Here’s the thing: I agree with him.

Yet whenever I say you should block at will, the same dreary argument raises its head: "Blocking everyone means you just build an echo chamber! Social media is supposed to be social - blocking is for cowards!”

Here’s the thing: I agree with them.

Because we’re not talking about the same social media.

The insidious thing about social media is that it all looks like the same experience when it’s not. If you’re reading an essay someone wrote in a national newspaper, you know that newspaper has thousands of readers - so you expect some cranks in the comments. But if you read your slam poetry at a coffee shop, you’re not expecting hundreds of protesters to barge through the door.

Most real-life communication comes with some understanding of the audience the average user can expect to reach.

Social media does not.

And the big problem with social media is that people log in and go “Well, this is what social media is like.” Except it isn’t; the audience you have affects the experience you have so intensely that past a certain number of people, you’re not even living in the same virtual neighborhood.

So. Let’s discuss what you can talk about and what sorts of “social” experience you can have at every level of social media.

(CAVEAT: This all assumes you’re posting regularly - maybe one or two posts a day, plus a handful of comments on other people’s stuff. If you post sporadically, you may drop down a level or two. Also, it’s possible to buy followers, but we’re not talking about buying yourself some bots.)

You Have An Audience of 5 People.

Welcome to the lonely, remote island of Outpost Five.

At this level, your social media is… well, probably not that social. If you’re lucky you have that one friend who comments on everything you do, but realistically most of your thoughts are little more than a private diary.

Social media at this level is disheartening - which is why every network worth its salt dedicates itself to getting you more friends right away. Give us your phone contacts! Let us harvest names from your other social networks! Here’s a list of people to follow, God, please, hit that subscribe button!

The good news is that social media at this stunted level is trivially easy to manage. Nobody’s saying anything offensive to you except maybe for spambots. Doesn’t matter how good or bad your posts are; nobody’s listening.

Those who claim that “Social media should be social” are correct here, because for most people this experience is a failure state.

You Have An Audience of 50 People.

Good news! You have moved into the tiny hamlet of Fiftyshire. You can post something good and get one or two comments. You feel seen, which is the nice bit about being on social media. And these fifty people are generally hand-chosen - your family, your friends, maybe a couple of celebrities you like - so the chances of running into someone really awful are low…

But not nil. We all have that one relative who’s addicted to the wrong news sources and likes getting into arguments online. But it’s just the one crank, right? You can tolerate your whackadoodle cousin causing a ruckus in your comments every six months or so because it’s honestly more trouble to unfriend him - and it feels uncharitable. He’s one of a handful of folks who are part of your circle, and shouldn’t you give him space?

I mean, you can create an echo chamber in Fiftyshire by blocking any dissenters. This shrinks your information circle. That’s bad.

Because realistically? At this level there’s one, maybe two, stupid opinions you have to see - and not regularly. That’s not bad! Sometimes you stumble across some legitimate gripe they have, and your worldview is expanded. That’s a net positive!

But when you say something stupid, people just scroll past for the same reason you scroll past your cousin’s anti-vaccine rants. This is a peaceful town, stranger; in Fiftyshire, we live and let live.

You Have An Audience of 500 People.

Dunbar’s Number states that you can only maintain a list of about 150 people who, and I quote, “you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”

At 500, you’re well above that.

You’re still friendly with people, but your social connections are a more stretched. You’ve likely got more celebrities on there, and more tenuous connections - acquaintances from that writers’ group you keep meaning to get back to, that one girl you drunkenly exchanged social media with at a bar but she posts good pictures of her trips to France.

Occasionally you find someone who you wonder why you’re still following them because oh my God, the stuff they post….

But Fivehundredville is still a peaceable town. Mostly.

But at 500, your looser vetting standards means that things slip through the cracks. You’re more likely to offend someone - and that offended person can leave a comment that attracts other angry, like-minded commenters you don’t know.

You’re still not obliged to have flame wars every day - but you sure can if you want in Fivehundredville! - but you’ve started to understand there’s some level of management involved.

That management can take many forms: you be more careful about what you post because Aunt Gladys is watching, or you block a few select people who really get out of line (poor Aunt Gladys), or you adopt a brusque “I am who I am and I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks.”

But even the “I don’t care” is a strategy you’re adopting, whether you realize it or not.

Still, though, 500 people is fun! You’re talking with people, you’re staying in touch with folks you normally wouldn’t have remembered, you’re waking to one or two comments on most posts and maybe twenty comments if you hit the jackpot - this is nice.

What’s that? You want more of a celebrity experience? Well, you can try to upgrade yourself to:

You Have An Audience of 5,000 People.

That’s crazy, isn’t it? It’s more people than your high school, all following you!

When you’re in Fiftyshire, Fivethousand City seems like an impossible dream.

But it’s not that hard to achieve, particularly over time… if you focus on getting there. Friend a lot of people, devote time to crafting a fun experience (f’r example by, say, writing a bullshit essay on the various levels of social media), spend your days chatting and posting and commenting, and five thousand is a very reasonable goal.

…or you can get there accidentally by just having an interesting life. Maybe you circulate a lot in real life! Maybe you’re pretty and you post sexy pictures! Maybe you’ve got a lot of know-how about Legos and are willing to share it! Plenty of folks put up stakes in Fivethousand City without even really intending to.

And it’s nice living there. People know your name. When you post, you get tens of comments on the regular. You’re not famous or anything and it’d be the purest act of ego to claim you were - but you’re a kind of somebody in this little internet backwater. You even have low-level fans, folks who are happy whenever you post because it brings them joy.

But like every big city, Fivethousand City has good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods. Do you live in Fivethousand City because you post plant pictures and never discuss current events? You’re in the chi-chi part of town. Are you a woman who posts about politics? Whoo, you are from the streets.

Still, living in the big city is pretty normal most of the time. But every once in a while something weird happens….

• You stumble across a discussion of people you don’t know discussing how you’re a friend collector. How you only post those pretty pictures for the attention. How you actually don’t know jack about Legos, you’re just a poser trying to distract from the real Lego heroes.

• Someone, possibly even someone you’re online buds with, mentions that they’re afraid of giving you feedback. Which is weird, you’re just some schmuck, but they perceive you as holding real power.

• During a polite debate, you leave a disagreeing comment on a friend’s post - and people following you take it way more seriously than you, flood into the discussion, and start a flame war with someone you like in your name.

• You make a post you didn’t think of as particularly controversial that goes viral, getting magnitudes more attention than you usually do - and it attracts the attention of some larger group that thinks your noncontroversial post is seriously controversial. You have to deal with a swarm of nasty comments for a few days until it passes.

• You make a toss-off post that probably could have been phrased better, one where your good friends would have shrugged and knew what you meant. But it ends up in a flame war because that post gets presented to people who don’t have any good will towards you, and seem weirdly obsessed with getting mad at you because you didn’t use the perfect words.

• You make a post that is phrased perfectly, yet have some stranger barging in to tell you how you hate waffles.

These aren’t regular occurrences, mind you, just weird glitches you see every couple of months. And remember, Fivethousand City has good and bad neighborhoods! Maybe you live in Fivethousand City for decades and never run across any of ‘em.

Yet these things do happen - that’s life in the big city! And it means that sometimes you do big city things - rereading to spot potential outrages before you hit post, DMing friends instead of calling them out publicly.

These are behaviors that people in gentle Fiftyshire don’t understand. They never have to worry about the city things - heck, they never even realize those things exist.

But you do.

You Have An Audience of 50,000 People.

Hey, remember those little things that happened occasionally in Fivethousand City?

In Fiftythousand Metropolis, they happen monthly. Maybe weekly if you’re living in a bad neighborhood.

And when those events happen so regularly, you start to see patterns.

You can’t possibly keep track of everyone following you, but you do get to know the archetypes. And like a bartender clocking the hidden belligerence of the guy who’s about to start a fistfight, you start to understand which people are here to drink and socialize, and which people are here to stir shit up. (Or, if you’re posting sexy pictures, which people are only being nice so they can take you home.)

The truth is, there’s only so many things that can be said about anything you post, and after a while you can largely predict what will be said - in part because you’ve dealt with enough waffle-guys and bad-faith interpretations of your work that you’ve learned how to put on a public appearance. That doesn’t mean you don’t like people, because a lot of those archetypes are fun to hang with!

But the ones who aren’t fun, well… After a while, they’re mostly predictable. You probably began with good-faith rebuttals, having long, spiraling conversations with them that went nowhere - but after years of living in the grime of Fiftythousand Metropolis, you realize that engaging with a certain sort of commenter has a 98% chance of leading nowhere.

Why bother? When I say “Block at will,” it’s because your Spider-Sense has been primed.

And the folks who say “If you block people you’ll create a echo chamber!” simply do not recognize how things work in Fiftythousand Metropolis. I’ve blocked literally hundreds of incels in my time, yet if I write an essay decrying them that gets popular in any way, I will have some more incels.

I literally can’t not hear the moaning of the incels.

You can erect a workable echo chamber in Fiftyshire, which I agree would be bad… but in Fiftythousand Metropolis, dissenting voices are a fungible commodity that will arrive regardless of the barriers you create. (Note, however, that “having all those voices yelling at you” is extremely different than “I listen to them,” as witness one Ms. J.R.R. Rowling.)

Weirder still: Super Eyepatch Wolf (a great YouTuber who lives in the big city of a million-plus subscriber) has a theory:

For every hundred people who follow you, you acquire one dedicated person who hates you.

Not a problem in Fiftyshire; you may not even have that guy. And not a problem in Fivehundredville; five people who hate you, that’s easy to shrug off. Even in Fivethousand City, sure, fifty haters can get nasty at times, but it’s manageable.

At 50,000, now you’ve got enough haters to fill a Discord to brimming. They cease being isolated individuals and form groups - groups that are bonded by their loathing of you.

And sometimes they actively work to drag you down.

Now, I think the hater-number is probably closer to 1 in 500 people, maybe 1 in a 1000, which gets a little more manageable. And again, it depends on your neighborhood; a famous queer political poster is gonna get more haters than a famous glassblower.

Regardless: in Fiftythousand Metropolis, if you’re unlucky, you may genuinely have a large group of people who are a) out to get you and b) organized.

And the people in Fiftyshire are not going to understand that, because that’s not their experience.

But for you, the experience you used to have in Fiftyshire completely breaks down. You need to block people, because some of those haters will dedicate a day to ruining your life. You posting daily can lead to shitstorms if you don’t modulate what and how you post.

But don’t complain! Nobody sympathizes, because to get to 50,000 you had to work for it. So any problems you have living here are entirely your fault. Discussing how to manage the group of people who may or may not be trying to drive you to suicide is being ungrateful.

But hey. At least you’re not in:

You Have An Audience of 500,000 People.

“Social media is supposed to be social,” sneers the person from Fivehundred City.

But what they never seem to notice is that past a certain point, the social nature stops. Folks at the 500k level can’t interact with everyone, even if they wanted to.

So do the folks at the 500k level block anyone? No. They barely acknowledge them. This isn’t social media as anyone in Fiftyshire or even in Fiftythousand Metropolis understands it; you’ve catapulted out of human capacity.

Most of those accounts tend to be glorified marketing feeds, because they can’t be anything else. And the comment sections tend to be seething cesspools of mania because unless they feel like hiring a couple of full-time mods to instill sanity, it’s easier to just let whatever weirdnesses fester.

Now, if you want to make posting here a full-time job, you can - certain Twitter-owners do it, as does the President, which is my personal proof that both of them have too much free time on their hands. But it’s still gonna be a lot of ignoring folks - and mostly interacting with a tight group of known folks.

God knows what the haters can do now. They may actually drive you to self-harm if you can’t shut them out properly. It’s definitely happened before and will happen again.

Dunbar’s Number, if you’ll recall, says you can comfortably have about 150 friends. 500k is so far beyond our monkey brain capacity it is in outer space.

What’s it like here? Beyond the external signals I can see, I have no idea. I’ve never lived here. But I’ve talked to folks who do - and when they tried to explain what their social media experience was like to me, it was like me explaining to a happy Fiftyshire resident what Fiftythousand Metropolis is like.

So What Do We Do?

We hope someone builds a better social media, is what we do. I’m sure someone will figure this out some day, and when they do it’ll be bigger than Facebook.

But in the meantime…

Whenever a metadiscussion arises on “How to handle your social media,” understand that the experiences differ.

For example: There’s a constant debate on FetLife (basically a kinky Facebook) about needing better tools for blocking harassers, particularly for attractive women with large audiences. And clueless folks from Fiftyshire keep saying, “Just block them one by one, it’s not difficult!”

It may not be difficult, but it is tedious. And someone in a bad neighborhood in Fivethousand City might have to block four or five people a week - after they see the disgusting messages that these idiots sent.

Does this sound like fun? Because the point of social media should be having fun. If you’re forcing people to interact with slimeballs on the regular, well, many of them simply will not. And that’s a loss.

Like I said. I don’t really have solutions. I personally think the sweet spot for social media is somewhere between Fivehundredville and Fivethousand City; it’s why I’ve purposely not tried to promote my BlueSky account. And on the social networks where I have more followers than that, well, I often envy the folks who have fewer. Because their experience is, in a lot of ways, a lot more quality than anything I experience on the larger networks.

Fivehundredville is a pretty good place to live. I grew up there. I miss it.

If you’re there, treasure the experience. Just… be a little less provincial.

In other news, my book The Cathedral of Portals is out and free to read, a chapter at a time. It’s approaching the end of Act One, where the three storylines finally converge - so if you haven’t checked it out and you’re new here, give it a shot!

There’s three ways to read it:

• FOR FREE, a chapter at a time: At Royal Road, we’re on Chapter 20 - where a ragged family of portal-makers are trying desperately to survive in frigid mountaintops, leading one of the most eventful moments in the entire book.

• PAID, a chapter at a time: A paid level at my Patreon. We’re on Chapter 22 - where Philothea, who’s just been given control of their own town, deals with a threat that may destroy everyone in Treva.

• PAID, all at once: Pre-order the book at Amazon for its final publication on October 30th.

But first, let’s discuss my serialized novel for juuuust one second.

We have now caught up with The Cathedral of Portals to the point where it’s at when I first realized I was Onto Something - that delightful watershed moment where I’d realized that the genderless priest I’d created was clever enough that they’d taken on a life on their own, that I’d set things up so that the dysfunctional family was being held together thanks to being forced into tragedy but knowing that couldn’t last - and, most importantly, the world and the religion of that world felt real to me.

So what I’m saying is, there’s a good 30,000 words there - a third of a normal novel. If you haven’t given it a shot yet, well, there’s enough there to occupy a couple of afternoons. (And there’s about 250,000 words to come.)

And if you like what you read, well, this is the last week to sign up for my Patron at the paid level and get a copy of the full novel if you hang in there until it’s done in October. So it’s a make-or-break week; help if you can.

Anyway, let’s talk about how YouTube molded my mind even as I understood exactly what it was trying to do.

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It all started innocently enough: a list of 25 microbrand watches. I had no idea what “microbrand” meant, of course, but it auto-played while I was working and I looked up mid-video.

The first thing I discovered was that a watch could cost $25,000.

And it was an ugly watch.

Now, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but even the most agreeable beholder (CR 14, Wis bonus +7) would would have to admit that buying this gilded piece of junk was like pissing your salary down a gold-plated toilet….

But that was the satisfying part, wasn’t it? Look at this doofus doohickey that rich people were paying actual money for! What bad taste these millionaires had!

And of course, the pretty watches, well, I couldn’t see paying car-sized money for them, but they at least made for a pretty show of clean-cut, pleasantly-ticking machinery.

Which is when YouTube slipped the first electrode in betwixt my neurons.

Because the next thing it suggested, once it had determined that I would watch a video on watches twice (because of course I had to show these ugly watches to my wife), was a walkthrough of a microbrand watch factory - showing me exactly why these watches were worth $25,000.

Which made sense! Gini’s a quilter, and when she’s asked “How much would I have to pay for one of your quilts?” the answer is “You couldn’t afford it.” (Which is when she offers to make one for you, if you’re a friend.)

I’ve seen Gini toiling for weeks over a specific quilt; I’ve witnessed the skill that goes into choosing the right fabrics and cutting precisely and quilting the top and of course the expense of all the tools she needs to make that quilt happen. If she was paid, fairly, on a per-hour basis worthy of the years it had taken to master her craft plus expenses, each quilt would be thousands.

Would I pay thousands for a quilt? Of course not. But the justification for the expense was clear.

And after looking at a couple more watchmaker videos, I was like, “Yeah, all right, after designing it and then hand-tooling each miniscule part and the beautiful finishing and the craftsmanship to fit everything together, yep, it can take half a year for a watchmaker to assemble this. These watches are, objectively, worth $25,000.

“…I wouldn’t pay that amount for, you know, a watch, and particularly an ugly one - but it’s a equitable amount for someone to ask for.”

Ah, but that was the first mistake. Once $25,000 becomes reasonable on some level, well, your ceiling done been raised.

And it was also a hoot to see what people cared about when it came to watches. There were all these stern videos on The Watch Mistakes You Must Never Make, mostly by either skinny, goggle-eyed try-hards in expensive suits and shiny leather shoes, or craggy, beardgroomed dudebros in leather jackets wagging fingers at the camera.

And they’d tell you, in all seriousness, things like “This clunky fool wearing a 40mm watch on this too-slender wrist might as well be walking around wearing a sodden diaper! Everyone in the room is laughing at him for not realizing a 38mm watch is more his speed!”

There was this whole bizarre culture around watches, and YouTube was my window.

It was all ridiculous, of course, because you know what we all have to tell time these days? Phones. And they’re way more precise than any manual watch can be. Or it’s a smartwatch, which again, is not only more accurate than any mechanical watch but also receives texts and monitors your heartbeat.

Yet the thing is, as much as I laughed at the obsession, viewing all this watch content was normalizing it. Like, yes, I could LOLercopter all I wanted - but spending twenty minutes a day on watches quietly shifted the Overton window away from “these whackadoodles are obsessed with watches” to “these whackadoodles are too obsessed with watches.”

As in, “Watches are important, but these schmucks take it too far.”

And soon enough, I was looking at people’s wrists to see what they were wearing. (Answer: Either “nothing” or “a smartwatch,” but once a month or so I’d snag a glimpse of something truly impressive, like catching a $25k Pokemon.) Unbidden, I had opinions on which watch manufacturers were the “good” ones and which once were flailing. I slowed down when I walked by jewelry stores…

And that’s how the bad ideas take root. I remember having some legitimate qualms with The Last Jedi - a film that took bold swings, not all of which paid off, but I liked its ambition even as I didn’t appreciate what it did to my boy Luke.

I also remember YouTube going, “So - you hate Last Jedi, riiiiight?”

I didn’t watch the videos because they were, mercifully, by folks I had correctly marked as right-wing choads - but if I had, I could easily see my Overton window shifting from:

“Wow, these folks feel way too betrayed at how Rian Johnson portrayed Luke Skywalker”

To:

“These folks have a point about the way Rian Johnson betrayed them.”

The main lesson to learn about Holocaust Denial is that giving anything attention in any way gives it credence. You can say all you want that you’re gonna destroy these factless bozos in a debate - but having them seated at the debate table makes it seem like there’s an argument to be had.

And YouTube is extremely good at giving someone a seat at your table. All you have to do is view the right videos. The context these videos provide will be normalized - you’ll go from “These fans feel too betrayed” to “But they do have a point in being betrayed” to “I guess Kathleen Kennedy did ruin parts of my childhood”…

Yet never will the fundamental question of “Is making an artistic choice you don’t like really a betrayal?” arise.

