much better than I was expecting. I had hoped for a funny read and maybe a bit of gossip. It delivers, but it’s also a very engaging personal story and has some very valuable insights on navigating the digital world we live in, how to accomplish our goals, and how to stay happy and sane while doing so.

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I just realized I never mentioned/bragged that I got to see Neal Stephenson in person again! This is the third time I’ve been lucky enough to attend one of his book events. The seveneves reading was held at Public Works, a cool location on the northern fringes of the Mission District that's kind of a combination of art gallery and performance space. It was PACKED - we got there about 45 minutes before it was scheduled to start to find a lengthy line outside and a crush of people inside. We eventually found a spot on the second floor with a semi-obstructed view down to the stage below.

I’ve always enjoyed seeing Neal - he doesn’t seem like a naturally gregarious person, but has a kind of poised intellect and dry sense of humor that’s very compelling. This time around, he gave some very brief remarks introducing the book. One that sticks out in my mind was a quote that he said he’d heard from Bruce Sterling, something like “A thriller is a science-fiction novel that includes the President of the United States.” By that standard, he was comfortable describing seveneves as a thriller, and launched into reading a passage featuring the titular President along with an assortment of other characters in full-on crisis mode.

There was a lengthy question-and-answer period afterwards. I really should have written this earlier so it was fresher in my mind, but here are some of them, to the best of my recollection.

Q: Is Enoch Root in this book?

A: That would be a spoiler. Stephenson finds the biblical Enoch interesting because he’s from an era when there were so few people on Earth that you could keep track of when each individual person was born and died; and Enoch is the one person for whom we have a birth date but no death date.

Q: Will you write another book set in the multiverse of Anathem?

A: Maybe. Neal thinks that his [he visibly cringes here at his own words] most efficient value-add is in creating new settings. It takes him a long time to write each book, and he feels like that time is best served by coming up with wholly original books. But whenever he finished a novel, he does feel like there’s more left to do there. If he ever runs out of ideas for new books, he’ll enjoy going back and revisiting some old ones.

Q: Is Jesus a time-traveling alien?

A: Anything is possible in the Multiverse.

Q: Is the <something from one book> related to the <something from another book>? (There were a couple of variations on this from multiple questioners.)

A: No. [After additional variations are asked:] He’s noticed a trend where people are looking for connections between his books, like they’re some kind of puzzle to solve. He doesn’t really work that way. Every time he starts work on a new novel, it’s like he starts building a new car. He works on it for a while, then starts driving it, as far and as fast as he possibly can, until he crashes it. Then he walks away from the flames and starts looking for a new car to build.

I was kind of dreading the signing line, but our sub-optimal mezzanine location ended up translating to a decent spot in the queue, and we got through in a good ten minutes or so. This was a less intimate experience than the one at the Swedish American Hall, but still a positive one, and Neal was very gracious.

Now, on to the book itself!

This should come as no surprise, but I enjoyed it. I don’t think I’ve ever disliked a solo-penned Stephenson book, so that wasn’t much in doubt; the more interesting question for me tends not to be “Will I like this book?” so much as “What the heck kind of book will this be?” I studiously eschewed all spoilers, so that was a fairly open question for me by the time I started reading it.

It isn’t directly comparable to any of his earlier books; it does have some of the fast-paced structure of REAMDE, but broken up with more typical scientific tangents. If I had to pick one to compare it to, I’d probably say The Diamond Age: the narrative is closely connected to learning about various scientific and technical principles, but in this case there’s a more propulsive central threat driving the plot forwards.

As is often the case for Stephenson, the plot itself is cool, but the ideas he spins out in the course of developing it are the real stars of the show. I don’t feel like recapping the story, but many of those themes are spread throughout the whole course of the novel, so let’s jump ahead and do some

MEGA SPOILERS

First, a somewhat random observation: gender is really important in this book. There’s much more female representation than one would necessarily expect, and more than in Neal’s other books. Ivy and Dinah are our only eyes in space for a long time, and the strongest through-line of continuity in the novel. They are, in some respects, typical Stephenson heroines: smart, resourceful, and brave, probably in that order.

In some ways what was more interesting, though, were the women who were NOT heroes. Specifically, President Julia is almost inarguably the biggest villain of the first 2/3 of the novel, and Aida becomes a sort of evil matriarch whose shadow darkens the final third. On the one hand, I tend to be happy when women are portrayed in a positive light: making wise decisions and saving the day. On the other hand, though, I wonder if there might be a different, kind of softly insidious bias in doing so relentlessly: representing female characters as ONLY good and talented, while male characters may be either heroes or villains.

It’s a challenging knot to untangle, because you wouldn’t want to revive old gendered stereotypes about villainous women: the black widow, the femme fatale, the dragon lady. Thinking back over Stephenson’s earlier books, I can’t think of another novel where the clear, sole adversary was a woman, so this is fairly new territory for him, and he acquits himself well. Julia is hateful, but in a believable and complex way: there are reasons for her actions, which are not blamed on her gender. She’s just as capable of dooming the human race as any man would be. I was reminded in some ways of Meredith Stannard from Dragon Age 2, another rare example of a female villain who also manages to be a compelling and loathsome adversary while being a believable human being.

The nature of her villainy is an interesting one, which is kind of alluded to in a light-hearted manner during that early meeting in the White House, and draws into sharper and sharper focus after the Earth is destroyed. As in basically all Stephenson novels, the protagonists are engineers, scientists, and crafters: the “doers” who actually accomplish tasks, who build things, who solve problems. The first third of the book is almost exclusively focused on them, in a sort of “man versus nature” narrative, as they draw upon on their ingenuity to try and surmount the seemingly impossible threat facing them.

We get the first solid indications of problems once Tav is launched into orbit. There’s a surprisingly pointed critique here of internet “social media” culture: Stephenson invents some fictional social platforms (such as “Spacebook”) that are obvious doppelgängers for Facebook, Twitter, and similar apps. People often see these things as annoyances or distractions, but Stephenson draws an even harsher picture: the ephemeral, low-friction nature of these platforms, which lends itself so well towards memes and bandwagoning and witch-hunts, is actively harmful, and ultimately dooms virtually all that remains of the human race.

The book presents a classic Stephenson opposition. On the one hand you have the “doers”, on the other hand the “talkers”. (This is subtly, but importantly, distinct from the Randian division between “creators” and “takers”.) Members of the GPop are doers, while the Arkies rapidly fall under the sway of the talkers. And the way in which this happens feels perfectly congruous with what often happens today: people are intensely interested in a subject, but have no means for directly affecting it, and so they endlessly discuss and argue and analyze and criticize it. Anyone who has seen a toxic fandom run amok on Tumblr or watched in horror as a seemingly rational person joined the ranks of a misogynistic mob will will quickly recognize the path down which the Arkies are traveling. People become obsessed with winning arguments and scoring points and gathering followers, and all of this noise eventually contributes to a shared hallucination that bears little resemblance to reality. Non-events become catalysts for incredibly harmful actions, good deeds are reinterpreted as gross insults, and the Arkie community eventually destroys the thing they claim to love. In the same way that some authors will insert fictional versions of hated critics into their works, it’s tempting to imagine that Stephenson is doing the same for the anonymous mob, but I think that he’s making an observation about a broader social sickness.

(And, yes, I’m well aware of the fact that me making a long-winded blog post about this book is pretty much Exhibit A in “talking about things instead of doing things”. It’s hard for me to ignore the fact that my posting frequency on this blog is inversely proportional to the amount of creative, productive work I’m doing in my life. Posts such as this amuse me, but really don’t contribute anything of value to the world.)

I think I was very much primed to respond to this section of the book, since it resonates with a lot of problems I’ve been mulling over for the past year. Mostly the stuff mentioned two paragraphs above: the ability to create tenuous and semi-anonymous connections with other people is a pretty impressive innovation in human history, but it seems to sap our capacity for empathy, and as a result there’s a shocking degree of hostility and abuse online which appears to be growing without abatement. We seem to live in a time when simple messages that align with your worldview are always more compelling than nuanced messages that question it, and the best way to gain influence is to produce a stream of those messages and channel them towards those of like minds. This leads to siloed thinking, echo chambers, battlegrounds where people on one side are convinced that they are right and pure and those on the other side must be eliminated.

