Tag Archives: personal

End of year one

blogging, ,

One year ago I started this blog to:

…see if having another place—a new place, without the history and other issues inherent to those other blogs—to do that personal kind of long-form blogging that I miss, whether I actually use it. And more importantly, does it do that vital de-cluttering.

I don’t know how much the mental de-cluttering has helped with my productivity in other writing pursuits, but I have definitely been blogging more, including finishing more of the essay-style postings.

I have made progress on my novels, and I have managed to finish a few old stories that have been languishing for years. So I’m going to declare that this has at least improved things. Now that I’ve finally realized the power of scheduled posts, the fact that I often have bursts of several topics occur to me at the same time is no longer an annoyance.

I still have a lot of essays in the half-finished stage, but more of them are getting finished, posted here, and cross-posted to my writing site.

I’m willing to declare this first year a success. Not a resounding one, but definitely a success.

Let’s see if I can do even better in year two!

Things out of our control, part 2

life,

I was just laying down to take a nap last night when the phone rang. The name on the screen was a friend who very seldom calls, but when he does, it’s important. So instead of letting it go to voice mail and laying back down, I answered.

He was at a hospital, outside a room where his dad lay unconscious and not expected to recover.

I didn’t know my friend’s dad well. I had met him a few times. I had admired his father’s artwork many times before I met him, because he’s kinda famous. So when my friend introduced me, I made the mistake of calling him “Mr. J——.” He shook his head and told me, “No! I’m Bud.”

It was fun getting a tour of Bud’s studio from the man himself, complete with a few amusing stories about his son, my friend. Some years later I had the privilege of hearing him play fiddle at his son’s wedding.

My favorite moment with Bud occurred during a barbecue one Fourth of July. My friend was setting up some fireworks. Some bottle rockets and the like. Bud came over and told his son to aim them up at one particular tall tree. “There’s a wasp’s nest up there I’d like to get rid of.”

What followed was a debate about the pros and cons of firing fireworks into a tree that loomed over the house, and happened to be infested with wasps. Bud almost talked his son into it. Almost.

All of that flashed through my mind as his son told me, “We’re taking turns saying good-bye.” I asked him what I could do. He said that he just needed someone to talk to. Someone who wasn’t there and crying.

I managed to gulp back the tears and tried to be someone who wasn’t crying.

There’s nothing we can do in times like that, other than be there for each other.

This year has been a bit of a challenge. My last grandparent died a month and a half ago. If the doctors are right, this will be the fourth parent of someone I know who has left us since I lost Grandma B.

They’re not connected. I know that. Because of my age, and because many of my friends are of a similar age, our parents are “getting up there,” as one friend put it.

But it’s a reminder that we shouldn’t take anything and especially anyone for granted. Make sure you tell people you care about how you feel. Now. Because we never know which conversation with them will be our last.

Catching-time

life, , , ,

According to the Shropshire Word-Book, written by Georgina Jackson and published in 1879, “It is called catchin’ time when in a wet season they catch every minute of favourable weather for field work.”

We have a weird relationship with time. When I was a kid, adults in my life put a lot of importance on how early one got up in the morning. If you were the sort of person who regularly got up at dawn (or earlier), you were obviously a morally upstanding, productive member of your community. If you slept in a bit later, but still got up “early” and started your workday sometime well before 9am, you were still a good person, though perhaps not quite as good and hard-working as the people who got up earlier. If you slept in until “all hours of the day,” there was something seriously wrong with you, and you were clearly leading a life of decadence bound for a (deservedly) horrible end.

Exceptions were made for people who had jobs that required them to work “graveyard” shifts, and the like, but even then, there were implications that this was only-just tolerated as a necessary evil.

I became especially cognizant of this in my early twenties, when I was juggling part-time college with multiple part-time jobs, one of which was a night job. A number of my relatives could not understand why I thought it was all right to sleep in past nine just because I had worked late, then stayed up to finish homework, and didn’t have to be at class or work until afternoon. They would quote folk proverbs and Bible verses at me about how early risers were healthy and successful, and only the wicked “slept the day away.”

