Of course, it’s not just soldiers who pay the cost of the war. It’s their families, and even their friends. And often it’s people who never asked or wanted to be involved– children, civilians, and folks just trying to live out their lives while the world falls apart around them.

There are no easy answers on Memorial Day. But I do want to thank all the people who take up arms for our country. And I fervently hope there comes a day when you don’t have to any more.

Here’s a song that’s been stuck in my head for the past day or so. It seems apropos. The lyrics are simple and the video’s lighthearted, but unless the message at its heart sinks in to the collective human race, there will always be a price to pay.

Find a bunch of baby goslings and their parents while wandering around South Lake Union Park.

Visit a street fair in the University District.

Take a walk on the seashore.

Go kayaking in Puget Sound. (Note: this is not me, but as far as ways to not write go, this seems as fine a method as any.)

For good measure, you can always read a couple of novels.

And acquire that kickass TV show you’ve been meaning to watch on DVD.

Bonus meta-procrastination: Compose a blog entry explaining in pictorial format why you haven’t been writing.

I’m sure I am not the only writer who failed at getting writing done this weekend, though for most people I suspect their reason rhymes with “Riablo Smee.”

This was the second year in a row I spent a day at ECCC, and I have to say, this year was way more fun than last year. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because I wasn’t fighting a cold this year. Or perhaps it’s that this year was way more chaotic and crowded.

That’s right, you heard me. I like chaos at cons. I like crowds. The energy is fantastic, and I have never once had a problem with stereotypical smelly B.O. Let’s face it, folks, we’re well beyond the days of the basement-dwelling nerd. Geeks have self-respect these days.

In all seriousness, though, this year did feel much different. Just for comparison, here’s a shot of the main exhibition hall on Saturday afternoon at last year’s con. Busy, but not really crowded:

Here’s a shot of the exhibition hall on Saturday afternoon this year:

I rest my case. Not only were there more people, there seemed to be a lot more energy in the crowd. (Although again, that may be because I was healthy this year.) I got the same vibe from ECCC this year that I get from Dragon*Con: mad delightful chaos, with plenty of energy, enthusiasm, and of course, lots of kickass costumes everywhere you look.

ECCC also had a fantastic guest list this year: George Takei, Wil Wheaton, Summer Glau, Adam Baldwin, and Edward James Olmos, to name a few. The lines to get into the guest panels were incredibly long (I saw on Twitter that people waited for an hour and still didn’t get into the George Takei panel), but luckily for me, I wasn’t that interested in the special guest panels. Instead, I walked around, took pictures, toured the exhibition hall, and attended a Star Trek vs. Star Wars Dance-Off put on by members of the fantastic Portico Dance Company (see right).

In other words, I soaked up the atmosphere and just had fun. I’d love to see a George Takei or a Wil Wheaton panel sometime, but I’m not going wait in line for hours to do it, especially when I’m only there for one afternoon.

There are two types of conventions I go to: media cons, and literary cons. Media cons, like ECCC, I attend for the crowds and the costumes and the energy. Literary cons I attend to meet authors, sit on panels, and learn stuff that I didn’t know before. Admittedly, most cons have a little bit of both (and Dragon*Con is as close to a fusion of the two as I’ve found), but ECCC was a pure media con. Fun, crowds, costumes, merchandise, spiffy art.

Next week is Norwescon, and that’ll be more the literary side of things: hang out with writers (including, hopefully, many of the awesome folks I met at the Rainforest Writers Village), attend panels, do the writer’s workshop. I’m really looking forward to it, but mostly for different reasons.

What literary cons and media cons have in common, though, is getting to hang out with passionate, creative people. At literary cons, it’s the writers I get that vibe from. At media cons, it’s the cosplayers. There were some amazing costumes, most of which took a lot of work and dedication to put together. Cosplaying well takes skill (and sometimes guts), and like writing, it’s essentially a creative art– a completely different one, perhaps, but still, it’s a manifestation of that same fusion of creativity, passion and energy that I sense in writers, and indeed, in all pursuers of the geeky creative arts.