But, any time my mind starts down that road, I realize that I’m sounding increasingly like a cranky old man, and start to question how new this all really is. You can imagine almost any criticism lodged against social media today to also have been raised at, say, the popularization of the novel. Just picture a solemn man with muttonchops shaking his head sadly. “Kids these days, with their books! Everyone is reading all by themselves, in solitude and isolation, losing the person-to-person contact that is necessary to form a healthy civic society. And people inevitably end up reading a few authors who reinforce their own prejudices, so they never become exposed to the range of opinions one would find out in the real world! Bah, humbug!” So, I dunno… the rise of electronic social media feels fundamentally different to me, but each generation probably feels that way about whatever new form of media arises in their lifetime.

Wow, that was a much longer tangent than anticipated. Returning to track:

In all the discussions about who to send into the GPop, and particularly when Julia makes her unexpected arrival, I was reminded of the “B” Ark encounter from Douglas Adams’ Restaurant at the End of the Universe. It’s been decades since I read it, but if memory serves, a planet facing catastrophe decides to send out three space arks. The “A” ark contains everyone at the top of society: the artists, generals, leaders, philosophers. The “C” ark has the people who perform actual work: stonemasons, janitors, welders, soldiers. And the “B” ark is everyone in the middle, people of status who keep the wheels spinning but don’t contribute physical labor or intellectual creativity: stockbrokers, insurance salesmen, middle management. The eventual joke is that there’s no real catastrophe at all: the planet just came up with this plan to trick all of its useless population into leaving, so the rest of them could focus on what needed to be done without supporting dead weight.

Those arks don’t directly map onto Neal’s, but it’s still a pretty good approximation. The heroes are all part of the “A” and “C” ark. People like Tekla are solidly in the “C” camp, but most protagonists like Dinah actually straddle both sides: Dinah has the leadership and creativity of an “A”, but tinkers enough with physical objects to be considered a “C”. Julia and Tav, in contrast, are pure “B”s. They don’t have anything of value to contribute, and yet they are incapable of doing nothing, and so they begin to churn, ultimately causing problems and preventing the “A”s and “C”s from doing what needs to be done.

In many ways, this division reaches its apotheosis in the third section of the book. “Blue” is led by technocrats, and is primarily driven by practical decisions: what’s the greatest need, and what’s the most efficient way to satisfy that need. “Red” is led by politicians and media experts; we only see it from the outside, but it seems to be driven largely by emotion (vengeance, pride, greed), and works towards its goals through media savvy, messaging, and cunning. Blue outnumbers Red, but Red kicks Blue’s butt. You get the feeling that this is happening because Red is playing to win, while Blue is trying to achieve the best outcome. Again, the parallels to our present world (or, really, all of history) are easy and depressing to make. While one does have a general sense that the human race has generally trended towards greater altruism over time, it is incredibly difficult to remain altruistic while another powerful party is willing to take advantage of it.

Okay, I think I’m done with discussing whatever that is. On to the next topic:

In a lot of schlocky fantasy and sci-fi, authors create worlds full of cultures, where each culture is defined by one or two major characteristics, and virtually every member of that culture we see exhibits those characteristics. I think I first became aware of this when reading David Edding’s Belgariad: Drasnians are crafty, Nyissans are treacherous, Chereks are brave, Mimbrates are chivalrous, etc. And of course there are ample examples in science fiction, such as Star Trek: Vulcans are rational, Ferenghi are greedy, Romulons are sneaky, Klingons are hot-blooded, etc. And, of course, humans are somehow the only species that exhibits varied personalities, where you can’t assume how someone will act before meeting them.

I tend to really dislike these sorts of creations: at best it’s boring or reductive, at worst it can smack of racism or bigotry. But, I actually loved how this comes about in seveneves. It’s kind of an inversion of the normal approach: we aren’t seeing individuals being defined by their genetic heritage; instead, we see genetic heritages being defined by individuals. The Seven Eves have control over their reproductive choice, to a greater extent than anyone else in history, and shape their own progeny to meet the needs they see. So, later on, when we see Doc being a stereotypical Ivyan, it’s not because Neal is being a lazy writer and saying that all Ivyans are smart: it’s the result of the choices that Ivy, the character, made five thousand years ago.

And, even better, the characters in the book are all self-aware of the situation and reflect on it. Einstein is prickly partly because he knows that he’s being judged by the standards of other Ivyans. Beled and Kath Two fall into an easy intimate rapport based on their compatible ancestries, but are very aware that those ancestries are defining the roles they play. There’s even a bit of eye-rolling when the Julian proves her treachery: she’s damned for the act, but also for the fact that she’s reinforcing negative stereotypes and playing back into a narrative about how one can expect Julians to behave.

As a quick sidebar: I was a bit surprised to see that, in the future, Dinans are the leaders while Ivyans are the intellectuals. Based on their namesake characters, I would have expected it to be the other way around: Ivy was the commander of ISS at Zero, and the commander of Endurance during the Big Ride. We know from her background that she’s intelligent, but not much of that is on display during the book, and tends to be portrayed more in her handling of people and situations. Dinah, on the other hand, never has any direct reports under her, and is mostly defined by the advances she makes in robotics research and development.

But, the more I think about it, maybe this does serve to emphasize the triumph of deliberate genetic engineering and intentional acculturation, over simpler ideas of natural inheritance of traits. After all, the Eves didn’t just say, “Make more of me forever!” They individually decided what traits were most important to them - often in secret - and worked with Moira to ensure that those traits were passed on to their children. That’s much more interesting than “Ned was an honorable man, and so all of his descendants were honorable as well.”

And, finally, some random thoughts:

There are just a handful of illustrations in this book, which are superbly done. One thing that's missing and would have been very helpful would have been a scale representation of where the various celestial bodies are in relation to one another: the Earth, the ISS, Amalthea, Probst's comet, and the moon. Much of the book is taken up with discussing the "Big Ride" and the amount of propellant that will be necessary to achieve it, but while I was reading it wasn't all that clear to me why Earth didn't just launch its people directly into the moon's orbit. I had a sense that it must be because the moon was much further away; this is the sort of thing that people like Neal who have actually worked with space explorers would immediately know, but civilians like me have a hard time visualizing.

Anyways, after finishing the book I eventually did some Googling and finally found a good scale diagram of where various objects are in orbit. I really wish now that I had looked this up while reading the book, because it makes the immensity of their task so much clearer.

(Click that image to make it big.)
Now: I would need to re-read the beginning to figure out exactly where the ISS is in the novel, but presumably it's in its present-day orbit, about 200 miles above the Earth. This is the same orbit into which all of the Arks are launched. This does make sense since, for the last several decades, all of our manned missions have been confined to launches in this orbit, so we wouldn't have the capacity to send up manned missions to much higher altitudes in the very short timespan allotted in the book.

In contrast, the moon is [checks Google] 240,000 miles away from Earth. Wow! That means that the ISS is .08% (not 8%) of the way from Earth to the Moon. That's really astonishing; both in terms of the task that the characters in this book need to accomplish and, in the real world, it makes me retroactively even more impressed at the success of the Apollo missions. And retroactively sad that our species' capacity for spaceflight has apparently declined so swiftly over the past four decades.

Neal continues to demonstrate his fantastic skill at coming up with wonderful character names. My favorite name in this book is definitely Sonar Taxlaw. Sonar also continues a grand Stephenson tradition of characters who are introduced very late in the book but end up becoming surprisingly compelling, along the lines of Olivia Halifax-Lin or Jules Verne Durand. We don’t get to spent a whole lot of time with her, but she’s pretty fascinating, both in her own right and as a window into Digger society, particularly its quasi-religious approach to societal roles while also recognizing the characteristics of someone “on the spectrum”. There's a great line like "Sonar happily recited some facts, which was her favored technique for interacting with other people," which is something that I can certainly relate to.

One persistent criticism of Stephenson’s books is their abrupt or lackluster endings. I actually think that his last few books have all had nicely satisfying endings: The Baroque Cycle, Anathem, and REAMDE all wound down their main plots gracefully and gave a good amount of closure to their characters, while leaving their worlds open for future exploration. seveneves isn’t quite as tidy; you could easily imagine another five hundred pages being spent to wrap up the Red-Blue conflict. Of course, this isn’t the worst criticism one can imagine: coming to the end of a nearly thousand-page-long book and wanting it to keep on going says a lot for the quality of that book.

END SPOILERS

Okay! So, uh, I really liked this book. I was going to throw together a snap-in-time list of my favorite Stephenson books, but I’m finding it impossible to compare them (how does one judge the relative merits of Anathem and REAMDE?), so I’ll just say that seveneves is another great book. It isn’t as difficult to read as Anathem and The Baroque Cycle could be, but also has more engaging ideas at play than REAMDE or Zodiac, and is a good all-around example of Stephenson’s capabilities.