Which, unless one is working in agriculture or some other vocation where sunlight is literally necessary to the work at hand, is nonsense.

While the human wake-and-sleep cycle is moderated by sunlight, it is part of a complex system of neuro-chemicals and hormones. The release of some of those chemicals are stimulated by the detection of sunlight, but it isn’t exactly the same in every person. There really are some people who are biologically wired to be morning people, some that aren’t, and even some who are definitely night people.

I am not one of those morning people. Getting me up and about before sunrise is a seriously unpleasant chore, no matter how early I go to bed. Even when I do get up regularly at a particular hour after a good night’s sleep, my brain never feels as if it is firing on all cylinders until a couple of hours after sunrise. In the summertime that’s no problem, but in winter—when sunrise at my latitude doesn’t happen until nearly 8 am—that makes working a 9-to-5 office job less than ideal.

Which is why I’m grateful that at least some flextime is fairly standard in my industry for my kind of work.

The flip side is that in the summer, when sunrise is much earlier, it’s a lot easier for me to get into the office and productive earlier in the day, and more likely that I will leave the office earlier, so that I can enjoy the sunny evenings.

Which is why I have a lot less hatred for the arbitrary annual movement of the clock forward and back than many of my friends. I understand perfectly well that the amount of sunlight we get in the summer is the same, no matter what any of us arbitrarily set our clocks to. But, because the official business world does follow that convention, and even in a flextime environment, one is expected to stay at the office until that hour hand creeps into the vicinity of the 5, the artificial temporary movement of that hour to earlier in the solar day gives me more time to appreciate and enjoy the sun when I am awake and out of the office.

So, it works for me. I’m sorry that it does nothing more than annoy some others.

Not all like that

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It happens any time I write (or link to someone else’s post or article) about certain groups of people opposing gay rights, or those people doing really awful things in the name of opposing gay rights, et cetera: a direct message, private email, or (rarely) a public comment from someone explaining that “not all of us are like that.”

Sometimes it’s nothing more than that simple statement: we’re not all like that. More often it is a bit defensive. “You really shouldn’t generalize, because you make those of us who aren’t like that look bad.” The phenomenon happens so often, that advice columnist & gay rights advocate Dan Savage has started referring to those people as NALTs, for “Not All Like That.”

The thing is, that “you make those of us who aren’t like that look bad” is utterly false.

I’m not the one making them look bad. If I post a link to a story about a study that shows that nearly 75% of those who describe themselves as Evangelical Christians oppose gay rights, it isn’t me who is making those Christians who don’t oppose gay rights look bad, it’s the other Christians who are making Christians look bad.

If someone posts a piece showing how an organization is cherry-picking facts from a study which actually proves that the denial of equal rights harms the health of gays and lesbians to support their lies that being gay is unhealthy, it isn’t us who is making Christians look like liars. It’s the liar who claims to be speaking for Christ who is making Christians look like liars. It’s also the Christians who disagree with him but who are too timid to confront him about his lies who are making Christians look like liars and bigots. And it is especially those Christians who are too timid to confront their co-religionists but never hesitate to scold someone like me because they’re “not all like that” who are making Christians look like liars and bigots.

And that means, instead of scolding me for posting it, or “correcting” anyone who posts these news tidbits, you need to go scold or correct your co-religionists. Tell them you disagree. Tell them that they are lying. Speak out in public forums when they lie, and tell them they don’t speak for you.

I mean, really, my major in college was Mathematics and I posted the article which said nearly 75% of Evangelical Christians oppose gay rights. I don’t need you to tell me that nearly 75% is less than 100%. I already know that not all are like that.