Speaking of creative arts, there was some damn fine art of the drawn and painted variety there too, of course. I went to the ECCC Art Auction in the evening, and bought a cool piece by Lar DeSouza. (All the proceeds went to the Seattle Children’s Hospital, so I blew my budget for a good cause.) My favorite find of the day, though, was a print from DPI Studios. Jaysin is a nice guy and a fantastic artist, and I bought a limited edition print of the picture that is currently featured on DPI Studios’ homepage. I snagged the last one, too, which makes it all the sweeter.

There was creativity of another kind as well, in the form of a preview for BrickCon, a Lego exhibition that will be at the Seattle Center in October. There was a lego Batcave, a lego Stargate, a bunch of lego Star Wars vehicles (including a very nice Lego Super Star Destroyer), and perhaps my favorite, a Lego Space Needle.

Next year I think I’m gonna have to carve out time in my schedule to go for all three days of ECCC. Maybe get a VIP pass, too. I mean, it’s only a ten-minute walk from my apartment. Since I have free lodging, I don’t have to feel guilty about shelling out the extra cash, right? As well as the extra cash for cool art? Right? (The correct answer is: no, I should not.)

Full slideshow of pics from the con is here.

Then, on the evening of Wednesday the 29th, my mom called. She had suffered a seizure and was in the hospital. Preliminary tests had found a lesion on her brain, and the doctors suspected it was metastasized breast cancer.

By Thursday afternoon they had confirmed the lesion was a tumor. They found cancerous growths in her lungs, too.

Thursday night, I caught a redeye flight from Seattle to Raleigh.

Friday my brother flew down from New York, and my uncle drove down from Virginia. In her hospital room, Mom had a long stream of well-wishers from her work, her church, and her neighborhood.

Saturday she had brain surgery, and the tumor was successfully removed.

I write this on Sunday, New Year’s Day, with a pen and a pad of paper, sitting in the ICU. A few feet away, the strongest person I know has been laid low by a few tiny clots of cancer cells and the prospect of another excruciating round of chemotherapy. And that long blog entry I wrote about 2012 seems rather trivial. What comes will come; hug someone you love, because in the end, that’s what matters. Of all the problems and obstacles you can run into on the road of life, rejection letters don’t even count as pebbles.

But I may still post that blog entry at some point. Because in cancer, there’s another reminder: strive for your goals now. Don’t put things off. If you have your health, take advantage of it. And just don’t say you’ll do things “one day.” Because that “one day” may instead be the day that you wake up with a healthy, normal life, and end the day in the hospital with a brain tumor. Cancer doesn’t give warning. It just happens.

It looks like Mom will get past this. But that’s what we thought back in 2009 when she first beat breast cancer. There’s no way of knowing for sure. All we can do is trust in modern medicine… and god, if that’s your thing. Although, for the record, if there is an all-powerful God out there who’s in charge of the world, then cancer is a really, really, really shitty thing to let happen. I don’t think you can appreciate how truly, awfully shitty it is until you see it up close in all its painful reality, until you see someone you love get struck down with it multiple times, or watch someone, like my grandmother, die a slow and agonizing death as it eats away at her. Seriously, fuck cancer.

Admittedly, it could be worse. The tumor was small and discrete, and easily removed, and there have been no side effects from the surgery. Mom has a wonderful network of friends and family who are supporting her, and will help her get through this. The family’s been brought closer. But looking for a bright side in this is a bit like the old joke: Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

I hope you and yours have a happy 2012 and beyond. We may too, yet. But from where I’m sitting, I mainly just want to get past the next few days. Then we’ll see about the rest of 2012.

It’s a question that I sometimes hear asked of writers: “how do your beliefs influence your stories?” It’s usually asked in a religious context, but even so, it’s still a broad question. And there are various ways to interpret and answer it, not to mention all the corollaries that spin off, like:

-”Do you let your beliefs inform your works?”
-”Do you try to avoid any appearance of bias toward your own beliefs?”
-”How does an atheist author write a Christian character, or vice versa?”

