So, an author I follow on Twitter posted yesterday to say that she is supporting the protest of the Protect IP Act tomorrow by “blacking out” her own Web traffic–no Facebook, no Twitter, no blogging.  I thought that was a pretty neat idea, so I decided to follow suit.  Of course, then I didn’t blog about it right away, so it’s probable no-one noticed. Still, I guess it’s a moral victory?

Coincidentally, yesterday was also the day I was pointed to an excerpt from Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead.  Said excerpt included this little bit here, which I, at least, found pertinent. Quoting from another text, she lists

“the very many bad things that can happen to a writer to keep him – him is assumed – from producing his best work. These include not only the practice of journalism – a bloodsucker for sure – but also popular success, getting too involved with political agendas, not having any money…”

(NB: if you read the rest of the excerpt, Atwood does not 100% agree with this statement. Please do so before you react to what she’s said.)

“getting too involved with political agendas.”  I saw this, seriously, about an hour after I’d announced I would black out to protest PIPA.  And my immediate thought was “How do I know if I’m too involved?”

I have seen, met, and known writers who were definitely too involved in political agendas.  One of them is somebody you may have heard of: a woman named Ayn Rand?  If her writing and the school of Objectivism were not so inextricably linked, she’d probably have less of a vocal hatedom (though I’m not sure you could say she wasn’t a success…).  I also know people who are rabidly one thing or another–right, left, pro-choice, pro-life, capitalist, socialist, etc. etc.–to the point where I know that I’ve stopped following the social networking accounts of even the ones I agree with.  There is such a thing as letting your politics crowd your writing, to the point where you are so inextricably connected with your politics that it will subconsciously bias people who might otherwise give you money, or–worse than that–to the point where you are known as a political figure, not an artistic figure; where your signal is entirely politics and no-one really remembers that you wrote a book or whether or not it’s any good.

However.  However.

Sometimes you can’t deny that you care about the issue; sometimes it will leak into your discourse no matter what you do; sometimes you know that at best you’ll get a telltale look on your face when people ask you about it and it’s probably better to own up to it than to leave people to put words in your mouth on YouTube comments.  Sometimes, you believe in something so strongly that you want it to be linked with you.

So, there it is.  I’m against SOPA.  I am anti-censorship, rabidly and sometimes dogmatically.  I am also anti-IP theft, rabidly and sometimes dogmatically.  But I don’t believe SOPA or PIPA effectively address that issue; I think SOPA and PIPA are too vaguely worded and would give the power to stop a lot more than pirates.  I think that the damage piracy does is real, but also overstated; and I think that a lot more attention should be paid to why so many people pirate and how to effectively target pirates than is being paid right now.  If legislation were introduced that attacked pirates exclusively and that guaranteed due process for those accused of being pirates, I would consider supporting it.  But not this.  Not PIPA.  Not SOPA.

I think that the issue crosses party lines and ideological lines (in a left-vs.-right sense), and I think that, as an artist, both issues are something I by definition have to have a stance on.  For me to pretend I do not have a stance on censorship or IP theft would be to create something of an elephant in the room; people who know what I do will wonder why I haven’t said something, words may be put in my mouth, and my blood pressure might spike from the effort of not saying anything for fear a potential writing gig might wither on the vine due to my statements.  I would be shocked to hear that no-one in the world of letters disagrees with me, and equally shocked to hear that someone disagreed with me so completely that it would bias them against me.

So, there’s my stance on the subject, in just under a thousand words.  I support the desire of artists and those who publish and market them to make a living wage; I do not support the effort to control free speech (which, by the way, cannot be “abused.”  MPAA.)  And that’s the last you’ll hear about that for at least the next five minutes.

I’ve been cryptic about it on Twitter, but mostly because I’ve been unsure of my ability to blog about the subject sanely.  Now I feel like the words are starting to fall into place, so I’m going to try.

First, the most basic information: One of my relatives is extremely ill.  The relative in question does not want people knowing about this (I only know because his partner panicked and called my immediate family), so I am staying circumspect about the details.  I can say this: the relative is not one my readers know personally, and the illness appears to be treatable, but we need more testing before we know for certain.