I understand why people may be reluctant to confront the liars and bigots in their group. Those bigots and liars are mean, and they don’t fight fair. I get it. Really, I do. But if you’re too timid to go take them on, then keep your mouth shut. Whispering to people like me that “we aren’t all like that” doesn’t help me, it doesn’t prevent any of the meanness, nor does it further the causes of truth or justice. The only thing it does is make you feel better about being too cowardly to actually do anything about the lies and the bigotry.

And I have exactly zero desire to enable that!

If you happen to be one of those who are not like that, and are looking for something more concrete to do than whisper to people like me that you exist, may I suggest you get involved in one of these fine organizations:

The Reconciling Ministries Network

Evangelicals Concerned

Integrity USA

Dignity USA

The Welcoming Congregation Program

The United Church of Christ LGBT Ministries

Queer Dharma

Music

music,

My music listening tastes are a bit weird and all over the place. Often the old, “It’s got a good beat and is easy to dance to” are my primary requirements. Interesting lyrics are always a plus.

Sometimes my tastes are hopelessly pop:

“Cover the face! Pump the bass!”

Keywords are forever

technology, ,

A long, long time ago I was invited to take part in a meta-writing and meta-publishing project. This was before more people knew what the internet was. It was called an APA, for Amateur Publishing Association. There were tons of them dedicated to lots of different topics.

Everything was conducted via physical mail. At regular intervals you would send in your contribution, which was a minimum number of pages of writing (or writing and art) in which you would talk about your most recent challenges or successes in your writing and publishing projects, or ask questions, and respond to things the other contributors had sent in previously.

That sort of communication tends to happen on forums and blogs, now. Not unlike blogs, each person’s contribution tended to have its own personality. Rather than just call your contribution “Gene’s pages” or “Pages from Margaret” people often named their section, as if it were a syndicated column or a separate publication. My pages in this particular project were called “From the Desk of the Script Doctor.”

“Script doctor” comes from the movie and theatre industry. A script doctor or script consultant is a writer who is brought in to rewrite an existing script. Sometimes they call it “polishing.” Usually the script doctor is just fixing problems with structure, or pacing, or dialog before a script goes into production. Usually the script doctor is a more experienced writer who has gotten a reputation for being good at significantly improving a script while staying true to the original spirit of the story.

As a fiction editor, that’s what I’m particularly good at. I’m horrible at copy editing. I read right through all sorts of typos without them bothering me, for instance. But figuring out where your characterization is going off the rails, or finding holes in your plot and suggesting fixes, and similar things, I’m really, really good at.

So I used that as the recurring name of my contributions in that APA. And when I was invited to join another writing APA, I used the same name over there. Years later, when I started blogging on LiveJournal, I used the name there, and so on.

When I first set up my twitter account, for the short bio I wrote something like, “A script doctor reading, writing, and publishing in Seattle.”

My account all set up, I searched for and followed a few people. As most folks setting up a casual account do, I followed several real life friends that I knew were using Twitter. When I checked my account later, I wasn’t surprised to see that the friends had followed me back, along with one or two other friends whose accounts I hadn’t yet found.

The next day, there were a bunch of followers, almost none of whom I knew. The really odd thing was that they were mostly business accounts, mostly local, and all related to medical equipment or services. I clicked on one of the unfamiliar accounts that didn’t look like a business, and the bio had a URL for his private medical practice in a neighboring city. “That’s odd,” I thought.

The next day, the number of medically-related business or consultant accounts following me had doubled. And then I realized what was going on. Whoever was running these accounts was doing dumb searches on the keyword “doctor” and following every account that popped up.

I went through them all and blocked the ones whose streams consisted of nothing but advertisements for their business. Then I changed my bio to “A sentence wrangler reading, writing, and publishing in Seattle.” I figured that would take care of the spammy medical-services related accounts, right?

As time went on I got a lot of the obvious spambots following me, as well as the slightly less obvious spamming accounts for businesses or services. Don’t get me wrong: not all business-related twitter accounts are spammy. But there are a lot out there where the person running it just doesn’t get it. They either never post anything at all, or they post virtually the same statement again and again with a link to their business web site or an article about some service they offer, or they post random quotations/words of wisdom with a link back to their company website.