Also! I wanted to point out this fantastic interview between two of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson and David Mitchell. They do get into some plot points of seveneves, so you might want to hold off on the interview if you're avoiding spoilers for the book. It's a lot of fun to see them interact, connecting in some ways and not connecting in others. I hadn't really thought of it before, but Neal and David are in some ways mirror images of one another, in that they both combine elements of genre fiction with literary qualities. But, David Mitchell is more firmly on the "literature" side of the spectrum, while Neal is more on the "popular" side. This interview also gets at another interesting distinction. One of the things I most admire about Mitchell is his keen moral compass; he's unusually willing to delve into questions of morality in his books. Stephenson, as the interview makes clear, takes a more detached view: he doesn't deny the existence of good or evil, but also views it as a kind of fundamental and permanent aspect of the human condition, to be recognized rather than struggled against. I get the sense that David writes, to some extent, because he hopes to help increase empathy and altruism in the world. Neal writes, to some extent, because he's interested in studying how humans work.

Okay! These scattered thoughts are now done. Good book.

COM Port

Once again, I had the pleasure of meeting one of my literary icons in the flesh. The latest name to strike off my steadily dwindling list of “awesome authors I would like to meet one day” was William Gibson, who came to San Francisco to promote his brand-new book, The Peripheral.

I’ve had a weirdly mediated relationship with Gibson. He is often credited with inventing cyberpunk, and he was a direct influence on some of my most formative creative forces, including Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” and the Shadowrun mythos. I’ve been aware of him for a long time, but it was really only within the last decade that I began reading him directly. I was pleased to see that it still holds up: while reading Neuromancer today seems less like a prophetic glimpse of the future than it did in the 1980s, it’s still a darn fine read, and prone to causing whiplash when you start to realize all the seemingly ordinary things it described that simply did not exist at the time it was written.

His more recent books have drifted closer to our present time, and perhaps a direct result he has gained more acclaim from both the mainstream press and literary critics. The Peripheral seems like a return to form, with him uniting his recent style with his older fascination with the future.

This event was held at The Booksmith, the same independent bookshop that hosted the wonderful David Mitchell last month. Unlike that previous event, which was held in a movie theater, this was in The Booksmith’s own cozy bookstore. I’d been lucky enough to catch an early notice of his appearance, and so had managed to snag a coveted reserved seat by pre-ordering the book. This proved to be even more helpful than I had hoped, as business obligations forced me to race north from Santa Clara in order to arrive at the reading in time, and without the reservation I would have been stuck standing very far back indeed.

Gibson opened with a few brief remarks, then jumped into a reading. He had noticed that this book was “unusually vulnerable to spoilers,” to the extent that he’s been reluctant to retweet positive reviews because of how much they give away. So, he restricted himself to the start of the book, only reading chapters two and four (roughly five pages combined). It’s always really engaging to hear an author read their own words; Gibson doesn’t have a radio voice, but he’s able to place the beats and the intonations so subtly and effectively that they strongly elevate the text. I found myself re-reading these chapters soon after, and got more out of them the second time around.

He also accepted quite a few questions, and his interesting answers are the main reason why I’m writing this up now. In no particular order:

Any time an author (or, I suppose, another creative type) takes audience questions, it’s inevitable that they end up fielding multiple variations on the query “Where do you get your ideas from?” (fortunately at least phrased differently). Gibson is pretty intentionally non-self-reflective about “his process”, and leaves thematic analyses of his works to the critics. He did say, though, that he often feels like, as he goes through life, he accumulates various stray thoughts in the “hopper” of his mind. They stay in there, decomposing over the years, until he’s ready to take them out and try to use them in a novel. By this point, they’ve often changed enough that they may bear little resemblance to what he originally encountered.

Back when he first started writing, he wanted to get a stream of new, strange ideas, and so he would spend hundreds of dollars on magazines. In those pre-Internet days, that was the best way: magazines were (and are) aggregators of different, random thoughts. He’d just absorb them all: gothic Lolita, tons of magazines from Japan, whatever he could get his hands on. Now, of course, rather than spending hundreds of dollars to get a certain amount of strangeness, everyone can get an unlimited amount of strangeness through their web browser. It’s gone from him trying to open a faucet to him having a fire hose.

One person noted the different time spans of his books (Neuromancer set in the future but really about the 1980s, Pattern Recognition and friends are of and about the 2000s, etc.) and inquired about the significance. Gibson mentioned that, while he was very careful to never put information about the year in the book, in his own mind he had thought that Neuromancer took place around the year 2035. But, he said, all science fiction and speculative fiction books are really about the time in which they were written. When you read 19th-century science fiction today, you aren’t learning anything about any sort of possible future: you’re learning about the 19th century. This process happens to all books, including his own.

As for the reason for shifting time periods, he’d felt like his “yardstick of contemporary weirdness” had grown limited. Back when he was first starting to write, he had a strong sense of the strange things happening in society, and could use that to drive his novels. In later years, he felt like he was losing that sense. In some ways, his more recent present-day novels were a chance for him to re-calibrate that sense of contemporary weirdness; and now, armed with a fresh sense of the odd things at the fringes of culture, he’s more confident in writing about the future again.

One person mentioned that he had always thought that Gibson was cautiously optimistic about technology, and asked what he thought about other writers, like Dave Eggers, who seem more deeply pessimistic. Gibson demurred, and clarified that he has always been agnostic about technology. He believes that technology is amoral when it is created; it is only when human beings get their hands on it that it becomes good or evil. I thought that was interesting; it put me in mind of Kurt Vonnegut’s famous commencement speech, in which he implored budding engineers to only pursue positive and not wicked technology.

Another person asked whether Vancouver has had an impact on Gibson’s writing. It hasn’t too directly, only appearing twice across his entire career, once in a short story and again in the climax of Spook Country. He did share a fun anecdote about how, when he was writing the Vancouver scenes, he would clearly visualize visual aspects of Vancouver, then drive out to double-check them, and would flabbergasted at just how severely wrong his ideas had been.

After finishing his questions, he started signing. I appear to have some kind of superpower to always end up near the very tail end of any signing line; fortunately, I always have a brand new book in my arm, so it’s always a pleasant wait. Several other people had brought along some beloved older books for him to sign, but of course I was too dense to bring any of mine. I was really impressed by his stamina: even after signing books for nearly an hour, he was still engaged and pleasant with each person coming through the line, thus reinforcing yet again my belief that authors are some of the nicest people on the planet.

I’m still not much further than chapter four in the book, and honestly I’m backed up enough with other stuff that it will probably be a while before I can focus on it. Still, it’s wonderful to have another great tale to look forward to, and having a brief moment of contact with the man himself makes me all the more excited to dig into it.

SAUNDERS SAUNDERS SAUNDERS

George Saunders, possibly my favorite currently-working short-story writer (with periodic competition from Haruki Murakami), recently came through San Francisco to promote his new book, Tenth of December. When I first saw the news on his Facebook page, I was initially delighted, then slightly aghast. "They're holding it in Book Passage?" I thought. "There's no way they'll be able to fit everyone in there!"

Anticipation built in the lead-up to the event. Tenth of December has received glowing praise from some major outlets, including the New York Times, which proclaimed it "the best book you'll read this year." My brother went to his talk at Lincoln Hall in Chicago back in January, and reported that it was packed with throngs of fans. That should have tipped me off to arrive extra-early to the event, but for whatever reason I left work around my normal time, and arrived at Book Passage around a quarter to six.

It was already clearly bursting with people. Enough were standing just inside the door that getting inside would be a challenge. And, standing patiently just outside, was... George Saunders! He was speaking with a woman who seemed to be helping coordinate the event - perhaps a publicist or agent. He seemed calm, amused, and curious, gently smiling at people nearby while they discussed whatever they were talking about. Not wanting to shove past the guest of honor, I hung back for a bit until they moved on, then wormed my way to the counter and picked up a copy of Tenth of December. While the clerk was ringing it up, George worked his way back past me. Gesturing towards the variety of his books on display, he said, "I recommend you buy one of each of these." Everyone laughed. "For your own best interest, of course," he added, still shyly smiling. "Nothing wrong with self-promotion," the woman added.

