Category: blog

Talkin’ about love

i just wanted to pass along praise for Solitaire. i loved the cover, and while it’s true that you can’t judge a book by its cover, your words ended up in my hands and in my head because of the art. amen for that.

i’m not a big sci-fi reader, but i was cruising through the pages, and then one line nailed me like a Mack truck. the line about wanting to be in Snow’s arms spoke so much to me about humanity and existence, and how a lover can have such influence and healing, be a haven. that line alone made it clear that i’d finish the book, and i ended up reading cover to cover that night.

being much more of a romantic than a sci-fi fan, it was the words about Snow and Jackal and the way they cared about and understood each other that were my favorites. your words were familiar and the ache for their relationship to survive is like the ache i have for my future and the possibility of love like that.

thanks for sharing your talents, and for using your talents to share emotion, compassion, intelligence, humanity, independence and togetherness, etc etc etc!

can’t wait for more,
maria

Thanks very much. I’m glad you enjoyed it.

I find it challenging to write about love. I think it depends on describing small and sometimes inherently uninteresting moments in ways that reflect the greater whole, like building a pinhole camera to watch an eclipse. It seems to me that often writers choose to focus on the Big Moments of love, but in life (at least, in mine) those are only about 10% of the package –” the rest is daily, built primarily, as Jackal describes it, on the dozen hourly acts of will that bind people together. Those are the bones of love. It’s hard enough to write honestly and well about the beginning of love, or the end: but writing about persistence of love is, I think, a very particular and delicate skill. Something to keep working on, for sure. I will be a Happy Writer when I can write that well.

Having said all that, of course the Big Moments –” where the foundation either holds, or not –” are part of any story. Much of what interests me as a writer boils down to examining moments of choice, and even when the choice seems small it can still be a big moment. The things that drive our choices are so varied. There are a million stories there.

I wasn’t sure as I was writing Solitaire that Jackal and Snow would be together after VC. I didn’t make that decision until very shortly before I wrote the scene where Jackal finds Snow outside Shangri-La. It was hard to write about their saying goodbye (in the phone call just before Jackal goes into VC) and to think that it might be true. I’m glad it wasn’t.

The choice about whether to have Snow come to the NNA was really, at base, a fundamental decision of whether to write a book about the presence or absence of hope. I decided that it was a braver choice, as well as a happier one, to have them try to work things out. It can be hard to sustain hope. It’s a choice that has to be made over and over again –” I think will plays a greater part than disposition in the choice (well, I believe that about almost every choice, but that’s my bias). I believe the courage to hope is a quintessentially human thing.

I don’t know if I’m a romantic or not. I don’t believe that romantic love conquers all –” I think in many cases it just makes life damn complicated. And I don’t understand people who think that bad love is better than no love at all. I think some people don’t know how to love, and that some people love each other but are not good together. Feelings aren’t enough, no matter how intense. The persistence of love depends on doing as well as feeling. I do believe with all my heart that this kind of love (and lover) can be a haven, a fortress, a greenhouse, a grand adventure, and the best story in the world.

Space for story

Dear Kelley,

No question, rather a comment. I’m very glad that I didn’t read any of the reviews or the questions posted here. I simply read the book. (Great cover, btw).

Solitaire was a delight. I congratulate you on your knowledge of facilitating techniques. You must know someone in the business because it was so accurate.

What makes a book for me a really good read? It nudges everything else just a tad aside. Like finding that little bit of elbow room at a crowded bar, it allowed me to order up a portion of Jackal, a sip of Snow, and a shot of Neill neat. That’s not any easy feat when life around me feels so complicated. I truly want to thank you for that.

As to the most recent questions/comments posted on your website, it never bothered me that you didn’t develop Steel Breeze into a major plot twist. I felt that they were superfluous from the start, a convenient excuse to convict Jackal. I read it as Jackal was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I wasn’t expecting a conspiracy intrique novel. You’re probably too young to remember the Patty Hearst scenario. Yet, had you gone down that road, I’m sure comparisons would’ve been made.

Getting back to my original point: thanks for the great read. I’m nominating you for a Lammy because I can, and because I think you deserve a thunderous round of applause.

I’m just a reader, but I say bravo, Kelley, bravo.