I really crack up at that last one. There either must be a manual out there “Tweet Your Business for Dummies” that tells people to download a giant list of these quotations and several times a day copy one out of the list, then tweet it with your link.

But I digress.

All those other kinds of thinly disguised advertising accounts follow me, yes. However, even though all mention of my old “script doctor” joke had been removed from my bio and any other information I see on my account, it was still the case in the following months that about four out of every five of these spammy accounts that followed my account were a medical services-type business.

Even now, when my profile reads “A typographer and sentence wrangler writing, dabbling, publishing, and analyzing in Seattle”, and when I’ve replaced my avatar with a cartoon unicorn, they still come for me.

What’s happened is that these accounts aren’t being set up by someone who is doing a manual search of twitter bios. Instead, during that week or so that my bio had the phrase “script doctor” in it, some data aggregator recorded my account into a database, along with the keywords it was searching for that it found in my information. And now, I’m in that database as a doctor forever.

My day job(s) have included being responsible for managing documents or contents for about 25 years, now. I understand from personal experience that one of the least pleasant tasks is to go through older metadata and clean it up. For example, when we released that new product in 1990, all of the documents that went along with it were applicable. When we released a newer version later that year, several of the documents were replaced with newer versions, but several of the previous version’s docs didn’t need updating, so they weren’t marked as superseded. As time goes on and more products are added along with new versions of old products, and as the business grows and more employees come along, you keep adding docs and no one has time to go back to comprehensibly review all the older data on documents that no one has touched for years.

So I understand that I’m forever going to be listed in various lists—as companies share, acquire, or otherwise mix their data together—as a doctor. One wonders if there are also databases that list me as a unicorn, now.

Tempts me to find excuses to put other words in the bio. I’ve always liked the job title, “Emperor.” What do you think?

What’s it about?

writing, , , ,

A friend recently asked our monthly writing group for advice about a novel idea that he had been struggling with. His specific question was whether the story was worth finishing. I asked him what the story was about.

He began explaining about the story’s setting, the history of the planet, and a number of complications. If I reproduced it here, it would have gone on for several paragraphs.

At a point when he paused for breath, I interrupted to say, “You haven’t told me what the story is, yet. All you’ve given me are complications. Who is your protagonist? And what problem is he struggling with?”

Another friend participating in the conversation put my same question a different way. Referring to a story we had just finished critiquing. “That story, even though it was only 10,000 words, had a lot of complications and subplots, right? But what the story is about is, ‘Ian gets suckered into delivering a stranger’s ashes to a temple.'”

That summary evokes a story. You don’t have to know who Ian is. You don’t have to know exactly what culture he lives in. You don’t have to know what sort of temple it is. “Character gets suckered into delivering someone’s mortal remains somewhere,” sets up a dramatic situation.

What will make the story interesting and uniquely yours are, indeed, all those background details—the character’s personal history, the importance his society places on funeral rites, the character’s acceptance or rejection of those expectations, any difficulty or surprises he or she encounters on the way, and so on—that make the tale an entertaining or enlightening experience.

But the spine that holds it all together is that central dilemma. In that particular example, the word “suckered” tells you that he is at least somewhat reluctant to be doing it. It also tells you that the person who tricked him into it must have had reasons they were even more reluctant to undertake the journey. The fact that it is someone’s mortal remains and there is a temple involved hint at some of the kinds of difficulties the character may face along the way.

When I asked the original question, this is what I was really looking for: did the author know what the spine of his story was? Exactly what the spine is doesn’t matter when asking whether the story was worth finishing. Neither do all of those other details, background information, and complications tell us whether the story is worth finishing.

What tells us whether this is a story that you need to tell, is if that central nugget is at the forefront of your mind when thinking of what the story is about.

From all the information he gave us, I could come up with such a central, one sentence, summary of what that story might be about: John receives a message from the heavens that reveals his whole life is a lie.