I’ve never actually dealt with this situation before.  The passing of my paternal grandmother was sudden–so sudden that it happened while we were in the middle of flying to visit her and Grandpa, and we found out when we landed at the airport.  The passing of my maternal grandmother was prolonged by a losing battle with Alzheimer’s, such that in the end we all knew it to be inevitable. This situation is much more gray, and I’m having trouble coping with it.  Not in the usual sense of being maudlin and shattered; but in the more twisting, complicated sense of being unsure of what I’m supposed to do next.  My conversations with the relatives in the know are brief and to the point, ending with a little hesitation and an offer to let them go.  My day-to-day activities all seem to be interrupted by it–not actually stopped, but dyed, turned a little dark and a little guilt-ridden as I wonder if I should be doing these things, if there is more I can do for my family, if my family will be offended if I continue on with the other things I’m doing in my life.

Of course, I’m still writing.  Writing is my anchor, and the one thing I will absolutely take for myself here is that I will not give that anchor up.  But as I continue on with normal life, waiting for the doctors to tell us more, I keep finding myself wondering, is this right?  Is this rude?  The answer, of course, is that it’s right for me, but I have a history of trouble accepting that sometimes, that’s as far as the question needs to go.

The bottom line here is that things are very much in flux for me right now, so my updates may be a little sporadic and there may be some serious mood whiplash here and there as the work-a-day mixes in with the worrying and the mourning.  I’m not going to try to shield you guys from this–that’s a disservice to you as a reading audience, and it would be dishonest of me.  But I am going to be careful to shield my family’s privacy, so please pardon if things get circuitous.

If you want to know how you can help, the answer is that you can keep living your life.  Keep commenting here, keep eating good food, keep reading both good books and bad.  Condolences and concern are appreciated, but at this stage it’s all still larval; for all we know we could be bottling up empathy only to find it’s unwarranted.  So please, do what is right for you, and don’t worry about me.

That is all I had to say about it; the rest, like my emotions, is on hold.  I promise the next update is just going to be a recipe or something.

So, here we are, the last working day of 2011.  Another unique day, with unique twists to navigate and unique challenges and opportunities.  Another day to try to do this thing right and that thing better and not do these other things at all.  Another day for writing, and editing, and cooking good food, and long walks in the chilly air with my girlfriend.

If that seemed really navel-gazing, it’s because that’s the kind of mood I’m in. The period between Christmas and the New Year, for me, has always been kind of a weird doldrums, where the air in the office is too warm and the daylight hours are too short and I feel like I’m at the tail-end of a meal and there’s more of the nasty, overcooked side dish left to finish than I realized.  There is a general sense, during this week, of Get On With It; a feeling like the things I want to do won’t be accomplished now, so please let’s get through the final holiday and on into a new year with new promises and new opportunities.

So I’m trying to refocus myself and see my way to treating these days as they are–days, like any other, if perhaps a bit colder than the summer days I seem to remember happening at some point, and therefore days where I can still be getting things done.  This week has been a lot about nesting–my girlfriend is off work, so there’s been a lot of cleaning and tidying at the house, and I got this weird thing called a Christmas bonus, so I picked up a few things from IKEA and a home decor sale at Target to tie the house together.  I’m now somebody who owns a rug, which may actually be the gateway possession for fitted slacks and polo shirts and worrying about my stock portfolio.

One thing I have definitely noticed about myself this week is how much more informed I am.  I’m sitting here, sipping an energy drink I probably shouldn’t be having, and I’ve been steeping in data about the cool things happening in the world around me.  There’s this article, which has me thinking about privilege and exactly how one could legitimately claim a person is “too sensitive.”  There’s this other article, which all at once has me hoping for the future of American education and has me wondering where the author gets off assuming some of what he assumes about the Occupy movement.  (Forbes is on my shit list a little bit lately, so please pardon any cognitive bias there.)  And there’s this video, combining my love of tiny children and my love of hockey (which also serves as a unicorn chaser for any upset the previous two links might have given you).  Earlier this year, I was worried about how out of the loop I felt, but lately it’s seemed like I’ve had much higher quality of information, and much more wherewithal to research that information and make sure I have it right (like, say, during the enormous clusterfuck about the 2012 NDAA).  It’s fascinating, and I don’t think it’s entirely me; I think that information overload has just become either a) more natural or b) easier to navigate.  I try to believe “b” because I’d be really, really sad if it were “a.”

Something else I’ve noticed about myself this week is how much quieter I am.  I used to be a chatterbox, prone to conversation for conversation’s sake; and when I say “for conversation’s sake,” I mean “conversation that is not really about anything, or indeed composed of anything but the phrase ‘So, yeah…’.”  On the way home from Christmas break, my companion actually wound up having to carry conversation for long stretches, to the point where I actually felt bad about it.  I also caught myself ducking out of holiday festivities to just take a minute to myself (usually by hiding in the bathroom about as long as I, personally, estimate a normal person takes in there).  This isn’t to say I don’t love company or conversation, but it is a weird shift in my internal dynamics that has probably been going for a while and I am only just noticing.  It may be a result of shifting toward more time spent writing and editing.  It may also be a result of living with an introvert.