I made myself as skinny as I could and endured the flow of human traffic while waiting for the event to start. Fortunately, Saunders seems to attract fans like himself: kind, patient people who accept discomfort with good grace. I didn't hear anyone complain or see anyone leave before the event was over. There's a certain sort of sacramental quality to author events, and a small element of pain can help heighten the experience.

Another woman who may be an owner or manager of the store welcomed everyone and thanked us for coming out and supporting independent bookstores. Saunders was standing nearby, and I noticed that he started off a round of applause for those independent bookstores. Neat! She gave a glowing introduction, recapping the recent praise from the Times, NPR, and various other critics and outlets; she also talked about Saunders' influence on a new generation of writers and his admirable personal qualities, then welcomed him to the microphone to the loud sound of clapping. People who had arrived even later than me were standing outside, and they had thoughtfully hooked up a sound system so everyone could hear. (Thanks to the glass walls, at least some of them were hopefully able to see him as well.)

Saunders thanked everyone for coming: I think he said that this was the first time he'd been to San Francisco since his first book tour (which, if my miniscule research is correct, would have been over 15 years ago), and that he appreciates how supportive the city has been of his books. He also showed some wonderful, self-deprecating humor. "Let's all make a pact to not read another book all year. It will save Joel Lovell some embarrassment."

He said that, since so many people were standing, he would pick a shorter reading, and then answer questions. His reading was a diary excerpt from The Semplica-Girl Diaries.

Tenth of December is a collection of short stories, most of which I've read previously in The New Yorker and a few of which have appeared in other magazines (including McSweeney's Quarterly Concern!). I'm pretty sure that Semplica-Girl is the most recent, since it was just published in the New Yorker last fall. It's an incredible story. Like many of Saunders' stories, it seems to occupy a near-future time, where recognizable trends in contemporary American life have metastasized into something something slightly more horrifying. Also like some of his recent stories, it strikes this really fascinating and challenging balance, where you strongly empathize with a character while (hopefully) rejecting their worldview. (See also the excellent Victory Lap, another story that destroyed me when I first read it in the New Yorker. In Victory Lap, we see a young boy who has accepted the values system enforced by his parents; it isn't an evil system, but one that's probably harmful. The boy is confronted with an awful situation, and every thing about his ingrained sense of morality tells him to walk away from it. He somehow overcomes it, finding within himself a spark of pure morality that tells him that he needs to act. What's so brilliant about Saunders' story is that, within the context of the tale, the boy thinks that he is sinning, thinks that he is doing the wrong thing, which makes his actions all the more brave. I want to praise him and weep for him at the same time.)

Anyways! He read the excerpt, after prefacing it briefly: he explained that this is an excerpt from a diary, and that "when I say 'equals,' in the text there's an actual equals sign there. It's funny if you read it. Trust me." He launched into the story, in which the narrator writes about the sudden, surprising death of a co-worker, the strange and disturbing (and inadvertently funny) funeral service, and the way it made him freshly appreciative of his own family life, his wife and his children.

I hate to admit it, but I actually don't remember reading this. I'm not sure if this was a passage that was edited out of the New Yorker version, or if the later events in the story crowded this entry out of my mind. I think I do recall the co-worker's death and how it creates an impulse to do something nice for his family, but most of the other elements in the story (the priest, the brother's eulogy) seemed original. Maybe it was Saunders' wonderful reading voice that made it seem fresh.

There's a lot of humor in that passage, leavened with sadness, and there were appreciative chuckles throughout the reading. When he was done, he asked for any questions. When nobody immediately raised their hand, he commented, "I have to say, I've been doing this for a while, and I've noticed that, invariably, the first person to ask a question is the person with the highest sexual energy in the room." Everyone laughed. An older woman faked out asking a question, but a younger man did it for real. ("Congratulations," Saunders said.)

As is my wont, I'll write up the questions and his responses, to the best of my recollection.

"I understand that you're a practicing Buddhist. Feel free to not answer this if you don't want to, but I was wondering how it has affected your work?"

Saunders has been a student of Nyingma Buddhism for many years. He used to talk about it a lot, but as he got further along, he realized that you're not supposed to discuss it. So, he can't directly address it, but will talk around the question.

Religion is important to him, and has been important to his writing. He grew up Catholic and attended a Catholic school. "And Catholic, in Chicago, is the most Catholic you can get!" While in school, the nuns would make the children go through the Stations of the Cross. It was interesting, because they would direct the children to vividly imagine being participants in the story, and specifically, being Jesus's persecuters. They would tell the children to imagine that they were a Roman soldier, and try to imagine what they were thinking, and how they would have felt about what they were doing. Saunders thinks that this kind of sacramental activity opens up a space in childrens' minds, which can be very valuable later in life.

"You grew up on the Southwest Side of Chicago Chicago. I read that you had recently gone back and visited the old neighborhood. What do you think you got from the experience of growing up in that part of the city?"

"Is your name Brian?" It turns out that George recognized the questioner: apparently, they had attended elementary school together! That's pretty incredible. (I would end up a few people behind Brian in the signing line, and overheard him say that he had lost track of Saunders, and only recently started reading about him and realized that he had become an author.) To the question: Saunders got a lot out of their neighborhood. It always struck him as a Russian neighborhood, and was one that valued quippy humor: if you could tell a good joke, and make people laugh, then the adults would take you into your circle. So, from an early age, he learned that there was value in amusing people.

"How do you strike a balance between writing based off of your life experiences, and drawing from literature?"

There ended up being a LOT of questions about writing, and even when the question wasn't directly about writing, Saunders often smoothly segued into some fascinating insight. This was unusual - many authors are famously reluctant to talk about the process of writing, and loathe questions like "Where do you get your ideas" - yet it made sense the more I thought about it. After all, Saunders is, by profession, a creative writing teacher, and he has spent decades talking and thinking about how to write good stories. At one point, he asked the audience, "How many people here are writers?" before immediately interrupting himself with, "I bet everyone here is a writer." He quoted someone (I wish I could remember who!) as saying, "America has finally reached the critical moment in its history when the number of writers equals the number of readers."

He said that, for him, life experience is the key. You need to have something to say, something that can energize your writing. At Syracuse, he often sees that when young people come into the program directly from college, they're often very bright but don't have a whole lot of experiences from the real world to draw on; because of this, they usually fall back on technique. In contrast, the people who come into the program after working for a few years are just slightly more grizzled, and seem to have some extra direction and energy that they can put into their work.

But, one of the best novels that he's read in years is from a very young man (again, I wish I could remember the name!), so it isn't as if you need to have "gone out into the world" to write something wonderful. As with many of Saunders' observations, he pointed out that he can describe what has worked for him in the past, but cautions that other people may find they work differently.

"How do you know when to stop revising a story?"

In general, he thinks that people should revise more than they do. People generally don't like doing it, but they should continue to practice revising, and they will get better as they do it. You should be merciless. He's reminded of something a musician/composer friend of his said: "When you make a new piece of music, you should immediately go and listen to one of your musical idols. Like Bob Dylan or whoever you most admire. Think about how your music compares to this. You'll think that it sucks. And that's important: it proves that you still have taste! But, you'll start asking yourself why it sucks, and how to make it better. It's a painful process, but absolutely necessary if you want to be a good writer."

This may also have been when he gave an example of tightening up a sentence. It starts with, "Bob entered the room and sat down on the blue couch." Okay. A little wordy. What does the word "down" add to the sentence? It's a bit redundant with "sat". So now, it's "Bob entered the room and sat on the blue couch." A little better. Is it important that Bob entered the room? Does it give anything new to the story? No, not really. So let's cut it out. "Bob sat on the blue couch." This sentence is working better now. Can we make it any better? Well, why is the couch blue? Am I going to do anything with that? No? Well, let's cut it out. "Bob sat on the couch." (Long pause.) Do we really need the couch? Is it integral to the story? (Long pause.) "Bob." Well, all that we have left is a noun. But it's a good noun!

"What is your favorite story that you've written?"

He claims to not be very fond of any of them, though he's grateful that people enjoy them.  He named one exception, and I'm kicking myself for not remembering which one, but he says that he didn't understand the story while he was writing it, and still doesn't understand it now, and because of that it's still interesting to him.

"You mentioned that you had discovered that you could make your stories better by setting them in a theme park. How did you come up with that idea?"

Incredibly enough, it was from a dream. He had written a story that wasn't quite working - there was something there, but he couldn't figure out how to make it good. Then, in this dream, he was in a living room, and looking out the window. He saw a button, and pressed it; suddenly, all of the objects in the room began floating up, as if they had escaped from gravity. It was a wondrous sight. Then, all these other people came into the room and started touching the objects. He got irritated, and said, "Sir! Please don't touch those!" And then he woke up. That vivid sensation he got in his dream was something he decided to put into his story, and from then on it was a tool he could draw on.