Best regards,

Jeanne Westby

You may certainly describe yourself as “just a reader” if you wish, but I never will. Readers are the earth and sky to me. So thanks for all these kind words, and I’m glad you liked the book.

It is a great cover. It’s gorgeous, simple, reflects the essence of the story, and makes people want to walk across the aisle and pick up the book. The artist is Bruce Jensen, who has done much good work. It was a particular pleasure to learn that he’d been assigned Solitaire because he did the cover of Nicola’s first book, Ammonite, which she and I both really liked (lovely image of a planet with a subtle cloud-cover in the shape of an ammonite –” although our pleasure was diminished when the then-president of the publishing house wandered by the editor’s desk and insisted that a spaceship be put in the picture. It’s science fiction. There has to be a spaceship. I swear this is a true story.)

In my corporate life I was, among other things, a professional facilitator. I ran meetings (mine, and other people’s) for groups of 2 to 250 people many times a day for years. The last 6 years of my corporate life focused on process development and improvement, project management, team-building, managing, coaching, and facilitating. I taught workshops on communication and leading effective meetings. I mentored folks. I had an absolute blast. If I ever have to go back to corporate work, it’s what I would choose to do again. And it sounds as though you’re in the business yourself (you’re the first person who has chosen the word ‘accurate’). I’d be interested to hear more about what you do. Me, I think everyone should have some training in this area. People might actually get more done with a little less unnecessary friction (and it seems to me there’s more than enough of the necessary kind to satisfy even those who need conflict to feel that they have done something meaningful).

I like the image of elbow room at the bar. It’s certainly my experience that a good story makes a space for itself inside my head. For me, it’s as if the best stories carve out little caves where they can take up residence and echo back and forth to one another. I can’t imagine my life without books, movies, theatre, conversation (the best talking, for me, always includes story. Let me tell you what happened to me today….). I fall in love with worlds, with characters, with a particular feeling or a specific moment. I imagine myself living that life, making those choices, having a beer with those people, being a part of their world. Writing is another way to give myself that chance.

One of the best compliments I’ve had about Solitaire came from Bill Sheehan, who said in his review for Barnes & Noble.com that I had obvious affection for my characters, and that the best moments in the book had the quality of “actual, felt life.” That’s the essence of the connection that I talk so often about wanting to make with readers. And I’m coming to understand more and more how important these seemingly simple things are to me as a reader and a writer.

I just read the A.M. Homes short story collection The Safety of Objects. She’s a good writer, and I can understand why some people like her work a lot, but I don’t, and I couldn’t figure out why. Nicola and I had a conversation (over beer, naturally) about it the other night, and she went off and read a couple of the stories and said, “Oh, it’s because she doesn’t seem to like any of her characters very much. There’s very little compassion.”

I think she’s right. Homes is perceptive and can write a killer sentence, but she doesn’t tell the kind of story I want to read or write. I can’t imagine wanting those worlds, or those characters, making a space in my head. So telling me that Jackal and Snow and Neill mattered to you (which is how I read your email, and certainly hope you will correct me if I misunderstood), and that you enjoyed their company, is a gift to me. So is the Lammy nomination, which I certainly appreciate.

And I do remember Patty Hearst –” I’m not so young as all that (grin). I recently went to a friend’s 30th birthday party, where I was the oldest person in the room. She observed to me privately that all her under-30 friends asked her, “How do you feel?” in tones of concern or compassion, and all her over-30 friends said, “Congratulations, life is so much cooler on this side of the fence.” And so it is.

Accidental

It looks like I waited so long before posting my question that Albert more or less beat me to it, but with a different interpretation. I did not think Jackal had been set up by them: I understood her part of responsibility, but it puzzled me that Steel Breeze did not merit mention in the book’s conclusion, when everything else was tied up and resolved or explained to some degree. There was a tremendous shift of priorities in Jackal’s world in the last part of the book, and that made sense, yet the Steel Breeze thread was left hanging like a discarded plot device. In the greater scheme of things, with the world government coming about, and Jackal and her friends filling their roles in its chinks, suddenly the opposition fell silent, neither defeated nor continuing its terrorist campaign. I wondered where they’d gone.