But that’s the conflict I pulled out of it. If that isn’t the story which my friend wants to tell—nay, needs to tell—then it isn’t his story.

And even after all that, the original question of whether the story is worth pursuing has to be answered by the author. Does re-evaluating the unfinished work he has now make some sort of central dilemma jump out at him? Perhaps a completely different central dilemma: maybe the story he needs to tell is the story of John’s sister, who is dealing with her brother’s sudden onset of insanity, then begins to wonder if he really is insane; or perhaps it is the story of a city elder who has to deal with this fanatic, John, who is trying to destroy civilization.

If such a dilemma jumps out at him, if he feels the need to tell that story, then yes, absolutely, it’s worth finishing. Otherwise, it’s probably time to set it aside to work on something else.

March Forth!

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It was spring of my first year in college. I walked into the Math Lab, where I worked, and the administrative assistant looked at me and declared, “March forth!”

“What?”

“It’s the only date on the calendar that is also a command,” she said. “March forth!”

Puns have never really been my thing. I find some of them cute—occasionally even clever—but I almost never think of them on my own. So the joke had never occurred to me. She was flabbergasted that I’d never heard the pun before.

That “March forth!” is an imperative was moderately amusing. I tried in subsequent years to think of something to do with it. Because just pointing out that the day sounds like a command lacks something. And truth be told, about half the time I don’t remember the joke at all until March fifth, by which time it’s too late.

I don’t remember anyone that I ever told the pun too having ever heard it before I mentioned it.

A few years ago, at my previous employer, I wound up on a committee charged with setting up some parties and other fun activities to prop up morale in the work place. Right after someone suggested some activity involving people wearing the shirts of their favorite football team, another co-worker suggested Combat Boot Day. None of us knew what it was.

“When I was in college there was this other girl in my dorm who got us all to wear boots—like Doc Martins or something that could pass for combat boots—on March the fourth. Because it’s March Forth Day. And you March in groups to classes together. And at the end of the day we had a party back in the dorm.”

I had to tell about the admin assistant at my college job who had first told me the March Forth pun and had acted surprised when I didn’t know about the day. But she also hadn’t told me anything to actually do to observe it.

The co-worker said her dorm-mate said it had been an annual thing at her high school. “It was weird, but kind of fun to march around and have people be confused. But now that I say it, I don’t know how we make that an office activity.”

Then I read this rather heartbreaking article: Trauma Sets Female Veterans Adrift Back Home. And I thought, “Okay, here’s something I can do.”

So, this March Forth, I would like to urge everyone to go donate to The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.

March forth, and spread the word.

Romanticizing the exotic

life, ,

My Great-uncle Lyle used to tell the story of how his grandparents (my great-great grandparents) married. Great-great-grandpa had been raised a good Irish Catholic boy. He wanted to marry a Native American girl. His priest didn’t believe in interracial marriage, so they ran off to Kansas until they found a minister who would marry them. And that’s how we ended up being Baptists.

Once he told that story within earshot of his brother, my Great-uncle Roy. Roy said that wasn’t quite right. He’d been told that the state they lived in when they met didn’t allow interracial marriage, they’d had to run off to Missouri to marry, then settled in Kansas.

Lyle shrugged, said that great-great-grandma had said it was the priest. Then they both started speculating that it might have been something a bit less noble, such as that they were already living together, so the priest didn’t approve for non-racial reasons.

There are a few problems with the story. One: Missouri didn’t repeal it’s law against interracial marriage until the 1950s. Now, some of those laws only prohibited Whites from marrying Blacks, and didn’t specifically mention Native Americans. I haven’t been able to find out the specifics of Missouri’s law back in the 1880s, but it renders that part of the story a little suspect.

The other is that there’s some doubt about great-great-grandma’s ethnicity. Clearly she told her grandsons that she was full-blooded Choctaw. In the couple of photographs that have survived of her she certainly could pass for Native American. One of my cousins who is into genealogy has found contemporary documents that list her race as either Indian or Choctaw.