That, I am afraid, is all I have to say today; I somehow doubt you want to hear too much more about it anyway.  For the moment, I am going to shuffle off to reading Cracked articles and maybe poking at some editing, not necessarily in that order.  I will be back on the 31st with my musings on the dying year, and maybe a recipe or two if the New Year’s festivities are exceptionally tasty.  Thanks for reading, world.

So, here we come: Christmas time. Hanukkah has already started, trees are up and lighted, lights are up and tangled, and presents are slowly but surely making their way under the heavily scented pine boughs.

This year has been a weird one, because it’s the first time in recent memory Christmas has snuck up on me. Not to say that I am upset that it’s Christmas; these days it’s my favorite holiday of the year, absent its hideous and well-derided corporate trappings.  I suspect the holiday spirit will come crashing down on me as soon as that happens, but it’s strange for me to have not been exploding in Merry Christmases and Happy Holidays prior to now. It’s not bad nor do I feel like a Scrooge, it’s just a little off-kilter.

The big, bright, shining thing about this year is that it is my first Christmas living with S. Last week we acquired our first-ever Christmas tree together, a little three or four foot pine who currently resides on one of our coffee tables. His name is Mr. Tree, we have decided, and we selected him because he was standing alone in a corner of the lot, isolated from the other trees by a good ten feet of cold concrete. It is our resolution as of now that every year we will select the loneliest-looking tree in the lot to come home with us; Mr. Tree certainly seems to appreciate it. As much as I have not been feeling as Christmasy generally, the experience of decorating a tree with S., of negotiating aesthetics and unknotting lights and debating how tacky our tree topper should or should not be, is a Christmas memory I’ll always treasure. Mr. Tree is currently decorated with some red and silver ball ornaments, busts of the characters from the Rankin-Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and a San Jose Sharks snowman. Because if we’re going to have a tree, by gum we are going to make it our tree.

I will have another post in a couple days time, about Christmas and exactly how it feels this year; but for now, I leave you with that little peek into my non-writing life, and I’ll start the process I hope to start by saying: Merry Christmas.

(We appear to be continuing our biweekly tradition. Do you guys think I should like, start posting Word Metrics here or something?)

This week, I discovered the joys of beta readers.

It’s not that I’ve never had someone critique my work before. I’ve had lots of people critique my work before. I even paid an author once to take a piece apart for me, and they sent me into a crisis of faith that I really, really needed to have.  But this is my first experience with Beta Reading in the traditional sense: working, chapter by chapter, through a book.

Currently I have only one beta reader; her name is Sonya, and she happens to be romantically involved with me.  But that doesn’t mean that she’s not also willing to be critical, and critical she has been–and for reasons I would have been critical had I been handed the same text.  We’re working our way through Done with Mirrors, my tiny, hoodoo-drenched labor of love, and it’s been edifying for me to see exactly how much I’ve grown since I first put Strangler Tom Carter ne Holkins down on paper.

I was reaching so much in some scenes, underreaching so much in others; I was clearly ready to make out with my copy of The Last Goodbye; and there are still places where it’s obvious that I thought the best way to be an awesome author who would get all the moneys and all the ladies was to have my prose act as much as possible like it was written by Neil Gaiman.  Also, it started with a scene with a dead body in it, and that’s a sin only surpassed by starting with a scene where the main character stumbles on to a magical creature and discovers a strange world where he gets to be special.

And yet…and yet…there’s something here.  And when I sit down and really dig into it up to the elbows, it gets a bit gory and a bit greasy, but ultimately I find the patient survives, and with all the key parts intact, and all the magic.  Both the actual magic in the book and the, you know, literary magic, or whatever you prefer to call it in your neck of the woods.  It’s been a really nice exercise, especially after the occasionally hair-pulling effort of finishing Eyes of Stone, and it leaves me with a lot of hope for the future. You know, like most things that are not the CNN Political Ticker.  In fact, this whole exercise has me thinking that my general sense of hope and love for the world is kind of lacking in my books right now, but I’m also not exactly sure how to convey that, because I often find books that are about the eternal triumph of the innate good in the human spirit to wind up kind of cloying…

But for now, the bottom line is, I feel like I might be pretty good at this writing thing; I’m thinking maybe I should be trying to make a career out of it.

Wait, what?