I reiterate here what you knew from my journal, for the sake of your site’s visitors: I enjoyed Solitaire tremendously. Its part of trauma didn’t feel gratuitous or exploitative. You handled it well, leaving my imagination to do its job. 🙂

I look forward to your next novel.

Ide Cyan

I’m sorry this has taken so long, but getting your question right on top of Albert’s really put my brain in a twist. It would be easy to say, well, no book is perfect or yes, a world-building error or some equally shuffling first-novelist patter. And I tried . But the question of Breeze and their role in the story won’t go away so easily.

I think of the elevator incident as the white squall that appears from a clear sky and sinks Jackal’s life: a stew of small choices and random factors that bring a great storm into being, like the proverbial flap of the butterfly’s wing a half a world away. Steel Breeze is one of those factors. One can infer from casual references throughout the last section of the book that they are indeed still active, still fighting the bad fight, but they certainly aren’t high on Jackal’s radar screen. Although this has never bothered me, it’s clearly bothering some readers. Fair enough, but I would much rather be criticized for an active choice than for an error of ignorance or a failure of imagination, so let me be clear: it was a conscious decision to have Jackal’s interaction with Steel Breeze be almost literally a hit and run, and for Breeze to become no more important in Jackal’s re-created world than her parents or her loss of Hope, or any of the thousand other hits she took after her world fell away (which is to say, important but not differentiated. It’s all one big scar.)

So why don’t readers get this? Why does this need to be addressed in ways that other things don’t (meaning, for example, how come no one’s grumpy that she doesn’t ever think once about trying to reach out to her father? Or that we don’t find out until page 211 that there were 98 children on those elevators? Or maybe everyone is grumpy about it and no one’s told me yet.). Whenever I tried to think about how to a better job with this, I kept getting caught on why do I have to do it at all?

That reaction interested me intensely. It’s what made me rewrite this answer about a million times, trying to get to the core of it. I don’t mind being involved in a learning process –” I love to learn. I am willing to describe my own mistakes when I recognize them. But I wasn’t able to do that satisfactorily in this case. So I was doing laundry yesterday, still trying to parse my way through it, and my inner voice remarked to me, Well, if they didn’t like this accident, they’re really gonna hate the next book!

An epiphany, with wet bath towels. I finally understand that Solitaire is more about the white squall or the butterfly’s wing than I ever consciously realized. Everyone at Ko, including Jackal, tries so hard to keep it all under control, and look what happens –” the bottom falls out anyway. This may seem incredibly obvious to everyone else, but it never occurred to me that I was making my metaphors that literal. When I was writing it, it seemed important that Jackal’s tragedy happen when a piece of random violence collides with one of her own great fears, so that she could more easily make a fatal mistake; and I gave her the fear of falling from a great height because it’s one of mine. It seemed that simple at the time.

I love the writing brain: it does like to play.

So now I know that the elevator incident is not a simply plot device to get Jackal out of one life into another. It’s also a manifestation of accident, and accident wants my writing attention right now. The next book also involves the accidental, whose consequences propel people in unexpected directions and present them with unimagined choices. Which is, of course, where the real story is for me: not about the horrors or delights of randomness in the world, but in the ways we choose to respond when the chaos wagon rolls down our street. And so I will be thinking, as I approach the new book, of how the characters react not just to the specific accident, but to the existence of the accidental. And then I will have to find ways to integrate that into the story in better ways than I was able to in Solitaire.

I will have to pay particular attention to the ending of the new book. I am certainly not interested in the ‘complete package’ resolution. I have to admit I’ve been puzzled that many (most?) readers find Solitaire so neatly wrapped up. I think the world is rarely tidy, and I tried to shape the ending of Solitaire so that it would feel like the moment between exhaling and inhaling again, a literal breathing space while everyone gathers their energy for the next arc of the story, the next round of life. I wanted to end it in a space where hope could exist. To me that’s not an end, but a beginning. Clearly I haven’t done that in the way I envisioned. So another new question for me as a writer is, how to resolve the experience of the next book, create a resonant and compelling ending, without tidying away all that messiness that accident and choice create in our lives?

Which brings me to my current answer to your question, that I will have to be satisfied with for now: Steel Breeze went to the place where other accidents go, spinning off around a corner like a car hubcap come loose and never seen again. I didn’t forget about them: I sent them away unresolved because life is full of things that we never get to grips with. It’ll happen again: because of this conversation, I have discovered another layer that needs to be in the new book. Hopefully, it will be more skillfully done.

