Category: blog

5 second favor

If you have 5 seconds (and haven’t already heard this pitch), I would like to ask for your help. If you’ve already got the t-shirt on this one, then I ask for your patience (grin).

I have the chance to have A Leader’s Manifesto published by ChangeThis.com, a great organization providing a very generous service to the online community. If my manifesto receives a large number of votes, ChangeThis will — for free — design and publish a professional PDF file that anyone can read, store and share on the web or through email. ChangeThis will also distribute the manifesto through their online network.

If you’re willing, will you please take 5 seconds and vote for the manifesto?

Voting closes on the 15th (not sure what time), so this is my last get-out-the-vote effort for the manifesto. It seems clear that it will have enough votes to be published, but it’s such a great opportunity for me that I’m trying not to leave anything to chance.

You’re all awesome and I appreciate the help.

You can read A Leader’s Manifesto in full here to know what you’re voting for (or here’s a single-page version if you prefer).

You can vote to publish the manifesto here.

I pick champagne

When I was in high school, I was for one brief shining moment a New England Debate Champion.

I am not generally competitive. There’s nothing wrong with competition: I just don’t like the stress. I suck at sports, and even in the most casual situations I’ve never been a fan of any dynamic that was all about winning.

The thing is, I like to win — I am just not always willing to pay the price, which is for me a weird combination of trying to exercise power over others (I’m going to win win win!) and feeling powerless myself (oh no they’re winning I feel bad bad bad!). I am willing to make myself vulnerable to the world in lots of different ways, but competing is not such an easy one for me. Maybe it comes down to the difference between being good/not good at something myself (does someone buy my novel/short story/screenplay, or not?) and being better/worse at something than someone else. Maybe I just don’t like being shown my place in line. I dunno.

At any rate, signing up for the debate team in high school still remains one of the great mysterious choices of that part of my life. And I only lasted one term (semester, quarter… we called them terms). But in that term, my debate partner Jon Sweet and I kicked some serious smart-kid ass up and down New England.

We found a good division of labor: Jon did as much of the extemporaneous talking as possible, and I wrote as many of the prepared words as possible. I was great at putting the arguments into coherent and occasionally passionate terms: and Jon was great at doing the thing that scared the bejeezus-most out of me, which was fielding oral debate on the fly — answering the challenges calmly, with the facts and figures, and a particular easy-going charm that just made him seem so much more convincing than everyone else.

And so one Sunday we went off to one of the other schools (Exeter, maybe? Not too far away…) and represented St. Paul’s as a Novice Team. Our topic was, I believe: “Resolved: the United States should unilaterally cease production of nuclear weapons.” (Or something like that — Jon, if you ever come visiting here, do you remember if this is right?) I remember nothing of the experience except the statistic that (at the time) the US had the existing nuclear capacity to destroy the entire world dozens of times over (I can no longer remember the exact number, but it was impressive). So when it was my turn to stand up and field the challenges, I just kept finding creative ways to make the response be about We can kill everyone a lot with the stuff we have now, why do we need more?

And at the end of the day, after doing this three or four times, we got named the winning novice team and they gave us little silver bowls, and then we all climbed in the van and went back to school.

I must say that winning was one of the biggest surprises I’d had in a long time. It felt… really weird to win at something that I was pretty sure I actually wasn’t that intrinsically good at. Hey, you know, maybe that experience is part of where my attraction to team-building (and ultimately Humans At Work) came from — I’m certain that neither Jon or I would have won on our own, but we made a great team. Huh. I’ve never thought about it in those terms before, but that’s really what the dynamic was. And it was one of my first direct experiences of the power of teamwork when people are playing to their strengths.

Anyway, Jon and I were friendly but we weren’t active friends outside of debating. I was always a little bowled over by his confidence and charm (waves to Jon through the internet), and I was shy, and…. And so you may imagine my surprise to wake up in the middle of the night sometime the next week to find Jon shaking my shoulder. It was the first time a boy ever snuck into my room.

Hey, Kel, this is for you, he said, and put something in my hand, and phtt, he was gone into the magic invisible wormhole that boys go when they sneak out of your room…

And there I was, holding my first bottle of champagne.

It was just great. Really an amazing moment.

So I did what any kid with no real experience of fizzy alcohol or radiator heating would have done: I hid the bottle behind the radiator.

For several days.

In winter.

The following Saturday night, my friend Margo and I settled down after dinner to savor the experience. I had craftily set up the furniture in my room so that I could block the door from being opened (we didn’t have locks, those were simpler times…). We opened the window and lit cigarettes. I put on music (probably Traffic). I produced the bottle. I peeled the foil. I took off the little wire hat.

I didn’t even have to touch the cork. It exploded out of the bottle all by itself and champagne went everywhere. All over us. All over the bedspread. All over the india-print wall hanging. All over the ceiling (drip drip drip).

And at the door: knock knock.

It was the faculty member on our hallway, Miss Moroney. She opened the door and it banged against the drawer. I beetled over and peered out. My heart was pounding a zillion beats a minute. Behind me, Margo was desperately fanning fumes out the window. I was sure we were going to be in Big Trouble — alcohol was the kind of thing that could get you suspended or expelled.