"'Adams' is one of my favorite stories. I was wondering if you could say a little about how you wrote it?"

It kind of came out during the time that George W Bush was making the case for the Iraq was by claiming that Iraq had WMDs. Like a lot of good liberals, Saunders thought, "No... no, they don't!" But he couldn't be totally sure. But he was pretty sure that they didn't, and it seemed like a lousy case for starting a war. So, "Adams" started as a piece that he wrote to try and work through the political issues he was thinking about. Over time, it transformed into something different, but that's where it started.

"As a bookseller, I've noticed that a lot of people are connecting with your work, and what's interesting is that, they often read it as poetry. Is that something deliberate that you've done?"

George is very gratified to hear that. In a way, it is what he's trying to do. When he's writing, he's very focused on language, and very focused on trying to make the words as strong they can, which is something that poetry tries to do. However, he points out that he's often working with deliberately ugly language: technical speak, bureaucratic talk, commercials. So, it may be a kind of poetry, but it's the ugliest kind of poetry.

"I heard that [a female author's name - argh, why do I write these things when I don't take notes!] taught with you at Syracuse. I was wondering whether you learned anything from her?"

Yes! They only worked together briefly, and that was eight years ago, but she was very influential, and he still thinks often about what she taught him. One thing in particular had to do with the intersection of psychology and literature. By analyzing the brains of people while reading or listening, scientists have been able to demonstrate that people have similar reactions to poems, short stories, and jokes: in all cases, the instant that you read that final period, your brain immediately jumps back to the very start of the poem, story, or joke, and rapidly replays it, analyzing it for efficiency. There's something biological that makes us evaluate the piece, and determine how necessary it was; people will know immediately after reading it whether it had unnecessary digressions, or whether something early on proved to be important later. That insight has definitely affected the way he writes.

"How important do you think it is for you to develop your own voice?"

(Warning: this paragraph contains profanity.) Everyone seems to go through the same process. When you first start writing, there's probably some writer you admire most. Maybe it's Margaret Atwood. You decide that you want to be like Margaret Atwood, and start scaling that Margaret Atwood mountain. You climb higher and higher, all excited - "I'm going to be a great writer, like her!" But, the stuff you write is shit. You keep trying to get higher, but get discouraged. "Whenever I try to write like Margaret Atwood, all I can write is shit!" Dejected, you come back down from the mountain. "I guess I can't become a great writer by imitating Atwood... how about Toni Morrison?" And then you try climbing the Toni Morrison mountain. Sooner or later, you realize that you can't compare with any of these great mountains of writers. All you make is shit. But... but it's your shit. So, you pile your shit into a little mound, and stick a flag in it that says "George." It's small, and it's awful, but nobody else is on your mountain. So, over time, you start piling on more shit, and gradually turn your mound into a hill.

(Incidentally: these written words are in no way any sort of substitute for Saunders' speaking. I can't capture his funny phrases, facial expressions, all the things that make him such a wonderful speaker. Sorry. If you ever have the opportunity to see him in person, I highly recommend it!)

So: finding your unique voice is crucial. It's hard, but if you're going to write anything worth writing, you need to learn how to write like yourself. (I won't recap the well-reported and very interesting tale of Saunders' own idolization of Hemingway as a young wannabe writer.)

"When I was in college, my professor was also a good liberal guy, but he didn't care much for Kurt Vonnegut. He specifically disliked Vonnegut's fatalism, like when he writes 'So it goes.' I was wondering if you have any thoughts about that opinion?"

Saunders said that that's a question he'll need to think about, and he doesn't have an immediate answer to it. And that's fine. More generally, he says, he finds that one of the most powerful forces you can get in writing is being able to keep two contradictory ideas in your mind without making a decision about which one is right. Doing this can lead you to do some very interesting things in your writing.

As an example, he gave an experience he'd had when he agreed to write about the Mexican-American border for a travel magazine. Being the good liberal he is, he already knew the answer: open up the border! So he confidently accepted the job, figuring, I'll just head down there, maybe grab a couple of facts to support my case, and then just type it up. Well, once he got there, he was confronted with stories that immediately shook his convictions. On his very first day, he spoke with a pastor who told him about a family that tried to cross the border into Texas. They were pursued by Mexican criminals into the States. The criminals murdered the father and raped the daughter. The mother was already pregnant, and died when giving childbirth. Well. That was all clearly horrifying. So, he had a new position: "Close the border! Lock it down!" The very next day, he met a man who had come over illegally decades ago, and had literally built a seven-room house out of cinderblocks. He had a family and was living a successful life. What message do you take from that? "Open up the border! Give better opportunities to more people!" At the end of his trip, he was far more confused about the issue than he was when he started. And, he thinks, that led him to write a much better and more interesting piece.

So, going back to the original question: he doesn't have a good answer about how to reconcile an admiration of Vonnegut with a disapproval of his fatalism... but reconciliation may not be necessary, and perhaps not even desirable.

(A side, personal note: I think this is a really interesting topic. Not necessarily the question as phrased, but just the idea about how Vonnegut and Saunders might relate to one another. I enjoy both authors a great deal, and I think they both have a lot in common: both came from the midwest, had technical backgrounds, wrote from a strong moral compass that came from their own experiences, yet wrote in interesting, creative settings that seem tinged by science-fiction while still reading as literary. And I also think they're two of the most impressive humanists of the past century. Vonnegut is more explicitly humanist than Saunders, but I think both of them have, at the core of their writing, a deep love of man. Both are often described as satirical, yet I don't think either of them truly are... they see the ugliness that people are capable of, and it distresses them all the more because they also see the value of each person's life. They can use dark humor to make their points in shocking and effective ways. All that said, I would never confuse one of their stories for the other's: their styles are very different from one another, as is the way they construct their plots and how they depict their characters. I'm also intrigued by the idea that Vonnegut is a fatalist. I wouldn't use that word to describe him. I tend to take "So it goes" as a kind of quiet prayer for the sad things that have happened. The past is past; we can mourn it, but can't change it. I feel like so much of Vonnegut's writing is actually stressing the importance of action, of being good citizens of the planet, of showing compassion for our brothers and sisters. It's an obligation that he frequently depicts being broken, but that remains no less important for us to try and honor. "There's only one rule that I know of, babies - God damn it, you've got to be kind.")

"Your characters have such interesting voices. Do you find them getting into your head, or spilling into your own life?"

Saunders has always enjoyed coming up with voices, even in a literal sense. When he was in school, he was on the basketball team. He never actually played basketball, just sat on the bench. He and one of his friends would make fun of players on the other team: they came up with nicknames, and would invent whole back-stories for them, and give a unique funny voice to each opponent. For example, there was one team with older kids, including one kid with facial hair, and facial hair on his facial hair. They called him Mister Mustache, and would crack wise whenever he went past the bench. Eventually, their coach told them that they sounded fey and to knock it off. So, he stopped doing those voices. But it isn't totally different from what he does now: he actually has a particular sound in his head for each of his characters, and if he can get that sound entertaining enough, then it will come through in his writing.

Unlike some other writers, he isn't into Method Writing or something of that sort. Other people will say something like, "I create my characters, and then they speak to me and tell me what to do." Nope. His characters are strictly one-way creations, and never talk back. And, once he's done with a story, he puts the voice away.

Finally, one anecdote from him that may have been attached to one of the above questions, or might have come from another one that I've forgotten:

I'd read in other contexts about his evolution from an Ayn Rand-worshipping young idealistic libertarian into his current liberal humanist self. I had NOT heard, though, that at one point he was in a band! I think he said that he played guitar. Another person in the band knew a guy, who knew a guy, who knew a guy, who knew someone who was in the Eagles... so obviously they were going to be huge. At one point, he had a very specific thought that ended up motivating him to change his course in life: he saw himself on a college campus. It was a very idealized college campus, with, like, men wearing sweaters with a single large letter on them. But he just got this really powerful idea that, "I'm going to go to college, and become an intellectual." While he now despises Ayn Rand ("Well, not her personally, because she's dead. I just think that her philosophy has caused so much harm."), he loved her novel since it was the first novel he'd ever read, and from her he got this ambition to become an intellectual writer, which set him on the course that has led to today.