I’m extremely grateful for the chance to think about all this.

Early thoughts about translations

I am from Germany and I heard here from you today the first time. I am very interested in your story about Salome (“And Salome Danced”). I’m going to write a short text about her and her story in fact of the bible-text because I’m studying literature. Now I found the comment that your story is out of print here in Germany. I loaded it down now in English from your homepage. Do you or your publisher know where I can get it in German?
So I will read next time and hope I can talk to you about it and about the thoughts behind it.

Love, Steph

I’ve sent you a scan of the German text by email. I have no idea whether the German translation captures the nuances of the story (and I don’t know if we’d be able to figure it out between us, but it would be fun to talk about it). I read enough French to know that the French translation made some language and metaphor choices that I found really interesting –” not wrong, just interesting. Some things just don’t translate directly –” cultural references, slang, and the more subtle differences in worldview that a native language creates as we absorb it. These issues interest me in particular since I’m studying to be an interpreter of American Sign Language. If there are so many subtle (and not so subtle) worldview and assumption differences between spoken languages, imagine the difference that might arise between a spoken language and a signed language. And how do translators and interpreters make decisions about expressing meaning in light of those differences? Oof, there goes my brain.

I do hope you’ll let me know what you think of the German text.

When story goes wrong

I just finished reading Solitaire. It was a very powerful book. Halfway through, I almost did not continue –” I did not see how Jackal could do anything worthwhile after the elevator event. But I persevered, and enjoyed the conclusion very much.

While I see the need for the direct plot line, I guess I was a bit disappointed that Steel Breeze never came in for much attention. Surely someone in that organization must have set up Jackal. But why?

I hope to see another novel (or many more) from you!

Albert

I’m certainly glad you didn’t stop reading: I wanted to affect readers, but not like that.

When I stop reading a book, it’s usually because it’s terribly written, or personally offensive, or because I feel the writer has done something to mutilate the book and twist the story beyond repair. Good writing draws me into the head and heart of the characters: bad writing can push me right out, no matter how much I want to engage with the story. Offending me is harder to do, but certainly possible: the only books I’ve ever actually thrown away were, for example, 50 pages of one episode after another of sexual and emotional brutalization (all 300 pages of this particular book might have been like this, who knows? I didn’t get that far). I find this sort of thing offensive because it’s lazy and self-indulgent, in my opinion. I’ve read equally disturbing scenes in books that upset me, and that I might have a hard time reading again, but they weren’t gratuitous: they were specific, written to make clear both the circumstance and consequence, and part of a larger context (rather than the entire context). Writers who think whole novels “about” victimization are deep and meaningful are fooling themselves, but they don’t fool me.

Then there’s the story-gone-wrong. This one’s harder to pin down, but the best example I give is actually from the movie Alien 3. I adored Alien and Aliens: I found them suspenseful, frightening, and well-made, with characters that I cared about. The movies had an internal consistency that impressed me: the Ripley of Aliens was the same woman, but she’d clearly been affected by her experience in ways that directly shaped her actions in the second movie.

And then came Alien 3. What a bunch of crap. In just a couple of hours, everything that was meaningful about Ripley was destroyed. The connections she fought for (with Newt, Hicks and Bishop) are severed even before the credits finish rolling; the fact that she’s a woman is made an issue for the first time in the story arc, in ways that are almost entirely unpleasant; she’s rendered helpless; she’s raped; she’s impregnated with a baby alien; she loses her guts to the point that she can’t take her own life (by which time I’m thinking, who are you and what have you done with my Ripley?) And her amazingly brave struggle of the first two movies ends with an alien bursting out of her chest. Perhaps some postmodernists would call this “deconstruction” and find it artistically meaningful, but I thought it was bullshit. I am still thoroughly annoyed by this movie, can you tell? But it wasn’t badly written or even particularly offensive in any of its elements: it was simply wrong.

And so I am relieved that this was not your experience with Solitaire. The elevator episode was tricky for me, and involved a fair amount of is this really the right way to go? consideration before I wrote it. Writing it was a bit like chewing tinfoil.