“Kelley,” Miss Moroney said, “I have to know… are you smoking in there?”

I have never been so happy to be caught doing something wrong in my whole life.

“Yes, I am,” I said, in my best George-Washington-cherry-tree voice. “I’m sorry, it’s just that it’s so cold outside and I just, well, I’m really sorry, I won’t ever do it again, I’m really sorry, I really am.” And I’m sure I looked terrified. At any rate, she took total pity on me and told me that if it ever happened again, she’d have to report it. I groveled earnestly. I thanked her. Then I closed the door, and Margo and I damn near laughed ourselves sick (very quietly!) as we drank the remaining bit of the champagne.

I didn’t sign up for debating again in the spring. I think I hurt the teacher’s feelings who ran the group, but I knew it wasn’t for me. I’d been lucky to be with the right person, but I didn’t really have the fire for winning that one needs to be a top-notch debater. Because debating isn’t about persuading, or having an actual conversation. It’s about positions, points, arguments, and sometimes it’s just about volume and who bangs hardest on the table.

I’m just not very good at it. I would much rather have champagne.

Human cities

My friend is having a hard time right now, partly because of the pressure that humans put on each other by living in communities. We are not made to be solitary forever, but we damn sure aren’t always made to live so close together, either.

If you’ve read or listened to my essay “Surrender,” then you know I had a dream of a city life. Sometimes I still do, but the city in my imagination is very different now. I could never live in New York: too big for me, too much. The psychic weight of all those people would crush me. Chicago was wonderful, but I am not so sure that I would fit there anymore. I don’t know if it is that I have become smaller, or… well, I don’t know.

What I do know is that I’m not yet ready to live off the grid. I think a small community might be too small for me. I don’t do active “community” that well at the best of times, and I need a variety of human ways, of human expression, around me. I need access to a spectrum of human experience. Others tell me this is possible in small communities. Perhaps it is. And perhaps it is elitist and ignorant of me to think I need the nice restaurants and the club guarded by men where only women dance and the high-speed internet and multiple movie theatres and a store that carries the beers of the world — but I do think that, at least for now.

Mostly, I think, I need that hum of human energy. And (and there’s always an “and”…) I need to be able to shut the door on it sometimes, too. Seattle is good for me that way, right now. I don’t think I could shut the door in New York, or even maybe Chicago. And to my friend whose door is not shutting so well right now, I send my love and the only assurance I can give, which is that human cities, like the humans who live there, are sometimes random, sometimes unpredictable, and sometimes they hurt us. But we love our cities, and sometimes they sustain us, nurture us, love us back. Just like the humans who live there.


click here

City living, heavy trouble.
City living rough.
We are given angry hearts
But anger’s not enough.

I don’t always know what is enough. I just know that humans have it.


click here

I am the eagle
I live in high country
In rocky cathedrals that reach to the sky.
I am the hawk and there’s blood on my feathers.
But time is still turning
They soon will be dry.
And all those who see me
And all who believe in me
Share in the freedom I feel when I fly.

Come dance with the west wind
And touch all the mountaintops.
Sail o’er the canyons and up to the stars.
And reach for the heavens
And hope for the future
And all that we can be
Not what we are.

And why is this song in a post about city life? Because woven within all the noise and the chaos and the fizz of the city is this part of being human, too. We are eagles and hawks in our concrete canyons. In our cities, we dance and reach and hope.

You’d better like to play

I’ve been reading Bob Lefsetz for a long time. He writes specifically about the music business, but he’s got something to say to anyone who wants to combine art and business. His passion is always for the art; like me, he believes that traditional business models for publishing, distributing and marketing art are pretty much dying on the vine, while the major book publishers music labels are blinking hard and saying Hey, what happened to our revenues? And he riffs. I like that.

The other day, Bob wrote this post about redefining success. Those who have been reading here for a while know that I’ve gone through some of this myself recently. And it’s still going on for me, as I ponder the balance between fiction and screenplay and management consulting and life, between security and freedom. As I fall in and out of fear. As I reach for a goal and sometimes get a fistful, and sometimes miss it altogether. I think many of us are engaged in our own redefinitions right now.

And I wonder how we will all define success on the other side? I’ll let you know what I come up with. And I’d be interested in hearing your postcards from this particular road.

I do know one thing for sure: Bob Lefsetz is right when he says You’d better enjoy playing.

And what if that is the real success?

Preliminarily dangerous

I’m delighted to report that “Dangerous Space” has qualified for the Preliminary Nebula Award Ballot in the novella category. Finalists will be announced in early March, I believe, and the award ceremony takes place in LA in late April.

“Dangerous Space” has qualified because during the 12 months after its publication, at least 10 members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) recommended it for the award. Thank you to those who took the time and trouble to recommend it — I appreciate your support and am glad you liked the story.

I’ll post the final ballot when it’s, you know, final (smile).

If you’re interested in the arcana of it all, here are the rules. And if you’re interested in the story, you can download it right here and read it for yourself. Enjoy.

Friday pint

Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint archives.