Yet that’s what videos do: They seethe and bubble with unquestioned assumptions. Movies owe you - you personally - satisfaction upon watching them is a message buried in 90% of any video expressing fandom anger. If you’re not careful, you’ll slurp down that framing and ignore salient facts like Sometimes movies aren’t made for you and People can intend to please you and fail and the ultimate truth, criticism that starts and ends with “I didn’t like it, so it has no artistic merit” isn’t actually criticism, it’s just a gut reaction without any intellectual content.

Likewise, you can start watching a couple of videos on Hey, dudes, here’s some advice to help you get your life together! and quickly slide down the ego-shredding log-flume of If you had only followed this advice exactly you would have 100% had success, and anyone who doesn’t have 100% success is too stupid to follow the instructions.

YouTube will quietly reframe your reality, bit by bit, because the people who make the videos build that reality. They focus on the bits they think are important, like watches. They leave out the bits that don’t occur to them are worth discussing, like whether an entire (beautiful!) industry designed around catering to financial excess is maybe not the healthiest consumer habit to encourage.

And in most cases, it doesn’t matter if you participate ironically. The Internet is rife with old, dyed-in-the-wool racists who once rolled their eyes as they made patently ridiculous black jokes and fat chick jokes, but never realized that the joke itself carries a payload. Every joke about how lazy minorities are or how stupid women are embeds an assumption that seeps.

Hell, the point is this: I was viewing these watch videos ironically. And now?

I own a watch.

This is not a $25k watch. It’s a gift from my Mom, a $975 Christmas/birthday present to remember her by because all the other kids and grandkids are getting her old jewelry when she passes, and I wanted something from her that I could have while she was still alive. And in terms of bringing happiness, it works. The Chemin des Tourelles’ smoked-crystal skeletal mechanism, which shows the little cogs ticking along right in plain view, brings me a deep satisfaction.

But even now, occasionally, I think, “Wow, I really did want that Cocktail Time Seiko Negroni watch, it would be easier to read in dim light” or “Ooof, that new Tissot line is clean.”

That urge did not exist as of the beginning of 2025. And I have that rogue addiction under control, mostly, because I’m not spending another $400 when I have a beautiful watch already.

But the desire has been implanted. Even though it started as mockery.

Even though I thought I was smarter.

You probably aren’t either.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” - Kurt Vonnegut

…so they say. Reddit and Twitter are filled with massive dweebs who have come to use Dark Souls (and all the other Souls-like games) as proof of their competence. They were able to beat Dark Souls - and you were not, which is proof they are better than you.

Yet I have come to adore Souls-like games, where the inescapable difficulty is stuck on “punishing”… Although I also very much suck at videogames.

So what gives? Did I actually Git Gud, like the internet trolls tell you to do?

But let’s get into a little more detail. A more accurate term to describe Dark Souls (and its monster hit cousin Elden Ring, and Lies of P, etc etc etc) is unforgiving. Even the weensiest minions can kill you in a handful of hits. The bosses can (and do) often one-shot you. The maps are mazelike and full of traps. And there’s no super-armor to protect you; you’re always vulnerable.

There’s no exiting out of your fighting animations, which means pushing the “attack” button is a commitment - most games let you abort out of a mistimed attack to dodge away, but not Soulslikes. You press that button when someone’s about to hit you, and you will spend the next 1.2 seconds locked into your fighting animation on a helplessly big swing that an enemy can (and will!) eviscerate you during.

But the trick is, Dark Souls plays fair - because the enemies are also locked into their combat animations. (Well, mostly.)

So the main skill in Dark Souls is learning. You figure out your enemies’ movesets (the strategy guides are filled with things like “When he raises his axe above his head, dodge to the left and light attack”). You figure out when you can take a breather, when you can go in for the big assault, when to run away from the fireball your enemy’s about to barf out.

That learning takes time… because on the hardest levels, one or two mistakes is all it takes to end you.

And the dysfunctional gamers will tell you this punishing difficulty is proof that beating Elden Ring means you’re an elite gamer.

But if that was the case, why is the Platinum rate for Elden Ring (meaning someone not only beat Elden Ring, but also every optional super-difficult superboss in the game) hovering around 10.8%? As in, one in ten people has not only beaten, but trounced the game - which is exceptional when the average rate for platinuming a game is usually between 1 and 4 percent? Why is Bloodborne, which is arguably just as difficult as Elden Ring, also at a 7% Platinum rate?

Saying “Hey, I’m in the top 10% of gamers!” doesn’t sound so elite now, does it? (Especially when that percentage counts all the people who opened up the game and decided to bail on it without even seriously trying to beat it - I’d bet of the people who played it, that percentage is probably closer to 20%.)

Here’s the dirty little secret of Soulslike games: They do not reward perfect reflexes.

They reward persistence.

Dark Souls makes a covert contract with you: If you’re willing to make a hundred attempts to beat this stupid boss, I’ll help you win.

Which sounds absurd. But there’s tons of ways to make the bosses easier. If you’re willing to grind killing little weeny enemies over and over again, you can buff up your stats to the point where you can make five, maybe ten mistakes in the course of that fight instead of dying to your first mistake. You can summon in another player to help you, which makes things a lot easier when the boss isn’t exclusively focused on mauling you. And you can figure out the boss’s weaknesses, change your build to a fire-based kit-out that melts his health.

And above all, if that boss has one move that you cannot beat, the stupidest move that you just can’t nail the timing for dodging or parrying or blocking…

If you play enough times, the randomizer will eventually hand you a fight where the boss doesn’t use that move in that fight (or at least not as often). And then you luck into a win.

Now, a caveat: because Soulslikes are perfectly fair, it is extremely difficult to play them if you opt to give up all these advantages. Plenty of nutters start at first level and never increase their stats, never get the good armor or weaponry, playing the game where they have to hit the boss seventy times to kill him but the boss only has to hit them once.

Those victories are impressive! No question.

But playing on the hardest difficulty is optional. And if the designers didn’t want you to use these awesome weapons/increased levels/summons, they wouldn’t have put them in the game.

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Look. There are games like Returnal, a very well-reviewed game that I have described as “Like Dark Souls but if it hated you.” The fundamental difference between Returnal and Dark Souls is this:

When you die, you go back to the very beginning of the game and start with nothing.

So if you’ve finally figured out how to win that first boss fight, great! It means you go into the second boss fight without any knowledge, with the same expectation that you’ll have to spend at least five or ten tries to beat this new boss…

And to get a shot at that new boss, you have to fight your way all the way past the first level, past the first boss, past the second level, and then step into the second boss arena and get obliterated.

Remember how I said about one in ten players in Elden Ring beat everything in it? Wanna guess what the percentage of people who beat the second boss in Returnal?

20%. As in, only one in five people who played the game bothered to beat the second boss, out of five bosses total. (About 4.4% beat the game total. 1.4% platinumed it.)

That’s what happens when a game really does not give two wet farts if you beat it or not. (And unsurprisingly, Returnal’s spiritual sequel Saros, which was just as difficult, was a commercial disappointment; Elden Ring outsold it by literally 100 to 1.)

Toxic gamers love to tell you that Dark Souls requires true skill, but honestly, it just requires a certain mindset.

And the weird thing, it’s a healthy mindset!

I found a lot of parallels between Bloodborne and writing professionally. You had to learn not to take the defeat personally, whether that defeat came in the form of a “YOU DIED” screen or an email saying “Regretfully…” You have to learn to take each failure as an opportunity to learn - “What could I have done better?” - instead of internalizing it as proof that God, I can’t do this.

In a very real sense, learning to not be fussed by defeat is the main skill you develop in a Soulslike. It tests your tenacity instead of your reflexes…

…which makes it absolutely fine if you don’t enjoy such games. There’s a weird mentality in the Internet waters that suggests you are somehow weak if you don’t force yourself to do things that you are supposedly doing for fun. Hey, they say, if you’re posting on the Internet and don’t want to deal with ten thousand trolls insulting you and doxxing you and posting AI images of you, well, I guess you just couldn’t handle it.

Sorry, am I getting paid to post on Reddit? Are you getting paid to be the very best, like no one ever was, at some rando videogame? Get outta here.

You should be able to exit a hobby when it no longer provides enjoyment.

At the same time - and here’s where I attract some detractors - I also am wary of lowering difficulty for games like this, even though I’m thoroughly in favor of accessibility.

See, each game is designed to provide its own experience. There’s been some gamer kerfluffle around Mixtape, a videogame that’s designed to let you feel what pretentious teenagers get up to at the end of a summer.

People have gotten upset because Mixtape presents zero challenge. There are game sections, but there’s no way to fail them - take your hands off the controls and you’ll be given access to the next section all the same.

And that’s great! Not all videogames are about challenge. Some are about evoking a feeling and a narrative, and if you have a game where kids are chilling and listening to their favorite songs and dreaming of the future, having a do-or-die section where they have to defend their hometowns from a drone invasion or it’s game over would just be stupid.

I repeat: Videogames are about the experience. Sometimes that experience is the story. Sometimes it’s about the vibe. Sometimes it’s about adrenaline. Sometimes it’s about caring.

And yes, sometimes it is about challenge.

Let’s be honest: Early on in Bloodborne, I found an enemy I could not beat - the Blood-Starved Beast. I literally rammed up against him fifty times and didn’t even get close to winning.

And there’s two uncomfortable truths laying side by side here:

1. If there had been any option to turn down the difficulty, at that point in the game, I would have taken it.

2. If I had turned down the difficulty, I would not have had the same experience.

I know exactly what I would have felt if I’d been able to dial down Bloodborne’s combat, because I have done it many times before - I’d feel relief that I got past that sonuvabitch, complain a bit at how ridiculous that thing was, and then I’d forget about that boss entirely until someone else complained about him.

Which is an experience, to be sure.

But the experience of beating the Blood-Starved Beast without turning down the difficulty? I was exultant in a way that no other game had gotten me to feel before. It was a personal triumph that had me dancing about the house - knowing that I had gotten myself in way over my head but that I didn’t give into despair, that the victory I had just attained was because I had risen to an unthinkable challenge.

This lighting-in-a-bottle feeling is the same feeling that got millions of folks playing Elden Ring. The triumph is as exhiliarating as the defeats are disheartening.

That said: I have, absolutely, played games that I enjoyed with scenario #1. There is nothing wrong with cranking the difficulty down because you feel this level some boool-sheeeet.

But there is also an experience in scenario #2 that only arrives when victory is the only way out.

The issue with that, of course, is that some people don’t feel that scenario #2 experience. If they eventually beat the boss, they don’t feel triumph, they just feel annoyed because it was “harder than it should have been.” And that line on “harder than it should have been” is fuzzy, defined individually, and no one person’s perspective is innately wrong on that.

But at the same time, I feel that making games easier sometimes ruins an experience, the same way that throwing in a drone-popping invasion into Mixtape would also change the experience.

(And in the exact same way that people who demand challenge find the game “easier than it should have been,” which much the same reaction that the game should be tailored to providing the experience that they prefer.)

And the uncomfortable conclusion I have ultimately come to is that some games only really provide the experience they set out to is if they’re calibrated to a certain difficulty. For Mixtape (or any number of other narrative adventures), that experience arrives on “Not much difficulty.”

For Soulslikes? The answer is “A lot of difficulty.” Because the experience is in tenacity, and it’s hard to generate tenaciousness when you can pop into a menu and kill the boss on your next attempt for sure.

The conclusion here, incidentally, is not that “Soulslike games should never lower the difficulty.” Lies of P, one of my favorite games (also fully platinumed by Yours Truly), added lower difficulty settings, and more power to that developer!

But if someone does not lower their difficulty, I also do not see that as elitist - I see that as a conscious choice made to deliver an experience, the same way that using large words in a book may ice out certain readers, but that’s not a reason for every author to use simple words.

It’s a big world. People should have choices as to what sort of art they deliver.

That’s all.

In other news, my book The Cathedral of Portals is out, and the folks who have given it a shot at reading it in serialized format largely seem to be loving it. (If you’ll recall, that’s how I intended for it to be written.)

So if you haven’t, give it a shot! And remember, if you sign up for my Patreon before July 31st at the paid level and stay through the end, you’ll get a complimentary copy of the book in the format of your choice (assuming I can output it in that format).

• FOR FREE, a chapter at a time: At Royal Road, we’re on Chapter 8 - where Tesa is now in a desperate journey across the Kintari mountains with her family to try to find a job now that she’s been blackmarked by the Guild. (With a special guest star from the prologue.)

• PAID, a chapter at a time: A paid level at my Patreon. We’re on Chapter 10 - back on Tesa, who is now in the city of Cairn Traban, discovering why things are still going to be difficul there.

• PAID, all at once: Pre-order the book at Amazon for its final publication on October 30th.

• PRICELESS YET FREE: Sharing a link promoting the book! Or leaving a review/commenting/following on Royal Road!

Hello! I am Priesty Priesterson, devout worshipper of Temu Christ. I behave exactly like the author thinks a Christian does, which is to say nine times out of ten I turn out to be a venal asshole who opposes the protagonists. My religious order is pretty much the Catholic Church with, like, a noose instead of a cross because our Christ was hanged, isn’t that deep?

But my serialized novel The Cathedral of Portals just got to the chapter where I introduce Exemplar Philothea, devout worshipper of the Peddler - where the Peddler is very much a Christ analog. And I’m gonna be honest:

I think the religion’s the best thing about the book.

Because what I wanted in the Cathedral of Portals (now coming M/W/F to a browser near you!) was a reflection of the complexity of real-world religion as I saw it - with a lot of interpretations of the exact same scripture, with folks using their beliefs to justify both cruelty and kindness, and with a muddled version of events that’s very much been tainted by outside forces and yet people take it dead seriously.

I’ll be honest: When I pitched the idea of the Church of the Bodiless Ascension to her, Gini didn’t think I could pull it off. She thought the idea of a religion based around a genderless Christ figure was too abstract, too scholarly, and that I couldn’t make it interesting.

Thankfully, at least in Gini’s eyes, I made it extremely compelling.

So lemme tell you how I built a religion, using Christ as a template but using that as a way to open up the world to become something entirely different.

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Step 1: Make the Religion Explicitly Capitalist (And Yet Also Socialist)

In the world of The Cathedral of Portals, The Peddler was an extremely successful merchant who forged a worldwide network of five trade routes. But instead of being a venal asshole, the Peddler instead channeled that immense wealth into bettering the world. “Improve the world fivefold,” said the Peddler, “And Heaven will be yours.”

So what we have here is not a poor carpenter, but basically an Elon Musk who took a world-changing amount of money and used it specifically to give poor people a leg up.

Which has a couple of interesting knock-on effects:

First, the Church of the Bodiless Ascension very much believes that trade is their sacred mission - like the Peddler, they believe that trading between neighbors improves communal ties, so they’re all about buying and selling for profit.

But they also believe that trade should be heavily regulated - to give the same price to everyone is as close to a sin as they get, because to them, the whole point of a marketplace is that you leverage the flow of commerce to give price breaks to the poor and to give jobs to folks that will help them not be poor. Why else would you take on this sacred duty?

The Peddler said it themselves: “When the Church does not rule the coin, coin will rule the Church.”

But of course, this isn’t a perfect world, and some folks are gonna be greedy - and a Church based on a merchant’s opinions, even a good-natured merchant, will have some built-in biases. So while some marketplaces are managed according to the Peddler’s will, others are quite happy to gouge people with slave-labor contracts. And while the idea of an unregulated black market is of course a sin, they often become a necessary reality when incompetent merchants seize control of the local trade routes and yet have no idea how to manage inventory.

Still, what’s important is that the public believes the Church should be working for the common good, so you have a populace that believes wholeheartedly in socialist beliefs. Which means even the greediest of church elders are forced to do acts of good socialism to keep up appearances.

Second, because the Peddler had Five Sacred Trade Routes (and also because you have a Church that believes that labor is not a joyless task but instead is something that should be done for personal improvement), folks travel. A lot. They’re given time off to do so, and often join pilgrimages that take them along one of the Sacred Trade Routes. And that in turn means that you have a populace that is heavily encouraged to rub elbows with their neighbors, meaning that religion has eroded (but not erased!) the concept of countries and states.

And that idea that folks should be neighborly is further reinforced by:

Step 2: Make a Genderless, Raceless Christ Figure

Early on, I decided I wanted a religion that had “discrimination is a sin” baked right into its very foundation. That alone would change the world; it wouldn’t stop people from discriminating against gender or race, of course - it’s human nature - but it’d make them work a lot harder to justify their biases.

So what I decided was that my Christ analog would be genderless.

Or, rather, they became genderless.

The Peddler was put to death by the Tyrant King (may his name be forever stricken from the records) for the sin of refusing to fund the King’s unjust war. (For all the Peddler’s coin, in a tie, the guys who control the swords are gonna win.) The Peddler could of course have funded a revolution to free them… but they were firm in stating that starting a war would not improve the world fivefold.

So like Christ, they let themselves be led to death.

But when the Peddler died, something much crazier happened than returning from the dead. Lemme quote from today’s chapter:

And at the moment the Peddler was torn from limb to limb, God gave them Their Bodiless Ascension—raising Them to Heaven as proof of how beautifully They had learned God’s lessons.

And during that glorious Ascension, God erased all memory of the Peddler’s gender, appearance, or race. None of Their Steadfast Students could remember who the Peddler had been, only what They had done.

On that day, God transformed the Peddler from a human into an ideal—the first True Student.

And that has two knock-on effects:

First, when someone becomes an Exemplar of the Peddler, they give up their gender. Which means that not only are nonbinary folks tolerated, they’re often venerated.

Second, between that and the fact that the Peddler’s Advisories heavily revolved around “Respect the competent, no matter where you find them,” you have a whole culture that’s taught not to discriminate against any physical features.

They do; of course they do. Again, that’s human nature. But given the whole point of the Peddler is that they became anonymous so they could be judged by their deeds alone, again, it makes it a lot harder to be sexist or racist… And so the society is less sexist and racist.

(In fact, the book is light on character descriptions simply because the folks in the book don’t often draw such distinctions.)

Basically, anyone can do any job, and often does.

Step 3: Make the History Realistic.

Every chapter in The Cathedral of Portals starts with a quote from Scyr Lil, Historian - someone writing from a distant future who’s trying to reconstruct the past. And that was nice because it gave me opportunities to shim in bits of worldbuilding I couldn’t quite get into the book…

But unlike the main characters, Scry Lil is approaching this world from a scholarly perspective - which means they’re very aware that the Peddler’s Advisories aren’t unadulterated. They’ve been translated and rewritten and edited, with layers of interpretations and folklore accreted around it - and who the Peddler was or what they actually said is still very much in question.

Did the Peddler actually exist? Was all memory of their features erased? What did the Peddler actually believe or do?

But hey - Scyr Lil’s first quote, which kicks off the book, tells you all you need to know:

Millennia have passed since the Sundered Age, and we still have no satisfying answers to the era’s two central questions:

Who was the Peddler?

And what caused the Sundering?

The characters in the book are operating off fundamental assumptions that are technically wrong. But that doesn’t matter. Much like the Bible has been endlessly mistranslated and edited, The Peddler’s Advisories have often been rewritten with a vengeance…

Which means that, much like the New Testament, the Peddler’s Advisories have a couple of core tenets that get repeated so firmly that it’s probably what the Peddler said… but a lot of other opinions have been shoehorned into the Advisories and now, to all appearances, those rogue philosophies are what the Peddler said.

Which means that in the world of The Cathedral of Portals, people have intensely different takes on the Peddler, depending on which bits of the Advisories they’ve found compelling. And those discussions propel the narrative quite heavily.