I generally describe myself as “nonreligious,” which is a more polite word for “atheist.” I’m not a strident atheist; my beliefs are my own, and I don’t begrudge anybody their beliefs as long as they don’t try to foist them on me (see: the religious right). In fact, my own beliefs tend more toward what most people would call “agnostic.” I don’t believe in a lack of god, so much as I lack a belief in god.

But I’m not writing this to debate labels, or to debate the wisdom of my own viewpoint. Rather, I’m writing this so you know where I’m coming from when I talk about how we tell stories.

When I first moved to Seattle, I dipped my toe in a few organized atheist and skeptic groups, looking to meet new people. But I realized that I didn’t relate to most folks there quite as well as I thought I would. Having more or less dedicated my life to creative writing, I was no longer as captivated by the facts of reality, as by the possibilities of reality.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that there are people interested in the rational study of how the world works. They become scientists, and researchers, and are responsible for a large chunk of modern progress.

But I’m a writer, and moreso, a writer of speculative fiction: I don’t write about how things are, I write about how things might yet be, or how things might have been, if the world or the universe had been a little bit different. My stories are mostly fiction, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have truth in them. I think fiction, in its highest form, is merely a tool to tell the truth about something: whether about the world, or our own humanity, or love, or… anything, really. All fiction does this to some degree– you can’t write a story without saying something– but in my opinion, the best fiction recognizes and harnesses it, and even amidst the elements of fantasy, it reveals truth.

A lot of religious writing– the parables Jesus tells in the Bible, for example– are fictional stories designed to tell truths. But unfortunately, most religious writing doesn’t present itself as fiction. It presents itself as history. And so the truth of the writing gets lost in a debate about the facts of the writing. Which, in the end, partly helps to explain why I’m not religious any more. Some religious stories do have truths to reveal, but to subscribe to a religion means not just to enjoy the stories it tells, it means buying into an entire worldview, and subscribing to various “facts” that are often only peripherally related to the truths within the stories. I’d rather leave facts to the world’s scientists, and truth– well, I’ll leave truth to the world’s storytellers.

One thing I often do as a writer is to change the nature of reality within a story– perhaps in one story God is a biological entity; perhaps in another God is a pool of consciousness, from which individual souls split off like droplets of water; and perhaps in a third story God doesn’t exist at all. Perhaps in one God is a bad guy. I love to experiment, to change these “starting conditions,” as it were, and see how the people and worlds in my stories are affected as a result.

I suppose, in a sense, this is my own exploration of reality, sort of a hybrid of imagination and rationalism. In the crucible of fiction, I perform experiments with the characters, and my scientific and creative sides blend. Each story is like its own little trial run of reality, a petri dish where I can add a mix of ingredients and see how they grow. And hopefully, in the end, each one will produce a truth– not facts, or beliefs, but little nuggets of truth.

At the highest level of storytelling, that’s what I strive for. Even when I’m throwing chupacabras in the petri dish.

So, if you ever want to have a discussion with me about truth, I’d rather you didn’t talk to me about beliefs. But tell me a story, and listen to mine, and then perhaps we’ll be a few steps closer to understanding each other.

GeekGirlCon was set up to promote and celebrate the role of women in geek culture. In a perfect, equal world it would not be necessary– however, the world, especially the world of geeks, is neither perfect nor equal. I hate to say it, but there’s a lot of sexism in geek culture– just check out the latest brouhaha over DC Comics’ reboot of Starfire, in which women’s sexual liberation gets twisted into male wish fulfillment– probably because almost all of DC’s writers and artists are male.

On other fronts, Internet culture is horribly sexist, and often claims “irony” as an excuse to be not just blatantly sexist, but racist and homophobic– this is Not Okay. And things are arguably even worse in online games.

There are serious problems outside of pop culture, too: for example, women are still very underrepresented in STEM careers (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math). And even outside the geek realm, societal norms aren’t helping matters.

Given all this as context, yes, we need a GeekGirlCon.