I'm sure there were many more questions that I've forgotten, and I already feel bad about not capturing his tone correctly in his responses to the ones I did remember. He was very generous with his time and each questioner, and, as the owner/manager/whoever said at the end of questions, it felt like we'd all just completed a seminar on writing. Very cool!

The whole program, including reading and questions, ran for almost exactly one hour, after which he signed books. I always stick around for these things, and I always end up near the end of the line - not intentionally, I just either am standing in the wrong place, or move to the wrong area when the main program ends, or else am just not aggressive enough in entering the line. It was a pleasant line, but pretty long - I think I was there for about ninety minutes before I reached the front. It's all good, though. The reason it took so long was because he really engaged with each person in the line. It was pretty incredible - he shook hands with almost everyone (which might not sound like a big deal, but in my experience is actually very rare at author events - most people are understandably apprehensive about catching a cold from a stranger) and chatted for a while with each person: about his books, or about their lives, or whatever. I saw him give Brian a hug, which was awesome. George seems like one of the kindest people I've ever met in my life.

As usual, I was very self-conscious about not taking too much of his time. I gladly shook his hand and thanked him for sticking around. He asked if I was a writer. "Um, not really... well, I've done some technical writing," I stammered, then blurted out something about how much I'd enjoyed CommComm. That was the first short story of his that I'd ever read, and it made a big impression on me. He listened graciously, then said, "Well, you know, I used to be a technical writer, and we did a lot of work with the Department of Defense, back when they were closing military bases." He talked about how CommComm was inspired in part by his work at that time. "Wow, so a lot of that bureaucratic language and doublespeak came from your own experiences there!" I exclaimed. We talked for just a little more before I took my leave.

I'd been daydreaming a little about writing while I was waiting in line. I've always loved writing stories, going all the way back to "War with Venus" in the second grade. It's always been an ambition of mine, but never anything I've pursued with any diligence, and it's been years since the last time I worked on any fiction. The last piece I was even vaguely proud of was "Empty," a short story I wrote for a creative writing course back in college. Reflecting over the things Saunders had said, I realized that my own mountains that I had been attempting to climb at that time were the mountains of Thomas Pynchon, Daniel Orozco, and Robert Anton Wilson. Those are all writers who I particularly enjoyed (and enjoy!), and I was trying to recreate the wonderful chilly strangeness of their works, and became discouraged when I couldn't. I'm pretty sure that I'll never become a writer of fiction, and kind of doubt that I will give it a serious try, but I feel like if I ever do, it will be thanks to the wonderful guidance that George Saunders so generously imparted on this night, delivering an impromptu master's seminar in the process of creating a story.

Oats

I'm a decent fan of the web comic The Oatmeal. I have a very different relationship with it than I do with my other webcomics, mostly due to its irregular publishing schedule. A lot of webcomics stick to well-known newspaper-style schedules: Sinfest puts out a new strip every single day, including a color strip on Sundays; Penny Arcade has new strips every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The Oatmeal puts out a new strip when he has a new strip.

They aren't really strips, though: his comics are LONG, and extremely well-drawn. To be very crass, I feel like The Oatmeal produces the same amount of humor content, but delivered in large chunks rather than in a constant stream.

Pretty much everyone first encounters The Oatmeal after being linked to a particularly funny and popular strip of his. There are several such entry points: what life is like for Apple product owners, or paying attention to cats, or why Sriracha is so delicious. Then, once you're on the extremely well-designed website, you start clicking around through the wealth of other great comics (why printers are evil! what the word "literally" means!), and before too long you're a fan.

Matthew Inman, the creator of The Oatmeal, has recently gained some fame and notoriety outside of the world of webcomics-creation. (As a side note, it would be interesting to examine why so many webcomics creators use pseudonyms and what effect, if any, it has. Why do we have Jonathan Gabriel and Tycho Brahe instead of Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins; Oats instead of Inman; The Authors instead of Steve Havelka? This isn't a universal tendency, of course: Ryan North, Kate Beaton, Tatsuya Ishida, and many more proudly write under their own names.) He was involved in (and exacerbated) a legal tussle where someone threatened to sue him after he complained about them stealing his comics. (Yeah, it was as weird as it sounds.) That led into an awesome campaign by Inman to raise money for cancer research and wildlife protection, specifically to spite his enemies. More recently, he tapped the newly-found generosity of Oatmeal readers to raise money to help secure a museum to honor the great(est) inventor Nikola Tesla.

I recently had the pleasure of hearing Inman give a short talk and a Q&A here in San Francisco. Sadly it was in the Marina, but for once I didn't particularly mind trekking out to that particular neighborhood. It was held at the Books Inc. there, and like other branches of that local chain it was well-organized and well-staffed, somehow managing to handle the hundreds of readers who had turned out for the event. It was a young crowd, and while it did give off a bit of a techie vibe, it was more of the cool SF techie than the nerdy Silicon Valley techie that I was kind of expecting.

Inman proved to be a really good speaker, spinning through a series of anecdotes and thoughts. A lot of his talk was autobiographical, and while much of it was familiar to those of us who've kept up with his blog, there were new nuggets of information scattered throughout, including the tale of his family's defective cat, and his extended battle of wills with a friend's cat who confronted a dishwasher.

He graciously took a lot of time for questions from the crowd. Some particular ones that I remember follow:

• Where does the name The Oatmeal come from? He used to play a lot of Quake. His screen name was Quaker Oatmeal.
• What was he like in high school? He listened to a lot of Nine Inch Nails.
• What did it feel like to withdraw $200,000 in cash? It made him nervous. He needed someone to help him, and drew a Venn Diagram of people he could trust who were huge and had firearms, and settled on a friend from Alaska, who brought a shotgun and guarded him from the bank.
• There is no more awesome sensation in the world than feeding a grizzly bear peanut butter with a spoon.
• For his birthday, someone gave him a Tesla Cannon. He wants to use it to heat sandwiches.

Inman gamely stuck around to handle the LONG line of people getting their book signed. Interestingly, he does sign as The Oatmeal - and with a lot of style!

Hrm... I'm just now realizing that I haven't written about webcomics in forever. There are a ton of great ones out there, far too many for me to keep current on. I'd break them down by the following:

Comics I Regularly Follow:

• Dinosaur Comics - I've periodically dropped in on this over the years, but have become a regular follower in 2012. Possibly my favorite comic of the moment; Ryan North has a wonderful comic sensibility.
• Sinfest - I've been following this since at least 2003. It's changed a lot over the years. I don't think it's as laugh-out-loud funny as it was at the start, but in many ways it's more interesting; the author often uses the comic as a vehicle for self-examination, to intriguing effect.
• Penny Arcade - I hesitate to even call myself a gamer these days; I might play three or four games in a year if I'm lucky. Fortunately for me, while Penny Arcade the entertainment business is gaming-focused, Penny Arcade the comic is more about the weird obsessions of its creators, and continues to be amusing and relatable even as I drift farther away from the gaming culture.

Comics I Sporadically Follow:

• Hark: A Vagrant - Kate Beaton has semi-retired the strip, refocusing on her Tumblr and new projects, but she still occasionally updates. I'll always love her for Fat Pony and for her literature comics and all the other awesome stuff she does.
• Overcompensating - I used to check the site a few times a year, now I watch it regularly, although updates have been getting rarer lately. Rowland is a very busy guy, between running Topatoco, restarting Wigu, and getting married!
• The Oatmeal - You know the score.
• Wigu - I'm going through the archives.

Defunct Comics I Re-read When I Need to Laugh:

• Pokey the Penguin - Still my favorite webcomic of all time.

 Comics Emeritus:

• Men in Hats - Another wonderful absurdist comic, and one of only a few whose book I've purchased. It ended years ago.
• Sluggy Freelance - My very first webcomic! The abrupt shifts in tone eventually got too severe for me to handle, but I admire how it paved the way for future comics.
• PvP - I never got too enamored of this comic, and gave it up when the cat started inhabiting the Christmas tree, which felt like a rip-off of Bun-Bun from Sluggy.  Hm, it looks like Scott has updated his style - it looks good!
• The Trenches - I may revisit this sometime, but the start of the strip didn't really grab me. It might resonate more for people within the industry.

As is often the case, time is the great limiter in what I read. Yeah, a comic only takes several seconds to read, but if it's something you do daily or weekly, it adds up! I'll continue to curate my reading, and am sure the list will continue to evolve over time.