(This, incidentally, is why I find it short-sighed whenever someone complains that the Bible is self-contradictory - the reason the Bible lasted so long is because it’s self-contradictory! The more people can extract their personal meanings from a religious text, the more likely it is that text will catch on and spread. If the Bible had singular, clearly-stated instructions - as in “Thou shalt not kill, and that includes during war and in self-defense and also suicide, and there’s no exceptions ever,” then practically nobody would follow it. All you have to do is look at how many people follow the reasonably precise instructions in Leviticus to realize that specificity is the death of broad popularity when it comes to most religions.)

Anyway. I could go on - but if you want to see the underlying worldbuilding, pay attention to Scyr Lil. They’ve got some pointed understandings of the world the protagonist lives in… and yet, like many historians, they don’t really understand what’s happening in the protagonists’ time at all.

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Anyway. I could go on, but if that’s not enough to intrigue you, I don’t know what will. But a large portion of the book is driven by the tension between the Church’s tenets and their actual applications, and I felt in the end it came off as pretty realistic.

As a reminder, there’s three ways to read it:

• FOR FREE, a chapter at a time: At Royal Road, we’re on Chapter 2 - the introduction of Philothea.

• PAID, a chapter at a time: A paid level at my Patreon. We’re on Chapter 4 - the second chapter in Philothea’s story.

• PAID, all at once: Pre-order the book at Amazon for its final publication on October 30th.

• PRICELESS YET FREE: Sharing a link promoting the book! Or leaving a review/commenting/following on Royal Road!

I hope your Christ analog will be as fun to create as mine was,

T.F.

(If you don’t plan on reading it chapter-by-chapter as it’s published M/W/F, you can just buy it in advance from Amazon for when it releases on October 30th. Thanks if you have!)

But! I told you how I wrote The Cathedral of Portals for my wife - and Gini herself wanted to tell you why you should read it the long way, starting today, at Royal Road.

Like many authors, Ferrett used to worry that I, his loving wife, was simply indulging him when it came to reviewing his work.

…until the day he handed me the second chapter of a book (not this one!)—and before I completed a full page of his latest draft, I flung his laptop back at him. “No! What are you doing?” I cried. “You lost everything unique about the voice you had in that first chapter! How could you screw it up this badly?!?”

Homie don’t play that.

So when I tell you that the end of this book caused me to pull over to the side of the road and sob for fifteen minutes before we could go on, I’m not kidding. It was so beautiful that I couldn’t function until I had time to absorb it all.

There were also times during its writing that I was so furious with Ferrett that I couldn’t speak to him for at least an hour—what do you mean that’s all you’ve written? How can you leave me like this?!

Originally, Ferrett wrote this book as a gift to me. We had talked about the concept, and I was enraptured and excited. (And very dubious I could pull off the genderless, mercantile religious order I was describing - T.F.) I had so many visions of where it could go and what could happen.

I got almost none of those visions fulfilled (though I’m seeing some of them in the sequel, which he is slowly writing now…).

The book unspooled over the course of two years, with me experiencing the good fortune of having it read aloud to me, a chapter at a time. Over long car trips and curled up in bed, I lived in the Chill and got glimpses of the Incandescent. I fretted for families and clenched my fists in fury over political maneuvering. I cried—but I also laughed.

And shouted with triumph.

And, yes, I tried to pry spoilers out of the author.

I had to wait through the times when Ferrett was too busy to write, or life was too crazy for read-aloud time. But the reward was always worth it.

And now you have a chance to enjoy a taste of my experience. Chapters dropping every few days is not quite the same as waiting for a week or more, and you don’t get the delight of having him read it aloud.

But you can have that community sharing and speculating about what’s coming next. A shared reading experience is the best.

So go read The Cathedral of Portals, and join me.

Also, I told you that if you joined my Patreon at any paid level, I’d donate half the money to the Transgender Law Center to help fight the good fight for trans folk everywhere. Much to my delight, the first month looked like this:

So I did this:

And because someone else didn’t want to use Patreon thanks to fluctuating international rates but did pay in advance for an annual subscription, I donated that whole shebang to the TGLC:

Just keeping it honest.

(Also, obviously if you sign up for the Patreon at the paid level you can read the next two chapters right now, etc etc etc)

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One other thing: My birthday is July 3rd. I was an only child - and the only grandchild for the first eight years of my life. So every birthday, I got swept up by a large crowd of loving relatives, brought to my grandparents’ house by Long Island Sound, and we sat on the porch to watch the fireworks glitter over the ocean while they fed me cake.

I thought the fireworks were for me.

Obviously, I caught on at some point - but before that, I was generous. I liked that everyone got to share in my fireworks. And even after I caught on, I still secretly thought of them as my fireworks, made for me but meant for everybody.

A lot of you may be having mixed feelings about our country on its 250th. Some of you may not wanna celebrate, well, for the very reasons I’m donating so much to the trans legal funds.

But I’d hate for you to miss out on the fireworks, if you like them.

So if you want, this weekend doesn’t have to be about, well, that. If it helps, think of it as another birthday celebration, a big gift from a never-grown child who only wants to cheer you up on his birthday.

Anyway. I hope if you do click through to read The Cathedral of Portals that you enjoy it. (And that you do click through!)

Sincerely,

T.F.

But he does have the girl he loves - Nikki. And Nikki seems to genuinely like Bear - whether she’s in love with him is another matter, but she’s clearly fond of him. They get along in a quite genuine way… but he can’t spit out how badly he wants to date her.

But he can make a wish on his One Wish Willow.

Now, Bear has no idea the One Wish Willow is actually real. It’s seemingly a cheap toy from the 1970s, with a package printed entirely in red ink. When he snaps the One Wish Willow and demands that Nikki should “love him more than anyone else in the whole f**king world,” he has no idea it’s going to work.

But work it does. Nikki is now, well, obsessed with him. And her obsession spins and rebounds like a pinball through Bear’s life, creating crazier and increasingly unpredictable moments until it all culminates in the best horror film of 2026 - and perhaps the best horror film I’ve seen since Hereditary.

(Pour one out for The Backrooms, which had all of one week to be the Best Horror Film of 2026 before I saw Obsession the next week.)

But like any good film that reflects modern culture, Obsession is inspiring a lot of opinions. And the loudest opinion from the men’s rights advocates and incel-adjacent crowds is this:

Bear couldn’t be blamed for this. He had no reasonable expectation that his wish would be granted.

According to them, while what happens in Obsession is sad, it can’t be blamed on Bear - this is a public safety matter, where the real tragedy is that government can’t mandate a public recall on the One Wish Willow brand.

You know what? They’re half-right. Bear can’t be blamed for making the wish. It was a stupid wish made out of frustration, and it’s only bad luck that a) he phrased the wish so carelessly, and b) the wish actually had some major magical ju-ju backing it.

….buuuuut saying that “Bear couldn’t be blamed for this” is an exculpatory excuse that conveniently excuses, well, men in general.

Because here’s the thing about being a dude in Western culture: like the One Wish Willow, you are frequently handed accidental power.

I never specifically asked for my employers to view my pursuit of power as “a go-getter attitude” while viewing women’s identical pursuit as “unlikable,” but you know what? It happens.

I didn’t ask women to have to spend an extra 60% on clothing just to look as acceptable as my dudely jeans and a button-down outfit are, but, again, here we are.

I never set up a framework to make women so afraid of men that one out of 16 of them gave up their virginity out of fear of being abused, but hey - even if I’m a nice guy, they don’t know that, right?

To quote Dennis, that classic psychopath from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia:

• Dennis Reynolds: If the girl said “no,” then the answer obviously is “no”...

• Mac: No, right.

• Dennis Reynolds: But the thing is she’s not gonna say “no”, she would never say “no” - because of the implication.

But unlike Dennis and his carefully-orchestrated D.E.N.N.I.S. system, it is possible to be very much not aware of the implications. Women face hazards you do not - you’ve never had to clutch your car keys defensively while you walked across an empty parking lot. In fact, you’re so unpressured by many outside sources, you can remain blissfully unaware of the pressures you bring to bear.

My flashpoint came from a convention almost twenty years ago. I heard a woman complaining about how scary it was that a dude hit on her in the elevator in a tall building, because it was a small space and she had nowhere to run for, like, fifteen floors. And she did not know how the dude would react to a straight “no,” so she had to curry favor at least until she could get into a more open area.

…and I’d never thought about it that way. I don’t think I’d ever flirted with a strange woman on an elevator, but I wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with it either. Why not? It’s a public space, and I’d have no problem if a woman (or even a dude) hit on me in an elevator.

And that’s how the One Wish Willow snaps into action. I may not have meant to make that wish, but the nature of systemic power means that, just like Nikki is forced into acting like Bear’s perfect girlfriend, I can inadvertently force women into acting in ways that benefit me.

The very nature of being a dude in America is that you make careless wishes, and the system is set up to create positive outcomes for you. And none of that is your fault, particularly not when other systemic problems mean you’re still awkward and lonely and poor and completely unaware of the power you wield…

But once you become aware of the problem?

It’s how you react to those unasked-for power boosts that determines your character.

If Obsession was solely about Bear’s making an unexpectedly bad choice, it wouldn’t be a tragedy. But Bear is, pretty early on, made extremely aware that something’s wrong with this new and loving Nikki - and because Bear is an extremely weak-willed person, he makes repeated choices that double down on that behavior. He denies, he rationalizes, he tries to rig this new system for his own benefit while avoiding responsibility.

Here’s the truth: Yes. As a dude, you often are the benefit of One Wish Willow-style situations where your societal power influences specific events in your favor. Not all events; I mean, for all the power that Bear is granted by the One Wish Willow, he’s still working a crappy job at a music store and living in a home only by the past largesse of his dead relatives.

Like Bear, you never asked for that power; your narrow little isthmus of strength is the result of forces beyond your control, the culmination tectonic generational shifts that started long before you were born.

What matters, however, is what you do once you’re aware of the problem. Do you deny it? Do you lean into it? Do you do what you can to defang it? Do you take cautions to ensure your wishes are not carelessly made?

Or do you just tell everyone that you don’t bear any responsibility, that this is a product safety issue, it’s a shame that these forces exist but you didn’t create the One Wish Willow?

That’s what determines your ultimate character. Not the first wish you make, but all the subsequent reactions once you realize that that One Wish Willow sure as heck exists and some external power is contorting people’s options around you.

(And yes, in the movie, Bear’s options are extremely limited. That’s part of the reason he remains even vaguely potentially sympathetic going into the third act. But still, the movie’s pretty clear right up until Bear’s last decision that he’s not going to face his problems head-on.)

So yeah. Obsession is a great movie simply because it does reflect our society so damn well. And the box office returns indicates that people are resonating with it.

I’ve left a lot of spoilers out of this discussion. Realistically? This film’s still packed with surprises. Go see it.

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As a reminder, if you’ve subscribed to my Patreon at the Chapter Previews level ($3 a month), the preview chapters for my new book The Cathedral of Portals start next week! And the week after that, the free version of those Chapters will be premiering on Royal Road (link to come).

And as always, if you don’t want to read along in real time, the same way my wife had me read the chapters to you - though I wish you would! - you can just buy the book on Amazon to have it delivered wholly to you when the serial is done at the end of October.

And for those of you who have signed up or preordered… thank you. I got this, which was a first in my career:

Thanks for listening. I’ll be back next week with some actual book news.

T.F.

But first, the cover….

An ancient cataclysm has sundered a medieval world into two parallel dimensions. An order of monks struggles to keep the two lands united by building portals - complicated, expensive, temporary, and above all dangerous contraptions that can slice your arm off as easily as they cut through reality.

Three families converge on the engineering secrets that will create a miracle:

• A genderless pair of small-town priests are forced into the deadly political machinations of their merchant Church, who controls the portals.  

• A family of rogue portal-makers is driven to starvation by the Guild that safeguards their riftmaking secrets.  

• An orphaned eight-year-old, forced to crawl between the worlds by a mad merchant, stumbles into a dimension-spanning conspiracy.

This is the spellbinding, epic, low-fantasy tale chronicling the decades-long construction of the great mechanism that will bridge these severed worlds - the fabled Cathedral of Portals.

You can advance purchase The Cathedral of Portals (which is a thicker book than Game of Thrones) on Amazon for $4.99 when it comes out on October 30th -

- or, starting July 3rd, you can read it one chapter at a time on Royal Road, every Monday/Wednesday/Friday, just the way my wife got to listen to this story as we drove across America in our van -

- or if you really wanna support an artist, you can sign up for my Patreon, pay me $3 a month, get all the chapters two in advance, and (if you’ve subscribed before the thirteenth chapter goes up on August 3rd), I’ll send you a digital copy of the book when it’s done.

(Half of that money I collect’s going straight to The Transgender Law Center, because thankfully I don’t need to rely on Patreon for bills… yet.)

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In 2021, Gini and I were burned out; we were living with my mother in California, helping take care of her while she went through chemo. We were burned-out refugees living out of my Mom’s guest room, constantly driving borrowed cars to bring mom to hospital visits.

But I was burned out creatively, too. My last book had bombed, partially because (like all my books) it was a crazily unmarketable pitch and nobody could find a way to sell it.

The process of getting a book published traditionally is long. I didn’t have it in me to spend a year writing a book, then wait four months for my agent to read it, then wait a year for him to shop it around, only for it to get rejected.

Why was I bothering?

As Gini and I drove cross-country in our van, I read her the first chapter of this story I’d been working on. She loved it. So I read her the next chapter…

And as I ran out of story, dear reader, I started writing it for her.

Usually I write all my stuff in one go, then present it complete. But this was a collaboration, like the Princess Bride or The Hobbit. I’d see which characters Gini loved, put more focus on them; I’d see where she thought it was going, dodge that. I’d enforce and then subvert her expectations - and above all, I wasn’t writing towards an ending, just spinning a yarn for these long trips to Ohio and back.

In those sweet moments, I wasn’t writing for anyone but my wife.

And reader, I hit her hard. During a particularly tragic moment in the middle of the book, she stopped talking to me for an entire afternoon. I let her make a choice about who lived or died at the end of the book, and she was in tears.

So even though I think this is my finest work, right up there with Sol Majestic, I didn’t wanna publish it in like all my other books.

I wanted the readers to experience it like my wife did, one narrative morsel at a time.

Now, I know some of y’all were resistant to that idea: “I don’t wanna go to a site every day,” “I’ll never remember,” “I don’t like serial novels.” Fair enough! If you wanna read it your way, the book will be compiled come the end of the experiment.

But if you’d like to read it the way the author intended, where if you’re really into it you might have to wait a few days before you find out what happens next…

Well, the series premieres on July 3rd - my birthday. It’ll be running through the end of October, at which point the full book will be released on Amazon. Everything will be published on Royal Road, but if you sign up for my Patreon you get chapters posted two in advance of the schedule.

And let’s be honest: this is an experiment. If you feel like helping out Ya Boy here, I’ll post the link to the story on July 3rd - clicking through will help my traffic. I might even get a new audience on a new social media! Who knows? But I’ll post again to remind you, never fear.

If you feel like sending either the book link or the book Patreon to your friends, that’d be cool, as I don’t have nearly the reach on social media that I used to. (I’m on BlueSky, though I’m trying to keep it low-profile.)

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And yeah, sorry, it’s been a while since I’ve posted. The current administration has been, uh… stressful… and I’ll leave it at that.

But if you’re looking to escape the relentless march of politics, well, The Cathedral of Portals was meant as an escape. There’s villains, yes, and upsetting setbacks… but the core of it is three families who genuinely want to do good in the world. It’s a nice town in an indifferent world, and they’re doing their best against the will of some Extremely Rich Bastards to make their half of the world a better place.

So if the headlines are overwhelming and you want to go somewhere to get away from it all, all I can tell you is that The Cathedral of Portals worked for us.

I hope you join me.

Sincerely,
T.F.

P.S. - My Mom’s okay!

Still, you think: I need to keep engaging with this schmuck, because Other People are watching me debate and being convinced!

Set the keyboard down, comment-jockey. You’re wasting your time. And your time is important.

Me, I think the biggest challenge to leftists these days is figuring out where to invest their time and energy - because there’s so much propaganda out there designed to bog us down in useless debates that make us feel better, but don’t actually accomplish anything.

Put another way:

I think a very real reason we keep losing elections is that we’re focusing our efforts on persuading imaginary people instead of supporting and energizing actual people on our side.

And I think the most successful propaganda that leftists have fallen hook, line, and sinker for is the Myth of the Persuadable Spectator - that spending hours engaged with this Facebook troll is worthwhile simply because someone else is reading this thread and being convinced!

Like all good propaganda, there’s a speck of truth nested the center of this dubious claim: there was an abundance of persuadable spectators, back when the internet was smaller.

But these days? Ain’t nobody there.* Let me tell you why.

Speaking of futile efforts to persuade people, I have a new book series out! Statistically speaking, you, dear reader, have probably bought it by now! Can I then persuade you to talk it up to your friends so I can sell more copies?

Probably not. But it’s a good series, people seem to like it, and if the tagline “The Tiger King but with sympathetic characters and smuggled adorable baby dragons instead of smuggled abused tigers” doesn’t do it for you, well, I’ll put the pen down and stop wasting your time.

But look at that cover!

Subscribe now

So before I break down this myth, let’s discuss the difference between commenting and posting in terms of “How likely are you to persuade someone who reads this?” (Which isn’t the only reason to post, of course, but it is the Persuadable Spectator justification for the battling it out on the Internet.)

Posting: Worthwhile! Keep doing it!

If you’ve created a post/video/Tweet/et al, that’s going out to people who follow you on social media - or to people who read the forum/Discord/etc that you’ve posted in - then, you’re speaking directly to people who, for whatever reason, have signed on to hear what you have to say. And sure, maybe you’re posting to an echo chamber of all lefties, or the algorithm doesn’t show that post to two-thirds of your audience…

But you have at least a chance to make your case… Or to make your trans/minority/queer/etc friends feel like you support them, which can also be well worth the effort.

And in most cases, the effort you put in is directly attributable to the engagement you get. If you spend thirty seconds tossing off a pithy bon mot like “Elon Musk drove Twitter into the ground and is now driving America into the ground,” welp, it’s unlikely to convince anyone who’s not already singing in your choir - but it took you under a minute, so little harm done.

Whereas if you write, say, a 2,500-word essay about The Myth of the Persuadable Spectator, sure, that’s an hour down the drain - but the people who get all the way to the end of your essay will have a greater chance of being persuaded.

Either way, good job! Have a cookie.

(Just be warned that if you’re hate-quoting someone, you’re giving them a platform to persuade your audience. If you’re quote-Skeeting some KKK member masquerading as a reasonable person, there’s the danger that someone who’s reading you goes, “Oh, that’s a good point.” So beware who you’re handing over to your friends and chosen family!)

Commenting Early On: Maybe worthwhile!

So there’s two ways to comment semi-productively:

• Be one of the first twenty replies to the post

• Respond to the first- or second-level replies to the post.

And here’s where the myth of the persuadable spectator starts to fall apart. Because in the modern Internet, nobody is reading past the first twenty replies unless they’re already deeply invested.

If you’re lucky, most people will skim the first ten replies to find the funny comments that got upvoted the most. After that, it’s like the second page of Google results - nobody’s going there unless they absolutely have to.

Truth is, by the time you’re leaving reply #300, the only people who will go to the effort to read it are the people who are looking for a fight.

And those people have made up their minds already. In many cases, they’re searching hungrily for keywords/hash tags so they can go ham on biscuits on the folks who dared criticize their precious Elon.

(Or so they’re searching so they can get their salary in rubles. Don’t forget, there’s full-time operatives out there who are paid to demoralize and exhaust you! Don’t kid yourself; you’ve argued with at least one bot or a paid operator, probably several.)