And Friday is finally back to being Friday again, instead of having to come out wearing Saturday or even Sunday clothes. I’m glad we’re past the holidays and I can finally get my days straight again.

I hope your first week of ’09 has been a good one.

  • Movie Solitaire (June 2004) — If Solitaire were a movie… and it will be, if I have any influence with the universe at all. But that’s a future post.

  • Ambivalence (July 2004) — A ramble on ambivalence in Solitaire, irony, management… and on the elevator scene. We had quite a conversation about this a few months ago, as well. It seems to push people’s buttons, for sure.

  • Cover me (July 2004) — A good image keeps on giving.

Enjoy.

Even if you can only be a little nice

I’m guessing no one here is surprised to find that family behavior is key to health of gay youth (many thanks to P for the link).

But please, if you read the article, don’t roll your eyes at the first few paragraphs, send a mental d’oh to the writer, and bolt away — it gets more specific as it goes on, and some of the conclusions are, I think, very helpful. In particular, the idea that “acceptance” is not an all-or-nothing event, and that even in an environment of general disapproval, any small steps toward acceptance can have a solid positive effect. When you consider that the negative effects include suicide, depression, and drug abuse, then any nudge in a different direction is a good thing.

It astonishes me that this is the first study to ever “establish a link between health problems in gay youths and their home environments.” It’s not that no one could prove it before: it’s that no one ever bothered. That, as much as anything else, points to how much impact intolerance has in the world. And of course, the lessons of this study go beyond being a queer kid. We’re all different. We could all use whatever little bit of nice each other can spare.

Helen MacInnes

I began reading Helen MacInnes when I was a teenager — many happy hours curled up in a leather armchair in my school’s library with one HM book or another. Recently, she’s made a resurgence in our household, and I am having enormous fun rediscovering her work and remembering why I have enjoyed it so much over the years.

Her books are suspense/spy thrillers, many of them set during WWII, so there’s lots of action and people running down dark alleys and such. They’re brilliantly written, with characters who are interesting and believable people even in unbelievable situations — although MacInnes was an astute observer of political conflict on both the macro and micro-level, and her plotting shows it. Her work focuses always on the human consequences of politics. And, like John D. MacDonald, she had many things to say about being human in general, and she wasn’t afraid to let her characters say them every once in a while.

He ought to have come alone. But it had been easy to be persuaded, for the selfish reason, quite apart from the more practical one that this mission must seem a holiday as usual, that he would have been miserable without her. He lay and thought of the way in which two people, each with their own definite personality, could build up a third personality, a greater and more exciting one, to share between them.
 
— from Above Suspicion by Helen MacInnes, 1942

If you don’t know MacInnes’ work, seriously, go get some. (Edited to add: Thanks, Mark, for this additional link to information about MacInnes as a person and a writer.) Libraries everywhere are bound to have her — she was enormously popular in her day, and I agree with Julia Buckley that it’s a damn shame HM doesn’t get more love now. She’s ten thousand times a better writer than Robert Ludlum or Alistair MacLean.

They all made such businesslike gestures, thought Richard irritably. Did it really prove greater efficiency to walk with a resounding tread, to open doors by practically throwing them off their hinges, to shut an insignificant notebook with an imitation thunder clap? Probably not at all, but — and here was the value of it — it made you look, and therefore feel, more efficient. The appearance of efficiency could terrify others into thinking you were dynamic and powerful. But strip you of all the melodrama of uniforms and gestures, of detailed régime worked out to the nth degree, of supervision and parrot phrases and party clichés, and then real efficiency could be properly judged. It would be judged by your self-discipline, your individual intelligence, your mental and emotional balance, your grasp of the true essentials based on your breadth of mind and depth of thought.
 
— from Above Suspicion by Helen MacInnes, 1942

The grasp, the breadth, the depth, are things that I aspire to as a writer and a person. Helen MacInnes certainly had them as a writer, and I imagine she was a fantastic person to drink and eat and talk with. Another person on the long list of if only.

Friday pint

Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint archives.

And look, here’s Friday come around again. It’s been a day of screenplaying, hence the lateness of the post. In the archive world it’s May, summer and warm, and I hope these pints may warm you a little in the winter of today.

Enjoy your weekend.

Dreamcatcher City

My 2008 ended with a day of loud music and creative rage followed by a night of champagne, spaghetti bolognese and conversation with Nicola about the gifts and the bruises of the old year, and our fears and hopes for the new. And, especially, what we want. Because, as Nicola said last night, talent and hard work and good ideas and luck are not enough without the wanting. And of course in wanting out loud, we make ourselves most vulnerable to bruises and gifts.

My 2009 begins with a gift. Karina has made a vid for my essay Surrender. How lucky I feel, in the gift and the friendship of the giver.

I hope 2009 brings you gifts that make you feel lucky, that make you proud of your choices and hard work, that make you glad you stuck it out for this thing and were brave enough to walk away from that one. I hope that you get your chance to walk out on the high wire and that no matter what happens, you have the fierce joy of finding yourself what you have always wanted to be.

What we want is what we are. What we do is who we are. I hope that in 2009 the wanting and the doing will be brilliant for you.