Michael Chabon

I feel like my life has gotten objectively better since I moved within easy access to San Francisco. Exhibit A: Virtually any major writer who does any promotion for their new book will put in an appearance in the city or close by. My most recent example of this was Michael Chabon, who appeared at City Arts & Lecture on September 11, the day after the release of his latest and highly-anticipated novel, Telegraph Avenue.

I really like the City Arts program. I've previously attended for Patton Oswalt's book tour for Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, and... and I'm sure there's one other even that I'm presently drawing a blank on. The setting is a bit formal compared to other literary events: it's held in the Herbst Theater, a great, classic auditorium space. But, it doesn't feel stuffy, and I think that's due to the influence of the program itself. People who show up are excited about the speaker and engaged with the material, so there's a pleasing collegial atmosphere that pervades those events. (I do wish that they would archive their online broadcasts so I could link to them, but if you're lucky enough to receive them on your public radio station, you can probably get a good feel for their tone.)

My affection for Michael Chabon's writing has outpaced my consumption of it. I hang my head in shame and admit that the only book of his I've read is "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" - but it was an absolutely incredible book, among the best I've read. I've been meaning to read "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" for ages, but I don't get any credit for WANTING to read a book. When I'd heard about "Telegraph Avenue" - heck, when I heard the name of the book - I knew I wanted to grab it, and I was delighted to have a chance to hear Chabon talk about it in person.

For those of you who aren't local, Telegraph Avenue is a major arterial road that runs through much of Berkeley and Oakland. It runs through a bunch of different neighborhoods, and has a fairly different character throughout - from the funky university town vibe near its northern end, where it abuts UC Berkeley, through a surprisingly residential neighborhood, through north Oakland, the edge of the gentrified Rockridge neighborhood, though the transitioning Temescal neighborhood, and eventually terminating in the urban core of downtown Oakland, just a few blocks from the Bay. It's probably the quintessential East Bay street, and a fine setting for a novel with its heart in the Berkeley-Oakland area.

Michael was interviewed by Adam Savage, of Mythbusters fame, who did a phenomenal job. Apparently the two of them know each other and are friendly - Adam said that they'd met at an 826 Valencia "Spelling Bee for Cheaters" tournament and hit it off; later during the Q&A, Michael mentioned that he'd called up Adam to get his "expert advice" on a particular problem he was having with the book (if memory serves, something like stealing or steering an airship?). Anyways, they had an easy rapport, and the chat flowed very well: it didn't feel scripted, and while there were a couple of brief pauses for reflection, it kept moving nicely throughout.

I don't want to dig too much into the (fascinating!) autobiographical stuff Michael talked about at the beginning - I'm pretty sure this will show up on KQED sometime, and I can't really do justice to it. What struck me most, though, was how incredibly humble Chabon is, and how openly he talked about the struggles he has had with writing. For people like me, who absolutely love reading and have a really tough time writing, it's kind of a relief to hear someone of Chabon's stature describe how he's had to abandon stuff that just wasn't working (apparently, he threw out almost everything from his first draft of The Yiddish Policeman's Union), or needed to get rid of characters, or written himself into a corner and gotten stuck. I guess that Chabon is this talented not because he doesn't make mistakes or because he's a perfect writer, but because he's a hard worker who can recognize what's good, what needs to be better, and figure out how to improve his work until it becomes the amazing thing we all get to read.

I used to write a fair amount of fiction, back in high school and college, but never was sufficiently serious about it to get any good, and while I've been writing a lot since graduation, it's almost all been technical or business-related stuff. I've just recently started dipping my toes back into writing fiction again - and it's hard! I've been happy to see that the writing itself comes relatively easily - I can sit down and crank out however much quantity I'm going for - but I'm never happy with it when I re-read it. Anyways... I have no illusions about ever being anywhere near Chabon's league, but listening to him made me cheerful, since I can definitely imagine becoming BETTER than I am now.

As with many City Arts programs, this included an extremely generous Q&A session with the audience; I think it lasted nearly as long as the main discussion with Adam Savage did. The questions covered a wide area but were uniformly thoughtful and knowledgeable. Again, that's part of what I love about City Arts: people who come here are already up to speed on what's going on, so you get really interesting, specific questions, instead of the more vague "What did it feel like to write this book?" questions that often crop up at more general-audience events. For example: the first question was, "I think you were in front of me in the line to the Wilco concert at the Fox Theater with your son. [It was his daughter.] What is your relationship towards live performances, and does it influence your work?" That prompted an incredibly thoughtful response from Michael about not only music, but experiencing live music with his kids. Another person had read Chabon's acknowledgement that he had used Scrivener, an OS X app, while writing this book, and had asked what that process was like. After checking whether the questioner was a Scrivener developer (he wasn't), Michael gave a concise and pretty compelling summary of what Scrivener does (basically providing a really useful way for you to organize all your sources that you would consult while writing and making them easy to find and access), but then segued from there into an app that he was even more excited about, Freedom, a productivity app that does exactly one thing: kills your Internet connection for a set period of time. That in turn led to some great discourse on distractions in writing - and once again, it makes me know so good that I'm not the only person who, when I'm actually in the flow and enjoying what I'm writing, will suddenly think, "Oh, I should check my email!" and derailing a previously productive session.

Also amusing: I think a grand total of four questions throughout the night came from people who self-identified as residents of the Temescal neighborhood. At one point Chabon joked, "I feel like I'm sitting in Pizzaiolo right now." He hadn't talked a whole lot about the book itself during his conversation with Adam, but the questions during the Q&A did a lot to draw out some comments about his affection for Oakland and Berkeley and how neighborhoods change.

I stuck around afterwards to get my book signed. This program rewards repeat attendees: you can see who knows the drill, because they're the ones who make a beeline for the door, turn left at the lobby, and immediately start lining up, while others are still wandering around looking lost. Michael Chabon was very gracious and pleasant, chatting with everyone who came through the (very long!) line. These events have gotten less awkward for me since I (finally!) figured out that it's OK to say "I really like your books."

I'm juggling multiple books at the moment, so it will probably be a while before I finish Telegraph Avenue, but I'll definitely post here once it's done. I read the first 30 pages or so while waiting at the event and on BART afterwards, and am loving what I'm reading so far!

Roundup

It's been a REALLY long time since I've done one of these, but... here's an even-more-random-than-usual post about things that I think are cool!

First, on a time-sensitive note: WOO-HOO, Shadowrun just passed the $1.5 million mark! That's really incredible; they're on track to raise quadruple their original budget. I think they're being very smart about how they approach this windfall. After some early speculation about significantly expanding the scope of the project (adding multiplayer, etc.), they decided to stick with a game that's achievable within the timeframe they've declared, and just making that game as awesome as possible. "We" have already gotten great music (they're bringing in the composers from the SNES and Genesis games!!!!), a lot more content (including an initially-backer-exclusive mission that ties together Jake's and Harlequin's stories), a better mission editor, etc. Any more money they raise will translate into more and better content.

I eventually decided to chip in at the $60 level, which is about the going price for a AAA game these days. Shadowrun Returns will NOT be a AAA game, and I imagine it will retail for around the $15 cost of the smallest reward tier, but I have a history of getting a lot of mileage out of these sorts of games. I agonized for almost a week before settling on that tier; I do love T-Shirts, and the digital exclusives and Doc Wagon card are nice bonuses. That said, I was mightily tempted by each of the next tiers. $100 puts your name in the credits, and I do like the idea of that kind of immortality (I'm one of those immortal geeks whose names are in the final credits to the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition movies). The newer $125 tier brings in an awesome-looking Deluxe Box Edition; Jordan borrowed this idea from Tim Schafer's wildly successful Doublefine Kickstarter, and I have a ton of fond memories of cracking open a box and finding goodies inside - a thick manual, a map, perhaps a Moonstone if I was lucky. The dogtags they're creating seem awesome. That said, I don't have the same box fetish for Shadowrun as I do for other series, so I could let that one slide. If I was REALLY crazy, I would have sprung the $250 for early access to the level/mission editor; I haven't really done much game modding since my Civ II days, but with this setting and this energized of a community, I could definitely get behind it.

ANYWAYS. There are about two days left in the fundraiser, so if you've been on the fence, now is a great time to contribute! Even the basic $15 pledge will, in addition to the items listed on the front page, give you access to a backer-exclusive mission. It's Shadowrun! Come on, chummers!