And maybe you’ll get some engagement in those replies! But nobody persuadable is showing up; what’s happening is that the algorithm is broadcasting your replies to your friends, and it’s broadcasting the other guy’s replies to their friends - and it’s not so much “an exchange of ideas” as “Two gangs banging garbage can lids to tell everyone to come to the alley fight.”

And let’s be honest: when the algorithm shows you a wall of comments from your buddy engaged in a furious argument that you utterly do not care about (“HONEY BAKED HAM ISN’T HAM, FELICIA!!!”), do you:

a) Go listen to your friend’s fine points about the substandard quality of Honey Baked Ham in the hopes of being enlightened, or:

b) Go “Crap, they’re going off about Honey Baked Ham again, scroll past, scroll past, scroll past.”

You know it’s b.

Likewise, by the time you’re three levels or deeper into a thread, the same principles apply. Nobody is reading through a complex seventy-post back-and-forth unless they came in packing an opinion anyway.

So if you’re making a point early on where people can see it without clicking deeper, great! Get in there!

But if not, at best you’re flinging a comment into the void. At worst, you’re hauling your own audience of flying monkeys in to have an argument as ritualized as Kabuki theater.

A Side Note For The Naive

There are many people who claim to be “apolitical.” They’re “Just asking questions.” They claim they want to understand.

But when you pay attention to their post history, you’ll find they’re asking the same questions over and over again, no matter how many well thought out and well-researched answers they get. (Call it “Rogan syndrome.”) You’ll find that they’re “apolitical,” but miraculously despite not claiming to be conservative, about 80% of their arguments neatly into party lines.

These folks prey on your desperate need to believe in the Myth of the Persuadable Bystander… but they’re not persuadable. They just don’t like the social backlash that comes from identifying as a TERF or a neocon or whatever ideology they’ve aligned with.

…which is not to say there’s not people with educatable moments! Your Aunt Louise may well not be familiar with queer culture - and may have some questions that seem awkward. If you have the spoons, it can be worth giving them some compassion to get past that ignorant phase that we all had at some point.

(Hint: Telling someone to “Just Google it” these days often sends them straight to Joe Rogan, one of the most popular podcasters on the planet. You cannot trust Google to educate any more, if you ever could.)

But if you give Aunt Louise good answers and she’s not internalizing any of them, or even acknowledging that those points have been made in her future posts, she is not persuadable. Move on, friend.

Commenting Later On, On Your Own Posts: Oh My God, Please Stop

So there’s two main arguments for getting into lengthy arguments on your own posts:

1. I’m persuading bystanders!

2. I’m letting the people I’m advocating for know I have their backs!

I’ve already talked about why #1 isn’t really working - if someone wakes up to see Ferrett S has left 80 comments on this essay, they’re usually scrolling past quick as a subway train.

But the other argument - “Arguing back lets my minority friends know I’m advocating for them!” - is also booshwah. You know what will usually make your minority friends feel even better?

Feeling like they can comment on your posts without some spiteful bigot blasting them in the face.

Look, letting some jamook leave a wall full of transphobic comments in your space is just giving that bigot air to breathe - and it’s not like your minority friends haven’t inhaled that halitosis before. Like I said, the arguments for pro- and con- anything have all been regurgitated ad infinitum; there is not one trans person on the Internet who doesn’t know intimately what the TERFs’ most popular arguments are.

You let enough TERFs into your bar, it becomes a TERF bar. So why engage them? Block those mofos and move on. They’ve got their own space, you do not need to give them yours.

Commenting Later On, On Someone Else’s Posts: Oh My God, Please Stop

You know what I loved about determined conservatives engaged in slap-fights in my comments?

They brought me so much traffic.

Seriously, every time someone got a wasp up their ass about something I wrote and would not stop commenting, they usually brought on about five new people who were supportive. Mind you, I wasn’t convincing anyone, but I was getting people to broadcast my message further.

Social media profits off of engagement - they do not care what that engagement looks like. If people leave 50 excoriating comments on some dork essay, the algorithm goes “This is popular! I must show it to more people!” And then it starts going viral.

This is where “Just ignore the trolls” comes in - if all you’re doing is participating in a hate circle jerk where nobody is convincing anyone but you’re raising awareness of a hateful essay, you are doing active harm.

Look. The only way we’re gonna survive the next few years is to know what fights are worth having. And pouring your energy into giving some loathsome creep an extra thousand views is not The Way, my friend.

So What Do I Do?

• Block people in your own comments when it’s clear they’re not persuadable.

• Stop commenting in places that funnel traffic to jerks.

Or recognize your need to refute bozos for what it is: A fun way to pass the time. Engaging in flame wars can be entertaining! It’s often cathartic to unload your keyboard shotgun on some anonymous dorkola!

But treat it like a videogame: this is not productive, this is something you do for fun. As such, only flame if it invigorates you - once the debate starts to drain you, the opposition is winning.

What Was That Asterix (*) For?

When I say “Nobody does this,” that is a shorthand for “So few people do it that it’s not worth going out of your way to cater to them.” I’m absolutely sure some person is itching to weigh in to say “Well, I was persuaded!” or “Well, I read every comment on a YouTube video!”

Look. I read the manuals for every power tool I buy, front to back. But I can acknowledge that doing so is a very rare activity - and as a percentage of users, I am in such a vanishingly rare minority that I am statistically irrelevant.

And the overall point of this essay is “As an advocate with limited energy, where is the best use of my time?” Yes. There’s probably a Persuadable Spectator out there - maybe it’s you, recently, not back in 2010 when I’ve acknowledged it was an actual thing.

But are there better ways to invest your energy?

God yes. So many ways. Like, you know, actually getting off the keyboard and into real-life volunteering if you can.

Message ends.

Here are the nails in question:

Now. If you’re signed up to this newsletter, chances are good you know exactly what those nails represent. That color is #rebeccapurple, the color that was immortalized in the Internet to honor my dead Godchild Rebecca.

Now, it turns out that because #rebeccapurple is one of the listed name colors in the Internet, a lot of companies have just gone down that list and made an item - shoes, backpacks, what have you - in that exact shade. It’s not a particularly creative way to do things, but I imagine it’s pretty easy.

Yet it was a shock when Rebecca’s mother gave me a bottle of #rebeccapurple nail polish for Christmas. Most children don’t get a product named after them, but I mean, my Goddaughter was special. She gets a special afterlife that takes root in obscure corners of the Internet.

So I had my nail tech Ashley whip up a memorial set of nails for me… and those nails made me very happy. They reflected Rebecca’s tiara spirit, her Jewish heritage, her love of bright colors. I wanted to share it with the world.

And I did not - not on FetLife, not on Discord, not on BlueSky - because I could not bear to have someone give me The Response.

“Who’s Rebecca?”

(Or worse: “I’m sorry for your loss,” stated with the clear assumption that the death just happened.)

Look. Last year was her ten-year anniversary. She would have been sixteen (she held out long enough to die on her sixth birthday, so the date is always a little poignant). The memory is worn down enough that it stings only in little moments - though I still visit her grave once a year like clockwork.

And if you too are asking “Who’s Rebecca?”, I can’t blame you. That’s now dusty history in a bunch of long-dormant blog posts. I could say “She was my goddaughter, she died of brain cancer,” and that would get across some of it…

But then I look back to gut-wrenching essays like “Flashlight” written when we were in the middle of her slow demise and yeah, that summary seems mighty hollow.

Thankfully, a lot of you remember Rebecca - it was a huge deal at the time. But for the rest of you, well, my friends, that is what I hated the most about flinging every aspect of my personality across the Internet over the course of two arduous decades:

Realizing people can know me without knowing them.

Even as recently as 2021 - and God, has it been four years since I walked away from blogging? - I had people who would swear they knew me, they were fans of me, they liked me… But they didn’t know Rebecca.

Yet why should they? It’s not like there’s new Rebecca news. Hell, the only reason I’m posting this now is because some company’s business model is based on mass-producing CSS colors created a decade ago. Otherwise, she’s still gone, yep, that absence still yawns endless, stay tuned for no headlines whatsoever.

Then I think of my Uncle Tommy. Now that’s a much deeper cut. Tommy died in the haymaker days of LiveJournal, back in 2003 when having like 5,000 people reading me was, like, obscenely big for a social network. My Uncle Tommy raised me, and he had a story every bit as compelling as Rebecca - he was a hemophiliac, an HIV survivor, yet fearless because hell, what did he have to lose?

Tommy is an axiom of my life. Almost everything you find admirable about me (and, let’s be honest, a few ya probably don’t) had their roots in one Mr. Lucas’ bold spirit of “Live fast, die young.”

Yet if I mentioned Uncle Tommy to, say, FetLife, a place where I have tens of thousands of people who follow me (and many who’d consider themselves fans of mine), I guarantee you the vast majority would be “Who?”

It’s like watching history erased in real time. And yes, I am aware there’s nothing special about that process - hell, I’m fading as we speak, I’m sure there’s folks in polyamory Discords going “Ferrett? What a weird name.” In a decade or two most folks will forgot I ever posted.

I don’t mind that… at least for me. I crave that anonymity, in a way. I was dancing in the spotlight for so long that I feel better huddled in the cool darkness of the backstage theater.

But Tommy and Rebecca, well, that was the one unalloyedly good thing I did as a blogger - I got to introduce two magnificent people to the world, people who could not introduce themselves.

I am accepting of my own death. I have come to understand that eventually I too will be the vast and trunkless legs of stone moldering in the desert, the same fate as the unnamed emperors of old.

That’s okay… for me.

But I want Rebecca and Tommy’s names written in fire on high cliffsides, my grief electron-sharp enough to etch them into indelible history. Yet they will be - they are being - forgotten. And it’s nobody’s fault; I don’t, I can’t, get mad at people who didn’t intersect with me in time to see them. It’s just time gliding past, that infinite strip of rolling sandpaper that grinds everything down.

In time Shakespeare will be gone. Might be when humanity’s gone, but that’s coming. Eventually. Time plays the long game.

So yeah. The worst thing for me as a blogger was referencing a fundamental axis of my life, something so fundamental to me it seems like me itself… and discovering that no, they’ve become a footnote in my ledger. They’re a FAQ. They’re a question on a trivia quiz.

It doesn’t happen much these days.

But I’m glad I no longer have to endure it.

Two brief things:

First, yeah, I write this newsletter partially to sell books. I usually shill The Dragon Kings of Oklahoma, my most recent series… but it seems correct today to reference Flex, my first book, where the lead character is an unapologetic ripoff of Rebecca’s spitfire spirit. The book cover even looks like her, a little:

I probably wouldn’t be a published novelist if it wasn’t for Rebecca being a better personality than I could make up out of my tiny mammalian brain. So thanks, kid.

Second, with regards to my last newsletter, I think I am gonna publish on Royal Road later this year. Don’t worry if you don’t wanna follow me over to a new platform, or read me serially; the feedback was pretty solidly “I like you, Ferrett, but that’s a stretch too far.” But all that means is that you’ll have to wait a while longer for the book, which will eventually be published in an Amazon format.

You’ll get it. Just a little later. And maybe some other people will get a very different experience.

But I’m head-down in writing a book now, so lemme get to a good pause-point before I start thinking business again.

But yeah. I miss you, Rebecca. I miss you, Tommy. That won’t stop until I do.

And in the end, it always comes down to these words, which are carved into my heart:

Rebecca is a miracle. Even if this was all we got, she is a fucking miracle, and I want you to know that.

I just want more.

But internalizing this idea involves kicking some other bad ideas out the door.

The bad idea is this: People make decisions based on what they believe will be the best option.

You’ve got a movie producer making a movie? He’s choosing the best script, the best actors! You’ve got some middle management guy deciding what manufacturer he’s sourcing his goods? He’s choosing the best manufacturer!

For years, I believed this - and chalked up any terrible outcomes to a differing definition of “best.” I thought the best movie would be a fantastic new intellectual property with great writing - but they wanted a Transformers sequel directed by Michael Bay.

Or, sometimes, I thought it was just the decisions of people too incompetent to know what was best. If some company chose a slipshod supplier who delivered bad goods late, well, someone was just awful at understanding what made a good supplier.

But that wasn’t what was happening at all.

See, people might make decisions based on what they believe is the best outcome… so long as they don’t have management over their heads to punish them for bad outcomes.

The minute you add in layers of management second-guessing them, most people stop choosing the best option.

Wanna know what the actual rule is?

People make decisions based on whatever will get them the least blame when things go wrong.

And boy oh boy, that’s a different thought process.

The folks in the middle layers of management who signed off on Michael Bay directing another Transformers movie didn’t necessarily think that Michael Bay was the best director, or that the Transformers movies would be profitable (though they were!)…

They believed that if Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon failed, they could point to their decision and go, “B-but it was Michael Bay directing! He’s produced tons of money-making pictures! And Transformers, who would have thought that a recognizable brand like Transformers would fail us?”

And their bosses would grumble… but they probably wouldn’t fire them.

Whereas they know that if they signed the check to film an entirely new intellectual property from some hotshot arthouse director and that bombed, management would come knocking on their door looking for someone to blame. And those decisions would not be nearly as defensible - “You tried an untested property, without a bestselling book or a musical to base it on? And hired a director without a proven track record?”

And so the hatchet would fall upon their noggins.

The truth is that most decisions in a large organization are not made primarily by quality, but by how justifiable the decision will be seen in hindsight by their managers. If a company hires a slipshod supplier, it’s probably because one high-up manager was golf buddies with the supply company owner, and everyone downstream said “Screw it, this isn’t bad enough to risk my career on.”

In circumstances like these, I find it’s rare that the people don’t know that something is about to be terrible - or so poorly-researched that “terrible” is merely one of a number of things it could be.

Yet that decision gets made because if they sign off on it, nobody will blame them.

So if you’re wondering why Hollywood is plagued by sequels and reboots, well, nobody lost their job signing off on a new Transformers movie, the Transformers movies were successful, how could we have known Transformers One would bomb?

And you’re wondering why a specific bureaucracy signed off on some staggeringly stupid policy, it’s probably because several layers of middle management looked at a clueless decision made by a clueless upper management and said, “If I fight this tooth and nail and things get worse, I’ll be blamed for whatever happens. But if I shrug and say, ‘Looks fine to me,’ then upper management will get blamed if this goes sour.”

And bam! Bad policies out the door. (Well, that and a healthy dose of “Management doesn’t have to live under these new policies, only the plebes.”)

Now, of course that’s not everybody - I know someone’s scratchin’ at the keyboard right now, eager to tell me how they always strive to make the right decision. And good for you! But in general, I don’t believe most people do decide on the “best” outcome; most folks just look to keep their heads down and let the shit roll downstream over them.

In fact, once you start looking around, you’ll come to see that a lot of life’s low-grade annoyances are a vexing intersection of “Management won’t get blamed for it” and “Our clients aren’t irritated enough to change their behavior.” Are airline seats small and uncomfortable and have no luggage space? Sure. But upper management will never get blamed for trying to squeeze more money out of each flight… and just as importantly, it’s not like most people are saying, “I’ll spend extra to book on the airline that treats me well! I will have brand loyalty!”

Nope. Pretty much everyone just searches for the cheapest possible flight, and so there’s no reward in it for the airlines trying to be better. And without pushback, the policy stays put.

So if you’re trying to make change, the lesson is this:

You need to make that company’s bad decision into such a risk that it looks like it’ll be less blame for middle management if they reverse the policy.

That doesn’t mean you yell at middle management or, God forbid, the poor schmucks working customer service - it means that the only way to combat bad policy is by creating enough friction that it ripples upstream, bypassing all the layers of uncaring bureaucracy to start chafing the people who actually made the decision in the first place.

‘Course, that’s tough to do. It involves getting a lot of people on your side. And if it’s politics you’re looking to upset, it means you’ll either have to alienate people who were once loyal supporters of your opponent (because in this new modern political era, pleasing the opposition means nothing so long as you can pander to your base and keep a grip on that 51% majority), or to create enough hubbub that the policy’s too much trouble for them to enforce.

Guess which one’s more effective in an oligarchy?

Just a thought to help guide some of your decisions through the next couple of years.

Plug time Before I Talk About My Next Book!

Hey, my series The Dragon Kings of Oklahoma is still out there and available to read! Only $2.99 a pop! Quick, fast reading featuring adorable baby dragons and a cynical, quick-thinking protagonist, and my fans say it may be their favorite thing I’ve written! So hey, if you haven’t already, click the link and buy that sucker!

My Next Book, Which I Am Still Pondering.

So. In a past newsletter, I asked you folks which of two books you’d prefer - and to my immense surprise, you did not pick the kinky one. No, you picked the one that’s more like The Sol Majestic - a sweeping generational epic about the building of a magic portal. The book is called, tentatively, The Sundering Gates.

The problem with The Sundering Gates is that it’s a really big book - like, “Bigger than the first book in Game of Thrones” sized. I wrote it for my wife Gini during COVID, reading her each chapter as I went along; I had no end game and no serious plans of publishing it, so I didn’t care how long the damn thing ran.

I don’t feel like splitting it into smaller chunks, because I think the story benefits from being told without artificial cliffhangers. And I am a little leery of publishing a huge book that I’m not sure if people would finish. I mean, a publisher would probably tell me “Make it a trilogy” or something, but that’s exactly why I want to self-publish.

I need my ability to make bold artistic decisions, even if they’re stupid!

But then someone in my Discord (you’re welcome to join, btdubs) suggested, “Why not publish it on Royal Road?”

Which, you know, I’d heard about, mainly through anecdotes from strangers like “My niece makes good money publishing on Royal Road.” It’s basically a place where people publish serialized webnovels, sometimes for profit, sometimes for kicks. It’s had some huge successes, most notably in LitRPG books.

I liked that idea. I liked the idea of people consuming this book the same way my wife fell in love with it - one chapter at a time, spaced out over several weeks. And I liked the idea of combining social media with my writing - Royal Road’s got subscribers, and followers, and having a site that encourages traffic to other readers could potentially hook me into a larger audience than I normally command.

…or it could be the wrong fit. I’ve heard some folks saying it’s not as friendly to LGBTQ topics as it could be - and The Sundering Gates isn’t exactly homoromantic, but it’s got a polyamorous lesbian struggling with a bisexual wife who wants a baby, a genderqueer priesthood who give up their genders as God intended, and several background gay couples.

Furthermore, having perused Royal Road, it’s mostly aimed at quick reads and a younger audience - fast-starting LitRPG and Progression Fantasies, with fairly simple prose. (That’s not a ding - there’s an art to writing both transparent prose and fast-moving plots, one I largely lack.) I know there’s other stuff there, a lot of other stuff - but that does not appear to be the popular stuff…

Accent on appears. I’ve been mostly poking around the site, taking nibbles of the various fictions here and there. And I think it’d be kinda fun to do a week-by-week style of storytelling on a site that’s not my own… unless nobody read it, in which case I’d probably be in for months of committed misery.

So that’s where you come in! Do you read Royal Road… or would you follow me there if I started posting what is perhaps the best book I’ve written yet? Or would you be more like, “Screw it, Ferrett, I want it all in one place, I’ll pay you the $3.99 to slog through it.” If it’s published serially, I might finally start up a Patreon where I post chapters in advance of the rest of the story.

(“Post it elsewhere” or “Post it yourself” will not be helpful, alas. I’ve looked at the alternatives and have decided it’s basically A or B, take yer choice.)

So! Lemme know. Tell me what you know, and more importantly what you feel, on these options. Be realistic. If you’ve got experience in RR stuff, either in producing or consuming, weigh in. And I’ll probably publish The Sundering Gates, oh, in a few months somewhere.

Hopefully with a better title.