I heard a fair amount of speculation prior to the con that the attendees would mostly consist of lonely guys trying to pick up geek girls (hey, more sexism!), but in actuality that was not the case. In fact, I’d say the guy-girl ratio was about 30-70, based on a few rough counts I did at panels. Admittedly, it was kind of a nice change from normal cons, where the ratio is sometimes almost reversed. The panelists were almost entirely female (again, a reversal of the norm) and the panels were some of the most interesting that I’ve attended in years: possibly because the topics and perspectives were ones that often don’t get discussed at cons.

I attended a couple of panels: one was on Writing Urban Fantasy, hosted by Yasmine Galenorn. It’s not exactly a new topic, but it was presented in a much more systematic way than I had ever seen before, complete with a handout describing the basic formulas that a lot of Urban Fantasy is characterized by, do’s and don’ts, cliches and tropes, and the interplay of reason and magic. And I walked away with some good ideas to work into my NaNoWriMo novel next month.

I also attended a panel on Geek Girls in Culture, talking about the role of geeky women in TV and movies and books, and the good and bad sides of their portrayal, and which ones have geniunely inspired the panelists over the course of their careers. By and large, the panels I attended were some of the most fun, informative and entertaining that I’ve seen– and I’m not just saying that because I want to suck up to the geek girls. I think we did get to see things presented from an angle that is often lacking or underrepresented in “mainstream” geek culture.

By and large the con was well-organized for a first year con. There were some hiccups– like long lines in the narrow hallways prior to the panels, which occasionally intermixed. There were also some quirks to the venue– the con was held in the Northwest Rooms of the Seattle Center, except for larger events, which were held at the EMP Museum about a five or ten minute walk away. The EMP is a big place, and things were sometimes difficult to find– notably the Masquerade line, which unlike almost everywhere else didn’t seem to have any volunteers around. Someone told me that it was the line for Masquerade participants, not spectators, which meant I ended up doing another lap around the building before I figured out that yes, it was the right line after all.

Speaking of the Masquerade, this is pretty much the only area of the con I had any actual complaints. It was held on a stage at the EMP, however, the lighting was the worst I’ve ever seen at a Masquerade. The spotlight overhead was dim and orange, which made photography a total pain and certainly didn’t flatter the costumes. And despite some quick instructions from the MCs, most of the participants simply walked up, did a quick turn, and back off the stage without so much as a pause. Again, tough for the audience to appreciate your costume (or photographers to take pics) if you don’t actually stop for a few seconds. That said, there were some great costumes, particularly in the kids’ division– it’s good to see such a promising next generation of geeks.

But all in all, it was an excellent con, particularly for its first year. It’s filling a unique and (unfortunately) needed niche, and it was definitely a hit with the community. Saturday-only tickets sold out before I got there, so I had to buy a two-day pass. I had hoped to make it back on Sunday, but didn’t– probably because I stayed up until 3 am writing, then slept in until 2 the next day. Hopefully it’ll be bigger and better next year. And hopefully it’ll give more girl geeks (and young geeks in general) a taste of the community beyond what they see online.

Full set of photos from the con here.

After the first hour, I almost left. Not ’cause I was offended, mind you. Well, okay, I was offended, but it was because almost every single group in the parade was just a bunch of people in matching corporate T-shirts walking down the road, surrounding a car or mascot festooned with the corporate logo and handing out literature or coupons or goodies.

So while I’d like to acknowledge BECU, Esurance, Group Health, Microsoft, Verizon, Expedia, Macy’s, Fuze, Amazon, Orbitz, Alaska Air, Starbucks, Best Buy, Chipotle, Cupcake Royale, various radio stations and car dealerships, and anybody else I missed for their support of a good cause, I do have to ask: did y’all have to be frontloaded at the start of the parade? If it weren’t for the lesbian bikers who led the way, I’d have thought I missed the Pride Parade and stumbled onto the Corporate Advertising Parade.