The elevator event has also indirectly engendered some interesting responses in reviewers (and, I assume, readers). Most reviews state that Jackal has been framed. They even go so far as to say “unfairly convicted” or “something she didn’t do.” Some perceive that she’s been deliberately put into this position by Ko as punishment. Et cetera.

I’m not sure how to feel about this. I tried to create an ambivalent situation with this plot element, and either I did a great job or a lousy job. It doesn’t matter to the overall story arc what interpretation the reader takes away (she was framed, she was set up, she was an innocent victim, etc.), but it does matter to me that I didn’t communicate it well. You’ve already put your finger on part of it –” I didn’t want the book to become the story of How Steel Breeze Did It. But the other part must be that I didn’t give enough pointers.

And now I can’t talk about this without spoilers.

SPOILER ALERT. BIG SPOILER ALERT.

Okay, so here’s what my intention was: Steel Breeze has in fact already created the assassination scenario, with one of the two elevator attendants prepared to carry out the attack (if you’ll recall, one turns up dead and the other is missing after the event). In the meantime, Jackal has had too much to drink, and is not thinking clearly, particularly with the stress of seeing her web in danger. And she pushes the wrong button. She makes a mistake.

If she hadn’t pushed the button, then the attendant would have carried out the original plan, and the ambassador would have gone down anyway. Would the other elevators have been targeted? We don’t know –” maybe yes, maybe no. We do know that Jackal is in no way a terrorist. Steel Breeze didn’t even know she was going to be there, and they didn’t care about her: they were after the ambassador. They saw the chance to use her after the fact, and jumped on it (I have a very clear picture of Sheila Donoghue in a communication strategy meeting laying it out for Breeze’s media contacts). And Ko couldn’t afford the bad blood with China, so they gave her up.

But the fact remains that Jackal is responsible. She is not guilty of terrorism or murder, but she is guilty of the deaths. She was incorrectly convicted of the crimes she was charged with, but she is not blameless.

So there you are. This whole bit of plotting was pretty frustrating for me –” took me ages to work it all out to my satisfaction, and even more time to decide how much information to include in the book. The elevator scene is a pivotal point, where plot, character, action and consequence intersect with a bang. I needed an event that would strip Jackal of her people, her company, her desire to defend herself, and then propel her into VC. It had to carry a lot of weight, and I think I showed more skill in creating the emotional structure than I did the plot structure. It’s been a big writing lesson, one that I’m chewing over as I begin work on my new book.

Jackal’s life changed forever in the random intersection of her carelessness and Steel Breeze’s machinations. Later in the story, she imagines everyone in the world as colored beads in a bowl, knocking against each other, leaving dents. That, for me, is a metaphor for the elevator scene.

What’s the writer reading?

I know what I’m reading (smile). What are you reading at the moment?

Sam

Lately I’m reading across a spectrum of genre and concern, and that’s about to become even more wacky: I’m making a research list for my new novel, which will include the geology and biology of Midwestern or Northwestern lakes; the art of Norman Rockwell; left- and right-brain neural functionality; cognitive development in adolescence; and who knows what else?

But until those start rolling in from the library, I’ve been enjoying From A Buick 8 by Stephen King. He’s so audacious and damn stubborn in his determination to put pure-D horror and subtle emotional metaphor in the same room and make them get along. I admire him immensely for this. When it works, the result is wacky, thrilling, thoughtful and grown-up, all at the same time. Even the moments that (IMO) miss this high-water mark still resonate for me.

I just read The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (me and about a million other people). It’s a good book, lovely writing and some amazing moments. I think it wobbles at the end and loses some focus, but that’s a matter of taste, and is also a relative criticism, sort of like saying that someone hung the Matisse a few inches off center.

I am also reading a bunch of non-fiction about American Sign Language and Deaf culture, because I’ve been studying ASL. I’m about to get more serious about it — in January I’ll enter a 4-year program to study ASL and interpreting. It’s a beautiful and eloquent language, and its linguistics fascinate me.

Living the story

I am always pleased when an author I have enjoyed has a web site so I can pass on my appreciation.