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See, as good little liberals, we’ve been awash in terrifying takes on what Trump could do when he takes power on January 20th. Admittedly, Trump has always had the discipline of a three-year old seeking candy, so anything that actually gets done will likely be because his cabinet stopped infighting enough to agree on an agenda…

But if you’re reading pretty reasonable takes like this one on the plans already gearing up for mass deportation, it’s not too hard to imagine the ol’ “Squads of armed civilians riding up from red areas to run riot in Cleveland while the police look the other way” issue.

Yet hey, you know what else is a reasonable take?

That if things do get that bad, I am:

1. Highly unlikely to be there at the moment when the squad arrives;

2. Highly unlikely to see anything so grievous that I will trigger a firefight to stop it, and:

3. If I do start a firefight, I am highly unlikely to have the skills to do anything other than make the situation worse.

(For the record, I hope things don’t get that bad, but I will lay good money to say that 2024 is the closest thing we’ll see to an honest American election again in our lifetimes. Welcome to power, oligarchs!)

Still, my wife and I kept getting itchier - if it does come down to something like that, do we want to stand there with our genitalia flopped into our moist palms, wishing we’d gotten some firepower? It was an intrusive thought, but that intrusive thought was wrecking our lives….

Just like it does for people everywhere after every goddamn election. We could have T-shirts printed with “2nd Amendment class of 2024,” just as waves of people picked up Biden-fueled terror-guns in 2020, and Obama-fueled terror-guns in 2008 and 2012. Every four years, there’s a massive surge in gun ownership.

So my wife and I basically decided that a gun was essentially a splurge-purchase to make us feel better. Would it help if the shit hit the fan? Realistically, no. Would the shit hit the fan so dramatically that things would come down to one close-to-retirement couple standing tall with their pistol against a treacherous tide? Come on, get real.

Yet we did agree that getting a gun would help vent this ennui-soaked feeling of powerlessness, and also that shooting guns was hella-fun and we would have probably gone full down the bang-bang-shooty path years ago if it wasn’t for my history of mental illness.

So we had discussions about “How to handle Ferrett’s Seasonal Affective Disorder” (coming this spring to an armed household near you!), and worked out some solutions, and we got about eleven hours of training before purchasing our first gun.

Since then, we’ve been going to the range, watching videos, reading up on how to use it, because if we’re going to have a weapon designed to kill we’re going to use it well. Yet let me tell you… soaking in self-defense culture is like walking through a portal into a whole new world. It’s like our world, but it’s a flip side, one that fuels police brutality and a lot of fear-voting -

Except unlike Narnia, what fuels this dark portal fantasy is not magic, but marketing.

And yeah, if you’re a long-term gun owner, I know how ridiculous this sounds to you. This is all part of the pavement, and here’s another starry-eyed newbie taking you on a stroll through your driveway. And to a large extent, you’re not wrong.

But there’s a couple of chemtrails in that Kool-Aid you’re drinking, and I notice it because I’m new to the taste.

Anyway. Lemme tell you what I’ve found, after this brief commercial break!

I’ll be brief, because most of y’all have heard it by now - but if you haven’t purchased it, the full Dragon Kings of Oklahoma trilogy is out and only $2.99 apiece! If you’re looking for adorable baby dragons, fast-paced adventure, quick patter, and what it would be like if the Tiger King met Hap and Leonard, well, this funny series is for you. You can read it in a weekend. Promise.

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First rule of Gun Club: You will not learn without getting a little Trump rubbed on ya. The instructors are mostly right-leaning, a lot of the gun stores have “Let’s Go Brandon” signs hung on the walls, and, well….

Second Rule of Gun Club: But you’ll put up with all that nonsense because guns are fun!

Seriously. They are. Once you get over the realization that this machine was designed to murder people, the joy of having an explosion cupped in your hands is pretty amazing. The visceral thump of a gunshot shoving air out of the way in its rush to get to the target feels like nothing else. It’s a videogame-like challenge to put more shots in the paint…

And you get to accessorize. You want a tac-light for your gun? A red dot? What are you carrying it in? Do you like the backstrap? Need a new trigger?

And above all, isn’t there a sexier gun to have? Each gun feels a little different, looks a little different, you can get your John Wick on. You can debate which gun is better, all that fun stuff.

And because so much of America is down on guns, it gives that Christian illusion that you’re an underdog when really you’re firmly in control of things. But it is a little awkward in liberal circles to say “I own a gun” - it’s notable that liberal author John Scalzi chose to reveal he had a conceal carry license when he was trying to prove to his audience that they didn’t really know him - so you get that hush-hush whisper-whisper thrill of “Nobody else really understands but you.”

Guns are fun. That’s hard for a lot of liberals to swallow, but they really fucking are.

But you know what else you swallow along with the fun?

Third Rule of Gun Club: Everyone is literally out to kill you. All the time. If you’re not ready, you’re dead.

Now remember: My wife and I are trying to be realistic here. If the shit hits the fan, the elderly couple with the heart conditions and half a day’s training aren’t gonna Bruce Willis the forces of the Evil Empire. We bought the gun because it vented off some fears we could not otherwise abate…

But realistically, we know that these fears will not be solved with a pistol. The gun is not a wand from Ollivanders. There have been buckets full of school shootings, mass shootings, robberies, etc…. And there were people with guns there.

Most of them froze.

I encourage you to watch this video from YouTuber Hard2Hurt, where he discusses what actually happens when the shit hits the fan. Humans are not hard-wired to do well in surprise violence situations. To quote him regarding what people do in violent situations without training:

“This is why I hate people talking about being a ‘mama bear’… Everyone walking the planet will tell you ‘Don’t mess with my kids!’, but, uh… it doesn’t bear out!… If someone were stabbing your child, you wouldn’t think, ‘Well, I would scream and kind of push at him a little bit and then fall over.’ You wouldn’t think you’d do that. {This mother in some really sad footage} didn’t think she would do that, and she did.”

In fact, the heartening thing is that it’s hard to get humans to kill at all. As Lt. Col. Dave Grossman noted in his book On Killing, it takes weeks of highly-specialized training to get like 90% of soldiers to fire their guns at a human. Normally, it’s like 20%. And yes, those figures have been hotly debated, but the fundamental truth is that “Everyone thinks they can fire a gun at a living person if it comes down to it,” and the majority of them really cannot. Not without a lot of training.

Ah, but that’s why you get the training for self-defense, right? All these gun classes! All these holster exercises and move and shoot competitions and video simulation chambers! You take a lot of classes to be ready. To protect your family.

That’s where the chemtrails enter the Kool-Aid, though.

In our concealed carry class, the instructor gleefully showed off his new training tool, a video with fake (but realistic) pistols that put people into dangerous situations - a junkie burglarizing a bodega, a biker messing with you at a highway rest stop, and so forth. It had branching paths that reacted to your reactions - where you shot, when you shot, etc etc.

Predictably, the trainees - who may not have even fired a gun before an hour ago - froze. The video unspooled uninterrupted.

In every case, “doing nothing” wound up with the trainee being shot.

In fact, in the junkie burglary, the junkie got his money, began to flee, then stopped at the exit to specifically shoot you, ignoring the other two bystanders. Just as sort of a bon mot to add homicide to his charge of robbery, I suppose.

But that’s the way a lot of self-defense training works. They condition you to shoot bad guys, nothing but bad guys. If they’re discussing desperate homeless people, it’s only in terms of how they have nothing to lose and will absolutely murder you. And sometimes, if they’re realistic (which our trainers were), they’ll admit that yeah, a bad guy is stealing your television, but if he’s on his way out the door it’s better to let him have that $800 Amazon Fire HDTV than it is to deal with the legal repercussions of shooting someone.

Yet he was a bad guy. And he had it coming; you just chose not to give it to him - in part, because society has a lot of weird laws around shooting people. And should that bad guy turn around, you should shoot. Immediately.

In the moment of crisis, you train to shoot. You don’t train to deescalate the situation - that’s silly, that guy’s gonna hurt you!

No, the whole point of an unsettling amount of self-defense training is to get you to use the gun.

You may think I’m kidding. But I mentioned Lt. Col. Dave Grossman earlier, talking about the percentages of people who can shoot at living people. Turns out, the guy’s one of America’s most respected and well-consulted police trainers, and his whole point is that most people won’t shoot to kill - which is why cops should shoot to kill, and as quickly as possible, because if you don’t shoot first you’re gonna be shot.

Seriously. The class is/was called “Killology,” it’s widely taught, and it neatly bisects the world into “you” and “everyone you’re prepared to shoot.” A fun quote from it is “If you fully prepare yourself, in most cases killing is just not that big a deal.”

Which is to say the most prevalent training of cops is not “You are a shield to protect the public,” but “You are in danger, and you need to kill anyone who looks at you sideways.” And then we wonder why there are so many police shootings.

And don’t get me wrong! Others may (and do!) disagree, but I want a cop who can kill to protect the public. Occasionally. When other people are in danger. But Killology (now the Grossman on Truth training) ingrains a cowardly response where the point is not that “You are a brave warrior tasked with laying down your life to shield the innocent,” but rather “Everyone’s out to kill you, to hell with their lives, it’s better you gun down ten people accidentally than you lose your life.”

Then we wind up with situations like Uvalde, where the (bad) cops are presented with an actual danger, and their response is not “I’m ready to lay down my life,” but “Holy shit, I’m in danger, I can’t let that happen” - and so they keep their distance because they got trained to protect their lives at all costs.

(Insert long, rambling treatise here on how I respect people who are willing to lay down their lives for others, but I respect them because they’re valuing other peoples’ lives more than their own. Anything else is mostly an exercise in power.)

But that whole mentality of “There is a great danger, and only a gun will solve it” is the dark magic I am speaking of.

My wife and I are buying a gun to help us ward off fear so intense it verges on an existential dread… Just like these people, who dread bad guys. They’re scared by different forces beyond their control - for them, they’re concerned with burglars and rapists and forty-five minute waits for cops in rural areas - but all the same, they’re grasping a psychological lever to regain some feeling of power.

Which isn’t bad, as long as you’re realistic about a gun’s limitations! And I think it’s possible to be realistic about a gun’s limitations, because those limitations are numerous. Yes, a gun when properly utilized can protect someone - but that involves the proper training, the proper reading of the situation, a proper set of circumstances to create that situation, and so forth. And a gun when improperly utilized leads to your five-year-old involved in a horrible tragedy, or your teenaged kid shot when he sneaks back into the house after a party.

I think in a sane world - the world my wife and I are trying to live in - we’d all look at it as “preparing for a worst-case scenario,” with the understanding that it’s a workaround for some mostly-irrational fears and that the worst-case scenario is probably not going to happen.

Problem is, a lot of self-defense culture is specifically designed to erode that sense of “probably not.”

Because the best marketing tactic to get people to buy more guns is to exacerbate that fear to make them think a) there’s a problem, and b) the gun is the solution…. which is why it’s no coincidence that a lot of gun owners think that America is dissolving into criminal chaos, when statistically speaking, crimes have plunged since the 1990s.

Now, some folks just wanna hunt. Fine. Some folks just wanna make the fun-machines go bangy-bang. Fine. And there will doubtlessly be people who are like “No, that’s not the gun people I know,” and you’re brilliant, yes, I’m glad your people are looking at it realistically.

(And props to my Dad, who was an NRA member for many years and a decent shot, but he took some classes to simulate what it would actually be like in a crisis situation and was pretty honest about how accurate - or not accurate - he would be if the fit hit the shan. I mean, I know that realistically assessing one’s capabilities can be done; I’ve learned from the best, which is to say “my Dad.” So, yeah, hashtag #notallgunowners.)

But as someone who’s been educating himself through a steady diet of YouTube videos and Reddit threads and forums, I’ve been seeing a lot of what my wife calls “Main character syndrome” - that sense that this person sees themselves as the hero in a movie. The time will come. Soon. When it does come, they’re gonna be Johnny-on-the-spot. And if they don’t step up to that challenge with lethal force, they’re gonna be dead.

To them, this is a world where there are only three people: Main characters, victims, and targets. And they own a gun, which makes ‘em the main character.

This is how the self-defense culture (not necessarily gun culture, though there is some significant overlap) causes this feedback loop. The people in the self-defense loop feel like they’re under threat, which makes them a good market to cater to, so people looking to sell them guns and training and pepper spray nod and go yes, it’s a dangerous world, ya gotta be ready….

With each iteration, they lose their grip on the reality of “This is a worst-case scenario, and probably not the greatest solution to it” and tumble further into the black-and-white parallel world of “The world is full of bad guys, and you can’t negotiate with them.”

(And I should add that the people who are tumbling into this abyss are not bad guys, from a certain point of view. They can be charming, friendly, and helpful, good people to have around… so long as they perceive you on their side.)

Now, we’ve always had guns… But what we didn’t have before was a lifestyle marketed with the gun. You’re rarely buying just a gun, you’re buying a whole mindset promoted alongside it. And that mindset encourages paranoia, because if they’re out to get you, why wouldn’t you buy?

The self-defense spiral is a prototype for all sorts of other negative spirals - hey, guess what happens when a liberal doomscrolls on TikTok? But while the liberal doomscroll usually ends up in hand-flinging despair (“Why would I vote for an impure candidate?”), the self-defense spiral can be a portal to a world populated by only bad guys and main characters.

And it’s not the only reason, but I think it’s a significant reason that there’s no sense of cooperation from Republicans any more. Because this world is full of bad guys, people sitting outside your window ready to murder your family, and how dare anyone suggest you should let them get murdered?

Anyone who talks that way that must be a Bad Guy.

And us? We’re stepping through the shadows of this marketing-created world as we begin our journey into becoming weapon-competent.

It’s not the real world. It’s not the types of dangers you’re actually likely to face.

But it is a world that sells a lot of weapons.

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In closing, I’m gonna leave you with two links.

First, what skills should you learn if you start carrying guns? Well, how to staunch blood flow couldn’t hurt.

Second, here’s a brilliant comedy routine on guns from someone who’s offensive, yeah… but he’s making good points. Say hi to Jim Jefferies:

Jim Jefferies on Gun Control, Part 1

Jim Jefferies on Gun Control, Part 2

But here I am, picking myself up off the floor - and asking you to help me decide which of my novels to publish next.

Yet as I was putting the final edits on my new book The Hippogriff Riders of Oklahoma (out today! Only $2.99!), I stumbled across this passage that seemed far too relevant - a passage from a point in the book when Daisy’s been outmatched by the story’s villain and has tumbled head-first into his pill addiction:

“I knew there’d come a day when you got whupped right and proper,” Wild-Eye said.

“I’ve been whupped before,” I protested.

“No. You been beat. Your Daddy got whupped—when he realized he was goin’ bankrupt fighting the banks. And he did not take it well.”

“So what’s the difference?”

“Beat means you get set back. Whupped means they won so hard that they can dominate you—make it so if you keep fighting, they can chip away at you and yours bit by bit until there’s nothing left.”

“And you been whupped?”

Wild-Eye grimaced. “I was a proud and out gay kid in Douay, Daisy. Didn’t matter how well I fought; if three or four kids jumped me, I was takin’ a beating. And I took too damn many.”

“…until I came along.”

“No.” He snorted. “I mean, you did come along, and I’m grateful. But…I made my choice long before you stepped in as my guardian angel. Me tellin’ everyone I was a queer might get Momma kicked out of church. It might cost Dad his job. And eventually, if I really kept throwing it in people’s faces, I might end up catching a beating that’d put me in a wheelchair.”

I nodded.

“I could leave town—lotsa kids did that. Don’t blame ‘em, either. Why’d anyone wanna stay in a town that hates you?

“Or,” Wild-Eye continued, “I could…go transparent. Sand off all my edges to fit in. Take the hits they’d give me just because I used to be openly gay. And hope nobody noticed me.

“It’s the choice everyone makes eventually, Daisy. There comes a time when you face a fight that you know you’re probably gonna lose, and losing will cost you everything. And everyone thinks they’ll fight until the bitter end—but you can’t tell which way a man’s gonna turn until he really sees what that struggle’s gonna cost him. Hell, your dad was the strongest man I ever knew! I woulda bet he’d have fought ‘til Gabriel blew his horn—but once those foreclosures started piling up, he crumbled.”

“Momma leavin’ him didn’t help none,” I added.

“Point is, the reason it’s a tough decision is because fighting on isn’t always the best choice. Good chance I’d have caught a fatal beating if you hadn’t pitched in to help. Your dad saved your family house by givin’ up the farm. You might lose this one, Daisy—and fightin’ Marten and Edgar could make it cost you everything.” He looked up at Ace, tumbling joyously through the air as she chased the last threads of daylight.

“So what do you think I should do?”

Wild-Eye took a long drag on a joint. “I wouldn’t judge you either way.”

No real spoilers here: Daisy picks himself up, fights the good fight, and wins. That’s fiction… but it happens in real life sometimes.

I fear we are exiting the Fuck Around stage of world affairs and about to steer sharply into the shores of Find Out. (Don’t email me if you think otherwise; you don’t know the future, and neither do I.) And if my fears come true, the fight is gonna get exponentially harder than it has been; people will be forced to make a lot of grueling choices about whether they can fight.

Fighting sometimes costs individual folks everything. But it’s the only possible way out for everyone.

I hope you too make the right choice.

(And if you’ve got ten bucks to spare, here’s a real good book on where to start fighting. Lesson #1 is “Do Not Obey In Advance.” Lesson #20 is “Be As Courageous As You Can.” Let’s you and me hunker down somewhere between those two, okay?)

Anyway, so while I’m reasonably happy with the Dragon Kings of Oklahoma series as an experiment, I need to get working on self-publishing my next book. (It won’t be the fourth book in the series; I don’t think I’ve earned enough to justify spending quite so much on the covers for this series. And I’d hate to hire a lesser artist for book four. Maybe if the series takes off a little more.)

But I have two books that I could publish in 2025, and I like them both about equally. So I wanted to get an idea of which one tickled your biscuit a bit more. Here’s two rough descriptions with placeholder titles, and you can email me or comment on this post to tell me which one you’d be more willing to lay down $2.99 to purchase.

(Hint: “Both” is not helpful! I get to publish one!)

Option #1: The Sundering Gates

An epic generational fantasy about a small town’s struggle to invent and build the world’s first stable interdimensional portal. Lots of characters, lots of politics, lots of heart. If you liked The Sol Majestic, this one’s got that same vibe, though a bit less flowery and mixed more with a dash of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. My wife proclaims it by far her favorite thing that I’ve ever written, and so does my partner Keri, and a friend in my Discord who beta-read it keeps asking me “When’s it gonna be published? When?”

But The Sundering Gates would be hard to market (including getting a better title, if I can manage it), and it’s long - like, A Game of Thrones-sized. But I don’t feel like breaking it up into smaller books because I wrote the kind of book where people could lose themselves in for weeks at a time, and I don’t want to break that up by saying, “Here’s Intermission, give me another three bucks.” I just want you to float in the narrative.

And as a lapbreaker of a tome, it would be hard to get reviews - longer books, particularly with multiple characters, have more opportunities for people to bounce off of ‘em. And reviews are a large influx of traffic.

Option #2: Corded

Hot bisexual warriors rope-fighting for dominance in a smut-filled, BDSM-filled book. Very fast, written at a pace like Automatic Reload, filled with action and intrigue and a pretty nifty bit of worldbuilding to justify why '“tying each other up with ropes” is the primary form of combat.

Marketing-wise, it’s a great and easy pitch. (And I think the cover would be cheap.) But I’d have to do a rewrite on this one, since I finished the final pass way back in 2020… and also, I haven’t written smut before. (I think there’s all of one sex scene in my published books.) Then again, that smuttiness may be a bonus for you, but I worry about blue-balling people because I don’t have another sexy novel in the trunk waiting for you. Like a lot of my stuff, it’s a one-off.