I realize that parades need to paid for, and it’s great that so many corporations are willing to attach their names and their logos and their money to a cause once considered taboo. Equality is becoming mainstream, and that’s great! It’s just that I felt like I was exposed to enough advertising to make up for several months of not watching TV. I mean, holy Oscar Mayer^® ham sandwich with Wonderbread^® and Hellman’s Mayonnaise^®, Batman^©.

But I’m glad I stuck around, because the next two and a half hours more than made up for the first. It had its share of drag queens and raunchiness (which matched my expectations), but it also had chorus groups, and community and activist organizations, and dance troops, and sports teams, and drum bands, and even, to my surprise, churches. Despite the fact that I’m not religious, I grew up mostly as a Lutheran, and was proud of the number of Lutheran churches marching in the parade. So Central Lutheran Church, Immanuel Lutheran Church, and Holy Spirit Lutheran Church, among several others, I give you guys props. It’d be nice if y’all could get your more conservative compatriots on board, too.

The parade lasted for a solid three hours, and by the time it was done I was ready to leave– not because the parade was bad, far from it. But after several hours on my feet, I really just wanted to sit down somewhere, rest my legs, and get something to eat. Judging from how the crowds began to thin well before the end of the parade, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one. And I felt kind of bad for the groups at the end of the parade. While there was still plenty of crowd left, I couldn’t help but feel like those groups got shafted a bit. Maybe if the number of corporate marchers had been cut by, say, 50%, the parade would have been a more reasonable length? I hate to armchair quarterback. I’m just sayin’.

I also had a bit of an epiphany while watching the parade. Now, I’m not gay, and I don’t plan to get gay-married or civil-unionized at any point in the future. I support marriage equality and gay rights because it’s the right thing to do; because gay people in love deserve all of the same rights and legal protections and official support networks that straight people in love do. Gay people deserve to be accepted and loved for who they are, just like everybody else. And therein lies the root of my epiphany. I’m not just supporting gay rights for the sake of gay people; I’m supporting them for the sake of everybody. Because gender orientation aside, gay rights is ultimately the cause of allowing people to live their lives however they want, as long as they aren’t hurting anybody. And if I have some political creed at the root of my being, that is it. People deserve to live their lives the way they see fit, and gay marriage is an important step in letting that happen.

From my point of view, gay marriage is just one aspect of a wider change in society. It used to be that people let their identities and their lives be dictated to them by custom, by societal pressures, by religion. But more and more, I see people determining their identities and their lives for themselves, living life the way they want, determining their values not because it’s what they grew up with or it’s what society has pressured them into, but because it’s what they want and what they believe and who they are.

Whether you’re gay or straight or somewhere in between, that’s something you should be able to support. And if you’ve found your way in life, if you’ve found that niche that makes you happy, if you’re accepted for who you are and you accept others for who they are, then regardless of your gender or your religion or your sexual orientation, you absolutely deserve to be proud.

Yesterday I rode in the Fremont Solstice Parade with the Painted Cyclists. The cyclists aren’t officially part of the parade, but every year, they ride the route before it starts, wearing nothing (or close to nothing) except bodypaint. Sometimes the paint looks like an actual costume: there was a group this year where each person was painted like a character from The Wizard of Oz, including Dorothy, Glinda, the Tin Man, and the Wicked Witch of the West. There’s also a group called the Keystone Kops, who each year paint themselves up with bright blue police uniforms and then help with traffic and crowd control. But sometimes it’s just a solid color, or a pattern, or whatever random creativity people want to express.

I joined a group with a couple people I knew, whose chosen theme was “bunnies.” It wasn’t my first choice for a theme, but I still said yes. After all, it’s not every day you get a chance to ride your bike past tens of thousands of cheering people wearing nothing but bodypaint and underwear (and I was definitely in the minority as far as the underwear).

I did the ride for a few reasons. First, there was a “challenge” aspect that appealed to me, particularly because I’ve been shy for most of my life. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, Do one thing every day that scares you. And even though she probably wasn’t talking about cycling in the buff, the general spirit still applies.