Solitaire was terrific and affecting. I grew up on Heinlein and Asimov, still read Barnes and Bova, and don’t much like fantasy except for Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover and Anne McCaffrey’s dragons. Solitaire does not seem to me to fit into any neat category, and I just enjoyed it. In a way, it reminded me of some of Connie Willis’s work (like Doomsday Book or Passages), I suppose in the sense of the main character being trapped and the reader empathizing strongly.

Immediately before reading your book, I had read Moral Hazard by Kate Jennings, a novel by a poet which takes a look at the corporate environment of an investment bank and the people who inhabit it. Her heroine is an outsider who has taken the job to support her husband’s care through Alzheimer’s Disease. Not SF, and not as interesting as Solitaire but it addresses some of the same issues.

I shall look forward to your next novel.

Anonymous

It is certainly worth the work of a website to have a way to receive appreciation. Thank you for taking the time to pass it on.

It turns out, according to the Author’s Guild, that something like less than 30 percent of writers have a website. I don’t understand it: it’s an amazing opportunity to connect directly with readers, regardless of whether the writer wants to make herself actually accessible or not. It seems to me that even if one knows (or believes) that a particular web site is managed for an author by a third party, there’s still the sense that the content comes from the writer herself, without filtration by a publisher or interviewer.

As an example: I went to David Bowie’s site the other day. Lovely site, very glam, although the notion of paying to be a member makes me a) incredulous and b) grumpy (and I’m a fan). But still, seeing the welcome message or the message board responses gives me a thrill –” it’s that “I” language, the knowledge that, behind all the technical gloss, someone whose work I love has sat down at his keyboard and communicated.

It’s more difficult to justify an ivory tower existence in this brave new internet world. I am fond of saying that the world is wide, but it is also much smaller than it used to be. We are all connected, like it or not –” not simply by technology, but by the increased awareness of each other that technology makes possible. Suddenly it’s a lot easier to know what war or famine or different cultures are like: we can see and hear the individual stories that make the larger issues real in a way that can’t be replicated by mass media reporting. And it seems natural to me that connecting with artists whose work we enjoy is one natural outgrowth of this new awareness and technological capability. I think that artists had better learn to deal with the growing cultural expectation of this sort of connection.

I’m glad you don’t choose to categorize Solitaire. Just enjoying it is exactly the response I am hoping for. Since you’re a science fiction reader, you probably know (Theodore) Sturgeon’s Law: “90 percent of everything is crap.” I tend to agree with this, and I look for the other 10 percent wherever I can find it, whether it’s speculative fiction or poetry or mystery or mainstream, or any other part of the literary ecosystem. I grew up reading everything I could get my eyes on, pretty indiscriminately for a while, until it finally occurred to me that some books were better than others. I knew that I especially loved a book when I found myself trying to live it. I annoyed the bejesus out of the neighbors for an entire summer by trying to become Harriet the Spy, and exasperated my parents by escaping from home with little bags of food and a determined expression, in the spirit of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. And then I discovered Tolkien, and Heinlein, and Frank Herbert (and I wonder how many other people spent significant portions of their adolescence trying to get the muscle on the back of their little finger to twitch on command?….).

I don’t try to re-enact stories anymore, but any work that I enjoy inhabits me to some extent. Sometimes forever.

I will put Moral Hazard on my reading list. Thanks for the recommendation.

Readers matter most

Hi Kelley,

I just wanted to say I liked the first chapter of Solitaire. It sounds like the kind of story I’m going to love. Your style, new to me, has already engaged me. And the premise of the story made me go “ooooh, that’s cool.” I’m looking forward to Solitaire coming out in September. Yay! Anyway, congratulations on this endeavor.

Silvia

I’m embarrassed at how long I’ve taken to respond to this. I hope you decided to read the book anyway (grin), and that it lived up to your expectations.

There’s no excuse for taking so long to answer, although there are several reasons. Nicola’s sister and her sweetie visited us from England, and of course, when family visits, redecorating is essential. I spent the time just before Solitaire‘s release scraping, spackling, sanding and painting the living room. And then re-painting, because our first color choice was such a hideous mistake. (Lesson learned: small room + red paint = disaster. Many of you probably already knew this, but it seems that I am a person who learns by doing.)

And then there was the trip to Chicago for my friend’s wedding. And various bottles of champagne to drink, as well as some really nice Brunello and a bunch of Oranjeboom beer. And a short story to get into the mail. Et cetera. And the public reaction to Solitaire to ponder.