And it’s not deep. It’s a fast-paced popcorn read, which is all fine and well. But I dunno whether that’s where I wanna go next after a trio of hot buttery popcorn reads.

Anyway. That’s the two books I’m pondering releasing into the world in the first half of 2025. Let me know which one you’d be willing to fork over hard cash for…

And if you haven’t forked over the cash for the new series The Dragon Kings series well, the third book is out today. Only $2.99. Same as the price in the first book in the series, which is very well reviewed.

And yeah. We’re all still picking ourselves up off the floor. So big hugs to all.

I also cleaned up a lot after my sick dog.

These two things are related.

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So my dog is an adorable nine-month-old puppy, as you can see from this photo here:

And the second book of my Dragons of Oklahoma series, still available here for a mere $2.99, is dedicated to him:

My dog’s name is Sitka, and he is part pittie, part boxer, all sweet. Not a malicious bone in this dog’s body. He’s responding well to training, becoming calmer and more affectionate…

And he’s also had a rampant case of the runs for the last five days, necessitating middle-of-the-night walks and impromptu house cleanings.

If you’re about to tell me what to do when a dog has stomach problems: you’re part of the problem I’m gonna discuss.

Because my Mom knows what to do: boiled chicken, that’s the trick for a sick dog.

Except our dog trainer said no, you feed a sick dog bone broth on the first day, two ounces every four hours, and then cooked ground turkey. And no rice, rice irritates the stomach.

My partner Keri said I needed pumpkin, no-sugar pumpkin filling works well for stopping up a dog.

And the vet, when we finally got an appointment in, said that probiotics and maybe I/D prescription food would fix this. Oh, and boiled chicken and rice, rice helps the digestive system.

Meanwhile, we were trying everything people told us to do, and still having to hose out a cage twice a night.

Now, I’m sure this will clear up - we saw the vet after the weekend, got amoxicillin to knock out any potential infections, and we’re having his stool samples tested.

But the uncertainty is what’s getting us. Here we are, wondering whether this is something serious - after all, we didn’t think the disease that claimed our last dog’s life was serious until it very much was. We’re wondering what kind of food we should give the dog. We’re wondering whether he’s sick because he’s stressed about something. We’re wondering how to balance our desire to watch over him 24/7 to prevent accidents with our desperate need for sleep.

Tending to a dog with a cranky tummy is a reasonably simple problem - yet here we are, awash in too many options.

I mean, heck with my dog, I don’t even know what I should eat - I mean, not my preferred repast of cake and chocolate milk, obviously! But there’s studies debating the health of red meat, of wine, of cooked vs raw vegetables, of how many minerals you should get and in what doses from what sources, whether intermittent fasting helps, and above all, balancing what tastes good to me with what’s good for me…

Which, as a diabetic with liver damage, makes everything I choose to eat a bit of a stressor. Ultimately, I have to take an educated guess as to what my ideal diet should be -

- but I don’t get to see the other options. I can’t rewind the clock to my 20s to eat a different diet and see whether I would not have fatty liver and diabetes come age 55. All I can do is commit to one option, and hope.

Same with my career. I’ve stuck with the same job for almost 25 years now - would I have done better at another company? And with money! When I make an investment, is this a wise place for my money or am I gonna lose my shirt? And with romance! When I date this person, will they become a trusted companion or another regrettable breakup for the pile?

Point is, every day we’re committing to decisions with incomplete information and long-term consequences we cannot undo. We humans get used to that background level of stress - or, at the very least, we learn to cope with it, because we have no other alternative.

It’s stressful on the macro level and stressful on the micro level. Right now, my dog is whining. My dog whines a lot. Does this mean he’s about to splatter the floor if I don’t let him out right now, or is he just bored?

I’ll find out one way or another.*

But in between spraying copious amounts of dog enzyme remover on my carpet, I was finishing up my 100+ hour run on Metaphor: Refantazio, an RPG brought to you by the people who made Persona. It’s basically “Persona, but in a political medieval world.”

So I had to make allies as I navigated the kingdom, battling monsters and deciding which companion I would spend time to bond with that day.

Epic stuff, really. Much more complex than deciding on a dog’s food intake for the day.

Yet it wasn’t. Saving the kingdom was trivial. Because:

Unlike my dog, I was presented only with a handful of options at every step, and only one was the correct one. If my dog was a videogame, I’d be presented with something like “Boiled chicken / Pumpkin / Prescription food,” and at worst I’d have a one-in-three chance at nailing it.

Unlike my dog, I could look up a tutorial that walked me through, step-by-step, how to beat this unfathomably tough boss monster of a stomach - and victory was guaranteed if I followed the directions.

Unlike my dog, if I screwed up, I could reload an earlier save and see how I could have done it better.

Now, there’s lots of debates over what the appeal of videogames is… Which is a stupid debate, because videogames (like animation) are merely a medium to transmit art. Do the games I’m drawn to have clear choices and predictable outcomes? Sure, but there’s a lot of PVP games and misery simulators that don’t. Do I like games that are power fantasies? Sure, but there’s plenty of games that have no stories at all, or are actually designed to make you feel powerless.

(Here’s a two-hour-long, surprisingly riveting video on a game that’s designed to make you feel small and powerless.)

Yet when we talk about videogames, I think one of the reasons they’re such a potent entertainment is they let you experiment with predictable outcomes.

Hey, you wanna personally gun down every last living creature in this settlement, just to see what happens? Go ahead, then reload if you feel guilty. Don’t know where to go next for this cryptic quest in Elden Ring? There’s a wiki that walks you through it. Want to get the full Zodiac set of furniture in Animal Crossing? Well, you’ll have to grind - a lot - but eventually you can get it with enough patience, guaranteed.

For some of us, videogames are a window to a life that we don’t get to live. Noah Caldwell-Gervais, my favorite YouTube essayist, once opined that one of the reasons games like Fallout were so successful was because it’s become a collective form of travel. Most folk can’t afford the time or expense for a month-long walkabout… but they can sure as hell trek across a virtual Mojave, bask in the neon lights of New Vegas, head to a faceoff at Hoover Dam.

But I’d also add that videogames are, for some of us, a compelling fantasy because every decision leads to a known (and usually positive) payoff. We live in a world where you can stay up at night fretting about whether you should be volunteering more, whether you should be exercising more, whether you’re dating the right people or neglecting your friends. What’s the right balance for you? There’s too many options to say for sure, only likely outcomes - and you only get one roll of the die.

Whereas in videogames, blissful videogames, you get to decide whether to throw the baby in the oven - and you know for sure whether it was the right decision, and you can always reload if it got too bad.

Technically speaking, juggling political alliances to battle a mad God should be magnitudes harder than choosing to feed my dog stewed chicken or ground turkey.

Yet it’s not harder, because the videogame features tons of tiny, carefully curated, options, each with one optimal answer and a guaranteed payoff. My dog is just a frustrating guess.

Which is why I’d rather be playing videogames than real life. Yet I live in the real world; I’m sanguine enough to realize that the cost of existing here means that I am obliged to deal with life’s inconsistencies.

But lots of people don’t.

Any time you see people who live as though there’s a guaranteed outcome for any behavior in life, they have turned the world into a videogame… and usually to their detriment.

You see it in the aspiring tech bros who are 100% certain that if you get up at 5 a.m. and hustle until nightfall, you will absolutely become a millionaire before you’re 30. You see it in the organic nutritionist who knows, absolutely knows, that if you take the right nutrients you’ll never get cancer. You see it in the religious zealots who know that not only is there a God, but they understand God so well that they’re 100% sure they’re doing exactly what God wants.

In a way, I envy those people. It must be lovely, waking up with the heady knowledge that if you take the correct steps, you will always succeed.

But life doesn’t always work that way; realistic people know that. You can work hard to become a millionaire and still not get the talent or the breaks for it. You can still get cancer even if you eat perfectly and exercise every day. And if there is a God (and keep in mind, I do believe that), I’m pretty sure you don’t know Them as well as you think you do.

To quote one colossal nerd: “Failure is always an option.” To quote another: “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.”

And let’s be fair; the flip side to Jean-Luc’s statement is that it is possible to commit mistakes and win. Sometimes someone who doesn’t have the talent to become a millionaire catches a lucky break. Sometimes someone who smokes like a chimney and eats asbestos Pop Tarts never contracts cancer. Sometimes God, if They exist, smiles on the absolute worst people for reasons we will never understand.

Some folks can’t handle this uncertainty - so they rewrite reality, or at least their own interpretation of it. They make up their own 100% guaranteed path to success - and when that turns out not to work for everyone, they either ignore the failed outcomes or they quietly change the path.

It’s never the path’s fault. They just didn’t follow the directions strictly enough.

And life being what it is, sometimes they get what they’re after! But more often, they go raving to their grave with mad delusions of grandeur, dying in a cloud of contradictions they cannot possibly process.

Me? I visit the world of Metaphor: Refantazio. Sparingly. It’s where, on occasion, I scratch that very human itch to live in a controllable world, a predictable world, a world that wants me to succeed.

Then I’m back to choosing what to feed my tummy-troubled dog. It’s confusing. It’s a little scary. It’s ambiguous.

But it’s what I got to work with.

Hey, if you got this far, I have a new series out, about baby dragons and small-town life and lots of funny stuff, and it’s all available for, well, pretty cheap. Check it out.

* - He was just bored. The little jerk.

I’m proud of this book; I think it’s every bit as funny and interesting as the first book in the series (which remains available for a measly $2.99), and my hope is that these books become comfort rereading for those who like both Daisy and Wild-Eye, but also the shrinking-but-proud town of Douay itself.

(Also, the sequel to Fae Lords - entitled The Hippogriff Riders of Oklahoma - is available for pre-order!)

But! I published six books through traditional publishers before I released my own! And before I jumped into self-publishing, I read a lot of forums to get a sense of the challenges writers face in self-publishing. And I came away with four reasons you absolutely should not self-publish - which I promise you are not the usual four reasons you’ll find elsewhere.

Bad Reason #1: You Wrote A 600-Page Book During A Weekend-Long Ketamine Bender And You Have To Get It Out Now Now Now!

…okay. You think I’m kidding. But a surprising number of self-publishing posts I’ve seen are variants on “I spent this week writing a novel, and here it is Sunday and Amazon is already selling the book I wrote and that’s why self-publishing is amazing.”

I seek out those books sometimes. They’re badly formatted, packed with easily-catchable spelling errors, and if there’s a point or a plot buried in this avalanche of paragraphs it is not readily viewable from the sample chapters.

And if your view of “self-publishing” is “I can wing this wad of words out where anyone can read it” with absolutely zero additional ambitions, then great!

But “Putting it out there” is all you’ve done.

Good writing takes time - and even if you’re one of those vanishingly few folks who can knock out a readable 100,000 word novel in a weekend (and there are some!), your manuscript still generally needs an editing pass and a formatting pass and a cover better than “MY KETAMINE WEEKEND” on a white background in 25-point Comic Sans.

Yet what a lot of people seem to celebrate about self-publishing is that it doesn’t take any effort. You upchucked a book and flung it before an audience - and again, if all you want is a seat at the table where your books are listed next to James Patterson and Stephen King, great!

Because let’s be honest: America’s obsessed about monetizing every hobby. Sometimes, writing should be for your own satisfaction. If the only thing that matters to you is that you got this idea out of your head and onto the page, then I think you’re amazing for doing that! Writing takes effort! Why not celebrate by putting your baby out into the world?

But a lot of the time those “I wrote a book in a week!” posts are followed by an aggrieved “Why isn’t it selling?”

And there I think is one of the subtle issues with self-publishing - at its worst, it encourages this low-effort, high-ego payoff where writing isn’t really a skill, it’s just a state of mind. You had a great idea and typed words, and doesn’t that mean success?

I’m not saying that writing should be a constant state of anguish. But I am saying that it’s a craft - and unless you have a lot of native talent (and some do! Much more than me!), then most of the time the end result is a 600-page book that you’re nagging your family and co-workers into buying and remains unread.

And I think that’s a shame, because that weaves into the second thing that self-publishing doesn’t necessarily do -

Bad Reason #2: You Want To Get Better As A Writer.

When I started writing back in the Stone Age, there wasn’t a self-publishing market to speak of. If you wanted your words on paper in actual bookstores, you had to send out your manuscript until someone actually paid you and published it.

That sucked in a lot of ways. Marginalized voices got extinguished. Wild new strains of writing couldn’t get past the publishing filter. Editors butchered stories, publishers mismarketed them.

But one thing it was extremely good at was letting you know how good you were getting as a writer.

Baby writers started out with boilerplate rejections from small presses and crept up the scale to getting personalized rejections from the high-scale/high prestige markets. (Hint: if they say “I look forward to your next submission,” they are not kidding. Send them something immediately.)

Moving up that scale to get the “good” rejections involved a lot of self-analysis - learning your strengths, shucking your weaknesses, determining the most impactful approaches to a story.

Self-publishing can give you no scale to measure yourself.

Now, I’m not saying that “getting rejection letters” is the only way of honing your skills - many folks got their start writing fanfiction, where they started with “meh” reviews and developed the chops to attract a devoted audience. Or folks can have a solid crit group that’s honest and bold and supportive.

But writing isn’t about you. If it was about you, then imagining a story would be enough.

Writing is about communicating your ideas to an audience.

And at some point, most good writers need to enter into some kind of feedback loop where they see the gulf between “What they meant to get across” and “What the audience actually came away with.” They have to understand how to shape the bullet to fit the brainpan - to manipulate their plots and dialog to make the reader laugh, cry, or grieve.

Self-publishing’s worst instincts can sever that feedback loop. It’s trivially easy to go “I’m an author, I have twenty books out there!” when nobody critical has actually ever read their books - just their friends and family.

(I say “nobody critical” because your friends and family are not likely to tell you “Your book sagged in the middle and your protagonist’s journey wasn’t compelling.” There’s a point at which commercial books have to interface with strangers, and the people who are like “Oh my God, you wrote a whole book?” are not the strangers who will up your game.)

Self-publishing is great at many things. But particularly if the author is rushing to print because they find all that “editing” and “thinking” annoying, self-publishing can get someone into a place that feels like success but they’re not actually improving.

…and again, if you just want to see your book out in the world, I say that’s wonderful. And I don’t demand that every author sell out to an audience - I mean, hell, I’m gonna go into detail about one of the big reasons I moved to self-publishing, and that is because I am unmarketable.

Yet there is a distinction between being beholden to your readers and understanding that connecting with a reader is part of that magical alchemy that makes a book, well, a book.

I think some of the folks stuck in this loop are potentially awesome writers who could be much more successful in the way they want to be… but self-publishing alone will not help them get to where they want to go.

But others, well, part of the reason they’re skipping an external publisher is because they are allergic to any negative feedback. And that’s a problem because of the third reason not to self-publish, which is:

Bad Reason #3: You Thirst For Good Reviews.

Another trend in self-publishing posts: “Someone left me a bad review and I need to tell them they’re wrong!”

First: Don’t. Never interface with someone who left a review, you will never win.

But second, this urge often seems to stem from a need for control. “The critic didn’t read the book the way I intended.” “They missed the central point.” “This was a romcom and they expected a serious drama!”

Guess what, chumlet? None of that matters.

You cannot control the circumstances in which someone reads your book.

The wider-scale bad reviews are annoying, because yeah, if someone who hates horror reads your horror book and hates it, that is kinda on them. I get those.

But you have limited control over what they pay attention to. Did the reader miss an essential clue? There’s a good chance you didn’t signpost that properly. Did the reader think your lead was boring and passive instead of charming? You may have done a bad job showcasing your character’s strengths.

Again, writing is about communicating with the reader. And a lot of the people who seem the most stung by bad reviews are people who don’t realize that these words on the page are all you get to convince someone the book is good. You can’t stand over their shoulder, you can’t control who purchases it, all you can do is write the book well enough so it stands on its own.

So in the unlikely event that your book escapes the boundaries of your friends and family, you will get unfair, negative reviews. Some of them are, yes, unfair.

But some of them indicate where you need to improve as a writer.

Bad Reason #4: You’re In It To Get Rich.

So how much have I, a reasonably successful traditional publishing author, made on my self-publishing effort?

With luck, in the next few weeks I will break even on what the cover cost me.

Admittedly, some of that is on me. I struggled with cover design in traditional publishing; I feel The Sol Majestic did poorly in part thanks to a cover that didn’t have any references to food, which is all the book was about.

I was so thrilled about having cover control that I paid a professional artist professional amounts of cash to get the cover of my dreams - and boy, look at that cover! I’m still happy.

But have I cracked a thousand dollars yet? Lordy no. Probably in time. The book is still selling steadily, and I’m told that sequels coming out - have I mentioned the Fae Lords of Oklahoma is out literally today? - often boosts the old books.

But when I say “steadily,” I mean “2-4 copies a day six weeks after release” - which is, at least according to the streams of posts I see, way more than most self-published authors see.

Let’s put it this way: Traditional publishing has a high barrier and the highest ceiling. If you make it big in traditional publishing you get movie and TV deals, which is where the real money comes from.

But self publishing is low-barrier, mid-ceiling. Which isn’t to say it’s not profitable if it works! You probably won’t make traditional publishing cash if you hit the highest levels, but you’ll still have enough for a Lamborghini.

…yet that is not the reality for most folks. Most folks push it their book out and see maybe a couple hundred bucks at best. And that’s not because they wrote bad books - it’s because the ecosystem is choked. Self-publishing means that you’re struggling to be heard in a market where anyone can, and often does, enter.

You can make the big buck$$$ at self-publishing, but boy oh boy is that not the norm. So best not to expect it. Treat it like sane gambling - don’t do it if you wouldn’t have fun without the cash.

(This is why, incidentally, I implied in #1 and #2 that you were better off mentally if you were self-publishing for self-satisfaction only. The reality can be brutal. Writing for to make you and you alone happy is seriously underrated.)

Okay, So All Of Those Are Downsides. Why Did You Self-Publish, Ferrett?

Reason #1: I Am Impossible To Market.

Other authors write in similar styles, or stick to one genre; I get bored easily, which is why my works range from the prose-dense and drama-centric The Sol Majestic to the nonstop action of Automatic Reload to the wisecracking summer read of The Dragon Kings of Oklahoma.

Most traditional publishers struggled with that. They’d tell me the book was quality work, but they didn’t see a way to sell it.

You know what? They’re right.

For me, self-publishing is my way of saying, “I don’t want to have to be responsible for making some poor editor take a chance on my weird-ass writing.” Because to my mind, by signing the contract I’m promising, “Yeah, this will sell thousands of copies, enough to make back your investment!” And that hasn’t always panned out.

(And yes, I know, publishers plan their advances so they make bank even if the book never earns out - this is my twisted psyche alone.)

I want to take the risks entirely upon myself - I want that authorial freedom to say “Maybe this won’t sell, but I think the story is worth telling anyway.”

So yeah, now I’m selling Dragon Kings of Oklahoma. But I have a rope-centered fantasy erotica that’ll be coming that is entirely different in tone and approach. I have a generational saga in a low-magic setting that, again, is closer to Pillars of the Earth than my Carl Hiaasen Dragons of Oklahoma riff. I have a polyamorous Narnia book sitting in my closet.

I can be free to publish any of those without wondering if it’ll hurt my brand. And God, is that freeing.

Reason #2: It’s Quicker!

Traditional publishing is slow as a sloth - say you spend a year writing and revising the book. Then you send it to your agent, who takes a few months to read it so he can determine if he feels good about selling it. Then he sends it to publishers, who may take a year to get around to giving their word on it.

And then - if it gets published - it may be another two years before it sees print….