But going back one generation further, we find that at different times in his life her father claimed to be from the Choctaw tribe, and other times from the Cherokee. Her mother apparently told at least one person she was “half Indian” at least once. No official records list them as such, but then, since great-great-grandma’s father was born only four years after the passage of the Indian Removal Act, if they had recent Native ancestors, their families would have had reason to keep it secret, or at least minimize it.

Also, the geographical location of the families of both of great-great-grandma’s parents for several prior generations in northwestern Virginia, doesn’t make the Choctaw connection very likely, as the tribe’s traditional territory was south of Virginia.

Finally, records indicate Great-great grandma was born in Kansas in the county where she married Great-great grandpa. No indication of an elopement at all. He was born in Ohio, and appears to have met her after coming out west to “seek his fortune.”

A lot has been written about why some U.S. white families claim some Native American heritage when little evidence exists, and also why virtually no U.S. whites ever admit any African ancestry. I’m sure those sociological reasons play into our family’s excursion into this genealogical conjecture.

The whole thing amounts to a personal “just-so” story—an unverifiable and unfalsifiable narrative to explain a tradition, a biological trait, or a behavior. For instance, my Great-grandmother I. wanted white hair as she got older. Her hair stubbornly remained black, with only a very modest sprinkling of silver right up to the end. She always attributed it to “Mother’s people,” saying that her mother and maternal grandmother had dark hair that never went gray. My two great-uncles both took pride in their versions of the story because it seemed to cast our ancestors as independent people unfettered by societal conventions. Great-uncle Lyle usually brought up the story whenever someone in the family made any sort of racist comment, and concluding with an admonition against racism.

My amateur-genealogist cousin has uncovered a lot of family stories indicating that other descendants of our great-great-great grandparents would bring up the supposed Native American heritage as an excuse for being short-tempered; a bit less noble than my great-uncles’ take, but not really any more sensical.

For a long time I thought of the story as a sort of affirmation of my own non-heterosexuality. If these ancestors could defy the social and legal forces that condemned their love, raise five daughters who all went out to have families of their own (all seeming to live happy lives as productive members of society), then no one in my family had the right to condemn my love.

The narrative each generation of the family wove fit their own sensibilities, projecting our own notions about what is right and proper (and whether “proper” is a good thing or a bad thing) onto the previous generations’ stories. I don’t think that’s wrong, per se. I loved and admired my grandmother, great-grandparents, and great-uncles for various things they did while we were together, and am happy to keep their memories alive now that they’re gone. They were each attempting to do the same thing for the previous generations that I didn’t get to meet personally, and hoped that perhaps I would help keep those memories alive, too.

Memory isn’t the same thing as fact. Even in our own lives, so we shouldn’t be surprised to discover that memories passed down have taken on a life of their own that strays away from the purely factual.

Did my great-great grandparents elope? Doesn’t look like it. Was Great-great grandma Native American? Can’t verify it. Was Great-uncle Lyle correct to condemn racism? Absolutely.

Maybe his facts weren’t right, but the point he always made was that despite appearances, we’re all descended from the same big, tangled family tree. That it doesn’t matter where some of the intervening ancestors came from, because ultimately we’re all human. And that’s truth, which sometimes is different than fact.

Not all reasons are reasonable

literature, , , , , ,

Several years ago I was browsing in a bookstore.

Now that I think of it, a lot more of my personal anecdotes probably ought to begin with that line than usually do. But I digress…

I picked up a paperback that had an interesting title. The back cover description gave the impression that the book was a parody of noir detective novels such as The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep, but with demons and faeries and werewolves and the like. I’ve been a fan of both science fiction/fantasy and detective stories for longer than I can remember, so this could be right up my alley.

Except, as I said, the description made it seem like a parody. Sometimes parodies are great. Sometimes they are just mediocre. And sometimes they are nothing more than mean-spirited dreck.