In other sci-fi news: I just beat Mass Effect! No, not Mass Effect 3. Mass Effect 1. I know, I know, I can hear you groaning. In my defense, I'm always way behind on the games I'm playing. Now that the series has ended, I'm finally going to go through and play the whole thing, not unlike how I experienced The Wire. And actually, that's not a horrible analogy. ME's cast of characters is much smaller, of course, and more heroic / less ensemble-ish, but it's an emphatically story-based experience that goes through many arcs and immerses you in a fully realized environment.

The story was what drew me most to ME, and I was not disappointed. ME is famous for giving a real story that has important choices with profound consequences; it isn't a story like Final Fantasy that runs on rails, or even like Baldur's Gate that tends to offer the same actions with varying motivations. You'll be deciding who lives and who dies, and those people will affect the course of this and future games.

ME also deserves massive props (heh) for its morality system. I've often railed in this blog about how much I dislike the Manichean ethics of games like Fallout and Bioshock. ME is one of the best systems I've ever encountered. Instead of the boring and reductive "good" and "evil" categories - really, how many people actually think that they're doing evil in the real world? - ME uses "Paragon" and "Renegade". These aren't intrinsic properties of your character; rather, they're how your character is perceived by the world. You might choose to execute a criminal in order to protect the lives they may threaten in the future; that's a "good" action that you're taken for noble reasons, but it will also cause people to fear you. These are two separate axes that your character can move on, fairly independently of one another. I came to think of Machiavelli, with Paragon roughly equating "Love" and Renegade standing in for "Fear". It is better to be both loved and feared, but you can choose to be only one. I tended to hew pretty closely to the Paragon path, and had maxed out those points by the end of the game, but did take the Renegade path at a few points, and really appreciated being able to do that; it made my character more nuanced, and didn't penalize my gameplay. (In contrast, for example, in SW:TOR, once you max out your Light Side, you need to be really careful to not take any Dark Side actions at all, or else it will gimp your character.)

The gameplay itself was... fine. There were a few things that I really liked; the level designs were pretty logical and fun, and only the Citadel occasionally overwhelmed because of its sprawl. I actually came to appreciate not being able to jump. It's such as common thing in first-person games, even ones that don't really need it, but you would NEVER see a team of heavily-armed soldiers bouncing up and down while on a mission. On the few occasions where vertical movement is required (like mounting a low ledge), it's simply an action your character can take. Combat was fun; I played as an Engineer, and mostly focused on my tech abilities while letting my squad shoot bad guys down, but near the end I got better at using my pistol and had fun with that.

My complaints: first and foremost, inventory management was a huge pain. You get an obscene amount of weapons and armor and equipment in the game. You'll use only a fraction of it; most gets converted to omni-gel or sold for cash. They really should have just given you that gel or cash to begin with. There's a limit to how much you can carry before you need to recycle items; that's usually just an annoyance, but on Feros I was forced to convert a bunch of equipment I would have much rather sold, since there were no shopkeepers there. It's really, really hard to figure out whether a given piece of equipment is better than another; they're ranked by numbers, but it's often the case that, say, a certain level III pistol will be better than another level V pistol. To make matters worse, when you're buying or selling equipment on your ship, you can't tell if any item is better or worse than what a squad member currently has equipped.

Also: the Mako was cool at first, but got really annoying by the end of the game. I loved doing it, but I hated spending so much time trying to climb up steep mountains. I found out too late that combat from within the Mako also gives you a 40% XP penalty, which really annoys me; if I had known that earlier, I would have reached level 50 by the end of the game, instead of my measly 49.

Anyways. I know that Bioware radically reworked ME for the second and third installments, and I'm guessing/hoping that it will improve on those aspects.

There's a bunch more I could say about ME, but I may save it for a future post that covers more of the series, maybe behind spoiler tags. In the meantime: jumping around a bit, but in between my ME sessions, I've been playing the old Shadowrun Genesis game on an emulator. It's a lot of fun; I'd never even seen this game before, and it's quite charming. It shares many of the trappings of the SNES game, but the story is completely different, and in particular the Matrix seems to be a lot more complex than I remember. The Genesis version is also way more squad-based. I'm currently playing as a Decker with a permanent Troll Samurai and an Elf Mage as fellow-runners. There's a ton of stuff to do, and a lot of interesting strategy in planning out how to upgrade my characters. Oh, and I think this game actually has one of the best economies of any game I've played recently. Money is scarce and useful, and I think carefully about each major purchase, and each purchase has a drastic impact on my effectiveness.

After I finished reading the Sandman Companion, I realized that for the first time in nearly six months, I didn't have another book immediately available to start reading. So, I went looking for another book. I must have blinked, because now I suddenly have seven books to read: an assortment from the library, plus a few from Amazon (which I often hit up to research books but rarely actually purchase from), plus a few used ones plus the new Chris Moore book from Kepler's (about which more later). I finished a quick read of a comic: the graphic novelization of "Neverwhere". It was very cool, though I kind of wish that I'd been able to get ahold of the original Neil Gaiman novel before reading the comic. Still, it was a great book: weird and dramatic and fun. I find it interesting that Gaiman does so much mythically-tinged work, and yet it all feels so different from one another; Sandman and American Gods and Marvel 1602 and Neverwhere don't have any direct overlap at all, even though each is filled to bursting with mythology, either real or created.

Oh, yeah, Moore! I'm on Kepler's email list, and always enjoy hearing about what that shop is up to, but I rarely make it all the way down to Menlo Park. That said, when I heard that Chris Moore would be coming there to promote his new book, "Sacre Bleu", I knew I had to go. Moore is incredibly funny in person; he's self-deprecating, but quite smart and knows his audience really well. He didn't read from the book, but riffed for a while on Rastafarianism, the "rent-a-friends" that escort him to book-signings, why he doesn't go to Kansas, and the wonders of medical-marijuana delivery. He talked for a while about writing the book, and the cool stuff he learned about art while doing research. Moore had an extended question-and-answer session that covered a lot of fascinating stuff; among other things, he described the painful and drawn-out, year-long battle with his publisher over the production of Sacre Bleu. If you get a chance to pick it up, I highly recommend it; as a work of art, the book is remarkable, with blue ink, gorgeous reproductions of 1800's paintings, and a striking front cover. You'd think that, in an age when publishers were panicking about e-books, they would want to support a book that made such a strong argument for the printed word, but apparently not. (He also revealed that he started work on this book four years ago; he quickly wrote "Bite Me" because he had a mortgage payment due, he claims.) I was most delighted to hear of his upcoming projects: he's currently working on a book in which Pocket (from "Fool") travels to Venice, and encounters events associated with "The Merchant of Venice" and... I think "Othello". (In the signing line, he mentioned that he wrote the invocation to the book in iambic pentameter. "At the rate I was writing, if I wrote the whole book that way, it would take twelve years to finish.") He also said that he won't be writing another vampire book... but he does want to write a sequel to A Dirty Job, and hinted that Abby Normal may find her way into that story.

Oh, yeah, public service announcement: I haven't finished the book yet, but Chris said (justifiably annoyed) that almost every single review of the book that he's seen has given away a crucial piece of the story in the very first paragraph. Sometimes in the very first sentence. So, if you want to be surprised, be like me and avoid all reviews until you're done. (Feel free to peek at the star ratings or letter grades if you like, just don't read the prose.)

I hung around afterwards for the book-signing. Moore was very gracious and cool, and engaged with everyone who came through; that meant that the line moved slowly, but nobody seemed to mind. I've gotten better at these things, and actually try to think a little about what I might want to say (not because I want to take up time, just to make things less awkward). I eventually decided that I could mention that I had lived in Kansas and 100% agreed with his assessment; however, I overheard him chatting with the ladies in front of me about iambic pentameter, so my brain went "Oooh! Shakespeare!" and so I asked him about that instead.

Fun fact: Moore says that his readership is about 70% female. I wouldn't have expected that, but from looking around the room, that seemed totally accurate. In fact, I think I may have been one of the only males my age there; I saw a few older gentlemen, but not many younger. Which seems a bit odd; I think pretty much all of his books that I've read feature males in their 20s or 30s as protagonists. Plus I tend to assume that males are more into horror books than females; then again, I guess women tend to enjoy vampires more, so maybe that's where that disparity comes from. Eh. Anyways, I thought it was interesting.

Phew! I think that's it from me for now. I'm heading out very soon for the lovely environs of Big Sur (not to be confused with Pine Cove), where, for the third year in a row, I'll be walking down Highway 1 for the gorgeous 21-Miler portion of the Big Sur Marathon. For the first time, I'll be doing it in the company of a group of friends. The weather looks to be gorgeous, the company should be fine. I will see you all on the flip side!