I know, I said a danger of self-publishing was being too speedy - but traditional publishing is too slow! Me, I like being able to write a story and getting it out in an efficient manner. Admittedly, I have to wait for artists and my own editors (thank you, Gini), but I’m writing the fourth book in the Dragon Kings of Oklahoma series now - and if I think it’s worth putting out there, I can have it in a couple of months.

Reason #3: It Preserves My Mental Health.

When I was carrying a whole publishing company on my back, I felt obligated to do everything I could to promote the book - so I went on book tours, I did flurries of blog posts, I tapdanced on social media.

Reader, that was killing me. Especially when I did all of that for a book that flopped.

Self publishing allows me to determine my own level of interaction. You may notice I did no book tour for Dragon Kings, because I didn’t have that in me any more. I am no longer on social media, and don’t feel the need to be.

And I am so much happier.

Admittedly, the publishers never pressured me to do that stuff - I was willing to do it on my own. Yet that was in part because of the fear that if I had a book that didn’t please them, they’d never publish me again.

(I could do a whole essay about the death of the mid-lister, which I arguably was; each succeeding book was more of a struggle to sell, in part because with my relentless thirst for novelty.)

In the world of self-publishing, it’s all on me - so I can not go balls-to-the-wall for every release. If a book flops, well, that’s coming out of my own dime, and I’ve cleared that with the wife.

My failures, and my successes, are my own.

Reason #4: I Get To Write About Adorable Baby Dragons.

Seriously, buy the series.

Then again, our marriage was more of a bet than a certainty. We loved each other so much that we both decided, “I will carry this regret to my deathbed if I don’t give this a shot.” So we did the magnificently risky thing, we tied the knot, and…

Twenty-five years later, here we are. Best friends still.

So lemme give you twenty-five hard-earned lessons learned over twenty-five years.

(And while you’re at it, briefly endure this cheap plug for my book The Dragon Kings of Oklahoma and its upcoming sequel, The Fae Lords of Oklahoma, only $2.99 at Amazon. That’s the last you’ll hear of this tawdry commerce today; let us move on.)

Practical Kindnesses Are The Best.

“Being reliable” is a secret weapon in a long-term relationship. Roses and romantic dinners are a wondrous spice, but I’ve learned the meat of the meal should be the pragmatic stuff: showing up when you said you would, cleaning the dishes before they ask, keeping the bank account balanced.

Anticipation is a Necessary Skill.

Speaking of practical kindnesses, part of being a good partner is paying attention to what they want and doing it without being asked. Taking out the trash before they ask comes off as a kindness; taking out the trash after they’ve asked you three times comes off as grudging.

Your job isn’t to do what they say; your job is to listen to more than their words, and demonstrate that you not only know what makes ‘em happy, but you can do the nice thing before they even know they want it.

Thank Easily and Often.

Some couples say you shouldn’t get credit for everyday tasks like taking out the trash without being asked. We say that thanking someone for routine kindnesses shows that you still appreciate them.

Look, there’s plenty of folks in the world who don’t take out the trash - and you’re lucky enough to date someone who does! Celebrate that. Express gratitude freely for the tiniest things. Cherish what you have, even if it’s long since become the baseline behavior.

Stupid Things Can Be Important.

The little in-jokes you share? The tiny rituals you have, like exaggeratedly saying “Ope!” every time you pass each other in the hallway? Those are part of what define you as a couple. Don’t underestimate those tiny bonding moments.

Take an Interest in Each Other’s Hobbies.

I have zero interest in quilting. But I have cultivated enough knowledge of the craft that I can admire my wife’s crisp edges, her color work, her designs. Likewise, she could care less about Magic: the Gathering, but if I say “Did you hear what the dimwit fans did to Commander this week?” she knows that “Commander” is a Magic format and is happy to listen to the latest spilled tea in Magicville.

You don’t have to be into everything they are - but if they wanna geek out about their thing, you should be by their side ready to geek out with them. (At least about the highlights, anyway.) Because…

A Large Part of a Long-Term Relationship is Growing Together.

You will change over time. They will change. This is unavoidable.

What is avoidable is changing so much that you drift apart.

And the reason couples often drift apart is because they live their lives in isolation, with a little overlapping semicircle of a Venn diagram. Which means that when one partner changes, they do it in the isolated part of the diagram - they’re changing who they are with their friends, they’re changing who they are at their job, they’re changing who they are when they’re at conventions -

And then their lover wakes one day to realize the person their partner has become is now incompatible with them.

I’m not saying you should never have time alone. But too many couples take the attitude of “If I’m not involved, I don’t care.” Yet you should care. Because otherwise what you’re effectively saying is that “I only love the parts of you that intersect with my needs,” and does that sound like a sustainable environment to you?

Reevaluate People Once In A While.

“My stepdad’s a total jerk,” I warned my kids the first time they were about to meet him. “Cold, snide, you’re just gonna have to learn to deal with him.”

Except they met my stepdad. And they thought he was funny and likeable.

Turns out what had happened was twofold: One, in the last fifteen years my stepdad had mellowed considerably, and two, when I’d met my stepdad he was a new visitor to a house with a pretty bitchy teenager still reeling from his mother’s divorce, so of course we hadn’t gotten along.

But I was older, he was older… it was time to reevaluate.

Because my kids let me see him through a new light, by the time he died I was hugging my stepdad and sending him Father’s Day cards. And that only happened because I was willing to step away from old grievances and see who they were now.

(Less heartwarming: It is also useful to periodically reevaluate old, beloved relationships to see whether they’re still healthy.)

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Speaking Your Partner’s Love Language Feels Awkward At First.

I’m a person of words. In love language terms, I’m a “words of affirmation.”

My wife wants the house cleaned.

Problem is, for me, cleaning the kitchen doesn’t feel like love.  It feels like some sort of weird performance art.  Here she is, upset and needing roses, and I’m in the other room washing crusty oatmeal out of a dish.

But you know what you do? You recite the magic incantations and don’t expect to feel it internally. What will happen over time is that you may never feel the love - even after all this time, I still would rather bring Gini roses than vacuum the carpet - but you’ll come to see how happy they become.

Sometimes, Nobody’s to Blame.

Life’s full of crappy situations where nobody did anything wrong: The car springs a flat tire, you misinterpret ambiguous statements in opposite ways, you accidentally hit a partner’s nerve in a way that neither of you could have foreseen. Wrestling with each other to determine who’s at fault will just make things worse.

If your first goal during every upset becomes “Find who’s to blame,” you’re doomed. Learn when it’s appropriate to blame the person, and when it’s appropriate to blame the situation.

“I’m Sure You Did.”

Likewise, we’re all human. We forget things. It’s entirely possible that your partner told you about this relative coming to town, or this party you said you were going to tonight.

Assuming you trust your partner not to be a gaslighting jerk, the proper answer is not to get into a fight over “who told what and when,” but rather issue a kindly “I’m sure you did tell me - and I’m sorry, it slipped my mind. What can we do now to fix this?”

(This particular tip comes in handier at the tail end of the 25 years, when everyone’s getting a bit senior-brained.)

Feelings are a Symptom, Not a Diagnosis.

It’s fine to be mad, or sad, or scared, or jealous. But too many couples go “If I’m mad, they must have done something to make me mad.”

No. Your anger is valid; it’s a sign that you’re hurting. But the real work comes in interrogating that hurt to find its true cause - seeing if your partner actually was at fault, determining what the best fix is to help you feel better, discussing it with them cooperatively.

And it may well be that you’re mad, but it’s unfair of you to be mad. Or sad. Or jealous. Unless you can be mature enough to look at that squarely, you’re just reacting blindly.

But Remember To Listen To Your Feelings.

If you’re the sort of person who’s been trained to attend to other peoples’ needs, you can talk yourself out of listening to your feelings. And sometimes you really have to listen… except you’ll go “Wow, that person makes me jealous” and then smother that feeling under layers of “Well, that’s unfair to them” and “What does it really matter?” and “I guess I could be wrong”…

And it turns out that yeah, that person really is trying to drive a wedge between you and your partner.

Assuming every emotion you have is justified can make you abusive. Assuming no emotion you have is justified can make you the abused. So be careful.

What’s Satisfying Is Rarely Effective.

One of the tricks adults learn is that a good life is full of unsatisfying compromises.  Nine times out of ten, your choice is to feel good, or to do good.  It can be cathartic to fly into righteous rages, but favor calm negotiations whenever possible.

Apologizing Unilaterally Is Important.

Just because someone said something hurtful doesn’t mean it’s okay for me to say something hurtful. And occasionally, you have to apologize for your bad behavior even when they don’t.

This is especially relevant when raising children. Because when your children do something unrepentantly, overtly disrespectful and you lose your temper, it is not fun at all to walk back in there and say, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that” even when they’re still wrong.

But modeling that good behavior is vital for kids. And it pays off… in, like, ten to twenty years.

There is Room for Only One Person in the Freakout Tree.

Gini and I believe firmly in the the “tree theory” of relationships: any couple lives on a small island with one tree.  (We envision it as a coconut tree on a sandy beach.)

When things get bad, one person – and only one person – climbs into the tree to have their freakout, while it’s the other person’s job to stay on the ground and talk them down.

If you’ve got two furious monkeys in the tree flinging coconuts at each other, you’re both gonna tumble down painfully - and there’s gonna be nobody to catch either of you. So we have a strict tree protocol in that we may alternate positions in the tree very rapidly, but we never both shimmy up that trunk simultaneously. And we’re generous in terms of switching off.

In practical terms, that means that if Gini’s upset, I’ll be reassuring her. If I’m upset, she’s reassuring me. And if while she’s upset she says something careless that makes me even more upset, she will clamber down from the freakout tree to explain what she really meant, and once I’m patched back up she will climb back up again to resume her previous freakout.

Explicitly asking “Hey, can I have the tree?” has saved our bacon more than once.

Productive Arguments are a Collaborative Effort.

Here’s a definition for you: A bad argument is where everybody walks away with the same opinions they had going into the argument - like, say, they don’t wanna have sex with me any more.

A good argument is where people come away with usable information - we’re not having as much as sex as I’d like because they’re working long hours. Maybe there’s something I can do to make things easier for them to relax.

So remember, you can have fights that are actually productive - so long as you treat it as a cooperative game you’re both playing where the rules are:

• You are trying to figure out how your partner works;

• Your partner is trying to figure out how you work.

Whenever you get any new information, you’re winning. Even if it may not feel like it at the time.

Allow Takebacks During Arguments.

Words are hard. Expressing emotions is hard. Doing both during a fraught dispute is difficult at best. So at some point, one or both of you is likely to say something they didn’t quite mean.

What often happens then is that the other person seizes on to that exact phrasing: “Oh, no - you said I was the worst badminton player in the world! The world! Explain what you meant by that!” And they won’t let them move on from that one misstatement.

If someone says something really hurtful and is trying to walk it back, give them to space to explore what they wanted to say, not the actual words that fell out of their mouth. That opinion may still be hurtful, but at least let it be accurate.

Never Settle Your Arguments on the Internet.

It is extremely hard to present something from your perspective accurately on the Internet, meaning that the argument is near-invariably tilted in your favor. And even if you do manage to be even-handed, lots of folks on the Internet are primed to inform you that any dispute is a red flag that means DUMP THAT S.O.B. (Not to mention your friends will automatically circle the wagons.)

If you’re in the middle of a fight, don’t post to Facebook - even if you’re vagueposting. Don’t vent to strangers who won’t be there after the decisions have all been made. Don’t expose your partner to hostile attention they didn’t ask for.

By all means, talk to your friends and family and therapists to get some feedback! Getting multiple perspectives on a disagreement is healthy (and people who want to wall you off from outside feedback are often manipulating you into isolation). But resorting to the Internet to determine “who’s right” all too often leads to the most toxic possible outcomes.

Don’t Support People Who Don’t Support Your Relationship.

This is a tricky one, because sometimes your friends are right not to support a relationship - they’re watching out for you, and they’re seeing signs that you’re not.

But other times, you have toxic, jealous friends who don’t want to see you succeed - or people who do the bad transitive math of “Well, I don’t like hanging out with this person, so you shouldn’t want to hang out with this person.”

If someone’s trying to undermine your relationship for selfish reasons, that’s the person you need to drop. Because they’re not supporting you - they’re shaping you to be convenient for them. And recognizing when people see you as a tool to be used is a vital skill.

Hold Dialogues, Not Monologues.

I know I’m about to get into a crappy fight when I’m pacing around my room, practicing the big angry speech I’m gonna give to my wife when she gets back. And in my fantasy world, she’ll patiently listen to every one of my points, agree with me, and then beg for forgiveness.

Obviously, that never happens. So don’t bother.

Know When You’re Cheating.

Cheating isn’t just physical - it’s emotional, too. Any time you’re breaking agreements during a relationship, I’d argue that’s a form of cheating. Y’all can debate my word choice here - but regardless, keeping secrets so you can do something you know your partner would be hurt by is corrosive at best.

So you wanna know when you’re cheating? When you do something and your first thought is “I better make sure my partner never finds out about this.” And if that happens, the first thing you should do is make sure your partner finds out about that.

When All Seems Lost, Go See a Movie.

If you’re trapped in a bad patch where all you’re doing is going over the same hurts, do something that reminds you why you liked each other in the first place. See a movie, go to a concert, play a board game - remind yourself what you’re fighting for.

You Don’t Have To Understand It To Respect It.

I remember helping a trans friend of mine through a bad night. And they thanked me, because I really got what gender meant to them.

Reader, I did not.

I’m a cis guy who’s never felt an urge to be anything else. I can listen, read, and internalize as best I can, but the idea of knowing you are something other than who you were born as is alien to my experience.

But I do not have to feel that to respect it.

Likewise, Gini doesn’t experience the profound seasonal depressions I go through, but she sees the toll those two months a year have on me and takes them seriously. My mother’s never had a single same-sex attraction that I know of, but she sees the struggles gay people have finding love and supports them.

Now, “You don’t have to get it to respect it” has ramifications that go well beyond this essay - but let me focus on relationships to say that your partner may well have some things they have to deal with that you do not. Maybe they have ADHD, maybe they’ve got a chronic illness, maybe they’re an extrovert who desperately needs company or an introvert who desperately needs silence.

Refusing to accommodate someone’s needs unless their experience matches yours - or worse, accusing them of faking those needs for attention - is a monstrous thing to inflict on anyone, let alone someone you love. People are different, and you must understand that your experience is but a small facet of humanity as a whole.

They walk a different path; you may never step foot on it, but for God’s sake, buddy, at least read the map.

Lean Into Your Introvert Habits.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that Gini and I recharge by razzing the tattoo artists on “Ink Masters.” That reality TV junk-food felt so trivial that it couldn’t be important… but really, we need a couple of days a week alone to bond over our outrage at this latest disastrous “MasterChef” ruling.

Whatever you need for downtime is whatever you need. Don’t let outside influences factor into it.

Like is More Important Than Love.

Like I said a few weeks ago: “How much you like someone and how much you love someone are separate scales. We all know someone we love but don't like (say, that relative who's become a frothing political maniac on Facebook), and someone we like but don't love….

“Without a sea of positive ‘likes,’ the relationship starts tumbling into the abyss of ‘quiet dread.’ Instead of being happy that the dishwasher has been taken care of, you groan silently as you realize that crap, it's up to you again. You brace yourself for Thanksgiving because you know your partner's gonna make that stupid, thoughtless joke that sets everyone on edge. You don't want to talk about that hobby with them because Christ, don't you know how much money that will cost?”

You wanna accentuate the “like” at every opportunity. And like I said in my first couple of times: anticipating what will make them happy and doing it proactively keeps that “like” meter topped off.

A Sense of Humor is a Secret Weapon.

I hope you can laugh at the worst things. Because they’re gonna happen. And if you can joke about it, no matter how bad, it helps you survive.

That fire-and-brimstone sermon still resonates with a lot of modern Internet fandom. Even if those new queer-friendly, ostensibly progressive Internet fundamentalists would likely scoff at the idea of organized religion, deep down - whether they know it or not - they’re running off Edwards’ same preordained ideas about damnation and salvation.

But first! A history lesson.

The point of “Sinners” is this: every single person alive has angered God. How could we not? God’s grace is perfect, and we all know how far any of us fall from perfection. And God’s power is infinite; nothing can reliably predict death, nothing can prevent death, except for God.

Which means the only reason you’re not boiling in Hell right now is because God wills it.

If that seems dour, the religion “Sinners” is steeped in gets worse. See, the modern religions mostly revolve around a quasi-transactional relationship. You do your best to follow God’s rules, and if you follow them well enough then God decides “Hey, this dude’s cool! Let’s not burn him.”

But in Calvinism, that’s… not how it works.

In Calvinism, God’s so all-powerful He has determined whether you’re going to Heaven or Hell long before you were born. You don’t go to Church to please God; you go to Church to find out if you might be one of God’s chosen, who tend to be righteous folks, but not always.

From one perspective, Calvinism neatly sorts people into two boxes: Good and Bad. If you’re Good, nothing you do can displease God; you won the lottery of divine love. And if you’re Bad, well, all the good works you amassed while you’re breathing don’t count, sorry, you’re going straight to the boiler room of Hell, all the way down.

In other words, what you do literally does not matter. You’re either Good, or you’re Bad.

If you’re Good, you don’t have to do anything to prove it.

If you’re Bad, nothing you do can cleanse that stain.

Does that… sound familiar?

Does that sound like toxic Internet culture?

Dragon Break!

Before we delve back into this cultural darkness, I will remind you that my new book The Dragon Kings of Oklahoma - i.e. “Tiger King, but with baby dragons” - is out! If you ordered it and read it, thank you! The reviews have been coming in all positive, saying the book is as fast-paced and funny and, yes, occasionally serious as I’d hoped - and if you’re one of those reviewers, then I am grateful.

If you haven’t spent the $2.99 to get Dragon Kings, well, it’s less than a Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee.

And if you have, don’t forget that the sequel The Fae Lords of Oklahoma is out in a month, and it’s just as good as the first one - or so my wife says, anyway.

It’s fun, quick reading! Unlike, uh, today’s essay, which isn’t. So get you some laughter now before we get darker, okay?

Back to Business.

The reason I’m writing about this distorted fundamentalism is because I read a very insightful Tumblr thread discussing how the Isabel Fall incident was the last chance for fandom to turn back. (If you wanna read that thread instead of my six-paragraph summary below, you’ll probably be better informed.)

If you’re not familiar with Isabel Fall, alas, she’s no longer with us - oh, someone who used to go by the name of Isabel Fall is still floating around. But the identity she once held - the person she once was - got obliterated in a tide of Internet hatred.

Her crime? Writing a great short story.

Isabel Fall wrote “I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter,” a layered, nuanced look at how trans identity might be coopted in the context of military violence. It was an uncomfortable read…

And a lot of trans and trans-adjacent folks on the Internet got furious at the title, decided Isabel Fall was a straight person mocking queers, and descended on her in numbers so great that she had to check into a mental hospital.

Except Isabel Fall was trans. And the story was not mocking queer identity; it was exploring her own experience in uncomfortable ways. And that discomfort -

- here it comes -

- made the angry reactivists decide that Isabel Fall was Bad.

And here is where Jonathan Edwards’ bilious DNA is spliced into a culture that, on the surface, has nothing in common with the sex-hating, gender-essentialist agenda of the Calvinists. Much of fandom is, on the surface, pro-queer, pro-freedom, pro-women - all that good stuff we healthy liberals value.

Yet the trick about being Bad on the Internet is that it’s like sinners in the hands of that angry God: Once it has been determined that the target in question is Bad, there is nothing the target can do to expunge that Badness.

In this world view, being Bad is not a set of actions that may have stemmed from misunderstandings, lack of education, mental illness, or - God forbid - even people misreading what was said, as happened in the case of Isabel Fall.