But as important as critics are, readers are the ones who matter most. I’d be interested in what you thought was cool about the premise, and whether Solitaire turned out to be what you hoped it would.

Negative conflict

Now Kelley, after I sent the comments that you replied to I saw flaws in my comments before you replied. Although you didn’t really address those but you did hit on others. The thing that I decided I missed saying in my previous comment is that I do understand where you were going with both of the stories commented on. I really enjoyed them and the insights they contained. It’s just that I have this thing about putting fine points on almost everything. It can be a pain in the patootie for other people, lol. By the way, no need to apologize for a rant as far as I’m concerned, for what is a rant but a strong opinion with a place to voice it?

I don’t think we can take away the police for murderers and other people who don’t stop at the line where you cross into private and agreed taboo territory either. I really believe that negative conflict is a thing with a life of its own and infects like a virus. But maybe people can eventually get a grasp of how to eradicate that virus. Like some other viruses there will be those too hardy from adapting to be vulnerable enough to stamp out. Just makes me think that the best place for me to do the work I have chosen is right here with me. One little change at a time, exposing it to as many possible places to spread positivity.

Nadja Salerno Sonnenberg. Wow, that is who I was seeing all through your piece, “Strings.” Nadja is my heart, my secret love for all the rest of my life. I was blessed to be able to see her perform here in Anchorage last month. A network of my friends who know how much I love her work made it a reality for me to go to her concert. One paid for the tickets and another picked them up and another went with me, (the ride and shared witness), the rest cheered us all on. I give special invitation only video and CD Sonnenberg concerts here at my home. I was literally floored when you mentioned her. I wrote a poem called “Strings” which is on my web site but it was about my mother who played violin. I grew up in a family of classical musicians, the dean of music at UC Santa Barbara is my second cousin and I am or was a classical and jazz musician back when I had an ax and all my brain cells were working. And just what does any of this have to do with anything here? I don’t know but I felt like talking to another lover of the talent, the incomparable energy, the sound of Nadja.

I am so looking forward to reading your book Kelley. Just as soon as I get my hands on enough money to buy it I will. I won’t even try to wait to see if I can win it. That kind of winning, (contest stuff), isn’t prevalent in my life. 🙂 My big winning comes from having great people in my life and knowing who I am.

Sly

Thanks for the clarification, and no need to worry –” I wasn’t feeling misunderstood in any way. I was just letting your comments trigger some thoughts about rules and red herrings. I do try to stay on topic when someone asks me a question, but sometimes I just wander off into other parts of the playground.

I like the phrase you’ve used, “negative conflict.” I was socialized to regard all conflict as negative (I think a lot of us were raised this way, especially women, although it’s by no means a gender-specific phenomenon). It’s only in the last 10 years or so that I’ve learned that conflict isn’t bad. It’s just disagreement, and like any other communication dynamic it can be handled well, or it can be a train wreck. My corporate experience really helped me learn how to differentiate between the two, as has living with an independently-minded person.

Seems like so often people pick the wrong things to fight about, akin to fussing about the stain on the rug while ignoring the person bleeding onto it –” we get twisted up in the tangential details while the major issues go unaddressed. There’s no win there. I wish someone had given me an understanding of conflict management when I was young, although I understand that there are many grammar schools and high schools now where the basic principles are taught, and enforced. I’m all for it. It’s much better to learn how to deal. Avoidance is so often toxic to everyone involved: I know this is true even though I still do it sometimes. It is at those moments, among others, that I most clearly comprehend the extent and the moray-eel grip of my own socialization.

Going back to your original comments, what I think of now is how correct Timmi Duchamp is in describing red herrings as distracting (not just irrelevant). She was talking about pronouns, but it can just as easily apply to any other thing that we internalize without questioning it. That unconscious acceptance is what I think of when I read your comments about viruses. But I do think people are learning more and more how to question others, and ourselves, which is all to the good. I have hope for less conflict in the future, although reading the news these days certainly doesn’t support that perspective. And yet, I think humans have an amazing capacity to expand our inner horizons, to encompass what is strange and scary without being swallowed by it: to find ways that we can be different without killing each other physically or emotionally or psychologically. It’s a thing people can learn, if we choose to (and if there is someone around to teach us, and help us practice). It would certainly be much more useful on a daily basis than much of what I learned in school.