The back cover also had a photograph of the author. And the photograph was not encouraging. Everything about the stern-faced man’s pose, expression, and even hairstyle typified a kind of fan or writer I had met far too many times throughout my years in the fandom. They espoused a philosophy of social darwinism that holds most of the human race in contempt. Their idea of humor always involves belittling others while drawing attention to their own superior command of vocabulary, or (alleged) facts, or logic.

The only thing I enjoyed less than having conversations with them was reading anything they wrote. So I was quite certain this guy’s idea of a parody would be all about the mockery, with a healthy slathering of self-importance and self-congratulation at his clever turns of phrases.

The very brief author bio included beside the photo mentioned martial arts.

Every one of those aforementioned unpleasant fans who had been martial arts enthusiasts had been misogynist homophobes who were constantly explaining to people that they weren’t racist, but…

I put the book back on the shelf.

Several years later, through a series of coincidences including recommendations from friends who were the opposite of the kind of person I had inferred the author to be, I found myself downloading some sample chapters of the audiobook version of the first book in the series.

I enjoyed the sample. I found the main character very engaging and I wanted to know how the story ended.

So I bought the entire audiobook and listened to it. It was nothing like I expected the book to be, based on my reading of that back cover.

I was still buying books from the Science Fiction Book Club at the time, and they had some omnibus editions collecting the first seven books in the series into a few volumes, so I bought those. They arrived about a month or so before I was laid off at my previous place of employment.

One day, between contracting gigs, I started reading the first book—a few very short days later I had read all seven that I owned. I couldn’t put them down.

I needed to get more.

Since then, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing the author in person, even spoke to him very briefly in an autograph line. I spoke with his wife for a teensy bit longer. Between reading his books and short stories, reading some of his commentary, hearing him talk about his life and writing, and seeing him interact with his wife, it’s clear that my assessment was completely wrong. For one thing, those douchebags I had incorrectly lumped him with would never, even with a gun pointed at their head, willingly hold hands with their wife in public—let alone do a sneaky-pinky lock with a sidelong glance and a wink while being interviewed on stage

Which shouldn’t be surprising. I had based my assessment on a photograph and a single phrase in the author bio. The stories aren’t parodies, either. So that description from the back of the paperback was just misleading. As many are.

I could laugh the whole thing off as a very amusing case of forgetting the adage about judging books by their covers. But it isn’t that simple.

The assessment came out of personal experience. I can’t count the number of guys I’ve met—mostly in fannish circles, but not exclusively—who shared that particular combination of beliefs and attitudes. In person, the attitude usually manifests fairly quickly. And they usually just as quickly place me into one of the categories of people they hold in contempt. Of course, since they seem to hold most people in contempt, that isn’t surprising.

They aren’t just unpleasant to be around. Whether they are active in politics or not, they spend a lot of their time trying to convince people of the validity of those social darwinist ideas I mentioned above. That means they advocate policies that threaten me and people I love (not to mention society as a whole). So I have really good motivation to identify people with those attitudes, if for no other reason than to minimize the amount of time I have to spend with them.

We make decision like that every day, without even thinking. While walking down the street, or up a grocery aisle, standing in line at the bank, or selecting a seat on a bus, we assess people on a variety of superficial characteristics, then act accordingly. That gut reaction, that ability to put together a bunch of nonverbal cues to identify people we should be cautious around is a valuable survival trait.

But, having spent my entire life fighting for respect and acceptance in a world that rejects gay men (or any one who doesn’t confirm to certain gender expectations), I understand the dangers of misjudging people.

The reasons behind our gut reactions aren’t logical; they don’t conform to the rules of deductive reasoning. That doesn’t mean they are always wrong. Even if they did conform to the tenets of logic and rational analysis, they wouldn’t always be right, either.

The best we can do is keep as close an eye on ourselves as we do strangers we meet throughout our life. When we recognize a mistake, we can correct it, and learn to be a bit less hasty in the future. And when we’re right, we can feel a little less guilty about the times we weren’t.