A second reason was simply that bodypainting is awesome. When I was in Austria last year, the World Bodypainting Festival was going on at the same time, so I went for a day and was blown away by some of the costumes and designs that people had done. It was sort of a combination of art and special-effects makeup, and the results were pretty cool. So I wanted to see what people would come up with during the painting party.

And third, it was a fun way to strike against American prudishness in regards to nudity. Does anyone else find it ridiculous that it’s more okay to show people being killed on TV and in the movies, or play video games with graphic depictions of blood and guts, than it is to show a naked boob? The whole idea that non-sexual nakedness (and there definitely is such a thing) will somehow “corrupt the children” is, I think, absurd. Lots of kids lined the parade route, and I’m reasonably sure that most of them will grow up to be fully functional human beings despite having glimpsed various male and female parts that the society has decided are gross and icky. At the painting party, where literally hundreds of naked men and women were walking around, there wasn’t the least bit of awkwardness or sexual tension– it was just about creativity, and art, and doing something cool. It was such a comfortable environment that I would have changed my original plan and gone naked myself, except that I hadn’t shaved certain regions (most people had), and well, let’s just say bodypaint and body hair don’t mix very well.

Despite the parade being a celebration of the Summer Solstice, there was no Sun in sight that day. The weather was classic Seattle– 55 degrees and drizzly. But still, hundreds of people showed up, me among them. Afterward, as we stood outside with our bikes and waited to get underway, I couldn’t help but think how, in the camping and backpacking world, this is textbook hypothermia weather. Warm enough that you don’t think it’s a danger, but still plenty chilly, and the wetness seeps away any warmth that you manage to build up that much faster. (And, surprisingly, paint is not a good insulator.)

We drew plenty of stares as we made our way along the city streets about a mile and a half toward the start of the parade, but the energy of the crowd was awesome, and we cheered and waved at everyone, and got plenty of car honks and cheers in return. The parade route itself was even better, and we looped back several times along the route, staying in front of the parade, in general celebrating summer and pretending that the weather was not actually chilly and rainy. Good times.

I’m glad I did it, but next year I’ll probably be on the sidelines with my camera. For a guy who does photography as a hobby, it irks me that I didn’t get a single picture of the cyclists or the parade. Next year I’ll most likely be on the other end of the camera, unless someone comes up with a really good theme, and I get tempted to paint myself up again.

Speaking of cameras, because I know you wanted a picture, here’s me at the painting party. So much for the trend of no embarrassing pictures of me on the Internet… (Man, I hope that never makes the Google Image Search results for my name.)

And here’s a video of the all the cyclists going by. There are some really great and creative costumes in there– most far more so than mine. I’m tempted to say “watch the video and find me yourself,” but fine… I’m just before the 2:30 mark.

And lastly more pics from yesterday, the vast majority not of me, just because.

Looking back on my twenties, it feels like a large chunk of it was spent trying to obtain those things: a solid job, a house, a stable life. But in retrospect, it wasn’t the right thing to do– or maybe I just did it wrong. Through school and college, I mostly just surfed along, and was able to succeed without putting much thought into things. It’s like I was on a conveyor belt, cruising my way toward graduation or finals or the end of the year, and simply knocking down the obstacles as they came up. After I graduated, I guess I expected life to keep being like that.

For a while, it was. Holding down a regular job is the same sort of “conveyor belt” model: as time proceeds, you complete assignments as they come along, and sort of coast your way through a series of days, which turn into weeks, and into months, and into years. It’s possible to live your whole life that way. A lot of people do, and many of them are happy.

But other things don’t fall so easily into the “Conveyor Belt” model of life. Relationships, for example. I suppose once you’re in one, it feels a bit like a conveyor belt, but the process of meeting someone, of starting a relationship, of falling in love, is in my experience one of the least predictable things ever. Maybe it works differently for some people– in fact, I know it does. Some people I’ve met are able to move from relationship to relationship with hardly a missed step. For me, it’s never worked that way, but that’s a story for a different blog post. Probably a different blog.