Thanks for the gentle and diplomatic correction of Nadja’s name. I agree, she’s wonderful, and I’m embarrassed to realize that I don’t actually have any of her CDs. When I first saw her, years ago, I was so taken by the story welling up inside me that I let the actual music get away. I will have to go fix that.

Companies are people

Hi, Kelley,

I’ve gotten a chance to look at Solitaire and it strikes me that your depiction of corporate culture is both accurate and non-judgmental. You seem to treat the corporate milieu more like an ecology –” which can be both benign and malign, depending on where you are within it and how much you understand about it. This runs counter to a great deal of current position-taking regarding the corporate model, which wants to show it either as an Evil Empire or an Innocent Institution that’s merely misunderstood. I wonder if you’d care to comment on your unique approach?

Mark

It’s taken me a while to tackle this question because I keep wanting to say everything I believe, or feel, or know, and that turns out to be a lot. I’m not entirely satisfied with this answer, only because there is so much missing. I think I will have to write a book about it.

I used to believe that business was really complicated. Now I think business is simple: people are complicated.

When I first began working in the adult world, I played the Evil Company game with enthusiasm and an aggressive disregard for how many people I was broadcasting to. I was underappreciated, misunderstood, and the victim of corporate abuse: managers were stupid, leadership was nonexistent, and the company was fucked. Blah, blah.

At a job in Atlanta, I first began to learn some ways that I could change my own behavior and thereby influence the behavior of people around me. I should fess up that I did this because I was about to be fired for being a major self-righteous pain in the ass. I was given the option to change, or to continue being my unhappy self with another employer. So I changed. I learned to be a facilitator and team builder, and I began the intensive study of communication and process and organizational dynamics that is still a large part of my life and work even now, more than two years after my last corporate job.

I’m glad I sucked it up and did the work: it made a huge difference to my life, and it made me understand that corporations aren’t Evil or Good. They are people. When people are less skilled at working together effectively, their part of the company (their particular ecological niche, if you like), becomes chaotic at best: at worst, people get stress, ulcers, and a downward spiral of hostility and misery. When people are better at working together, they get more done and they are more likely to feel that what they do, and who they are, is of value. They thrive, and the company usually benefits.

We hear lots about goals and vision, and those are important. But many executives seem to think it’s the only relevant thing in business. To which I say, get real –” goals are the easy part. Anybody can set a goal. It’s achieving the goal that’s hard, and in my view of the universe it is the responsibility of managers and leaders to do the hard work. It is their responsibility to give people process, tools, and clear rules for working together. It doesn’t matter how complicated the actual mechanics of the particular business are: I absolutely believe that companies live or die on everyone’s ability to manage communication, relationships, process, and interpersonal dynamics. The rest is details.

No two people have the same corporate experience. You can change a person’s morale just by transferring her to another department and moving her five cubicles to the left. And you can also change her morale by teaching her to play nicely with others and then insisting that she do it. And that her boss do it, and so on, right along to the vice presidents and the president and the CEO, who in my not-at-all-humble opinion are all 100 percent responsible for setting the tone for this. If they don’t, shame on them. And I really mean that: shame on them, because what they do, or don’t do, makes a difference to the people that work for them. People’s daily lives are not a trivial thing.

I was amazingly lucky to have the chance to build an entire team at Wizards of the Coast, from scratch, based on these principles. It gave me a great deal of joy. It was also hard, and scary, and imperfect. Like ecologies, corporations are systems, constantly adjusting to different conditions, different surfeits or deficits or pressures. Balance is not a destination, it is a journey.

The skills that Jackal has in the book are real, and they can make a difference, and they are a whole bunch of fun when they do. It’s also true that working this way doesn’t mean that humans become less complicated. Our company may still not make the decisions that we might wish. We may not always have a happy experience. Sometimes it doesn’t work out, no matter how skilled we are. That’s in the book, too.

For people who are interested, I can recommend a few books that I think are very good or brilliant in addressing some of the concepts that are important to me. It turns out, not surprisingly, that I think these ideas are important in life: how to manifest them in business is just one of the challenges.