Bad is not something you do; it is something you are.

And once you’re viewed as Bad by these new fundamentalists, there is no context in which anything you have ever done can be considered Good. Were they kind to someone once? Well, that person is a Predator, sometimes Predators do random nice things - but only to stock up good will so they can enact future harm. Has that Bad Person once said something wise and heartfelt? Well, they were just mimicking what Good people say to infiltrate Good places.

There’s no overlap between Good people and Bad people.

There is literally no valid reason a Good person should want to associate with a Bad person.

More importantly, anything you’ve ever said can be used as evidence of Badness. Did you shitpost a problematic opinion ten years ago, when you were fourteen and at your dumbest? No takebacks! Your worst day is the only day that counts.

(You saw a glimmer of that fundamentalism in 2016, when some progressives refused to vote for Hillary because she’d once opposed gay marriage. I was a gay marriage fan in the early 1990s, and lemme tell you, almost no politician was stepping up at the time. Yet there were folks who refused to believe that Hillary might not have the same opinions she had twenty years ago.)

Anyway. You may think I’m exaggerating; I’m not. People like this exist. This isn’t all Internet fans, nor even everyone participating in so-called “Cancel Culture.” But the cycle of “someone gets tagged as a Bad Person, gets avalanched into oblivion” is a regular event on the Internets, and all too often it’s the new Internet Fundamentalists doing it.

It’s not everyone doing it. It’s just enough of them to drive people - Bad people - off the Internet and into psychiatric wards.

The flip side to that Good/Bad mentality, however, is that Good people are inherently Good until proven otherwise. If you’re Good, then Good deeds will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely…

Which means that Good people get to make snap decisions - because they don’t make mistakes, except maaaaaybe in failing to root out Bad people in time. (But don’t worry, most of the time it’ll be retconned so the Good person in question never really liked that Bad person or their work.)

In this context, the frightening thing is that there are no mistakes. Good people never choose the wrong target, Bad people never do anything without malicious intent.

Who gets to be Good and Bad? Well, they’re all chosen by someone. The Internet Fundamentalists just skip the “pretending that God decides” part and skip straight to the “self-serving group of people decides” part.

Here’s the truth: people want to believe that Good is what defeats Bad. But history shows that’s not true. The Crusades thought they were Good. The Spanish Inquisition thought they were Good. The McCarthyists censoring Hollywood thought they were Good.

You know what actually defeats Bad?

Thoughtful introspection.

Because if you were to ask me, the biggest cause of Bad in the world is folks deciding unilaterally that they’re Good, and never looking back. Monsters are not bred from pits of black evil - they’re bred from justification.

And nothing justifies evil more than a morality that needs never question itself. You can commit the cardinal sin of failing to act in the face of Evil because hey, things can’t be that bad, we’re Good. Yet even if you take up arms for a just cause, without introspection, eventually, well… you live long enough to become the villain.

But hey, let’s be honest, Ferrett. Aren’t you a Bad person? Didn’t you have your own awful takes? I mean, crap, haven’t you purposely and permanently posted a mea culpa/apology on the front page of your site?

Don’t you benefit from Bad being a mutable concept?

Yeah. I do. But you know what I also benefit from?

Having a fan base.

A fan base is a thumb on the Good/Bad scales that most people lack.

One of the reasons I left the Internet sphere (and have only returned to these small-audience Substack essays to promote my book, really), is because I had a cadre of people who had determined I was Bad based on a handful of bad takes, and a cadre of people who had determined I was Good based on a handful of Good takes…

And the best way to survive in fundamentalist spheres is to rally enough “He’s Good!” people to shout down the “He’s Bad!” people.

Look, you think the Good people don’t have bad takes? Dubious behaviors? Unhealthy relationships? Of course they do! They’re frickin’ human! If you pressed your ear against the rumor networks, you could exhume behavior that could absolutely be used as evidence that they are Bad…

Unless they can find enough people claiming they’re Good to erase those bad behaviors.

If someone is known to be Good, then those behaviors happened, sure… But they don’t count. Knowledge of these awful actions hangs out at the fringes, a cloud of dreadful receipts preserved and handed around by a subset of devoted haters who burn to reveal the Badness of this person to a willing crowd -

And should there be any dip in this person’s perceived Goodness, perhaps they’ll plunge below the threshold into Bad, and then the switch will flip on. At which point all those bad things will suddenly become very relevant.

Ever wonder why you don’t hear about some artist’s crappy behavior until the gossip floodgates open and all the sewage spills out? It’s not that those things weren’t public knowledge - someone was saying them, often for years - but rather, the preordained notion that this person is Known to be Good rendered those complaints invisible.

You wanna know the real damage of Internet Fundamentalism? Part of it, of course, is the people who get mobbed for making uncomfortable statements - folks who try to express nuanced thoughts to people who support non-binary genders but do not support non-binary morality.

But the other harmful part of this Internet Fundamentalism is hiding people’s mistakes - and don’t get me wrong, some people are predators. On some level, the fear is correct: there are sociopathic people who work the system, and they harm they cause are not mistakes.

Yet other mistakes are genuine: folks who aren’t good with social cues, privileged folks who were swaddled away from the negative feedback they needed to learn the proper lesson, or folks who made, you know, a couple of boneheaded moves in the process of becoming a better person.

But nine times out of ten, the casual fan won’t hear about any of those incidents until they hit critical mass enough for someone to get labelled as Bad.

And since everyone makes mistakes - seriously, everyone - then the best bet of surviving in this new and brutal world is to gather a crowd of hangers-on, or the protection of a person with a crowd, all so your mistakes will be overlooked…

And by no coincidence, the quickest and most reliable way to get in with the Good crowd is to make a public sport out of hammering any perceived Badness in the most entertaining ways.

I’m a fan of callouts. But in these circles, calling out someone becomes a zero-sum game that gets played for social credit. Every person they take down adds to their protective layers of being perceived as Good. Morality is no longer the primary motivation; posturing is.

(Side note: the other survival skill in this environment is “having zero shame.” Trump survives because he has never once apologized, which leads people to rally around him because they confuse a psychopathic “doesn’t feel shame” with “did nothing shameful.”)

Ironically, the problem I have with Internet Fundamentalism is not public shaming, or even removing people from public discourse. I think there’s some bad takes that deserve a bit of shaming; some folks have screwed up consistently enough that I’m fine with deplatforming them. (Hell, as noted, I’ve mostly deplatformed myself.)

The end goals of this fundamentalism - to create an actual safe space for minorities, to encourage people to take more moral actions - are something I actually support.

Problem is, this new Internet Fundamentalism obscures the evidence we’d need to make those moral decisions with compassion and humanity. If none of us are truly human - if we’re all mistake-free machines chosen to be Good or Bad - then evidence either gets ignored or accumulated, and hardly ever gets presented in a nuanced light. And Internet Fundamentalists hate nuance; it’s all paranoid readings (view that Tumblr thread!) designed to determine the thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

The ability to hear things in context - to determine whether a malicious actor is consistently making “mistakes,” or whether this is a genuinely flawed human being who screwed up a couple of times and has since committed themselves to improvement - is utterly lost. The ability to draw a distinction between predatory behavior and teachable errors is utterly lost. The ability to comprehend that we may misunderstand the situation is utterly lost.

And in the end…. Our understanding that we contain both Bad and Good is utterly lost.

I think if we’re honest - and being honest would be terrifying - we’d have to look at ourselves with insight and realize that a lot of what we did was Bad, and what we do now may be Bad. We’d have to understand that everyone, Good and Bad alike, is capable of inflicting permanent harm upon innocents. We’d have to accept that even Good people can rip permanent scars into someone’s psyche and never notice the damage done, for that is both the benefit and the detriment of privilege.

And if we acknowledged all that, we might have to give people a space to recover from their missteps. (Which would be even more terrifying because sometimes you gift someone the space to grow and they use that to commit more evil. How can you do anything in a world without certainty?)

But the system we have isn’t working. It’s not actually finding bad actors and rooting them out - in many cases it’s shielding bad actors from public scrutiny because they know how to look Good for a while. And in some cases the folks that Good people claim to want to nurture are being condemned because they tried to speak discomfiting nuance to a crowd of people who thirsted for cozy oversimplification.

I’ll be honest: One of the reasons I had so many wretched takes back in my LiveJournal days is because I thought the Internet would reveal our sins so thoroughly that we’d have no choice but to be reveal our innermost thoughts. I was certain that one day we’d all look back and go, “Shoot, that was an awful opinion I posted - and in this newer, more transparent world, we have proof that all of us have done something regrettable. How can we combine compassion and accountability to focus on education instead of punishment?”

That didn’t happen. Instead, we got new Good people and new Bad people - and more modern forms of excommunication.

I can’t help but think that, had Jonathan Edwards stepped up to his Internet pulpit in this day and age, a Jonathan Edwards steeped not in dour religion but dank memes and TikTok activism, he would have probably cheerfully sipped his coffee and went, “This is fine.”

Whoo, that was fun, wasn’t it? Need something enjoyable to wash the taste out of your mouth?

Buy my book.

Yet before I explain why, here’s three things you can do to help my book if you’re so inclined (aside from buying it, of course):

• Review it on Amazon and GoodReads when you’re done. The more Amazon reviews, the more Amazon will promote the book. So once you’re done, leave an honest review.

• Buy the sequel. Yes, The Fae Lords of Oklahoma is available for presale - look at that amazing cover! - and it’s dropping six weeks from now. (Don’t read the book description if you want to avoid minor spoilers for how Dragon Kings turns out, though.)

• Talk about it on social media and Discord channels and the like. But only where your feedback is welcome, and only if you enjoyed it! Which I hope you will.

  

So Why Am I Cool With Four-Star Reviews?

Authors are supposed to want all five-star reviews, right? Scour r/selfpublish and you’ll find it littered with posts like “Someone left a one-star review on my book of poetry. How do I find their address so I can carpetbomb their home?”

Except… I don’t think every good book deserves a five-star review.

In fact, I don’t think some of my most beloved authors deserve five-star reviews.

Now, I’m not blind to the way the algorithm works - obviously, having five stars is better than four. But I actually hate that paradigm of “max stars or it’s crap” - I’ve been told by sales clerks that if you rate them a 9 out of 10, their managers will write them up for poor performance.

…which means that once again, the Internet has hammered the idea of “nuance” out of existence. Which is the Internet’s most special skill - reduction. This person is Good or they are Bad. This new movie is The Best or it is The Worst - in fact, this year my partner Keri and I have seen no less than five 2024 movies that the Internet has lavishly crowned “Best Horror Film of the Year.”

And anything that’s not The Best or The Worst, according to the Internet? Isn’t worth discussing. Doesn’t get discussed.

Yet good reviews not only give you a rating, they provide context. For the longest time, Roger Ebert was my favorite movie critic - not because I agreed with his reviews, but because I could compensate for them. He always delved deep into the reasoning behind why a film moved him, what he found compelling about the characters even if the plot and production were terrible.

Five-star reviews do not do that. They tell you “An anonymous person enjoyed this to some extent.” They tell you nothing of the reasons or the person.

Yet I suspect most people have a sense of what a five-star book is for them, even if the ratings system gives them no place to boil that idea down.

And for me, a five-star book involves depth.

A five-star review means that a piece of media reflects the human condition in some serious way. It doesn’t have to accurately depict a range of emotions - but even if it’s a dreary book about failure, it has to provide an interesting, truthful insight as to how humans think and feel.

And some books do that well! N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy has some incredible revelations about who gets power and why. Watership Down is about rabbits, but the rabbits’ uniquely animal take on things establishes what humans are - and how you don’t have to be human to feel. Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon is a set of light humor stories about a bar, but it has revelatory philosophies underpinning it.

Yet some of my favorite books don’t do that at all.

I loved The Stainless Steel Rat series when I was a kid, a funny pulp fiction series about the best thief in a cold science-fiction universe. I adored the Spellslinger series about a musician who fell into a world with a talking otter and cast spells by doing Beach Boys covers. Pillars of the Earth is a historical novel about the building of a church with beautifully realized characters and a stock soap opera plot.

Not a one of these books has anything new to say on the human condition.

Yet I have reread each of them multiple times, because they’re fun.

And yes, you could apply the old “Galaxy Quest” logic, wherein you can say that Galaxy Quest is a movie with three-star goals (cheap Star Trek parody) and a five-star execution (who does not cry when Alan Rickman intones “By Grabthar’s hammer”?). Regardless, these are stories that weren’t primarily trying to illuminate or enlighten -

They were built to entertain.

And that’s what Dragon Kings of Oklahoma was built to do. You’ll gobble it down in a day or two. You’ll laugh at the banter between Wild-Eye and Daisy. You’ll probably find the baby dragons cute. And maybe you’ll be taken aback by the occasional spikey ruminations on the real challenges that face a small town….

But then you’ll be done.

And if I’ve done my job right, you’ll go “That was fun.”

And then - if you want to - you can pick up the second book in the series and do that all over again, and in December you can get the third book and go back again. It’s a series that, for me anyway, is comfort reading - nothing too challenging, skirting around serious issues but never delving into them, fast-paced and funny and not at all meant to keep you up at 2 a.m. going “Wow, I never thought of things that way.”

(I tried that. It’s called The Sol Majestic. And I’ve got one more in the pipeline that is like that, if this whole self-publishing thing pans out.)

Anyway. Dragon Kings of Oklahoma is not great literature - but neither was the Xanth series, or The Martian, or the Myth Adventures, or Ready Player One.

As such, I happily accept a four-star review. I think it’s accurate. I’ll take a five-star review for the algorithms, but honestly, I’m happy with what it is.

I hope you will be too.

(And don’t forget to write a review when you’re done! Five stars welcomed.)

Fortunately, I had a solar-powered electrical system installed in my van that could provide regular, clean power to my home - clean power enough to run my Internet and maybe a fan or two to keep away the worst of the summer heat. With it, I could continue to work remotely and keep my job.

The bad news: I had built that electrical system myself with my wife.

It was terrible.

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There's a saying in the van community: "You build three vans: One for your enemy, one for your friends, and the last for yourself." That's a nicer way of saying "The first time you try anything will be a regretful mess, the second time will be decent, and the third is where you really hit your groove."

I wish we'd built the van for our enemy, but alas, we now live with (and in!) the sad remains of our exploratory handiwork. My wife and I cut a hole in the van door and installed a custom window, but its leaky seal dribbles water into the van door's bottom on rainy days. We installed solar panels, and they literally flew off our roof as we were on the freeway between Arizona and New Mexico, 1,500 miles from home.

And the electrical system is the worst of it.

It works, mostly. But even though we bought a professional diagram to lay it out, the big red switch labelled "Off" doesn't actually turn the system off for reasons we don't understand. (We found another way to shut things down.) We put the batteries in an inconvenient place where we need two people with small hands working in conjunction to rewire them. Fuses are screwed to a piece of particle board at weird angles because the wires were stiffer than we thought they'd be and this is the only way we could get everything to fit.

And we have wires everywhere, because we have yet to install walls, and so any wires coming out of the system to supply power to an external system are duct-taped to either the walls or the floor or both.

So when my wife said, "Can't we use the van to power our Internet?", reader, I did not want to. Because we had disabled the electrical system for the winter, it had been a year since I worked on the damn thing, and now I no longer remembered anything.

But it was that or shell out for a hotel room for a week - a hotel room that required a pet-friendly space for the puppy we had gotten literally four days ago - so while she looked after the dog, I set to work.

Cue four frustrating hours of work getting everything started again.

And the more I looked at this, the more I was ashamed. I could see the tally of all our bad decisions piled up in this cramped space, knew everything we should have done better, thought of all the neat van electrical systems on the Internet where the wires were perfectly perpendicular and the batteries were easy to get to and the solar panels weren't secured by safety layers of Bondo tape.

Part of the reason I had balked at the idea of using our van is that I didn't want to look at this.

But soon enough, I had the camper fridge we'd bought running off of DC current, and then after a run to Home Depot to get some 75-foot extension cords, we had this cobbled-together monstrosity...

And the fiberoptic cable and wi-fi started up again.

And our laptops started charging.

And our drinks were cold, and we had a friend over to steal some internet so he could work, and soon enough we were telling people proudly about our Tom Sawyer-like expedition where, using nothing but know-how and gumption, we had gotten ourselves some power.

All with this electrical system that I called “crappy.”

There's a couple of lessons here.

The first is for people in general: You don't have to be that good to impress people.

Seriously. To electricians, our van is a joke (and maybe even a little hazardous). But it functions. To the ordinary person, goddamn, Ferrett, you learned enough about electricity to save you taking seven days off from work.

Particularly in hobbies, there's this tendency to compare yourself to the best of the Internet - started whittling? Well, here's a guy who carved a lace doily out of maple. You're learning to sing? Here's someone on TikTok with the voice of an angel killing the Sarah McLachlan covers. Took up painting, oh crap, here's a guy who paints tunnels into mountains so realistically that coyotes crash into them.

But as someone who's built a couple of bookshelves for people who don't build bookshelves, they don't think "What a crappy bookshelf." They think "Wow, I can’t do that." And they are amazed at the delta between their talent in this area - which is to say "none" - and your talent - which is to say "functional" - and you should let them be amazed.

Stop judging yourself by the best person on the Internet! Judge yourself by the average Joe. And for most skills, a year's dedication max is enough to get you into the stratosphere compared to someone who didn't train.

Is what you did perfect? No. Is it even necessarily good? Maybe not. But you've still come a long way, baby, and at this point your skill may even be useful.

Don't let anyone tell you that doesn't count. (And don’t get me started on the American habit of “You gotta monetize your hobbies!” If you’re whittling little rabbits for your buddies, great, you don’t have to rush to Etsy.)

Second thing, for artists in particular: Shut the hell up about the flaws in your work.

I told you up front that I consider my electrical system to be crap. And it kind of is; I wish I could build another solar system for my friend, and then one for me, but ain't nobody got the cash for that. There's so much I could fix had I the time, money, and inclination.

But it would have been just as easy to title this newsletter, "How I Survived The Apocalypse With My Finely-Tuned Electrical Powerhouse," and that too would have been accurate!

Conan O'Brien was on Hot Ones recently, and he said the easiest way for a guest to lose an audience was to make a deprecating comment. People see what they expect to see - and if you tell them it's bad, they will believe you. And the guests who shrug, "Wow, I'm doing terrible, huh?" actually convince people that they are doing terrible, and the show spirals.

If you're an artist and someone compliments your work, it's natural for many to pshaw, to point out that ragged cut or to point out that ink splotch or tell them in some mild way that hey, it could have been better...

And you have broken a spell.

Yes, your work is flawed. In a couple of weeks, my new book The Dragon Kings of Oklahoma will be unleashed upon the world - and like every novel I have ever written, from my perspective it is a stitched-together mass of mistakes. I am a competent enough writer to understand what I was shooting for, what I failed to accomplish, what places I am likely to lose certain audiences.

But in reality, my wife says that Dragon Kings is the best book I've written, and she loves it with all her heart, and when she copy-edited it for me she came out of her office squealing that it was just as good as she remembered it was!

Which will cast the spell you need: "Here is a laundry list of all the ways I fell short of my goal," or "My wife sighs happily when I tell her I can read her the next chapter in the next book of the series"?

You're an artist. Manipulating perception is what you do. So start with that central perception of putting the thing you hate so much out there without your commentary. Don't upsell them on it more than you need to for marketing purposes, don't downsell them on it -

Simply place the art on the stage and sidle off. The art will stand on its own, or it will not; this is not a toddler but a teenager, and at some point it will have to be alone without you anyway.

Let the electricity flow without comment.

Anyway, buy my book.

Psst! BONUS DOG.