When I moved to Seattle, I very deliberately stepped off the conveyor belt of the job. Admittedly, I do still have a job, but it’s part time, I set my own hours, and being a writer shares equal or greater priority with it. And writing, especially before you’re getting paid for it, isn’t a conveyor belt at all. It’s a trail, and a poorly marked one at that. There’s nothing and no one pulling you along. You have to move your own feet, and you better bring a machete, ’cause you’ll be doing a lot of bushwhacking.

If I don’t write, no one will fire me. No one will pull me into a performance meeting and yell at me. I won’t let down my co-workers. The only punishment for not writing is that I don’t get to be a writer… and since this is not an acceptable outcome, I keep doing it.

I tried not being a writer. I tried it for six years. Then, when I grew more and more restless, less and less content, I tried other things. I looked into graduate school. I tried just writing as a hobby. None of it worked. And one day, thinking about this, and all the things I could do with my life, I came to a realization that while I could probably be successful at a lot of things, they would never feel right, because none of those other things were writing.

It took me most of my twenties to realize this. Maybe if I had been more honest with myself, or been more courageous, or not spent a few years’ worth of free time playing WoW, I would have reached that realization sooner. But that’s water (and time) under the bridge; it’s gone, and it’s not coming back. So here I stand, at the start of my fourth decade. I know for sure what I want to do, and it’s goddamn terrifying.

In a way, wanting to be a professional writer is the ultimate conceit. You have to believe that you’re good enough to do it, and that one day you will succeed, even in the face of poor critiques, piles of rejection letters, and plenty of stories of other people’s failures that tell you otherwise. You ignore that nagging voice in your head which tells you that you suck and you’ll never be good enough and you should just quit now. Even when you know for a fact that the story you just wrote is bad, you still have to hold on to that nugget, that belief that you can and you will succeed at this, or all will be lost.

If you let that belief go, if you get discouraged, you’ll stop writing, and then here’s the thing: nothing will happen. You won’t fail out of school. Your boss won’t give you a bad review or fire you. If you’re not making money, the decision won’t cost you anything financially, and heck, you’ll find yourself with a ton of extra free time. But you won’t be writing, and that part of your soul is always going to hurt, and eventually, it will drive you crazy. It’s happened once to me already. I don’t want to waste time letting it happen again.

So here I am. Thirty years old. I’m staring down a long road paved with rejection letters, of years of unpaid practice and work, hoping for a break, hoping that maybe at some point I’ll write something good enough, which when combined with a dose of luck, means I’ll be able to make a living at this thing. And then I’ll do it again. And again. And with each bit of success it will hopefully get easier, but until then, it’s a long, long slog. And all the time, that voice in my head will whisper, You should have a career and a house and a family and be settling down by now, not living in a tiny apartment working a part-time job and putting tons of work into some crazy whim with only marginal hope of success.

Maintaining that level of determination, in the face of a pile of self-doubt and rejection, is the hardest thing I’ve ever done; the thought of doing it for years and years to come is scary as hell. But if the alternative is not being a writer, then I’ll do it.

The next decade is going to be interesting.

Tomorrow, the Patriot Act will still be in force. Large segments of the population will still think torture is okay. And all of the people killed during 9/11 and the resulting wars will be still dead. No one’s coming back.

Killing Osama bin Laden won’t stop a single person from going hungry, nor will it educate a single child, or grant a single underprivileged person access to medical care. America is still massively in debt. Corporations still wield huge amounts of influence on our elected officials. And tomorrow, the right wing will still be inventing conspiracy theories about Obama.

But amidst all the problems, sometimes you just have to stand up and sing “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.”

I don’t know if evil really exists in the world, or if it’s simply a human construct. But if any individual could be said to be evil, Osama bin Laden certainly qualifies. Well… qualified. So with that in mind: Huzzah! Major props to everyone involved; thanks for delivering us some good news.

Just revenge is sort of like soda. The calories are empty, but it sure tastes sweet going down.

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“I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”
- Mark Twain